Why Marketers Must Address Middle Class Challenges

There is one audience every marketer is allergic too.

The middle class.

You can talk about them in the abstract, but you must never mention them by name.

To embrace the middle is to suggest that your brand is smug, satisfied, mediocre and just plain middling.

But it’s time to recognise and champion the importance of the middle class as the heart of our nation.

Because the middle class are hurting.

And this is a massive problem because they are the people virtually every business depends upon.

The less well-off may need our help and the richer may attract our fascination but the middle are the engines of our economy.

And things are getting increasingly bad for them.

Jeremy Hunt, Chancellor of the Exchequer in the last UK Government, may have got into hot water for saying life is tough for households earning £100,000, but this is one thing he is right about. Because life is tougher for them and everyone that grafts for their income.

That’s the PAYE employees in basic and higher tax groups who don’t have private and passive incomes, family wealth, non-dom status, tax avoidance schemes, homes in the Isle of Man or anything else that marks out the grifters from the grafters.

People that have seen their economic power eviscerated by pointless levels of growth and then had injury added to injury by inflation and then another injury in interest rate rises.

Yes inflation. If I had a pound for every time people have told me that inflation and the cost-of-living crisis is over, I’d have a lot less today than five years ago. It’s not over, not by a long chalk.

People make this mistake because we don’t understand inflation. We are a generation that has no memory of the corrosive inflation of the ‘70s. And even though we are beginning to realise how weak the pound in our digital wallet has become, I still don’t think that we really get it.

How toxic it is. How psychologically damaging it is. How enduring it is.

Inflation doesn’t ever go away.

Headline inflation eventually comes down but the damage Is done.

Prices once up will never come down. So we are paying far more for everything than we were a few years ago – about 20% more than this time in 2020. Energy costs and food prices may have come down, but the middle classes spend a lot less on these as a proportion of total income than the rest of the population.

Of course, in an inflationary economy, wages go up. But, partly because of unfounded fears that wage rises will drive inflation, they are not in line with inflation. No one that has received a pay rise has got anywhere close to keeping their income stable.

And those people that report pay rises, tell us that they are hardly getting anywhere. Because those rises either end benefits or slide them into a higher tax bracket. And this at a time when the tax burden of the middle vastly out paces the rich.

Then the double whammy is that the Bank of England has tried to control this inflation by increasing and maintaining high, interest rates.

This has crucified middle class families through their mortgages payments or rent. And all for nothing, since this round of inflation wasn’t caused by people having too much spending power, but by supply side costs like energy.

Slowly but surely the middle class is being hollowed out. Sapped of their energy, dynamism and spending power. And that should petrify every marketer.

These are the findings of the latest installment of ‘What the Fuck is Going On?’, the ongoing research programme at Saatchi & Saatchi, that dived deep into the lives and feelings of middle class people all over the four nations of the UK. It tells the story of a group of people that see work almost like a religion but can’t make it pay anymore. People that are more resilient than many but are having that resilience tested to the limits. People that are motivated by aspiration but are seeing the engine of aspiration – university – fail to deliver for them and their children. In part because of the obscene levels of debt that a university degree demands. And people for thier social contract with the establishment appears not ot be worth the paper it is written upon.

If you care about them, your brand should be doing something for them – being middle class they don’t like to complain and won’t ask for help. Because, in the words of Labi Siffre, they understand all too well that ‘There’s someone, somewhere, much worse off that you are’.

Support their aspiration, help them make more considered choices, enable their ambitions, deliver real value and support the causes that they still believe in but at less able to contribute to. And above all don’t be embarrassed to serve them.

Because make no mistake, that sound you hear is the silent scream of pain from the middle class. From your best customers. From your route to growth and that of the Nation as a whole.

You can download the short book ‘Heartland, giving voice to the British Middle Class’ here.