December 16, 2011
The Brief Message
By Arif Hussaini
The commercial break during a TV program that you have been avidly watching seldom qualifies to be called brief like a bikini with a tacit prospect. No wonder the program host has to make an explicit request: ‘Please don’t go away, we will be back after this brief message.’
More often than not, the message is so long, repetitious and boring that you forget the sequence of the program you had been watching earlier.
A disgusted Einstein would have exclaimed: ‘I don’t bother you about relativity, why bother me with your miracle grinder!’
An honest host would simply declare: ‘We are looking for fat wallets with credulous persons attached to them’, or ‘Customers wanted, no experience necessary, gullibility preferred.’
Honesty and salesmanship are two different departments like honesty and politics. In an election tumult, a Republican thinks the Democrat to be dishonest and a Democrat puts it the other way around. It is a free season for all misleaders. But, in the field of salesmanship, it is an year round open season for half-truths. Perhaps, it is more so during the Xmas and New Year season.
America , producing one-third of world products, is a buyers’ market, and advertising is the invisible oil that lubricates the country’s industry.
Advertising is a finely honed art today. But, as far back as 1700, Dr. Samuel Johnson, the eminent British wit and lexicographer had already concluded: ‘The trade of advertising is now so near perfection that it is not easy to propose any improvement. But, as every art ought to be exercised in due subordination to the public good, I cannot but propose it as a moral question to these masters of the public ear, whether they do not sometimes play too wantonly with our passions.’
The practitioners of the art of advertising have mastered the craft to such perfection over the past 300 odd years since the above statement of Dr. Johnson that now it is not sometimes but almost always that the game is played ‘wantonly’.
A glib-tongued salesperson makes a filibustering senator look tongue-tied. He is trained to do that.
An optimist invented the airplane; a pessimist invented the parachute. A salesperson sells both to a person who is not really in need of either. It is almost an axiom now that a successful salesperson will sell a refrigerator to an Eskimo.
Advertising is a hide and seek game in which a customer when sought is maneuvered to pay willingly twice as much as the item is really worth. He is led to believe that he has struck a bargain. The more you spend in this game, the more you are made to think that you have saved till you pile up such a huge debt that the only way out of it is to file for bankruptcy.
A smart and successful salesperson puts up with a smile when his samples are flung out of the window, his ancestry is questioned, and he is sometimes thrown down flights of stairs. He is seldom provoked, as he never feels insulted. That is what the textbooks on salesmanship teach.
But, such books strike as outdated when you find these days a handsome salesman rejecting the offer of a free ride plus further possibilities by a pretty and seductive driver simply because her car is not insured by his company! The same sales fellow is unwilling to accept a Porsche in a bet on a sure winning hand of cards just because the car is not insured by his company! As a baby, he might have been dropped on his head by the nurse.
To me he appears an inveterate loser. The nut might still be walking to his destination.
If you are in business, you have to advertise unless your society is experiencing acute shortages owing to war or some other calamity. At one time a person had to wait for months to secure a PIA ticket as the company had total monopoly in the country on air travel. Yet, it kept taking out expensive advertisements in national papers. Reason: it had an advertisement budget and the concerned executive did not wish the amount to lapse! Commissions? In all probability, yes.
If you are in business and you do not advertise, it is like winking at a pretty girl in the dark. You are no less a nut than the insurance man mentioned above who refuses to take the ride, as his company had not insured the lady’s car.
Decades back when making a fast buck was the highest consideration, if not morality, insurance caused more fires than going to bed with lighted cigarettes.
The insurance companies have learned many lessons. The small print on an insurance policy takes care now of all eventualities. What it says on one page, it contradicts on the next.
Insurance companies figure out first when you are most likely to die. They then assure you that you would live a couple of decades longer. That is where you become a sucker.
Sales people are generally big problems to their bosses, to their spouses, to their credit managers, hotel clerks and even their colleagues. They draw and spend more expense money with less effort and get smaller value out of it than any other civilized group with the possible exception of politicians. They come in at the most inopportune time, under the slightest pretext, stay longer, ask more personal questions, make more noise and mistakes, pacify more belligerents, tell more lies, explain more discrepancies - yet they keep the economy moving. We can’t do without them. Nothing happens until somebody sells something! That is how business is structured in this country.
Celebrities who endorse products cost good money. So, some businesses have started making use of the talents (?) in the animal world.
Shimmering creatures - a green lizard or gecko, a brown rooster, a snow-white duck, a pretty lap-dog, to mention just a few - come now on the screen endorsing products used only by humans.
From the days of Aesops in the sixth century BC to Kalila and Damna (Arabic), Anwar-e-Suhaili (Persian), and the Arabian Nights of the middle ages to the modern day superb fables of Disney and in the sleek comic books, people have always used talking animals to convey moral and even political themes.
This technique was often resorted to when an intolerant despot was occupying the throne. Freedom of speech is a great blessing of modern time. One does not have to resort to a cock and bull story. The cocks are instead put in a pit to fight it out. It is called a debate in the modern day civilized parlance.
The animals in the fables also exaggerate but without offending your intelligence like the fast-talking salesman behind the counter. You can make an allowance for their liberties with truth and place them in the category of art. For, in the words of the famous writer and thinker, G. K. Chesterton, “Exaggeration is the definition of art”.
Evidently, such a definition does not apply to the glib talk of a salesperson convincing a customer that the canary he is trying to sell him can hatch an ostrich egg!
arifhussaini@hotmail.com
