the times | Friday August 28 2020 1GM 41

CommentBusiness

Slogans might sound good to the

ad men, but do they really work?

S

ince the financial crisis,

Britain’s economic recovery

has been broadly sluggish.

One success stands out,

however. The country has

enjoyed an employment boom over

the past decade. That’s going to

change because of the coronavirus.

As the job retention scheme and its

equivalent for the self-employed are

wound down, joblessness will surge.

That’s unavoidable and is not an

argument against ending the

furlough scheme. The question for

policymakers is how best to cushion

the blow to the newly unemployed

and quickly get them back into

work. There will be a vital role for

the state.

There are various ways of looking

at the long-term performance of the

labour market. Figures this week

show that the proportion of workless

households has been decreasing

steadily since 2010. It stood at

13.1 per cent as of the second quarter

of this year, down 0.6 percentage

points from a year earlier. It’s

important, because an entire

household without work will tend to

remain in that state.

All the evidence, however, is that

the trend will reverse sharply as job

support schemes end. The reason for

these schemes was compelling when

Rishi Sunak, the chancellor,

announced them in March. The

pandemic was an immense external

shock to the economy: paying

businesses to retain their workers,

and allowing public borrowing to

take the strain, would contain the

damage to the economy’s long-term

productive capacity.

But the shock will have enduring

effects. Entire sectors, such as

hospitality and retailing, will have to

reconfigure the way they do

business. If they have to enforce

social distancing (or, equivalently,

customers stay away for fear of

infection), their revenues will suffer

while their fixed costs remain

constant. For many companies in

customer-facing sectors, their

operational leverage — the ratio of

fixed to variable costs — doesn’t give

them much leeway. They have to pay

fixed costs for rent and utilities and

their only way of cutting costs in

order to survive is to reduce

headcount.

The role of government cannot be

to continue subsidising jobs that

otherwise would not be

commercially viable. There is a

history to this. Governments of both

parties in the 1970s were wont to

spend large sums of taxpayers’

money to support ailing companies

for fear of job losses, both directly

and in allied industries. It was a bad

policy. Supporting what was then

British Leyland, the volume car

manufacturer, may have made a sort

of political sense, but it ignored the

fact that the company’s product

range was substandard. To persist in

supporting jobs in companies whose

products or services don’t attract

buyers is merely postponing the

reckoning.

Nor can government simply stand

back from the present crisis and

allow the market to reach an

equilibrium. The companies that are

no longer viable were not “lame

ducks” before the crisis: they’ve

been damaged by an external event

that they couldn’t reasonably insure

against. The same goes for their

employees. The money that the

Treasury has been spending on

subsidising jobs should be redirected

rather than turned off.

Companies that may have a future

if they can successfully restructure

should have tax credits for the

purpose (for example, restaurants

that need to redesign their

premises). Workers whose skills are

no longer marketable need to be

retrained and universal credit needs

to be made more generous to

provide a safety net while those

workers look for new employment

opportunities. There is no serious

prospect of reducing the ratio of

public debt to GDP while this

disruption lasts, nor would it be

economically beneficial to try.

Helping the labour market to

recover is going to be the most

pressing issue of economic policy in

managing our way out of the crisis.

Oliver Kamm

At this time of year,

as a child I was

taken to the John

Lewis department

store to buy my

school uniform. Scratchy flannel

shorts, knee-high socks and brown

lace-ups that entailed you sitting in

the shoe department, clutching a

ticket from one of those take-a-

number machines awaiting a

matronly figure to measure your feet.

Every trip, I would study the retailer’s

slogan with puzzlement: Never

Knowingly Undersold.

To a six-year-old, it was as

mysterious and complex as a Doctor

Who episode. What did it mean? My

mother must have explained and I

suppose I grasped the central point,

but to this day I have found people’s

sentimental attachment to these three

words completely baffling.

It is objectively a very bad slogan.

For starters, it contains not only a

double negative but is also in the

passive voice, uses a stupidly archaic

word (have you ever approached a

shopkeeper and said “I’m terribly

sorry but Argos down the road has

undersold you on this Kenwood

blender”) and manages — in the

space of a mere three words — to

include a caveat. “Never Knowingly”

is mealy mouthed. Not “Never

Undersold” but “Never Knowingly”.

Well, officer, I never knowingly

stabbed my neighbour and buried him

under the patio.

That, though, is not why Sharon

White, the new boss, has flagged that

she’s likely to ditch the slogan. She —

perfectly reasonably — is more

interested in cold, hard economics

than clear English. The promise that

John Lewis won’t be beaten on price

was always problematic when the

store’s reputation was based on selling

decent-quality, mostly own-brand

products, which, by definition, you

can’t directly compare with other

retailers’ products.

But the moment that the internet

came along and John Lewis said “Ah,

when we said Never Knowingly

Undersold we meant only when

compared with rival high street stores,

not Amazon or AO.com” the slogan

became completely untenable. It

should have been axed 20 years ago.

Better Late Than Never, I suppose.

Which might be a good replacement

slogan, considering John Lewis’s tardy

customer service during Covid.

It makes you wonder about the

utility of corporate slogans. This week

KFC announced it was suspending its

Finger Lickin’ Good one because “it

doesn’t quite fit in the current

environment”. The fast-food

restaurant claims it isn’t Covid-

suitable. It is a complete stunt and a

clever one, too, accompanied by large

billboard adverts. If you are licking

your own, clean, fingers, what’s the

problem?

However, you never can

underestimate sections of the British

public to be willfully offended by

commercials. In March the

Advertising Standards Authority

received 163 complaints about a KFC

television advert, which featured

people licking their (own) fingers,

claiming that this was grossly

irresponsible in a pandemic.

The point is that Finger Lickin’

Good is catchy, memorable and

authentic in a way that Never

Knowingly Undersold is not. And

getting us to talk about it by

pretending to temporarily ban the

phrase is a genius bit of marketing.

The vast majority of corporate

slogans, however, are pretty awful —

and a hangover from the Mad Men

era, when powerful advertising

executives believed they could make

you fall in love with a brand with just

three or four clever words: The Real

Thing; The Future’s Bright, The

Future’s Orange; The Best a Man Can

Get; Every Little Helps.

Most are portentous and

meaningless but suited an age when

monolithic companies dominated a

small number of broadcast channels

and advertising outlets. Just Do It,

Nike’s slogan launched in 1988, is

hailed as one of the all-time greats,

responsible for transforming a

running shoe company into a global

sportswear giant. Really? The ad man

responsible, Dan Wieden, later

admitted it was inspired by the last

words of convicted murderer Gary

Gilmore, who said “Let’s do it!” to the

firing squad before his execution. So if

you’re wondering what the ‘it’ refers

to, it’s not going for a jog, it’s

gruesome death.

My favourites are often the silliest

because they are the most

memorable. Red Bull’s disgusting

energy drink achieved cult status

partly thanks to its tagline, which I

guarantee you can remember, even if

you haven’t touched the stuff. I can’t

pass a jar of a certain sauce in a

supermarket aisle without saying “I

feel like Chicken Tonight, like

Chicken Tonight!” while doing the

stupid clucking arm actions — to the

cringeing embarrassment of my

children, who are far too young to

remember the adverts, which stopped

airing in the 1990s. I never buy the

stuff, mind you.

This is the problem. A 2014 study in

the Journal of Business Research

suggested that the memorability of a

slogan was unrelated to how much we

liked it. Or were willing to spend

money on it.

Until this year, slogans were slowly

on the way out. The successful tech

brands of the 21st century — Uber,

Deliveroo, Facebook — don’t bother

with catchphrases. Who needs to be

reminded of a brand when it’s on the

homescreen of the device you look at

every hour of the day?

Then along came Covid and, to give

credit to the shambolic government,

it came up with a brilliant, simple,

easy-to-understand slogan that

dominated our lives with a menacing

certainty. No antiquated words, no

passive voice or double negatives, no

caveats: Stay Home, Protect the NHS,

Save Lives. Except we stayed at home,

we protected the NHS, we did not

save lives.

This is why slogans are so tricky. If

they don’t do what they say on the tin

(to borrow another memorable one),

they soon start to sound ridiculous.

So farewell Never Knowingly

Undersold, good

riddance Stay

Alert. I will not

mourn your

passing.

‘‘

’’

Harry Wallop is a consumer

journalist and broadcaster.

Follow him on Twitter @hwallop

Oliver Kamm is a Times leader writer

and columnist. Twitter: @OliverKamm

The Treasury should

redirect job retention

money, not turn it off

Workless households

22%

20

18

16

14

12

96 99 02 05 08 11 14 18 20

Source: ONS

April to June

Harry Wallop