1066 and all that!

Felix sit annus novus.

To our Celtic tribes to the north, lang may yer lum reek. This broadly translates as ‘ Long may your chimney smoke’. And nope, I have no idea what it means either.

And to everyone else a Happy New Year and welcome back for another year of Cicero Speaks wit and wisdom. I trust you had a good break.

Before I start today’s words of enlightenment, I would like to thank those of you posting comments and feedback. It is good to know there are people out there reading me. And not only are you passing comments, I even have four followers. Thank you. As someone pointed out another 8 and I will have as many as Jesus. In his early days obviously. And I am in no way comparing myself to Him.

Did you read the recent proposal to take history off the National Curriculum and to merge it with car mechanics or civic duties or some such nonsense? No doubt this has been decreed by the curriculum gauleiters so that there might be time to study such life enriching subjects such as health and safety for beginners or green studies. I was appalled. History was and is my subject. I fell in love with it at an early age and that explains a lot about me. Some of the most exciting, most dramatic and most mysterious stories in human existence are episodes in world history. Unless they are from the Byzantine Period, the Middle Ages or Britain in the 18th century obviously. But that still leaves an awfully lot of history to read, consider and study.

Now I am not going to go off on one and go on and on relentlessly about government education policy and our Big Brother, we know best, one size fits all approach to the management of our education. Sorry to disappoint.

Instead I want to explain the relevance and importance of history to me as a marketing guru and to business. For this is one of the most frequent questions I get asked by young hot shots fresh out of university armed with their shiny business degrees. And I despair. They might have fed their brain with models and 2x2 matrices but they have starved their soul. And it is my mission to help them get back in touch with their heart. For the soul and the heart are as important in business as the rational and the brain.

History is the most important subject anyone can ever learn. Ok, I will accept that it might have limited relevance if you want to build a bridge, be a brain surgeon or a farmer, or work in health and safety (though maybe if you did want to work in health and safety and you did study history, you would understand its irrelevance) but for a career in business it is the best training anyone’s brains could have.

In explaining why, I want to move beyond the cliché so memorably summed up by Winston Churchill who once said that ‘those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it’. While true, the importance of history is far more than that.

For me as a marketer, history is about people. It is not about dates. Nor is it just about kings and queens and battles and stuff like that. It is about people, mostly ordinary people. People whose voices are only sometimes heard and their lives glimpsed. And it about understanding why people behave the way they do and the consequences of that behaviour on themselves, their communities and on history.

Marketing too is about people. It is about ensuring you understand the behaviour of people and how they will feel, think and act about your brand, product and service. So if you understand history, you understand people and you are well on the road to becoming a great marketer. Trust me on this one.

And there is another reason why history is great training.

In the days when today’s history was yesterday’s present and on News at Ten, I was studying the subject. Obviously history in those days was far easier as there was less of it around.

In those halcyon days of my acne and angst ridden youth, I was answering questions like was World War 2 inevitable; or was Henry the Eighth’s English reformation the start of modern Britain; or did the Norman Conquest wipe out the Anglo Saxon tradition of government and church. Today I am trying to find out if there is a market for a niche online savings proposition for a bank. And I am so grateful for my history training. Yes really.

Sure I am no longer required to go into the Treaty of Versailles; or discuss the setting up of a16th century English civil service new tools of government; or debate the significance of Bishop Wulfstan to the Norman church. But I am still required to assemble facts and data, to analyse these facts and to construct a logical and cogent argument that answers the question. Same as I did when I was studying Norman, Tudor and European history.

So in my world no one would ever get a job in marketing or in business unless they had a good history degree. Fortunately for all the accountants out there, many of whom now running major businesses, we are not in my world. More’s the pity.

And finally. Here’s a thought. Over the Christmas and New Year break I got lost and in doing so I finally understood the reasons behind the credit crunch. I am a man and when we get lost we stubbornly refuse to admit we are lost and to seek directions. We see it as a sign of weakness. Men run most banks. They were buying and selling and stuffing their balance sheets with a whole range of complex financial instruments described through an alphabet soup of TLAs, or three letter acronyms. They did not understand what was going on. And like the man lost somewhere in middle England, the wiring in our DNA, evolved over countless millennia, means we can not and will not ask for directions. The result, the credit crunch. Eat your heart out, Robert Peston.

And most finally, now that some of you seem to have got the hang of using the technology to post comments and pithy remarks, and I thank for you these, please feel free to suggest any ideas, topics or issues on which you would like to hear my thoughts and opinions. I will do requests.

Have a great week. Et este fortanatus.