WHY WAS THE THIRD MAN SO FETED?

 Recently I watched The Third Man. I ‘d been looking forward to this great oldie (just like me I chuckled.) An hour and a half later I was disappointed and grumpy. It’s a rather slow and dreary film. Trevor Howard, one of its stars, in that clipped tone of his were he alive today, would have pronounced it “absolutely ghastly.” Yet in 1999, the British Film Institute voted The Third Man the greatest British film of all time.

Is my memory so bad? Have standards changed? Is it as great as I remembered but in the meantime have I completely lost it? Alternatively, is my critical mind now clearer and less forgiving? There’s one great line when Harry Lime (Orson Wells) justifying not being the nice guy and instead profiteering on the black-market killing hundreds with diluted penicillin:

“In Switzerland, they had brotherly love and they had 500 years of democracy and peace. And what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.”

A brilliant and memorable joke but the rest is mostly slow.

 

It seems slow because we understand things much quicker now. We are smarter. We are more demanding. But equally we get fixed in our views more firmly and are also more gullible.

Most of my working life was spent in marketing and advertising exploiting such gullibility. In truth a lot of marketing was nonsense. Marketeers behaved like Bishops protecting their fiefdoms and advertising men were quasi-Jesuits preserving myths like the weight of advertising was directly proportionate to sales. Spend more. Sell more.

Not true. The king had no clothes. Marketeers were often shysters like Kevin Roberts the one-time CEO of Saatchi and Saatchi who wrote a book called “Lovemarks” in which he claimed brands were running out of juice and could only be revived by his magic potion. This included the injection of intimacy, commitment, empathy and passion. Pass me the sick bag Doris; this is toxic tosh.

I suspect the banks might have read his book. Marketeers in banking played with intimacy whilst the money men were closing branches and playing with derivatives.

I was once invited to a discussion group of marketeers where I was mugged by a woman who said surely everyone now knew marketing budgets should be invested in good causes and a social media guru who laughingly said soup sales were correlated to illness and that since sick people consumed more soup he was advising Heinz to track flu epidemics and invest accordingly.

Marketing and advertising require rigour, common sense and a sense of humour. Looking back I remember laughing a lot. There’s not much laughter now.   

But this is not meant to be a lecture on marketing so much as a warning on the dangers of mythology. Just as Orson Wells once wove a magical web around his films so marketers (of which he was of course a master) created myths about their work.

Sadly most advertising is dull, intrusive, tone deaf and seldom funny. Similarly with films. Those the critics love are seldom those the punters go for. Like the Third Man, La-La Land was a wow with the critics. It was also pretty ghastly. 

It’s clear that in our frenetic world common sense, lightness of touch and creativity are in short supply. Mark Ritson (Marketing Week) consistently lacks ‘lightness of touch’ but I love how he debunks pretentiousness. 

Read his “The Greatest Marketing Bullshit Of All Time.” It’s a brilliant demolition of marketing mythology. In his rant he uses the term “brandwank”. 

“Brandwank”! I wish I’d created that. It’s utterly priceless.

SPRING IS SPRUNG, THE GRASS IS RIZ....

The current lockdown is creating problems. Government, and through them the police, have powers not seen since the Second World War. Sometimes this goes awry as when a police constable, surely not destined for early promotion, was recorded in York rebuking people for sitting in their own front garden and when park benches have been taped up.

My own recent experience in our private, communal garden has thrown up two, differing views. Most stridently, the need to rigorously enforce government guidance, limit the time people can spend outside and restrict the extent of children playing.

Less stridently but just as insistently the need to apply common sense, respect for one another and to enjoy the weather and the beauty of Spring. Freedom first. Control second.

Everyone I know has applied social distancing, social isolation and caution. What’s impressed me most  is the speed with which a large number of retailers have adapted their businesses to home delivery services.
Points of view from Mark Ritson, a former professor of marketing and a writer for Marketing  Week, are usually insightful and useful. He consistently and punishingly puts social media in its place. He praises well-thought-through brand strategy. His weakness is he swears so much. Saying fuck a lot isn’t very professorial.

He’s written recently to say nothing will f**** ** change after coronavirus ends. We shall revert  – as ever –  “back to normal.” This is not an academic reflection it’s a self- opinionated thinker swotting a fly. Mark is the Nigel Farage of business thinking. Sometimes right, often wrong, always abrasive. But things will change – not for everyone, obviously -  but enough to create a seismic trend to society. Here are a few possibilities:
- The economy – the worst recession since 1930. Some say a “scale disaster.”
- Our attitude to the environment. A big bonus.
- Our shopping habits.
- Commuting behaviour and attitudes to working from home.

- A boom in start-up businesses (partly because of unemployment increases.)
- More businesses thinking the unthinkable and pivoting.
- Less marketing or as it’s now described “colouring in” (sorry again Mark).

I was recently asked if I thought the surprising surge in the FTSE might be caused by markets anticipating a postponement or cancellation of Brexit.

I said that I thought Brexit was irrelevant but, more importantly, so increasingly  was the EU. Rich and relatively Covid-free Germany is proving intransigent to the pleas from Italy, Spain and – increasingly – France to help their neighbours. As a one-time ‘remainer’ and Europhile I’m sad to see this. Unless the rich can help their struggling partners and act like part of  a  ‘Union’ the EU seems rather pointless.

Do I sound grumpy?

Tom Stoppard noted that social distancing legitimised the way he always wanted to live. Part of me agrees with that. But it’s been such a gorgeous Spring I’ve forgotten how awful it must be living in a city.

And isn’t Spring amazing?

It’s dem birdies.

EVERY LITTLE...

No this is not about Tesco which is doing much better under Dave Lewis. Before he came along a better strapline might have been “Every dozy dinosaur needs a kick up the arse”. Having said that I have no idea why they’re targeting Aldi with their new Jack’s stores.

They are going down-and-dirty and as an occasional Aldi shopper I know it’s not down-and-dirty but just has lots of low cost, high quality products. Professor Mark Ritson in Marketing Week said Tesco should be trying to be a better Tesco and not trying to be like Aldi. Aldi is brilliant at being Aldi -  like a shark, ruthless and very efficient. This applies to Lidl too. Both examples of great retailing and high productivity.

But this blog’s not about Tesco it’s about the middle class darling Waitrose or as it’s now known Waitrose and Partners. Warning bell. An expensive rebranding exercise and  the worst profits for years. Does any connection spring to mind?

Let me confess two things. I like the partnership model and I like shopping at Waitrose. But for my loyalty to be maintained I need:
- It to stock what I want
- Its fruit and vegetables to be pristine – they charge enough to guarantee this surely?
- Its service to be exceptional

Recently little niggles have started to occur – rotten bananas, under-ripe avocados which ripen to black nastiness, constant stock-outs, no more Warburton’s bread that we like replaced by private label that we don’t like, slow service in the café, no more free coffee in the cafe on the Waitrose card, serve yourself coffee which runs out and is very messy.

It’s all very trivial, a series of little irritations but they combine to make me feel less loyal. And then it compounds…there are fewer staff around; where’s the presence of a jovial manager the sort who welcomes and is omnipresent; the rumour that you should stop using your Waitrose loyalty card because after a month the algorithm notices and the “lost customer” warning will kick in and you’ll start getting big discount vouchers to lure you back, much bigger than any “loyal” customer gets.

Little niggles build into monster gripes lead to customer loss. The “that’s typical” Victor Meldrew moments keep on happening. Sometimes there’s nothing you can do. I was told about a series of disasters at a hotel with an important customer. In desperation the manager offered a free meal with wonderful wine. All was wonderfully well until the sommelier spilt a glass of Lynch-Bages down the wife’s white dress.

We spend a lot of time talking about big pictures in business but big pictures can be ruined by a series of small smudges. Unless the process works brilliantly and consistently, unless that manager is leading from the front one thing can lead to another.

Every little cock-up leads to customers walking away – and who can blame them. Let’s not forget the maxim “the customer’s always right (even when they’re wrong”.)

THE FUTURE'S BRILLIANT

When I say that we’ve never lived in such glorious and exciting times some of you will think I’ve taken leave of whatever senses I have left. The history of mankind is pretty short in the scheme of things. If our planet had existed for just a year then Homo Sapiens would have been around for less than 10 minutes. More importantly the real, real digital action has been taking place in the past fraction of a second.

The internet and digitisation are transforming our lives. Like many I too am a sceptic when it comes to suggesting that Amazon’s warehouse in the sky 45,000 feet up dropping drones to earth to fulfil our orders in hours or minutes of our placing them is likely to be anything other than a nice bit of PR. But when I read about a company called “Zipline” which uses drone-type small planes to deliver healthcare products to the 2 billion of the world who would otherwise be denied access to them due to challenging terrain and gaps in infrastructure, I’m on my feet and applauding as potentially 3 million lives a year could be saved by this.

Two decades ago Jean-Marie Dru, worldwide Chairman of TBWA, was the proclaimed the originator of the word “disruption®“as a creative tool. Like all trendy concepts it lay quietly in the agency world for a while but has now accelerated to the point at which all business life is being disrupted, old business models are being demolished and it’s normal.

Dru says rightly that:
“Digital is forcing every single business leader in the world to rethink, sometimes to revolutionise, his or her company.”

Companies like Coca-Cola that have for over a century been a bellwether for the global economy are now wounded because they’re selling something that’s become increasingly unfashionable - sweet, sugary fizzy drinks. At a recent Marketing Week conference a delegate shocked the audience and speaker Professor Mark Ritson by asking the breathtaking question;-

“Is Coca-Cola entering its Nokia phase?”

The clock cannot be turned back despite the wishes of a large number of British Conservatives and Brexit supporters and people throughout the world especially in the American rustbelt. Globalisation is here to stay, digital is here to stay and change everything. Not least it’s likely to lead to increased unemployment as the robots get to work. It’s taken advanced societies like Finland to counter the threat of this by producing plans to introduce a living wage for everyone, whether at work or not.

With this front cover Time magazine were not being satirical. The future is nearer than any of us think. Artificial Intelligence, Virtual Reality, Total Connectivity and Limitless Creativity are here and changing our lives. Remember GE, that great manufacturing company? Well it’s now the largest software company in the world totally reinventing itself.

I’ll repeat - we have never lived in such exciting times and I am thrilled by what I see. The world really is getting better.