Bogof's Week

Grocer, Oct 14, 2000

You could tell BBC anchorman Michael Buerk was happy in his work at the IGD convention by the way he laid into some of the speakers. Particularly the marketers among them. And Labour spin meister Philip Gould.

Buerk told the audience whenever marketers got together he always found his eyebrows tended to rise in disbelief (unlike my colleague who told me his eyes were in danger of closing during the interminable marketing session).

Anyway, having told Tesco's Tim Mason et al that he had detected the faint "whiff of bullshit" during their presentations, Buerk turned on Walkers' Martin Glenn and demanded to know how anybody in their right mind could claim consumers felt an emotional attachment to a bag of crisps -- no matter how good they tasted.

Fair point. I have to say he treated outgoing Wal-Mart Europe boss Allan Leighton with more respect and it was the latter who cracked most of the funnies. I particularly liked Leighton's neat idea of forming a company called going-plural.com after being flooded with letters and emails in the wake of his now infamous "I'm going plural" resignation speech. He also highlighted an obvious irony in his decision to quit Wal-Mart: "If you perform well you can leave. If you perform badly you leave with a lot of cash. I should have been crap,"

Later he insisted that he had not done a "Kevin Keegan" by resigning -- despite Wal-Mart's problems with Germany.

By the time of the awards in the evening, Buerk was back in the limelight. He praised IGD president Sir Ross Buckland for performing his arduous job as "snogger in chief" -- in presenting prizes to the mostly female winners.

Given that perk, there'll probably be a queue of candidates to be IGD president.