Sir Tim Smit
Sir Tim Smit trained as an anthropologist and archaeologist, but chose a career as a music producer. He was sufficiently successful that he was able to retire to Cornwall at the age of 33, intending to write film scores. On arrival, however, he helped discover the Lost Gardens of Heligan instead, and found that he’d not only unearthed what was to become one of the most popular gardens in the UK, but also a Channel 4 documentary series and a bestselling book. He decided to fill one of Heligan’s restored glasshouses with examples of all of the plants on which mankind has depended, but soon realised that there were so many, he’d have to construct the world’s biggest greenhouses to accommodate them. The enormous lean-tos he subsequently built for the millennium became internationally famous, partly because they were architectural icons of great simplicity and partly because they were constructed in an industrial wasteland – one of Cornwall’s worked-out clay pits. The Eden Project became a beacon of regeneration and of low-impact management. Visitors are drawn by the world’s biggest rainforest in captivity, but leave encouraged to appreciate and protect the world’s natural resources. The founding of Eden was the subject of a popular book of the same name, and in recent years the Project has been regularly named the Best UK Leisure Attraction at the British Travel Awards. Tim remains at Eden to this day, which in professional circles is as renowned for its unorthodox approach to business as it is for its plant collection.
Martin: Tim, thanks so much for giving me some time today. I’m going on a journey to try to understand the ethics of marketing, and when I was working here at Eden as Sales & Marketing Director, you sent me an email in which you said “Marketing is the Devil’s art”, so can I start by asking you what you meant by that?
Tim: Why marketers interest me is because of that Einstein thing about, to get out of the mess you’re in, you don’t want to use the thinking that got you there. Ironically, I think the one area where that is wrong is in marketing, because I think that marketing is the only thing that can save the human race right now, by giving us a different vision of ourselves to live up to. If you accept the notion, and this is trite and general, that marketing and the creation of brands is generally about creating an emotional response to an inanimate object, or group of objects or services, then marketing also has the potential, in the right hands, to make us feel an emotional response that would see us protecting things, or defending things.
Therefore when I said that it was the Devil’s art, I think it has been used to create market forces that are currently out of control, which means we have a global economy that is dependent on consumption, that we know we can’t sustain. Everybody knows it. I think that needs new concepts, new ideas, new ways of emotionally relating to things, and I think the only people that can do that [are marketers]. Heavens - marketers are in the most powerful part of government, in the Nudge Unit in the Cabinet Office, because they understand that telling people not to do something actually often encourages people to do it, so you’ve got to find the language that seduces people into the behaviour. We’re so quick to look for the silver bullet, and what we need from marketing, in my view, is a quieter, stiller voice with deeper roots into the psyche, that will be helpful to us.
Martin: I think there is this sense that marketers drive consumption, consumption/consumerism is bad, ergo marketing is bad. Is consumption always bad, do you think?
Tim: Consumption is not de facto always bad, because as creatures we have to consume things to sustain ourselves, clothe ourselves, shelter ourselves. Some of [it] will be good, and some will be bad - there’ll be job creation, there’ll be the environmental impact or otherwise, and so on. I think part of the problem is that often people casually start to use the word ‘consumer’ as opposed to ‘people’. It is absolutely extraordinary, and when you look at modern politics, there’s a very strange dysfunction in the way that we’re being sold politics as if we were consumers of politics rather than as if we were citizens. I think it has created an impossible social contract – how can anybody in politics represent anything if the game now is to see whether you can be as purchasable as possible, as loved as possible. It’s quite interesting, having met them, that the last three Prime Ministers - Blair, Brown and Cameron – all seem to me (and Blair and Cameron were the most alike) [to] conduct themselves, in both private and public, with an extraordinarily childlike fear of being disliked. Which is extraordinary, because actually that’s not ‘leaderly’, that means you are like flotsam and jetsam, rather than actually setting a course, and I think there are ramifications for that.
The thing is you’re talking about marketing as if it’s a silo, without realising its actually something that has now permeated every aspect of public and private life, and has become deeply imbued not just with selling techniques - it’s become very hard to tell where real life begins and ends, and marketing has taken over. And that relates to opinions that are shared between friends - how much of those is actually an opinion they have, or how much is a position that was as easy to put on as clothes. It affects everything, not only the way we feel but the way we think.
Martin: Let’s talk a little bit about your attitudes to marketing, because you said in your book Eden ‘Why, for God’s sake, put yourself and your friends and family through years of grief to build a crappy theme park so that some smartass can define it in a sentence?’ and later you say ‘It’s far too complex for that’. I think that one of the challenges that marketers have is to take concepts and make them quite simple for people to understand, but I guess you don’t feel that boiling something down is necessarily a good thing?
Tim: I think that quote does truly represent what I feel, but with the passage of time I would temper it, because I think there is a distinction [between] being able to summarise what something is as a whole, [and] actually asking yourself ‘OK, if I only had one thing to say about it, what’s the most important thing?’ I’ll give you an example: when we [asked ourselves], ‘when you arrive at Eden, what is the most important thing to say?’ we discovered [that it] was that we are a charity, because without that, so many of the responses [to] coming to Eden would be coloured by a different lens. And also it had a massive impact, as you’ll recall, on people’s preparedness to do the forms for Gift Aid, so it had a big financial impact. So ‘we are a charity’ was the first thing, but even today if I had to sum up what Eden is, I think it is both a strength and a weakness to not be able to do it.
You might argue ‘yeah, so much for your middle class sensibility – if you don’t, someone else will’, and if someone else’s is more compelling than yours, you’ve then lost control of your own brand, in a sense. You could make that argument quite well – I wouldn’t like it, but I’m not saying you wouldn’t be right. The thing is that things like ‘It’s an environment centre’ – well, no, it isn’t quite; ‘it’s about conservation’ – well, no, it isn’t quite. I guess [Eden’s] about creating attitudes that are hopeful about the future and exciting a form of behaviour change that makes people live more lightly on the world, at which point you’ve lost the will to live!
Actually it’s basically [a] showbiz [version of] ‘we can make the world a better place’. And maybe, in hindsight, I was too precious about it. It’s like people who write books - they hate being edited. However, the ‘elevator pitch’ is a very useful first step. However, the danger is in the difference between the two words ‘simple’ and ‘simplistic’ – that is, ‘oversimplified’. It’s that distinction. And I think the danger is if you get to the simplistic you’ve got a line in the core brand that is going to be hard to pull back.
It’s very interesting - the converse can be true, that the elevator pitch is right and the behaviour on the ground is wrong. Now that’s an interesting one! I’ve been talking about that quite a lot with our friends at Kew. This extraordinary thing – Eden has to do it, everywhere has to do it: ‘Come to Eden-stroke-Kew for skating, concerts, a dozen different things’ - um, how’s about the best fucking collection of trees in the world, in one place, that is a national treasure, that people have died to get? All of that is going over there. You notice that sometimes you need to be in someone else’s country to see it. The madness of being in these extraordinary gardens that only mad people would have put together, that is genuinely a treasure and the only thing you read about is ‘come and do a chocolate Easter egg hunt’.
Martin: It’s the need for novelty, partly, isn’t it? And it’s also about trying to be different things to different people - there are going to be people who are fascinated by plants and others who aren’t. We did a segmentation study while I was here, and having this conversation now, it occurs to me that part of my motivation for wanting to do that was about allowing Eden to be complex, but also recognising it has to be different things to different people.
Tim: That process was very interesting, [but] it is said that you’ve only got to mention numbers once and before long, what was your invented numbers to prove a point have become accepted numbers. So you create six different groups of potential visitors - you’ve only got to mention them twice and they’re a reality. They are the potential visitors. They were constructs. I do it myself – I’m sure you do – all the time you make a construct, and that does lead to – is there such a word as ‘simplisticism’?
Martin: There is now! Einstein said “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler”. You want the complexity retained, even if we try to communicate in a way that connects with people.
Tim: An interesting point within that Mart though is, when you say ‘what is one trying to do with marketing’, maybe one doesn’t simplify it enough. If you’d asked me what are you trying to do with Eden, I guess the bottom line is you’re trying to make people care. In fact, the opposite of consumerism – I want you to have a relationship with it that isn’t like ‘here’s a selection of things in a supermarket‘, this is something like ‘being sheltered’. It’s a different family of constructs. And I think the problem is if you try to sell or market ‘caring for something’ using the language of product on something that is meant to be a deep emotional response. I remember there was a church in Brixton or Streatham which had this [sign] outside where obviously some trendy vicar had [written] ‘Isn’t it comforting to know in these days of rampant inflation that the wages of sin remain the same’ and it brings a smile to your face, but strangely the more I thought about it, I felt it actually demeaned the church, because ultimately [it’s] ‘if we can’t beat you we’re going to join you’, and there’ve got to be times when part of your proposition has got to be ‘look, we don’t join you’.
Martin: OK. Another aspect of marketing - I think you said once that you didn’t want to research Eden because people would tell you that building greenhouses in an old clay pit would be a stupid idea; but I do wonder if they would have said that, because clearly it’s a fantastic idea and the visitor numbers prove that. Marketing is about listening to prospective customers and research is the way that we do it. I don’t think it’s about finding solutions, it’s about identifying problems which clever people (not necessarily marketers) can try to solve. So I think the intent is honourable but it does put people’s backs up a little bit – especially the dreaded phrase ‘focus groups’. What are your thoughts on research?
Tim: We are so quick to want an answer that we don’t spend enough time on the questions. I can think of so many occasions where the question we asked was wrong and in fact led the interviewee. ‘Is this research or are we commissioning some findings?’ You’re clever enough to know that if you felt the answer was ‘that’, you might not even be aware that the question is going to give you that answer. There are many jokes about it, aren’t there? There’s the one about: ‘How do I get to Dublin? Well I wouldn’t start from here’.
But interestingly I’ve been spending quite a lot of time thinking about how questions are asked. Let’s say we were going to be locked in a room and we had to solve the problem of the Health Service. If you just said ‘We just need to solve the problem of the Health Service’, I don’t think anybody could help but have the current Health Service in their mind, as the patient being medicated to some form of improvement. What we are very short of in our society are people who start with the proposition ‘Imagine there is a no Health Service – how would we start one today?’ I’ve been doing that with quite a few things, and it’s really interesting. It’s quite interesting to do it with you life as well. If this was a button and you went ‘bang’ and everything I own other than the people I love and the people close to me [disappeared] and have been amortised into cash - it’s all gone, my house, everything else - and I start my life over again, what bits of the old life do I want to keep? That’s quite shocking, because if it no longer exists, your thinking process starts rather differently to ‘I’ve got all these things, how am I going to lead the rest of my life?’
Martin: It’s quite freeing.
Tim: Yes, and I’m not advocating it! But it is an interesting thing about where you start from, isn’t it? ‘We may have got this all completely wrong, we should just get rid of this idea and go somewhere else’.
One of the greatest books I’ve ever read is If This Is A Man by Primo Levi who is one of the few people who survived Auschwitz. It’s extraordinary for many reasons, but one of the major reasons is that he lives through this terrible thing but he hardly ever talks about the horrors of the massacres, the gassings. There’s a chapter which a lot of people who’ve read it say influenced them really badly [in which he writes] you can often tell what makes you happy, or the anticipation of what makes you happy, but unhappiness is really difficult. His insight into the unfocussed nature of unhappiness in comparison to happiness is that, in his view happiness could be accurately ascribed to activities and states of mind created by relationship. His example is this...’when I was working outside in a cotton shift and rough wooden clogs in 20 degrees below zero I knew it was the cold that made me unhappy. Then they realised I was a valuable chemist and they took me inside where I suddenly realised it was not the cold, but the hunger that was making me unhappy. Realising I was a good chemist they then began to feed me better when I realised that of course what made me unhappy was not the cold or the hunger, but the sense of indignity being dressed in these foul smelling clothes they gave me... etc.’
It’s all about the lack of focus for what makes you unhappy and I think a lot of us suffer from a notion of a malaise somewhere, and at its saddest, people are thinking it’s their [spouse], or whatever. ‘It must be something therefore it must be that because its very difficult to get to the point that maybe, maybe its just a sense that I’m dissatisfied with where I am in the world, it’s me, it’s something else’. I think marketing has some neurologically clever triggers to make people think ‘oh that will make me happy’ and I wonder whether, at its heart, the most powerful [marketing] hints at something that is sustaining, something deeper than flavour. And I don’t know where this conversation is going, but there’s something profound in there about our needs and our insecurities, and also the triggers of compensation as opposed to satisfaction.
Martin: Yes, I think part of the fear of marketing is ‘you know something about me that’s going to trigger something in my insecurities that will lead to me parting with money. Marketers have somehow got some control over me because they understand me better than I understand myself’.
Tim: Chris Pomfret, who used to be the marketing boss of Unilever, told me a funny story about his ice cream division. They were doing a whole lot of research about ice creams and [an interviewee] said ‘Oh we don’t really do ice cream very much’ but they opened up her freezer door and there was a box of Magnums. And he said it was electric! He said ‘But those are ice creams’, and she said ‘Oh no no - those are our guilty little pleasures’. He thought ‘guilty little pleasures – they’re not ice creams’. He said, ‘to be honest I’m not the greatest marketer in the world, I had a lot of good people, but that’s one of the things I brought which everybody thought ‘fuck - that’s good’’. It’s funny – that’s an emotional response to something, isn’t it? It’s a product, but the way that it’s viewed…
Martin: Which fuels that sense of consumer manipulation, I guess, because we don’t have much control over our emotions.
Tim: It is said now that we don’t have any rationality at all, it’s all post hoc. We’re just a mass of emotions.
Martin: OK let me ask you about creativity, because I think that’s a relevant topic for a discussion on marketing. I’ve developed a theory about how you run Eden. I was watching a programme on BBC Four late one night, about the history of the long-playing record. The thread that ran through it was the successes that occurred when artists were in control. When Led Zeppelin refused to let any singles be released from their albums, album sales rocketed. Despite the marketing people pushing them, Pink Floyd refused to put the band name, or band photo or even a title on Dark Side of the Moon, yet it’s considered an all-time classic album. Berry Gordy wanted Marvin Gaye to focus on recording hit singles, but he wanted to make What’s Going On, and got his way, to huge plaudits. History forgets, of course, the artistic decisions that ended in failure! And I think here at Eden, power sits with the artists, and when I say ‘artists’ I mean ‘creative people’ of one sort or another. Tell me if I’m wrong, but as you were a very successful record producer, are you almost running Eden like a record company, where it’s all about the artists, the talent?
Tim: I think it is quite difficult, that question, because I’m not even sure I can answer it honestly. I’m not sure that [anyone] can ever answer questions about their past honestly, because you always want it to make sense, therefore you give a rational explanation, [when] it actually was chaos, but you like to feel that you were somehow in control, so ironically, the control that you’re talking about may well be retrofitted.
That said, I think there’s a degree of that. I think where that is certainly true is where we’ve been at our bravest; where we’ve been at our worst, because believe me, within Eden there are a lot of myths about what’s good and bad, let’s be praising [of] good management and good luck. We’ve done a number of things at scale which have made people look at us through the glasses we would like them to wear, and they don’t see the myriad fuck-ups we’ve made along the way, through a mixture of arrogance, not paying attention because we weren’t interested enough, and I think we’ve been guilty as hell of a lot of those things, and I don’t think it does anyone any service to deny that.
We have a weakness to the sort of concept as ‘OK here’s a hundred thousand to spend on a summer season, but we know not quite what.’ We’re appalling in that area, because no-one owns it, no-one feels the adrenaline buzz of getting up in the morning. We’re at our best when we terrify ourselves and put something on, whether it was the Sexy Green Car Show or the Live 8 [concert], where the price of failure was so public, so obvious, that it made it worth being good.
So in a sense, your insight is a very profound one, which means that if you’re going to be an artist, consistently be an artist. The problem comes if you want to be both the artist and Berry Gordy, and then you have a real clash because if you don’t have the capacity for the Berry Gordy-type administration - putting the nuts and bolts, the process, in place - you just can’t get it. We can tell so many fibs about our successes because the reason our successes were successes were because they were so big that no-one would say whether we had good marketing or good press or whatever because we just did something that everyone wanted to write about, which is different from ‘have you got the skills to get that in the public eye’. I don’t think we’ve ever addressed that honestly here, and I think it’s a really good question. So the honest answer is, at our best, it has been run like a record company with the artists in control. At our worst it’s like we were an independent that got taken over by a major, and we do not work well under those conditions. I think that’s right. Does it sound right to you?
Martin: Yeah, it does. I think one of the things people don’t like about marketing is that we apparently only care about the bottom line and often at the expense of beauty, art, aesthetics, but I think generally that’s not true. I’m reading the new book by Ed Catmull, who set up Pixar, called Creativity Inc., and he talks about Disney always having to feed ‘The Beast’, the relentless release schedule - the marketing people would demand the next film on the slate, but Pixar wanted to take the time to create something brilliant. And I’m not sure he’s quite right there, because marketing people also want something brilliant – you can’t polish a turd! So I guess that begs the question, can creativity ever originate in the Marketing Department, or is Marketing there to direct creative people? I read a book recently about the LEGO Company, Brick by Brick by David Robertson, which suggests that creative people work best when constrained.
Tim: That famous phrase ‘Please God give me the freedom of a tight brief’ which is actually a really good sentence. I think that is undoubtedly true. I can think of a number of huge businesses that are totally created by marketing. The world’s number one, I would say, is Nike. Virgin is a really good example – Richard Branson, I’ve followed his whole career. I bought the first four records he produced all on one weekend. You’re probably too young to remember it, but the selling proposition was this advert: ‘Made for people who love music’. The way it sat on the page made you feel, if you’re a music lover, you’ll want these things. If you look at what he’s done since, you’ve got the notion of the adventuring liberal invested into banking, cola, [condoms], health clubs, all the rest of it, all run by business guys in suits doing nothing particularly extraordinary. Virgin Atlantic was clever, and my dad, who was boss of KLM airlines, was full of admiration, because in 1984 when he started it, it was basically for people who wanted something else. He was very clever about that – ‘for people who want something else’. There wasn’t a class of people at all who could be identified. It was just that anyone who wanted something else would like Virgin – it’s clever. The biggest of all, because they’re completely nebulous [are] the mobile phone companies – all they have is a licence for some frequencies. Everything else – Orange Wednesdays, The O2 – they’re all constructs of marketers. So if that’s true marketing has not only added to the wealth of product, it has actually created a product itself, because without the marketing there was no product other than a wavelength, which is just a piece of physics, which is no-one’s right to colonise at all.
Martin: I saw an interesting statistic about the LEGO Company recently: it takes a $1 kilo of plastic and turns it into a $75 kilo of LEGO bricks. Exactly the same stuff, but that’s the effect of clever product design, good marketing…
Tim: The distinction there though is that at least it’s something that is real, and does in fact have an injection of creativity that isn’t marketing, whereas [mobile companies] and all the services [they] provide – that has been developed purely by marketers - marketers both selling, at one level, and marketers imagining what the consumer might want before it is sold. They act as both the faux consumer and the seller, don’t they? Yeah, marketing leads the world – very interesting.
Martin: I heard Jon Alexander speak recently. He’s an ex-adman and he believes that 1984 was a really interesting year because a lot of challenger brands came along that are now part of the establishment. – Virgin Atlantic, Apple’s Big Brother ad. I think that was also the year that the Body Shop floated. But the Body Shop is now part of L’Oreal, Virgin is now quite mainstream, Apple has become the most valuable company in the world, more so even than oil companies.
Tim: That’s interesting. That brings you to another point - why is it that most of the most admired entrepreneurs of our generation, whenever they’ve allowed the City to take them over, it usually takes between two and three years before they want to buy them back? Because actually ‘the market’ doesn’t understand creativity, and it wants to buy it, as if the moment it’s bought it, it can cage it. It’s fascinating. Branson himself bought back his music brands, didn’t he, and sold it again. Very very odd. I can’t think of many big companies which you would say are creative any more. The IBM’s of this world, thank God they were so staid, because, them and Xerox, they were the ones who allowed Apple [to emerge]. If they had any nous, Apple wouldn’t exist, because they just gave away that technology. Odd, isn’t it?
Martin: It is. I’ve worked for marketing-led companies, and you read Ed Catmull’s book, and it’s very clear that Pixar is a creativity-led company, and it’s served them very well. And of course Steve Jobs was heavily involved there. At Apple, Jobs was a fantastic marketer at the top of a company that was marketing-led, but still kept creativity at its heart through Jonathan Ive. I guess that’s an example of a company that got creativity and business in equal balance.
Tim: If you read Walter Isaacson’s biography of Jobs (which considering Jobs encouraged Isaacson to do it, it’s bloody raw in places), you can see that the myth of Steve Jobs and the reality are slightly different, that his failure – well, it’s a relative failure, but when he got kicked out of Apple - was a hugely necessary part of his journey, to get a lot of stuff out of his system. I thought it was a riveting book, actually.
Martin: Steve Jobs was a marketer at heart, but I would say you’re probably a PR guy at heart. You manage publicity extremely well. You talk about marketing as the Devil’s art, but publicity is almost a cousin of marketing.
Tim: I like to see publicity, if that’s what we’re going to call it, as being the gentlemanly relative!
Martin: There’s a certain nobility to it, is there?
Tim: I think there’s something else in there, though, if we’re being serious. I’m not being overly therapy conscious on all this, because I don’t do it, but I do know what my strengths are. My strength is that I’m not an original thinker, though people think I am, the thing is that I’m very widely read, because I’m addicted to reading stuff and seeing things, and unlike people of my age I think I’m young-minded, which means that I’m fascinated to see whatever’s going on at the moment as well. And if you view me like a sponge I absorb this stuff and I squeeze it into a cauldron and mix it up and then what comes out purporting to be new is a hybrid of all sorts of other people’s thinking. That’s what I do, that’s actually what I do. I’m not being falsely modest. Then, the other thing I do - I am good with people, in as much as I realise that inside almost every man and woman is a sadness that they’re not part of a big adventure. That’s how I’ve built gangs all my life. It is ‘look guys I can’t do this [alone]’. When I was in the music industry, basically I put together one of the world’s most famous studios, Abbey Road, some of the world’s best musicians, who were not always in work, and a lawyer and whatever and I said ‘I’ve got no money, but I can persuade so and so to let us have the studio, these great musicians to do it, I’ve got a song’ - and some capital that didn’t exist was created out of stuff that was dormant, that then had the opportunity to see the light of day.
The secret to it is it’s more like theatre direction. Heligan was all about theatre direction too, so was Eden – finding smart people that were looking for something, and giving them enough space to have the spotlight on them and not interfere with them. And it’s quite interesting – Eden became more boring the more corporate we became, because actually our strength in the first place was a bit like the Wild Bunch, that people who’d always wanted a bit of authority had their own – ‘I haven’t got time, just deal with it’. The moment it then becomes organised into those kind of male hierarchy structures, actually a lot of the fun goes.
And then the other thing that happens is that members of the Awkward Squad, who actually get you to where you need to be, when you get to solid state, others who are perhaps more normal want to say ‘well we don’t think they work very hard, why aren’t they earning their money? Winkle them out, kick them out’ and then they wonder why the organisation becomes greyer. It’s so odd, I’m fascinated by that, because you need friction. I think that’s a difference between anger and destruction, and creative friction, and I think an organisation without creative friction has got the seeds of its own death in it.
Martin: Is marketing part of the problem, in that case? If you think about movies, for example, the director has this vision for the film, but as soon as the ‘suits’ get involved, with focus testing and playing for the audience, perhaps requiring changes, putting a happy ending on it…
Tim: A Tale of Two Cities – ‘I know Dickens is good, but does the guy have to die at the end? Can’t they have a ménage a trois?’
Martin: Yeah, that’s one of the things marketers get a bad rap for, and maybe it’s justified, I don’t know, but it’s this idea that we take something and by applying ‘is it going to work in the marketplace’ we sap the life out of it. I don’t know…
Tim: I think marketing, like many professions, has suffered through becoming siloed. It means that marketing is perceived as a series of actions that enhance products and services, in a way which doesn’t allow for some of the distinctions you’ve been surfacing in this conversation. So for example, it can’t make the difference between the emotional tug of a movement, a spiritual thing, and the desire to have all the gratification from a Magnum. Now, some marketers might be quite cynical and say ‘that’s because they ain’t different, and if you’re looking for God, you’re looking for a Magnum too’, and I don’t know, sometimes in my more idealistic moments I think that’s a hellish conclusion. Other times, when I’m being quite real in the world, I think if you look at religion for example, why is it so many of my friends have become religious after a personal tragedy they couldn’t cope with, and found it gave them some kind of shape and pattern to their grief, so it is an emotional need, and maybe the notion of movement is the same. I think it almost tells you as much about the person analysing it, I’m not sure you can get an objective distance, because it rather depends on what your own spiritual or intellectual perspective is on what answer you come up with. It’s a bit like what people say about writers, in that fiction tells you more truth than factual books, because fiction is the way that writers actually expiate their personal demons. So what was your question? I’ve rather digressed…
Martin: Does marketing make things greyer when we apply research and other processes to them? Is it better when creative people are allowed to create their ‘product’, if that’s the right word, free from interference from those who’ve got to sell it?
Tim: It’s almost about permissions, because if one is employed to be a marketer on the understanding that we want you to market this thing so that we sell more, is that the same thing as marketing something so that people feel more. If we were selling [an event] last summer together, why is it not possible to write a brief which says ‘we want everybody who sees our posters to know there’s this bloody exciting thing going on in this exciting place’. You might then think, ‘all my training tells me that if you put too many messages on one thing, you’re going to lose focus and people are just going to be confused’. But we want to somehow convey to the public this isn’t a Magnum ice cream, that it’s great for families but it’s got the element of the Branson bit in it there somehow - how do you convey an attitudinal bit, [a] saving the planet bit, and [that] it’s fucking good fun? And it’s really difficult, it’s really difficult. And in a sense the marketer suffers [as a result of] the absence of an overall excitement like a Live 8, which captures in a moment all sorts of things because it’s big. But when it’s in solid state there will always be a conflict between those who are seeking footfall, awareness of Eden and the brand values, which they’re not all the same. And as you pointed out with your research, it’s hideously difficult. If you over-strengthen one, the others lose. So essentially, it does argue for the simpler strategy, because at least if I sell something which is getting bums on seats, I can test whether that’s worked. I can’t tell you whether someone feels more cool about Eden from that - that’s a lot of expensive research - but this is simply ‘I’ll advertise and they come through the door’. And I think it’s a battle. I think marketers are in a difficult position. If you were to reinvent marketing, it is almost about cultural or attitudinal projection, and that’s different - it makes an emphasis on things like tone of voice important. If marketing is just bums on seats you run the danger that you could get to a situation where the place has become actually like a bloodless pharaoh but is surviving on projected emotional response to it when you come.
And that is why, in a sense, I would argue about it being the Devil’s art, because it’s about temptation without necessarily concerning itself with the substance. Effectively what it’s doing is saying ‘temptation and endorphin response is all I need, baby, because I know what you need’.
Martin: It’s almost bad marketing then isn’t it, because if you make a promise and you don’t live up to it, it’s failed anyway – ‘cognitive dissonance’ is the phrase. We’ve got a vested interest in doing the same thing – you, the artist in this scenario, want to put on a fantastic experience, and you want to make sure people come and see it, and I want to encourage people to come and see it. It’s the old thing about the tree falling in the wood. So we’re both trying to do the same thing – put something on that’s great, something that people will want to come and see, and the way you make someone want to see it is this idea of selling benefits, putting a compelling proposition in front of them. So I guess it’s a conversation between us, isn’t it? You want to stage something that’s great, but I want to make sure there’s something inherent from which I can identify benefits, which I can successfully communicate to a prospective audience. If we can put those two things together, then everybody wins, including the audience. But it’s not an easy thing to do.
Tim: No it isn’t. So if we go back to your family or my family, your ideal day out is when you know that ten years from now you’ll be having dinner together and it’s ‘do you remember…’ and how do you capture that? The sense of ‘a great family day out’ doesn’t capture it.
Martin: It’s back to emotion again. Let’s just talk about a couple more things. This idea about ‘can business be good’ and you talk in your book Eden about working with companies to change for the future, rather than against them. Is business a necessary evil but you’re playing by the rules to effect change, or is business, in itself, good?
Tim: That’s a bit like saying is religion good? Business is what is happening everywhere except where the state is running something, or a charity, and I think a lot of people like me who were brought up in the Sixties have got a ridiculous notion of business somehow being manned by baby eaters. Business and the activities of producing products or services is not intrinsically bad, it’s just where processes are put in place that either exploit people or the land in a way that is not remediable. I actually think that the future of a lot of big things lies in the hands of business, but the toolkit to enable businesses to do it lies in the fiscal system, the taxation system which encourages such behaviour, and the problem lies when you have politicians who believe in a free market not understanding that the free market doesn’t work, nor yet understanding that most people in business don’t worry about regulation. This whole Thatcherite red tape isn’t the issue. The issue for every businessman I’ve ever met is a level playing field. They don’t want to be making this drug or that widget or whatever, feeling that someone can make some somewhere else of an inferior quality and compete on a level playing field. So I think ethical business – we’re already seeing it, actually - you’re finding that a large majority of the people coming out of university today want to work with a company or organisation that has got an ethical [behaviour] – and by ethical we don’t mean patchouli smelling, we’re just talking about family values, just don’t trust the fucking world. And it’s amazing how quickly people can find this miracle way to work better. I’m very optimistic, actually. It’s just that if you want to have clean water to 2 billion people, please don’t tell me Water Aid alone can do it. You need bloody great oil companies with drilling capacity. It’s just real. I think the world needs pragmatists with hearts of gold. That’s my philosophy: pragmatism with hearts of gold.
Martin: That’s a good phrase. Last question: The world is changing, and I need to think about the impact I’m making as a marketer. What would be your advice to me? How would you like to see marketing change, evolve, to meet the challenges that the world is facing now?
Tim: Wow. Many people in the profession of marketing have no choice but to find the words that make their bosses happy, [i.e.] that sell things. Those who set up their own companies and organisations who are marketers have the ability to use their insights into human behaviour to help people, to help themselves, have a happier life. And I think that a lot of the smart people in marketing will be setting up their own companies and agencies and so on, and I think they will get a great deal of pleasure out of using that talent for something that is both for the benefit of the product or service they are selling and actually marry it with realising that whoever buys it will genuinely get that benefit. Ironically, marketing could, at its very best, be keeping the products clean.
Martin: And for those who aren’t going to go and set up their own companies? Can they influence these bosses and try and change the dialogue internally, or is that impossible?
Tim: Strangely, your question is fantastically appropriate now and over a period of the last 18 months in a way that it might not have been. I think the marketer is actually now the guardian of the brand, and the marketer is now in a very powerful position to say to the Chief Executive or the Board, ‘if you produce a product that does not live up to the quality of aspiration I am putting on the screen, you’re screwed. I can sell it, but you’ve got to be as good’. Ironically you’re saying ‘You’ve got to be as good as my talent at selling it’, which I think is actually rather a nice place to be, because you can say ‘Look, my job is to future proof this company and if you can’t make the product live up to it, we will all die’. And you probably weren’t able to make that sort of bold sentence up until about 18 months ago, because now there’s a rush to compliance with good behaviour. So you’ve actually also got to be horizon scanning - that future-proofing thing is actually a really important role now, isn’t it?
Martin: And hopefully a lot of that change is coming in the way that consumers are thinking. We have to listen to customers, especially with social media creating more of a dialogue. If consumers are demanding more from their products and the ones that succeed are the ones that address those, that’s got to be a good thing. Marketing has to be more authentic, less glitzy.
Tim: The impact of the digital age is [that] it’s the ultimate feedback loop isn’t it? Christ, what a policeman for you! October ’98, when we bought this pit, was when Google went public. It’s now a fucking noun! And an adjective! And a verb!
Martin: And it’s got the whole “Don’t be evil” thing going on, which brings us full circle rather neatly. Tim, thank you very much for sharing your thoughts.