11th May:

According to the famous bible passage “the meek shall inherit the earth”. I reckon you need to worry less about the meek, though, and more about the accountants.

I was always crap at maths. But I never really worried about it because I never had any aspiration to be an engineer, a physicist or (god forbid) a maths teacher. The finer points of algebra and calculus remain as blissfully irrelevant to me now as the day I first studied them. I do worry about accountants though. Firstly, because it strikes me as being the dullest of professions and secondly because I believe that most accountants are closet megalomaniacs living with thinly disguised control-freakery issues.

Money makes the world go round. But are we its master or its slave? When the recent financial crisis was at its worst, the government rewarded several UK banks that were, to quote HM Treasury, “too big to fail”, by pumping many millions of Pounds of taxpayers money into them. They, in return, looked contrite for all of 5 minutes, mumbled something about a “global situation” and then sneaked off when nobody was looking to order another plate of oysters and bottle of Krug. And the current pressure on the Tories and LibDems to form a new government seems to be driven by an apparent need to reassure the money markets that everything is ok above anything else. Sorry, but who is serving who, here?

The spotty kid with too many Parker pens in his top blazer pocket may have graduated into the geeky, Volvo-driving adult who now heads up the finance department, but mock him at your peril. He may wear novelty ties/sock/cufflinks and require every excel spreadsheet to contain an outrageous numbers of tabs and interlinking formulae, but he also wears the sneaky, self-satisfied smirk of someone who knows he holds the purse strings and can finally get his own back. The kids that used to wait for him at lunchtime, stick chewing gum in his hair and throw his schoolbag up into the trees may have been more popular with the girls, but he’s the guy now calculating their redundancy payments. And loving every second of second if it...

Having only been very occasionally bullied at school for my big ears and quiet demeanour by the resident class psycho (every year had one - I assume he’s now either dead or in prison) I never felt the need to study finance. Probably no bad thing, however. Living in these interesting times, it does feel like a great many financial institutions refuse to accept that they are part of the problem and almost see themselves as being above and beyond the reach of our public and politicians. Which cannot be right. Liberal democracies require the flow of capital but they also require financial institutions to be regulated in order to prevent the abusive excesses and morally dubious activities the likes of which we now see Goldman Sachs being accused (activities that are probably far more prevalent than we’ll ever know).

So there you have it. Come the day of judgement, the meek may manage to get their hands on the keys to the earth. But I suspect it’s the finance geeks in the background who will still be calling the shots.

8th May:

As someone who has always felt more of an affiliation with the parties on the left of the political spectrum rather than the right, it saddens me to see the current state of Labour.

As their election campaign came to its conclusion this week, I realised just how much my opinion of Gordon Brown had changed over its course. I had previously considered Brown to be a rather dull but worthy politician – someone who had little time for the fluff and ephemera of politics, preferring to concentrate on the substance: the policies and issues that mattered. In some ways I looked on this as a good thing, thinking that it may herald a move towards a more serious and positive style of politics. As the events of this Thursday and Friday unfolded, however, I felt a change. Today, Brown strikes me as someone who is far more ruthless than I originally thought. He has patiently waited to achieve his life-long goal and then, having obtained the power he has so desperately craved, will do anything required to hang on to it. Irrespective of how desperate that makes him look or how illegitimate it leaves his position. Whether through arrogance or ignorance, Brown seems oblivious to the fact that the country doesn’t want him. It can’t be easy when you finally get the job of your dreams and then discover that people don’t think you cut the mustard but, like a boxer who has taken one punch too many, Brown really should know that the fight is now over and yet he boxes on. It isn’t pretty to watch. The blatant overtures to the LibDems, the talk of electoral reform despite 13 years of inactivity over this very issue and the hastily-denied furious phone call to Nick Clegg late on Friday night all broadcast the same message: I’ll do whatever it takes to remain as PM. Which is worrying when the recent revelations regarding Brown’s bad temper, the accusations of bullying and the whole ‘Bigotgate’ affair have already painted Brown as a man who is quick to blame others for his own failings and quick to cast aside anyone who dares to dissent.

There may be a power vacuum behind Brown, with no obvious successor waiting in the wings, but the Labour party needs to behave in exactly the same way as the Tories did with Thatcher back in the early 1990s if they are to regain public support. No one player can ever be bigger than the team.

6th May:

A few months ago I posted a note on Facebook commenting that, in my opinion, social media is irrelevant as a marketing tool to the vast majority of companies. Perhaps unsurprisingly, I received quite a few emails from friends and colleagues trying to persuade me that I was at best misguided (if not deluded) and at worst a luddite of Tyrannosaurus-esque proportions. My point, which may have been lost on the audience at the time, was not that social media has no value at all – it certainly can help brands to raise awareness of new products and drive sampling – it was simply that social media generally needs to be combined with the more traditional elements of the marketing mix and really only works for companies operating in some fairly specific market sectors.

Although some time has now passed since my original post, absolution has finally come in the form of acclaimed marketing consultant (and Associate Professor of Marketing) Mark Ritson. Mark writes a column for Marketing Week magazine, and this week’s column (“Hoodwinked by the Emperor’s New Tweets") very pointedly confirms and reinforces (vindicates?) my views on this subject.

In his article, Mark points out that vehicles like Facebook may provide companies with a free communication mechanism that has some viral potential, but the overall reach is relatively small and results therefore limited. Both Twitter and YouTube come in for similar criticism. As with my own original post, Mark is quick to recognise the part that social media can play within a wider, integrated marketing campaign and is certainly not dismissive of its power to affect the way we feel about a brand, but he does make the valid point that too many marketing professionals have jumped on the social media bandwagon for fear of being left behind, without really considering what they are trying to achieve by being there.

It’s a very good article indeed, and I’d recommend it:
http://www.marketingritson.com/documents/ritsonpage.pdf