Watching the English

THE MODESTY RULE - AND THE 'BUMPEX' SCHOOL OF ADVERTISING

A further potential impediment to the successful conduct of business is the English modesty rule. While the English are no more naturally modest or self-effacing than other cultures - if anything, we are inclined to be rather arrogant - we do put a high value on these qualities, and have a number of unwritten rules prescribing at least the appearance of modesty. Perhaps the modesty rules act as a counter-balance to our natural arrogance, just as our courtesy rules protect us from our aggressive tendencies? Whatever their source, the English rules forbidding boastfulness and prescribing a modest, unassuming manner can often be at odds with modern business practices.

During my research on the world of horseracing, I was once asked, as the official anthropologist of the racing 'tribe', to talk to a group of racecourse owners and managers about how they might generate more business. I suggested that they could perhaps do more to publicize the unique social attractions of racing - the sunny 'social micro-climate' of racecourses. With a look of horror, one of the racecourse managers protested, 'But that would be boasting!' Trying to keep a straight face, I said, 'No, I think nowadays it's called "marketing",' but the modesty rule proved stronger than any of my arguments, and he and a number of his colleagues remained unpersuadable.

That is an extreme example, and most English business people would now laugh at this old-fashioned attitude, but there are still traces of this mindset in the majority of English businesses. While most of us would not go to the extreme of rejecting any kind of marketing effort as 'boasting', there is a near-universal distaste for the 'hard sell', for 'pushiness', for the sort of brash, in-your-face approach to advertising and marketing that the English invariably describe, in contemptuous tones, as 'American'. As usual, this stereotype reveals more about the English than it does about the maligned Americans: we like to think that our approach to selling things is more subtle, more understated, more ironic - and certainly less overtly boastful.

And so it is. As I have said before, we do not have a monopoly on these qualities, but they tend to be more pervasive here than in other cultures, and we take them to greater extremes, particularly in our approach to advertising. There was recently, for example, a series of television advertisements for Marmite41 in which people were shown reacting with utter revulsion - to the point of gagging - to even the faintest trace of a Marmitey taste or smell. It is well known that Marmite is something one either loves or hates, but an advertising campaign focusing exclusively on the disgust some people feel for your product strikes many foreigners as somewhat perverse. 'You couldn't get away with that anywhere else,' said an American informant. 'I mean, yes, I get it. People either love Marmite or find it disgusting, and as you're never going to convert the ones who find it disgusting, you might as well make a joke out of it. But an ad with the message "some people eat this stuff but a lot of people can't even bear the smell of it"? Only in England!'

The humorist George Mikes claimed in 1960 that 'All advertisements - particularly television advertisements - are utterly and hopelessly un-English. They are too outspoken, too definite, too boastful.' He suggested that instead of 'slavishly imitating the American style of breathless superlatives' the English should evolve their own style of advertising, recommending, 'Try your luck on Bumpex Fruit Juice. Most people detest it. You may be an exception.' as a suitably un-boastful English way of trying to sell a product.

This was clearly intended as a bit of comic exaggeration, a caricature of a stereotype, and yet, forty years on, the avoidance of breathless superlatives is now the norm in English advertising, and the makers of Marmite have produced a highly successful advertisement with precisely the same message as Mikes' fictitious Bumpex brand. The resemblance is uncanny: the ad agency might have taken their brief directly from Mikes' book. This suggests to me that his main point, that advertising itself is essentially un-English, and would have to be radically re-invented to comply with English rules of modesty and reserve, is also much more than just an amusing exaggeration. He was quite right, and spookily prophetic. Advertising, and by extension all forms of marketing and selling, is almost by definition boastful - and therefore fundamentally at odds with one of the guiding principles of English culture.

For once, however, our self-imposed constraints have had a positive effect: advertising does not fit our system of values, so, rather than abandon our unwritten rules, we have twisted and changed the rules of advertising, and developed a form of advertising that allows us to comply with the modesty rule. The witty, innovative advertising for which the English are, I am told by people in the trade, internationally renowned and much admired, is really just our way of trying to preserve our modesty.

We English can blow our own trumpet if we have to; we can put on displays of heartfelt, gushing enthusiasm for our products or services, but the anti-boasting and anti-earnestness rules mean that many of us find this unseemly and acutely embarrassing, and we tend therefore to be somewhat unconvincing. And this problem is not just a feature of the higher echelons of English work - I found that workers at the bottom of the social scale are no less squeamish or cynical about trumpet-blowing than the educated middle- and upper-middle classes.

THE POLITE PROCRASTINATION RULE

Although the rules governing initial workplace encounters allow us to sidestep the problems normally posed by the no-name rule and the handshake dilemma, that's pretty much where the reassuring formality ends and the potential for embarrassment begins.

For a start, as soon as the initial introductions are completed, there is always an awkward period - usually lasting around five to ten minutes, but it can take up to twenty - in which all or some of the parties feel that it would be rude to start 'talking business' straight away, and everyone tries to pretend that this is really just a friendly social gathering. We procrastinate politely with the usual weather-speak, enquiries about journeys, the obligatory wryly humorous traffic-moan, courteous comments on the host's excellent directions and rueful jokes about one's own poor navigation skills, interminable fussing over tea and coffee - including the usual full complement of pleases and thank-yous, appreciative murmurs from the visitors and humorously self-deprecating apologies from the host, and so on, and on.

I always find it hard to keep a straight face during this 'polite procrastination' ritual, because I am reminded of images from wildlife documentaries in which we see birds and other creatures engaging in 'displacement activity' - turning aside and nervously pecking at the ground or grooming themselves when they are in the middle of a confrontation over territory or mating rights or something. In tense, hostile situations, animals often perform these meaningless 'displacement' routines, as a kind of coping mechanism. It is much the same with the English in business meetings: the whole process of doing business makes us uncomfortable and embarrassed, so we distract ourselves and attempt to delay things by performing a lot of irrelevant little rituals.

And woe betide anyone who dares to cut short our therapeutic pecking and fussing. A visiting Canadian businessman complained: 'I wish someone had warned me about this earlier. I had a meeting the other day and they'd all been dithering and talking about the weather and making jokes about the M25 for what seemed like half an hour, so I suggested maybe we could get started on the contract and they all looked at me like I'd farted or something! Like, how could I be so crass?' Another told me he had worked in Japan, and been invited to participate in tea ceremonies 'but there you are either having a tea ceremony or you are doing business, they don't try to pretend the business meeting is really a tea party, like you do here'.