Excalibur

"And now", said the conference chairman, "the moment I know you've all been waiting for."

The room fell quiet, apart from the occasional whispered apology as a member of the audience returned late from the break. Rarely had this exclusive hotel hosted such a gathering of marketing moguls. Most of the big names were there, as well as a sprinkling of smooth, soliciting consultants and desperate advertisers - those whose managers had not cancelled conference attendance budgets.

"It gives me great pleasure", continued the chairman, "to introduce the world's greatest expert on market segmentation, Professor Jan Thorsten Grunsson. Most of you know his work well, so I'll just mention a few of his achievements."

Five minutes later, the chairman finished reading out the famous Professor's curriculum vitae - we all had a copy of it in front of us. It told us that the Professor had consulted for half of Europe's top hundred companies. It told us that he had two doctorates. But at least it didn't count his warts (he had a few) or his bank balance - well, not quite, though it did tell us he was one of Europe's top-earning management consultants.

The slightly built, smartly dressed Professor sprung from his seat up to the rostrum. He had no computer, no transparencies.

"At least, no death by PowerPoint", I sighed to myself. I was already deeply underwhelmed by the succession of poorly designed and trite MBA-style slides that we'd been subjected to before the break.

He took off his reading glasses and held them in his left hand. He scanned the audience, or at least he gave the impression of doing so, because the spotlight on him was so fierce that seeing the audience must have been difficult. He scratched his head with his right hand, and then slammed his glasses down so hard on the rostrum that they must have been made of reinforced glass for them not to break. He then raised his left arm and pointed to somewhere in the audience, screaming, "Segmentize!" He paused for a few seconds, pointed to someone else, and screamed again, "Segmentize!" Then, silence for a few seconds.

"What is segmentization?", he asked. "Do you know?" He seemed to point to me. "Do you?"…pointing elsewhere. He was greeted by an embarrassed silence, broken only by a quickly muffled mobile phone ring as a consultant member of the audience stumbled out to handle an enquiry.

"Segmentization", he said in perfect English, "is the creative process employed to bring a segment to life, for staff who handle customers, and for the customers themselves so that they can help companies manage them…God knows, companies need help from their customers."

Forty minutes later, the silence that had first greeted the Professor crumbled. He ended on a ringing call to "segmentize or lose your best segments" and sat down to a wave of applause. Question after question burst from the audience. The chairman had to bring the regal audience to a close with the usual profuse thanks about how honoured we had been……….

That was five years ago. A month ago I read in the marketing press that the learned Professor had retired from full-time work. There was a brief interview. The memory of that splendid hotel speech flooded back. I called the journalist who had carried out the interview (I knew her well), and asked if she wouldn't mind putting me in touch with the Professor. She said she'd have to check with the Professor. Next day she called me back, with the news that he was visiting England next month and would be happy to see me.

When he came down into the lobby, I recognized him immediately. Retirement clearly suited him, though there was a tenseness - or was it weariness? - around his eyes that surprised me, even for a man just turned seventy. We settled down to our drinks. Mine - a whisky. His - a cocoa and a double whisky. For half an hour he took me through his career, how he'd worked in business for a few years, become a consultant and then returned to university to complete his first doctorate, how he'd fallen in love with academic life - and with a pretty young student, how he'd learnt about the respect shown to senior academics by business people who felt that they were missing something.

I asked him to cast his mind back to that day five years ago when he'd had such an impact on the audience.

"Oh", he said, "That was nothing special. By then I was doing that kind of thing three or four times a week, all over the world."

"Do you mind me asking how much they paid you?"

"£30,000 plus first class travel for myself and my wife, plus a luxury hotel", came his quick response. "That was my standard price".

"Every week?"

"Of course"

"Almost a David Beckham", I thought.

"Did you give the same speech?"

"Of course not." He looked around, almost as if to see whether anyone else could hear. "Do you want me to tell you how I fixed it?"

"Yes, yes please."

"OK, but you must promise me not to tell anyone else, at least until I die."

"I'll do my best", I replied. "How long do I need to keep it quiet?"

"Six months at the most."

I blushed deeply, and started to stammer, "I'm dreadfully sorry, I didn't know, I…."

"Don't be", he said. "You weren't to know. And there's nothing you or I can do about it. So on with the story."

"How about another drink first."

"No, I'm feeling a bit weak. Let's get on with it." He drained what he had left of his whisky and continued his life story.

"When I was about forty", he said. I'd done pretty well for myself, combining consultancy, academic life and directorships. I'd made my first few million dollars. It was about then that the American business school guru factory got to work. I was at a conference in the States, and one of the professors who had just wowed the audience with a brilliant speech got very drunk in the hotel bar. I had to take him to his room. I was about to leave him there but he insisted on me staying. I think he was a bit lonely - his wife had just divorced him. Thank God I never suffered that!"

He continued, "What that Professor told me transformed my life. He gave me advice that was worth millions and millions of dollars. And I have followed it more or less to the letter ever since. This is what he told me."

" 'Jan, there's a funny thing about marketers. The more senior they are, the harder it is for them to admit they don't understand something. Whether they understand something or not doesn't matter, it's what they're prepared to admit to that counts. If you want to make serious money, you must follow marketing principles. You must first segment your market, but use psychographics as well as demographics. Look for areas where people are confused, and confuse them more. The more you confuse them, the more money you will make, because they won't be able to admit that they are wrong. And if you're going to do it properly, become an actor.' "

The Professor paused, and winced. "I didn't believe what I was hearing. It was completely against what I thought academics stood for. But I was persuaded. You may think that I'm really dishonest. But do you know what the clinching argument was for me? My American friend said, 'If you won't, someone else will, and you'll lose the client' ".

"At that point", the Professor smiled, "he passed out, and in the morning he was gone. But I thought long and hard about his advice, and then I hit upon the answer. Just like a successful comedian, you've got to have a catch phrase. It works all over the world. But in marketing, to confuse senior marketers, the catchphrase must be plausible nonsense. If it's not nonsense, they'll understand it. But if it's not plausible, there will be no basis for them to instruct their junior colleagues to find out more about it, to 'establish its foundation', to 'position it within the management debate', and so on. Need I say more?"

"Not really", I replied. "Except….I must say I haven't followed your career that closely, but you said that you didn't give the same speech all the time. I only heard your 'segmentize or die' speech."

"Ah", he said, "but now that I've told you how it works, can you name some similar catchphrases?"

"One to one, customerize, value chain, competitive advantage, customer relationship management, customer-managed relationships, service excellence, positioning, hype cycle, product life cycle, integrated communication, business transformation, business re-engineering, outsourcing, e-business, enterprise resource planning….."

"Stop, stop", he laughed. "Some of the ones you mentioned aren't like mine, because they really make sense".

"Which?"

"Oh, come, come, that's for you to discover and me to smile about. All you need to know is that very few of them made any money for anybody but the consultants or suppliers who 'helped' their clients. You must know that yourself, as a customer, when you think of the products you buy and the service you get. But you didn't let me finish. I always made sure I had three catchphrases on the go at the time, and I presented them to different market segments. I had one for neurotic marketing directors, one for neurotic HR directors, one for neurotic CEOs. Remember, I said blend the demographic with the psychographic. I never liked dealing with Finance directors - they always wanted to know how the concept could increase profits, and I knew none of my concepts could. Each catchphrase lasted around three years - time for a couple of books, lots of articles and 30 or 40 speeches."

"Well", I said, noticing that he seemed in pain, "when the story does come out, have you got any words of encouragement for me?"

"Oh yes. Just stick to basic marketing - Marketing 101. It's got a good track record. Everyone understands it. And it works. It certainly worked for me. Goodnight."