How Nigh Exactly?"Repent! The end is nigh!" probably ranks alongside "Beanz Meanz Heinz" as one of history's most enduring marketing slogans. Unfortunately, it's also one of the least effective. Whereas the Heinz jingle is credited with shifting beans by the billion, a typical Speakers Corner sandwich-board man will struggle to convince even a handful of consumers to don sackcloth and ashes. So what exactly is the problem here? With Nostradamus forecasting Armageddon for this August, and computer programmers saying that, even if he's wrong, the Millennium Bug will do for us all, anyway, come January 1st, you'd have thought that the "Repent!" message would currently be fresh and relevant. Yet, if anything, it's become more like "Old Spice - the mark of a man": jaded, and a bit of a joke. I therefore decided to liaise with a marketing agency and try to re-invigorate it. The Surrey-based Bespoke Agency, whose clients have included IBM, Fuji, and Xerox, blamed the slogan itself. "It's both negative and overtly threatening," said Director, Clive Goodacre. "It's as if, for instance, McVities were exhorting us to 'P-p-pick up a Penguin, or we'll break both your legs.' What we have to do is market the end of the world, not so much as a dread finality, but more of an opportunity. Something that might appeal to high-income ABC1s." So what are the principal selling points of global extinction? A SWOT session (an analysis of a product's marketing potential in terms of Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats from Rivals) was convened. Here, Bespoke determined that the advantages of impending Armageddon were, in fact, many and varied. Building societies would be able to offer inexpensive, short-term mortgages, for example. You'd be able to walk out of DFS with a new three-piece suite, not just with no deposit and nothing to pay for 12 months, but nothing to pay ever. And the likelihood of Black Lace mounting another comeback tour was minimal in the extreme. Great. But how was I to convey all this on a 17"x22" sandwich board? I wouldn't have to. These days, brand recognition is enough, explained Bespoke. Benetton ads, for example, can use a photograph of, say, the aftermath of an elephant stampede, or something else that is, at best, relatively tangential to their actual product line. Nevertheless, everyone recognises the ad's Benetton logo and therefore understands that the company is in fact selling coloured pullovers. I should therefore go down the same route. The Omega symbol - The End - would be my logo. Eventually, I'd be able to get away with having this alone on my sandwich board. But, so as not to confuse my customer-base, I'd have to work towards it gradually. In the meantime, I was advised that it might be advantageous to enhance my brand's identity by forming marketing alliances with other, high-profile organizations. For instance, "Armani - clothes to be seen dead in." Or "This is the way the world ends - not with a banger, but with a Wimpey!" In the event, neither company proved particularly receptive to my overtures, so it was just me and my revamped sandwich board the following Sunday at Speakers Corner. "Repent!" had been replaced with a more touchy-feely, Blairesque "Hey there! Let's Repent!", while "The end is nigh!" became "Get Ready for it! Sublime Minimalism." Bespoke said that this would help convey the feel-good Buddhist concept of Extinction, Nirvana, rather than the fire and brimstone Judeo-Christian variety. "I haven't seen you here before, have I?" came a rather plummy voice from behind me. It belonged to a be-hatted middle-aged lady, obviously one of the regulars. "It's my first time," I said. "As a performer, anyway." I explained the rationale behind my board. "It is a bit different," she observed, dubiously. "How would you like to stand next to my husband? He's speaking over there." This is how it works. The sandwich-board man is basically the supporting act: the Ronaldo and His Performing Ferrets to the star-turn that is the speaker. As such, in order to maximise your message-spreading potential, you seek out the most popular speaker, stand alongside him, and bathe in his reflected glory. Today, it was a toss-up between the reflected glory of a representative of the Nation of Islam, whose principal contention was that the white man was a genetic aberration, and that of the aforementioned lady's husband, whose main thrust was that Jacques Santer was the Great Beast of Revelations. The latter seemed a better bet as regards not getting my head kicked in. While I stood and looked evangelic, two competing sandwich-board men approached, obviously taking me as a kindred spirit. Not for long. Just as when a mallard encounters a duck-billed platypus, initial empathy quickly gave way to suspicion that something was seriously amiss. "You're taking the piss, aren't you?" hissed the one, whose board, front and back, proclaimed the evils of sodomy. "You shouldn't come here to mock," advised his "Jesus is Lord!" colleague. It seemed politic to withdraw. I spent the rest of the afternoon walking up and down between speakers. With difficulty, because the breeze that was blowing across Hyde Park caught my board, severely restricting its manoeuvrability. I had to tack into the wind to make any forward progress. This made shaking off a German TV crew who'd latched on to me all the more problematic. Then again, they were the only people paying me any real attention, so I really ought to have been grateful. Even if it did mean that the only sinners to be saved would be from Dusseldorf and Munich. No, I don't think I was responsible for any instant Damascene conversions that day. Then again, Heinz don't expect an immediate, Pavlovian "I must buy beans" response to their ads, either. As the agency said, this is to be a long-term project. With time and enduring shoe leather, I reckon I'm on message to eventually convince all humanity to embrace Righteousness. Assuming, of course, there is time, and the end isn't actually quite as nigh as I'm making out. |