Lord Williams of Oystermouth
The Right Reverend and Right Honourable The Lord Williams of Oystermouth is best known as a former Archbishop of Canterbury, but is also a respected poet, academic and translator. He now divides his time between a number of roles including the Chancellor of the University of South Wales, Master of Magdalene College, Cambridge and a member of the House of Lords.
As a fellow Welshman, I followed Lord Williams tenure as Archbishop of Canterbury with great interest and always admired his courage, compassion and wisdom, and his clear desire for the Church to play an active part in the national conversation. When I embarked on this project, I always hoped to gain an interview with him, not least due to his 2002 Richard Dimbleby Lecture in which he talked about consumerism and the ‘market state’, and his address to the Catholic Church in Rome, which is where I began when I met him in his study at Magdalene.
Martin: I know that you’ve written a lot about consumerism, and marketers are almost the foot-soldiers of capitalism, driving demand; and I saw the speech you gave in Rome where you talked about ‘the unreal and insane worlds that our financial systems and our advertising culture…encourage us to inhabit’ so I thought you’d have some interesting views. So can I start by asking whether you think marketing is the Devil’s art?
Rowan: I certainly think it can be, in that, in Christian tradition, the whole notion that your desires, your wants, need to be monitored, need to be understood, need to be kept an eye on – that clearly is something that a great deal of marketing sets on one side. If you want it, you deserve it; if we can make you want it, then so much the better. So the idea that you step back occasionally and say ‘Well, what do I want? What does matter?’, that’s something which the hectic environment we’re in rather stifles – hence my worries, I think. And because the growth spiral is something which we’re more and more committed to, then of course the drive to keep demand up and push it and push it and push it means that you’re always going to be raising expectations, by fantasy of one sort or another, and that’s why I say that there’s an unreal side to all this which, again, disturbs me rather.
Martin: That’s interesting because when I went back in to see Sir Tim and asked him what he meant by that phrase, he said two things: one is that we create market forces that are out of control, creating a global economy reliant on consumption, especially when we’re running out of resources; and the other is that it’s all about temptation rather than substance, which means suddenly you’re into this idea of the Devil’s art again, and this idea of temptation.
Rowan: You are. But I think the first point really underlines the fact that it’s a particular kind of commitment to growth as a good in itself which has to drive this and I’m one of those that thinks that the notion of infinite growth is both impossible and bad, and that we just have to keep asking the question ‘Growth for what?’ or ‘Growth in what?’, because we lead finite lives on a finite planet, so there literally cannot be an infinite spiral of growth.
Martin: Absolutely, and I think there are things we do as marketers that are not particularly helpful, such as driving desires to create a demand, because of the need for growth.
Rowan: That’s right. It’s a difficult one because material culture does develop – people think of new things, and when you’ve thought of a new thing, I can understand that it makes perfect sense to say ‘Would you like one of these?’ and then it makes perfect sense to say ‘This is why you might like one of these’ and then you’re on to the moving staircase. I don’t think one can deal with this simply by saying ‘Well, you know, back to the Bronze Age…’, which is actually rather a good example because at some point somebody thought of iron, and there was a change. So marketing and advertising and the highlighting of new needs, or new awareness of old needs, or new styles of old needs, I don’t think you can be absolute and just say well none of that can or should happen, and that’s the hard thing because we’re talking then about how long is a piece of string, we’re talking about what’s the point at which this becomes ludicrous, at which this becomes a driver not of creativity on one side and convenience on the other but of anxiety. Now, that, I think, is one of the key notions in lots of marketing and advertising. You know better than I do, but my sense is that the creation of anxiety – ‘Should I want this? They’ve all got it’ – that’s part of the mechanism. And although I suppose it’s not quite as overt in some areas as it might have been a couple of decades ago, there is still that sense of an implicit ‘Will I be inferior if I don’t have this?’. And certainly the idea of ‘This goes with an enviable lifestyle, a lifestyle which I envy, and therefore which I desire’ also binds me into anxiety about whether I’m keeping up with it. So we’re not just talking about a spiral of economic growth, we’re talking about a spiral of competitive, anxious self-doubting and rivalrous mentality.
Martin: Yes, and it’s almost as if marketing has metamorphosed into something it shouldn’t be, because for me marketing is about trying to solve people’s problems. So if you’ve got a particular issue you need to solve, I’ll create a product that does that, and if it’s of value to you, you’ll pay a reasonable price for it. But sometimes, and the beauty industry is often criticised for this, is that problems are almost artificially created, making you feel bad about yourself, so we can sell you a product you didn’t really need to make money for our company.
Rowan: Yes, so creating desirable images of body, lifestyle, possessions, and all the rest of it, which everybody tacitly knows are unreal but nonetheless everybody accepts, is the currency you’ve got to use. I was talking to an academic colleague about the inflation of academic references – you have to say straight off, if you’re writing a reference for somebody, that this person is outstandingly brilliant, because otherwise nobody will read beyond the first line and we agreed that the question is where do you go from there? When you’re writing a reference for somebody who really is stellar, you sort of have to say ‘I know all the references sound like this, but I really mean it this time!’ And so you go on and on and on. If you like it’s the undermining of the notion of the good enough. Nobody seems to accept that most of what we do and produce whether academic or technological or whatever, is good enough. And if, as you say, it solves a problem more effectively than some other things, well, great.
Martin: And it is that growth thing. Finding that ceiling.
Rowan: But I think it’s always interesting to ask what are the emotions that an advertiser is seeking to key in to, and frequently they are fear and anxiety as well as disproportionate lust or acquisitiveness.
Martin: Yes. And there’s the creation of problems, and offering solutions. There is that driving desire for useless things that people can’t afford, driving people in directions it may not be the best place to drive them.
Rowan: Yes so that the driver of both production and acquisition is to create new status markers rather than to solve existing problems. And certainly in the way in which IT develops, increasingly it’s just ‘Here’s a refinement, here’s an improvement’, which is not responding to anybody saying ‘This isn’t good enough’, but responding to ‘Actually we can give you a little bit of edge on your neighbour’. I get so fed up with my computer repeatedly telling me that its updating or improving services because I want to say ‘Look I’m actually perfectly content with what I’ve got; this does what I want it to do.’
Martin: Exactly, and it gets to the point where the software is too good for the hardware and you have to buy better hardware because actually its become a useless device because the software has become too good for it.
Rowan: That’s right.
Martin: It’s that competitive element. One of the things I liked about moving into working for charities or arts organisations is that they don’t think in terms of competitors. Upgrading is all about building a better mousetrap, staying ahead of the competition. A museum I worked with, The Charles Dickens Museum, doesn’t see other museums as competitors, because they’re all there to have a positive cultural impact on society.
Rowan: Because they believe in the focal or basic aspect of what they’re doing which is to make better known someone who is worth spending time with.
Martin: Yes, and when it is fundamentally about the money, it does seem to skew… There’s a trend towards companies trying to think more in terms of what their purpose is. Why do they exist? What are they trying to achieve? The Charles Dickens Museum or the Eden Project has that in spades, but others seem to exist only to make money.
Rowan: We had an interesting seminar here a while ago on basically that issue. We had a number of people from the business world, and I was interested that only one of them came up with the classic neoliberal thing that businesses exist just to make money. Everybody around the table said that can’t be quite right, and somebody said on that occasion ‘If that’s the case then the ideal business is the drugs trade or the arms trade, because they make lots of money’. So if we were told that both of those were the real paradigms of successful financial activity, we might feel a twinge of unease, and that should tell us something.
Martin: That’s a great example. What are your feelings on social enterprise and the double- or triple-bottom line – financial, social, environmental?
Rowan: I’ve had quite a bit to do over the years with Partha Dasgupta, the economist at St. John’s College here. And Partha was one of the first people, as an economist, to write about the need to factor into profit and loss sheets what historically have been called externalities, but he said are in fact as much intrinsically part of what you’re doing as anything else. And I think some of what he’s saying has a bit of traction in the business world, because there is a sense that the virtual reality of ‘Just Making Money’ is seen by an increasing number of people as both stale and dangerous. So things are moving a bit – a bit – but very, very slowly.
Martin: Liam Black, co-founder of Fifteen, says that providing training for the underprivileged has to be secondary to making great food. If all other things are equal, that social purpose might give them an edge.
Rowan: And that’s fair enough, in a sense, because a business does its business. You can say ‘The purpose of this is to make great meals or widgets; we’ll try and remember that we’re not doing this in a vacuum, and therefore we will seek to maximise the positive impact of what we do and the opportunities that it offers, and we will try to minimise the social and environmental cost, simply because we recognise that if we ignore those they’ll come back and bite us sooner or later’. And I don’t have any problem in thinking that a business needs to think about what it’s there for, but as you say, the problem is there’s a slippage then from ‘We’re here to make good widgets’ to ‘We’re here to make lots of money’. You’ve lost the intrinsic worth of what you’re doing in the first place and moved on to something else. And it’s that intrinsic worth thing – the Dickens Museum is a good case in point – but I can think of quite a number of small to medium enterprises where there’s a very deep commitment to the worthwhile-ness of what you’re actually making, so that you believe in it. And it’s interesting that in some other cultures, notably, of course, in Japan, there’s such a tremendous emotional investment in making people believe that what they’re doing is worthwhile, and we titter, rather, at people gathering every morning to affirm the values of the company and the wonderfulness of the product, and, yes, OK, there are absurdities in that, but at least it does declare we’re not here simply for profit. We’re here for that other kind of profit, which is the sense of doing a good job, and I suppose that’s another turn of the argument, isn’t it – how do you revivify in society the sense of doing a good job?
Martin: That’s right and John Grant, who was Anita Roddick’s agency head, talked about companies being in the service of people’s needs, and people in the service of other human beings. He talked about seeing your life’s work as being in the service of something, which I thought was a really interesting take.
Rowan: Yes, because that means you’re getting your meaning and your worth not just from your own insides but from the exchanges of a social order, the sense of interdependence, which is why I must say I respond (in so far as I respond at all to advertising) to those advertisements which show [companies] very much in terms of personal interaction between staff and clients. Granted I will take it with a pinch of salt, [but] actually that’s quite a good way of advertising. It says ‘We care how you feel about this’, and while they may be lying through their teeth, nonetheless I’m very glad that they think it matters, that they think that could be more significant than some other things, so a marketing culture or philosophy which foregrounded that notion of service, I think that’s a good thing, and it takes you at least one step away from ‘All we want to do is sell you this’.
Martin: Yes. Richard Hall said, in response to the question of how marketing might move forward and be a positive force, about moving from a transaction to more of a relationship.
Rowan: Yes, and so much boils down to that basic fork in the road: transactional or relational.
Martin: And he was very keen that we become more empathic.
Rowan: You probably remember Miracle on 34th Street, that wonderfully sentimental film. I have all sorts of quarrels with its philosophy, but you may remember there’s a moment where Richard Attenborough as Santa Claus tells one parent that actually you can get this particular toy more cheaply at another store. And the initial reaction of the store manager, of course, is shock and horror and then you realise that in fact this is a hugely attractive ploy, because the mother says ‘Well, I’m going to come and shop here again because you treat me as a grown up, you trust me’. And they scratch their heads and say ‘Well actually, mysteriously, we’ve stumbled on something that works because it doesn’t infantilise or make people live in an unreal world’.
Martin: In online marketing there’s been a move to allowing people to give genuine reviews of things, despite the risk that everyone could be saying your product is rubbish. But when customers genuinely say something is good, it’s more powerful than the partisan views of the retailer.
Rowan: Well, that’s a very important point, I think. But that question of how can you develop a culture which in some way treats people as adults, I think is quite a taxing issue, isn’t it?
Martin: It is. I read a piece by Giles Fraser a while ago, about a speech the Pope had made in which he said – and I’m paraphrasing – capitalism treats everyone like babies. And as a marketer, does that mean I’m doing the spoon-feeding? ‘Give me this, I want more’.
Rowan: Which is really back to the question of learning to look at our desires, our impulses, not just say they’re self-evidently good, they’re self-evidently right, and say ‘So what exactly is that for?’
Martin: Yes, challenging it, thinking it through, and Richard Hall said that critics of marketing assume that people can’t make their own judgment, that people are cleverer than they’re given credit for, and they’re trying to sell me something and I can see through it.
Rowan: Yes, I hear that sometimes in relation to advertising and I think it’s something that’s worth bearing in mind sometimes with the tabloid press, that actually most people in Britain are not nearly as unpleasant as the tabloid press pretend they are, they’re not a mass of prejudice and paranoia as you would gather from the pages of certain periodicals. There’s some truth in that, but the long term effect, of course, is that at a certain level irony starts eating itself and you learn such complete detachment from what’s actually being said that cynicism springs out of that. So yes it may be true that people can see through advertising, as they might see through tabloid mythologies, but it sort of debases the currency and in the long run I think has a cheapening, a narrowing and de-realising effect. So it’s not as if you can just cheerfully go on on the assumption that of course people can see through this.
Martin: You’re saying it’s about taking responsibility.
Rowan: Yes, it is.
Martin: And an area that’s coming to the fore recently is around big data. There’s almost a fear that we marketers know more about you than you know about yourself, and that gives us an unfair advantage over you.
Rowan: Well, it’s a big ethical area, this. We actually had a seminar in the University Research Ethics Committee about the impact of big data on research ethics and in another part of the woods, so to speak, there’s all the concern about whether we really have any notion of privacy any longer, and if data now means power, how do we restrict unjust or disproportionate access to it? Have you read Dave Eggers’ The Circle? And Josh Cohen wrote a very interesting book on privacy, pointing out the ways in which we were increasingly giving ground to a philosophy and a culture for which privacy was an unnecessary luxury, because once we’ve got your profile, we will know what you want better than you will, and we’ll always be able to anticipate and shape and structure your trajectory of desire and aspiration.
Martin: The magic word these days seems to be ‘relevance’, and we can send you ideas that are relevant to you, because we know…
Rowan: …your tastes. ‘If you enjoy this book,’ says Amazon, ‘you might like the following…’
Martin: That’s right, and sometimes they’re uncannily accurate.
Rowan: We subvert that in our family because all of us use the same Amazon account.
Martin: You confuse them!
Rowan: Yes, [with] wildly different tastes!
Martin: So turning to things we could do to use marketing positively. In your Dimbleby Lecture you were talking about how we’ve become a market state, a market society, where the principles of consumerism are all pervasive now, which is a concern. Tim Smit said politicians are much more concerned about being popular than being leaderly. In your lecture you talk about the inevitability of it, almost.
Rowan: Well, yes, I don’t want to be fatalistic but it does seem to me that that is a trajectory that’s very hard to turn around overnight, [but may be] possible simply because of the very ambivalent electronic world we live in - people’s capacity to make their views known, to speak back, is greatly enhanced. A lot of the way people speak back is of course poisonous and bigoted, [but] at the same time I do obstinately believe that there is something about generating good opinion as well as bad that’s possible in that, and so I think we have to ask what is it we can do, not least as educators, to help people use those resources positively, in resisting this drive to be predicted and corralled and controlled. And for me one of the great examples that I came across was visiting a sort of Community Centre that we’re involved in as a College in South London, and talking to two teenagers there about their online campaign on knife crime; it’s a small local thing but they got 5000 people signed up very rapidly, and it’s a vehicle for people to say ‘I’m not controlled, I have agency’. I think a good education in citizenship - and I go on a lot about citizenship, I’m afraid - a school or a university or a college ought to be thinking a lot about how you think through civic values, civic virtues, not as information about how society works but what are the levers you can touch? Where does your voice come through? So I’d want to throw the ball a little bit towards the educational establishment including my own, to say what are you doing to make sure that happens?
Martin: There’s a guy called Jon Alexander who has set up the New Citizenship Project, all about trying to get us to think of people not as consumers but as citizens.
Rowan: That’s absolutely key, I think, absolutely key. Every time I give a talk at a graduation ceremony or whatever, it’s about this in one way or another. As you probably know, I’m Chancellor of the University of South Wales and was talking about this last week to them; the point of education, I was saying, is not that you learn the right answers to other people’s questions, but that you learn what are the questions that you really want to ask. Whether it’s in the financial world or the political world or the intellectual world, getting in touch with the questions you really want to ask is a key thing.
Martin: And if we are in a society dominated by consumerism, can marketing have a positive role? Can it be a force for good? Liam Black said that marketers are good storytellers and the world needs that, to paint a picture of a positive vision. It’s communication skills. He talked about marketing being like a glass – I can either fill it with water and take it to a homeless person or I can smash it and attack you with it. It’s what you do with it.
Rowan: Yes, it’s a good question, because marketing skills include a variety of skills, some of which are, in many ways, positive, and some are negative, because one of the skills is to find the weak points, the vulnerable points, to key in to people’s non-adult, acquisitive, unthinking, uncritical side. Whereas, as you say, good stories [can] make me think ‘Yeah, that’s a face I can recognise, that’s a rhythm and style of life I can recognise, and I wouldn’t mind having a part of it’. And this is where, in another part of the woods, this is a relevant consideration for me as Chair of the Trustees of Christian Aid, because we, like all the major charities, are profoundly caught up with anxieties over fundraising, especially in the present climate – what sort of advertising, what sort of marketing do we do, as a charity? And of course we talk, rather spine-chillingly, about our ‘market share’, then wince as we hear ourselves saying it. But we focus a great deal – a great deal – on specific stories, and increasingly in the last few years, the big advertising push for Christian Aid Week has been narrative : ‘This is the kind of thing we will do with your money. Here is the story of a woman who can only live by gathering firewood in Kenya, and if she doesn’t get enough firewood to sell at the end of every day she goes hungry, her children go hungry. Now - this what we can do with a little bit of support. We can plug her into a co-operative, we can equip her with information that she hasn’t got, we can work with local projects that will support her, and here she is talking about the difference that has been made.’
Martin: It’s back to that thing about marketing identifying a need, finding a solution and communicating it. So can I ask you one last question, which is to gain your advice on what marketers should think about when deploying their skills, or conducting their business?
Rowan: It’s a big question, but I suppose the key is to talk to people other than advertisers or marketers, to make sure that you don’t simply go out asking the questions you know the answers to, or [to get] the answers you want. And I think to embed the kind of ethical checklist that will [reveal] ‘These are the kinds of rhetoric and the kinds of language that are actually directed to fear or rivalry or anxiety’. Wouldn’t it be nice if there were a sort of charter in which people said ‘We will check our product all the time, for the degree to which we’re relying on fear and anxiety or whatever, and we will expect you to hold us to account.
Martin: It’s a nice idea.
Rowan: Don’t hold your breath!
Martin: It’s a next step on from the Advertising Standards Authority’s codes. It’s tangibilising that, I suppose. Well, thank you very, very much for your time. I really appreciate your insights and your wisdom.
Rowan: Thank you. Good luck with it all.