Calls have been made for the resignation of Conservative chief-whip Andrew Mitchell since the public outburst last week in which he allegedly swore at Metropolitan Police Officers and referred to them as ‘plebs’.
Always keen to examine the serious communications issues of the day, the IT Marketing Factory did not waste any time putting this one under the microscope. Here we present our findings, which we hope will provide food for thought for our web design, email marketing and SEO clients.
Know your audience
Mitchell denies using “the words attributed to him” and on that basis has received the dreaded vote of confidence from his boss David Cameron. No surprises if he’s out of a job by the weekend then!
But whilst his remarks were certainly disrespectful, maybe his greatest crime from a marketing perspective was failing to know his audience.
As a specialist IT marketing agency, we help IT support companies and UK resellers engage effectively with their target audience and the attention is always in the detail.
After all, is being a ‘pleb’ always a bad thing? The police officers who gathered to protest outside Mitchell’s constituency office wearing t-shirts emblazoned with the slogan “PC Pleb and Proud” don’t seem to think so.
The word originates from the period of the Ancient Romans where plebeians were the everyday Roman citizens and patricians were the privileged few holding positions within the priesthood and the ancient Senate.
The term was used widely in the 80s and 90s to mean either an ‘idiot’ or a ‘member of the working class’. But whilst the former is indisputably pejorative, the latter is not necessarily so. Indeed, many members of our society are very proud to describe themselves as ‘working class’ and it would not be unusual to hear the word used in this way in pubs up and down the land.
Of course, given the connotations of class, certain usage might be ironic. For example, a group of nurses who disagree with government spending cuts might remark: “What would a bunch of plebs like us know about running the NHS anyway?”
But isn’t this the crux of the issue? It’s rarely about the word itself – more about the sentiment behind it. Unfortunately for Andrew Mitchell, as an ex-Rugby public schoolboy, Cambridge alumni and now senior Tory politician, the use of this word in frustration at a policeman is only ever going to be interpreted one way. Know your audience, Mr Mitchell.
Is ‘pleb’ as bad as ‘chav’?
Just as a footnote to this sociolinguistic study, our discussion in the office came back to the modern day term ‘chav’ and how it compared to ‘pleb’. The general consensus was that the term ‘chav’ was always derogatory since we do not believe those members of our society labelled as chavs by others would readily refer to themselves in this way.
So it could have been worse!
