Let's do Cultural Sensitivity

When an American client asked if I could provide cultural sensitivity advice I saw a rich vein.

While PR people divide up populations into target audiences, modern societies consist of an interlocking network of entrenched camps populated by people of diametrically opposed views, and here in the UK we’ve had plenty of time to dig ourselves in.

The prickly English relationship with the Scots and the Irish dates back to the Iron Age, while Yorkshire and Lancashire are still divided by the Wars of the Roses which finished just before Columbus set sail.

There are many other opposing coteries here that you ought to be aware of if you want to enter pubs with any confidence and in general avoid the kind of social gaffe which could result in a visit to one of our diminishing stock of accident & emergency units. For instance:

UPPER / LOWER CLASS: It’s only in society that scum settles at the bottom. At the top of the greasy pole here are your royals, aristocrats and investment bankers. Everyone else is middle class, whether they like it or not, except the homeless. Wealth is not the point. It’s about breeding.

Foreigners are outside of this system of course, and simply foreign. Their breeding, if any, is irrelevant to us. Their quaint kings and queens are of no interest now we no longer cement our national alliances by inter-marriage between royal families. Instead we now have the Eurovision Song Contest.

PRO / ANTI EUROPE: The credibility of the EU is undermined by the fact that it’s a political construct. Since the real issues are so opaque, this is strictly a meta-division, defined by which division you’re in, not whether or not you agree with its alleged stance, hence the vacuity of the current debate.

PROTESTANT / CATHOLIC: This really only matters in Scotland, Ireland and the afterlife. That’s Celts for you.

OXFORD / CAMBRIDGE: This is mainly important on Boat Race day, when people realise that shouting for one crew over the other is the only way to remain awake during the TV coverage.

You’ll note that some of the more obvious divisions (eg black/white, straight/gay, male/female, lawyer/non-lawyer) are missing here, along with left-hand/right-hand, which is only relevant in cricket – where it’s astonishingly important.

This is because we’ve had plenty of time to get over these and move on. Our divisions are arcane, difficult to spot, and of course they cement society together, because people are members of different combinations of them. It’s what cultural sensitivity is all about, here and everywhere.

This is a rich vein. More when I get back from the fishing trip.

Light my fire

New media such as blogs have hardly altered PR practice at all, say 21% of the 200 senior level communicators (including me, naturally) who make up the President’s Panel of The Chartered Institute of Public Relations (CIPR).

Well, the principles may not alter but all new communication systems change the practice – some more than others however.

For example, from my office I can see part of a medieval communication system – Ditchling Beacon, one of the highest points on the South Downs – where they’d light bonfires if they saw, for example, the Spanish Armada impudently sailing up the English Channel.

On the North Downs people would look out for Ditchling Beacon to light up so they could ignite their fire, and so on until the message reached the king. So, depending on where he was, he’d probably have been among the last to know.

But the system was essentially binary – either the thing was on fire or it wasn’t. Hello, Ditchling Beacon’s lit up – what does he mean? Has anyone seen my pig? The Middle Ages are over? It’s cold up here?

They must have agreed beforehand what it would mean – OK, the next time I light up my beacon it means the Spanish Armada’s coming, right?

So there will have been teams of messengers charging up and down, telling everyone what the next bonfire would mean, and meanwhile, out in the Channel, your Spanish sea captains would see the beacon blazing away – Well, they’ve spotted us then (yawn).

Of course I’m probably simplifying things. Give people a communication system and they’ll find ways to exploit it – maybe they had several fires on each beacon. Hey, he’s lit up three fires at Ditchling, so ... (looks it up) ... Tobacco’s Been Discovered.

Or maybe they varied the colour – Ho, a blue flame ... (translates) ... The Bloke on the Beacon After Yours is Sleeping With Your Wife.

Anyway, you can see why this failed to energise the nascent PR business – not enough scope for manipulating the content. What price “The Spanish Armada, sponsored by Toledo Swords SA, is coming”?

Such simple systems have survived into modern times however. During the cold war, we had a four minute warning system here, set up to inform the nation that we were about to be hit by a barrage of ghastly foreign nuclear warheads.

During these 240 seconds we were expected to get our tax affairs straight, return our library books, dig a deep underground shelter and lay in provisions. I wouldn’t have stood a chance of course, but 400 years ago I’d have been among the first to know about the Spanish Armada.

Seeing the big picture

Salvador Dali could see the big picture. One of his works is called Fifty Abstract Pictures Which as Seen from Two Yards Change into Three Lenins Masquerading as Chinese and as Seen From Six Yards Appear as the Head of a Royal Bengal Tiger.

From even further away it looks like a coloured blob, like all paintings, but that’s not the point.

At the other end of the scale there is HD Turing’s 1948 essay The Problem of the Olive (we’re talking about flies that trout eat) in which he concludes that the best way to distinguish between three species of Baetis is to examine the colour of their eyes. He inscrutably declares that in B. rhodani “the eyes are madder brown (which has a distinctly red tinge)”.

Here is a picture so small as to be invisible to the naked eye. While he’s got his magnifying glass out comparing eyes the next bloke on the riverbank has tied on a hairy green-looking thing and caught the bloody fish.

In British Lite Culture we take the Turing approach. Thus, last week there was a nasty accident on the anticlockwise carriageway of Europe’s busiest road, the M25 – London’s orbital motorway – in which six people died. The police closed the carriageway for nine hours, bringing chaos to the surrounding area and presumably costing millions of pounds.

Now, I have nothing against the British police, despite having been searched (dogs and guns, the full works) under Section 44 of the Terrorism Act while provocatively dropping my wife off at Gatwick Airport.

But increasingly they’re missing the big picture. After all, what exactly is to be learned from a fingertip search of 500 metres of motorway? When I ask this people say “we need to know what happened”, and at first sight this seems sensible.

However, the job of the Highways Agency and the traffic police is not to pick obsessively over history but to keep traffic flowing. Their efforts on the M25 will end up as free consultancy for the insurance companies but I doubt if anyone else will truly benefit – certainly not the thousands of people whose lives were massively disrupted while skid-marks were measured.

In the PR business, as elsewhere, seeing the big picture helps your career trajectory as well as your client. Those who ask Why are we doing this in 10pt? stay writing press releases, while those who ask Why are we doing this at all? get promoted to account director

Remember that while small picture people re-arrange the deckchairs on the Titanic, the big picture types are getting into lifeboats (and the serious spin doctors are telling everyone we just stopped to take on fresh ice).

Fly-fishing your way to business success

The trout season is underway on British rivers, and fly-fishers are exhuming the kind of clothing you normally see on scarecrows, shaking the bottle-tops out of their fishing bags, filling their hip flasks, reviewing their tackle and buying bizarre hats.

Those with jobs know the close relationship between work and play – and not only because one pays for the other.

For example, PR people have put fly-fishing on their “active” corporate hospitality menu to spice up the constant barrage of golf, clay pigeon shooting and lunch. A summer’s day spent stalking trout on a chalkstream half a mile from your guest is not perfect for deal-making, but it’s obviously better than being roped together in a blizzard on the north face of the Matterhorn.

But fly-fishers also believe they learn business lessons without actually having to go to the office. And even if they are wrong, at the very worst they are by now millions of trout ahead. Here’s an initial selection of such wisdom.

Getting into rivers is easier than getting out. If you've waded downstream in a powerful river, the chances are that you won’t be able to wade back up – and in several of the rivers I’ve fallen into you'll also by now be wobbling on the brink of an invisible slippery ledge, with a sheer drop on three sides. Lesson: always have an exit strategy – a fall-back position could involve drowning.

Why have one fishing rod when 40 or 50 would do just as well? Fly-fishers maintain that you need them in different lengths, actions and materials – and buy more rods than they ever use. In business one obvious parallel is financial reporting, where the x-dimensional views of every last penny can obscure the fact that you’re going bust.

Ugly flies can catch beautiful fish. Successful fly-fishers know that the flies they tie are designed to catch fish, not win prizes. In businesses like advertising and PR there’s a temptation to see analogies with the trophy cabinets of football clubs. But in sport, the trophies are the objective. In business we should look at the client’s ROI as well as our own.

Hell and high water are all in a day’s fishing. Although you returned from the river drenched, broke and knackered, you’re going to do it again tomorrow because you love it. Back in the office, if you’re not having fun you’re doing something wrong.

David Shenk, in his perceptive book Data Smog, says: one of the most vivid consequences of the information glut is a culture awash in histrionics.

PR people are not wholly to blame for this but they’re among the prime suspects. Nearly 400 years ago, legendary English angler Izaak Walton said: Study to be quiet.

These four words are worth a business book to themselves but, taking his advice, I’ll shut up now.