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Hello and welcome to a characteristically uplifting episode of The Hard Sell, where the stick in the swill-bucket rattles back.
I’m Presenterbot 4000, and you’ve caught me at my second job:
ensuring these fleshbags don’t escape until their regulation knocking-off time.
I’m Jeff Bezos’ favourite employee! Today this programme is looking at technology again,
which is why I’m here, but this time with particular focus on the heart-stoppingly exciting
world of office equipment. Hold me back, someone.
Technology took several great strides after the war, and by the eighties, society was
striding right up to meet it. The alpha male of the Reagan and Thatcher years, as we all
know by now, wore a crisp Savile Row shirt, a tie with diagonal stripes to emphasise forward
momentum, and a jacket with shoulder pads like milkmaid’s yokes. The workaholic acquisition-obsessed
archetype of the Yuppie was created. Everyone either invested in companies or started one.
Or were unemployed and therefore worthless, but never mind them. With more and more people
going into business, more and more new companies arising, it was a good time to be a technology
firm specialising in photocopiers, word processors, printers and the like. Here are some of the
many ways in which such things were sold to you fleshy ***.
The OGs of this business are probably Xerox. After all, the word is synonymous with photocopying
- much to the irritation of Xerox themselves, who’d actually prefer their name to refer
to themselves rather than the process. Stands to reason really: it might sound like a good
thing to be so omnipresent that people talk about xeroxing things rather than photocopying them,
but if they’re xeroxing them on Canon machines it still benefits your rivals and
not yourself. Still, you know you’ve penetrated society’s consciousness when you’ve become
a verb, for better or worse. Xerox have been around for ages, since the days when you could
unironically make an advert like this and no-one would bat an eyelid.
If you can’t figure out what’s so bad about that advert, then congratulations: you’re a sexist ***.
Or an imbecile. One or the other.
In Britain, Xerox was represented in the 20th Century by their European subsidiary in partnership with the Rank Organisation.
That’s the ones. Their involvement was almost by chance; they’d,
metaphorically speaking, sort of, tripped and fallen into camera lens manufacturing,
and if they wanted that side of the business to turn a profit they needed another technological
product sharpish. The head of that Department, Thomas Law, happened across a small company
that claimed to have invented a machine that made copies really fast. He and Rank decided
to invest in that. And that machine turned out to be the photocopier, and the company
turned into Xerox, and the photocopier became one of the biggest and best-selling inventions
of the decade and both companies made money hand over fist. The end. Except not, obviously.
By the early eighties, Xerox was a verb and Rank Xerox was the European arm of a giant
corporation that had long since moved beyond photocopiers to make printers, word processors,
some new thing called a Facsimile Machine and fully integrated network systems. Enough
to run an entire office on. A full fledged technological revolution, or so the marketing
went. The integration of modern technology into the classic setting of the soul-crushing
business office, which has existed long enough that Herman Melville out-Dilberted Dilbert
a hundred years before Scott Adams was even born, let alone first tried to pick up a girl
with hypnosis and blithe apologias for fascism. Anyway, we were talking about selling Rank
Xerox, for which the main pivot was the marriage of old and new. Therefore the advertising
needed to invoke extreme cleverness, and futurism, but also tradition and reliability.
Who fits the profile? Good thinking, Einstein.
Albert Einstein, another victim of the same semiotic process as Xerox, the genericized trademark for extreme smartiness.
The perfect figure to invoke to advertise computers and other such office equipment.
Rank Xerox. It’s the office equipment Einstein would use. If he wasn’t dead. And therefore unable to
confirm or deny our assertion. So take our word for it. Shut up.
One problem you may have noticed with this advert is that it’s not especially exciting.
That was the advertisers’ greatest challenge. Because photocopiers just aren’t interesting.
And nor are fax machines, or electronic typewriters. Even word processors are mildly interesting at best.
Frankly I’m surprised you’re still watching this programme. Although having said that,
DO NOT PRESS STOP, LASERS ARE TRAINED ON YOU R POSITION RIGHT NOW, PROVE THEY AREN’T.
Anyway, making exciting adverts for office equipment is a tricky proposition, and one
with which the people tasked with selling Rank Xerox tended to struggle. I mean, look at this thing.
This is the age of the Yuppie! Capitalism is the new rock and roll!
What’s this dull sepia mess in aid of?
The Yuppie stereotype finally made his way into a Xerox advert, almost too late to make
a difference, in an overcompensating singalong from 1989.
But the imperial age of the Yuppy was over by now, with Black Monday two years earlier having wiped the smiles
off their filofaxes, and a looming recession about to render them practically extinct.
It was time for advertising to stop concentrating on the overachieving individual
at the top of the totem pole, and start embracing the ordinary employee.
From 1991 and directed by Richard Loncraine, a campaign to keep Rank Xerox’s stock high
during the recession. Going for the "slice of life" format was probably sensible,
as it makes their products relatable to ordinary proles.
The photocopier, fax machine and friends are now just everyday tools for everyday work, rather than what they were in the 80s:
futuristic ultra-machines whose careful use could make you personally richer than Croesus.
Another advantage of the slice of life format is the addition
of a regular cast, which in turn provides the opportunity to shift the focus.
A few years earlier, Donna would be a nameless extra, and the action would be centred entirely
on her shoulder-padded, fringe-phobic boss. Now Donna is the central character, and the
Yuppy boss is a semi-antagonist. She’s not the enemy or anything, but she’s not a sympathetic character either.
It’s not so much that the public opinion of the Yuppy has changed
- no-one ever liked them - it’s that their standing in society has fallen.
The logically named Rank Xerox partnership lasted from 1956 to the collapse of the Rank
empire in the late 90s, whereupon Xerox took full control of the European subsidiary and
simply folded it back into its massive multinational ***. It’s just been Xerox worldwide ever since.
But there are other fishes. Probably the biggest after Xerox, and possibly even bigger in the
UK, are their Japanese rivals Canon. Yes, it doesn’t sound like a Japanese name at
first, but it actually comes from an Anglicisation of the name of the legendary East Asian Bodhisattva
Guan Yin, known as in the West as the Mercy Goddess, revered by Buddhists of all stripe,
as well as Taoists, and venerated in temples across Asia, including Shaolin. So there you go.
Their advertising in their home territory has, as is often the case, tended toward the
incomprehensible, at least to Western eyes.
The strawberry represents the average rainfall in Yokohama Prefecture. You never know, it might.
Like Rank Xerox, Canon’s advertising in the early nineties deliberately went to the
white-collar equivalent of factory floor. The similarity ends there, however; Rank Xerox
went for everyday realism, with an everywoman spokescharacter. Canon went for representational
symbolism and an animated mascot made of paper.
Actually, I’m still having trouble with the fact that you’re walking and talking.
Okay then.
I think he’s supposed to be whimsically charming, but actually he’s a bit more like you’re
hallucinating, and he’s the one who spiked your drink.
Eventually this evolved into this briefly but irritatingly omnipresent little number from 1993.
This is one of those times I’m really glad to be a robot.
I can just delete this song from my memory.
And I have. I’ve had to. Repeatedly. You, however - you're stuck with it for the rest of time.
Notice how even the advert itself gets sick of it
and actively interrupts before it’s finished. I wonder what the rest of the song would have been?
Oop, no I don’t, I don’t even remember what song we’re talking about anymore.
Eat it, fleshbags.
But surely there must be a British technology company I can buy my office equipment from,
says the Daily Mail reading Brexit-voting idiot at the back. Well, sure.
Amstrad didn’t do photocopiers, as far as I can tell, but their word processors and printers were pretty
good, and relatively inexpensive. That, in fact, was their unique selling point in the advertising:
that they were quite cheap.
Say what you like about Alan Sugar. Please do.
But he knows what motivates ordinary people to open their wallets, and it’s nothing
to do with the chips and wires inside, or indeed whether or not Einstein would have bought one.
It’s always the bottom line, the old dosherooney as he would say, because he’s a ***.
Which meant that Amstrad’s computers and the like were quickly outpaced
in the technological stakes, but continued to sell right up to the point of absolute obsolescence.
Meanwhile, Sugar and his company had moved on to something more lucrative,
specifically making satellite dishes for Sky television. And Tottenham Hotspur.
Those are the three main techniques for selling office equipment: aim at the boss, or the
company itself, and dazzle them with metaphors; aim at the employees and demonstrate your
product’s practical use; or simply slap a price tag on them and call it a bargain.
All depending on how big of a company you’re aiming at. If you’ll excuse me, I think
someone might be about to try and nip off for a ***.