MEMORIES MAKE MONEY AND SAVE LIVES

On Saturday a charity that I chair, responsible for raising funds to restore the oldest building in Brighton held its AGM. Professor Bruce Brown, pro Vice Chancellor of the University of Brighton spoke engagingly about the things that made Brighton special and its being a Super City of the future, according to an HSBC study, owing to its independence of spirit, an  ideal qualification for a thriving SME community.

But I was riveted by what Bruce said about the distant past, when few read and books were unusual, when buildings themselves were like “textbooks” – where pictures, sculptures and decorations all held great meaning and how old buildings, well restored and archived were “memory palaces”.  Google has its own value, of course. The internet allows us to find out how to make a bomb or deworm a cat but a memory palace it is not.

I am not nostalgic but the practical value of having people in a business who know where the bodies are buried and who know how to deal effectively with a crisis be it pandemic, flood or earthquake is immense. I’m not talking about spectators who, seeing a building collapse, are fondly reminded of Fred Dibnah – the TV steeplejack star and demolition expert of the 1990s. Practical memory means having an intuition so finely honed that it and not your brain instinctively helps you do the right thing when there’s no time to stop and think.

And we are placing perhaps too little value on memories and instincts seemingly wired  into an organisation which often determine how it behaves. It’s the expression “it’s in the woodwork” that determines how a Google, News International, BA or even political party behaves. Better to delve into the collective memory to understand it rather than try and brainwash it and hope it will change. Cultures don’t change that easily because of the collective memories that permeate them.

Having recently had a birthday and gloomily counting them forgive me if I reflect on the value of grey hairs. In Japan they give the wise, older executives “a seat by the window” so they can read their newspapers more easily but also because they are a constant resource of memories for others to use.

The current propensity to say in an age of change that the past is like an unwelcome anchor is wrong. We all need access to the past to avoid making the same mistakes and reinventing that same old wheel  which may be diverting to watch but is wasteful.

Memories matter. They inform the future. Ask someone older next time.

THOSE WELCOME WINDS OF CHANGE

The original “wind of change” speech was made by Harold Macmillan, then British Prime Minister, 51 years ago in and about Africa. To many it seemed a seminal insight.

This week a very dear friend came round and as we had a drink or two he sighed. Understand that this guy is someone hugely successful and effective so his weary pessimism was significant.

“Our institutions are falling. The Media. The Police. The core of government. The judiciary (they’re probably next). Big companies we’d relied on. The armed forces. Nothing seems  capable of surviving any more…it’s very depressing”.

I disagreed. It seemed to me the windows were being opened in a large, dusty house that ponged a bit. It’s time to work out what we stand for and to stop talking about money the whole time. If money were the sole determinant of a successful life then the Mafia must be up there with the great institutions.  I think what’s happening is just what we needed. A big shake-out. Sorry for some of the guys caught in the crossfire like Paul Stephenson but in a zero tolerance world you don’t take freebies if you’re the top policemen, however innocent that may have been.

So as you write your next marketing plan you’d better be clear about what you would or wouldn’t do (“would you pay £5,000 for a copy of your major competitor’s plan? Would you slip a briefcase full of £20 notes to a buyer at a supermarket group to double your facings? Would you write an anonymous damaging tweet about a personal rival?”).  If you aren’t clear that this is a game with rules and diving in the penalty area gets you fired then join the guys in the smelly house with closed windows.

And if you don’t find life funny and full of delicious ironies then you should join the pastafarian cult. Didn’t see it? Niko Alm in Austria persuaded the driving-licence authorities to allow a licence photograph with him wearing a colander on his head. As a disciple of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster he must have been persuasive or do you think he just slipped then a brown envelope full of euros?

WHO'S IN CHARGE NOW?

It used to be so easy.

There were people who were in charge and there were those who obeyed them. Think of school. Think of work. Think of society. Society was neither big nor was it small; it was just a perfect triangle of rulers at the top and the ruled at the bottom - kings and subjects.

And then, following the American model of checks and balances, we had the executive, the legislature and the judiciary and, added to that, the free press. Remember Watergate, that moment when all rulers trembled. Followed by a period when through processes of consultation in companies, concepts like referenda in politics, abnegation of decision making to others (“this one has to go to Brussels for a ruling”) and an over eager use of market research,  the tree of ruling has been damagingly shaken. We have delegated the decision making process and those whom a one-time gardener of mine used to grimly call “the authorities”,  are now no longer in authority or, more to the point, have any authority.

And it’s been, happening again and again and again. Dictators, Party Leaders, MPs, Police, Media have all lost their influence and next? It’ll probably be the judiciary because it’s time for the biters to be bitten as the always wise Matthew Parrish put it.

I don’t know about you but I’ve never had a greater sense of power. If I don’t like something that’s been done or the way it’s being done I shall complain and kick up a fuss. That’s what social media can help me do but beyond that the so-called authorities are running so scared that any blip on their political or publicity radar will make them fumble with their bone china strategies.

Which brings me to marketing. I’m rewriting my book Brilliant Marketing for its 2nd edition. Since 2008 when I first wrote it much has changed. As marketers we used to practise mass-marketing, what Seth Godin calls “interruption marketing” and power-marketing…telling people what to think and do. Marketing was once a baseball bat of a weapon where we stunned consumers first and then left it to salesmen to finish them off (closing the sale we called it), now we are using conversation, irony and gestures of friendship. We are building relationships not inducing transactions (or we should be.)

Most of all, we, the customers, are in charge. Let’s hope we use this better than the ones that went before us.

BISEXUAL VICAR IN BONDAGE DISPUTE

The thing I’d always loved about the News of the World was its Donald McGill naughty seaside postcard sleaziness. The editor of the News of the Screws seemed likely to be a Max Miller “you-really-think-those-are-big-tits?” sort of person. We all read it – in fact it had the highest AB readership of any organ (sorry!) The News of the World was the Heinz or Kellogg of newspapers. An institution that was as British as the London Palladium, the Beatles, Coronation Street, Twiggy or Auntie Bessie’s Yorkshire Puddings. It was an iconic brand.

And then it got sold to Mr Murdoch, the man who has arguably done more for newspapers, the media in general and sport in particular than anyone in history. Yet whilst he’s done all this good he’s done something else too - set the bar higher and higher until the only way of them hitting the target was for them to be increasingly more “creative” in how they got sales which meant how they got news.

The fact is that spying is a common enough business practice and has been for centuries. That poor old Vicar in the headline was probably caught by a camera hidden in a bible. But what’s unusual is for a big brand to be killed-off like this one, like a pig with swine fever. The product had been bad: the brand was strong. So what went wrong?

Are we as Matthew Parrish suggested, in Saturday’s Times, simply getting things out of proportion? Because this was the way the media all always behaved with now that extra of technology thrown in?  The NOW brand was a leader amongst a pack of wolves who behaved in a similar way. The Telegraph started its MP expenses campaign via a stolen CD so, as we know, they were really all at it. That’s what they believed they had to do in their relentless quest for “truth”. Spy, eavesdrop and pilfer dustbins.

Machiavelli has a lot to answer for because the end doesn’t always justify the means despite the pressure from owners, shareholders, CEOs, CFOs and talented people hungry to advance their careers.

But there’s only one thing even more unpleasant than the reek of corruption and sleaze which I can smell a lot of right now - sanctimoniousness.

More tea Vicar?

WHY RUTTING CHIMPANZEES GET AWAY WITH IT

There are two aspects to the DSK saga that strike me.

The first is why the great and the good seem time after time to get way with inappropriate or sometimes possibly criminal behaviour. Zuma, Clinton, the Kennedy’s and now the man that was born to be the President of France, Dominique Strauss-Kahn.

The recent swing from how a previous recipient of his unwelcome attentions described him, “rutting chimpanzee”, to wronged roué is pretty amazing. The high profile arrest, the comic spectacle of the French in the dock, the self-righteous commentaries and the immediate presumption of guilt was always liable to prove troublesome for any prosecution but the speed with which their case is unravelling is bizarre. It argues for all of us to be a lot more circumspect until we have all the facts. As Sean Meehan, Professor of Marketing at IMD said:-“in God we trust …all others need data”.

The truth is, as the editor of the Lady, Boris’ sister Rachel Johnson noted, DSK is sort of fanciable and (I loved this one) seemed to like women a lot. Years ago I was at the Hay-on-Wye Book Festival when Bill Clinton was there. Sponsored by the Guardian it was full of feminists who strongly disapproved of his presence. Until they met him at which point “phwoar!” set in and they pretty well all confessed to melting beneath his ardent you-are-the-only-one gaze. Others, like the Kennedy’s had a kind of droit de seigneur about them that meant they got away with murder. Incidentally this sexual entitlement for the boss was known to apply in several British advertising agencies at one time.

None of this justifies rape. None of this justifies lousy behaviour or the sexual equivalent of ram- raiding.

Simply that there’s more to a scandal than meets the immediate salacious media eye. As Rod Liddle notes “sex sells papers” and he was desperate to scoop the Prime Minister being found in bed with the Archbishop of Canterbury and several goats.

The second question is why on earth talented people behave so badly, recklessly and stupidly.

Stephen Ambrose, the late US historian and biographer had the answer:

“God created man with a penis and a brain, but only gave him enough blood to run one at a time”.

So the worst charge would be diminished responsibility. Hmmm!

WHY HAVE SO MANY GOOD CAUSES SCREWED UP?

Polar bears, organic vegetables, political correctness, liberal values, employee rights, health and safety. Somehow they’ve all got melded together in some kind of misguided and worthy gel. And all the good stuff that lay behind the causes they individually represented has been lost.

How can it be that I’ve leapt from a believer to a sceptic this fast?

Let’s look at organic food. How is it can I find myself applauding Matt Ridley saying that organic farming was sustainable for sure, sustainable insofar as it sustains famine and food shortage? Why? Because it’s so inefficient a method of production.  And I’ve just begun to discover something important: a lot of it doesn’t taste very good. And there’s the e-coli issue in Germany has made me question how safe it is. So if it costs more, tastes poor and makes me ill,  that seems a dodgy old marketing platform.

One after another, good liberal causes are being strangled by mendacity or hype. I suppose it’s the messengers rather than their messages that I’ve begun to distrust or think would say anything to prove their point. Life seems too short for this and the devil in me is muttering there’s nothing that a diet of Marlboro, pork pie, Tequila, chocolate and Jeremy Clarkson won’t solve.

My second thought this week relates to role models.  There’s probably nothing really wrong with Bob Diamond who runs Barclays or Sepp Blatter who runs FIFA or Bernie Ecclestone who runs Formula One or Jean-Marie Le Pen who runs the French National Front Party (potentially the next French President). They are rich, successful, utterly shameless and with feet of something clay like.

But Rory McIlroy, the wonder golfer, fills me with joy (especially in contrast to the charmless Tiger). As does John Hegarty ad man extraordinaire whose book is just out. As does Jamie Oliver. As does George Clooney. As do Sue Barker, Margaret Heffernan, Carolyn McCall, Stevie Spring ….

All nice guys.

As Margaret Heffernan put it “nice is the new mean.”

The nice guys who espoused the nice causes I talked about up front have screwed up because they’ve stopped being nice. The moment you forget your values and just focus on winning at all costs you lose your sense of fun, your reputation and your soul.

VENICE: A PARADIGM OF DEGRADATION?

Jan Morris entertainingly described the history of Venice as a transition from power to luxury from luxury to flippancy and from flippancy to impotence. But the Venice of today, where I recently spent a week, is on the ascendancy again.

There are real craft shops doing great stuff, the Biennale is in in full swing and once you’ve overcome three shocks one has a deep sense of admiration that billions of dollars have been well spent on restoration
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The shocks are economic -the pound/euro parity – so a couple of beers cost £15; iconoclastic - the cruise ships (Voyager of the Seas which has over 3,000 guests and is 14 stories high slid past on the Giudecca Canal and nearly gave me a heart attack because there are no skyscrapers in Venice except these) and finally commercial, the posters and African market traders of knock-off designer labels in St. Mark’s Square. The 96 sheet ad for Citroen was particularly nasty, the Louis Vuitton knock-off bags a close second.

Pseuds’ Corner would have a field day with the arty fliers. Here are just some of them:
“One of a thousand ways to defeat entropy”;
“The cloud of unknowing”;
“Permanently becoming and the architecture of seeing” (this one authored by Julian Schnabel, the US film maker and artist) and from the Canadian exhibit at the Biennale itself – (Canada clearly got out of bed the wrong side that day)
“Triumphant secretion sculpted in foul mist
Dehydrated spectral birth at war with false metals”

Even the local Casino got in on the act with this: “an infinity of emotion” – yes that’s what you get with your chips on the tables of Venice.

The city is glorious – learning, effortlessly reaching back a thousand years and forward to a world of art and experiment, of hand craftsmanship and of car-free and Vespa-less perfume. Venice feels quite modern and self-confident in some ways, a world apart from the wrinkled old lady I first saw over twenty years ago.

Look at Venice today and see how once great can be reborn as the capital of conferences, global art, fashion and opera. There’s the odd jolt and tacky moment but it felt young, experimental and fun; a place in which to learn rather than a place in which to decay or die.

And maybe it’s a place to use as a new paradigm – one of restoration and hope.