Orwellian Pub-topia and The Allure of Scalability


I was struck by an analogy I read today where someone likened a brand having a social media strategy to a brand having a pub strategy. In principle, the analogy is okay but the main problem I have with it is about scalability. It would be fine if the analogy were referring to a pub in which hundreds of thousands of people went and that pub sold lots of advertising which was tailored somehow to each patron and the conversations that happened in the pub were written down and analysed by the landlord for targeting purposes and those conversations were read by subsequent patrons and the pubs were giving away free beer because they hadn't worked out how to make money out of the millions of people hanging out in their pub and, well, you get the idea.

The thing that marketers find so deliciously irresistible about all this social media stuff is the allure of scalable. Social media scales, pubs don't, not good pubs. There is a pub in Manchester on Deansgate St. called The Moon Under Water. I have a vague feeling that it's the largest pub in Europe. As a 16 year-old boy, hooked on Embassy No. 1's, it felt like what I imagined the inside of the Titanic was like, full of wooden corridors, everything tied down. And it was one of the only places in Manchester we could be guaranteed to get served at our age. It's a Wetherspoons pub and, like all Wetherspoons pubs, it's principles are based on an essay by George Orwell in which he described the perfect pub. The essay, in fact, is where this pub derived it's name. And Wetherspoons really do follow his essay to the letter. The only problem being that The Moon Under Water is not a very good pub. It's dark and full of slutty-looking under-aged girls being ogled by cantankerous old men that prop up the bar at their usual positions, demanding conversation from the heavily made-up young chavs behind the bar. The slightly sticky carpets, the glistening gel in the hair of the spotty floor manager, the cheap frozen ready meals and the ornate pseudo-Victorian embroidery on the polo shirts. It's all as depressing as it's flat weak larger. The problem is that Orwell's very admirable principles simply don't scale very well. A really good boozer is intimate, warm, welcoming, quality and full of the kind of people you want to be around. If you ever try to scale that it falls apart. By scaling you are relinquishing the humanity, the personal touch and with it, the impression that you actually care. And that's kind of the case with social media, you follow your friends, you choose your settings and you create your own little niche. There may be 250m people on Facebook but there's only 20 of those people you actually give a toss about. But what marketers are really failing to understand is that a social network as an opportunity is very difficult to scale. Maybe it's not such a crap analogy after all. So, what's your pub strategy? I know mine.

By Mike Laurie