BBC NewsBorrowing was £17.4bn last month, the second highest October figure since monthly records began in 1993.
Sarah Tucker
I recently appeared in the Daily Mail discussing the realities of life in Richmond upon Thames.
The article was fairly straightforward: a pleasant place, some frustrations, some observations, a few jokes. Nothing especially revolutionary. Yet the comments section reacted as though I had proposed replacing the National Grid with avocados.
Among the hundreds of responses were complaints about Richmond, London, celebrities, cyclists, immigrants, school mums, traffic, local government, expensive lunches, expensive houses, expensive coffee, expensive furniture and, unexpectedly, my silver trousers.
Particularly my silver trousers, which apparently resembled Bacofoil.
To clarify, these trousers were from Jigsaw and have since sold out; this may or may not be relevant to the discussion.
Most people regard hostile comments as something to be ignored. Entrepreneurs should do the opposite. Not because the comments are right, but because they reveal something far more valuable than agreement ever does.
They reveal friction.
The mistake founders make is assuming customers will tell them what they want. They rarely do. What they reveal instead are the points where reality rubs against expectation.
The Richmond comments contained dozens of these points.
One group insisted Richmond is a paradise. Another argued it has become unbearable. One person claimed it is full of rich people. Another quoted a wealthy Russian saying it was full of poor people. Several argued there is nowhere to park. Others listed five underused car parks. Some thought the area impossibly exclusive; others complained it was no longer exclusive enough.
At first glance this looks like contradiction.
In reality it is demand.
Whenever a group of people cannot agree on what something is, there is usually an opportunity hidden somewhere nearby.
The entrepreneur’s instinct should be to ask: what are they actually arguing about?
Take the complaints about parking. Nobody really cares about parking. What they care about is convenience. Parking is simply the visible symptom.
Similarly, nobody in the comments genuinely cared about avocados. The avocado became a stand-in for a broader concern about overcrowding, availability and competition for resources.
Likewise, the debate about celebrities was not really about celebrities. It was about status.
This is where most market research goes wrong. People talk about the thing nearest to hand rather than the thing that is actually bothering them.
The successful entrepreneur learns to listen one layer deeper.
The comments about Richmond being “not what it was” are another example.
On the surface, this sounds like nostalgia.
But nostalgia is often a poor description of what people feel. Most people do not actually want the past back. They want the emotional certainty they associate with the past.
Nobody wants 1973 broadband speeds, 1973 dentistry, 1973 inflation. Yet many people want the sense that places had identity, communities felt stable and life seemed more predictable.
Those are entirely different things.
When entrepreneurs hear “things were better before”, they should translate it into a more useful question:
What feeling has disappeared, and how might it be recreated? The same applies to complaints that seem irrational. One commenter declared Richmond ruined by cyclists in Lycra. Another complained about scooters, dogs, tourists, aircraft.
Eventually, one begins to suspect that if every category of human activity is unacceptable, the problem may not lie entirely with the activity itself. Yet even here there is useful information.
People often express dissatisfaction through whichever target happens to be visible. A founder hearing these complaints should not ask whether they are fair. A founder should ask what underlying tension keeps producing them.
The most revealing comments were those directed at me personally, not because they were particularly cutting. Being criticised for metallic trousers is not among life’s great hardships.
What interested me was how little attention many commenters paid to the article itself.
The article became secondary – the author became the story. This happens constantly in business. Customers frequently react not to what you have said but to what they imagine you represent.
A luxury brand sells aspiration to one person and arrogance to another. A technology company represents progress to some and disruption to others. The product remains unchanged. The interpretation does not.
This is one reason founders become so confused by feedback. They think they are receiving objective assessments when often, they are receiving projections.
That does not make the feedback worthless – quite the opposite.
Those projections reveal the emotional landscape surrounding a market. The entrepreneur’s job is not to argue with it. The entrepreneur’s job is to understand it. What struck me most about the Richmond discussion was that many of the harshest critics seemed oddly fascinated by the place.
People who claimed they would never live there knew house prices, shop names, parking arrangements, local politics and restaurant bills in extraordinary detail.
This is not unusual. Indifference is silent, and strong opinions are evidence of attention – and attention remains one of the most valuable resources in business.
So what did I learn from my Daily Mail experience?
First, complaints are often mislabelled desires. Second, contradictions are usually signals rather than problems. Third, status anxiety drives far more behaviour than most people admit. Fourth,
nostalgia is rarely about the past.
And finally, if hundreds of strangers are discussing your trousers rather than ignoring you altogether, something has successfully captured attention.
Entrepreneurs spend fortunes trying to achieve exactly that. The trousers, incidentally, are still
excellent.
