HALLO DORSET ARE YOU THERE?

OK, this joke about Dorset, where we’ve just spent the first chunk of a rather longer holiday than usual, a place which T- Mobile and broadband forgot, a place where it’s always “whatever-o clock”, slow, measured and clotted-creamy, has gone on long enough.

Dorset is a tiny county which it takes longer to reach by car than a return trip by Easy Jet to Venice. Above all Dorset belongs to the memory of Thomas Hardy. He’s the creator of names like Eustacia Vye, Damon Wildeve and Bathsheba Everdene. He’s the writer of novels in which the dreadful hand of fate constantly touches the shoulder of the unlucky or amoral - the nearest we have to a writer of Greek tragedy.
But there’s something else.

An award for exceptional marketing goes to Dorset.

We were entertaining our grandchildren (or vice versa). Over three days we did the following:
Visited the ruins of Corfe Castle (one of the few strongholds to withstand the parliamentary forces in the south of England in the mid-1600s) where we learned to use a sword - “aim for the nose” -  a halbert - “great for gouging at close quarters” and a bow and arrow - lethal wounds were delivered to head, groin, legs and upper body of the targeted strawmen.

And so on to Abbotsbury - an award winning sub-tropical garden - huge Monterey Cypresses, brilliant succulent plants ; the Swannery - 600 of the white feathered thugs whom the children all fed with grain and we learned about their habits (did you know that the wretches bask in the reputation of being “one-swan-guys” but they all pop off for constant “surreptitious affairs” at the “Bonking Swan” no doubt.)

And then their farm. There’s more money to be made now by tarmacking fields and having kids ride plastic tractors, have pony rides, watch lamb races, have close contact with exotic birds (in the cage with the budgerigars and parakeets) and operate radio controlled pirate boats on the lake - than there ever could be by growing stuff.

Finally the museum day - “oh no Grandpa not museums!” Dorchester is about the same size as Goldaming, Newport Pagnell or Kenilworth… so quite small. It has a Town Museum and five (yes -  five) others. A Teddy Bear Museum; a reproduction of the Terracotta Warriors, a Dinosaurs Museum (where else have you heard “kids - you can touch anything here”);

an abbreviated version of the British Museum Tutenkhamun Exhibition and the Mummies (the boys loved these dead bodies so much that they eyed me as if to say “not long now.”).  Where else could there be this much enterprise, enthusiasm to please and involve and overall sense of drama?  If everyone attacked their cultural opportunity as well as this then all would be well in the sector.

Dorset I’ve heard you loud and clear.

And one other thing. Dorchester has a Michelin star restaurant. Proof that there’s more to life than my smart phone.

I KNOW EXACTLY HOW YOU FEEL

The trouble is that just isn’t true. We talk increasingly about empathy but when it comes to understanding Isis or Al Qaeda we simply don’t have a clue.  Actually, we often don’t even understand how people near to us really feel. It’s ironic isn’t it that those of us who spent our lives in advertising were, much of the time, guessing about how our ads were going to work?

But soon all that’s going to change and marketing, as we knew it, is going to be pretty well redundant. As neuroscience becomes front page newspaper stuff and not arcane and academic we are going to be embarked on a journey that will let us unravel moods and feelings and our ability to detect, predict and manipulate them.

And I think this is really exciting because it takes the finger-in-the-air-ness out of not just marketing but behaviour in businesses and specifically things like negotiation. How much time is spent trying to outwit and double guess each other? Eliminate business poker and we can spend more time on innovation and pure problem solving.

I’m writing this on holiday in Dorset – grandsons outraged that I’m tapping away when there are trees to be climbed and monsters to be caught. Outside although it’s drizzling I feel that curious contentment about this green and pleasant land that is pure gut and not rational. Yesterday I had a pint of Palmer’s Best Bitter (the Bridport Brewer) slightly flat, slightly warm, mildly hoppy and bitter sweet. It tasted to me of village cricket and memories of steam trains. But my wife said it tasted to her of “disappointment” not that it was disappointing but that it reminded her of “something not quite fulfilling what she’d expected it to”. I reflected she was probably right; it was a sort of UKIP taste – slightly discontented and mildly aggrieved, happy to put up with chipped cups and white bread.

A taste can do that as can a smell. Summer holidays are evoked by the smell of sun on old stones and of a BBQ aroma.  Mansion polish: just one sniff of it and I think of Oxford.

We can only guess at people’s memories, at what is stored in the brain ready to go off at any time. Yet “mood-barometrics” – the study of how to measure mood – will take us a long way down the road of disentangling the mysteries of feelings and human instinct.

The smartest business people are recognising the need to engage and inspire the emotions. The art of storytelling, creating a compelling narrative,  is the stuff of the C suite. We are on the verge of an era where emotion plays a much bigger part in business than spreadsheets and facts.

Einstein once said: “Everything that can be counted does not necessarily count; everything that counts cannot necessarily be counted.”

But that was then. The world is changing and quite soon we’ll be able to count the things that really count.

SOMETHING'S ROTTEN IN THE STATE OF DORSET

It was “Broadchurch” that got me thinking. You know the Dorset Noir TV series that got such astounding ratings on ITV. I was given the box set for my birthday and we’ve spent the past week glued to it.
It got me thinking that Michael Douglas was right when recently he said that the long form TV series like Games of Thrones, the Borgias, Wired and so on were the future of film.

Their publishers said the same to Dickens and Trollope …”look Charlie just write an 800 page cliff hanger with lots of characters and weave a really complex plot. Just remember big is beautiful”
.

After a week in which they held the smallest penis competition in Scotland – I’m serious – and EF Schumacher the economist who wrote “Small is Beautiful” was on my mind, this may seem a bit of a surprise.

After all our attention spans are reducing…aren’t they?

We’ve got 20:20 in cricket, speed dating, speed interviewing, snacking and in Pecha Kucha the 7 minute presentation (20 slides, 20 seconds each) which is designed to be twice as good as TED speeches  which last twice as long.

So short is good. We’re all obsessed it would seem by the “quickie”. When I got sent a 25 minute YouTube piece I found myself feeling my time was being stolen. ..”where do I find a spare 25 minutes?”

When I read anything now I think “get to the point PD James, stop prevaricating.” Given this logic the greatest crime novel title would be “The Butler Did It”.

But the return to the Aga-slow-cooked plot where the complexities and weakness of human behaviour get played out and twists and turns happen with tantalising unexpectedness,  is not a sign of a fashion change. The appetite for good stories just never went away. Ask JK Rowling, ask Ken Follett, just as we asked Dostoevsky or Wagner….well… imagine the abbreviated Ring Cycle. No actually now I think about it, speed Wagner should be mandatory.

The reason the Reduced Shakespeare Company is so funny, apart from brilliant performance and scripting, is that it’s mad. Hamlet in 30 seconds is a hoot. Whilst performed over three hours it’s harrowing. Probably even the Petra Kucha (or 20:20 version) of World War II would be pretty funny too.

Only comedy works in the short form - hence PG Wodehouse. In our noir world you need time to eat, digest and discover.

Me? I’m now off to create “Mad Men Noir”. It’s long. It’s brutal. It’s going to be terribly depressing. It’ll involve heavy drinking, the serial killing of competitors and the most complicated marketing plan ever.
As to whether these blogs are too short read next week’s effort which will be 800 pages of unremitting misery all in black and white.

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