There’s a gag about a chap in a Rolls Royce
who passes a Big Issue seller and recognises him as an old school chum.
He
stops and commiserates on his pal’s penury. The friend asks how the toff became
so rich and he embarks on a long story about how he began collecting and
selling firewood but making a pittance, then he collected more wood but still
earned loose change and on and on it goes until the punchline: “then my uncle
died and left me £20m.”
I sometimes feel the same about marketing. At the 2008
How-Do Awards I sat next to a charming lady who said she was a marketing
expert. I asked her to name the one book she had read that revealed the secret
of that black art. It was called Simply Better, she said.
So, after a trawl on
the internet and ignoring the publisher’s marketing guff, I bought it, cheap,
on Amazon. Some 216 pages later I, too, had the knowledge.
The key piece of
advice ran thus: devise your product or service, turn up on time at the right
place, don’t knock the furniture over, do what you promised, don’t
overcharge....and wait.
Straight from the old Ronseal School of Business
Studies.
There was other stuff like “identifying generic category benefits” but
you get my drift?
Personally, I’m a great believer in serendipity. I recall
once turning down the role of Royal correspondent on a national newspaper. The
bloke who sat behind me took the job.
A year later Diana had spilled him the
beans and he was a millionaire. His name? Andrew Morton.
I felt a bit like the
Big Issue seller in the gag.
You have to have talent, of course or an ingenious
and original product.
I remember spending 20 minutes on the telephone at the
Sun trying to explain the system of patents to a reader who claimed he had
invented the spiral staircase.
Stelios chose a high risk strategy to market
easyJet. He handed over care of his company’s reputation to the fly-on-the-wall
documentary filmmaker for Airline. Sure, the planes were often late or filled
with drunken sots on a stag do to Latvia.
But the tickets were £5
each way and the real stars of the show were the easyJet staff, so diplomatic
and courteous they should be rounded up and sent to solve the Israeli-Arab
conflict.
One of the best marketers I ever encounted was a London barrow-boy I unearthed when asked by a
newsdesk to find the “real life Del Boy”.
Tony Jordan - real life Del Boy
Tony Jordan was straight out of Central
casting. Black, curly, swept-back hair, drainpipe trousers and talked exactly
like Trotter himself. He revealed all the tricks of the costermonger’s trade.
He certainly had the gift of the gab.
Later I wrote about him again when he set
up classes to teach others how to flog tacky porcelain angels from Taiwan for
multiple of their true value. We lost touch and then one day, years later, I saw his name in
a newspaper.
He was listed as the number one television screen writer in the UK
by Broadcast magazine. Apparently, he joined the soap
after sending a speculative script to the BBC about market traders, with a
covering letter saying he had been born and raised in the East End of London.
Tony Jordan - years later
The BBC turned down the script but gave him a job on EastEnders because of his apparent life experience. Ironically,
what Tony never told me or the BBC was that he was actually a Northerner and
kept that quiet for years until he was established. Not so much Little White Bull, more Little White Lie. That’s serendipity.
