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.

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

Ditch the bitch and other insults

Image from Marketing Week

Third party demarketing is when an outside body intervenes to ban a product or piece of marketing. Even if they are not successful, the surrounding publicity normally gives the brand a tremendous boost.  Which is what they were counting on.

One example of this strategy comes from George Shaw, the PR specialist responsible for the notorious 2001 'Ditch the Bitch' advertising campaign for London divorce lawyers Brookmans.  Shaw fell just short of admitting to deception: “Experience has taught us that the press are more likely to cover stories that have been leaked or they have unearthed for themselves” (Shaw 2013).  The client in this case was able to leverage a minute advertising budget into a campaign worth in excess of £1.5 million by carefully and covertly orchestrating viral marketing to give the impression to national media that the public was outraged by the slogans “Ditch the bitch” and “All men are bastards” (Clarke 2001).  

Shaw's strategy seemed to be to leak details of two otherwise obscure posters to moral guardians (women's groups) and regulators (the Advertising Standards Authority and the Law Society).  When the media storm had died down it became clear that far from being outraged, virtually nobody from the general public had complained (Dyer 2001), so there was no ban and no investigation. The Advertising Standards Authority received a single complaint: when this was rejected the campaign generated more headlines.

There was more good news for the creative team behind the low-budget campaign. It won the top award that year for ambient from the advertising trade journal Campaign.


References

Clarke, Anna (2001), “Legal firm attacked over 'ditch the bitch' ad campaign”, PR Week, 16 May

Dyer, Clare (2001), “Divorce lawyers' posters attacked”, The Guardian, 16 May
Shaw, George (2013), Brookmans Case Study, Avocado Media, London, via www.avocadomedia.co.uk/Pages/case.html  accessed February 2013

Where does the gorrilla sit?

Image from www.towerbooks.com

In third party demarketing, an outside body attempts to restrict the marketing of something, and often ends up doing the job for the brand owner at no cost to them.

An unusually frank admission about the use of this kind strategy comes from 1996, courtesy of what was then a start-up airline. easyJet was opening a new Luton to Aberdeen route, but with an established competitor in British Airways, and short of funds to finance a major promotional push, easyJet instead booked advertising spots close to the BA's checkin desk at Aberdeen Airport (Anderson 2010).  They then designed a poster in BA colours and typeface warning "Beware! Thieves operate in this airport". This provocative execution, which tied in with easyJet's wider PR message about BA's fares, predictably was vetoed by the airport authority: what followed was what easyJet's marketing director at the time called “a strategic leak” to the local Press and Journal (Anderson 2010), which obligingly gave the offending poster front page coverage.  Nowadays, of course, it would be on Facebook.

Advertising bans have become something of a staple of the now fiercely competitive airline industry, with easyJet as likely to be complained about as to make complaints (see for example Farey-Jones 2011 and 2012).  A new strategy seems to be emerging with this form of attack advertising: in making a complaint the rival travel company positions itself as the consumer's friend; however, in defending it the original company is able to generate publicity by attempting to substantiate the claims made.

Anderson called his book Gorilla Marketing from the old joke:  "Q: Where does an 800 pound gorilla sit?  A: Anywhere he wants to".  easyJet spent its early life trying to provoke the gorilla (British Airways).  Now the irony is that on most measures easyJet is the bigger airline.  But, as Stephen Brown (2001) noted, “There’s nothing like a little outrage to attract attention and turn a tiny advertising spend into a megabudget monster”. An 800 pound monster, perhaps?

References

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

Brown, Stephen (2001), s “Torment your customers (they'll love it)”, Harvard Business Review, October
Farey-Jones, Daniel (2011), “EasyJet business ad banned after Ryanair complaint”, Campaign, 27 April
Farey-Jones, Daniel (2012), “EasyJet complaint leads ad watchdog to ban train ad”, Campaign, 9 May