Ask most people who was Prime Minister at the end of WW2 and they’ll say Winston Churchill.
But that isn’t true, he was voted out of office before the war ended.
How can that be, the man whose face is on our £5 notes along with his quote: “I have nothing to offer you but blood, toil, tears, and sweat.”
How could Britain have voted him out of office before the end of the war?
It was called ‘The Khaki Election” and there’s a very interesting lesson which we still haven’t learned.
It’s all to do with ‘experts’ living in an echo chamber.
In 1945, Germany had surrendered but Japan was still fighting, so the war wasn’t over.
It seemed to the Conservatives the perfect time to hold an election.
Churchill was a hero to everyone who spent the war in Britain listening to the radio, they heard him every week, he was the voice of the nation.
So it seemed obvious to the experts to quickly hold an election and all that emotional attachment would sweep Churchill to victory.
And it looked like they were right, amongst the votes cast in Britain it was a landslide in favour of Churchill.
The formality remained of counting the votes of the soldiers, sailors, and airmen serving abroad.
This took six weeks, and when the result came in it was astonishing.
The votes from abroad outnumbered those at home, and they voted Churchill out by a large majority.
The experts living in an echo chamber, sitting in London, only heard the opinions around them: their friends and colleagues, the radio, the newspapers, so they thought that was everyone.
They never bothered asking the opinions of the people serving abroad.
Towards the end of the war, Churchill’s speeches were mainly about the dangers of creeping Communism, he wanted to go back to the way Britain had been before the war.
But the troops didn’t want to go back to the way it had been before the war: living in poverty, no work, families in hovels, starving.
Meanwhile, the Labour party spoke to the troops about change: decent homes, decent pay, education for their kids, free medical treatment, a better life.
But the experts at home didn’t see that coming because they assumed everyone thought the same as them.
That should have been the lesson we learned from the Khaki election, but it wasn’t.
Later, experts would have to learn the same lesson again about Brexit, then experts would have to learn it again about Trump.
Strategy departments are full of people who went to university, so they consider themselves experts.
Gordon Brown, like all politicians, considered himself an expert.
He was out canvassing for re-election when one elderly lady said: “What are you going to do about the immigrants?”
He brushed her off, saying: “We’ve got that handled don’t you worry about it.”
Then he got into his car but forgot his microphone was still switched on.
He said to his assistant: “Oh, just some silly, bigoted old woman.”
That clip was played on every news broadcast, and it cost him the election.
It showed the contempt ‘experts’ have for anyone who doesn’t think like them.
That’s something we badly need to learn in our business.
That’s why advertising is in the state it is.
We’re not interested in whether ordinary people like the advertising.
We’ll give them what we think they ought to want: because we are the experts.
We’ve learned about brand purpose, and heuristics, paradoxes, and fallacies, and AI.
And yet, much as we know the theory, the public still hates all the advertising.
They must be stupid because we are the experts, so we are right and they are wrong.
It reminds me of a book Robin Wight wrote, called: “The Day the Pigs Refused to be Driven to Market”.
We never seem to learn, there’s a world outside the echo chamber.
Fantastic read as always Dave
Appreciate your overall message, but is that an accurate precis of the Gordon Brown/Gillian Duffy story? Tell me if I’m wrong but I don’t think he used the words ‘silly’ or ‘old’ as in your quote, I think he said ‘She was just a bigoted woman.’ I also don’t think Duffy just said ‘What are you going to do about the immigrants?’. She said: “You can’t say anything about the immigrants because you’re saying that you’re … but all these eastern European what are coming in, where are they flocking from?”
back when my kids were young, say 1999, we had them enrolled in new york’s poshest private school. it practically bankrupted us. one saturday i ran into our congressman in central park. i said, you have to do something about the schools. (public education in nyc was horrible.) he asked where my kids went and i told him. his reply? it doesn’t get better than that. missing the point entirely.