Size Matters
I am writing this sitting in my garden. We dinosaurs know how to enjoy our retirement! It’s a beautiful sunny day, a soft breeze blowing and the flowers are all at their very best. The garden fascinates me. It always seems so improbable that from such small seeds large and beautiful plants will grow. They don’t last long though do they? A few days and they have reached the size and performed the function they were intended to, then fade and fertilise the next generation of plants. It’s the natural order of things.
A similar pattern seems to obtain in the commercial world when you come to think about it. I suppose there was once a man with a Bunsen Burner and a big idea that eventually became ICI and a bell-weather for the Stock Exchange. Certainly in my lifetime a number of such success stories have taken place. Sir Alan Sugar, Sir John Cohen, Sir James Goldsmith and many more, all had visions of where they wanted to get to, and got there. The businesses they built still perform well but not all of those who became commercial giants do. Which prompts the question: How big can you get before the natural order of things takes over, and the bubble bursts? I bet some of our banks can answer that question now. By the way, while we’re talking about banks; Have you noticed that the banks and others in the financial sector don’t offer to sell “services” any more. Now they sell “products”… What nonsense! That’s what I call marketing gone mad!
My first experience of really big business was when I joined the “London Evening News”, There were three London evenings then, “The Evening News”, “The Evening Standard”, and “The Star”, “The News” was the biggest both in circulation and physical size; it was a broadsheet. The other two were tabloids. All were constrained by some sort of control over the number of pages they could publish each issue. Probably a left over from the wartime paper rationing. Both sizes mattered and would become the subject of intense research some years later to decide which size was the more easily read. The result led to most broadsheets downsizing to tabloid.
My job was to sell classified advertisement space for the “Motors” category. It wasn’t strong when I joined, consisting of line after line of grey type-face, frankly it looked boring! I remembered the phrase coined by the man who taught me to sell. “If you want to sell it…show it!” I said as much to the manager of the department, Harry Joseph, and he promptly arranged for the advertisers in the category to illustrate their advertisements with photographs. Soon the other evening papers were offering the same service and “Motors” became a 'top of mind' category. It reached it’s optimum level commanding pages of ads instead of just columns. The ads, now containing photos, were no longer classified as classified, but were now called semi-display. Much to the irritation of the display advertisement department who swore we were poaching their business. Size mattered very much to them!
It all seemed to happen quite suddenly. Supermarkets made their appearance gobbling each other up as they struggled to grow, then they transformed into hypermarkets. To the apparent surprise of planners and politicians, these patterns of growth left in their wake a state of serious decline in the traditional high street, a decline that was accelerated by the advent of out of town retail parks and shopping malls that began springing up all over the place. Even greater change was looming, whole industries; Mining, Railways, Steel, Shipbuilding, The Docks, Cars, Motor Bikes all began to vanish from the scene, shrink to insignificance or be taken over by foreign capital and reduced in size and importance.
Following the pattern developing in the rest of the commercial world publishing houses began to merge. Now instead of being dedicated to the success of just one title, the Sales teams (Marketing departments came much later) were to sell groups of titles. Instead of someone with a vision owning and directing a newspaper, corporations now owned them and their characters changed, in my opinion not for the better. Circulations that had soared in the sixties and seventies plummeted in the eighties and nineties and currently show little sign of recovery. Will the Internet spell their doom? It was confidently predicted that commercial television would. I doubt it, they will learn to use the internet effectively in the same way as they learned to use television.
All this activity was of course, accompanied by much hand wringing by politicians, most of whom had never held a job in any form of industry but who naturally could be relied upon to supply all the advice and solutions to the problems their own ignorance of market structures had created. Strikes, riots and civil commotion of all kinds erupted from bemused work forces fighting to retain their jobs, unaware that it wasn’t just their firms that were failing it was their entire sector of the economy. All this was all illustrated by photos in the newspapers and a plethora of programmes on television. No one seemed to realise that two important movements in the social scene were taking place. On the one hand businesses had all become convinced that big was beautiful and were rushing to merge with one another as quickly as possible, while at the same time gigantic businesses that had reached their zenith were heading into decline within industries that were themselves becoming redundant….that was a new buzz word for a while. The one area that seemed to brush all these problems aside was the City of London and the financial sector. Our banking industry could be relied upon to maintain it’s position….. Now they are to be advised and regulated by politicians who have never been involved in the financial world but who are certain they can run it better than those who have been doing so for years. Keep your fingers crossed and hope that they don’t appoint themselves to the boards of the banks!
Big has become anything but beautiful, the companies with global activities are tooled to handle vast volumes and employ huge work forces. When one of those companies fail, the shock waves spread far and wide. Suddenly through no fault of their own, skilled people lose their livelihood. Fortunately the natural order of things, is as always, working in the background. The advent of the internet has given new impetus to the desire of people to be their own boss. New companies are starting up every day many becoming self employed. Whereas before it was expensive to commission and place advertisements on television or in the press it is now relatively cheap to launch a website and with the right marketing advice, start a business and tell the world what you have to offer. Size still matters but the future will be delivered by small businesses growing into big ones. Not too big though…..size matters!