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As Christmas is looming around the corner, even the Fool, Connect magazine's columnist, is feeling festive. This month, he has therefore submitted not one but two pieces, the first of which discusses what actually pays the bills: a feigned show of morality, or good old-fashioned profit?
"Being a good old-fashioned Capitalist, and having been subjected to one too many iPhone pictures of Gap wearing longhairs sipping from Starbucks Big ‘n’ Talls, whilst protesting globalisation, the Fool is not the sort of chap given to angst over the latest example of imagined corporate hypocrisy.
"Given that the depth of understanding of the real effects of global capitalism by the perpetually agitated rent-a-mob who usually attach themselves to protests is measurable only in Pictometres, I tend shrug, pass go, and collect another £200.
"But just occasionally comes an example of Newton’s third law in action which, despite Paradise/Panama papers, corporate morality, social justice and other lurid leftist fantasies which seem to dominate our world, makes me think that natural selection might still win out in the end.
"Paperchase is a UK company which flogs cards, paper, artist materials and the like. The company has been around since the late 60s, and during its history, has had quite a journey, passing through many hands before landing with its present owners, the private equity company Primary Capital, and its board of directors. So far, so err, un-station(a)ery.
"Because of the number of similar companies out there, it’s a competitive industry, which means that in order to stand out, the company find it necessary to advertise. This they do through various publications and trade journals, and other than a bit of a to-do about stealing an artist’s work in 2010, the company have been pretty uncontentious. Until mid-November this year that is, when, as part of a promotional push neatly timed for the run up to Christmas, they decided to offer the readers of the Daily Mail some free wrapping paper. And suddenly things started to go rapidly upside down.
"StopFundingHate is a campaign which, depending on your viewpoint, either ‘aims to stop companies from advertising in, and thus providing funds for, certain UK newspapers’, or is ‘a small group of hard left Corbynist individuals seeking to suppress legitimate debate and impose their views on the media, who encourage people to influence the content of newspapers they don’t read themselves’. This group, as is their want, took particular umbrage at Paperchase’s decision to help Daily Mail readers out with their Christmas plans, Facebook and Twitter literally catching fire (stop it, you’re better than that. Ed.) with, it is estimated, over 200 posts from SFH’s members decrying the company’s promotional efforts.
"Now under normal circumstances, sufficient virtue would have been seen to have been signalled, and the grown-ups would shake their heads and move on with their lives. However, in an extraordinary turn of events, Paperchase decided to take to Twitter to apologise for their actions, and promised they ‘wouldn’t ever do it again’. That is, they promised never to again advertise in Britain’s second largest selling daily paper (circulation 1.5million). One would also imagine, by extension, their new found piety will also prevent them from doing the same in the largest selling, the Sun, and 9th best-selling, the Daily Express, (combined circulation 2.1million) the two other expressly stated targets of SFH’s campaign. (In addition, one must assume that they would also wish to avoid any connection with the world’s most visited English language newspaper website, MailOnline).
We’ve listened to you about this weekend’s newspaper promotion. We now know we were wrong to do this - we’re truly sorry and we won’t ever do it again. Thanks for telling us what you really think and we apologise if we have let you down on this one. Lesson learnt.
— Paperchase (@FromPaperchase) November 20, 2017
"As corporate strategies go, this might yet turn out to be a move rivalled only by Gerald Ratner’s description of his own Jewellery chain’s products as ‘crap’, which, instead of seeing him hailed as a ‘bit of a one’, proceeded to rapidly send his company to the brink of bankruptcy.
"As anybody but Paperchase’s PR department might have foreseen, those readers of the various publications which Paperchase apologised for associating themselves with (that’s approximately 3.6 million daily readers, plus another 16 or so million website visitors) didn’t take too kindly to the company’s decision to effectively brand them as ‘supporters of hate’. A campaign to boycott the company’s stores followed, the results of which will no doubt be seen when the company next report their sales figures.
"Now the fact that Paperchase have decided to effectively side with a group of a couple of hundred shouty protestors against the content of certain newspapers is not actually the most stupid thing they have done in this instance. That’s obviously a subjective judgement, dependent upon one’s own engagement with reality. There are however questions that need to be asked:
"If the company is truly as pious as they obviously believe they are, what were they doing advertising in the Mail in the first place? Either nobody in their media-buying department has ever read that particular paper (unlikely) or they chose to ignore its traditional content in favour of the commercial reality of reaching the maximum number of potential customers. In which case their subsequent apology makes them look both stupid, and unprincipled.
"Secondly, was spending a fortune on advertising that has ultimately resulted in branding millions of potential customers as ‘funders of hate’, and in turn causing them to boycott your company, the best use of precious company cash?
"But perhaps, if this does indeed turn into a ‘Ratner’ moment for the company and sales crash as millions of people decide to shop elsewhere, the stupid will have been strongest with the co-owners of the business, the Board of Directors. They will have sacrificed not only their jobs, but also their investment, under the belief that a feigned show of morality, rather than good old-fashioned profit, would pay the bills.
"A company called Paperchase as a metaphor for why the finance industry might actually survive all this nonsense. Look in your dictionary, you’ll find that under irony."
You can read the Fool's column every month in Connect magazine, here.
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