its contribution is decidedly modest. Any liquid, whether a glassful of tapwater or a mouthwash named in honour of the father of antiseptic surgery, will coat the mouth, wash away surplus food particles, and mildly reduce the build-up of dental plaque. Listerine may be somewhat better than pure water in doing just that, but it is certainly a lesser part of good dental hygiene than either brushing or flossing. Indeed, the alcohol content of many mouthwashes may dry the back of the tongue and thereby encourage the growth of the bacteria which are largely responsible for bad breath. If you really want to deal with bad breath then brush your teeth, floss, and, if you really must, gently scrape the back of your tongue with the edge of a teaspoon. Despite fifty years of advertising to the contrary, Listerine does nothing at all to help with colds or sore throats. No data has ever been produced to demonstrate that Listerine has helped the guy get the girl or the girl get her guy.
Lambert’s story is the perfect way to introduce the topic of salesmanship. It’s a tale which begins with Pasteur, Koch and Lister – a group of scientists responsible for one of the most important set of medical discoveries ever. Their work was rigorous and scientific. It has been of vast and continuing benefit to mankind. By contrast, the story of Listerine mouthwash begins with an invention: a pseudo-medical term, a phoney disease, and unjustifiable medical claims. The product created to honour Lister was founded on a fraud.
Listerine may not have done much to endear itself to medical science, but in the annals of consumer marketing, Gerry Lambert can claim an honoured place. Consumer brands had only been around for some thirty or forty years, when Listerine took off. The first British company to register a trademark was Bass, the brewing company, whose red triangle logo was registered in 1876 and is still in use today. Yet a trademark and a brand are rather different. A trademark as boring as Bass’s triangle does nothing to encode a more complex identity in the consumer’s mind. If Bass’s was the first British trademark, then Lyle’s Golden Syrup with its green and gold can and its wonderfully weird illustration* has some claim to be the world’s first and longest enduring consumer brand.
America proved to be even more fertile ground for consumer marketing. The challenge for the first marketers of mass-produced consumer goods was to convince buyers that their products were as good as those offered by better known local suppliers. In densely settled Europe, with its long-established communities, those local bonds were often slower to break down. In America, with its vast landmass, unsettled population, and new communities, there was often little or no local bond to conquer. In 1882, Quaker Oats launched a national ad campaign around its logo of a ‘man in Quaker garb’. Coca-Cola’s famous cursive logo arrived in 1885, though the bottle wouldn’t follow for a further thirty years. The year 1900 saw the arrival of Campbell soup served up in a tin looking much the same as it does today.
Important as these innovations were, they remained tentative. In 1900, J. Walter Thompson started to pitch the idea of trademark advertising – that is, the notion of building a family of associations around a familiar logo or product – but it would take the heated, urbanized atmosphere of the Roaring Twenties for Thompson’s vision to be fully realized. Gerry Lambert and his reckless talent for invention was one of marketing’s first and greatest stars. Lambert was no longer selling a mouthwash; he was selling an aspiration, a lifestyle, a fantasy, a dream.
That’s the positive spin. The negative one is that he was also creating a fear that had never existed before – the fear of ‘halitosis’ – and answering it with a collection of half-truths and lies. As consumers ourselves, we suspect all salespeople of the same willingness to say anything at all to close the deal. The issue is at its most intense when it comes to branded consumer goods, but all industries need to market their wares. Entrepreneurs need to take risks and show drive to succeed, but they also need to sell, they need to persuade…and, the worry persists, if they need to lie, then lie they will.
My quest to understand capitalism from the inside required me to understand the selling impulse too. I needed to meet the modern day Gerry Lamberts and understand what made them tick. But I had a problem. When I met senior CEOs and entrepreneurs, I could hardly ask them, ‘Would you be prepared to lie outright to gain a sale?’ When I did broach the question of salesmanship, I got the kind of answers you might expect. A man who had chaired a major British consumer goods company told me solemnly, ‘It’s about laying out the advantages and values of your product…You can’t fool the consumer. In the end, it’s all about communication.’ And I believed him – that is, I believed that he had come to believe that. I suspect that most senior marketers at most blue chip companies believe something very similar.
But Gerry Lambert did set out to fool the consumer. It wasn’t that he wanted to lie; it was that he didn’t much care whether he did or whether he didn’t. The modern day advertiser has to live with a host of protective consumer regulations, the scrutiny of advertising watchdogs, a media waiting to pounce, and a globalized market where a scandal in one territory can quickly create havoc in another. One advertiser told me candidly that he welcomed all these advertising regulations, ‘however boring and stupid’ they might sometimes be, ‘because the nature of what we do always pushes us to the max. It makes my job more manageable – more ethically manageable – if I know that I just can’t lie, however much I might feel pushed to do so.’
In short, the carefully managed world of the modern marketer has become a bad hunting ground for the true salesman. If I wanted to find the unvarnished truth about the sales impulse – Essence of Salesmanship, free of any careful PR overlay, free of any government-imposed restriction – I needed someone whose need for good PR had long since vanished. I needed someone who didn’t care what others thought. I needed someone who was a salesman through and through and who wanted to tell me how it worked.
And that was how come I came to be in a bar outside Liverpool Street station in London with a man that I’ll simply call Tom. Tom grew up in Essex. He had wide estuary vowels, no fancy schooling, and no Oxbridge polish. In US terms, this was a kid from the wrong bit of New Jersey, not the right bit of Martha’s Vineyard. He drifted into the City of London, working in the back office of a major investment bank. Tom knew he could sell stuff. Stocks, bonds, derivatives, he didn’t care. He just knew he could sell. But the major investment bank wasn’t set up to give Essex kids without much formal education the chance to prove themselves. The major investment bank wanted Oxbridge types speaking to clients and Essex types settling the trades. Tom got bored.
He dabbled in the markets during the dot.com boom and got dot.com busted when the markets crashed. He lost his own savings and his family’s savings too. Then a chance conversation in a pub told him about a job opportunity in Madrid. He didn’t know much about it, except that the job involved selling shares. He made a call, got offered a job, was on a plane to Spain the following week.
What he encountered there was madness. He found six salesmen yelling into phones. He found a place that had a tape recording of a busy trading room on permanent playback, as a way of making clients feel that they were dealing with a huge organization. He found a place where the chief salesman had a notice above his computer that read, ‘You’re Steve Fox. You’re a broker. Be a cunt.’ Tom received five minutes of training – essentially a guy telling him to ‘flog shit’ – and he was put to work.
That work involved calling punters in the UK – ordinary individuals with some money to invest, very few of them expert in finance – and getting them to buy stock in US companies. Unlike outright criminal enterprises (so-called ‘boiler rooms’) that stock was always delivered, but the salesmen didn’t know or care whether the stock itself was sound, or whether the investment in question made sense for the individuals they were talking to. Their job was selling. Nothing else mattered. It wasn’t about stock selection, financial know-how, customer care, or even the bare minimum of business ethics. It was selling, pure and simple.
To cut a long story short, Tom was very good at his job. He quickly became the most successful salesman in the company he joined
