Brainwaves, The glory, the glamour, the gongs galore …

With the end of one year and start of another, throughout the country – perhaps throughout the world – everyone spends time trying to recall who in their spheres of life deserve to be awarded gongs for their achievements in 2011. In marketing we tend to think our businesses are unusually keen on such communal backslapping.

Not so. Today, almost every business and profession is up to its neck in trophies. Hundreds of thousands of people, from all walks of life, attend awards thrashes each year, paying handsomely for the privilege.

The major dinners take place in London, mostly on Park Lane. The Great Room at the Grosvenor House can squeeze in up to 1,500 people, while a real biggie at Olympia will manage 2,500. But similar dinners, albeit on a smaller scale, take place in every chandelier-spangled hotel in the country.

The guests will always dress to impress. The sponsors will charge hefty sums to enter the competition, inflated prices for the dinner, fees to the donors of prizes, ludicrous programme advertising rates and other nice little earners, probably totalling around £50m a year in all. It’s a small but perfectly formed industry.

Yet almost nobody attends an awards bash either to be entertained or for the inedible grub. Most view it as an unavoidable business chore.

The rest are either hopeful contenders – oh, the glamour of that triumphal walk in the spotlight – or chums of the hopeful contenders. And the organisers are adept at hinting to all and sundry that they are in with an excellent chance.

This delicate process might be called gong-teasing.

Why have awards and awards shindigs become such an indispensable part of business life? A visiting Martian would be bewildered by our insatiable urge to ring each other’s necks with garlands. Quite simply, awards make us feel good about ourselves. They help us convince ourselves that the value of our work to society is far greater than is measured by our measly little monthly payslips. This is the reason for the dressing up, the fanfares, the glamorous venues, the famous compères and the rest.

"Almost every business is up to its neck in trophies. Hundreds of people attend awards thrashes each year"

They imbue the awards with glory, with mystique – with almost religious significance. To win a trophy, it all implies, is much more exalted than just earning loadsamoney. The glittering prizes honour quality, accomplishment, excellence. They are an increasingly alluring antidote to our increasingly mercenary world.

But the truly neat trick is that while pretending to glorify higher values, awards deliver the shekels too. To the winners they generally deliver higher salaries, maybe extra sales and bigger profits too. This is why, while many people mock awards, and moan about their cost, everyone still enters.

Merit and money indissolubly entwined: in the 21st century, what could be better?

Winston Fletcher writes extensively on advertising and marketing.
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