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There is one audience, every marketer is also allergic.
Middle class.
You can talk about them abstractly, but you must never name them.
To embrace the middle is to suggest that your brand is complacent, complacent, average, and just plain average.
But it is time to recognize and assert the importance of the middle class as the heart of our nation.
Because the middle class is suffering.
And that’s a huge problem because it’s the people that virtually every business depends on.
The less well-off may need our help and the wealthier may attract our fascination, but the middle class are the engines of our economy.
And things are getting worse for them.
Jeremy Hunt, Chancellor of the Exchequer in the last UK government, may have got himself into hot water when he said life was tough for households earning £100,000, but he is right about this. Because life is harder for them and for everyone who grafts for their income.
These are PAYE employees in the basic and higher tax brackets who do not have private and passive income, family wealth, non-dom status, tax avoidance schemes, houses on the Isle of Man or anything else that distinguishes robbers from robbers.
People who saw their economic power gutted by meaningless levels of growth and then added to the damage by inflation and then further damage in rising interest rates.
Yes inflation. If I had a pound for every time people told me inflation and the cost of living crisis were over, I’d have a lot less today than I did five years ago. It’s not over, not for long.
People make this mistake because we don’t understand inflation. We are a generation that does not remember the corrosive inflation of the 1970s. And while we’re starting to realize how weak the pound has become in our digital wallet, I still don’t think we’re really getting it.
How toxic it is. How psychologically damaging it is. How persistent it is.
Inflation will never go away.
Overall inflation will eventually fall, but the damage is done.
Once prices go up, they never go down. So we’re paying a lot more for everything than a few years ago—about 20% more than this time in 2020. Energy and food costs have fallen, but the middle class spends much less on them as a proportion of total income than the rest of the population.
Of course, wages rise in an inflationary economy. But partly because of unfounded fears that wage growth will lead to inflation, they are not in line with inflation. No one who got a raise came even close to maintaining a stable income.
And those people who are reporting wage increases are telling us they’re hardly going to get anywhere. Because these increases will either end the benefits or move them into a higher tax bracket. And this at a time when the tax burden of the middle class significantly exceeds that of the rich.
The double whammy is that the Bank of England tried to control this inflation by raising and maintaining high interest rates.
This crucified middle-class families through their mortgage or rent payments. And all to no avail, because this round of inflation was not caused by too much people’s purchasing power, but by supply-side costs such as energy.
Slowly but surely the middle class is being emptied. Drained of their energy, dynamism and purchasing power. And that should petrify any marketer.
These are the findings of the latest installment of ‘What the Fuck is Going On?’, an ongoing research program at Saatchi & Saatchi that has delved deep into the lives and feelings of middle-class people from all four nations of the UK. It tells the story of a group of people who see work almost as a religion, but it no longer pays off. People who are more resilient than most, but have that resilience tested to the limit. People who are motivated by aspiration but see the engine of aspiration – university – fail them and their children. Partly because of the obscene levels of debt that a college degree requires. And the people for their social contract with the establishment don’t seem to be worth the paper they’re written on.
If you care about them, your brand should do something for them – as middle class people, they don’t like to complain and won’t ask for help. Because, in the words of Labi Siffre, they understand all too well that “someone somewhere is much worse than you”.
Support their aspiration, help them make more informed decisions, enable their ambitions, bring real value and support the things they still believe in but are less able to contribute to. And above all, don’t be ashamed to serve them.
Because make no mistake, that sound you’re hearing is a low middle-class cry of pain. From your best customers. From your journey to growth and the growth of the nation as a whole.
You can download the short book “Heartland giving voice to Britain’s middle class” here.
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