Richard Hall

Richard Hall spent his early career as a marketer at such companies as Reckitt Benckiser, Rank Hovis McDougall and Corgi Toys before moving into senior roles in the world of advertising at French Gold Abbott, became CEO of FCO and finally Euro RSCG, of which he was Deputy Chairman. He’s the author of The Secrets of Success at Work and several titles in Pearson’s Brilliant series, including Brilliant Marketing which has consistently been the bestselling marketing book on Amazon, now in its second edition. Richard now runs his own consultancy from Brighton, serves as Chair of various organisations, especially in the arts, and mentors senior executives.

Richard has always struck me as someone who understands and appreciates the cultural role of marketing, rather than just its economic function. I was keen to get his perspective on some of the criticisms the profession is facing today, particularly as he has both observed and contributed to its development over several decades.

Martin Williams: Richard, thanks for taking the time to talk. As you know I’m on a journey to ask, and hopefully answer, some big questions about marketing. I know you’re a big advocate of marketing, but do you think it can ever be evil, or is it purely a force for good?

Richard Hall: That in itself is a kind of self-defeating philosophical question, because it’s a bit like saying ‘Is Christianity a force for good?’ or ‘Is virtue always virtuous?’ because it doesn’t always work like that. Marketing essentially seems to me to be a broadly good thing because what it’s about adding value and moving goods in the most efficient way from one person to another, and generally speaking, what marketing has done over time, I think, is to make the world a better place, a more cheerful place. Film, and media in general terms, have been improved by the presence of marketing – for instance, Ridley Scott started his career in advertising, so did Alan Parker, so did a whole raft of other people. So there are all sorts of good things that have happened.

But it isn’t necessarily and always a force for good, of course not, because it can be used as Goebbels used it for his own purposes to great effect, and it’s used by governments in spinning messages, sometimes which aren’t true, and PR in particular has been used by people to conceal truths or to alter the way people look at things, not necessarily in the best way. So not always, but remember one thing – we’re talking about human beings who are not predictable, consistent in themselves, or always motivated by the very best of intentions. So as long as we live in a human society, we have to put up with the good and the bad in equal measure.

Martin: So let me put a few things to you, then – perceptions that contribute to the public’s distrust of marketing, to get your thoughts on them. So firstly, how about the idea that we marketers are trying to persuade you to do things you don’t want to do - that we’ve got some sort of psychological power over you?

Richard: Do you read The Guardian?

Martin: I do indeed!

Richard: I thought you might! Martin Lindstrom – I don’t know whether you’ve come across him – he wrote Brandwashed and Buyology. He makes his money out of this stuff and then writes books saying what a terrible thing it is, or can be a terrible thing. The truth of the matter is, as David Ogilvy, years ago, said (and it would have been regarded as sexist if he said it now, if he were alive) is that ‘The consumer isn’t a moron – she’s your wife’. And the reality is that the human race is quite smart, quite astute in all sorts of ways, and sort of knows what marketers are about, and I don’t know of anybody who thinks that marketers are smarter than they are. They understand the game that they’re playing, they understand that if you produce an experiential thing in a shop where you’re selling Nespresso and you have coffee smells around, that it’s more likely to predispose you towards thinking a Nespresso’s a good thing; as Johnson’s baby powder is used in baby departments in department stores to make you feel good and ‘ooh’ and ‘ah’ about babies. But we understand that, we’re not idiots. I was teasing you when I said ‘Are you a Guardianista?’ at the beginning, only in the sense of saying, it’s only people who are of that sort of persuasion, or quite left wing, who seem to think people are stupid and must be protected against themselves. They aren’t; they don’t need to be, and I think people are incredibly smart and they make their own decisions. If they didn’t, then the success of Lidl and Aldi over the past few years wouldn’t have happened. So people do make their own minds up; we marketers would like to think we’re cleverer than they are – we’re not.

Martin: That’s a very good point. OK - what about this idea that all we care about is making money, at the expense of some higher purpose – artistic endeavours, aesthetics, those kinds of things?

Richard: It’s the old one about whether you make a film for box office or whether you just make it because it’s a good film. I think it’s quite a current conversation, because I’ve been having conversations with people recently about their careers, about their lives, and about what is going to drive them and what matters, and I think you can begin to separate it into two things. The first thing is, however idealistic you are, you have to eat, you have to clothe and look after your family. That doesn’t mean you have to take a lot of expensive foreign holidays, but try bringing up a family in abject poverty and then talk idealism and you’ll get very short thrift from the person who is poor. Austerity has sharpened our realities about that.

The second thing is, there’s a lot more to life than money, and there’s been a lot of good stuff written recently. Rod Liddle wrote a good piece in the Sunday Times about the fact that we believe, because we’re driven by guilt and so on, that we have to take our children or grandchildren, in school holidays, on quite expensive and complicated trips out, when actually what they want to be is left alone to kick a ball around and generally muck about, and actually get bored sometimes, because that’s part of the nature of life. And we over-egg the pudding in trying to give them stuff they don’t necessarily need. There is a lot more to life than money and all the psychological research that’s been done shows that it is absolute garbage to suppose that offering large bonuses is generally motivating. It motivates a few souls, but generally speaking money alone is not enough to sugar the pill of an unpleasant job.

What most of us want in life really, is to have enough money to get by on, to be warm, to have some friends, lots of friends hopefully, who make one laugh, and to do some stuff that we think is worth doing so that there’s a legacy of some sort – whether its painting, gardening, singing, writing or just being a thoroughly good and charitable person. Human beings have an altruistic streak, most of them, unless it’s knocked out of them, most of them have this need to make the world a better place, and were quite good at doing that actually. And I think we underestimate that, and sometimes employers just get it wrong. I mean, I don’t thinking the banking system is sustainable as it stands, for instance.

Martin: It’s interesting you mentioned the world of film - there’s this idea that the marketers are the ‘Suits’, and we come in and do focus groups and expect Directors to change their work on the basis of a particular observation that we’ve made. Is that helpful, do you think, or should we just leave Directors alone and just market what they produce? 

Richard: No, they’ve never been like that. I think that’s a misunderstanding of art, and the craft of art, and I think you have to put the two together. If you go back to an era that I’m particularly interested in, which is 16th Century Venice, we can look at, particularly, three very formidable artists of the time, Veronese, Titian and Tintoretto, and say ‘Well, what was driving them? What vision of life? What great artistic endeavour were they involved in?’ Well, I’ll tell you what they were involved in: they did commissioned portraits, but they did brilliant ones, and they did commissioned works of fine art which were primarily religious, and in the case of Tintoretto and Veronese particularly, you’re looking at absolutely spectacular things.

For instance, Tintoretto, who ran a studio and if you write that into the 21st Century, that could have been a design studio or an advertising agency, and he’d come back and say ‘I’ve been speaking to the Scuola San Marco, and they’ve commissioned us to do a Last Supper’, and they’d look at him and say ‘Boss, we’ve done three Last Suppers already’, and he’d say ‘no, no, no, we’re going to do a different story this time. They’re all going to be pissed because that’ll look good and they probably actually were, OK? They’re all going to be pissed except for Jesus’. But he’s commissioned to do it and he’s commissioned to a brief. I don’t believe great art or great anything happens without some sort of brief. Blank sheets of paper tend not to be filled, unless… there are some artists who believe you just daub things, throw things at a wall and hope for the best. I don’t think that any of the great artists from Picasso backwards have ever done it, and if you asked Picasso what he thought his brief was, he’d draw up a sheet of paper and say ‘It’s what goes in there’, you know, it’s inside the poster usually that the work is done. So I’m pretty skeptical, generally speaking, about artists being completely free spirits who do completely what they want. I think what they have to do, however, if they’re going to make a real impact, is they do have to love what they do when they do it, but within the context of the brief that they’re given to do, or the brief that they create for themselves.

Tintoretto’s The Last Supper (Image: Creative Commons)

Martin: Let me ask you about consumption – this idea that marketing drives consumption, consumption/consumerism is bad, ergo marketing is bad. Do you think that’s true?

Richard: No, no, I think it’s part of the rich game of life that we live in. I think one of the most chilling experiences that people had (it doesn’t happen now) was to go to a Communist country where there were no posters except for political posters for the Communist Party. It was a chilling experience but it was also a reminder that when you went, instead, to New York, where there were lots and lots of posters, this was a more vibrant and fun place. It’s a little bit like, if you will, going to Kabul when the Taliban were in charge, and music was forbidden.

I think what marketing does in its own sort of very small way, and we over-egg the importance of it, is it provides a kind of birdsong to the life that we lead. So I find myself walking through a supermarket, rather than depressed by the amount of manipulation that’s going on, actually motivated; I find myself enriched by the ingenuity, the packaging style, the way in which people present things, the language with which they describe it – and I’m not taken in for a second (and I don’t think most people are). I think it makes life a bit more interesting, and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that at all.

Does marketing and advertising, in general terms, increase levels of consumption? That’s a really interesting one, which marketers and advertisers have been struggling with for years and years and years, and if you’re running an advertising agency, you argue like mad that cut the advertising and you’ll cut your sales. There is precious little evidence that there’s a straight correlation between the two, unfortunately for the people who are trying to make the argument.

I think that it works at a completely different level. I think what happens is that advertising and marketing builds a presence that sustains over time. I think it’s a bit like building a kind of insurance policy with the consumer, which pays off over time, but I don’t think there’s very often an immediate return. I think there’s an exception to that, and the exception is when you blur what marketing and selling does, and in other words, if you, as a small supplier actually take your yoghurt to the market, the farmers market, and on a one-to-one basis you starting selling it to people, looking them in the eye - that’s marketing, but it’s a different kind of marketing, its one-to-one marketing and I think you can make a difference then. But I think if you just do an ad, it sort of sticks around over time and has an effect, but I don’t think there’s any great sense that ‘double the expenditure and double the sales’ - I really struggle with that.

Martin: I think with consumption, there are ‘consumables’, like yoghurt, and then other products with disposability built in. I read a quote recently from William Morris along the lines of ‘Have nothing in your house that isn’t useful or beautiful’, and I wonder if the issue isn’t the marketing so much as the fact that we’re more accepting of disposability than previous generations.

Richard [laughing]: I think we’re talking about our wives – they’re both beautiful and useful! I think he’s right – I think that’s a great line. I think William Morris was a strangely interesting person. I don’t think all the stuff he did was beautiful, but I think a lot of it was. He was the hero of the British exhibition in the recent Biennale in Venice last year and Jeremy Deller, who designed the stand, had William Morris as his hero figure. What do you think beautiful is? [William Morris] was very prescriptive – if he didn’t think it was beautiful, it wasn’t beautiful, and I think that, in it’s own right, is going to be a problem. Forget the supermarket – walk through any city and look at what’s happening architecturally, or artistically, and when it’s going well, what you get is a real sense of momentum. So if you go to London, you get a real sense of something happening, a real buzz in the air, which you used to get in New York and you don’t get to the same extent now; and you don’t get at all in Paris, and you used to. One of the joys of the world in which we live is when things are going reasonably well, people try things, do things, and that again is part of the way marketing works. Marketing is a contributory factor in creating momentum in the broader social sense.

Martin: I was going to ask you about trust, and Big Data, but I think you’ve sort of answered that by saying that people aren’t stupid.

Richard: I want to talk about Big Data. There’s a book that’s just been written by Viktor Mayer-Schonberger and Kenneth Cukier called Big Data which is a very, very good book indeed. It absolutely exposes all the dangers which you refer to, in terms of manipulation of people, in terms of intrusion, in terms of all that’s to be known about us being exposed to general gaze. Well, there’s upsides and downsides. Let me tell you the upside.

What Big Data enables us to do is it enables us to predict disasters in a way we’ve never been able to do before. For instance, if you try to predict where the next outbreak of avian flu is going to happen, it’s a really difficult thing to do, because all the data you would normally get and the way you’d normally handle it is going to come too late for you to do any good at all, in medical terms. However, if you use Big Data in an intelligent way, as they have been, and use all the information that is available on Google - you simply pick up all the references to avian flu, people out there checking what the symptoms are and so on, and where there’s a big spike, that’s likely to be where you’ve got a problem. And that’s what they’ve been using, and it’s been fantastic, and it’s made a big difference. And there’s a whole series of areas where Big Data can actually make things safer and better for us. So I actually think, on balance, you’re always going to have a balance between beauty and commercialism, you’re going to have a balance between good and bad, you’re going to have a balance between the beneficial aspects of Big Data and the fact that people are theoretically spying on us.

Do you know what? I don’t think there’s very much about me that I care if anybody knows or not. I don’t have a particularly private, secret life; I don’t particularly want people stealing money from my bank account but that’s a perfectly reasonable thing not to want, but if they know where I spend my money, do I mind? No, not at all. I think it’s fair enough. What’s the big deal? I’m struggling. I think the matter of principle begins to overtake reality and practicality.

Martin: It’s this idea of relevance, I guess. I get emails from book companies trying to sell me books even though, through all of the data they’ve got on me, they know I don’t read those particular types of book. They don’t ever send me suggestions for the kinds of books I really might want to read. I’m not talking about Amazon, I’m talking about other companies. I’d quite like them to send me suggestions for things I might enjoy. Sending you something that’s relevant to you is a benefit of data.

Richard: Of course – if it’s used well.

Martin: For me, marketing is all about solving problems for customers, but it does get a bad name when problems are over-stated or even created to generate demand for a product. The beauty industry is often criticised for making people, particularly women, feel inadequate. Is that still marketing?

Richard: I sort of worry about who it is that’s taking the issues about women so seriously. Let’s take two sides on that. One is I’m absolutely clear, as I think any sane human being would be, that the incredibly painfully thin models that are used don’t represent a particularly healthy way of role-modelling clothes horses. And that seems to me to be common sense. The bit that I really struggle with there is why the industry seems to think they make clothes look good. I find myself, from a male perspective, looking at these very, very thin girls and thinking ‘Hmm… I don’t think she’s fanciable’. So I think there’s something very strange that’s gone on there, which I’m not really qualified to talk about, other than to say I don’t know any women who think they look great either.

Are women bemused? I don’t want to patronise women, I think we’re talking about the same thing David Ogilvy was. I think they’re smart enough to understand that a lot of this stuff is garbage. I think they also are perfectly entitled to try things that seem to make them feel better if they like them. If we’re men we may use aftershave – why do we use it? Do we use it because we think women are going to say “My God, Martin, you are the most sensually attractive…” I don’t think you expect to pull – you’re a married man with children, you’re not going to pull because you wear Boss aftershave. You may happen to like the smell, it may make you feel better.

The whole issue that really does bug me is that we treat people as though they’re very, very stupid, and consumers as though they need to be protected. The same thing applies to children. Whilst they’re impressionable, and human beings overall are impressionable, I’m impressionable, and Alan Rusbridger, the Editor of The Guardian is also impressionable – we all are, but I don’t think, in general terms, we’re stupid. I think one of the things that’s really interesting about children is that they operate tribally in a more efficient and effective way as a market than almost any group that I’ve come across, in so far as, if that tribe overall, and all the peers, decide that ‘X’ is not a good idea, ‘X’ doesn’t have a chance. So if you try and sell a bunch kids at my grandsons’ school a version of LEGO which somehow between them in their intelligence in conversation, they have decided is rubbish or not cool, or whatever it happens to be, you haven’t got a prayer. I think that’s really interesting, and my own perspective, going way back in time, is again that children are interesting and bright.

An example of that – I don’t know whether you ever came across the catastrophe of a doll called Baby Alive? It was the first baby that pooed! You fed it this gunk, you turned on the motor at the back, there was this grinding sound, the ‘stomach’ digested the food and it ‘pooed’ it! That was wonderful, you changed its nappy and so on, it was a great idea! What children did, of course, because they’re more intelligent than the manufacturers, [was] they worked out that it would be even more fun if you fed it real food, so they started to feed it liver and bacon and sausages, and the trouble with that was that quite a lot of it remained inside the doll, where maggots [developed], so there was this wonderful situation where it became a bluebottle factory! Overall, I think children are very bright.

I think one of the issues is that you don’t have to give them everything, and the difference between good parenting and bad parenting is total indulgence and controlled generosity, and by the same token, if you said to me ‘I really, really want some more Chateau Pétrus’, and I said ‘Martin, I’m not going to give it to you’ and you shouted “I want it!’, so I gave it to you, you’d say ‘Another bottle!’ We have choices in life not to indulge each other like that, and the best news I’ve seen [recently] is that violent crime in this country is declining and one of the reasons, they think, is that alcohol consumption is declining, binge drinking is declining. And one of the most interesting phenomena (and I had an argument with someone from the Daily Mirror who said my arguments were tabloid, which I thought was a bit odd!) is this – we’re becoming less self-indulgent, and [alcohol consumption] is particularly declining [among] 16 to 25 year olds, as is drug consumption. You know, I think people are smart enough to make their own decisions, they increasingly demonstrate that, and I think that applies to children too. But children need the guidance of parents who don’t give them the earth. This is an awful thing to say - and I used to be in the toy industry - but I refuse to give my grandsons toys, because I think paper and pencils and stuff like that is more interesting. Other people give them toys, but I won’t.

Martin: I think there’s a clear message coming through, which is critics of marketing underestimate consumers, of all ages. It’s a very good point. I was going to talk about the arts, as I know you’re a great champion of them. I think the BBC find giving exposure to artistic endeavours perfectly acceptable, but as soon as something is deemed ‘commercial’ they become a little more squeamish, and I guess that simply reflects public taste as a whole. It strikes me that maybe it’s not ‘marketing’ so much as the profit motive we find distasteful. 

Richard: I’ve never found popularity distasteful. There’s a friend of mine who’s writing a book at the moment about Jenny Lind, who was a Swedish opera singer of the 1840s and 1850s, who travelled the world and was a very well known figure in classical music circles, a friend of Mendelssohn and of Chopin and so on, a really significant figure. How significant? Well we’re talking The Beatles. She’d fill 2000-seater theatres with 5000 people [standing-room only]. Were there planes, she’d have filled airports, but she filled stations instead. She was just an  enormous star. And Dickens attracted a vast, vast following wherever he went. I’m not sure why we’ve suddenly become a bit strange about the arts being niche and minority. Does it all have to be like the Turner Prize? So much of the Turner Prize I look at and think ‘Well, maybe it’s me but I don’t get it and I don’t like it.’ I find that I look at Hilary Mantel’s novels and think these are absolutely wonderful, and I’m probably an exception, but I think J K Rowling was a genius in writing the Harry Potter stuff, a genius storyteller. There’s a separate conversation about whether she’s a great literary figure, but as a storyteller, absolutely astonishing, up there with the best ever, up there with Beowulf. 

My own feeling about the arts is the more engaging the artistic endeavour, the more people talking about it, the better. I actually think we’re living in a golden age of the arts in this country, which we’re a little less enthusiastic about than we should be, because Britain in general and London in particular has become the arts centre of the world, and we represent 1% of the world’s population. Unbelievable! And we’re doing really well and we’re producing really good stuff. The stage version the Mantel duology (so far) has now moved to London from Stratford and is amazingly successful. Huge. So I think we probably get the arts about right.

Martin: So to wrap up, can I just ask what your advice would be to marketers who do want to do some good in the world? How should they approach their work?

Richard: I think the most important thing to understand about marketing, but it probably goes way beyond that, is it’s about an understanding of the way people think and feel, about people’s fears, aspirations, their desires, the sort of life that they want. I think one of the things that’s saddened me a little bit about seeing the way marketing has been taught, certainly in the MBA schools, is that it’s become a very technical process-driven thing and ultimately I think the way that great marketing works is understanding more about the heartbeat and less about the way that behaviour happens. Having just written a book about business thinking, about decision-making, creativity, empathy and problem-solving, and by virtue of doing that having done a lot of research into the bio-neurology of human beings, I’ve realised to my surprise to some extent, that we know very, very little about the way the brain works - surprisingly little, and the more we learn, the better the world will be because we’ll become more empathetic and better able to try and understand what might be going on inside someone’s mind, rather than throwing bombs at them.

Equally, in marketing I think it’s critical that we become more empathetic and understand better what it is that makes people work, because that’s when we become really effective and more engaging marketers and people who can actually do that bit of magic which, for me, makes the big difference, which is become entertaining as well as commercial. I don’t think marketing is about just a transaction, I think it’s about building long-term relationships with people. That, for me, is where it really sits. That’s why I enjoy it, that’s why I don’t regard – for heaven’s sake! – nearly half a century of doing the stuff a complete folly, because if it was just transactional, if it was just about making money, I think that would have been a sad waste of my time. 

Martin: Indeed, and a great way to end our conversation. Thank you very much, Richard – I really enjoyed talking to you and gaining your perspective.