Marketing Talk

Ofcom have just published the latest in a series of annual reports on how children (5 – 15) use and think about TV and online media, and how their parents and carers attempt to police it. The picture that emerges is of digital media playing an increasingly important part in the school and social lives of children, while their parents (half of whom admit their kids know more about the internet than they do) make a gallant attempt to keep up.

Particularly striking is the fact that, for the first time since the annual studies began in 2006, 12 – 15 year-olds have declared that they would miss their mobile phones and the internet more than television. Even so, TV remains the main media time-sponge amongst 5 – 15 year olds overall, at an average of 17 and a half hours a week – two hours up on 2007. Second-choice media activity varies, with younger children preferring computer games, while older children browse, do homework, and Facebook. 12- 15 year olds are now online for the best part of 16 hours a week.

While Google is the most used website across the group as a whole, social networking becomes increasingly popular the older the child. Membership of sites such as Facebook at 54% is about the same amongst 8 – 15 year olds as it is amongst adults in general. For 12 – 15 year olds, it’s a passion – three in four being active users. Life in the digital playground is not without its negative side, naturally. Malicious gossip, embarrassing photographs, impersonation, being picked on – it’s not all sweetness and light online. One in five 12 – 15 year-olds reported personal experience of this kind of thing in the past 12 months.

In spite of the fact that a minority of respondents admitted to risky behaviour (e.g. divulging their profile to contacts they had only met online) 88% of 5 – 15 year olds were confident they know how to stay safe. Their parents, as a rule, concurred with this view. 79% pointed out that staying safe online was something their children learned to do at school, and most of them had clear rules about their children’s use of TV and media – including an increase in the direct supervision of such use amongst some parents. The report concluded, however, that many parents could do more to use the technical controls available to them (such as internet filters and PIN controls for TV) alongside discussing do’s and don’ts with their children. They might have to learn more about the internet first, of course…

What does all this mean for marketing? In spite of the growth of online as an advertising medium, concerns about television still dominate much of the controversy about marketing to children, as I have discussed elsewhere. The increasing amount of commercial presence online, not only in terms of content but also in how that content gets filtered and made available to users, affects not only adults but, increasingly, children. The 2011 Ofcom report reveals that parents are concerned about their children’s exposure to inappropriate content and behaviour on television and digital media. Perhaps we should be doing more to ensure that parents and children can also recognise and respond appropriately to commercial activity online?

I’m very pleased to be blogging the news that I was lucky enough to receive the Journal of Social Marketing award for Best Paper at the recent 10th International Colloquium on Arts, Heritage, Non-profit and Social Marketing, held at Leeds Business School on 7th September. This event, the length of whose title is proportional to its excellence, is an annual shindig for academics from all over the world to share their work in progress. It’s always a fascinating occasion. Amongst other things, this year’s Colloquium featured work on selling theatre to sheep farmers, what the Big Society means for marketing, and how to promote road safety to the Norwegians.

In a Colloquium you stand up for 20 minutes, explain what you are investigating and how, and what you’ve found out so far. Then your audience pitch in with their reactions so you get a sense of how much (if any) sense you’ve been making. They have to be constructive because more than likely they’re on next. It’s hard work, fun, friendly and a useful step towards getting an article in print (see my previous post Publish or Perish). And if you are very lucky, now and then there are prizes to be had! (Mine is a year’s online subscription to the Journal of Social Marketing by the way, and a very nice framed certificate).

My certificate (printed on recycled paper natch.)

Getting a catchy title is always a good start. Try ‘Fixing the menvironment and healing the shecology: a gendered approach to pro-environmental social marketing’. Well, the judges liked it!

The point of the paper is that men and women may well talk about environmental issues in different ways. If this is the case, it makes sense to aim separate marketng messages reflecting these differences at men and at women in order to encourage them to adopt greener behaviour. I got the idea for this when I was doing a project last year with my colleague Dr Anne Smith from ISM-Open (the Open University’s end of the Institute for Social Marketing which we jointly host with the University of Stirling). We were working with a number of organisations to find ways in which employees themselves could devise and then implement greener working practices, eventually ‘marketing’ them to their colleagues. We spent a lot of time talking to people in focus groups. I couldn’t help noticing that the men were talking differently from the women somehow but couldn’t quite put my finger on it.

Reading around the subject I came across the work of the American linguist, Deborah Tannen. As long ago as 1990 she wrote the kind of book that most academics can only dream of — a best-seller that got her work in front of a mass readership, and catapulted her into a whirlwind tour of chat shows and radio interviews. The book was called ‘You Just Don’t Understand’, and the big idea behind it was that men and women are two separate cultures when it comes to communication. Do I see you nod your head? She claimed, convincingly enough for the book to go into several new editions, and to spawn a multitude of further research publications, that in order to avoid the kind of conflicts and breakdowns that are all too common a part of daily life, we need to adjust our communicative styles to take such differences into account.

Men are more competitive than women, she argues (forgive me Professor Tannen if you are reading this. I freely confess I am oversimplifying your excellent work). They’ll do anything to avoid being ‘pushed around’, including talking in a way which emphasises their technnical expertise (even if it is based on very slim credentials). Women on the other hand are more conciliatory. They will do anything to avoid being ‘pushed out’, including talking in a way which keeps relationships intact and values emotion.

Taking this theoretical framework to the conversations I had recorded in my focus groups, how did the evidence stack up? Sure enough, there were the men, jockeying for position in the talk, interrupting, disagreeing, coming up with technology-inspired solutions to global warming, and generally having a great time rubbishing each other. OK they weren’t all like that, but there was enough evidence for me to recognise many of the patterns Professor Tannen had revealed. The women, particularly if there were no men around to talk across them, were more given to nostalgia, worrying about how the environment was just part of the problem of society becoming less connected and generally agreeing that if we all did our bit, perhaps there’d be some hope of a greener future. Again, I’m oversimplifying vastly, but you get the general drift.

There is of course more to it than that. We speak as we do for many reasons, which interact with gender. But gender is important — and in recent decades it’s become a hot topic as scholars such as Judith Butler have questioned the apparently ‘given’ nature of gender, revealing the importance of social norms in what we take for granted as male and female. She argues that gender is something we ‘perform’ — so perhaps all that environmental talk I was listening to is part of a performance, as each speaker acts out a part based on what they consider appropriate to their image of themselves as male or female, or any variation thereof?

What might this mean for social marketers keen to find the most relevant and effective ways of communicating pro-environmental messages? Is the best idea to approach men and women with different stories? Might advertising work, for example, with male characters shown as solving environmental problems, ‘fixers’ using technology to triumph over the competition provided by global warming? Women, on the other hand, might be potrayed as directly involved in ‘healing’ an ecology of which they feel a part. A possible scenario might be a woman growing organic vegetables, a symbol of personal activity to reunite ‘natural’ processes of nurture and nutrition for family and friends. Or should we rethink this all, and wonder how we might find ways of offering changed environmental behaviour as ‘material’ somehow for ‘performing’ gender as individuals see fit?

What do you think?

First of all, welcome back to Marketing Talk! After a summer break we are back in business with yet more musings on the marketing milieu. (Well actually my professor has just accused me of being a lapsed blogger, which is worse than being a lapsed Catholic, as you can’t get absolution for Portal sin). So here I am again, clutching a firm purpose of amendment.

Happily, comment moderation is on (so you don’t have to read them), but the blogging lacuna has not deterred the many unknown admirers who praise my posts in superlative but grammatically-incoherent comments, promising me great things should I buy their electronics, marry their brides-in-waiting or apply their potions. Please people, enough! I’m happy as I am. Really.

Watercooler moment?

Now, to the subject of this post. We have just had notification of the final withdrawal of watercoolers throughout the university. It’s the end of an era. When I first got here they were generously dotted throughout the Business School in a canny attempt at social engineering. I think the idea was to unite knots of disparate colleagues in earnest debate around each watercooler about last night’s TV, recent advances in financial accounting, or who’d left their lights on in the South car park. But the only gatherings I can remember were actually impromptu seminars on which button was for the cold water, and where to put your cup to prevent a jet of refreshment hitting the carpet. The watercooler as social hub never really caught on.

The real epicentre of office socialisation then, as now, was the ‘coffee dock’ — a room down the corridor equipped with sink, wall-mounted boiler for hot drinks, microwave, fridge and — inexplicably but delightfully — a dishwasher. This is where you bump into people, steal their milk, and generally tune into what’s going on. Canny internal marketers stick their posters here, cunning managers visit in search of hard-to-find colleagues, indigent postgrads warm their meagre lunches here. So far no-one to my knowledge has worked out the dishwasher.

Coffee docks are fiercely territorial, used only by inhabitants of the relevant corridoor or wing. Cups and utensils are ranged proprietorially around the kitchen sink; clearly labelled milk bottles cram the fridge. Watercoolers are more universal somehow. They don’t belong to anyone. While they were here they were everywhere but nowhere in particular. Their passing has gone largely unremarked and unmourned. We are more of a ‘kitchen-sink’ than a ‘water cooler’ culture. And I suspect so are most other institutions.

The writing on the wall for our watercoolers dates from 2010 when the company which supplied them went into administration. Since then they have been maintained by the university, but the supply of parts has dried up and in the current financial climate the mains water tap seems preferable as a source of corporation pop. The failure of that company tells us something about social trends relevant to marketing. People have so many options to communicate nowadays (text, phone, email, even blogs) that the idea of hanging around a watercooler to do so seems a bit redundant. We also have fewer topics of common knowledge and interest. Apart from major sporting occasions and royal weddings we hardly ever all watch the same stuff on television, thus removing one mainstay of watercooler encounters.

This kind of diversity (of media, experience and interest) is a headache for 21st century marketers. Long gone are the days when they could rely on targeting broad segments of the population with more or less the same marketing approach. Many contemporary marketers think in terms of groups of consumers as ‘tribes’, united — often fleetingly — by certain habits and enthusiasms, just as they are divided by other characteristics such as age and geography. Rethinking how you see your customers so that you understand them in their own terms rather than the convenient ones you would prefer to impose is not easy, but should be at the heart of successful marketing. While watercoolers, with their universal pretensions to refreshment, are drying up, the coffee dock, with its tribal following, is here to stay. Hello kitchen sink marketing.

Last week I manned (personned? personified?) a trade stand for the Open University at a big event aimed at charities and voluntary organisations.

There were inspiring keynote sessions, multiple track workshops, surgeries and presentations, a blogging zone (hello there!) and a lady giving Indian head massages. The delegates (a record number according to the organisers) were to mill around the exhibition area between (or perhaps even during) sessions, engaging in meaningful interactions with myself and another two dozen or so hopeful purveyors of products and services to the third sector.

So what happened? Not much actually. Interested enquirers, or even innocent passers by, were thin on the ground. They can’t all have been in the blogging zone surely? At coffee and meal breaks the exhibition hall packed out (cunningly that’s where the food was) but everyone seemed more interested in networking, making phone calls and eating than in meaningful interaction with the likes of me.

Going for a wander after the lunchtime rush to see how others were faring, I got the impression that everyone else was feeling a bit lonely too. We jealously derided the promotions company who had got a chocolate fountain and what looked like champagne cocktails to entice browsers. We loyally admired each other’s freebies (squeezy stress-relief balls very popular this year, with exhibitors at least). We even entered each other’s prize draws. Please, please, please let me win that iPad! Other exhibitors kindly admired my leaflets (being the high-minded OU, that was it on freebies from stand 34!). Little did they suspect I was planting a seed of educational desire in their subconscious minds which will surely bloom years hence…

Silence is turtle-shaped

The guys opposite were enterprising souls. Advised on likely numbers by the organisers, they brought along industrial quantities of Haribo sweets. As they demonstrated several times, accepting one of these ultrachewy items means you have to listen to whatever someone is telling you about their product as you are too busy trying to dislodge it from your teeth to say anything yourself. Great idea, but watch out for about seventy quid’s worth of unused chewy sweets on eBay soon.

My Six Top Tips for exhibitionists everywhere as a result of this experience are:

have something to start a conversation with — could be Haribo, or any number of small giveaways, but once you give someone something it’s difficult for them not to spend at least some time talking with you. A branded item with a contact number or website is ideal — but make sure you give it actively or the opportunity for interaction passes.

think quality not quantity — OK, we could have done with more footfall, but of the people I talked to, the vast majority sounded genuinely interested in taking things further in due course

see it as the start of a relationship. You can’t evaluate presence at an exhibition from immediate sales, but by the leads it generates. So have a follow-up form where you can record contact details and an exact idea of what it is that your visitor is looking for.

stand up (sitting down on an exhibition stand disconnects you from visitor level). Tiring, but essential.

look your visitor (or prospective visitor) in the eye and ask how they are feeling today. Works for those enthusiastic young people with tabards and clipboards, so why not you?

most importantly, listen.

Oh, and make sure whatever event you are exhibiting at does not comprise too much of a distraction from your stand.

Caramel Bunny, the langorously laid-back lapin whose motto has been ‘take it easy’ since the 1980s has suddenly gone a bit Type A. Cadbury’s astutely-planned new poster and press campaign has her urging us to get our bob-tailed rears in gear lest we miss the chance of bagging her and her chocolate twin in a seasonal cellophane two-pack.

No pen on that crowded dressing table, so the message to get nippy is in lippy.

What’s the hurry? The time of year, basically. This is known as seasonal marketing, particularly important for confectionery manufacturers (but also a mainstay of retailers — as outlined in a previous blog).

There, ringed on Ms Bunny’s wall calendar is April 24th, Easter Sunday — cue for chocoholics everywhere to abandon Lenten abstention and dive back into the brown stuff big time.

I’ve never quite understood the connection between Easter and chocolate. Yes, eggs are a sign of new life — and feature in Christian iconography as a symbol of divine perfection, as in Piero della Francesca’s sublime Brera Altarpiece which suspends an ostrich’s egg over the head of the Madonna.

Eggstream beauty from Piero

And I’m willing to accept bunny rabbits as Easter symbols, given their famed fecundity and similarity to the Hare, sacred to the Pagan goddess after whom the season is named in English-speaking countries.

But why all the chocolate? Neither eggs nor bunnies exactly summon it to mind in their natural states. My theory is as follows. Even in the unreliable UK summer, the weather tends to get a bit hot for chocolate to be quite as alluring a prospect as it might be in the colder months. In fact I remember a long time ago when I worked at what was then Rowntree Mackintosh, a certain senior manager frowned on sunny days because they were so bad for sales. Prospects for year-round profits have improved for chocolate manufacturers with the development of brand extensions into icecream. But Easter, even a late one as this year, is the last opportunity to move significant quantities of the real stuff before the summer comes along.

That is, before the advent of global warming and the likely contracting of chocolate munching months. Let’s hope Caramel Bunny doesn’t entirely lose her cool in years to come.

Just seen this endearing little video on the web, heralding the arrival in our shops of Levi’s ‘Water<less’ jeans — with more than a nod to the classic commercial ‘Laundrette’ which boosted sales of 501s (and, apparently, revived the fortunes of boxer shorts) as 80s heart throb Nick Kamen removed his to the delight of a gaggle of laundering ladies.

In Marketing Talk’s humble opinion ‘Water<less’ is a slightly misleading act of branding. The jeans are not waterless in the sense of having banished water from how they are made (cf ‘meaningless’). Instead Levis has found a way of finishing the garments which uses less water than its previous processes did. The ‘less than’ symbol (<) clarifies the point in written manifestations of the brand, assuming you’re famliar with mathematical notation of course. Somehow ‘Lesswater’ jeans does not have the same ring, though it’s possibly more accurate.

Still, let us not take away from this step in the right environmental direction. Even the company itself underlines in its press release about the new development that the vast majority of water that goes into a pair of jeans happens before they are manufactured (in cotton irrigation) and after they are sold (as consumers subject them to frequent washes between short bouts of wearing them). But the new development means that in the finishing process (where new pairs of jeans go through a number of washing cycles in order to improve their texture) water consumption is reduced by an average of 28%.

On its own, perhaps this is not such a dramatic environmental claim. But it’s part of a wider branding strategy aiming at sustainable production and consumption. While researching more water-efficient ways of cultivating cotton, Levis is also co-opting consumers in its water-saving effort. The new care tags in each garment feature instructions about reducing the environmental impact of clothes by washing them less often, washing in cold water, line rather than tumble drying and recycling via charity shops when no longer needed.

Cynics might see this as a way of passing the environmental buck to the much put-upon consumer. After all, the majority of global warming takes place because of the activities of organisations rather than individuals. Why not sort out cotton growing and manufacturing before lecturing the jeans-wearing public that they are overdoing it on the washing front?

But perhaps a better way of understanding the ‘Water<less’ launch is as an illustration of how manufacturers and consumers need to act together to create a more sustainable economy. Marketing isn’t just about organisations making and selling things, it’s about consumers using and disposing of them. — a complete system where changes in how manufacturers act need to be complemented by changes in consumer behaviour if they are to have a positive environmental impact.

Coffee-lovers the world over are spluttering into their cappucinos at the news that Starbucks, the Seattle-based global coffee empire, is changing its logo for 2011 and its 40th anniversary. Gone are the words ‘Starbucks Coffee’ and the green ring which contained them and two stars. We are left with the enigmatic female figure alone, untrammelled by letters or border, although she has gone from black to green. Howard Schultz, the entrepreneur who bought the business in 1987 and transformed it from a local supplier of coffee beans, tea and spices, to a business with branches in 55 countries, waxes lyrical about the brand makeover. According to Schultz ‘it enhances and respects our heritage and at the same time evolves us to a point where we feel it’s more suitable for the future.’

The ring, apparently, had been something of a strategic constraint — trapping the organisation, represented by the aforementioned enigmatic female, into established ways of doing things. Its disappearance ‘allowed her to come out of the circle’, ready for a wider range of business opportunites than coffee alone, and possibly more acceptable as an idenity to the visual, non-verbal, international culture in which Starbucks operates. The US marketing academic, Philip Kotler, makes a distinction between what he calls ‘utterable’ and ‘non-utterable’ branding. The latter is branding by non-verbal means such as logos, colours, typefaces, even noises (such as the sound your computer makes on starting up). Utterable branding devices, such as company names and advertising slogans, have their place, but non-verbal symbols communicate more quickly, deeply and internationally (avoiding translation issues). Plus, of course, they connect more readily to our emotions and appetites than to our reason. You can see the attraction for marketers.

This is not, by any means, the first time the logo has changed. The three founders of the original company back in 1971 (two ex-teachers and a writer) had literary notions about branding. They thought about naming the company Moby Coffee after Moby Dick, but somehow the idea of coffee and whales did not quite gel so they settled for Starbucks, after the First Mate of the ship in the book. Far from being a ‘third place’ where you could relax with latte and the papers, their vision was to provide connoisseurs with roasted coffee beans, tea and spices to be ground and enjoyed at home. They concocted a round logo in earthy brown proclaiming ‘Starbucks Coffee Tea Spices’. At its centre was a suitably maritime image, a slightly cleaned up version of a 15th century Norse engraving of a double-tailed mermaid or siren. Perhaps I am missing something about her allure, but I’m surprised to have seen in Schultz’ book Pour your heart into it that the idea here was to symbolise the seductive attraction of the coffee. Make mine a skinny latte and hold the whipped cream.

The brown logo did the trick for Starbuck’s relatively quiet business until the arrival of Howard Schultz. He had different ideas about what a coffee shop could offer, and bought out the founders in 1987, stylising the logo to render  the siren more chaste and changing the colour to green to create a contemporary vibe. In 1992 things changed again as the siren was re-sized. Her rather alarming two-tail appendage all but disappeared, and she flashed less flesh but more face — though if you hadn’t been around at the start of the image’s development in the 1970s you might struggle to understand what all these wavy lines were actually part of.

The 2011 version, while condemned by some observers as tantamount to brandicide, makes sense in terms of how Schultz sees the company moving. As it faces increasing competition from other chains, and possibly decreasing sales in the light of the financial squeeze, it needs to leverage its assets. One of the most valuable is the network of outlets it provides for selling stuff and services which can complement its core offering. It has already made steps into publishing and entertainment, it was a pioneer of wifi access, its business has always been about more than premium coffee. I would not be surprised to see it moving into upmarket fast food (a la Pret) and increasing its media offering. But looking at how other major retailers have transformed their businesses through expanding into areas like financial services and non-food items, who knows what the siren may be adorning over the next decade?

I awoke this morning to the 6am news on BBC Radio 4 reporting a £250 million government initiative whereby companies from the food and fitness industries will be shelling out vouchers for free healthy food and activities. Sounds like a good idea though, sadly, there wasn’t much information on how to get hold of said vouchers. Perhaps this will become clear in the fulness of time, so that frugal Marketing Talk readers will be able to fulfil their new year resolutions of daily rations of 5 portions of fruit & veg alongside regular exercise without breaking the bank. It wasn’t clear, either, what the companies (which include heavyweight confectioners such as Nestle and Mars) will get out of it.

I remember the Parliamentary uproar a few years ago when another confectionery-to-food giant, Cadbury, launched a promotion tying the provision of sporting equipment for schools to purchasing its controversially calorific products — so good luck to these enterprising organisations and their £250 million! Comment within the 6am news bulletin included a damning quote from Professor Tim Lang, the food policy guru at City University, who pointed out that food companies spend twice that amount every year advertising their oversalted, sugared and fatty offerings. According to Professor Lang the present initiative is not so much a public healh strategy as a way of protecting corporate food brands by appearing to be socially responsible.

But let us not kid ourselves. There is no way that we will eat more healthily as a nation without involving the food companies (a key industry recently highlighted in a series of BBC documentaries co-produced by the Open University). Social marketers promoting better food choices cannot afford to adopt the kind of moral high ground that will, in time, leave them isolated and ineffective. Principles need to be combined with pragmatism. Unless social marketers try to find common ground with the food industry and seek opportunities for collaboration. however suspiciously at first, they will remain bogged down in public relations wars which will, in time, do nobody any favours.

If we really are as interested in changing attitudes and behaviour as we say we are, then perhaps we social marketers might consider changing our own as a first step.

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!