Many years ago, back when fax machines were a thing, a friend of mine had been called in to evaluate the effectiveness of a luxury car-maker’s much-acclaimed recent advertising campaign.
He waited in a London meeting room for the latest sales figures to be sent from the UK Head Office. The fax machine rang a couple of times, whistled a bit then started to churn out the latest sales graph.
“I think it’s broken,” his companion said. “It seems to have got stuck.” But there was nothing wrong with the fax machine. The sales figures, covering the period both before and after the launch of the advertising campaign, appeared on the chart as an unbroken, straight and - worst of all - horizontal line.
Most of us, I think, would have seen this as decisive - and damning. Clearly the advertising hadn’t had any effect. All the other “soft” measures had been highly positive, but when it came to the one decisive measure - sales - there was nothing to show for it.
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