I just finished re-reading the exceptional book Fast Food Nation, by the American writer and broadcaster Eric Schlosser. I’ve read all his books, and think he’s one of the best investigative writers in the business. This is my second trip through that particular tome; back in 2008, I used it as primary source material to tell the story of the brothers in Monrovia who opened a burger restaurant, made millions, and were bought out by a milkshake salesman named Ray Kroc.
They were, of course, the McDonald brothers, but it was Kroc who turned their business into a global brand, and he did it by crushing the competition and stealing their best ideas.
“If my competitors were drowning,” he once said, “I’d stick a hose in their mouths.” This quote, and the story itself, formed the introduction to my first truly long internet article The End Of Rangers? which was published on E-Tims that year.
(Thanks, as ever, guys for getting me started on this journey.)
The book is a fascinating (and occasionally squirmy) look at the industry which makes much of what we shove into our mouths.
But it also tells some mind-boggling tales about how the founders of the companies we know and love today got their start.
Two in particular – the story of McDonalds and that of Kentucky Fried Chicken – are amazing guidebooks for the way major companies market themselves. KFC is not explored in great detail, but the book tells you enough that you get the picture. McDonalds gets more detailed treatment.
At the heart of both stories are great salesmen and self-promotion.
Bear with me for a moment here.
Harland David Sanders, the founder of KFC, and the guy whose image appears on the sides of the box and even the buildings, had worked on the steam engines, been a labourer, swept out train cars and stoked engines. He finally got a law degree and practiced law until he had a physical altercation with a client in the courtroom. From there he sold insurance, opened a ferry company, sold tires for Michellin and then became a gas station manager.
It was at his Shell Oil Service Station in Kentucky where he started to serve food.
It was 1930. He was 40, and but for World War II he might have turned it, then, into a major company. We’ll never know.
By the time the war ended he was back at square one again. He opened a new restaurant, but aside from running it he took to sales once more, this time traveling around the country trying to get other restaurants to buy his “secret recipe” for chicken. This was so lucrative that he took to doing it full time, and sold his own restaurant.
He was 65 years old. It would be another couple of years before he opened his first KFC, and having learned that selling secrets worked well he became one of the first men in America to start a company that worked by franchising. And it was in trying to raise awareness of his new business that he showed a remarkable genius for marketing.
He started to dress in a white civil-war type outfit, and as he had been made a “Kentucky Colonel” in 1950, he added some decorations and a big wide hat and began to call himself Colonel Sanders. And the media loved it, and the people loved it. They would flock to have their pictures taken with him, and everyone who did stayed for a meal.
He was 73 before he sold the US rights to KFC, for a mere $2 million. But he was already a very wealthy man and the new owners gave him a global ambassadors job with a full salary and he retained the rights for Canada and other parts of the world. He kept on working all the way up to his cancer diagnosis, and death, aged 90, in 1980.
The story of McDonald’s is the story of Ray Kroc and his own business innovations. He was also a master at spotting other people’s great ideas, and he utilised everything he learned to make his own company better and better. And in 1963, when one of the Washington franchises hit on the idea of a mascot, and started to get a lot of newspaper coverage, Kroc went there to find out what was going on, and saw, at once, the future of the whole company.
The franchise owner, Oscar Goldstein, who ran an ad agency and represented many local actors and performers, had asked one of his employees, a man named Willard Scott, who, of course, was later to become a national celebrity as a weatherman on The Today Show, to come up with a gimmick for his restaurant that would appeal to families.
Scott created a clown character named Ronald McDonald.
And the minute Kroc saw him in action he knew that here was the secret to building his restaurant chain to ever greater heights; market it to the kids.
Why is any of this important?
It’s important because companies spend so much time and effort on marketing for a reason; this stuff actually works.
Sanders saw a way to get his business in the news and on the telly, for free. And he continued marketing it like that until the day he died. Kroc saw that the target audience was just as important as how you did it, and went after the children by making McDonalds a place they associated with balloons, bright colours, toys and the eponymous character who ensured that “a visit to McDonald’s makes your day.”
How effective was it?
Well let me put it this way, a survey from a few years ago found that 95% of all American schoolchildren recognised Ronald McDonald by sight and by name. He was second to only one other character; Santa Claus, who’s modern incarnation was used, and is still used, as a primary marketing tool for The Coca Cola Company.
Over at Ibrox, this is the close season when promoting the brand is all important.
It’s also nearly the marching season, and luckily for them the two things represent similar opportunities for selling the brand. It’s a time when people climb into funky outfits and parade around advertising their “culture.”
What says “Ibrox” more than a bunch of goons dressed in orange outfits, marching down the street, except maybe for a bunch of goons in paramilitary style garb doing the same?
It’s not a coincidence that they’re planning to bring out a PUL playing strip just in time for a bunch of half-jaked shaven headed neds to order them in XXXXL so they can wear them down at Glasgow Green. It’s their version of marketing.
Dave King is a master marketer and make no mistake about it. He doesn’t have to dress the part, though, he only has to act the part. So he gets up and he makes ridiculous accusations against people and he throws the crowd some titbits of supremacist guff and he presents an image to them of a strong man looking out for their best interests.
And of course, a gullible and compliant media gives him the airspace and the free publicity that his bizarre comments are designed to attract. But they also go further. If Colonel Sanders had claimed he single-handedly won World War II I doubt the American press would have paid much attention to that. But King can launch wars and claim victories where none exist and our hacks not only write every word but praise him for his conquests.
Good salesmanship is about knowing your audience. Ray Kroc was superb at that. When he saw that the key to getting money from families was to target the kids it was a masterpiece of insight that has since been adopted by nearly every major global corporation.
King knows his audience too, but there’s one crucial difference.
Kroc was building something to last. King is trying to keep something from falling apart. That’s why the focus this summer will be on holding the club together, and he’s doing that by creating a sense of grievance and stoking the impression that they are surrounded by enemies.
But he knows this is a holding action. It’s not intended to grow the business; he doesn’t have the first clue where even to start doing that. Instead this is about appealing to the existing customer base in a language they understand and respond to; it just so happens that this is the language of paranoia and bigotry. It will never win them friends, but it’s not designed to. It’s supposed to keep everyone on the same page, and it does that admirably.
Aside from the clown costumes, King also knows that there’s no use here in creating mascots … not for the most part. There is one, but we’ll get to that shortly.
In the main though, he’s the front of the house, he’s the showman, but even the dumbest fans are aware that he’s a crook and not wholly to be trusted.
So instead of creating a positive image, he’s hell-bent on creating a negative one. And when selling your own image doesn’t work the simplest trick of them all is to create a monster instead, a dark mascot for the other side, a straw man to tear down.
Hence the targeting of Gary Hughes and Murdoch MacLennan. To make the SFA and the SPFL into big totemic enemies. To show strength by “going after them.”
Yes, this guy knows exactly what he’s doing and this stuff is not designed to convince anybody that he’s right. It’s all half-assed innuendo and stoking of conspiracy theories.
It’s not meant to be taken seriously, although our hacks are embarrassingly falling over themselves to try to climb onto the bandwagon, apparently failing to realise that King never intended it to go anywhere.
All this stuff has a two-fold objective; it is designed to protect him from future scrutiny by casting the bona fides of the decision makers into some measure of doubt and, more importantly, in the here and now, it’s an appeal to the Peepul to spend money.
It works too. The fans are boasting about how record numbers of them have got out their wallets, and King lauds them for it. Of course he does. The whole club is banging on right now about how confidence is in the air; well yes, it surely is.
But this isn’t really confidence. It’s a confidence trick.
For what is the measure of a confidence trick? What’s the idea at the centre of it? Is it so named because you give your confidence to the crook? No, it’s because the crook appears to put his trust in you. It’s the essence of one of the most notorious scams there is, the famous “419” fraud, otherwise known as the Nigerian e-mail scam, in which the mark is invited to become a partner in what amounts to an exercise in tax dodging and money-laundering.
King believes in his marks.
He tells them this.
Two years ago he made it quite clear to them that he had every faith that they would do their part in “returning” the team to the top of the game by outspending Celtic fans. He actually openly said this, but nobody thought to think on what it meant.
What’s more, he demonstrates his “faith” in them by “fighting their corner” in an endless string of battles which either go nowhere or end in backroom deals which are actually admissions of defeat that are kept far from prying eyes but spun as those great victories he and the media seem to place such great store in. The Ashley fiasco, which cost him near enough £5 million but was broadcast, at the time, as a big win is just one case in point.
And because King appears to be a leader on their behalf they have no problem giving him their money.
But Gerrard might be the best stratagem even King has ever come up with.
Phil has stated openly that Steven Gerrard’s job at Ibrox is not so much about managing the team on the pitch than it is about being the new face of the marketing department.
Gerrard, in effect, is their Colonel Sanders, a man who wears the uniform of a leader but who never commanded troops in an actual war.
He is their Ronald McDonald, a guy in a job where the role involves putting on a happy face and bringing joy to an audience of credulous people desperate for something to believe in.
Whether or not he pulls on the full outfit is something we’ll find out in due course, but those busy telling the world that success is assured with him there are doing their own bit of marketing on behalf of the Glib and Shameless liar. But there is no reason to believe them or evidence to support their confident assertions to this end.
Because above all else, confidence is easy to sustain before a ball has been kicked, just as spending money in the here and now can give you the appearance of having it.
But when the rent man comes or the bills start tumbling in, well then you better have more in your wallet than a sheaf of IOU’s.