Selling the Dream

by Hugh Mackay

  Bob couldn’t see the point. ‘We can’t expect our clients to hike out to Woop Woop to listen to a group.’

  Which was precisely Otis’s point. He would never allow observers to intrude on an in-home group discussion. He liked to work in a highly relaxed, naturalistic way. He could just imagine the scene if a couple of marketing types muscled in on a group being held in someone’s home. There they would be, in someone’s kitchen or living room, listening to a group of young mothers, say, chatting informally about whatever they wanted to talk about – jobs, kids, husbands, life in general – being only gradually and gently edged towards the topic of the research. (Otis was a great believer in ‘creeping up’.) To have some observer in a suit whispering in his ear or passing him a note, urging him to get to the point, would shatter the fragile dynamics of the set-up.

  It had happened once, when, in a moment of weakness, Otis had allowed a client to dispatch four executives in dark suits to observe a group discussion in a modest home in Bexley North. The host had run out of chairs, and two of the men had stood, leaning against the wall. The seven women in the group had been understandably intimidated by the presence of observers, and were completely unconvinced by Otis’s cover story that these bulky middle-aged men were trainee assistants learning the ropes.

  ■

  When Otis left university with a glittering PhD in behavioural science, he had dreamt of securing a job in a university department awash with sufficient grant money to support cutting-edge research into Otis’s favourite subject: the mind–body fallacy. With his idealism burnished to a bright glow, Otis wanted to prove beyond all doubt that ‘the mind’ was nothing more than a useful metaphor and that some of the most significant drivers of human behaviour could be found in the digestive organs – especially the gut. He didn’t discount the significance of the brain and central nervous system, but he felt the role of the gut had been seriously under-estimated.

  His search for such a post had been fruitless. When his parents finally threatened to cut off his money supply and his girlfriend ditched him for a neuroscientist, he responded without enthusiasm to an advertisement for a behavioural scientist to work on – he could hardly believe it – ‘cutting-edge research into the principal drivers of human behaviour’. Everything about the job sounded perfect, except that it was in the research department of a company that made hair-care products.

  He was duly interviewed, employed and, in return for a generous salary, put to work as part of a new product development team working on a project of such sophistication and complexity that Otis, PhD and all, had trouble grasping the nuances of the research design and keeping up with the flow of data being generated in the lab. The statistics were almost beyond his grasp.

  Stunned by the devotion and skill of his colleagues, he found himself caught up in the work. Away from the lab, though, he found it difficult to explain to family or friends that he was working on the development of a placebo gel that would be sold as a treatment for the ‘wider-centre-parting effect’ in middle-aged women suffering from stress. (The product had begun life as a hormonal gel, but when early research found no statistically significant difference between the effects of the gel with and without hormone content, it was decided to eliminate the expensive hormonal ingredient.) When he once hinted, in conversation with a colleague over coffee in the staff canteen, that, given the distress experienced by women affected by this type of hair loss, there seemed something morally dubious about designing and promoting a product known to have no therapeutic properties, he was met with a blank stare.

  ‘Ah,’ his colleague finally said, ‘I see what you are driving at. You do not yet understand. We are in the business of influencing human behaviour, not curing wider centre partings. We are unlocking the mysteries of human motivation. Who gives a fig about vanishing hair?’

  ‘The women who suffer from this problem?’ Otis ventured.

  ‘We are facilitating their capacity for self-healing, at best. But that’s a collateral benefit, my young friend. What we are really doing – at least this week – is determining whether a little more mauve in the pack design will enhance purchase intention.’

  Disillusioned, Otis moved to a job with a manufacturer of breakfast cereal where, he assumed, the products would at least have some nutritional benefit. Again he was struck by the high-order intensity of the research he was asked to work on. Nutrition scarcely seemed to come into it: he was exploring the impact of personality traits – especially introversion and extroversion – on breakfast-eating habits, and trying to establish the relative effectiveness of advertisements that showed people eating breakfast alone or in company, and standing up or sitting down. When he left, two years later, to take his first job in an advertising agency, the many interrelated questions posed by this research had still not been satisfactorily answered.

  As he moved from job to job, it began to dawn on Otis that the less a product mattered in the overall scheme of things, the more sophisticated the research that supported it. Privately, he framed this as the Law of Inverse Significance. The theory behind it was that when grown-up – and often highly qualified – people were put to work on the marketing of essentially trivial products, they needed to wrap themselves in a self-delusional cloak of intellectual rigour in order to be able to face themselves in the bathroom mirror.

  Pet food was Otis’s favourite example of the Law of Inverse Significance: he had seen some of Germany’s finest minds devoted to the development of products with features that would make them irresistible to dogs and cats, and some of the most accomplished social scientists he had ever met had been prepared to commit themselves to the design and execution of research projects to test the slogans, the images, the propositions that would capture the imagination (and empty the wallets) of pet-owners. By contrast, Otis had witnessed marketing strategies for luxury cars and public health campaigns emerge from a single afternoon of undisciplined brainstorming. Similarly, he had worked on million-euro campaigns for some of the most technologically sophisticated products in ‘the digital space’ that had been based on a chance remark overheard in the men’s washroom.

  For Otis, The Ripper loomed as a classic case of the operation of the Law of Inverse Significance. Knowing how much hung on the success of this launch, he saw this as a golden opportunity to relieve GBH of a very large sum of money to fund some seriously innovative research. So he had convinced Jerry Weisbrot, via Linc, to implement a series of experiments that would allow Otis to test some of his own emerging theories of human behaviour, including his undiminished conviction that some of its most potent triggers originate in the gut. Nowhere else, in his experience, were such generous budgets available to fund this kind of research – and the consequences were deceptively . . . well, inconsequential. But for Otis, it was never only about snack food, hair care, breakfast food, soft drink or deodorant: it was always about unlocking more of the secrets of the human condition as well. The book he would one day write, based on these accumulated insights, would, he believed, lay bare the mind–body fallacy. He had even settled on a title – Gut Feelings: The role of digestion in human thought and action.

  ■

  In addition to Otis’s impressive suite of research projects designed to explore every conceivable aspect of the market’s likely response to The Ripper, Linc had requested a series of AdLab groups so he and Jerry could directly observe consumers’ reactions to the product and to some of his promotional ideas. Otis had no option but to agree: though he regarded these sessions as little more than a source of reassurance and entertainment for an anxious client, he also hoped he might get some ‘atmospherics’ to add colour to his book.

  The observer group comprised Linc and Bob Kelman from the agency, with Jerry, Delia, and three young guns from GBH – one lawyer, one food technologist, one CIA. The GBH company nurse was stationed in a sick bay, located near the toilets, in case of emergency. On the other side of the glass, Otis would be facilitating a discussion with seven fourteen-year-ol
d males. Otis had insisted they should all come from the same school, in the hope that they might form something like a natural group capable of spontaneous interaction. Social influence, he believed, was going to be the crucial factor in the success of The Ripper.

  Before the boys arrived, Bob herded the observers into their viewing area, where he reminded them of the etiquette. ‘You can talk, but keep it to a murmur, okay? No whispering – whispering’s easier to pick up than murmuring. Any raucous laughter will be heard. We keep the lights low on our side, and bright on theirs. No need to take notes – Otis will supply you with a full transcript tomorrow. When all the groups are done, he’ll meet with you at the end of the week to discuss the findings and their implications. So have a drink or three, and enjoy the show.’

  A lavish assortment of GBH snack products was laid out on the table and a caterer swept in with a tray of hot party pies and quiches and a selection of wraps. Beer, wine and spirits were flowing freely, and the observers were well oiled by the time Otis and his group of fourteen-year-olds filed into the room on the other side of the glass and took their seats at a round table. At one point in his introduction, Otis gestured towards the mirror, explaining that there were observers on the other side.

  ‘Fuck! Really? Who are they?’ said a boy in a bomber jacket, coming right up to the glass, tapping his finger on it and waving.

  ‘Don’t wave back,’ hissed Bob. ‘He might see you when he’s that close.’

  On the other side of the magic mirror, Otis was trying to sound reassuring. ‘Just people who are interested in your opinions.’ Adult groups rarely pursued this point, he found.

  ‘You mean marketing people, do you?’ said the bomber jacket.

  A boy in a red jumper was starting to show some interest in this exchange. ‘Is this one of those fucking focus groups?’ he asked.

  ‘Bring the people out – I want to see them,’ said the bomber jacket.

  ‘Not possible, I’m afraid,’ said Otis, though he himself had long argued that observers should indeed be identified and introduced to the group, on ethical grounds.

  ‘Bugger this, then,’ said the red jumper. ‘They look at us and we can’t look at them. It’s like some kind of surveillance thing, isn’t it? Come on, guys, let’s shunt this.’

  ‘What about the money?’ said another of the boys.

  ‘Fuck the money. It’s peanuts anyway. This is exploitation. They’re going to use this for advertising and stuff. We should be getting paid a lot more.’

  A rumble of protest seemed to be gathering momentum, but then the caterer arrived with a tray of burgers, chips and drinks, and things seemed to settle down.

  Behind the screen, Jerry was worried. ‘Won’t this affect their taste-buds? How are they going to respond to the product it they’re already full of burger?’

  ‘They’re permanently full of something, Jerry,’ said Bob. ‘Don’t worry. Otis has it all sorted. He’s a tiger for naturalism. He’s scheduled some emptier-tummy groups as well, for comparison.’

  ‘Any chance of a burger for us?’ asked Delia.

  Jerry glared at her, and she reached for a limp wrap.

  On the other side of the glass, Otis had paused while the boys’ hunger pangs were assuaged. Then he asked them to talk about what they liked to eat when they weren’t at home. A disjointed, desultory discussion ensued. The general drift seemed to be that it usually came down to some combination of Maccas, pizza, chips and Coke, but someone complained that the question was stupid: ‘It all depends what time it is, how much cash you’ve got, and what you feel like. Ask us something else.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said the chorus.

  ‘Any more burgers, by the way?’ asked one of the boys. Hunger was already returning.

  ‘Sorry,’ said Otis, divulging nothing about the taste treat in store. ‘There are plenty of drinks though.’

  As time passed, the groups on both sides of the glass became more relaxed. When the boys’ wariness had subsided sufficiently, Otis decided the time might have come to expose them to The Ripper. He produced the pack and placed it on the table in front of the boys. Three of them reached for it at once.

  ‘Excellent!’ exclaimed Jerry. ‘What did I tell you about the PPAR?’

  ‘Shh. Sorry, Jerry, but we need to keep it down. I think the lads have forgotten we’re here.’

  At that moment, the bomber jacket waved extravagantly at the mirror and called out: ‘Hey, gross pack!’

  ‘Did he say “grouse”?’ asked Jerry, his voice rising with excitement. ‘I haven’t heard anyone say “grouse” for years. Has “grouse” come back into the lingo, Linc?’

  ‘He said “gross”, actually,’ Bob told him. ‘Keep it down, okay?’

  ‘What the fuck is in it?’ asked the red jumper.

  ‘What do you think might be in it?’ countered Otis.

  ‘How the fuck are we supposed to know what’s in it if you won’t tell us? What a dick.’

  ‘Just try to imagine.’

  ‘Bullshit!’

  Behind the glass, Jerry asked Bob and Linc if the boy was suggesting the pack contained bullshit. Bob and Linc thought not.

  ‘Tell you what it looks like,’ said a quiet boy in a T-shirt with Make me! on the front. ‘Mustard.’

  The other boys all chortled with delight.

  ‘Mustard! Rupe, you dick. When did you ever buy a packet of mustard? What the fuck made you think of mustard?’

  ‘I was actually thinking of mustard gas, although I suppose that wouldn’t come in a box, would it – and why would anyone be selling it, anyway?’

  ‘He does history,’ said the red jumper to the magic mirror, by way of explanation.

  Behind the mirror, Jerry said: ‘Good association, actually. He’s in the right ballpark.’

  The boys were throwing the pack around, giving everyone a chance to examine it.

  ‘It rattles. Must be full of little bits of something. Sounds like the packet of those snail-bait pellet things my mum makes me put in the garden,’ one boy remarked.

  ‘What does it say on the back? You can hardly read it.’

  ‘Especially if you can hardly read.’

  ‘Does anyone want to try it?’ asked Otis.

  ‘Of course we want to try it. Why the fuck do you think we dragged our arses all the way in here on a Friday night?’

  Otis handed out bottles of water and paper plates, then tore the top off the pack and emptied a small pile of pellets onto each plate.

  ‘See. I told you it sounded like snail bait. Looks like it, too.’

  ‘It’s better to suck rather than chew them,’ said Otis.

  The group fell silent. They looked. They sniffed. They coughed. They screwed up their noses. They simulated gagging. They glanced at each other, waiting for someone to make the first move. A boy in a Zorro T-shirt picked up a pellet and threw it across the table, hitting another boy in the face. A brief scuffle ensued.

  At last, the bomber jacket picked up a pellet, stuck his tongue out and placed the pellet on its tip. Almost immediately, he spat it out.

  ‘Fuck!’

  No one moved. The bomber jacket repeated the performance with a second pellet, but this time he didn’t spit: he held it in his mouth for a moment and then ran from the room, retching, in search of a toilet. Sounds of copious vomiting could be heard.

  ‘Cool,’ said the red jumper. He picked up two pellets at once and put them in his mouth, gagged, controlled himself for a moment, took a sip of water, then he, too, ran to the toilet.

  By then, the bomber jacket was back, ready for another go. ‘This stuff is evil,’ he said, with warm approval.

  The boy who had mentioned mustard was studying the fine print. ‘It says here: “May contain traces of poison”. I’m not eating poison!’

  ‘Come on, Rupe, it won’t kill you. I was just sayin’, about the snail bait.’

  Rupe shrugged but refused to try the product.

  Others around the table were taking
tentative tastes, some licking the pellets before actually putting them in their mouth. Some sucked. Contrary to Otis’s advice, some chewed and looked triumphant when they were able to control their gagging. Some coughed. But there was no more actual vomiting. Everyone was taking frequent swigs of water. It was turning into a contest to see who could eat the most without betraying any signs of nausea or revulsion.

  Several boys took to throwing pellets to each other, mouths open, trying to land them on each other’s tongues. One kept throwing a pellet into the air and catching it in his own mouth. No one was saying much about the product; they seemed more intent on doing things with it.

  ‘How would you describe the taste?’ asked Otis when the product had almost all been eaten or discarded one way or another.

  ‘I wouldn’t try,’ said the red jumper, his voice sounding hoarse. He picked up a final pellet and tossed it straight into an open mouth on the other side of the table.

  Jerry and Delia beamed at each other in the dim light behind the glass. Linc gave them each a high five.

  6

  HE SUPPOSED THEY might be called techniques. Little things The Darby said or did, or asked him to say or do, while they were in a state of intimate arousal; things of which he had not previously been aware that heightened his own pleasure in quite unexpected ways and evidently pleased The Darby as well. It was a revelation.

  Without wanting to make it too obvious that he was in experimental mode, he had attempted some of these techniques at home in his own bedroom with Hermione. It would be going too far to suggest that Hermione was suddenly keen on sex again, but probably fair to say she seemed intrigued.

  When he was growing up, girls had been a mystery to Linc. An only child who attended an all-boys school, he had not had much experience of females, apart from his mother and two aunts, until he started work and attended university as a part-time evening student. There were plenty of girls – attractive girls, bright girls, enchanting girls, provocative girls, mysterious girls – to be found in both places, but Linc’s lack of knowledge and experience made these early encounters awkward and sometimes painful. What did one say? What did one do? How was one supposed to respond?