NEITHER OF US HAD DONE much selling. We had been in occupations where our role was to think of clever ruses to ward off salespeople, and we had got quite good at it.
For an IT manager in the 1980s, the main telephone sales calls were from staff agencies or from companies trying to sell training courses. If I picked up the telephone and a voice said, “Hi. It’s Tracey here from PYO, I was wondering if you had any requirement for contract staff, we have a number of well-qualified and experienced people on our books who are available now and we only deal with the finest and highly employable personnel”, I would respond with, “Sounds interesting, perhaps you could find me a job. I’m getting fed up here”.
Tracey would then ask me to send her my CV and I would reply to the effect that I could only do that if she could give me some idea of what juicy jobs she might be able to offer me since I did not want to waste my time on unproductive paperwork. This would lead nowhere and eventually Tracey would get off the telephone as quickly as possible and mark me down as a time-wasting cretin, to be avoided on her future sales calls. With luck.
Similarly with people trying to sell training courses. I would say that in our organisation, if there was something wrong with the systems we changed the system, not try to change the people to fit the system, to do that would, as I was sure they appreciate, be a crass approach. As I left the industry the training sales people were just beginning to learn to have the courage to say, “Don't be stupid, you idiot”. I got out before needing to think up a counter to that one.
Then when I got home from work, people would ring to sell me timeshares. I would answer the telephone and a voice would say, “Congratulations Mr Collier, you have just won a holiday for two”.
“Where?”
“In Orlando, Florida”, with a contrived gush of awe in the voice.
“Orlando!”, I would reply, “I’d pay you to keep me away from there”.
Timeshare sales people are trained to promise the customer anything, provided they get them to the sales demo.
“Where would you like to go then?”
“Kyrgyzstan .”
“Where?”
“Kyrgyzstan .”
"Where’s that?"
“It’s in central Asia, the men wear cardboard hats and slap each other about the forehead and down then large glasses of vodka flavoured with sheep dung.”
“Never heard of it.”
“You’ve never heard of it? Sounds like another good reason for wanting to go there.”
“All right then, we’ll send you there. All you have to do is to come to our presentation on Saturday.”
"Send me the tickets to Kyrgyzstan and I’ll come.”
“You get the tickets after the presentation.”
“No tickets, no presentation.”
“No presentation, no tickets.”
“I can live without a visit to Kyrgyzstan this week, it’s you that wants me to come to the presentation.”
“See you Saturday, then.”
“Only if I see those tickets.”
High-pressure timeshare sales people would then telephone on Saturday morning and ask why I was not at the presentation, feigning anger and telling me how I had wasted their time by promising to come to something and then not turning up, and insisting that I should rush to the presentation straight away if I had any pretensions to be an honest man. They would deny all knowledge of any discussion about tickets to Kyrgyzstan , but I could retort that, it was Kyrgyzstan or nothing. They enjoyed the game up to a point anyway, and so, up to a point, did I.
The hospitality business is nowhere near as sophisticated as IT or timeshare sales and it is much easier to put sales people off kindly. Usually they are trying to sell advertising space and with a clear product you can soon prove that their publication is entirely inappropriate for you.
“May I speak to the person who deals with your advertising, please.”
“That could be me.”
“My name is Amanda, and I’m calling on behalf of ABC Promotions. I expect you have you heard of our products.”
“I might have, it depends what products you produce.”
“We are one of the country’s leading publishers of holiday magazines. Research has shown that social classes A, B and C form 85% of our readership, hence we can reach an above average proportion of high-spending customers. We are currently doing a promotion on tourism in your area and . . .”
“Wait! Hold on there. We require a more specialised breakdown than purely social class as our product is a very particular one. We don’t want a dining room full of elderly couples with nothing to say to each other, it’s not good for the image. Do your readers have any friends?”
“Well, research has shown that we can reach a high proportion of high-spending customers and other hotels have all expressed great pleasure with the results of advertising in our publication.”
Whatever you do at this point, do not ask who these other hotels are, otherwise you are put on the defensive, the onus being on you to telephone them to check their level of pleasure, which you have better things than to do. Instead, stick to your course:
“Yes, yes, but we have identified our target market as being young professional persons from the large cities, typically accountants, lawyers, management consultants and successful sales people. We look to publications which focus on our target market.”
“Excellent. All those people you mention will be in social groups A, B and C, with high disposable income, just the sort who read our magazine.”
“Maybe, but your social groups also include retired colonels, maiden aunts of private means, bank managers and car showroom franchisees, people we find do not respond well to what we have to offer. Advertising in a publication such as yours would therefore be too much of a scattergun approach, which I am sure you, as an expert in selling techniques will know is not to be recommended.”
At this point, you may get the question, “Where do you advertise then?”
“We apply scientific market research here. Our main source of data is the bedroom waste paper bin. When people have said they enjoyed their stay and they seem to be the sort of person pertinent to our target market group, we look to see which publications have been left behind in the waste-paper bins in their room, and we put the main slice of our advertising budget into those.”
“And what’s the winner?”
What you answer to this is not really important. Say, “Model Railways Monthly”, or something, because the person calling knows there is nothing they can do to get their publication into your guests’ waste bins, and the most they might try is, “Perhaps your guests are leaving those publications behind in the bin, and taking the ones they actually read home with them”.
Clever, but weak. One or two sales people have had the wit to try that one, but they know it has moved from the sales pitch to the clever answer, and they know they have lost it, to our benefit.
There is another tack that advertising sales people use which can be harder to counter. This is when the caller wants you to advertise in some publication, the proceeds of which are going to the hospital, the police, the fire brigade or some other, to them, enormously worthy charity. If the publication is local then it is fairly easy for a hotel or guesthouse to avoid, because it is local. You simply point out to the caller that you are a hotel or guesthouse and local people, since they live in the proximity, are the group you least might be expected to advertise to, do they think you are mad or something? More distant or widespread publications cannot be put off with this tack, so we keep a pet charity and we tell callers that, as they will of course appreciate, it would be inappropriate for us to dilute our benevolence.
But second only to advertising, the thing that people call you to sell you, is insurance. Half the world seems to be trying to sell insurance. While cooking breakfast at the weekend, we often listened to the commercial radio station, Classic FM, and contemplate the Martians landing sometime in the future, doing a social study of the people on earth based upon what they listen to on the radio, and coming to the conclusion that the only things the British spend their money on are insurance, savings, pensions and cars. “Dese peepol”, they’ll say, “no vunder dey look so bloody ill, if dats all dey vant to do wiz dere dosh!”
Insurance salespeople are usually a bit more sophisticated and persistent than advertising salespeople. They find out when your annual insurance premiums are next due, and call you a month or two before to ask if they can give you a quote, which they are sure will be less than you are paying now. There are two ways of dealing with this. The first, is to be honest.
“Insurance, you know, is the most boring subject known to humankind. If I’m paying a bit over the going rate then I’m happy to do this and so sub-contract the subject and not have to think about it more than is absolutely necessary.”
Alternatively, you can be a bit more scientific, “The difference between you and our present broker is that I know him, so the strategy is low-risk, whereas switching to someone I don’t know would be high-risk, and as someone steeped in the intricacies of insurance you will of course appreciate that I want to take an actuarial view about the level of risk I am exposing myself to.”
I did not usually use this second tack, though, for fear the person at the other end of the telephone might try to sell me an insurance policy against it.
It is extraordinary, that many of the bodies who claim to be able to assist you with marketing, including the guidebook publishers and the ‘Quality Guilds’, (organisations that collect businesses as members and try to promote them as maintainers of defined sets of standards), try to sell you insurance as a membership benefit . When they are asking you to subscribe, they point out that one of the advantages to you in joining their organisation, is that they will offer you low-cost insurance. The Martians, when they arrive, will find this even more evidence for my pallid look.
WARDING OFF SALES PEOPLE is all very well, but where do you actually advertise your business to any effect? This is the question we had to ask ourselves rather urgently, if we were to keep our head above the water.
Our existing clientele were for the most part elderly and wanted the traditional country hotel, or what they perceived to be that. The local people wanted a restaurant where they could drop in, some once a week for a drink, some on anniversaries and birthdays for a celebratory meal. All very understandable, but in a rural, sparsely-populated area of Britain, almost impossible to make a living out of. Even during the supposedly affluent times of the mid-1980s, with the proprietors well-known and popular in town and the place having a reputation for fun, good food and easy access, the business was not generating enough income to make a decent living for its owners. The truth is that in an area of low population, the only way to get enough customers to sustain a hotel or restaurant business is to attract people from a wide catchment area.
How could we attract them? We looked at the problem from two angles, the first question was, what can we provide that will bring people to this somewhat remote, under-promoted and facilities-sparse area, in sufficient numbers to sustain our business? And the second was, which groups of people are there who are large in number, under-advertised to, form loose networks with each other, tend to look at common publications, and have a relatively high disposable income?
The second of these sounds like a marketing manager’s fantasy. Everyone wants to find the perfect audience, people who have plenty of money and are identifiable as a responsive target. But we had to find one, or we could not market effectively. Putting an ad in the Tourist Board magazine saying, ‘A warm welcome awaits you at . . .’ would have been useless because everywhere else in the area and in every other area too was doing that. Why should people come to us if we are the same as everywhere else? They will drop by if they happen to want to come to the area anyway, but that is not worth spending money on advertising for.
We found our marketing manager’s dream, there was one, and it kept us afloat while we developed the meetings centre that we had come here for.
There were a number of group types we contemplated. For example The Elderly. We discovered a hotel, not that far from us, who had successfully concentrated on the over-50s leisure market. It shunned the tourism authorities’ classification standards. Like us, the man who had achieved his success in this way came to the business with no experience of country hotels at all. He looked at the problem, and he developed his key selling point which was attention to detail; logging every guest’s favourite everythings on computer so that when they return, their individual preferences are recognised and remembered.
We could do that, we have the technology, but it is a long-term strategy. The hotelier who had gained his success this way had been very clear not to try to muddle his product with a venture into conferences, banqueting, meals in the lounge and fitness clubs. This was another key to his success, not having his target-market guests kept away from the facilities they had come for by having to negotiate a wedding party. We could do that too, but we wanted to run a meetings and training centre. It was one or the other, so The Elderly as a target was out.
As an alternative, we thought about the large-readership special-interest magazines. We had heard that the three largest readership publication types were those aimed at anglers, gardeners, and railway enthusiasts, with golf another close contender. Attracting anglers to an area where there was not much in the way of fish, was, we thought, an uphill marketing exercise way beyond our expertise. By the same token, gardeners would presumably need a garden or two to come for.
Train spotters, or railway enthusiasts, were certainly worth considering. When we lived in Cambridge we were quite close to the London-to-Cambridge railway line, and when a steam train came by on one of the special excursion days the effect was extraordinary. Vast hordes of men, women and children turned out, lining the platforms and lineside footpaths, taking photographs, waiting for hours for the inevitably delayed train to smoke by, commenting on the finer points of the rivets in expectation of the great event. The male members of this army seemed to be predominantly bearded, with wild grey hair and a jacket that sagged at the pockets and elbows. Where did they come from? We never saw them at any other time. Wherever it was, there were certainly a lot of them. A potentially large customer base perhaps?
Our country hotel had a possible advantage with regard to this market; it was near a popular and picturesque railway which, as things go, had a fairly frequent supply of steam engines. But would this supply be frequent enough? It only happened during the summer on one Saturday per month. No, we decided. The rest of the year the railway’s landscape stayed equally picturesque, and the local railway station was especially charming during slack times owing to the chickens which came to peck your socks and sandals on the platform, but we felt that the woolly hair and beards would come for the steam trains, they would not come for the chickens.
Golfers were a stronger possibility, but by good fortune we learned something about golfers early enough to avoid making too many mistakes in this area. Golfers want 18 holes. Our local course is surrounded by the most sublime hills and has a club house among the friendliest in the country, selling bacon, eggs, sausage and chips all day. But it is only 9 holes, and these golfers, they need 18. Yet again, insurmountable negatives.
Is it all hopeless? Is there no solution to this problem? What about the Quakers? We had already contemplated the possibility of gearing ourselves up to appeal to Quakers, but had let the idea go for fear that Tricia, who wanted a pageant with flat hats and aprons, might try to compete on the richness of her scrambled eggs and so muddy the water somewhat. But perhaps that had been hasty. Our area is of significance to Quakers for two reasons. The first is that is has the oldest Friends’ Meeting House in the north of England. The second is that it is where George Fox first preached to a congregation.
George Fox is generally recognised as the father of the Quaker movement and he has a certain appeal for us in his position as spiritual mentor in that he was, in reality, rather disreputable, and was above all else, a survivor. The origins of Quakerism have to be set in the context of the first half of the seventeenth century, when the question of religion was exercising the minds of people far more than it tends to these days. British society was changing very dramatically and Protestantism, which arguably had been promoted originally in the country as a mechanism through which the ruling aristocracy could undermine the authority of the established (Catholic) church, was building up an ethic which, again arguably, led eventually to the Industrial Revolution. Historians might argue over which was the chicken and which the egg, however the effect was that, alongside much dispute and factioning, there was a growing urbanisation and a strengthening middle class.
George Fox was a dissenting preacher from Fenny Drayton in Leicestershire who found, in the Westmorland hills, some like-thinking souls. The story goes that he chose this area to make his first real public speech. The place he preached is marked by a plaque. It is by a rock on a windy, empty hillside with little human habitation nearby. Presumably he was, quite sensibly, hedging his bets.
George’s confidence grew in line with the number of people prepared to offer him a meal and he preached more widely, and as was the custom of the time with people who appeared to be fermenting public dissent, he kept getting arrested. He was not the only evangelising Quaker to be thrown into jail in the most insalubrious conditions, and it nearly killed him. Most of the others, it did kill, but somehow George survived and his name therefore lives on today. We have to afford him our admiration.
The Quakers are similar to the Jews in some respects. They have both been persecuted and, through an effective bar on entering the British university system have tended to do rather well. The other similarity, of equal importance from our point of view, is that the respective groups tend to all know each other, or say they do.
So far so good, but you cannot instantly identify a Quaker. A Quaker does not have a hooked nose and a bald head. A Quaker may tend towards corduroy trousers and an un-ironed shirt, but this does not mark him or her out specifically, so a Quaker does not have any difficulty in feeling comfortable walking in to any hotel and asking for a room. Furthermore, Quakers are often accepting folks, in the scheme of things. Uncle Jonathan, he of the memorable Christmas trousers, and his wife Auntie Brenda, are attenders at Quaker Meeting. Some time after we took over our hotel they were visiting west Wales, where their experience of a guesthouse included entering the owner’s quarters in the middle of the night to turn off the blaring television, the owner’s children having fallen asleep in front of it, and watching the owner’s son dive into their vacated seat after breakfast, to enthusiastically finish off their leftovers. They did not complain as many people would, they just accepted that it was one of life’s delightfully excruciating experiences.
We are in an area of significance to Quakers, but that is not going to be enough to draw them in. It would have to be our product that did that. Could we pitch that product right? Of course we could, but that was not the image we were aiming for. It would have meant changing our tack again. Some places have successfully targeted just this market but we were looking for something shorter-term, while we got our meetings and training centre ideas off the ground.
Think again.
What groups of people are there who are large in number, under-advertised to, form loose networks with each other, tend to look at the same publications, and have relatively high disposable income? Oh yes. Of course. Obvious, silly. Gay men and lesbians.
It is very easy to reach gay men and lesbians, you simply place an advertisement in the gay press. We chose Gay Times. But there is more to advertising than that, you need to be geared up to deal with the enquiries and you need to present a product that will make your customers both wish to come back and remember to tell others about you.
We ourselves are not gay in any sense of the word, morose heterosexuals is a more accurate description, and we were aware that this might lead to some resentment, to a feeling of being exploiters for purely financial gain, but we also knew that not all gay men and women want the gay-bars scene. There is a myth that all gay men want to do is prance about wearing little else but their tattoos and all gay women want is to sit barefoot in three-quarter length trousers flashing their dentures at each other. Some do, but there are also many who simply like to be able to spend a quiet weekend with a friend without being sniggered about. It is this latter group that we directed our advertising at.
There are some disadvantages to targeting this particular group. The first is that gay men tend to telephone with an enquiry at round about midnight. If the telephone rang after 10 o’clock we would say to each other, “It’s a gay man wanting a brochure”, and sure enough:
“Hello, I saw your ad and I wondered if you can tell me where you are”.
“We’re in Sedbergh.”
“Where's that?”
“It’s in the north of England, in the country, about an hour and a quarter north of Blackpool.” Blackpool is the Sydney or San Francisco of North West England. The story goes that, in its heyday as a seaside resort, there was a shop selling novelties and seaside gifts which, dating from a time when the language had different meanings from today, was innocently named, ‘Go Gay’. Two men opened up a wine-bar nearby and with more of-the-moment meaning and humour, named it ‘Gone Gay’. The thing somehow mushroomed from there, so that Blackpool has become the place in the north most advertised in the gay press. We could therefore relate our location in general to Blackpool.
“What sort of people do you get there?”
“All sorts, we don’t discriminate, though we prefer to avoid insurance salesmen if possible.”
“What about the local bars?”
“The local bars?”
“Yes, are there any, you know . . . lively ones?“
“There aren’t any local bars as such. One or two pubs smelling faintly of sheep. Not exactly a scene, you could say.”
Then we would either take a booking or we would not, depending on what the caller was looking for. Perfect. Everything clear right from the beginning, minimal likelihood of a mismatch of expectation versus reality. Contrast this with a ‘normal’ couple looking up our hotel in the guidebook, making a booking, arriving expecting whatever their image of a hotel happens to be, then feeling cheated because there is no Beaujolais on the wine list.
So although, unknown to them, we tended to take bookings from gay men while we had no clothes on, we in general were happy with the result and better still the calls did not come when we were in the middle of cooking dinner.
The second disadvantage we found with gay men is their unerring unreliability. They had a greater than average tendency not to turn up or to turn up late, or sometimes, though less often, to arrive ridiculously early. This could be on arrival, after a day out, or more predictably, for breakfast.
It is certainly not only gay men who can let you down after having booked, and there is a routine to go through to minimise the effect of this. First, we learned to ask for a credit card number and explain we will claim a deposit against the credit card in case of non-arrival. If the caller says they have no credit card, then if there is enough time between call and date of arrival, ask them to send a deposit. If this is impossible, say that you will hold the room until a certain time, say 6pm, and if they are going to be later than that they should phone you or you may let it to someone else. We have never yet had to carry out any of these threats, yet where we have not taken the precautions we have had no-shows. It can seem extraordinary to some people that you are so untrusting in this way, but it does seem to work.
Some guesthouses refuse to have anything to do with credit cards because they have to pay a commission on the transactions. They say, “If I don’t take credit cards, people have to pay me by cash or by cheque. I don’t see why I should have to pay three or four per cent of their bill, most people have a chequebook and if not, they can pay by cash, there’s a cash dispenser at the bank in town”. This has always seemed to us to be a most short-sighted attitude. “Remove all barriers to entry”, a marketing adviser would say to these proprietors. We would add that credit cards are a mighty useful discouragement against no-shows too. They added a measure of civilisation and humanity to our lives. Certainly credit cards can be a dangerous and unsavoury aspect of modern-day living if used without care, but from our perspective they improved the quality of our life considerably.
The regular unreliability of gay men is not particularly a problem, except that you need to be a bit laid back around breakfast and checking-out times.
The next disadvantage to the gay market, or pink pound as it is sometimes delightfully known, is not really a disadvantage at all, once one becomes aware of it as a curious observation. Gay men, upon sitting down to dinner or breakfast, need to get up to go to the lavatory. Usually if it is a couple, only one partner does this. Despite our being presumptuous enough to develop theories about all sorts of human behaviour, this one we have no idea about, though the phenomenon is very marked. It can be a bit annoying, when you have just served up a steaming bowl of something delicious that spoils when cold, but once the behaviour is recognised, you put up with it and do not take it personally.
The final and only real problem with gay men and lesbians is that they tend to smoke rather a lot. This is not too surprising as smoking members of the population typically belong to those groups marked out by low self-esteem. What the link is between smoking and low self-esteem our women’s monthly magazine psychology lessons never seem to tell us either, but it is certainly a noticeable phenomenon. If you want to run a hotel that smokers do not come to, go for people in middle-class jobs with middle-of-the-road lifestyles.
As for the effect on other guests, unless a gay couple happen to be cuddling in the lounge, as does sometimes happen, or unless a man happens to be wearing a lot of make-up, the majority of other guests do not recognise anything out of their view of the ordinary. Most people tend to see only that which they expect and are familiar with and a vast number of ‘ordinary’ people do not think they have ever met anyone who is gay. Cuddling in the lounge can be a bit of a giveaway but then the other guests just think you are a very Christian and worthy person for being so tolerant of these odd people who have turned up in your hotel. All benefit here.
And are gay men and women resentful of being marketed to by proprietors of a hotel who do not themselves prefer people of the same gender? No, of course not, not if you treat gays and lesbians like you would a train spotter or golf enthusiast, as someone who happens to have an interest or compulsion that is different from your own. The key to the product lay in the normalness.
For us, the really great advantage of focusing on gay men and women was that they could come from London, Melrose, Northampton, Ollerton, Preston, Queensferry, Rhyader or Solihull. A very wide catchment area, with food tastes that tended to be just as eclectic. Thus we began to fulfil our missions both social and economic: to increase the volume of business in a sustainable way, looking towards the future in terms of both services and product provided.
No, not really. What we were actually doing was finding a customer base that kept us going while we developed our original idea. Focusing just on the gay community, if that is what it can be called, was not our original mission and to have developed that line of marketing approach much further would have caused us to lose sight of our original goal. To be a hotel you have to be available. It is no good if you are unable to take people most of the times that they want your service, your reputation will be irreparably dented. Our mission was to run a meetings centre for groups.
WE DID A LITTLE MARKET research. We took a few days holiday in Cornwall.
For us, one of the key requirements of a hotel we would choose to stay in was that the food be to our liking. Freshly-cooked with a touch of adventure. Finding such a thing in the guidebooks is not straightforward because most British guidebook publishers do not seem to regard the style of food as being a matter of any great significance. They might give the restaurant some stars or rosettes but we were not looking for stars or rosettes, we wanted some distinctive cooking.
We telephoned a likely looking place, near Polperro.
“Does your hotel have any vacancies for the nights of . . .?“
“We are not a hotel. Can I just make that clear before we go any further, we are not a hotel.” The lady was being most adamant in her nasal South London accent. “We do have a room for those nights, yes, but we are NOT a hotel”.
“And you can do us dinner?”
“We do a set meal at 7 o’clock, all fresh ingredients. Cooked here by me. It’s a set meal cooked by me and its all fresh ingredients and home cooked by me because we are NOT a hotel, so you do not get a choice at dinner. It’s a set meal, cooked here, personally, by me.”
This had reminiscences of an Italian agriturismo we had stayed in once, run by a German woman who told us very firmly, “Ve meet in ze bar at 7.15, zen at 7.30 I ring a bell, and ve all go into dinner TOGEZER”. This was an ORDER. The place turned out to hold some of the best cooking we have ever had the pleasure to experience, so we hoped that the Cornwall version would be some type of British equivalent.
And it was. A no-choice menu at 7 o'clock, with just one red and one white wine on the wine list, and the food was wonderful. Simple, maybe a pasta with sauce to start followed by some fish and vegetables, and then a dessert which might be treacle tart or an assortment of chocolate sculptures; the lady with the nasal voice was very keen on her desserts. What made it so enjoyable was that it was cooked fresh, and it was cooked with love. Two vegetarians in the dining room were even more complimentary, the no-choice menu being actually a double choice: veggie or non.
It turned out that the couple who ran not-a-hotel had started out running the establishment as a hotel, with chef and waiters etc, but had decided, possibly after financial prompting, to give that all up and run not-a-hotel, where madam did the cooking and sir the waiting on. We-are-not-a-hotel was their trademark, and the reason that she had to make this so clear is that a hotel is what everyone expects it to be, whether the guests swear either by roast lamb with potatoes or wilted rocket and goat’s cheese, they expect their particular preferences to take precedence. People go to a hotel with all sorts of agendas, which makes it expensive if not impossible for a smallish place to provide their customers with the service they all want. By being not-a-hotel, our hosts were defining their product and so able to supply something that was in demand.
We are not a hotel. Hmmm. We’ll copy that. Hotels are passé. Hotels have a reputation for being pretty mediocre, so that if someone finds a half-decent one they are usually amazed. We shall be not-a-hotel, with tasty food like we’ve just experienced. The car journey home had us fired up to broaden our marketing in a plagiarised direction.
Where do we advertise? How are we going to reach the sort of people who will appreciate what we are intending to provide: a homely atmosphere, dinner-party style food, informality and efficiency? By telling them what we are not?
We tried ads in the national newspapers and up to a point, these worked.
We tried the Sunday Times, which has a large readership, and sure enough, this brought a good number of responses. The trouble was, the readership of the Sunday Times is so large and broad, we could not focus the product properly. The telephone would ring and a Colonel Blimp-ish voice would ask in pompous tones about our establishment.
“Can I ask where you are looking us up?”, I would ask. This is an essential question for someone wanting to monitor the effectiveness of their advertising and generally can act as a conversation piece with the caller, not putting them to any great inconvenience.
“Oh, er, The Times. I think!”, would come the reply.
“Ah, yes, The Sunday Times”, I would say, knowing full well that from that moment, I had lost him. I had issued a put-down to my potential customer, who did not want anyone to think he would stoop so low as to pick up a Sunday rag.
At the other extreme would come a half-concentrating female voice with an address in Islington, yells of children arguing in the background, wanting to know how many children we could take at a discount and whether we thought the journey would be too long for either the children or the Volvo.
In-between we picked up some very good customers, but the approach was just too scattergun. For everyone suited to our product there were two for whom it was entirely inappropriate.
What newspaper is read by a smaller by more specialised audience? The Guardian, perhaps.
Advertising in The Guardian was a better bet as the people who called us tended to be of a type, and by and large they were just the sort of people who responded positively to what we had on offer, typically being professionals who wanted comfort without flunk. The trouble was, there were too few of them. Some weeks, we would get no response to our advertisement at all, and with the weekly magazine edition of a daily newspaper, once the next week comes along, the chance has gone. We tried advertising with gaps in the regularity and still found that, if the calls did not come within a few days of publication, they never would. Again we got some very good customers, but not enough to call it a marketing success.
We’ll try the monthlies.
Good Housekeeping is a lifestyle magazine. It promotes an image of lush dinner parties arranged by women who may probably be accurately described as Well Turned Out. In many ways it seemed the perfect vehicle to show off our wares, since we were trying to promote an up-to-the-minute style of food and we quite liked the idea of seeming to be well turned out ourselves.
But we are quite a long way from Guildford, and a disproportionate amount of the genuine responses to our ads in Good Housekeeping had a Guildford post code; a far greater proportion than the proportion of the population as a whole that lives in Guildford. Something of a disadvantage for us. In analysing the reasons for this, I was reminded of my days in pre-hotel employment, when the company I worked for had branches in many towns around the country, and, quite by chance, in many places happened to have located their branch office opposite a Marks and Spencer shop. This gave me some diversion whenever I visited the branch office, as I could spend a pleasant hour gazing out of the window and watching the comings and goings. It beat working, I used to think.
Observing the Birmingham store could be a bit depressing. We in the branch office came to recognise the store detectives, and would see them apprehend down-at-heel and poverty-stricken looking people, as they came through the glass doors, presumably with a pair of unpaid-for underpants tucked up their sleeve. But in Guildford it was not like that. In Guildford, a large and expensive motor car would draw up, and, after having greeted a man in a brown coat the woman driving it would get out and go into the store. The brown-coated man would load boxes of groceries and, for all we knew, underpants, into the Mercedes or BMW, then the woman would emerge from the store with a small something or other she had omitted from her order previously telephoned through, and drive away.
The whole thing was done without much in the way of cheeriness or wonderment, as evidenced one day when a delivery van, backing out of a tight parking space, clipped the front of a Mercedes and knocked its number plate off. The van driver looked around for the owner of the Mercedes, but she was taking longer than she should have done in the shop. He pondered the situation with Mr Brown Coat, and they came to the conclusion that the best thing to do was to stand the number plate against the Mercedes’ windscreen, together with a little note that presumably said something like, Sorry.
The woman presently emerged from the store. Brown Coat happened to be inside the warehouse counting his grocery stock, but never mind, she could trust that Brown Coat had loaded up the boot of her car with goodies, just like he always did, so she got in and drove away, with a great big metal number plate stuck across the windscreen. We people of money and influence drive our car home after shopping, secure in our affluence and position on the estate, and are not to pay attention to anything that might upset our well-honed sensibilities, which we might encounter on the way, not even a big metal plate stuck on the windscreen.
This could be our customer base. Sounds good. Presumably people who do not notice a number plate leaning on their windscreen will not be too concerned to limit their wine consumption over dinner. We can live with that.
But there was a problem with Good Housekeeping. The magazine had a reader response card. Reader response cards are a technique used by magazines to attract advertisers. The idea is that, in the spirit of making it as easy as possible for people to contact an organisation which has something to sell, the publication removes as many barriers as possible, the reader is invited to tick a box alongside the name of the advertiser they are interested in on a tear-out card already addressed back to the magazine, pop the card in the post, and in due course receive details of the advertiser’s tempting product in return.
Sometimes this is done by use of a reference number, there is a number indicated on the advertisement and the reader circles the appropriate number on the card. But in this case it was made easier, the name of the advertiser was printed alongside the checkbox on the card.
At first we thought this was a fine mechanism. The responses we received via it were in the order of five times the number we were getting from a direct response to the ad. We were surprised and pleased and would have remained so had we not, in one of our investigative moments, decided to look in more detail at the publication. Our name on the reader response card appeared nowhere in our advertisement. There was no way in which a reader could have tied the two together. The responders were simply ticking away because they saw the word, ‘hotel’, or maybe they just ticked because they always ticked when they saw a box to tick. Apart from the general concept of a hotel, they could have had absolutely no idea of what they were ticking for. Though we were now not-a-hotel, and were giving no indication in our ad as to our previous incarnation, and neither were we including our name or location, we still had hotel in our name so far as the magazine’s marketing department was concerned and it was that name that appeared on the reader response card. We were sending out lots of brochures to people who wanted something different from what we were offering, and getting no follow-up from it, perhaps unsurprisingly. I think the magazine has now dropped this idea, possibly after too many complaints from such as the likes of us.
In a state of some despondency we agreed to try another of the magazines from the same publisher, but one which was mercifully free of reader response cards. This magazine was called Country Living and in principle it did not seem to be quite right for what we were aiming at, but we gave it a try. It turned out to be perfect and in true textbook marketing fashion we did not discover why until after its success had shown itself. In retrospect, it should have been obvious. Nothing sells more effectively than a dream. Country Living is a lifestyle magazine. Its title suggests that it might be a source of information about how best to clean the dried cow pats from the tyres of your 4x4 or howl with glee over a dying fox. But no! As with all professionally produced lifestyle magazines it puts over a dream, in this case one of life in the country for those who do not actually live there, but think they would like to. It is not cow pats and bloodstained foxes, it is fluffy lambs and bunnies.
WE HAD A STRIKING stone-built house, entirely surrounded by fields and hills, which we wanted to rent to people who wanted a few days away from their daily routine, where they could be, feel, and experience themselves in the country. Where better to advertise than a lifestyle magazine whose focus is entirely this? Obvious, when you think about it. Here’s to trial and error!
Of course, getting someone to respond to the advertisement is one thing. Getting them to buy is quite another. Having found the advertising vehicle that suited us best for its ability to match a potential customer’s requirements to the style of product we were offering, we still had to get a responder to commit themselves and make a booking.
At first we felt we were probably wasting our money, since the responders seemed to be primarily of two types. One was the Woman at Home. In this case the call would come through during the daytime, the caller would sound greatly interested and would be sure that her husband would be equally enthusiastic when she told him about it that very evening and she would immediately then call back to determine a booking. The End. We came to have a constant picture of life in the affluent suburbs, where hubby was daily appearing in the porch at 7pm with a cheery, “Darling, I’m haime”, to be deluged with ideas from the day’s magazine consumption, which he would then have to distantly and po-facedly allow to slip from the foot of the conversation agenda.
Alternatively the woman calling, for it was mainly women, would be a kind of eccentric blue-stocking. She would just get her friends together, only the trouble was that some of them were refusing to speak to her at the moment, but never mind I am sure they will break out of this soon and then we can all come for a jolly reunion.
One of these delightfully nutty types was the women whose group of friends were being rallied to attend her wedding. The slight problem was that the man she was marrying had been married before – to her – and they had been divorced. Her friends were not entirely approving of the reunion and neither, it seems, was her ex-husband. But she was sure it would all come out all right, provided she did not tell him until the last moment, sort of spring it as a surprise.
We had some difficulty getting a deposit from this particular caller, since she seemed to be using a number of different names and had given us a credit card number over the telephone, with one of her names that did not quite correspond to the name associated with the card. When we telephoned her to point this out it took her some while to decide which name was the matching one, but she get there in the end, and she got her party in the end, and she re-married her ex-husband, and her friends dutifully turned up as she said they would, and a wonderful time was had by all, to no-one’s surprise more than our own.
We found, too, that the Woman at Home was not necessarily unsuccessful either, in moving her enthusiasms to the implementation stage. It just took a little time. Our magazine advertisements seemed to produce little in the way of results at first, so that we began to wonder whether it was all worthwhile, until we discovered that the lead-in time, from initial enquiry to provisional booking, was typically about six months. Hubby just needed a little working on. Sega, sega! These Brits could teach a thing or two to a Greek housewife, in their quiet and unpublicised way (sega sega means slowly slowly in Greek, and is apparently the philosophy of a Greek wife in getting her husband to conform to her way of doing things, or so some people say).
The lambs-and-bunnies image. If that is what we were going for, it must be carried through to everything, from the brochure to the menu to every single telephone call. We had the lambs, we had the bunnies, both plentiful in the fields surrounding the house. Our product and these charming benefits clearly had to have an element of match about them, and we would have to sell the package to those people who did not currently know we were here, but would be pleased to.
It was not all plain sailing. There are those who define a sheep as a damp, woolly animal with a limp which is programmed to escape from whatever enclosure it finds itself in. The farmer who owned the fields around us had remained unchanged in his farming methods for fifty years or more. His sheep tended to limp really badly. Occasionally he would be fined for ill-treatment of his animals but this did not help us much. As far as he was concerned, sheep would limp like they always have done, and sheep would escape from the fields and eat poisonous daffodils and rhododendrons in peoples’ gardens like they always had done, and he would complain and ask for compensation, like his father and grandfather before him.
Then, as the winter turned into spring and the grass in the field was almost depleted and the sheep in desperation had eaten every poisonous plant in our garden they could scrump, they would stand in their field, looking forlornly at our guests through the fence, slowly swaying with watery eyes, and gradually and pathetically, they would prepare to die.
The guests who seemed most distressed by this tended to be Americans. “Can’t you DO something?”, they would plead, “Is there someone we can CALL?”
Of course the farmer was no more happy about losing his sheep than we were, but he was an old-fashioned farmer, his main concern was to blame someone and if possible to get some compensation. Compensation and subsidies for hill farmers are worth more than sheep. As for us, we just had to comfort the guests, though with a hobbling sheep barely able to get off its knees as a backdrop, this was not always easy.
As for paying compensation, we consulted the local people and we consulted the legal textbooks over this. The two were entirely at odds. The local people were adamant that it was everyone but the farmer’s responsibility to keep his animals from straying onto their property, whereas the law seemed to indicate just the reverse; the law says it is the farmer who has the job of containing his flock. Such is the aura surrounding farmers in a rural community. We decided to go with the law books.
As for rabbits, I am one of those people who find one of the most picturesque aspects about a rabbit is when you see it with the evening sun behind it, when its erect ears glowing luminescent orange like a neon sign. That it is sitting there looking at you and not running away into its hole, however, probably means it is ill. It probably is dying from myxomatosis. Quite frequently we see a rabbit sitting hunched by the roadside, almost willing a passing car to splat it across the tarmac to relieve it of its misery.
Fortunately, we did not have to sell the rabbit-reality to our potential guests, only the image, and it was only sometimes that this led us into trouble. Most of the time the sheep grazed lazily in the fields outside, while the bunnies seemed to be frolicking gaily in the hedgerows, and the farmer with his gun happened to be somewhere else. We were always concerned whenever the farmer sprayed pig-dung or some other evil-smelling substance on the fields around us on the very day we had a group of guests arriving, but this did not seem to matter. It was a smell of the country and so generally welcomed by the majority of our guests as a part of the image.
Even when our local farmer, one of the biggest landowners in the area, decided that the best place on his entire estate to store a mountain of rotting manure was right outside our dining room window, the guests did not seem to mind too much. We minded, we thought it was pea-brained, but this happened to coincide with a time when we had arranged an open day for the local folk, who thereby saw how childishly the farmer had behaved, ”Oh, no! Not again. He’s always been the same, you know. It’s a good thing you never met his mother. She was even worse!”. Then shortly afterwards, and without any word from us, he moved it. Someone will have chided him.
It was intriguing for us, as experienced townies, to have moved into the countryside where, we were told, there was a lifestyle under threat and a heritage to be preserved. The people who so adamantly asserted this on radio and television never seemed to go as far as telling us what this magical thing actually was that must under no circumstances be lost, but there seemed to be no shortage of people doing the telling. Maybe we could get a grip on it and use it in the selling.
Much of the fuss seemed to surround foxhunting. A body of people nationally wanted this activity banned, and it is this above all else that sparked a rash of you-townies-don’t-understand-the ways-of-the-country agitation.
A GREAT DEAL OF FOXHUNTING goes on in our area. Foxes are a nuisance because they will kill young lambs, they cause havoc for anyone who tries to keep poultry, and they attack the dustbins if they get a chance and leave rubbish strewn around in their search for something meaty. The poor old fox is probably in a permanent state of hunger and cannot catch enough rats and rabbits to keep himself from needing to upset people in his search for food.
So the human goes for him. In our area there were two methods of dealing with the fox problem, one involves one or two men going out at night with a flashlight and a shotgun, the other took place in the daytime using dogs. In both cases the outsider sees very little evidence of it. Fortunately for us, this is not an area where people feel they need to dress in brightly-coloured tunics and make squawking noises; they want the fox numbers reduced and they go about it quietly, without any prancing. If there was some other way of diminishing the number of foxes to a manageable level, most people in this area would be delighted and would not feel they had in any way lost any of their country identity. Foxhunting appears to be a social-class and personal-image issue, more than a countryside identification per se.
Nonetheless, foxhunting is homed-in on by many as being the very essence of the countryside, but we decided firmly against setting ourselves up as some type of hunting lodge, partly because we did not really have adequate capacity for drying damp wellies and storing guns, and partly because it seemed as if foxhunting might be banned anyway, which it subsequently was, at least with dogs.
We guessed all along that the foxhunting lobby would lose their case, because they played the publicity so badly. We might have been amateurs with little by way of professional advice behind us, but we could have done a better job for the foxhunting proponents than they did themselves, a pity for them that no one ever asked us. It is fairly well-known that they were so snooty about anyone who disagreed with them and so arrogantly sure of their position that they refused to negotiate and so lost the lot – that could have been Hilary’s area of consultancy. What has been less widely pointed out is that their advertising was nothing short of a joke. We saw posters saying, ‘59% of People Say Yes to Hunting’ next to others from the same source that said ‘Never Underestimate a Minority!’ (Surely a classic case of how to shoot yourself in the foot with your hunting rifle). And large posters showed a photograph of a young woman in a nurse’s uniform with a caption, ‘Now They Love Her’ with another photograph of the same young woman, this time in a hunting outfit, next to the caption, ‘Now They Don’t!’, the message being that she’s a nice girl until she gets hold of that whip! Where ever did the Countryside Alliance, as it liked to call itself, get its advertising agency from? I hope they never paid the bill.
The upshot of all this arrogance and self-defeating advertising was that hunting with dogs was made illegal, and the upshot for us was to give us comfort that, in terms of understanding something of how to do and how not to do marketing and selling, we possibly were not doing too badly.
WHAT ELSE THEN? WHAT IS the secret of the countryside, this thing that we are told has been weaned away from us culturally since the Industrial Revolution? We want to sell it to the world. It could be good for business.
One of the early things that struck us on moving to our rural home, was how many of the people seemed to be defensive about their life. All the indications were that we were arriving as the city slickers, with our neatly-pressed and skimpy clothes, our shiny cars with leather seats and radio controls on the steering wheel, our fancy foreign diet, and our confidence that we were one step superior to everyone else in the world.
As it happens, I do not approve of those who go out into the streets with such an attitude of superiority. I come from a relatively poor background where subservience was seen as a cultural virtue, and while I can understand the reasons for this within its context of the times, I shall be delighted when and if those times have passed. We have had Lenin, we have had Mao, we have had John Major’s Citizens’ Charter. As I see it, if there are well-cut trousers, radio controls on the steering wheel, or tagliatelle in squid ink to be had, I would like to get the chance to have some of that from time to time. I do not see any virtue in being under-privileged. Why should all those things that are available, theoretically at least, to someone who lives in a big city, be denied to a person who does not?
The local people, though, were for the most part very suspicious of this. In microcosm it is like the Russian peasantry at the time leading up to the 1917 revolution. They want reform, yes, but will beat up anyone who tries to change any of the established customs. The answer to the plight of the man who cannot afford a horse and must stoop to donning the yoke on his own shoulders and suffer the indignity of sludging his way through the mud to drive a furrow, is not seen as an overthrow of the established order in order than he might gain access to a communal tractor, but that someone should pay him more and that someone else should reduce the price of second-hand horses. We came in as Maxim Gorky, though were took care not to be so outspoken as he was, naturally.
Part of the resistance to the I’ll-have-some-of-that attitude, is a brain drain. Some who have left in their late teens and early twenties for university or work do return, but in an area where there is little in the way of technical and administrative occupations, what is there for them to come back for? The result is an understandable and widespread phenomenon, that those with the least to lose and most to gain through change, are the most strongly resistant to it. The people are small-c conservative. They are resistant to change. But what do they have worth preserving?
Upon analysing this issue, we were drawn to the conclusion that they do have something, but it is not what many people think it is. Not foxhunting. Not dancing round the church on Rogation day. Not, ‘Evening, George, how’s thee tups a-frisking?’ in The Bull of a winter’s evening. Nothing like that, nothing that could appeal to the tourist in such an archaic and picture-postcard way. Rather, there are two excellent virtues of being in the British countryside.
The first, is that in a small community, it is very difficult to keep your life a secret. You’ll get found out. This means that putting up much in the way of a front is hopeless. You have to be yourself and show the result to the world. The nice thing about this is that everyone else is obliged to do the same, so that the kind of global, politically-acceptable personality that you see in some communities is practically impossible. So you are a drunkard who mistreats his dog? The man next door is trying to build a wicker basket for his hot-air balloon, but the twigs keep taking root. And then again the couple across the street are just boring and only ever talk about their holiday in the Caribbean. No secrets, so just about everyone is accepted and, what is more, can be free to be amusing in public. This means that you can walk along the street and smile at people. Nod your head. Give a cheery wave. Coupled with the ability to be unconventional, all conventions being an openly personal issue, you would be perfectly at liberty to speak in a falsetto voice if you wanted to.
We were fairly quick in picking up this aspect of life in the country and soon began to use it to our advantage, keeping the dining room curtains open on evenings when we were busy, and drawing them on evenings when business was quiet. Start your marketing at home. If the local people believe you are doing well, they will help to do your selling for you, because although there are no secrets about you as a person, in a small community there is a great appetite for rumours and wanting to know what is going on, and this situation can be manipulated to your advantage. With no need to put a front, you can tell them, ‘We are heading for better things’. Well, it is true, isn’t it?
The second wonderful attribute, in addition to the privilege of living in a community of up-front oddities, is to be steeped in an area of change. While it may seem on first look that there is a permanence about a country town or village, in fact it is likely to be looking towards tomorrow, looking to ways in which it can promote itself. This attitude does not extend to everyone of course. There are many who would like it to be as it was in the old days, which is something that is never possible. Cities constantly change too, but in a country town or village there is even greater urgency about it – it’s just that it is less obvious on the surface.
Unfortunately, however, the burghers of the town, the committees, seemed fixated upon selling the public lavatory. To some extent, this is not entirely their fault. If you drive into a French town, you will be greeted with a sign that says something like, ‘Grisettes sur Brioche, ses plages, son parking, sa zone industrielle’. Then when in the town centre there will be arrows pointing to, ‘Hotel Paddington, trois etoiles’.
In Britain, there is a peculiar convention that any such signs should not advertise a business, they should only point to civic amenities. This then presents the problem of what they should point to. In our town of Sedbergh, which has essentially only one main street, there are signs pointing grandly to, ‘Town Centre’. Now what else have we got that is run by the local authorities? Ah, yes. ‘Public Toilets’. The impression given is that the town is proud above all else of its lavatories, people generally not having too much difficulty in finding the town centre, in a place with only one main street.
The impression is reinforced at night. Business are prevented by the planners from displaying illuminated signs, while the public toilets are advertised by bright and welcoming external lights. They are OK, they are Civic.
Then, when the youth of the town, with little to keep them occupied, gather around the entrances to the loos of a dark evening, the burghers become outraged. Is this a fitting image for our town? Somebody should do something. Haven’t these young people got anything better to do? Well, er, no, actually. And anyway, wouldn’t you expect them to gather where the lights are brightest? One year, around November time, some of the more disreputable youths filled one of the toilet bowls with fireworks, taped down the seat, and lit the fuse. It caused quite a lot of damage, but I can see their point.
And so with the town brochure. Instead of inviting the world out there to come and view real human beings at work, what did it do? It told you how to find the public toilets. Dese peepol, it must be someting to do wid buying all dis insurance. (With concerted civic effort, we have managed to stamp out this practice, in the town brochure at least.)
A desperate attempt to appear unremarkable and ordinary, and at the same time attract the tourists. Crazy or what?
CHRISTMAS WAS APPROACHING, and we needed to do a bit of marketing to get the place filled up. Christmas is an especially awkward time for one’s marketing activities because at any other time of the year, people come and go. They may stay a day, they may stay a week. They may have decided to stay a week and then move on after a day. It could be the other way round. Maybe you will be empty and then someone will turn up at the door. But not at Christmas. Christmas is the time when Expectations are raised. Things should be Special. You do not want to be sitting at home by yourself at Christmas. And so, for many people, the misery begins to strike home about early October.
We had decided to take a step in the direction we were aiming and advertise for a group of people to take over the entire house. We would feed them and clean their rooms in a manner similar to being in a hotel, but they would not have to share their meal and leisure times with other guests. This is the message we advertised for someone to take advantage of at Christmas.
Enquiries were numerous, “Sounds perfect, could you hold it for me for a week or so, I’ve just got to confirm with the family and I’ll be sending a deposit right away. Don’t let anyone else book in without calling me first. It sounds just what we are looking for”.
And then . . . and then, our caller had to do something which, unknown to her but well understood by us, was going to wreck the whole exciting scheme. Our caller would at some point have to speak to her mother. Mother’s idea was a different one. Mother’s image was to have all the family round her on Christmas day, while she cooked the turkey and fiddled with the trimmings and the grandchildren played happily with their presents, granddad drank a little too much port and all would be munificent in the world. While all the while her offspring were actually thinking, “Aaagh!, not again, can’t we find a way of preventing this nightmare from repeating itself next year?”. Hence their call to us.
And hence, no follow-up call. This year, however, we were fortunate to take a call from a couple who, in family matters were, as we were beginning to realise, unusually intelligent. They were aided somewhat by grandma and granddad’s physical location relative to them, as the oldest generation of the family lived in Scotland, north of us, while most of the rest of the family lived in parts of England conveniently south of us. This meant that the middle stratum – the section most aware of, and in need of, avoiding the impossible-to-fulfil charade during the forthcoming festivities – were able to say to grandma and granddad, “When you next come to see us, take a few minutes to call in at that place. See what it’s like. No commitments, just take a look and let us know what you think”. Intelligent? (This middle stratum was not short of a penny or two).
Grandma and granddad in fact called three times. The first two occasions we were guided by the perversity of life, to be out. But the Middle Stratum persevered in their requests, and on the third attempt at an unannounced visit, grandma and granddad struck lucky, or possibly by their reckoning, unlucky.
They were not sure at all. Suspicious in the extreme. It stood no chance of working out all right, “Well, I don’t know”, they voiced, more than a few times.
When you are selling something, the textbooks are quite clear. Never give your customer a get-out, and be sure never to let the customer go, without a closure of the sale, or at least a promise of closure. So, being true amateur professionals, while the couple were at their most uncertain, I said to them, “Think of what might go wrong. It will be too cold”.
“Och, no, I’m sure it won’t be cold. It feels lovely and warm just now.” This from granddad, who, as granddads tend to be, was a bluff and kindly character, whose glass of port did not necessarily have to be taken round the family table as such.
“Well then, the food will be terrible.”
“Och, no, no, no. There’s a lovely smell coming from the kitchen just now. I can’t believe the food would be bad. No. I’m sure it will be just fine.”
“It will be too far for the family to come.”
“No, no, no. They all live much closer to you than they do to us. They’ll be more likely to come, if it takes place here, than if we try to drag them up to Scotland. Ho, ho ho.”
And they booked. And they had a wonderful Christmas and grandma shed a tear at the end of it on account of how successful it had been and they wrote to us afterwards thanking us for our role in the event. Which just goes to show, that in marketing and selling, as in so many things, you should not always believe what you are told.
Can we keep this up?
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