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| Charles Saatchi's PR magic goes wrong | Charles Saatchi's PR magic goes wrong |
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| Charles Saatchi's approach to business – something he himself has described as "a burning righteousness" founded on little experience but plenty of ambition – has long brought him a great deal of success. Built on selling people everything from cigarettes to condoms to Margaret Thatcher, not to mention very expensive tickets to look at dead things suspended in formaldehyde, Saatchi's vast personal fortune serves as a quantitative measure of the fact that you can sell ice in the Arctic, so to speak, if you look beyond the detail that your potential customers are wearing three jumpers each, and focus instead on telling them persuasive stories that overcome their doubts of whatever it is you have to flog. | Charles Saatchi's approach to business – something he himself has described as "a burning righteousness" founded on little experience but plenty of ambition – has long brought him a great deal of success. Built on selling people everything from cigarettes to condoms to Margaret Thatcher, not to mention very expensive tickets to look at dead things suspended in formaldehyde, Saatchi's vast personal fortune serves as a quantitative measure of the fact that you can sell ice in the Arctic, so to speak, if you look beyond the detail that your potential customers are wearing three jumpers each, and focus instead on telling them persuasive stories that overcome their doubts of whatever it is you have to flog. |
| But over the past few weeks, Saatchi's special kind of genius for creating these stories seem to have backfired, at least when it comes to fashioning the narrative behind his personal brand. With the collective national recoil that followed Saatchi telling his wife, Nigella Lawson, through a Sunday newspaper that he is divorcing her, it seems like Saatchi may have lost his PR edge. | But over the past few weeks, Saatchi's special kind of genius for creating these stories seem to have backfired, at least when it comes to fashioning the narrative behind his personal brand. With the collective national recoil that followed Saatchi telling his wife, Nigella Lawson, through a Sunday newspaper that he is divorcing her, it seems like Saatchi may have lost his PR edge. |
| How are the principles that Saatchi relied on during his advertising heyday missing the mark? Helpfully, he has provided many quotable nuggets of wisdom in his oeuvre of books about … himself. | How are the principles that Saatchi relied on during his advertising heyday missing the mark? Helpfully, he has provided many quotable nuggets of wisdom in his oeuvre of books about … himself. |
"How sweet of you to think that advertising copy is written from the heart" | "How sweet of you to think that advertising copy is written from the heart" |
| So said Saatchi in his 2009 book, My Name Is Charles Saatchi and I Am An Artoholic, in reference to an occasion when he created a game-changing anti-smoking campaign, visiting lung cancer treatment centres and writing heart-wrenching straplines – all while fuelled by a steady supply of cigarettes. But Saatchi's flair for clever copy abandoned him when he tried to dismiss the photographs of him with his hands around Lawson's neck outside a posh London restaurant, by describing the scene as a "playful tiff". | |
| Saatchi knows better than most the significance of a well-chosen word, the time and effort it takes a talented copywriter to identify and execute a precise turn of phrase: "Labour isn't working" for the Tory party, "The world's favourite airline" for British Airways, and "Would you be more careful if it was you who got pregnant?" under an image for a man for a campaign for the Health Education Council. Or rather, he did. No one wants the wrong slogan to be attached to their product. No one wants it to be attached to a person, either: "playful tiff" will haunt Saatchi for a long time. Maybe this was a situation when looking heart-ward might have been helpful after all. | Saatchi knows better than most the significance of a well-chosen word, the time and effort it takes a talented copywriter to identify and execute a precise turn of phrase: "Labour isn't working" for the Tory party, "The world's favourite airline" for British Airways, and "Would you be more careful if it was you who got pregnant?" under an image for a man for a campaign for the Health Education Council. Or rather, he did. No one wants the wrong slogan to be attached to their product. No one wants it to be attached to a person, either: "playful tiff" will haunt Saatchi for a long time. Maybe this was a situation when looking heart-ward might have been helpful after all. |
"Everyone is needy, arrogant, callous, aggrieved, self-absorbed, petty, mean-spirited, spiteful, greedy, envious, ill-mannered and malicious" | "Everyone is needy, arrogant, callous, aggrieved, self-absorbed, petty, mean-spirited, spiteful, greedy, envious, ill-mannered and malicious" |
| That was Saatchi's optimistic summation of humanity from his 2012 book, Be the Worst You Can Be. While his commitment to living this aspect of his personal brand over the past couple of weeks has been remarkable, the public has failed to meet his expectations. | That was Saatchi's optimistic summation of humanity from his 2012 book, Be the Worst You Can Be. While his commitment to living this aspect of his personal brand over the past couple of weeks has been remarkable, the public has failed to meet his expectations. |
| Widespread response to Saatchi's behaviour has been less marked by arrogance and callousness than it has been by a wave of kindness, concern and empathy for Lawson. Maybe the petty self-absorption of which Saatchi speaks caused him to overlook the fact that it's no longer 1985. Despite his and Thatcher's best efforts to encourage Britons to look after themselves and not each other, the nation still has a capacity for compassion. This is one campaign where Saatchi has failed to understand his audience. | Widespread response to Saatchi's behaviour has been less marked by arrogance and callousness than it has been by a wave of kindness, concern and empathy for Lawson. Maybe the petty self-absorption of which Saatchi speaks caused him to overlook the fact that it's no longer 1985. Despite his and Thatcher's best efforts to encourage Britons to look after themselves and not each other, the nation still has a capacity for compassion. This is one campaign where Saatchi has failed to understand his audience. |
"… for the true entrepreneur, striving for success isn't business. It's just personal" | "… for the true entrepreneur, striving for success isn't business. It's just personal" |
| Lively advice for the ambitious in Babble, published by Saatchi earlier this year. But this latest string of events proves that the opposite is not true: treating the personal like an exercise in public relations wins the sympathy of no one. While sharing big news about a business via a media exclusive is a strong entrepreneurial strategy, telling your wife that you're going to divorce her in an interview to a Sunday tabloid (or, heck, even a broadsheet) is redolent of something. But it's not success. | Lively advice for the ambitious in Babble, published by Saatchi earlier this year. But this latest string of events proves that the opposite is not true: treating the personal like an exercise in public relations wins the sympathy of no one. While sharing big news about a business via a media exclusive is a strong entrepreneurial strategy, telling your wife that you're going to divorce her in an interview to a Sunday tabloid (or, heck, even a broadsheet) is redolent of something. But it's not success. |