Marketing Talk

It is so cold this morning that I am having to type extra fast to stop my fingers freezing to the keyboard. Outside, the charm of the dazzling snowscape is beginning to pall four days after the heavens dumped over six inches of the white stuff on an unsuspecting (and evidently unprepared) United Kingdom. Thanks to sub-zero temperatures night and morn it hasn’t gone anywhere since, and neither have most of my fellow citizens as a result.

I hadn’t realised how bad the snow was until I was half way back from the station on Saturday having dropped off No 3 son bound for a party in London (in the event snowed off). We had been making slow but steady progress through the dancing flakes on the way, but half a mile into the return the traffic stopped. Dead. For quarter of an hour. I then proceeded to inch forward (literally) for the next ninety minutes of what is usually a five minute journey. Time to muse on life’s great questions like, ‘is it more efficient to turn off your engine in standing traffic?’(somewhat academic in the circumstances, given the effect on the heater) and ‘what’s the Marketing Talk angle on snow?’

Well, for a start , it plays hell with distribution – the mysterious and often misunderstood ‘P’ for ‘Place’ in the marketing mix which represents marketing’s efforts to get goods and services in front of customers as cheaply and conveniently as possible.  Peter Drucker once described distribution as marketing’s Dark Continent: unmapped, dangerous, but full of potential riches for those prepared to explore and exploit it. I’m not entirely comfortable with the colonialist implications of this image, but he had a point. As customers we tend not to even notice distribution when it’s done well. The goods or services are there, and we take it for granted. But come something unexpected like snow (or volcanic ash) and it becomes very noticeable indeed.

For all that we talk of a shift to the service economy, for all the rhetoric about virtualisation and business at the speed of light, there is still no substitute (would that there were!) for road freight in getting the goods to the customer. Even internet behemoths like Amazon are powerless in the face of ungrittted roads. And if customers can’t face struggling through snow-clogged roads, the most titanic of bricks and mortar retailers faces a thin time this Christmas. The Independent newspaper suggested recently that snow was costing the economy about a billion a day.

So how is it that they cope in snowy countries? The answer is also to do with distribution, which includes the cost of storing goods (and keeping services available at short notice). If you are using snow-ploughs and gritters regularly then you don’t mind the cost of garaging and maintenance. If you are used to facing a snowy drive most of the year, you invest in a set of snow tyres. But if snowy conditions are a rarity (as they are in most of the UK most of the time) the costs of such precautions look disproportionate. Only when the weather takes an unreasonable turn do we start to question this apparent common sense and start baying for the blood of our ill-prepared transport chiefs.

Distribution is, like so many things in life, a matter of calculated balance. You need to combine adequate levels of availability with minimum cost, or the operation becomes too expensive to sustain and the price goes up. But cut too many corners on the necessary cost of distribution, and the result is late or no deliveries, and empty shelves.

But as the holiday season approaches I am now about to stop trying to drive through the snow, and start playing in it instead as nature intended.

A Merry Christmas to all Marketing Talk readers and best wishes for a peaceful and prosperous New Year.

When the client moans and sighs,

Make his logo twice the size.

If he still should prove refractory

Show a picture of his factory.

Only in gravest cases

Should you show the clients’ faces

So wrote the late David Ogilvy, advertising guru par excellence, in his classic book Confessions of an Advertising Man. One of Ogilvy’s agency clients was turkey magnate Bernard Matthews, whose recent death at the age of 80 marked the passing of a British marketing legend. Famous as the inventor of the Turkey Twizzler (or perhaps infamous, given the basting it got from TV superchef Jamie Oliver’s school dinners campaign) his yet more lasting claim to marketing fame is the way he fronted his own advertising campaigns, cheerfully assuring us how ‘bootiful’ his products were. You can understand how, in this case, Ogilvy was prepared to make an exception to his rule of keeping the client out of shot. Matthews’  Norfolk-jacketed accent, endearing enthusiasm, and innate showmanship (a great one for presenting turkeys to prime ministers on the door step of Number 10) made him a natural brand advocate.

It’s funny, given the importance of personality in branding, how rarely clients feature in their own advertising. Older readers may recall Victor Kiam, who was so impressed with his wife’s gift of a Remington Micro Screen Shaver that he bought the company — and proceeded to brandish the product at millions of viewers from his bathroom through the 1980s. Selling came naturally to Kiam, who was selling Coca Cola to passers-by outside his grandparents’  house by the age of eight.

More recent entrepreneurs, such as James Dyson or the ubiquitous Richard Branson, are shamelessly visible advocates for their brands, but they tend to avoid paid-for advertising in favour of high-profile stunts aimed at hitching a ride in editorial media. The advent of new media has given an even more direct platform to Dyson who radiates boyish glee at the ingenuity of his ‘bladeless fan’  in his explanatory You Tube video. I’m not sure I have ever noticed the air-chopping tendencies of traditional fans, but it’s hard not to be swept along by his delight in the smooth flowing properties of his invention.

The reluctance of advertising agencies to let clients speak for themselves in ads may, of course, be to do with the difficulty of keeping them on message. After all, they are paying for it. Legend has it that Bernard Matthews’  iconic ‘they’re bootiful’ was his exasperated alternative to the agency’s intended line ‘The only tough old bird around here is me!’  (brave copywriter whoever penned that). Matthews’ rejection of it stemmed not so much from amour propre than from a worry that mentioning ‘tough’ at all in the commercial would turn people off turkey.

That other possessor of a fowl-fuelled fortune, Colonel Sanders of Kentucky Fried Chicken fame, proved a more problematic advocate for the products sold in his name after he disposed of most of his chain of fast-food outlets to a holding company. In 1975 the then parent company unsuccessfully sued him for likening its gravy to wallpaper paste. Truth in advertising? Marketing Talk could not possibly comment!