THE PATRON SAINT OF GAFFES
I don’t recall about whom it was said, but the article in the
newspaper I read more than twenty-five years back said that he had “done a Ratner”.
I did not quite get the meaning then, but the expression stayed with me.
The memory cells were reactivated the other day when this came
up in a quiz. “To do a Ratner” is to say something so stupid that it sends your
fortunes plummeting. Research led me to his autobiography “Gerald Ratner: The
Rise and Fall … and Rise Again”.
Ratner was the CEO of the Ratner’s Group. Think of him as the
poor man’s De Beers. He had worked for about two decades in the family business
of imitation jewellery which had about 150 stores but had seen no spectacular
success. After he inherited the business in 1984, he “re-engineered” it and in
six years, it had 2,000 outlets targeting the working class.
How did he do it? Ratner
claims that when he was young, he had noticed that the vendors selling the best
goods at the Petticoat Lane Market were not the ones who got the most
sales; it was the hawkers who yelled the loudest that most customers were drawn
to.
Ratner applied this concept to his own business when he took
over the Ratner's Group and he made sure that all of the shops in the Ratner's
chain had bright orange displays that loudly advertised their prices and deals.
Soon he captured half the market and Ratner’s became a household name.
True, those who could afford the real stuff thought that the
baubles he sold were tacky and gaudy and looked cheap. Though ridiculed by
other jewellers and the affluent, those who did not have the moolah to buy the
genuine stuff or did not want to dip into their savings flocked to Ratner's. Spurred
by the publicity blitz and the low prices, sales went through the roof.
As the key person
responsible for the stupendous success of the company, Ratner was invited by
the Institute of Directors to speak about how he’d made his company so big so
fast.
He started the speech
well, but at some point, a member of the audience asked him how his company could sell things so cheap.
That was a fateful moment. You can listen to his now infamous response here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sKtBkVrqYYk
You can hear him say “Because
it’s total crap.” He also said that the earrings he sold were “cheaper than prawn
sandwiches but probably wouldn’t last as
long”.
This has gone down as
one of the biggest blunders in business history. So much so that even Ratner
refers to this as “the speech”.
He may have been honest,
or may have spoken in a light vein because it was a private event. He may not
have expected that the journalists listening would not report all that. The
next day it was national news. Overnight, the market capitalization of the
company dropped by 500 million pounds (much more than one billion dollars at today’s
rates). Customers began avoiding and English language adopted a new eponymous
phrase: “do a Ratner”, meaning really screw up things.
If you ever said something that you immediately
regretted having said or wanted to take back straight away, remember Gerald
Ratner, the patron saint of gaffes.
