Читать книгу Stuff Matters: Genius, Risk and the Secret of Capitalism - Harry Bingham - Страница 9

‘Ah, Maggie, in the world of advertising, there’s no such thing as a lie. There’s only expedient exaggeration.’

– ROGER THORNHILL (Cary Grant) in Hitchcock’s North by Northwest

In the mid-nineteenth century, European scientists led by Louis Pasteur in France and Robert Koch in Germany developed and proved the germ theory of medicine, which swept away centuries of myth and superstition. From new theories new practices. Joseph Lister in Britain was quick to see that if germs caused infection, then surgery was almost an open invitation to gangrene. Since wounds couldn’t be heated or filtered – two of the standard ways of eliminating germs in the laboratory – that left only chemical compounds. Lister knew that sewage was successfully deodorised with carbolic acid and began to spray a solution of it on open wounds and surgical instruments – and forced surgeons to wash their hands in a mild carbolic solution before operating. The incidence of gangrene among his patients declined precipitously. By 1870, his innovations had been enthusiastically adopted and improved upon, first in Germany, then further afield. Countless lives were saved. A medical revolution was born.

Needless to say, revolutions breed innovation. In the last three decades of the nineteenth century, a scramble was on to develop ever more effective chemical compounds to play the role of sterilizing agents. One such formulation was developed by a couple of American researchers for use in surgical situations. A couple of decades later, the same product, but heavily diluted, was sold to dentists for use in oral care. Two decades later still, the same product was sold as a mouthwash to America’s burgeoning middle class. In honour of the great Joseph Lister, the mouthwash was christened Listerine. It was a nice touch, but almost nobody bought the mouthwash.

Then the young Gerard B. Lambert took over management of the family firm. He had a revolutionary idea of his own. He’d advertise the product, something that the company had never done in its history. For a year, nothing happened. The copy was awkward, old-fashioned, uncertain. It didn’t work. The firm’s profit (which included income from items other than the mouthwash) remained stuck at its historic levels of about $100,000 a year. But then Lambert and his two ad-men, Milton Feasley and Gordon Seagrove, hit gold. Their new ad depicted a gorgeous young woman, alongside copy which told the affecting tale of a handsome young businessman finding himself rejected after a single romantic date. The ad’s headline commented darkly, ‘He Never Knew Why’.

The answer, said Messrs Lambert, Feasley and Seagrove, was halitosis, a term so obscure that very few doctors would have recognized it and most dictionaries of the age ignored it. All the same, the term had a pleasingly classical ring to it and it sounded scientific. As Roland Marchand comments in his Advertising the American Dream, ‘the ads took the form of quick-tempo sociodramas in which readers were invited to identify with temporary victims in tragedies of social shame. Now the protagonist was not the product but the potential consumer, suffering vicariously a loss of love, happiness, and success.’ Consumers responded to the ad in their droves. By 1927, the profits of Lambert Pharmaceutical had increased from $100,000 to more than $4 million. The advertising budget for Listerine saw a fiftyfold increase over a similar time-period.

Naturally enough, if you do something once and it succeeds magnificently, you’re under an almost overwhelming temptation to do the same all over again. It was a temptation that Lambert made no effort to resist. No sooner had his halitosis campaign started to take off, than he started to wonder what other ailments might not also be curable by this miracle mouthwash. The answer was quite a few. Listerine, it seemed, was an excellent after-shave tonic. It could cure colds. It would take care of sore throats. It was an excellent astringent, and who could possibly resist its effectiveness as a deodorant?

Listerine might very well have turned out to be the cure for all sorts of other things besides – ingrowing hairs, rough skin, violent conflict, old age – except that success breeds competition, and all kinds of other brands sought to muscle in on Listerine’s turf. Laundry starches became beauty baths (for ‘Fastidious Women’, naturally). New diseases were invented by the score. Do you, for example, suffer from ‘acidosis’ (sour stomach)? No? Then perhaps you worry about ‘bromodosis’ or ‘homotosis’? (Sweaty foot odours and a lack of attractive home furnishings, respectively.) If you have survived those afflictions, then do you perhaps need to consult a doctor about accelerator toe, ashtray breath or office hips? The world of the 1920s American consumer was strewn with new perils, new cures.

In all of this, it was almost easy to lose sight of one, rather central question. Did Listerine actually do anything for bad breath? The answer, then and now, is that its contribution is decidedly modest. Any liquid, whether a glassful of tapwater or a mouthwash named in honour of the father of antiseptic surgery, will coat the mouth, wash away surplus food particles, and mildly reduce the build-up of dental plaque. Listerine may be somewhat better than pure water in doing just that, but it is certainly a lesser part of good dental hygiene than either brushing or flossing. Indeed, the alcohol content of many mouthwashes may dry the back of the tongue and thereby encourage the growth of the bacteria which are largely responsible for bad breath. If you really want to deal with bad breath then brush your teeth, floss, and, if you really must, gently scrape the back of your tongue with the edge of a teaspoon. Despite fifty years of advertising to the contrary, Listerine does nothing at all to help with colds or sore throats. No data has ever been produced to demonstrate that Listerine has helped the guy get the girl or the girl get her guy.

Lambert’s story is the perfect way to introduce the topic of salesmanship. It’s a tale which begins with Pasteur, Koch and Lister – a group of scientists responsible for one of the most important set of medical discoveries ever. Their work was rigorous and scientific. It has been of vast and continuing benefit to mankind. By contrast, the story of Listerine mouthwash begins with an invention: a pseudo-medical term, a phoney disease, and unjustifiable medical claims. The product created to honour Lister was founded on a fraud.

Listerine may not have done much to endear itself to medical science, but in the annals of consumer marketing, Gerry Lambert can claim an honoured place. Consumer brands had only been around for some thirty or forty years, when Listerine took off. The first British company to register a trademark was Bass, the brewing company, whose red triangle logo was registered in 1876 and is still in use today. Yet a trademark and a brand are rather different. A trademark as boring as Bass’s triangle does nothing to encode a more complex identity in the consumer’s mind. If Bass’s was the first British trademark, then Lyle’s Golden Syrup with its green and gold can and its wonderfully weird illustration^* has some claim to be the world’s first and longest enduring consumer brand.

America proved to be even more fertile ground for consumer marketing. The challenge for the first marketers of mass-produced consumer goods was to convince buyers that their products were as good as those offered by better known local suppliers. In densely settled Europe, with its long-established communities, those local bonds were often slower to break down. In America, with its vast landmass, unsettled population, and new communities, there was often little or no local bond to conquer. In 1882, Quaker Oats launched a national ad campaign around its logo of a ‘man in Quaker garb’. Coca-Cola’s famous cursive logo arrived in 1885, though the bottle wouldn’t follow for a further thirty years. The year 1900 saw the arrival of Campbell soup served up in a tin looking much the same as it does today.

Important as these innovations were, they remained tentative. In 1900, J. Walter Thompson started to pitch the idea of trademark advertising – that is, the notion of building a family of associations around a familiar logo or product – but it would take the heated, urbanized atmosphere of the Roaring Twenties for Thompson’s vision to be fully realized. Gerry Lambert and his reckless talent for invention was one of marketing’s first and greatest stars. Lambert was no longer selling a mouthwash; he was selling an aspiration, a lifestyle, a fantasy, a dream.

That’s the positive spin. The negative one is that he was also creating a fear that had never existed before – the fear of ‘halitosis’ – and answering it with a collection of half-truths and lies. As consumers ourselves, we suspect all salespeople of the same willingness to say anything at all to close the deal. The issue is at its most intense when it comes to branded consumer goods, but all industries need to market their wares. Entrepreneurs need to take risks and show drive to succeed, but they also need to sell, they need to persuade…and, the worry persists, if they need to lie, then lie they will.

My quest to understand capitalism from the inside required me to understand the selling impulse too. I needed to meet the modern day Gerry Lamberts and understand what made them tick. But I had a problem. When I met senior CEOs and entrepreneurs, I could hardly ask them, ‘Would you be prepared to lie outright to gain a sale?’ When I did broach the question of salesmanship, I got the kind of answers you might expect. A man who had chaired a major British consumer goods company told me solemnly, ‘It’s about laying out the advantages and values of your product…You can’t fool the consumer. In the end, it’s all about communication.’ And I believed him – that is, I believed that he had come to believe that. I suspect that most senior marketers at most blue chip companies believe something very similar.

But Gerry Lambert did set out to fool the consumer. It wasn’t that he wanted to lie; it was that he didn’t much care whether he did or whether he didn’t. The modern day advertiser has to live with a host of protective consumer regulations, the scrutiny of advertising watchdogs, a media waiting to pounce, and a globalized market where a scandal in one territory can quickly create havoc in another. One advertiser told me candidly that he welcomed all these advertising regulations, ‘however boring and stupid’ they might sometimes be, ‘because the nature of what we do always pushes us to the max. It makes my job more manageable – more ethically manageable – if I know that I just can’t lie, however much I might feel pushed to do so.’

In short, the carefully managed world of the modern marketer has become a bad hunting ground for the true salesman. If I wanted to find the unvarnished truth about the sales impulse – Essence of Salesmanship, free of any careful PR overlay, free of any government-imposed restriction – I needed someone whose need for good PR had long since vanished. I needed someone who didn’t care what others thought. I needed someone who was a salesman through and through and who wanted to tell me how it worked.

And that was how come I came to be in a bar outside Liverpool Street station in London with a man that I’ll simply call Tom. Tom grew up in Essex. He had wide estuary vowels, no fancy schooling, and no Oxbridge polish. In US terms, this was a kid from the wrong bit of New Jersey, not the right bit of Martha’s Vineyard. He drifted into the City of London, working in the back office of a major investment bank. Tom knew he could sell stuff. Stocks, bonds, derivatives, he didn’t care. He just knew he could sell. But the major investment bank wasn’t set up to give Essex kids without much formal education the chance to prove themselves. The major investment bank wanted Oxbridge types speaking to clients and Essex types settling the trades. Tom got bored.

He dabbled in the markets during the dot.com boom and got dot.com busted when the markets crashed. He lost his own savings and his family’s savings too. Then a chance conversation in a pub told him about a job opportunity in Madrid. He didn’t know much about it, except that the job involved selling shares. He made a call, got offered a job, was on a plane to Spain the following week.

What he encountered there was madness. He found six salesmen yelling into phones. He found a place that had a tape recording of a busy trading room on permanent playback, as a way of making clients feel that they were dealing with a huge organization. He found a place where the chief salesman had a notice above his computer that read, ‘You’re Steve Fox. You’re a broker. Be a cunt.’ Tom received five minutes of training – essentially a guy telling him to ‘flog shit’ – and he was put to work.

That work involved calling punters in the UK – ordinary individuals with some money to invest, very few of them expert in finance – and getting them to buy stock in US companies. Unlike outright criminal enterprises (so-called ‘boiler rooms’) that stock was always delivered, but the salesmen didn’t know or care whether the stock itself was sound, or whether the investment in question made sense for the individuals they were talking to. Their job was selling. Nothing else mattered. It wasn’t about stock selection, financial know-how, customer care, or even the bare minimum of business ethics. It was selling, pure and simple.

To cut a long story short, Tom was very good at his job. He quickly became the most successful salesman in the company he joined then quit to set up a super-successful company of his own. The whole thing folded when his business empire was raided by the police, though an attempted prosecution fell lamentably short of proving criminality. He’s written an account of his time on the dark side and is looking to turn his talents to more positive ends.

When I met him, I asked him what made a salesman. What was the secret of successful selling? To start with, his answer puzzled me. He said, ‘You’ve got to be a chameleon…You’ve got to be a really good listener.’ Those might sound like plausible answers when written down, but seemed thinner than smoke when spoken in person. There was, on first sight, nothing of the chameleon about Tom. He was dressed in an expensive black open-necked shirt and black trousers. If he’d had less style about him, he’d have had a heavy gold signet ring and, in another era, perhaps a medallion too. He didn’t look like a chameleon, he looked like a salesman. You’d have guessed his profession from across the room.

Likewise with the listening. On the whole, when someone claims to be a good listener we think of a therapist, or perhaps the sort of close friend to whom we can pour our heart out, confident of a sympathetic ear and a glass of wine. Tom, on the other hand, would be a terrible therapist, having neither the subtlety nor the patience. Perhaps more accurately, he wouldn’t be interested enough to do it. He simply wouldn’t have cared about someone’s feelings about their mother’s inability to cuddle or their partner’s lack of sensitivity.

And yet, for all that, he was right. Talking to Tom and reading his book is an eye-opening introduction to how selling works. A salesman’s version of ‘good listening’ is simply about identifying the route into their wallet. For some people, it was letting them think there was a bargain to be had. For one rather lonely old woman, it was simply talking to her about anything at all and making her feel befriended and cared for. For someone else, it was talking to them about Schubert, their favourite composer. For someone else, it was simply about shouting at them – literally shouting: ‘YURI!! IT’S TOM. GET A PEN AND PAPER. I’VE GOT INFORMATION THAT COULD MAKE YOU A MILLION. YURI! I’M NOT MESSING ABOUT. GET A PEN AND PAPER FOR CHRIST’S SAKE!’

What makes Tom’s accounts of these conversations so disconcerting is that he’s not playing by the normal social rules of our species. Ordinarily if someone talks to you at length about your passions and pursuits, you’ll assume that they have a genuine interest in them. Ordinarily, but not always. We’re monkeys who have evolved complex social structures and whose brains are shaped to deal with that complexity. So things aren’t always simple. Perhaps a certain sort of conversation indicates a kind of flirtation. Or an attempt to create an alliance. Or it’s leading up to a request for help. We navigate situations of this kind all day, every day, without thinking anything of it.

What’s not quite so usual in regular social intercourse is the sheer brazen nakedness of Tom’s deception. He cared nothing about that old lady. He hadn’t heard of Schubert before typing the name into Wikipedia. If Yuri had liked whispering not shouting, then Tom would have been the breathiest whisperer in the land. The outrageously goal-oriented nature of Tom’s sales tactics takes the ordinary rules of human interaction and trashes them. In the evolutionary environment of the African savannah, when humans hung out in groups that were maybe 150 strong, people like Tom couldn’t have thrived. The nakedness of his deceptions would be exposed so soon, would leave him so friendless, that he’d have had to conform, at least to an extent, with the prevailing rules.

Indeed, much of the literature of salesmanship is purposely designed to help ordinary human beings over their savannah-designed mental circuitry. Those who teach salesmanship talk about overcoming ‘sales call reluctance’. That’s sales-speak for the ordinary human shyness when it comes to promoting oneself, one’s company, or one’s product. In savannah-world, where everything that goes around comes around, where reputations are quick to form and hard to shake, we’re right to have that shyness. It’s not that we’re not taking care of our own interests all the time. Quite likely we are. But if your tribe is just 150 strong, taking care of your own interests also means building a reputation for being a trustworthy person; it means making friends and working for others. A shyness over self-promotion is part of the complex set of mental tools and dispositions that guided our ancestors through that maze.

That was then, however. In today’s world, where Tom has a few million potential punters to part from their cash, the ancestral safety-check has pretty much stopped working. If a sales-woman allows her ‘sales call reluctance’ to get the better of her, then she’ll either move to a more congenial job – or be fired – or buy some books which will teach her, step-by-step, how to overcome her instinctive mental-emotional circuitry.

Nor is it just her emotions that she’ll be learning to deal with. She’ll be learning to manipulate ours as well. For example, you know those little consumer competitions where you have to write in ‘just 15 words or less why you love’ a particular product? They feel like a throwback to some older, gentler world of consumer marketing, an anachronism. Yet research shows that if you can get someone to write about their love for (let’s say) a breakfast cereal, then their resulting purchase behaviour will reflect that ‘love’, no matter whether or not they believed what they wrote when they wrote it. The act of writing itself cements a relationship that might not even have existed beforehand. That’s why those contests endure.

Or why is it that a competent car salesman will seek to avoid discussion of all those optional extras that come when you’re buying a car (paint finishes, alloys, extended warranties, and the like)? Surely, he should want us to expand our shopping lists. Again, however, consumer research indicates that if you introduce these extras too early, they become confusing – and the sale is less likely to happen. Once the sale is agreed, however, all those options come straight back onto the table. They’re no longer confusing. They’re complementary to the decision that’s just been made; they confirm and complete it.

The list of such sales tricks is ever-growing and many of them are now widely known. We know what a supermarket is doing when it pumps fresh bread smells out around the bakery, or positions the premium variants of a particular product at eye-level, or packages its value brands in a way deliberately designed to look cheap and unappealing. On the other hand, though we know these things, we are still influenced by them. Our savannah-designed brain circuity doesn’t rewire itself simply because we’re aware of some of its fallibilities.

If modern consumer marketing can sometimes come to seem like scientifically developed mind (and wallet) manipulation, it’s also too simple merely to blame the seller. As I read Tom’s memoir of his time at the rough edge of sales, it became clear that at its most elemental, sales is a game played out between buyer and seller, a kind of seduction. It’s not that the buyer has no interest at all. If they didn’t, they’d simply hang up. There wouldn’t be a sales tactic that could influence them to buy. But each buyer also has an obstacle, a resistance to that sale. The salesman’s task is to find that resistance and overcome it. Yuri liked to be shouted at, so Tom shouted. The elderly woman wanted a friend, so Tom became her friend. The bargain hunter wanted a bargain, so Tom transformed his sales patter into a dumb story about a once in a lifetime bargain. And so on. Each form of resistance met with Tom’s inimitable response.

I don’t even think that those lured into buying necessarily believed Tom. Did that old lady believe Tom was nattering away to her about fox-hunting because he really cared about her and her interests? Almost certainly not. From the way Tom reports the conversation, she was elderly and lonely but of perfectly sound mind. In effect, she was allowing Tom to talk her into making an investment (the thing that mattered most to him), because he was giving her the thing that mattered most to her. It was a tit-for-tat bargain, where the rules were understood by both sides.

Viewed like this, the artificiality of Tom’s sales techniques didn’t much signify. For sure, that elderly lady would have preferred a genuine friend to a phoney one, but a phoney one was better than no friend at all. Yuri would probably have liked being shouted at in any context, but if all that was on offer was being shouted at in a way likely to cost him several thousand euros, well, heck, he’d take whatever was going.

Just to be clear, I’m not suggesting that this collusion between buyer and seller made Tom’s activities ethical. They were nothing of the sort. Coke-dealing also works off collusion between buyer and seller. So does prostitution, illegal gambling, backstreet abortions, and plenty else. From a business perspective, though, the real problem is the essentially ephemeral nature of any scam. The businesses that Tom worked for and created so outraged the responsible authorities that they were certain to act and act aggressively. No successful business can operate unless it’s animated by a strong sales impulse, but if that sales impulse is permitted to run riot, it’ll end up throttling the business.

The way that successful entrepreneurs resolve this paradox is with integrity. Nearly all the businesspeople I spoke to talked unprompted of the importance of straight-dealing, of decency, of doing things right. For a fair while, I simply didn’t understand why this theme should recur. I hadn’t been accusing my interviewees of anything. Why were they so keen to defend themselves? When I met Tom and read his account of his life on the dark side, I understood. All business people are caught in a tug of war. On one side lies the lure of the easy sale, the slick deception, the deliberate manipulation of the buyer. Quick sales and fast profits are the potential reward. On the other side lies integrity: the desire to build a business that buyers will respect and return to; a business whose sales tactics are professional and goal-directed, but not abusive; a business that largely respects the unwritten rules of our savannah-society. More than the rest of us, entrepreneurs are subject to temptation and, more than the rest of us, entrepreneurs need to guard against that temptation by disciplining themselves to think, be, and act in an upright way. That’s not to say that all businesspeople always get it right. They clearly don’t. But few businesses of any size or duration have got where they’ve got without at least some attempt to do things right.

Risk-taking, drive, and the ability to persuade: these three traits lie at the heart of the entrepreneurial instinct, a kind of holy trinity of business. But the trinity would be radically incomplete without the joker, the maverick, the upsetter of norms – the entrepreneur’s appetite for invention. It’s to that restless and renewing talent we turn next.