“T” is for “Training”

There’s many an advert that has become a catchphrase, and most of us have an affection for a couple. Some, like “Tango”, have had social consequences well beyond the expectations of the advertising agency. Some have outlasted the company or product they promoted. And few could have been as successful in recent years as the Ronseal advert, with "It does exactly what it says on the tin" now a fixture in the journalists’ big book of handy clichés. The slogan has resonance because we are indeed all absolutely sick of products that don’t do what they promise. It’s bad enough getting home to find the giant box of detergent is only two-thirds full, but even more irritating when you discover that “No More Nails” ( “other adhesives are available”) is really just another glue, and buying it doesn’t mean you can finally chuck out your hammer.

The Ronseal trick is of course, not much about what they print on the tin. It isn’t that they set out a few of years ago to make an entirely different and amazing new product that totally revolutionised external wood treatment. It does not mean that they then wrote the words on the tin anew to explain the fantastic new properties of this wonder product. Instead, they just made sure that what was printed on the tin matched the properties of the contents. It was a really simple trick – tell the customers what they are getting. As Homer Simpson might put it, “Duh!”.

I was standing around over one of those conference buffet lunches – you know, the ones where you have a choice between saturated fats or refined carbohydrates, all gingerly balanced on a plate held in one hand so you can neither unwrap nor use the knife and fork in a napkin because there are no chairs or surfaces to use - with a training provider, the other day. This chap (or chappess) was extolling the virtues of their fledgling training consultancy. Full of it, the new proprietor told me that he (or she) was offering something really revolutionary. The key, it seemed, was the “inclusive macro-participative philosophy” or some such. As far as I could tell this was a belief that………

………at which point I rather lost the thread for a few minutes, but when I relocated it the point was that directories usually don’t have a category for “Participatory Learning Facilitation services” or some-such, which is what he (or she) felt was the proper description for the revolutionary development opportunity on offer. Well, you could have knocked me down with a deep fried miniature spring roll, so amazed was I at this revelation.

This is called the “Yellow Pages Paradox”. Suppose you have a piece of ground and you want to discourage customers for the local “Blockbuster” from clogging up your own parking spaces. The answer is perhaps a threat of wheel clamping, clearly a job for yellow pages. So you go and look up “Wheel Clamps” in Yellow Pages.

Oh dear. It isn’t there, is it?

That’s why yellow Pages have a directory to guide you around the directory. They KNOW you are likely to want to look up “wheel clamps”, but for some extraordinary reason they don’t want to list them. Instead, you have to go to the back, to the “directory of directories”, and look up “wheel clamps”, where they will tell you that you should really be looking under “Traffic Control Equipment”. How silly does that make you feel? You must feel almost as stupid as that poor gormless idiot featured on the Oasis “Chug it” posters in 2006.

So I was itching to tell this eager young Turk that if she (of he) started by calling their business a “Participatory Learning Facilitation” service or similar, no one was ever going to find it in a directory anyway. And if anyone did stumble across the listing, they wouldn’t have the faintest idea what was on offer. Even if they did then call, would they really want to sit through an explanation of the unique philosophy behind the (soon-to-be-an-ex) consultancy? No.

The world buys “training”. For heavens sake, if you are starting a “people development” business, get used to it! They don’t buy “participatory people development interventions”. They are not looking for “Embedded Organisational Excellence consultants”. They wouldn’t know a “Macro Learning facilitation service” if it bit them on the gluteus maximus. Just get listed under “Training services”, and put the higher philosophy at the back of the brochure. Right at the very back.

But if you must be so pretentious, you’d better remember that “Bankruptcy” is listed in Yellow Pages under “Insolvency Practitioners”.