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.

In defence of banks

Many happy returns to Cicero Speaks.

I take it you enjoyed conversing with me so much last week that you wanted to come back for more of the same, more of my thought provoking warm wit and wisdom. Thank you. I will try not to let you down.

And if this is your first time here. Welcome. Stick around. You will get soon the hang of this. And I hope you will be so stimulated by my thoughts and views on marketing, on business, on life, that you will want to come back and will want to take part in my Great Big Conversation.

And please let me have your thoughts on my thoughts. It is very lonely writing for you. Mr Google has laboured long and hard to allow you to comment on my words.

This week I want to stick up for banks. I know this is bound to be controversial but someone has to before we all get consumed by our choleric anger against them.

And before I start let me declare an interest. I am no apologist for the banking industry in this country but until recently I practised my marketing arts and science at one of these fine establishments. The banking industry has been good to me-it paid for my house, my car, indeed it funded my entire lifestyle, as it does for us all though in a very different way. And I do want the industry to be around to fund my old age which is coming up fast towards me. My future is almost behind me.

Now I may be stupid but I am not so stupid as to think that banks are entirely blameless in the situation we are now in. I understand that banks are guilty of humungous errors over the past few years. Only an idiot would think that if you lend money to a Tennessee trailer park resident with no income, no job and no assets, that you are going to get it back. And only someone who is severely learning disadvantaged would think it commercially sensible to buy these loans along with loans to his cousin from Texas, his wife’s sister in Alabama and his brother-in-law’s cousin’s wife’s friend in Florida. Sorry I forgot, that is exactly what the bankers did with our money.

Banking used to be easy. It was based on the 3-6-3 rule. You pay savers 3% for their money, lend at 6% and be on golf course for 3. But that was before the rocket scientists took over and decided to invent a whole new range of TLAs, or three letter acronyms, such as CDOs, CDS and WTFs, which no one, including me, understands. As my old boss (and in case my old boss is reading this, when I say old I mean former, you are not old, honest) used to say ‘if you don’t understand what you are buying and selling, don’t buy or sell it’. Wise words.

I think you will be with me so far. But you will no doubt be wondering how I can stand up for these morons. Let me try to explain. Let us look at why these bankers, and I know I am only one letter out, did what they did.

In some respects we must all share a responsibility for what happened, unpalatable as that might sound. Do we not believe we have an inalienable right to right buy a house with a cheap mortgage? Did we not think that our spending on cars, holidays, clothes and the rest via our flexible friends was a basic human right? And did we ever for a moment consider where the banks got the money to lend onto us?

Sure we gave the banks our savings to help fund the boom we have all enjoyed over the past few years but that was nowhere enough and so banks also got money to fund our insatiable desire for cheap borrowing from dodgier, riskier and more incomprehensible sources of funding. Yes I know the banks wanted us to borrow but we as consumers were not exactly slow in taking and spending it. Indeed to fund our borrowing ‘needs’ it is estimated banks need an additional £700bn over above what they get from savings. Where do you think this money is going to come from? Are we going to save an additional £700bn? I don’t know about you but I am a little brassick at the moment.

And now we all think we are all shareholders in these banks. We are not, except of course RBS where we are shareholders. As taxpayers we have only lent them the trifling sum of £40 odd billion plus a few more hundred billion in guarantees, soon we will be talking real money. And this money was given to them not so they could lend but so they could be safe and strong.

As a taxpayer I would like my share of this loan back. And I want to see banks big and strong and profitable, keeping our savings safe and generating profits to pay tax again. Don’t you?

This means that the banks have to lend sensibly and behave commercially. This does not give us the right, no matter how unfair it might seem, to demand higher savings rates, lower mortgage rates, increased lending to small businesses, an end to repossessions and even, and I kid you not, I even heard this on the radio, the right to 6 Nations rugby tickets since this is sponsored by one of the many banks we now think we own. I would like my money back as soon as possible

So going forward I would like the bank which has got my tax money to return to health at the earliest opportunity. I want it making good returns again, not excessive ones, good is good enough for me. I would like it to do this with great humility. And I want us as consumers to remember the part our greed played in bringing this about.

That is why I am standing up for banks.

And finally, here’s a thought. Are there any streets in London that are not being dug up? Everywhere you look there is a hole in the road. I play golf and I share my golf course with herds of rabbits, themselves inveterate hole diggers. I believe that there are less holes on my golf course than there are in central London currently. What is going on? Why has London taken on the appearance of an Ementhal cheese?

And that note, I’m off. See you again next week.

Ave atque vale. Et este fornatus.