What Richard Carrick Taught Me About Marketing, Customers and Shiny Shoes

People often assume that successful marketing is about producing clever advertising, designing attractive brochures or inventing memorable slogans. Richard Carrick taught me that none of those things matters unless you first understand how customers actually behave, which is often very different from how they claim to behave.

I look back with pride on the talented people I worked alongside during Airtours’ incredible growth in the 1990s, and Richard was undoubtedly one of the most influential. I often referred to one of his marketing outbursts as AFBM, or “Airy-Fairy Bollocky Marketing”, but beneath the occasional marketing waffle was someone who understood the importance of watching customers, listening to them and building the business around what they really did.

In those days, booking a holiday usually began with a visit to a travel agency to collect brochures, which were then taken home and spread across the kitchen table. The research Richard commissioned suggested that women dominated this initial research process, influencing around 80% of holiday choices, while the husband was generally brought in to validate the final decision and, rather predictably, make the payment. This was reflected in the booking data, where around 90% of holidays still had the husband recorded as the lead passenger.

Richard organised female study groups and sat me behind a television monitor with him while they discussed how they chose their holidays. It was fascinating because, rather than carefully reading every page, customers flicked through brochures rapidly, looking for something that caught their eye.

This was where I learned about “brochure flick ability”.

Brochures were a major factor in a tour operator's success or failure because customers usually collected no more than three or four. Typically, they chose two of the main Summer Sun brochures from the largest operators, followed by a more random selection from smaller companies, often because the front cover looked appealing or the brochure specialised in somewhere they already fancied, such as Sunmed for Greece.

To see this behaviour for myself, I spent years walking around the travel agencies in Bolton and the surrounding towns every Saturday while my wife shopped. I watched where our brochures were displayed, which one’s customers picked up and how the staff behaved when somebody entered the shop.

You could usually wander into one of the large vertically integrated retailers, collect an armful of brochures and leave without anybody saying a word. Independent agencies were much harder to escape from because the staff wanted to talk to you, while owner-operated shops could be positively dangerous. On a few occasions, an angry proprietor spotted me and demanded to know why I was nicking his precious Thomson brochures.

Once the brochures reached home, customers generally had a rough idea where they wanted to go, based on conversations with friends, family or, most importantly, somebody down the pub who had recently returned from somewhere sunny. They then flicked through the photographs and glanced at the lead prices to decide whether a hotel appeared affordable.

The study groups revealed something commercially important. Provided customers saw a free child place, they rarely studied the under-occupancy supplements or flight supplements hidden at the back. Calculating the final price was so complicated that we left it to the travel agent using viewdata.

I therefore made the lead hotel price even more prominent, repeating it above the pricing panel in lettering three times larger. At the same time, we moved more of our margin into under-occupancy and flight supplements customers weren't examining. It may not feature prominently in marketing textbooks, but it worked because it reflected how people genuinely shopped.

Richard also taught me to speak publicly without notes by memorising the key points rather than every word; however, I paid less attention to his strict rules about staff always wearing shiny shoes and never being photographed holding a drink.

However, his advice about wearing a smart tie at conferences, so people noticed that instead of looking into your eyes and realising how badly hungover you were, proved extremely useful.

Richard’s lasting lesson was simple: never design marketing around how customers should behave. Watch what they actually do, understand why they do it and build your commercial model around that.