I hadn’t expected this to be a trilogy. When I posted Prediction and Predictability, it was just some internal discussion document I’d written a long time ago, that somehow found its way to the light of day. Ironically, given the title, I had no idea that anything more would become of it.
But like George Lucas and that crazy standalone space story he had lying about, very soon, there were obvious questions that needed to be explored – and eventually, the demand for a whole three-parter.
Admittedly, Mr. Lucas was fulfilling the wishes of moviegoers around the world, whereas I simply asked if I should “turn this into a Trilogy” on LinkedIn and, very kindly, one person said yes. You might say that’s nothing like the same thing but I think, principally because of the way I’ve worded the second paragraph, the comparison still stands.
You see, words matter. Big time. I wrote something about the power of words here. They are the bricks with which we build meaning and understanding. There are whole branches of science that believe they even shape the way we think.
And they’re being weaponised like never before. Okay, not like never before, but certainly more routinely than ever before
Before we get into that, let’s re-cap the story so far, through the medium of The Marketing Textbook:
You’ve looked at your list of customers and looked at where and how they differ. You’ve defined those groups and and chosen those you wish to contact. Using our friend Ed Mayer’s analysis, you’ve now determined your audience, something he suggests can contribute upto 40% of the success of any campaign. In short, you’ve chosen the people whose Attention you feel you can gain.
You’ve looked at each pf these groups, analysed their various profiles and tried to understand what may best motivate each group. You’ve decided what the offer should be to most effectively reflect those motivations. Again, Mayer suggests that, done well, this should make up another 40% of your campaign’s success. The key metric at this stage is level of Interest you can generate.
And now, the next bit: the execution. Specifically, what words and pictures, tone and format are going to take your campaign from being merely eye-catching and attractive to becoming compelling enough to achieve the best level of success? Mayer states that this is where the remaining 20% of a campaign’s effectiveness lies. Words must take us well beyond the constraints of simple communication at this point. They’re there to create Desire. Finally, we must also ensure we finish off with an effective Call to Action.
At this point, ‘old-school’ marketers would be gleefully deploying a wide range of linguistic and literary tricks of the trade to create a favourable image, to flatter the reader, to build credibility, to suggest like-mindedness, to build towards a USP. In short, to construct all the elements of face-to-face salesmanship, to take a curious prospect and point them towards the life-affirming status of customerhood.
Look at any 1970s press ad and, once you’ve tried to ignore the almost constant casual sexism – and, sadly, more besides – you’ll see that writing ad copy used was very often a protracted attempt to schmooze the reader into submission, with florid language and ridiculous metaphors. Even ads for bread could use up three columns of text to luxuriantly, verbosely, disproportionately extol the virtues of the open sandwich:
“The Danes call them smørrebrød. But never mind that.”
All this self-importance from a time of fewer distractions and greater attention spans has contributed to a lingering stereotype of marketing presentation being a little insubstantial, superficial… …’fluffy’. Like any stereotype, that may well be based on a kernel of truth but it isn/t really a fair depiction, especially without the consideration of context.
Time – the availability of it to the reader – seems to be a key reason behind the changes to the words to which we most-demonstrably respond…. Sorry, I’m in the wrong decade to structure a sentence like that. I’ll try again:
Today, we expect punchier words. Shorter sentences. Day-to-day language and less ‘correct’ grammar. If that means less nuance, so what? And it’s nothing new – the further back you go, the longer ads seemed to go on for.
It’s easy now to lampoon even famously ground-breaking ads from the mid-20th Century for the length of their prose, their seeming ‘over-production’ but again, context plays a part. They were consumed in an age where time and attention were more abundant, where you had a whole five seconds to lure the reader into deciding whether or not to read on for the full half-minute. To quote Obadiah Yorkshireman, “Luxury!“
The actual ‘Lily The Pink’
Yes, even in those heady days, there were still limits to attention. Go back even further to the 19th Century and you see ads for the most utilitarian products, like soap, that were billed with the same sort interminable of ‘step right up’ repetitive hucksterism and dubious claims that you only really hear from boxing emcees these days. People back then must have had attention spans that ran into minutes! The very distinctive selling style from this time was memorably satirised by The Scaffold in the 1960s, a treatment which really was “most efficacious in every case”.
It seems inconceivable today that anyone could write a strapline like “It is a truth universally acknowledged that a man in possession of improving prospects must be in want of a better soap“. But in the context and era-defining phrasing of the recently-published ‘Pride and Prejudice’, it could have been the 1813 equivalent of “Got Milk?“.
Back in the 21st Century, we’re now expected to get the whole ad done with in five seconds. How do you realistically establish credibility, demonstrate need, get to the Unique Selling Proposition and give your Call To Action time to land in that time? You have to edit it right down. and make every character count. It’s not just fewer, shorter words, it’s the maximum level of promise you can elicit from what remains – and for that to happen, there’s been a grammatical evolutionary advance.
Remember, we’re in the business of ‘promise’ here and this was almost always conveyed by description; how something was, how it made you feel. ‘Luxurious‘, ‘Tasty‘, ‘Confident‘, ‘Unbeatable‘. The product was represented with the most flattering describing words (adjectives) available whereupon the consumer was simply invited to appreciate that description and, if they agreed – how could they not? – do the obvious thing and buy into it. Literally. The virtues of the product were used as a means to appeal to – and unlock – the discerning customer’s critical faculty. The language might have become slicker over time but we were still mostly flattering the reader into submission.
With less time to process all this impeccable logic into two-stage flattery and recognition, even the loveliest descriptions quickly become little more than a mushy word soup, just as Jane Austen would have become to our Boomer parents and grandparents. How can we continue to assume that flattery gets you everywhere, if you don’t have time to do all that? More recently, all we really have time for is just to tell people what to do.
Adjectives have become dinosaurs, Verbs are their mammalian heirs.
As you’ll remember, ‘doing words’ are not adjectives but verbs. They’ve always been there, evolving where their natural advantages allow but more recently, they’ve begun to out-compete slower, more cumbersome forms. Linguistically, we seem to be experiencing little short of a mass extinction event, a transition from the Adjectivian into the Verbian era, which is every bit as profound as the end of the Austenian eon, long ago. There’s an old political adage that says “if you’re explaining, you’re losing” and it follows that if you don’t then wish to ‘explain’, you won’t need to describe. It’s quicker and, it seems, more productive merely to instruct.
Many commentators have remarked at the growth of the verb-based slogan in the last decade over the adjectival equivalent, particularly its apparent suitability for political slogans. Thus ‘Take Back Control‘ out-performed ‘Stronger In‘ in the 2016 Brexit referendum. Later that year, Trump’s ‘Make America Great‘ pipped Hillary’s ‘Stronger Together‘. In 2019, Boris Johnson told you he’d ‘Get Brexit Done‘ while Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour were, as it transpired, unconvincingly ‘On Your Side‘. When we were faced with the stark uncertainties of the Covid-19 pandemic in the spring of 2020, the measures required of us were boiled down to similarly short, verb-led maxims. We now expect that such comms will follow this simple but clearly effective format and, inevitably, the same is true of marketing messaging.
But here’s the bit that’s often missed: you can’t just tell people anything and expect them to do it – there has to be something in it for them. Remember ‘feature’ and ‘benefit’? That’s still very much a thing, possibly more than ever. So the other stipulation in this new era is that the verb must convey some form of advantage. ‘Make‘, ‘Build‘ and ‘Save‘ all imply the construction or retention of something worth having. ‘Get‘ goes even further; it suggests the acquisition of something worth having. The only downside it has is that it’s harder to adhere to a promise of something being acquired – what if you can’t actually give the thing you’ve mentioned to everyone who read it?. Conversely, making and building things is a process, expected to take longer, which may even be revised thereafter, so it’s much harder to suggest that such a promise isn’t being kept.
Obviously, the other words have to convey some sort of positive outcome. Three words seems optimal but Subway and Alamo have boiled their straplines down to two. “Eat Fresh” and ‘Drive Happy‘ are notable for using only a verb which conveys the things their customers do, paired with a stated advantage imbued in that brand. Both choose not to turn the second word adjective into its correct adverbial form (“freshly” or “happily“).
An actual 1970s soap ad. Spot the sexism.
Back to that hypothetical 1813 luxury soap ad channelling Miss Elizabeth Bennett’s narrator: such a brand would, throughout that century, have extolled at length its highly-acclaimed (but unverified) efficacy, just like Mrs. Lydia Pinkham’s’Vegetable Compound’. By the mid to late 20th Century, its tone would have changed to mirror a more aspirational time, in which even a brand of soap constituted a lifestyle choice. It would also stop being marketed at men because as a household item, only women would be responsible for its purchase. It might suggest an exotic, even ethereal provenance and address psychographic rather than utilitarian benefits. Full-page glossy magazine ads would be filled with nouveau-riche couples smiling confidently, while not using the product, with terms like ‘secret weapon’ and ‘jet-set freshness’ punctuate the lengthy prose before a small picture of the product, suitably lathered, to remind you what’s being sold.
In contrast, such a soap, would now find itself continuing to connote aspiration and success but having slipped to mid-market affordability – or even lower. Social ads now feature a suggestively-posed, provocatively-cropped pair of same-sex, ethically diverse, naked millennials in a bathroom with the ironic headline ‘Get More Lathered’. Obviously, its true market is still 30-to-50s, as it always was, but something has to cut through our heightened defences, to divert eyeballs just long enough to make another 0.05% think it worthwhile clicking for more. Obviously, any hint of sex is a proven way to do that and, given our more enlightened times, we can all pretend that it’s not prurient anymore but inclusive and challenging. Whatever, dude. I made you look.
Again, I’m possibly exaggerating a little for satirical effect – but not by that much. Marketing literature has always been easy to parody because it has always had to be easy to distinguish and recall. Remember: the reason why so many of these historical campaign are so easy to poke fun at now is because, then, they worked.
Some suggestive soap. Possibly more compelling than advertising it in the style of Jane Austen.
Any marketer worth their salt will know the value of segmentation and many will be practising it to some extent – but are you doing it properly?
A few weeks ago, I shared a discussion document, about the ability to predict demand curves across segments – and how it was beneficial to work with a greater number of smaller segments, to aid predictive ability.
But this is only half the point of Segmentation. It’s all very clever to be able to decide which segments will and won’t reward the cost and effort of contacting them but that logic ignores one massive extra variable, which can change everything – the fact that you don’t have to say the same things to the whole list.
Having gone to some trouble to understand and divide up one’s customer base, it doesn’t exactly make a lot of sense to stop there. If we now know what makes the people in ‘SegmentX’ different from ‘SegmentY’, why aren’t we incorporating that knowledge into our messaging?
If we were working in a face-to-face environment, this information would inform our choice of words. A well-known long-standing ‘good’ customer will, of course, be received quite differently to a new face, not quite sure if they’re in the right place. You wouldn’t use the same salesmanship to sell to an elderly lady as you would to a teenage boy. You’d incorporate all the context you have at your disposal.
So why would you expect to gain the best response from an activity that puts the same words and pictures in front of every recipient on the list? The larger your database, the greater the potential to identify distinct differences across the list – and speak to each segment in a context that far more accurately reflects their part in the customer life-cycle.
By that, I don’t just mean the ‘textbook’ groups of Prospects, Triallists, Current Customers, Lapsed and Cold – although that would be a start. There’s also the possibility to identify ‘Risers’, ‘Fallers’ distinctly from the ‘Non-Movers’ (people who are continuing to exhibit consistent purchasing behaviour). At a time of flux in the wider economy, how many of your customers are suddenly struggling to afford the things you offer and are cutting back? How many are now doing well – or have down-traded from a more expensive competitor – and seem to be making a flurry of unexpected purchases? How do you understand these segments? And how do you best stimulate them?
Instead of your brand being simply the same version of itself, whoever is reading – like an old comic book from the analogue age – it should really inhabit a ‘multiverse’, where different audiences view it in different ways and you ensure it engages with each of them accordingly.
Of course, we do practice some context-driven differences in our messaging – but it tends to be informed by the medium, not necessarily the recipients. We’re likely to word our social activities differently because we’re aware of demographic and behavioural biases across them: younger, sharper messaging in Instagram and more professional-sounding, commercially-aware content on LinkedIn. Largely this is based on assumptions of the profile of each medium and, rightly or wrongly, rarely verified by any analysis of the populations themselves.
So, what of email messaging or, more importantly, expensive direct marketing? How are they best served by a ‘once size fits all’ approach to large quantities of very different people?
When this happens, we tend to write imprecisely and blandly. The effect is like Christmas Day television: suitable for all but a bit….boring It can also risk sounding inconsistent, or even self-contradictory to some parts of the audience – but if there is no seemingly viable alternative, we arrive at a ‘lesser of all evils’ fudge. It can result in a *targeted mailing*, which – and I’m exaggerating only a little for the purposes of satire – can read a little like this:
Dear Sir/Madam/Non-binary Identifier
You’ve been a Prospect/Customer of ‘GenericBrand’ for a number of months/years so, like everyone else, you’ll be delighted to learn of today’s exciting announcement.
And, like everyone else, your purchase history and product choices suggest you’ll be really interested to learn about our offer – which we’re also making to anyone else who’ll read it.
Still, we know that this is just right for you because, on balance, this is right for everyone, based on our knowledge that the last time we did this sort of thing, it proved to be a few percentage points more popular than anything else we’ve tried.
Please respond ASAP, to genericbrand.com/genericlandingpage and you too can redeem this great offer – just for you!
Very often, the justification for this sort of uninspring guff is that the polar opposite seems even worse. Using our ‘knowledge’ of the recipient to appear to be a benefit to them seems to be an exercise in proving our omniscience – which can easily scare the reader into wondering what the hell else this company knows about them.
Dear <TITLE> <FORENAME> <SURNAME> of <ADDRESS_1>
We’d like to thank you for being a fan of ‘GenericBrand’ since <TIME_CREATED> on <DATE_CREATED>. Because of your affinity to our brand over the last <DAYS_SINCE_CREATION> days, we think you’ll be interested in this message!
Also, given the fact that, in that time, you’ve placed <TOTAL_PURCHASES> purchases, worth <LIFETIME_VALUE>, we think you’re ideally suited to this offer – <TAILORED_OFFER_1>. We hope you agree, it’s the best offer we’ve made you in <DAYS_SINCE_CREATION> days!
To redeem it, all you have to do is visit genericbrand.com/tailoredoffer/1 and be fully confident that your next purchase – number {<TOTAL_PURCHASES> + 1} – with GenericBrand will be the best you’ve ever made with us!
And, it’ll be with you at <ADDRESS_1> in <POSTAL_TOWN> in no time!
There is – as always – a better solution in between the extremes. Data will always drive these distinctions but salesmanship is still storytelling and, as any film-maker will attest, ’show, don’t tell’ is the best way to go about it. Customers don’t want to be beaten about the head with how much you know about them; they want to know that they’re understood. The data you have is the key to demonstrating that understanding.
Let’s take the ‘Risers’ and ‘Fallers’ idea. Having arrived at a data-led definition of each group, you populate them both with the accounts that meet those criteria and you cultivate an offer which you hope will most clearly chime with their perceived requirements. How do you then go about communicating each one to each group?
First the ‘Risers’. They’ve suddenly started to purchase more but whatever brought about this change may easily be reversed. Their activity needs to be acknowledged and their new-found confidence thanked. In an unstable market, you can’t expect them to simply remain with you indefinitely – you need to protect this new business.’:
Dear <FORENAME>,
You’re amazing!
We’re so pleased to learn that you’ve become such a friend of ‘GenericBrand’ over the last few months. In a changing world, we hope you agree that we can offer you the choice and quality you require – and always the value you deserve!
To thank you for your support, we’d like to offer you <RISERS_TAILORED_OFFER>. We have a good thing going – and we hope we can take it to the next level!
Just go to genericbrand.com/nextlevel– and this offer is yours!
Let’s continue to be amazing – together!
The ‘Fallers’ are giving you the opposite problem. They may like your brand just as much as they always did but can’t justify maintaining their spend. The last thing they want to feel is rejected or forgotten. If they do, they’ll find someone else who values them. Find an offer that reflects this difficulty and reassure them that they’ll always be welcome and that you will continue to value them:
Dear <FORENAME>,
Hi,
We all know this is a challenging time and we’re listening to customers’ stories everyday. Like many of them, you may feel that the way you buy is changing – and we’d like you to know that we want to be part of those changes.
We’d like to offer you <FALLERS_TAILORED_OFFER> to help you make the most of your purchases – and to assure you that we’re here to help in every way we can.
All you have to do is go to genericbrand.com/heretohelp and, together, we can change the way we work – and take on the challenges we’re all facing.
Let’s do this together!
As any superhero aficionado will tell you, “with great power, comes great responsibility”. Very often, the ability to manipulate a database of tens – or even hundreds – of thousands of customers feels like an awesome power. It certainly provides a level of insight and understanding that’s difficult to gain in any other way. It’s therefore every marketer’s responsibility to make those insights matter, by informing the very best content it can.
Don’t just listen to me on this, consider the proclamation of one of the founding fathers of direct marketing. The 40/40/20 Rule’ is a principle established by Ed Mayer in the 1960s which states that 40% of the success of a marketing campaign is based on reaching the right audience, 40% on the offer you make to that audience, with only the remaining 20% based on various other factors such as its presentation and format.
You may be great at the first 40% and I’m sure you’re constantly agonising about the final 20% but are you doing enough to make the middle 40% as good as it could be?
I only have a few memories of my great-grandfather, Horace Barker. He was one of only three people I met whom I know to have been born in the 19th Century and he died a few weeks before my 5th birthday so we didn’t have a lot of time to get to know each other.
There are only a few facts about him I can recall: he was a kindly old man in his late seventies, married to my great-grandmother, Hilda. They lived in a bungalow with an immaculate garden and a greenhouse full of the sweetest tomatoes you’ve ever smelled. Unfortunately, my own insight ends there and I have to rely on other data sources to complete my picture of him.
If you know where to look, you can find out more about him. Various census sheets and official documents confirm that Horace was born in Pemberton, Wigan on 29th October 1897, he was a coal-miner, man and boy. He married Hilda in 1921 and together, they had a daughter, Marjorie, on 21st March 1924. He went to seek his fortune in Canada for a few months in 1929 but while he was there, Wall Street crashed – which may have influenced his decision to return home. At the outbreak of war in September 1939, Horace was recorded in the National Register as living at ‘Marus Bridge Shop’ and working as a “Colliery…Chargehand” (under-supervisor) and also a first-aider and an Air Raid Patrol warden. His wife Hilda was listed as a ‘Grocer and Confectioner’.
He was hardened by his experiences at the unforgiving coalface and later, as Colliery Manager, he bore the responsibility of the lives of the men who worked under him. The daily obligation to make life-or-death decisions undoubtedly shaped his outlook – and it’s no surprise to reflect that coal-mining was a formative part of some of the most revered working-class heroes of his generation; men like Matt Busby and Bill Shankly.
It’s not a fatuous comparison. Pop’ (as he was known in later life) once told his grandson – my Dad – during a callow attempt to make ambitious structural changes to a farm building “tha’ll ne’er do it” [You’ll never do it], knowing well that saying so would provide the extra determination to succeed. It worked. Like Shankly and Busby, he was what footballers would call a ‘psychologist’: adept at understanding and motivating others with a mixture of high standards and a gruff, uncompromising demeanour. By all accounts, he was a formidable character – and it’s easy to see why he needed to be.
Today, more than half a lifetime after his death, the world is a vastly different place. Fossil fuels – and their effects – are (literally) unsustainable and we’ve made great strides to power out future by harnessing the natural resources around us. That which we used to have to mine out of the ground to add value to our lives is necessarily diminishing in long-term value. And yet, over the same five decades, humanity has also created something in such a vast quantity that it now forms the most valuable mined resource than anything based in carbon.
Since 2017, it’s become widely accepted that data has become the world’s most valuable commodity, overtaking that long-standing former favourite, oil. The world’s most valuable companies now trade in quadrillions of bits, rather than billions of barrels. Carbon is just so finite, so boringly elusive, so…analogue. Data is different: it’s so dynamic, so ubiquitous, so…sustainable. And, just as with coal, the very juiciest bits of all this data, that inform decisions which can make or break fortunes, are there to be mined from the vastly more voluminous, less valuable stuff, all around it.
To do that, you need to be able to find relevant data, verify its accuracy and understand its meaning. For this you must also have a clear understanding of the problem that the data is being used to solve. You must also be aware of the statistical pitfalls of sticking different data together and making logical conclusions that clearly show that the correlations in the data unambiguously answer the questions being posed. To those who are not familiar with it, data mining may seem like a very indistinct process, maybe even a pseudoscience. But it’s simply a case of trying to create a ‘picture’ of knowledge about a group or an individual, based on available facts, cross-tabulated with other known information, to build a profile. If that still sounds unhelpfully abstract, then re-read the first five paragraphs above and you’ll see that’s exactly what I was doing there; turning documented fact into reasoned propensity.
Obviously, data-mining is not remotely dangerous; the work is not back-breaking work and there’s little chance of contracting long-term health conditions due to the working environment but it’s essentially the same principle – although I’m not sure that miners of old would see it that way. In ‘The Road To Wigan Pier’, George Orwell describes at length the awesome physicality demanded of coal miners, even comparing them to Olympic athletes. Pop once said of his own brother-in-law (whom he considered to be a less capable individual) “I’d durst let him’t strike at mi arse wi’ a pick”. If you cut through the old Lancashire dialect and the, er, slightly industrial language, it was a scathing put-down: ‘I’d dare to him to swing a pick-axe at my backside’ – believing him be too weak to do any harm.
Horace “Pop” Barker’s miner’s lamp. Photo: Paul Bentham
We still have his miner’s lamp, although the reason for its presentation (long-service, retirement or just his actual working lamp, polished up) is now lost in the mists of time. There’s also a brilliantly evocative picture of him, arms folded, his coal-blackened face staring defiantly into the camera, taken at the pit-head – I believe at Chisnall Hall Colliery near Coppull. He died in 1978, before the final decline of the industry that sustained his whole life.
I often wonder what he would have made of the miners’ strike of the 1980s, of Arthur Scargill’s leadership of the National Union of Mineworkers, of Health & Safety law, of the demise of ‘Old King Coal’ and even of the shift to renewable energy.
More than anything, I’d love to explain to him the parallels between his industry and mine: the intricacies of data, profiling and algorithms. With the arrogance of (relative) youth, I might expect the ‘wonders’ of the digital age to blow his Victorian mind. I’d tell him how confidently I could pinpoint the addresses of all the greenhouse-owning pensioners in Standish, based on a few data sources and the internet. I’d like to think he’d tell me I’d “ne’er do it”.
But then I shouldn’t be surprised if it left him largely unimpressed – a lot of statistical inference could easily be termed ‘common sense’. If you’ve had any experience of retail, as he did, you soon develop a sense of what ‘type’ each customer is, based on their buying history and their responses to different stimuli. Grocers in 1939 didn’t need a suite of linked tables to understand which customers would be best suited to which products; their database was in their heads. Computers have merely added the capability to make the same predictions on a far greater scale and with ever-increasing complexity.
Nor would he necessarily be a stranger to the more contemporary concerns of wholesale data collation. As a coal miner in Wigan in the 1930s, he is likely to have been well aware of the famous Orwell book about his hometown. If he were to have discussed Orwell’s most famous novel, ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’, just over a decade later, he would have become well-acquainted with that age’s most prescient description of data use and misuse – and a delicious historical irony would have followed. I remember the death of the aforementioned ‘pick axe’ brother-in-law in December 1983. At his memorial service, in the days after Christmas, the sermon made reference to the incoming new year (1984) and the parallels in the book of the same name that we should consider. Two or three weeks before Apple Computers famously did it, a vicar in Wigan was riffing on the warnings of the coming year.
There’ll always be a limit to what I can know about Horace Barker, and what I can reliably surmise, There are many closed-off avenues that, tantalisingly, could be re-opened with the provision of just a little more data. That’s the frustration of genealogy – the suspicion that one small discovery may set off a chain reaction of greater understanding. Exactly the same can be said of data mining – which makes the quest for the knowledge it can provide all the more enticing.
Racehorse Handicapping: Predicting the Unpredictable?
The role of a horseracing handicapper is to ensure that each horse in a race is carrying enough weight to offset their differing capabilities and their varying levels of form. It’s seen as a vital task because it means that, in theory at least, champion horses in the peak of their form are matched more evenly with their less illustrious competitors, ensuring a more tightly contested, less predictable race.
Taking the logic to its natural conclusion, the handicapper will only have done their job correctly if all horses in a race cross the line at the same time. While it’s possible (but still unusual) to have a dead heat in a two-horse or, in extremely rare cases, in a three-horse race, it’s functionally impossible for this ever to happen in a race involving a larger number of horses.
Famously, the Grand National is never a close race, using the definition of closeness as the difference between first and last places – indeed many horses fail to complete the course each year and the favourite rarely wins. There are just too many horses, too many obstacles, there is too much distance and arguably, there is too much that is unusual about the preparation to ever confidently hope to call a winner, let alone be able to harmonise the finish across the whole field. In probability terms, there are simply far too many unknown variables to trust any form of predictive modelling that would ever enable a handicapper to achieve the ‘Holy Grail’ of all horses crossing the finish line at the same time. In the face of such overwhelming statistical evidence to suggest its basic futility, why is handicapping necessary?
The answer is that ensuring a dead heat is not the point of handicapping at all. Handicapping is there to offset perceived differences in horses’ abilities and form. It acts as a regulator for betting, ensuring that favourites will not be favoured by the betting public by as wide a margin and that ‘dark horses’ will be viewed less darkly than they would be without handicapping. It serves the industry behind the sport, not the sport itself. There is no handicapping in Athletics purely because the sport exists primarily as a discipline to discern which athlete is the fastest (and by how much). Only the overlay of betting leads to the necessity of handicapping – something which many might see as a perversion of the conventions of pure sport.
Uncovering the ‘real’ reason behind the point of handicapping seems rather dull, irrelevant and perhaps even a little dispiriting but the subject is still of value because it acts as an interesting analogy that mirrors the issues of what can and what perhaps can’t be predicted – and to what extent, the distinction between the two states may become blurred.
Direct Marketing & Parallels with Racehorse Handicapping
The role of a Direct Marketer is to predict, accurately, the event of each customer choosing to make a purchase from an offering in a given time-frame – or not, as the case may be. As with handicapping, various models exist to discern the factors that most affect future behaviour. As with handicapping, these models are widely accepted as being able more reliably to predict the general level of behaviour than would otherwise be the case. As with handicapping, there are far too many variables to translate such improvements at the individual level. At this point, even the offer to give away £1,000 of vouchers with every £10 order will still only yield a certain percentage of response – it will not motivate every customer into action, often for a variety of what appear to be illogical reasons.
It may be suggested that the ‘Holy Grail’ of Direct Marketing is just as simple and just as unobtainable as the race where all horses cross the line together. It is an activity which is segmented using a profile which can determine only those customers who will order.
In reality, for this to occur, not only must this segmentation yield a 100% activation rate for the successful segment, but it must also be shown that all other segments will always yield a 0% activation rate – a practical impossibility.
Just as a handicapper may occasionally achieve a 2-way dead heat, a Marketer may occasionally achieve a 100% activation in a segment with a very small sample. In that circumstance, the Direct Marketer’s expectation is always that that offer, made more broadly, must be transferrable to other segments, uplifting their performance. The activity is then repeated through various other segments with the expectation that it keeps performing profitably until it fails. In short, the ultimate goal state of a Marketer can therefore never happen, as another sale can always be found.
Even if a model existed to find just the people who would only ever respond to a given stimulus (its magnitude), it would still be akin to believing “this is all the sales you can ever make”. It would be perfectly efficient, of course but it doesn’t necessarily mean that revenue is increased by all that much. It just clarifies the process of when to stop chasing the extra sales.
In reality, this a problem we’re highly unlikely ever to face. Customers are people and people are (at the individual level) incredibly difficult to predict. The ‘Holy Grail’ state just shows us what a perfect level of predictability would look like, which is useful when it comes to comparing and evaluating our own methods.
Applying a Predictive Model in Direct Marketing
As a contrast to the imaginary problem above, real-world examples of response rates across the segments of an activity tend to adhere to a more familiar principle: the law of diminishing returns.
This is taken from campaign data from a previous Spring/Summer campaign, using segments driven by our prior ‘Points Analysis’ method of segmentation and recorded from response codes given during telephone orders. For this reason (as it therefore ignores web orders from that campaign), the percentages are not relevant here, just the shape of the curve.
As with the ‘Holy Grail’ curve above, it starts off steeply, implying that this is a clear way to predict the responsiveness of one group over another. However, as the trendline (I’ve used a logarithmic trendline, by the way) progresses along the segments, it flattens so that by the lower segments, it almost represents an admission that the model can’t really say if the second to last segment contains significantly more predictable customers than the last segment.
Using the ‘revenue-building’ logic discussed above, this uncertainty can be (and often is) presented as a positive feature. As long as the responsiveness is at a profitable level, this ‘long tail’ becomes something of an asset, as it assures the Marketer that more sales can be added, with a positive ROI until the point on the axis where the curve touches the break-even point of response. The fact that these sales happen to come with decreasing levels of efficiency may be seen as a price worth paying.
One rather fundamental problem in the collation of the above chart was that the response metric was based on order-level, not customer-level responses. At this point, we need to be rather pedantic: the issue of predictiveness relies ultimately on the response of an individual to a stimulus, which is then grouped by the segments of similar individuals. Using the principles of RFM (the categorisation of customers by Recency Frequency and Monetary Value), order-level analysis conflates the effects of both R and F, when we require them to be viewed in isolation. To illustrate this point, consider that one hundred orders from a given segment may imply one hundred responding customers but it could in reality translate to just one very responsive customer – or any combination of reciprocal factors between.
Since then, we’ve adopted the more standard Binary segmentation model, which ensures the monitoring is at the customer-level, preferring the percentage metric ‘Activation’ (customers who ordered in a given season as a percentage of customers stimulated, by category) over the more traditional, order-level metric ‘Response Rate’ (orders received using a given response code as a percentage of catalogues circulated with that media code). The uncertainty factor of one customer ordering a hundred times versus a hundred customers ordering once each has been subsequently removed. We can now monitor precisely how many customers have ordered, as well as the number of orders those customers have placed, collectively and individually.
The Activation performance of the Binary list for the most recent Spring/Summer campaign, expressed for each group shows a similar curve, implying the same adherence to the law of diminishing returns as the older Points Analysis-derived curve above.
Once again, the asymptotic (flattening) curve implies a longer tail beyond the limits of the mailing list, which, using the methodology of the Binary process (with its allocation of decreasing points for customers ordering increasingly further back in time), also implies that further revenue can only be attracted at a less efficient rate. In effect, it’s almost telling us that after a certain point, we can mail anyone using this rationale and we’ll probably get the same return, whatever it is. This is hardly what you would call a predictive model.
All this is implied but none of it can be taken for granted, just as no segment that yields 100% Activation ever implies that the ‘Holy Grail’ has been achieved – there is always the question “what further potential is there?” to answer. It’s clear that we need other means of predictiveness to unlock the secrets of the deeper recesses of our mailing list.
The Limitations of the Binary System
Largely as a result of the paranoia/healthy scepticism (call it what you will) of putting all our eggs in the basket that is Binary segmentation, we have, since adopting Binary, also endeavoured to add a wider pool of customers to our recent mailings selections than merely those segments suggested by that system. It’s not unusual or ground-breaking to do so; it’s a practice that’s routinely done by even the most faithful proponents of Binary segmentation and it’s called deep-diving.
Using our previous (semi-proven) Points Analysis system as our deep-dive axis, we mailed representative samples from these deeper segments of customers and named them groups -1 to -5, in accordance with the Binary nomenclature.
What we found was that a huge proportion of the -1 group customers were activated (far more than we had anticipated), the equivalent of the Group 12 Binary segment, i.e. the best segment of the ‘Good’ portion of the list. Thereafter, the activation rate dropped massively for the -2 segment and continued to tail off gradually through to the -5 segment.
Perhaps it should come as no real surprise that there is a significant increase in activation in any Binary analysis from the 1 segment to anything that is essentially the ‘best of the rest’. I have to presume that a known increase in activation at this point in the list is not only common but probably also a phenomenon that is to be expected. Conversely, I have no idea if the level of disparity at this point is generally as great as we have found it to be. I rather suspect it isn’t.
There are two benefits to this figure being so notably high, which represent the twin roles of predictive segmentation I have already outlined. Firstly and most prosaically, it represents almost 7,000 activated customers and almost £300,000 of additional revenue. Secondly, it gives us a definition of customer type that we know we can continue to stimulate efficiently and it strongly indicates at what point this metric provides segments that are inefficiently stimulated. It also calls into question the wider viability of a system that seems to ignore a cohort of customers who are capable of yielding half as many activations as those it selects.
Ordinarily, as the Direct Marketing wheel turns and the results of one campaign’s test shape the standard practice in the next campaign, thoughts turn to the question of what methodology to test next. With such a statistical disparity as this, it’s also difficult to escape from the conclusion that the Binary model as it stands may not be wholly suitable for our requirements. This is not to say that the practice hasn’t been worthwhile or indeed that the notion of measuring campaign performance at the customer level isn’t of value. In fact the opposite is true: With ever more ordering methods, media codes as a means of recording performance are dying and, even if we could resurrect them, we would return to the same non-relational order-level analysis that tells us nothing about the customers on whom our business depends.
I would always advocate a customer-level metric, even if I might always wish for a method of segmentation that is more clearly suited to our list profile. The reporting disciplines required and indeed the limitations that customer-centricity can have on budgeting for additional in-season activities are all, in my view, a small price to pay for the insight the analysis can give to actual customers. As we move inexorably to a more sophisticated multi-channel interaction-based data model which encompasses customers’ web visits, email responses, retail transactions and even social media activity, it is clear that our basic ‘currency’, the only differentiating factor we have, to analyse anything of significance will eventually (and then always) be at the customer level.
Having said that, if we’re at the point of re-drawing the boundaries of what constitutes ‘very good’ customers from ‘good’ and so on, we can also have an eye on what shape of curve we’d like it to produce, based on recent customer behaviour tracked against information known about customers before that activity occurred. As I have already outlined, the process of measuring the performance of an activity has two basic roles: to assess both its magnitude and its efficiency. A curve that simply emphasises the magnitude of success is too steep and does little to imply where further success might be found. A curve which places too much concentration on efficiency tends to be too horizontal and very quickly can become practically non-predictive.
Obviously, there will always be customers who are more responsive than others in any database so it’s true to say that any curve will show degradation. In fact, as it’s a symptom of a correct profiling methodology, activation curves should have a degrading, downward-sloping shape from customers who are predicted to be the most responsive, down. It’s also fair to presume that if you measure a list against any given single metric, there will always be a ‘best of the rest’, chosen using a different metric which may out-perform the usual list, so at some point a secondary or even a tertiary segmentation metric should be considered. A problem can occur if those segments suggested by other metrics out-perform the primary-metric segments by too much. This may imply that a better, more appropriate primary profile would have included those names in the first place, something which would ensure the risk of missing such customers from a future campaign is minimised.
An Easy Win: Challenging the Timeframe
One way to improve the primary metric we have (Binary) may be to re-define that timescale of the selection. The version of Binary that we’ve adopted is based on Yes/No (or 1/0, hence the name ‘Binary’) classifications for a customer’s ordering profile over each of the last four six-month seasons. It is entirely predicated on the fairly standard assumption that a customer is a customer from the date of their first order until exactly two years beyond the date of their last order. By extension, anyone on the list who hasn’t ordered for over two years must be considered a lapsed customer and is removed from the house list. They may continue to be contacted, but only as part of a reactivation programme.
The fact that the Binary system is based on a two-year model and the fact that it was adopted by ‘mainstream’ catalogue operators such as Littlewoods and La Redoute seems to have a fair degree of compatibility. I have always been (and remain) dubious that the simplistic ‘two year rule’ applies as strongly in a niche market such as our own. As a ‘safety net’ against pinning our performance on adhering to it, I ensured that our mailings included a ‘best of the rest’ deep-dive, based on high point-scoring customers (who would therefore have been mailed under our previous segmentation model), who, being outside of the Binary segments would therefore have been inactive for over two years.
As we have seen from the most recent data, this 30,000-deep segment yielded a response (and therefore a Return on Investment) performance, similar to the ‘12’ group in the standard 4-season Binary model. Evidently, our less Recent, more Frequent and/or higher Monetarily-valuable individuals were able to outperform most of their more Recent counterparts. The cut-off at two years has always seemed arbitrary and inappropriate for us – and these figures appear to support that position. Recency is therefore not necessarily ‘king’ in a niche market, even if it may be considered as such by more mainstream operators.
To corroborate this view, perhaps it’s helpful to contrast the characteristics of a mainstream proposition and a mainstream customer with those propositions in a more niche market context.
Mainstream v Niche: Some Observations
Mainstream catalogue companies have tended to define their core markets more by the way they choose to buy (i.e. by choosing not to walk into a shop) far more than by the type of products they buy. They are in competition with a far wider section of the market, selling standard products to a broad section of the public. Light fittings, pyjamas, holiday footwear and all the other day-to-day offerings were always generally available on any high street or in a plethora of other catalogues or websites, in which there is usually massive competition. It is therefore difficult for them to create a sense of what their brand represents beyond their pricing, the quality of their merchandise and their service – certainly no-one can define their range as a whole as representing and supporting a ‘lifestyle choice’. Even before the further commodification of retail by search engine and affiliate sites, their offering was often close to being commodified by the presence of so much competition.
It is easy (and perhaps fair) to conclude that they must therefore adopt a ‘plenty more fish in the sea’ approach to customer retention over acquisition. If customers are that easily acquired, and if retention can prove to be so difficult, it follows that it is seen as far easier to entice a new customer than it is to win back one who has not been back for a relatively short amount of time. It’s dangerous to suggest they acted arbitrarily in arriving at two years as the determinant of dormancy; it seems reasonable to expect that it was driven by their data, suggesting a parameter that was appropriate for their purposes.
Conversely, niche market businesses tend to define their customers by a specific activity or affinity, which is to a greater or lesser extent important to all of their customers. They may find that the percentage of customers willing to buy remotely in that market is far higher than in general (historically) because of the relative lack of credible alternatives. Broader ranges of products that appertain to that activity or affinity may be more difficult to build, depending on the obscurity or the scope of that activity or affinity. Wider competition will always be present but, at their strongest, these niche markets are filled with customers who define their interest as a ‘lifestyle choice’. These brands do not just purvey goods, they represent or even define a lifestyle.
In a niche market, almost by definition, there aren’t quite so many ‘other fish in the sea’ and even customers who have been lapsed for a number of years are a far greater prospect to approach once more than any attempt to trawl for a fresh batch. If customers are not so easily acquired, and if retention proves less difficult than in the mainstream sector, it follows that it is disproportionately easier to entice an older customer than it is to acquire a new one. It seems clear that these markets inherently find the mainstream parameter of dormancy at two years to be inappropriate for their purposes.
Extending the Binary System from Two Years to Three
The Binary system’s strengths are its customer-centricity, its ability consistently to predict the difference in response between more regular-and-recent and less regular-and-recent customers and its scalability. Its weakness is the fact that we can prove that it has omitted perfectly responsive customers. Perhaps this can be corrected by using its scalability to ensure that they are re-admitted into the process.Under a four-season (two-year) standard model, the categories are defined by fifteen groups, which is the number of permutations of order activity (or inactivity) across four seasons. One point is awarded for the least recent reported season (four seasons ago), there are two points for an order three seasons ago, four points for orders from the penultimate season and eight for the last season. The number of points awarded doubles, the more recent the season, which seems like an arbitrary system but is actually an ingenious mechanism to ensure that every single permutation is represented by a different number of points.
In this way, we may contend that Recency is a vital factor in predictive modelling whilst also expecting to target customers that are patently less Recent in profile. The crucial point being that we have evidence that suggests we cut off responsive customers too readily by adhering to a ‘two-year rule’. By re-introducing segments of longer-dormant customers, we become able to evaluate their relative value – and therefore the predictiveness of this wider flavour of Binary analysis. Like the current four-season model, there’s also the thorny issue to consider of how many high-performing customer segments that even this model may continue to ignore.
We can’t turn back time but we can simulate the conditions of a six-season Binary selection. It is possible to re-order the customers we may have selected for the current Autumn/Winter campaign using a six-season Binary model. From there, we can identify not only which customers were mailed but also which customers placed an order in the current campaign and compare them with the equivalent responses using the usual 15-point, four-season Binary model. With six seasons, the number of permutations of orders increases from 15 to 63.
This hugely increases the level of granularity that the list analysis can give and will also help to establish the importance of the 5th-last and 6th-last season on predictiveness for a forthcoming campaign. Using four seasons (two years), the Binary graph for Activations from the current Autumn/Winter campaign to late November looks like this:
The same response data under a six-season (three year) Binary grouping shows a similar degradation but with more definition between high-performing and low-performing segments.
The added granularity helps to provide more evidence of predictiveness at each end of the Binary spectrum. Almost two hundred more customers are classified in groups which yielded an Activation rate of over 40% than in the 15-point model and over six hundred more customers are classified in groups which yielded less than a 10% Activation rate. If a 10% rate was shown to be the break-even point for inclusion, then this information would identify names who the Binary model would not predict a sufficient response. If no other justification could be found to mail those names, then that information could demonstrate a saving of unnecessary expenditure.
A ‘Health Warning’ for Any Model of Segmentation with a Single Axis
As we’ve already seen, demonstrating a suitably stratified segmentation model is only the first requirement of achieving a fully-optimised list. We must also ensure that no other potentially responsive segments are omitted. I’ve also highlighted the almost inevitable need for some subsequent segmentation criteria to exist beyond the reaches of the primary (in this case, Binary) model. Not only should this process stimulate as many as possible of the remaining responsive segments (a ‘best-of-the-rest’ group), it should also seek to test other responsive techniques beyond that.
A good example of that methodology would be the segmentation of customers, irrespective of Binary and Points, who have previously ordered during a Sale for a mailing of a Sale Catalogue. This is based on a given principle (that a customer is a known Sale responder). In the field of probability, this is known as Conditional Probability: where a given condition already exists, results in outcomes with a higher degree of probability and therefore predictiveness. The methodology appears sound but the result may or may not agree but either way, the results of that decision will shape our future selections.
Currently, our preferred secondary metric is the Points from our long-standing ‘PointsAnalysis’ table, which was created for our previous segmentation technique, where customers accrue 100 points every time they order, gain 1.5 points for every pound they spend and lose a point for every day that passes without an order.
In order to pursue this line of segment development, we will need to more clearly record what segments were used and on what basis. Where transient variables such as Points are used, the figures at the date of segmentation need to be written back to the database to enable better, easier analysis and cross-reference between the segments used and their eventual performance.
As part of my reconstruction of a six-season Binary in Excel, I have been able to identify customers mailed with and responding to the Spring/Summer Deep Dive catalogues. I have also been able to reverse engineer their historic Points level at around January 15th, based on their November Points and their known activity since January. This graph is what that analysis suggests. I can’t guarantee perfect accuracy within each Points band but I can say that the totals for each group match those given by a report for the activity of groups -1 to -5.
These responses strongly suggest that there are responsive customers to be found outside of the 4-season Binary model we employed in that season, bearing in mind that the Activation level for Binary group 1 was 4.6% and the “-1” Deep Dive group yielded around 18% Activation.
Conclusion
There’s nothing wrong with mailing across multiple axes of segmentation, as long as the hierarchy is established (if a customer qualifies for a segment in each method, which one wins and which method is left with the rest?) and as long as each segment is performing well. Curves which become too horizontal may still be predictive at the level of each category but also show that the method itself has begun to lose its predictiveness at that point. Thought should be given to the point in the list/on the axis at which one model is abandoned and another is given free rein to replace it.
For example, using the derived ‘live’ data for the current campaign below, comparing six-season Binary with Deep-Dive, based on Points, it may be concluded that, long tail or not, groups 1-4 should not be mailed but those quantities replaced by the best of the rest on the Points scale.
There are of course too many variables to merely prescribe a ‘one-size-fits-all’ answer here. Issues of quantities of names available within each group together with associated AOVs and break-even Activation levels all play a part. The main issue at this stage is that we give ourselves the impetus, and the tools, to break away from a single system of segmentation, as long as our focus remains at the customer level.
Whatever we do, it should be a far more scientific process than simply betting on the horses…
I read a great article recently (see below) in ‘The Drum‘, a great resource for stories in the world of Marketing, in which it is argued that the notion of ‘purpose’ is now essential to brand development.
I won’t lie, there’s a bit of buzzword-heavy guff in it – the type that often gives Marketing its ‘fluffy’, superficial stereotype. Nevertheless, there’s an important point to be made here. Here’s my (less guff-ridden) translation:
In the beginning, brands were all about ‘identity’ (like, who owns this *branded* cattle?). Basically, a measure to guard against theft became a means to discern quality and provenance, when goods were mostly commodities. Brands offered logical reasons not to buy the cheapest.
With the advent of consumerism, greater choice and, in time, the construct of ‘lifestyle’, brands had to move beyond mere identity and gain a ‘personality’, to win the affections of more discerning buyers. They began to appeal less to logical faculties and more to emotional states.
Inevitably, consumerism leads to over-consumption. Inevitably, ‘lifestyle’ and demographic segments become ever-more fragmented. Thus, a recognition of the excesses of brands and a market, now a greater sea of identities has led to differentiation by responsibility. Brands now need a ‘purpose’.
Of course, cynics may suggest that this is all bandwagon-jumping and not ‘social responsibility’ at all. You have a point – there’s a profit motive. But what’s interesting/important is the fact it’s happening at all – a reflection of society more than it is of brands’ ‘purpose’.
After all, when was bandwagon-jumping ever not an intrinsic part of advertising/marketing? Every good salesperson reflects/amplifies qualities they see in their customer, like a fairytale mirror. Marketing doesn’t drive change, it reflects it and, occasionally, accelerates it.
‘A prerequisite for brands to have purpose’: M&C Saatchi on passions and diversity
My speech was entitled ‘How to Run a Successful Equine Business in a Recession’ and, as a speaker, I was asked to meet Princess Anne afterwards – she was very complimentary, by the way. Every year since, I believe the event has returned to its usual venue of the Mechanical Engineers’ Institute on Birdcage Walk (although this year’s event was, of course, virtual) which means I’m also able to say that I’ve spoken at The Royal Society, the very epicentre of science since 1663. From Benjamin Franklin to Charles Darwin to Tim Berners-Lee, the list of people who could say the same is about as illustrious as one can imagine.
A couple of years later, rather less-than-illustriously, the laptop I’d written it on gave up the ghost and died on me. I hadn’t backed it up and, by the time I came to rebuild the data on its replacement, I thought I’d lost the speech. As Edmund Blackadder once exclaimed, ‘Bugger!’
Fast-forward to this morning when I was searching through my archives to find an elusive file for a thing I was doing and what do you know, badly filed in the darkest recesses of a subfolder entitled ‘Meetings’, I found it!
Obviously a lot has changed in the last ten years so I found myself reading it with slightly gritted teeth, hoping that it hadn’t aged terribly. I’m pleased to say that not only was that not the case but the points raised seem as relevant today as they did a decade ago when the world was, in so many ways, such a different place.
Anyway, without further ado, here’s the speech. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did writing it – and perhaps rather more so than I did delivering it…
At the lectern of the 19th National Equine Forum, at The Royal Society, March 8th 2011. Photo: Craig Payne Photography
How to Run a Successful Equine Business in a Recession
My Lords, Ladies and Gentlemen,
Thank you for asking me to come to speak to you today on what was originally going to be the grand and far-reaching title: “How to run a successful business in a recession”. When I first heard that title, I wondered if I should presume to pontificate on such a topic.
By adding the modifier ‘equine business’, the subject moves away from the standard and the mainstream towards the niche, the specialist, the quirky – which is an area I’m much more familiar with!
I also feel that the very notion of an ‘equine’ modifier is something of theme in itself – to which I will return: The distinction, if there is one, between ‘our world’ and ‘the rest of the world’.
I’m sure the academics amongst you would expect a well-prepared student to gain extra marks by attempting to substantiate or even challenge the premise of a question before going on to answer it.
The most problematic of all the terms in the title is the word ‘recession’. Firstly, the UK is not technically in a recession, as I speak – although we’re still wary of a ‘double dip’ taking hold. Whether or not the equine economy is in recession, nobody really knows and yet, for a “£4bn economy”, it strikes me that we should know much more than we currently do. We have a variety of surveys but no real indices of performance.
Does recession put us at most at risk of belt-tightening or will our customers deny themselves everything but their horse? Are any more people taking up riding today or are many riders walking away? I really don’t know. No organisation seems to be measuring these effects in any meaningful way. Whatever is being measured, could certainly be better shared.
Regrettably, there is almost no regular, independent data about the equestrian retail economy. We piece together a permanently changing hypothesis, based on our own experiences and morsels of information from trusted suppliers.
I can’t claim to be too frustrated by this, as it has always been thus but I am a little envious when I see more concerted attempts to quantify the ongoing performance of other specialist markets.
I’d also question what our definition of ‘successful’ is these days. Significant growth is usually the simplest determinant but in the current circumstances, many would argue that profitability will do just fine. To others, it may even be just surviving in business for another year.
If this sounds unambitious, I would urge you to leaf through the Plimsoll Report on our Industry. It paints a grim picture of an industry seemingly over-populated by mediocrity and apparently tolerant of the reduced margins that accompany an over-supplied and stagnant market.
In the quest for success in any economic environment, I’d say that businesses have only three basic forces that operate on us, over which we have some control. The economist’s twin favourites of Supply and Demand are there – as well as the bit in the middle, Operations.
Our Supply trade is still something of a cottage industry which remains heavily skewed towards the small operator. It seems that we are only now at the beginning of a period of consolidation that has been in effect over the last two or three decades in other, comparable, specialist markets, such as the camping and cycling markets.
In a downturn, difficulties are most keenly felt by those who are smallest or least professional – and I appreciate that those two terms do not mean the same thing.
It’s important, then, that every company should tread very carefully in their dealings with any suppliers that are the most susceptible to the icy economic winds. There are too many small companies offering too many alternatives of similar products, resulting in too much undifferentiated competition and resultant commoditisation.
This magnifies the risks of suppliers’ difficulties adversely affecting retailers who placed too much reliance upon them.
Whatever the economic climate, it’s always good business sense to think very carefully before deciding about which suppliers to appoint and which to retain. In a recession, that process becomes even more crucial.
Your operations, literally, are everything you do and ‘you’ is the operative word here. It’s the area over which you have the greatest control. You can have an effect on your processes simply by deciding to have an effect on them. Suppliers and customers can be influenced but very few companies would ever claim to be able to control either party.
In the good times, there is always the reassurance that growth is there to be achieved, as long as it can then be handled. Whether it’s extra computing power, a new fork-lift truck or an administrative position, these are significant step-changes that accompany linear growth. You can very often go from struggling to cope without the resource in question to struggling to justify having it when it arrives. Generally, as long as the problem your new resource leaves you with is better than the alternative you’ve avoided, you’ve made the right decision.
As the economic cycle slowly turns, aspirations for the future are not as easily funded – every resource needs to be justified by the present, in case that’s all you can reasonably expect. If that means the fork-lift goes back and the admin tasks need to be shared out again, that’s not an admission of failure, it’s just a recognition that the context has changed.
The level of demand is expected to reduce in a downturn. When demand reduces, it risks becoming outstripped by supply and so, prices must fall. You must lower your prices and in doing so, probably your margins. It’s simple economics.
Well, I can’t wholly say that’s not true but I can say it’s not the whole truth. Simple economic effects will only be solely in evidence when the world is full of simple economists and, happily, that’s still not the case. The Marketing world is a much subtler and more nuanced place to live than the Economist’s world. We also deal in products that are decisions of the heart more than they are of the head and with customers who have a living, breathing horse to care for rather than an asset to maintain and protect.
Yes, price competitiveness is perhaps of greater importance today but companies ignore at their peril the importance of customer service, whatever the market conditions. Reducing prices and margins is not an adequate justification for also reducing efforts to build a positive customer relationship. If all around are losing their heads in this regard, now is exactly the time to make sure you care more about your customers, if you want to see them more often.
We pay attention to the price points for each category of product we sell. It won’t shock you to learn that we sold far fewer rugs over £100 last year, compared to the year before. Nor will you be astounded to hear that rugs under £50 were much, much more popular over the same period. Such effects have only to be monitored as closely as possible in order that an ongoing strategy can be formulated around them. The effects may seem fairly obvious, but with the benefit of a few specific numbers, you can be surprised to see by how much these ‘obvious’ effects are in evidence.
The absolute favourite tactic of retailers everywhere to stimulate demand without appearing to reduce prices is ‘Bundling’ and it’s used everywhere: 3 for 2 offers, starter kits, family packs and software packages.
Bundling does come at a reduction in margin – the lower unit cost is what makes it attractive to the customer – but it’s a means of eliciting more value more quickly. Who really needs a stock of three bottles of shampoo in their bathroom? Or, for that matter, two? We’ve grown used to it because as consumers, we’ve agreed that if we pay up front for more stuff, we get even more of it free.
I appreciate that not all business are too concerned with issues such as holding stock but even service sector businesses need to understand that price points are vital to continuing to attract customers who now can’t justify the prices they used to pay. If the price tag is the barrier, offer reduced options that are cheaper but at the same margin, one-hour riding lessons instead of two, that sort of thing.
If you want an example of service bundling, how about that idea that was invented to keep football teams afloat in the years before sponsorship and television money – the season ticket?
Whatever the state of the economy, businesses always have to perform or eventually, they will cease to exist. Recession merely brings a heightening of this ever-present reality, a greater possibility that your company will fail. At the same time, it brings a greater possibility that your competitors will fail, which in turn presents extra possibilities that your company will succeed. We tend to think of Opportunity and threat as polar opposites but they never exist in isolation of each other.
I mentioned earlier a theme: the curious relationship between the ‘horsey’ and the ‘non-horsey’. If we are truly to achieve success for equestrian businesses, I must take this opportunity to impress upon us all to better engage with all those in our world and become more inclusive to those from the wider world.
The sphere we inhabit is different from the wider, mainstream world and yet it is a subset of that world. In the horse, we share a key differentiating factor from the rest of the world. We believe it gives us a common reference point and a set of shared values that are distinct to the non-horsey world.
It’s very reassuring to see the equine community gathering together on occasions such as this but like any community, we must acknowledge that ours has had its fair share of net-curtain-twitching and perhaps even the occasional garden-fence squabble over the years. With all that in mind, one might take the view there is less solidarity across our community than we’d like to think.
One might go further and conclude that the very notion of a single, convenient ‘equine’ umbrella to distance ourselves jointly and defiantly from the rest of the world seems more than a little illusory. ‘Riding’ is really a multifarious, mongrel construct, made up of a slew of different disciplines and, of course, the unaligned, much-maligned ‘happy hackers’.
Even if the horse does define us all as an extended family, such a kinship is both a blessing and a curse. Like an island community, we very often seem to draw comfort and strength from our differences from the ‘mainlanders’ who “don’t understand our ways” and we are often quick to highlight our differences from the mainstream.
I’ve heard many ridiculous statements over the years like “horsey people don’t have time for the internet” or “our customers don’t want that kind of service – they can get that at ASDA”.
If you looked at our customer database – of over a quarter of a million people – you’d see that many of them live in normal houses in suburbs or even towns and cities. You’d know that most of them are able to use the internet and you’d conclude that when they’re not around horses, they like to immerse themselves in the subversive counter-culture by visiting such places as Tesco, McDonalds, IKEA…even Primark. I would add that many of them wondered what all the fuss was about during the hunting debate and a significant proportion even believes, quite firmly, that hunting should remain banned.
It’s very easy to overlook the huge number of riders and horse owners who, rather inconveniently, don’t care about any of the disciplines and wouldn’t recognise a British Olympic rider if they met one while out on a hack. This part of the market, our customers, our community views their horse, as an escape from the rest of the world, not as an outward expression of belonging to an artificially-constructed ‘horse world’ or, heaven forbid, any reason to indulge in competitive activity.
Should that really be such a surprise to us? Do we really want our community to consist solely ‘the right sort’ of people if it is to flourish? Can we afford to be too choosy in a recession? In fact, forget the economy. Do we dare risk turning away the very people who may even assure the future of equestrian sport itself?
I’ve always felt that above all else, business in general – but retail in particular – demands and thrives on brutal honesty. If too few people are visiting your shop, who or what do you blame? The weather? The economy? The Government? Suppliers? Perhaps even the stubbornly unco-operative customers themselves? There comes a point where you have to accept that by doing things differently yourself, you can improve the situation.
Honesty itself won’t add a penny onto your revenue but it has a strange habit of pointing you towards the ideas that do put more money in the till.
As a marketer, it’s natural, even tempting to want to segment the market in which one operates and the horse world with its myriad of different sports seems ideally suited to this.
What can be less easy to do is to gain that same level of connection with all customers at the same time, from those who would define themselves by their chosen discipline but crucially, also those whose passion is just as fulfilled by ‘looking after’.
Faced with this challenge, the few elements that I’ve observed to be truly common across the whole of the horse world appear to be grooming, mucking out and a compulsion to support anyone who helps horses. A common denominator seems to be to do with clearing up a mess of one sort or another. It strikes me that it neatly highlights a necessary pragmatism that defines those who spend their time around the horse and it’s very similar to the kind of pragmatism that seems to me to be one of the most vital factors in achieving success in any business at any time, not just an equestrian business in a recession.
Thank you for listening.
The speakers at the 19th National Equine Forum, at The Royal Society, March 8th 2011. Photo: Craig Payne Photography
HRH The Princess Royal at the 19th National Equine Forum, at The Royal Society, March 8th 2011. Photo: Craig Payne Photography
The programme of the 19th National Equine Forum, at The Royal Society, March 8th 2011.
I believe it was Søren Kierkegaard who once said “If you label me, you negate me”.Already, I’m sensing you’re rolling your eyes at the audacity of my quoting a 19th-century Danish philosopher, without any warning.“Oh no, here we go.What an absolute [insert insult of choice]”.Hold on a moment, though.Wouldn’t your chosen term of abuse be a label, meaning you’ve rather spectacularly missed our Scandinavian friend’s point?
You’d also be falling into the trap I’ve laid for you.It was a pretentious quote but not entirely in the way it seems.I’m pretending to quote Kierkegaard but it’s actually a line from the 1992 film ‘Wayne’s World’, a far less academically significant (therefore a more socially acceptable) source.If I’d said I was quoting “Wayne from ‘Wayne’s World’”, would that have made the label any more flattering? Would it negate me any less if it was?
In recent years, as the public discourse in the UK, the US and elsewhere seems to have grown more adversarial and unsophisticated, I’ve found myself reminded more and more of Wayne Campbell’s unsuccessful chat-up line.Maybe I am a little over-sensitive to the choices of words used by anyone in power whose intentions are unclear – or conversely, as seems to be increasingly the case, perhaps most people aren’t sensitive enough.
The Scientific Case
“Of Course It’s In Your Head – Why Would That Mean It’s Not Real?”
For over a century, the disciplines of Psychology (the study of the mind) and Linguistics (the study of Language) have found themselves frequently intertwined.The central argument that has always drawn these two distinct areas of study together is this:Language determines Thought.It’s important to say that I’m in no way posing as an expert in either field.I did a little Cognitive and Social Psychology at University and for a year, I lived next door to a Linguist – and no, he wasn’t a cunning one.I can google ‘psycholinguistics’, read about Piagetian cognitive determinism and name-drop the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis but I won’t pretend to understand any of it fully and it won’t make much difference to my basic premise that you or I don’t.It’s just important that you keep in mind the widely-supported proposition that the words we use and hear used go some way – perhaps a long way – to influencing the way we think.
I have, however, worked in Marketing for over twenty years so it’s fair to say that I’ve written enough copy to know how to use language to seek to gain acceptance and approval from the reader – the keys to being able to persuade them.I’ve been to seminars in which eminently more experienced wordsmiths than I am have forensically deconstructed their craft as part science, part art – often a dark art.We’re all consumers of products – which makes us all consumers of advertising.It shouldn’t be hugely controversial to suggest we’re all to some extent aware of it when others are trying to change the way we think about something and yet the practice still works remarkably well for it to continue to exist.If you don’t just love a McDonald’s meal but you’re “lovin’” the experience of going there, that word has influenced, possibly even determined, your thought.Yes it’s a free country and you may have been free to make the choice to visit the ‘Golden Arches’ but how free were you to arrive at that thought?Consequently, if 300 million people don’t hear the name ‘Hillary’ without it being prefixed by the word ‘crooked’, what is that going to do to the unconscious opinion of her with a large swathe of them? It’s what psychologists (and marketers) call the ‘mere exposure’ hypothesis.
The Historical Case
“Time’s Arrow”
What about when the same techniques are applied even more nefariously?Let’s not mess about here, I’m going to go all ‘Godwin’s Law’ at this point and use one of the most chilling, notorious, shameful examples of persuasive writing – just to prove that it actually happened: “Arbeit Macht Frei”.It’s German and it translates as “Work Makes You Free”.Have you remembered where you’ve seen it, yet?It was (and still is) written above the gates at the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, possibly the site of the very worst of humanity’s depravity.The context is clear: those that were sent there, arriving in a state of fear, were met with a message of promise and a condition.“You may feel trapped and persecuted right now but if you work hard here, you’ll actually be free”.Even without knowing what happened next, it’s an incredibly shocking attempt at a strapline.When you then consider that “Freedom” seems to be a deliberate euphemism for the reader’s impending death, it’s breathtaking in its soul-crushing brutality.The real lesson that this example teaches us is not just that it’s a fairly crude attempt at thought control but that such a crude phrase was used so brazenly, so utterly cynically.
Meanwhile, back in the 21st century, where we all feel we know better and could never possibly return to those sick, twisted days, there’s a small, nagging suggestion that we may not be as wise as we think.Arguably, we’re still happy to support those who would use our language against us, so have we really learned from our species’ mistakes – and is our complacent belief that we have aiding and abetting aspiring thought-controllers of the future?
The Literary Case
“The Right To Tell People What They Do Not Want To Hear”
At the forefront of the effort to ensure that the horrors of totalitarianism must never be revisited was, of course, George Orwell.In his scathing critique of the subject ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’, he shrewdly included the vital role that the distortion of language could play as a means to facilitate and perpetuate an all-powerful state.“Newspeak”, the name given to the dangerously re-defined, state-approved form of language was the means by which concepts such as “doublethink” (a means by which one fact simultaneously demonstrates the opposite) could possibly exist.Logically, it seems perverse to assert a patently self-contradictory statement such as “War is Peace” but the practice of doublethink, delivered in the approved guise of newspeak, would eventually compel Orwell’s oppressed inhabitants of “Airstrip One” to agree that it must be the case.
You may think this is all a little extreme and scare-mongering but the context is vital.It was written in 1948 and propaganda was a huge part of the war effort on all sides.It had long been understood that to control what is believed to be “the truth” is to control a war effort and, by extension, a war – the famous quote about the truth being “the first casualty” of war was anecdotally attributed to Californian Governor, later Senator Hiram Johnson, in about 1916.Orwell’s genius suggestion was that by maintaining a perpetual state of war, his totalitarian regime was able to maintain a permanent control of truth itself.
Today, it’s a rather sad irony that, rather than his masterpiece and its darkest ideas being fully understood by all, they have, for many, become trite buzzwords from TV shows in which mildly perilous situations occur – an undesired form of newspeak, you might conclude.Viewers of ‘Big Brother’ and ‘Room 101’ may know of the Orwellian connection but without having read the book, can have no grasp of the gulf that exists between the plight of Winston Smith and that of the guests of Frank Skinner or Davina McCall et al.
The Semantic Case
“Warning: Implicit Content”
As our friend Søren would no doubt agree, the problem with labels is that they are generally one of many ways to describe a person or a group which can be used wholly to define them, removing natural complexity and using a simplistic shorthand instead.Too often, we don’t really identify it’s happening when others use labels and we rarely notice when we do it ourselves.Labels allow unspoken connotation to fill in the gaps and strip out context and nuance.It takes effort to realise that there’s more to the simplistic description than is being made explicit and it’s too easy to derive a wider, unsaid, implied meaning.
The other problem is that we all have many applicable labels at all times; some of which present us positively, many of which don’t.I’m a father, a husband, a dog-owner, a tax-payer, a voter and a graduate which I would hope all sound like good things to be.I’m also an SUV-driver, a cyclist, a caravanner, a Libran and a football fan, descriptions which do not always meet with universal popularity and can be used, in isolation, to undermine.Furthermore, depending on your particular perspective, my applicable geographic labels of Lancastrian, Northerner, Englishman and Briton may or may not derive positive acclaim.Subjectiveness, relative to an audience hugely affects the positivity, or otherwise, of a label.If someone wanted to create antipathy towards me from a Yorkshire audience, guess which label would be most useful in achieving that aim?What if the audience was from London?Or Wales?Or Germany? Labels make it easy to discredit and are too easily met with unquestioning acceptance.
The Pragmatic Case
“That’s No Way To Go, Does Your Mother Know?”
To a certain extent, none of the above should be that surprising.Most parents will recognise the important distinction between the justifiable chastisement “you’ve behaved stupidly” and the altogether more dismissive “you’re stupid”.We take care not to label children when they err because it’s unfair and it sets a poor example – yet we seem to forget all that when it comes to the behaviour of adults.Anyone can behave idiotically.It’s a complicated world – so we tend to simplify idiocy by distributing it at the individual rather than the event level.
Social psychologists have observed from studies that people tend to attribute judgements of others due to “dispositional factors above situational factors”.Mothers have long discouraged their children from taking such a disposition-centric view by encouraging the more situationalist “they can’t help it and probably didn’t mean it”.When we grow out of childhood, such guidance shouldn’t need to change – but as we become more hard-bitten by life experience, it just seems as if it is advice more appropriate for children.
The Logical Case
“Therefore, My Dog Is A Cat”
There’s also the issue of flawed logic to consider.Mathematicians have long known about something called the Conditional Probability Fallacy – a logical trap that suggests that if one thing is represented in another, the opposite must also be true.As a species, we seem to be innately disposed to accept certain binary truths and it’s logical for us to attempt to apply that trusted model wherever we see two states in a relationship.“Darkness equals night” so it’s obviously equally true that “night equals darkness”.The fallacy exists when such a relationship between the two states is implied, hence: “All fathers are male” – so all males are fathers?A simple logical ‘sense check’ is often enough to debunk the flawed conclusion here – our own experience tells us It’s obvious that the inverse cannot be true.
What if there’s insufficient personal experience to undermine the proposition?What if the intricacies of such logical traps are exploited to an audience largely unaware of their existence?Can we be conned, en masse, merely by implication?For example, it’s easy to imagine the suggestion raised by the logical relationship ‘All jihadists are Muslim” – so are we being invited by anyone who asserts this point to conclude that “all Muslims are jihadists”?Why is their religion suddenly important in this context, anyway?Where is the consistency with other descriptions of terrorists?When the UK was beset by horrifying attacks by the IRA, a supposedly exclusively Catholic Irish Republican militia, they were never described as “Christian terrorists”.Is it fair to surmise that there’s a reason for such inconsistency? Is there a justification for it?
The Legal Case
“You Can’t Handle The Truth!”
We trust our politicians and news outlets to deal in the truth but from a legal standpoint, that’s only a third of the requirement.Any witness in a court of law – arguably the arena where words matter most – must swear to tell “the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth”.We’ve heard this seemingly quaint legalistic phrase so often that its incredibly profound meaning tends to be lost.It’s of huge significance that there are three strands of truth in this well-worn saying and they absolutely do not mean the same thing repeated twice merely to add gravitas.Logically speaking, there are three very distinct requirements to be met by this oath.Firstly, there’s “the truth”:Is X factually correct, yes or no?In answering this point, is the requirement for the statement to be comprehensively true: does it explain all facets raised by the question truthfully or does it omit any elements that are also true and inconvenient to include?Finally, the need to strip away misleading detail: does the answer include other, spurious information, implied by its inclusion to be equally true and relevant?
In law, circumstantial evidence is deemed to be be flimsy and generally inadmissible.In the media and, far too often, in public debate, little distinction is drawn between material and immaterial fact.One provides insight to a story, the other adds innuendo. Guess which of the two additions tends to be most commercially attractive?
There’s a reason that physical representations of Justice are traditionally depicted as ‘blind’, her eyes generally obscured by a blindfold.It’s precisely because the Law is expected to ignore such spurious details as may be supposed just by looking at a person (i.e. “nothing but the truth”).A verdict must be based solely on the facts presented, in the expectation that they are exhaustive and untrammelled by concoction, regardless of wealth, power or any other supposedly irrelevant factor of those on either side.No politician or news outlet is bound as strictly to these principles and, by extension, their ability to convey what might be termed ‘absolute truth’ is inevitably inferior.
The Digital Case
“A Binary Expression”
In an ever-more inter-connected world, words travel further and elicit more words of riposte from more respondents than ever before.With such inordinate possibility and reach, has humanity used the adolescent phase of the internet principally to broaden its mind and further its understanding?Sadly, the evidence suggests, in the main, that it hasn’t.Indeed, we’ve tended to deal with the exploding plurality of opinion and viewpoint by most commonly retreating to the comfort and solace of people with whom we are most in agreement, like disparate prehistoric tribes retreating to their various, demarcated caves.
In our ‘echo chambers’, our digital ghettos, we appear to be doing what social psychologists have always observed in group dynamics: emphasise intra-group similarities and highlight inter-group differences, like opposing sets of football fans.Here again, language is a useful stick – striking a drum to emphasise unity and beating those to whom that unity does not apply.With all the zealotry of the Spanish Inquisition, those who are judged to be heretical to the orthodoxy of one side or the other are denounced as ‘snowflakes’, ‘libtards’, ‘fascists’, ‘leftists’, ‘Blairites’ or ‘TERFs’ to name but a few epithets.Similarly, the mere mention of these terms of heresy is sufficient to remove any further right of explanation or mitigation to be heard, like the man being branded a blasphemer in the always-relevant ‘Life of Brian’.In short, the process of labelling doesn’t just negate individuals in these circumstances, it can defenestrate them of their credibility.
A clear example of the ease with which negative labels can be proliferated in the digital age is the much-discussed ‘Centrist Dad’.Aside from the fact that it is principally designed to trivialise and undermine a particular assumed set of views, like any other label, it would appear to take the principle a stage further.To its proponents, the term generally represents a frustration at a perceived lack of radicalism that they would believe is necessary, a dismay at the supposed reliance on much of the status quo.Aside from the implied sexism and ageism of the term, it is essentially a disapproval of ‘Centrism’.The trouble with this term is that it is only really clearly defined by that which it is not – radical leftism or indeed rightism – rather than that which it can be said to be.Centrism is therefore analogous to atheism, which is defined merely as the absence of a belief system rather than an ‘active’ position in and of itself.So-called ‘centrists’ subsequently find themselves being thus defined more for a set of values that they don’t hold rather than any that they demonstrably do.This appears to be clear with-us-or-against-us posturing – and history holds dark warnings for that kind of simplistic tribalism.
And then there’s the media in the digital age.Like any other consumer product, media proliferation has led to a huge increase of news providers, each subsisting on ever-narrower niches of audience type.Unlike things like breakfast cereal, which has also found itself in a market in which it must accommodate more choices, tailored more closely to a more specific clientèle, it seems questionable whether news should operate in this way.British newspapers always represented a fairly diverse range of readers but reporting of facts generally superseded the in-house interpretation of their significance and so the Guardian and the Telegraph, while ideologically opposite, would report essentially the same stories, albeit differently paginated and analysed according to their (and their readers’) politics.
When the world wide web was barely a twinkle in Tim Berners-Lee’s eye and I was but a sixth-form student, I tended to spend my Monday mornings trying to avoid doing my Maths A-Level homework by reading each of the day’s newspapers in the library.Today, I believe that the appreciation it gave me of the role of a broad yet largely responsible media landscape was the best education I received at that time, consistently far more meaningful than my questionable ability to perform differentiation from first principles or indeed identify a Poisson distribution.As a result, I find myself suitably dismayed and alarmed at the willingness of a legitimised partisan press to use the language of their own tribal agenda, abandoning the media’s traditional role of observer and analyst, in order to become a willing participant.Most depressingly, those outlets that attempt to retain a vestige of objective detachment are now being demeaned by the dismissive label “Mainstream Media”.Somehow, this is what we seem to believe to be progress.
Words are also being used accordingly to reinforce another growing social trend: the rise of simplicity or – as it’s described by Stephen Fry – infantilism, of debate.Nuance seems to beyond the grasp of many, brought up on oversimplified phone-in radio debates and most issues find themselves being reduced to saccharine Good/Bad questions.Is this helpful when debating the most difficult questions we face? Complexity is an inherent component – or should be – to any far-reaching question. For that reason, the answer is not simple and anyone who claims otherwise is likely to be doing so for expeditious reasons.BAD! – with a commensurate level of qualifiers…
The Evolving Case
“If You Tolerate This, Then Your Children Will Be Next”
There have always been ways for the unscrupulous in power to self-aggrandise or denigrate those with whom they would disagree and, as Orwell and many others have shown, attempts to distort the meaning of words to suit an agenda is a recurrent one.Of course, they aren’t all as pernicious as newspeak.Some methods are older and simpler than others but they’re all employed with the same aim in mind – to influence our perception.
The old favourite among politicians is to speak with such eloquence and articulacy, that most people won’t stop to wonder if they’ve been lied to.It’s therefore no surprise that when everybody’s favourite Victorian throwback MP Jacob Rees-Mogg was invited to admit his investment company’s stance on the financial uncertainties of Brexit seemed at odds with his stated political position, he merely brushed off the matter by suggesting there was “terminological inexactitude” in the assertion (a phrase first adopted by Churchill in 1906 to circumvent the prohibited practice of using the term ‘lying’ in Parliament).Just as he expected, the country sniggered at the archaic delivery and chose largely to overlook the suspicion that ‘Jaunty Jacob’ had been putting his money somewhere other than where his mouth was.
I suspect you’ve been waiting for the next bit.I hope you’ll agree I’ve tried to restrict myself from returning to the Trump well of lexical chicanery thus far but then I’d hate to disappoint you so here it is, probably his most egregious example.When an earlier video emerged, during the 2016 US election, of Donald Trump’s startling boasts of what he felt his fame allowed him to do and say around women, the matter was then raised at the second televised Presidential debate.Famously, his main defence was “It’s just words, folks. It’s just words”, an astounding attempt to discredit his accusation by simply dismissing the importance of words – the very currency with which he was attempting to ascend to the office he holds today.Protectors of the power of language were horrified – notably JK Rowling who later tweeted that “If they [words] don’t matter, we’re all lost” – and then were further horrified to note that a wide section of the American public were happy to accept the explanation, uncritically.Once again, the most shocking examples of the abuse of language are not the most sophisticated examples but the brazenness with which the most crude versions are employed.
Finally, it’s important to note that the powerful do not have the monopoly on distorting language to further their own causes.Recent years have seen those with less power adopting a similar technique – with concerning implications.No-one should want to undermine the experience of minorities in their struggle to gain equal recognition and representation but to a language purist, it’s equally unedifying to see certain groups explaining their experiences and situations with the phrase “my truth”.It’s understandable that the assertion is that their perspective on issues is different and needs to be more widely understood but can it be right that the word ‘truth’, which is supposed to be an absolute, can now be treated like any common noun and fall under the auspices of a possessive?This isn’t merely a point of grammar but one of meaning itself.Surely there can only be one truth, however many interpretations of it there may be.If we complicitly downgrade the term ‘truth’ to mean little more than ‘opinion’, aren’t we devaluing the very concept of truth itself?
Such concerns are brought into sharper relief when, inevitably, the language of the powerless is then appropriated by the powerful.During the furore that surrounded Serena Williams’ conduct at the 2018 US Open Final, opinions swirled that she was both a powerful, millionaire athlete or the victim of sexism and racism, depending upon the level of support or condemnation being proclaimed.Headlines such as “Serena Williams is being punished for speaking her truth” legitimise the concept in the vernacular and will offer those who seek to further themselves by factual obfuscation with another useful tool to achieving it.
No wonder we’re being described as living in a “Post-truth” world but the very existence of such a phrase is, to my mind, hardly a portent of promise.If nothing is going to mean anything anymore, shouldn’t we be more worried that the most basic principles that anchor our hard-won rights are under the same threat of being erased?
Resonation 
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