News and blog

Cold calls sending out the wrong signal

150,000 years ago, give or take a few months, a Stone Age man (or it may have been a woman) stood outside their cave and offered to swap one of their nicest, shiniest stones, for a handful of berries.
They had to be pretty persuasive, because the folks who had berries had just trekked halfway round the side of a mountain to get them and didn’t want to part with them easily.
But one berry owner liked the idea and the deal was done, and from that moment on the world was never the same again. The stone-berry swap was the beginning of marketing.
You’d like to think that something which has been around for so long would now be refined and sophisticated and generally well thought of. But what has it evolved into? Annoying phone calls in the middle of Eastenders from call centres on the other side of the world.
Yes, 150,000 years of developmental history has led us into a very dark place indeed.
Now, don’t get me wrong. I work in marketing and I happen to think that without it, the world’s economy would grind to a halt.
Marketing and advertising, when done properly, are what help us all to make choices about what we spend our hard earned berries on. It’s how we know where to get things; and what kind of things there are to get in the first place.

Everyone cheers when an entrepreneur gets off their backside and starts a new business. But every business needs to market itself or else no matter how good the entrepreneur or their products, no-one will know where or how to buy them and the business is doomed to fail.
I’m hugely in favour of persuasive marketing. I applaud the creative brains behind a meerkat ad, my eyes fill up when I see ads with fathers indulging their sons and I’m definitely a sucker for the “2 for 1” or “buy one get one free” offers.
But coming back to the point of the story….how and why did we reach this low point in telephone marketing?
In the greater scheme of things, telephones haven’t been around that long. We didn’t have a telephone in our house until I was a teenager – and even then it was a shared line with at least one of our neighbours, and if they were using the line we couldn’t make a call (although you could sneakily lift up the receiver and listen to Mary from next door falling out with the latest in a long line of boyfriends).
It’s only really in the last few years that technology has given unfeeling, unscrupulous, thick-skinned barrow boys the ability to ring us up in our own homes and try to sell to us.
Even worse…they don’t even call us themselves…now they have computers to ring our numbers and recorded voices to talk to us.
Seriously. Does anyone ever stand there and listen to the full recording and think…”Wow…that’s just what I need…thanks Mr Disembodied Electronic Voice from Bangalore” ?
And that’s another thing. The Government and the marketing industry has come to realise just how unwelcome these calls are…so they jointly set up the Telephone Preference Service (TPS).
Every reputable marketing agency abides by a code of ethics and will not ring up any number which is listed with TPS, and, by the way, that is now 18 million of us and rising every day.
But the TPS is flawed, and can only block cold calls coming from the UK….so anyone using an international call centre can still get through to you.
It would be easy to say that we should just shrug these calls off. Hang up and move on. But, unlike unsolicited mail dropping through your letterbox every day which you can easily just drop in a recycling bin, the ringing of a telephone in your own home is a very evocative thing.
Especially in the evening, if your phone rings, you feel you have to stop what you are doing and answer it…after all, phones are there for people to communicate with you, a phone call is ultra-personal. And that makes having an impersonal call doubly annoying.
And things seem to be going from bad to worse. Now, in addition to the “legitimate” annoying calls, we are receiving an ever increasing number of scams where people try to get personal details out of you for identity theft, or they tell you you’ve won a prize and try to get you to call a premium rate number where they get a share of the call cost.
For most of us, these calls are infuriating and just make us angry. But for older people, many living alone, they can be downright terrifying.
I think it is time some nerdy young computer developer came up with an app which, at the touch of a button, can send an electronic pulse back down the phone and destroy the computer on the other end. Now that’s something I’d happily hand over hard earned berries for.