The reason why conferences take place in the lavish venues that they do is because the power of the spoken word is often deeply underappreciated, and the future of a business can be shaped in just a few minutes.
Perhaps the most infamous example was a speech made at the 1991 IoD Annual Convention, where two infamous jokes became so immediately damaging that the phrase “doing a Ratner” has since entered the business lexicon to describe how careless talk costs money.
Whilst Gerard Ratner’s disastrous speech was the most immediately impactful, other examples have occurred during business conferences, where in a chamber of peers, a business leader can sometimes inadvertently let their guard down in a way that has caused significant impact to a company.
GlaxoSmithKline Admits Drugs Do Not Work
Many examples of “doing a Ratner” are less about the content of a speech but more about its framing. Mr Ratner himself turned his jewellery empire’s biggest selling point into its biggest weakness, and the late Allen Roses nearly did the same for pharmaceutical conglomerate GlaxoSmithKline.
In 2003, at a scientific meeting in London, Dr Roses was quoted by The Independent as saying that GSK’s prescription medications do not work for most people, citing that 90 per cent of drugs on the market only work 30 to 50 per cent of the time.
This was not necessarily revelatory, particularly to the scientific community, and the speech was intended to advocate for targeted medicines, but at a time when broad-based medicalisation was central to GSK’s success, it was extremely controversial and compared directly to Mr Ratner.
Don Mattrick Tells Customers Not To Buy Xbox One
The Electronics Entertainment Expo is home to some of the most infamously impactful speeches and presentations, even outside of the computer game market.
In 2004, Nintendo of America managed to turn around several years of relatively middling success with a bold press conference when President Reggie Fils-Aime boldly stated that he was about taking names, whilst his company was about making games.
However, the opposite happened in 2013, when Microsoft revealed the Xbox One and managed to generate far more controversy than excitement, particularly with regard to the console’s online connectivity requirements, which risked alienating consumers without broadband internet.
This was not ideal, but the Ratner moment came in an interview filmed before it for GameTrailers, where Microsoft’s President of Interactive Entertainment Business, Don Mattrick, rather infamously said that people who did not have regular internet should buy their previous console instead.
The response was immediate, Microsoft reversed course within a month, and Mr Mattrick would leave Microsoft a month after that. The Xbox One would take years to recover and require a complete change in approach.
Topman Calls Its Suit Wearers Hooligans
Whilst Ratner moments typically involve insulting a company’s core customers, most of the time this is done implicitly; Gerard Ratner never said that his customers were cheap and tasteless, merely that the products they liked were.
However, David Shepherd, then brand director of Topman, was quoted by The Independent as saying to a trade publication that the fashion brand’s primary customers were “beer-swilling hooligans”.
Whilst the intention was to channel the then-contemporary concept of the “new lad” focused less on sartorial elegance and more on comfort and personal expression without standing out, Mr Shepherd went on to say that their customers only wear suits to court cases and interviews.
It caused a PR firestorm, and Topman continued to struggle until it finally collapsed into administration alongside the rest of the Arcadia Group in 2020.
