I was browsing in the bookshop at Salts Mill in Bradford recently, when for some reason, I was drawn to one book sitting spine-out on a shelf. It probably had something to do with the brightly coloured cover, but if you’re of an ‘air head’ disposition, you might call it fate.
Anyway, the book turned out to be written by a philosopher by the name of Julian Baggini, and is called ‘Welcome to Everytown – A Journey Into the English Mind’. Now philosophy titles aren’t what I would normally gravitate towards. There are no pictures of semi-naked women or fast cars for one thing, and it’s hard to escape the conclusion that you’re going to be expected to think. But as I read the cover notes, I realised that this was something I had to read…
You see the book sets out to explain and define the broadly-held philosophy of the British people. In order to do this, the author decided that he needed to move away from the cultural enclave he occupied at the time, to somewhere more typical of the way most Britons live. So he set out to find a place that was representative of the country as a whole ~ a microcosm if you like ~ and found it in S66, the postcode where I live.
Apparently S66 is as close a match to the national demographic as any postcode you’ll find. The breakdown of the national population ~ its age, wealth, health, housing, occupational status, etc – is mirrored more closely in S66 than any other area in the UK. It’s the Everytown where Baggini set up home for six months in 2005 – less than a mile, as the crow flies, from my house.
When I first read about this – that the area where I live had been chosen because it was just like everywhere else – I was a little miffed, if I’m honest. I think we all like to feel that there’s something unique or unusual in our existence, but here was a guy who was saying that this aspect of mine was about as far away from unusual as it’s possible to get. But then I realised two things:
1. I’m unusual enough ~ or so I’m told. (That’s what ‘weirdo’ means isn’t it?)
2. For someone who does what I do, there couldn’t be a better place to be.
Baggini needed to uproot, move and integrate to get an insight into what makes people tick. I’m already here. His motivation is a purely academic one, mine is a little more pragmatic – if I have my finger on the pulse of what people are thinking, feeling, needing and aspiring towards, I have a much clearer idea of what products, services and promotional appeals are going to hit the target.
So in that respect, I’m in the ‘right place’. But I regularly receive letters and emails from people who are clearly in the wrong one – if they want to make some money, at least. They want me to publish their manuscript or help market their product, but the concept has been developed and honed a long way away from Everytown.
Often, it’s been fashioned from the perspective of someone living in a rural idyll or a cosmopolitan metropolis or an academic/professional haven ~ and it shows. I’m sure I don’t have to labour the point, but although these are physical locations, the impact is in the thought processes, behaviours and attitudes they engender in the people who live there.
The end result is something that wouldn’t sit well with the people in Everytown, and that’s where the bulk of the market is.
Now I’m not suggesting that you have to live where your market lives to understand and serve it, but you do have to accept that if you live somewhere else, the values, wants, needs and motivational triggers of those around you will not necessarily be universal indicators. You create your products and promotional appeals around them at your peril.
So what’s to be done?
Well if you can’t live in Everytown, the next best thing is to expose yourself to the same opinion-forming influences as the people who do live there. That may mean opening yourself up to aspects of popular culture, literature and media that wouldn’t normally be your ‘cup of tea’.
If you’ve read ‘The Money Making Magic Of The Funfair Goldfish’ (and if not, why not?) then you’ll know that I’m an avid daily reader of The Sun and the Mirror. If you want to know what people are thinking about, talking about, worried about and aspiring towards, you’ll get massive pointers here – although I’m never sure in which direction the causal relationship works.
It doesn’t matter though. The end result is the same. The impact on what they want to buy and how they’ll be persuaded to buy it is the same, irrespective of the causality.
And it’s the same with mainstream TV. You might only watch documentaries and the news, but the people in Everytown don’t. They watch Big Brother, I’m a Celebrity, Britain’s Fattest Teenagers – and a whole host of similar programmes too horrific to describe. But if you ignore their popularity and place in popular culture, you’re missing a trick in learning what real people want, and how you can make money by supplying it to them.
There’s no place for snobbishness in philosophy ~ Baggini’s book is very measured and non-judgemental ~ and there’s no place for it in marketing either. Back in the 1930s, HL Mencken said: “nobody ever went broke underestimating the tastes of the American public”, and as cynical as it might appear, I think you could insert “British” in place of “American” and it would still hold true today.
Overestimating the tastes, though? Well that’s a different matter. But you’re unlikely to make that mistake if you make yourself familiar with Everytown.
Kind Regards
John Harrison
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