Telling the time for Trumpton

Trumpton as seen on TV in the 1960s

The UK Independence Party (UKIP) is making most of the political headlines in Britain at the moment.  UKIP's party leader, Nigel Farage, is rarely out of the news and the party is threatening to change the political landscape at the UK's 2015 General Election.

Despite the party's reputation for being stuck in the past, UKIP members are said to be active users of social media.  And because of their extreme views they are often the targets of satire and parody online.

One recent example is the Twitter account @Trumpton_UKIP which purports to be the social media outlet for UKIP in Trumpton, a place which many voters will remember from childhood.  On children's television in the 1960s and 1970s, Trumpton was a small, quintessentially English town where everything was as it might have been in the 1940s.  Trumpton had no crime, no ethnic minorities, no dissent.  @Trumpton_UKIP sets the fictional series in the present, where the Mayor and Town Clerk have defected to UKIP: the site brings a stream of topical tweets gently satirising Britain's fastest growing political party.

However, the site has come to the notice of the UKIP High Command, and their MEP David Coburn warned supporters not to be taken in by it.  For good measure he claimed to taking steps to have @Trumpton_UKIP closed down by Twitter, even suggesting that he might take legal action.

As we have noted in this blog, the principles of psychological reactance kick in when something we have previously enjoyed is about to be taken away from us.  That may be the case here, but given the fact that hardly anyone knew about @UKIP_Trumpton, the comparison is better made with advertising that was designed to be banned.  The masters of this back in the 1990s were EasyJet, while PaddyPower have taken over in the 21st century.  The attendant publicity surrounding calls for an advertising band were exploited by the companies involved to increase awareness and boost the brands.

The same seems to have happened with @UKIP_Trumpton, as Coburn's calls for a ban were picked up by The Daily Telegraph, The Guardian, The Financial Times and The Independent. UKIP are said to have suffered a sense of humour bypass.  More amusingly, perhaps, is that a little known satirical site had its rating boosted, and within a couple of days of the publicity had a larger following on Twitter than Coburn himself.


Update, 10 December.  Conservative, Labour, BNP, LibDem and Green parties now have Trumpton branches. This place is shaping up to be the virtual battleground for the UK 2015 elections.

Death becomes them: Musicians and psychological reactance

Psychological reactance comes into play when something which audiences are used to enjoying is taken away.  An extreme version of this is death, often said to be a great career move for out-of-fashion artists.

The Charlie Parker 'brand' is nowhere near
as strong as Elvis's.  Picture: Life Magazine

Paul Simon (still very much alive) has a song about this, on his 1983 album Hearts and Bones.  The Late Great Johnny Ace tells the story of how an obscure musician's career is boosted by his sad death.  The song goes on to refer to the shooting of John Lennon, and perfectly describes the whole
phenomenon of longing for something once it has passed.

Well not quite.  When painters die, their work invariably becomes more valuable: simply put, there will be no more pictures.  But in the case of recorded music death is merely the gateway to a whole new posthumous career.

Forbes Magazine has produced an annual report on top earning dead musicians for some years now, and their chart for 2014 is now available online.  Michael Jackson may have passed away in 2009, but this didn't stop him releasing a new album Xscape in May.  Elvis left us 37 years ago but his estate is still taking in the money through his back catalogue, merchandise and through tourism. You can even follow Elvis on Twitter.  Spooky.  Meanwhile the Bob Marley brand continues to be extended with new ranges of Marley foods, lifestyle products and clothing.  Marley died in 1981 but still speaks to us through the miracle of social media.

Each of these musicians is arguably more successful in death than they were in their lifetimes.  Their passing triggered grief among their loyal fans, while the media attention helped to bring their music to the notice of  much wider audiences worldwide.  At the same time the managers responsible for the late musicians were quick to identify the commercial potential in the short term, and to manage the 'brands' in the longer term.

Death is not a universal panacea though.  Most of jazz musicians lived and died in obscurity, and while there have been attempts to revive 'brands' such as Charlie Parker, Miles Davis and John Coltrane, there has been nothing on the scale of what happened to Elvis, Jackson and Marley. US audiences can order their Miles Davis T-shirts and other merchandise: in Europe we just get offered the music.

Death: Please don't try this at home, folks.

Complete rubbish: long running, low budget, high impact

Here's a campaign that has been running for years, yet can still generate headlines.

The 'offender' is the charity Keep Britain Tidy.  This organisation has been going for nearly 60 years and receives government funding for its campaigns to keep litter off the streets of Britain.  Keep Britain Tidy not only promotes its message, but it commissions research to help it understand what causes the problem in the first place.

The campaign targeted young people with sexual innuendo in the headlines
(pictures from the Daily Mail)

Back in 2002 the organisation found that a problem area was younger people: they didn't respond to conventional appeals either in terms of advertising or enforcement.  Keep Britain Tidy decided to target this audience with humour in advertising. A series of posters and beer mats were produced and these were placed in pubs and clubs frequented by young people.

The campaign uses slogans charged with sexual innuendo which gain impact by being combined with often incongruous images.

The low budget campaign is given regular boosts by what I call third party ostensible demarketing.   The creative execution mirrored other media popular with this age group - for example greetings cards with similar 'retro' photography combined with risque slogans.

In 2005 the posters were criticised by academics for being "lazy" and by the Christian Voice group for being "cheap, tacky and horrible".    Four years later they were back in the mainstream media for the same reasons: this time the complainants were the Plain English Society, whose grumbles brought a low key campaign into national prominence in the Daily Telegraph and Daily Mail.  These newspapers and campaign groups seem to represent what I call 'taste guardians' in Bradley & Blythe (2013).

Given the careful targeting of the material it is unlikely that the Plain English Campaign's elderly director had encountered the posters herself.  And as the Keep Britain Tidy spokesman commented, they had been around for years.

Despite the outrage and offence that this campaign can generate, I can find no instance of it being referred to the Advertising Standards Authority during its ten year run.


Sources

• WalesOnline (May 20, 2005) Sex sells - 'but we're simply taking it too far', WalesOnline
• Daily Telegraph (Sept 19, 2009), Keep Britain Tidy campaign should 'bin the filth', say campaigners, Daily Telegraph
• Daily Mail (Sept 19, 2009), Litter charity Keep Britain Tidy told to bin its 'filthy' sexual innuendo posters aimed at young people, Daily Mail

UKIP Calypso: Experience Pays

Earlier this week (20 October), former BBC Radio 1 DJ Mike Read released a song titled "UKIP Third Party Ostensible Demarketing'.  What this clumsy term describes is the process where a product's sales are boosted by carefully managing calls to have it banned.

The 'album cover': picture from The Independent

Calypso".  Read said that the song was a harmless piece of fun, something in a long tradition of political satire.  But within hours two things were happening: firstly the song started climbing rapidly in the download charts at iTunes and Amazon; and secondly it was being castigated by media figures and politicians for being racist.  This looks like a classic case of what I call '

Perhaps this is too hard a judgement on Mike Read.  Today (22 October) he is all over the media apologizing if the song has caused offence, and reiterating that it was only a bit of fun. Perhaps: Read had first performed it at the UKIP party conference in October.  Earlier the UKIP leader Nigel Farage had been urging his supporters to buy the song with a view to getting it to Number One in the charts. A contrite Mike Read, though, said he had asked his record company to withdraw the track.

At the time of writing UKIP Calypso was still on sale on iTunes and on Amazon.  It was still available the next day.  So is Mike Read being disingenuous?  He should know better than most about the power of ostensible demarketing.  In 1984 Read as a DJ on BBC Radio 1 was largely responsible for getting an unknown Liverpool band's debut single to Number One.  He had objected to what he regarded as sexually explicit lyrics and refused to play the track.  The band was Frankie Goes to Hollywood and the song, Relax, stayed at Number One for 5 weeks.

Does Mike Read still have the winning touch?  On the basis of the first week, possibly not.  UKIP Calypso entered the charts at number 21, although this position was obtained before the announcement was made that the track was going to be withdrawn.  In the meantime, though, the controversy is keeping the piece in the news.  Provocation can be a powerful selling tool.


*** Update, 27 November.  UKIP Calypso  entered UK charts at number 43.  It had been removed from sale on iTunes some time on 24 November, while Amazon removed the track the following day. ***


Sources

• Official Charts Company, 22/10/2014, UKIP Calypso sits outside Top 20 on midweek Official Chart Update, http://www.officialcharts.com/chart-news/ukip-calypso-sits-outside-top-20-on-midweek-official-chart-update-3228/
• Grundy, Gareth (11 June 2011), Frankie Goes to Hollywood's Relax 'banned' by the BBC, The Guardian, http://www.theguardian.com/music/2011/jun/11/frankie-hollywood-banned-bbc
• Mason, Rowena (20 October 2014), Get Mike Read’s Ukip calypso song to number one, urges Nigel Farage, The Guardian, http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2014/oct/20/ukip-calypso-song-number-one-nigel-farage-mike-read
• Plunkett, John (22 October 2014), Ukip calypso song should be withdrawn, says repentant Mike Read, The Guardian, http://www.theguardian.com/media/2014/oct/22/ukip-calypso-song-mike-read-radio-1

The books they tried to ban

The marketing message “The one they tried to ban” is a potent one, not only exploited by the music business but by publishers also.  When ex-spymaster Peter Wright attempted to publish his memoirs in 1985 he came up against the might of the British government which went to court in an attempt to suppress publication (Norton-Taylor 1988).  

Image from Amazon.com

Despite the fact that there was little in the book that was not already in the public domain, the notoriety generated by the attempted gag on publication ensured the book's success (Zuckerman 1987).  It is not just governments and official censors that can boost the popularity of a book through exploiting its non-availability: Flaubert, DH Lawrence, Salman Rushdie, Nabokov and many other authors appear to have benefited from being denounced by moral guardians.  Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code was hardly in need of a publicity boost ahead of being made into a film in 2005, but sales were not noticeably harmed when the world's press learned that the Vatican had appointed a Cardinal officially to debunk the heresies it saw in the book (see for example Pauli 2005).   

Similarly, sales of JK Rowling's Harry Potter books were buoyed by regular media reports that it was the most banned book in America (Capon and Scott 2013): Rowling’s publishers have also been adept at exploiting other aspects of psychological reactance theory -  in particular carefully withholding information from the media and giving the appearance that there would be restricted supplies of the books available (Brown 2001).


References

Brown, Stephen (2001), “Torment your customers (they'll love it)”, Harvard Business Review, October
Capon, Felicity and Catherine Scott (2013), “Top 20 books they tried to ban”, The Daily Telegraph, 1 March
Norton-Taylor, Richard (1988), “Newspapers win Spycatcher battle”, The Guardian, 14 October
Pauli, Michelle (2005), “Vatican appoints official Da Vinci Code debunker”, The Guardian, 15 March
Zuckerman, Laurence (1987), “Press: how not to silence a spy”, Time Magazine, 17 August

Relax, don't do it: Switch off now

In ostensible demarketing, people grow to like something more when it is taken away from them. In third-party demarketing it is an outside body intervening that can cause a brand's value to soar. Parental Advisory Labels, for example, can boost sales of a CD by giving it a cutting edge that it might have lacked.

The attempted imposition of bans by regulators, backed up by the calls of moral guardians, are the stuff of legend in the music industry also.  One of the early arbiters of public taste was the BBC and its infamous Dance Music Policy Committee, whose archives date back to the 1930s.  Leigh's excellent 2007 study of these shows how the corporation objected to innuendo and direct reference to sex, drugs, brand names, blasphemy and other taboos.  

Frankie Goes to Hollywood: image from LastFM.com

What happens when a piece of music gets banned? ‘Relax’, the debut single from Frankie Goes to Hollywood was banned shortly after its release in 1984 by the BBC, the single going on to reach number one and stay there for 5 weeks (Gareth Grundy writing in The Guardian, 2011).  It was a similar story for other classic pieces, not just ones censored by the BBC: the Evil Dead, Serge Gainsbourg, the Sex Pistols, Louis Armstrong, Frank Zappa, the Beatles, Billie Holiday and Pink Floyd all succeeded despite – or perhaps, because of - officious regulators or censors (Neil Spencer writing in The Observer, 2005).   

What better way to be noticed in a crowded marketplace, what more effective way of establishing the cutting edge credentials of a piece of culture than to have it withdrawn? see Stephen Brown's excellent piece in Harvard Business Review, 2001).  Ostensible demarketing exploits the principles of psychological reactance. In music it works by provoking Taste Guardians to talk the outrage, and then exploiting any subsequent ban.


References
Brown, Stephen (2001), “Torment your customers (they'll love it)”, Harvard Business Review, October

Grundy, Gareth (2011), “Frankie Goes to Hollywood's Relax 'banned' by the BBC”, The Guardian, 11 June
Spencer, Neil (2005), “The 10 most x-rated records”, The Guardian, 22 May

The Power of provocation: Third party ostensible demarketing

In Third Party Ostensible Demarketing (quite a mouthful), a brand owner attempts to provoke the regulators into banning something - a piece of advertising, for example.  This is what easyJet did in 1996 - their marketing director at the time describes it in his book Gorilla Marketing (Anderson 2010).  When it comes to advertising you produce a piece of provocative copy and then let it loose: if you can get some controversy going first then the regulators are more likely to act.  It can be quite straightforward to provoke the 'taste guardians' - church leaders, certain political figures, etc., and the mass media has a role in whipping up controversy also.

So, what happens if  your advertisement is banned?  No problem, you put it onto Youtube or Facebook with the label "The one they tried to ban".  The undisputed master of this is Paddy Power.

How advertising is designed to be banned: from the book
'Ostensible Demarketing', published by Routledge 2013

In the book 'Demarketing' there is a model of how this works. It shows how in the case of an advertisement, the key is to tip off 'taste guardians' that this ad is about to appear.  They in turn press for a ban, which makes the news and boosts the ad's visibility.

It is not just advertising that is boosted through banning.  Books, films, music and other cultural products gain extra publicity and credibility when third party regulators get involved.  Once again, the product is exposed to 'taste guardians' who call for a ban.  The controversy boosts sales for very little cost, and even if it is withdrawn the principles of psychological reactance kick in.  This theory describes how when something you enjoyed is removed you tend to long for it still more.



Reference

Anderson, Tony (2010), Gorilla Marketing, London: Grosvenor House Publishing Ltd