Tunnelling under the Thames
The first tunnel ever to be built under a major river was the tunnel under London’s River Thames
At the beginning of the 19th century, the port of London was the busiest in the world. Cargoes that had travelled thousands of miles and survived all the hazards of the sea were unloaded on the banks of the Thames, only for their owners to discover that the most frustrating portion of their journey lay ahead. Consignments intended for the southern parts of Britain had to be lifted onto horse carts, pulled through the docks and across London Bridge, built in the 12th century and as impractical as its early date implies. By 1820, London Bridge had become the centre of the world’s largest traffic jam.
It was an intolerable situation, and it was clear that if private enterprise could build another crossing closer to the docks, there would be good money to be made in tolls paid by users. Another bridge was out of the question, as this would deny sailing ships access to the city centre, and ambitious men turned their thoughts to tunnelling beneath the Thames instead. This was not such an obvious idea as it might appear. Although increasing demand for coal had meant a great many tunnels had been dug in mines in Britain, working methods remained primitive. Tunnels were dug by men with simple tools, by candlelight. However, in 1807, a group of businessmen set themselves up as the Thames Archway Company. Their ambition was to tunnel below the Thames, but there was little to guide them as there had been no previous attempt to do this. Their chief engineer was Richard Trevithick, designer of the world’s first high-pressure steam engine. His men made progress at the beginning, but then things began to go disastrously wrong, with muddy soil pouring into the tunnel. Eventually, the Thames Archway Company had had enough. Its funds were exhausted, Trevithick was sick from exposure to the river water, and its efforts had proved only that a passage under the river exceeded the limits of contemporary mining technology.
At that time, the only machines used in mines were pumps. It took a man of genius to recognise that a different sort of machine was needed, a machine that could prevent the roof and walls of a tunnel from collapsing. This man was Marc Brunel, a Frenchman who had become one of the most prominent engineers in Britain. Not long after the failure of the Thames Archway Company, Brunel saw a rotten piece of wood lying on the riverbank. Examining the wood through a magnifying glass, he observed it was infested with something that looked like a worm. Brunel realised that as it tunnelled through the wood, it would push chewed wood into its mouth and digest it, then excrete a hard substance that lined the new tunnel. Brunel realised that the worm’s digging technique could be adapted to produce a new way of tunnelling. His realisation led him to invent a device that has been used in one form or another in most major tunnels built since – the tunnelling shield. It consisted of a heavy iron frame that could be pushed forward a few inches at a time. The front of the frame was made up of a series of iron frames that could be folded back to allow miners to dig the ground ahead. Behind these frames was a wall consisting of a series of iron plates pressed against the tunnel face and supported on a set of horizontal wooden planks, which would prevent the face from collapsing. It was a complex and rather cumbersome machine and not easy to use, but it seemed that it would protect the miners from the worst of the river’s water. Brunel’s team carefully examined earth samples taken from beneath the riverbed, and subsequently decided to dig the tunnel close to the muddy river bottom, where he could expect to find clay. This would be a more solid and safe substance to dig through than the sand that was found deeper down.
Brunel began work on his tunnel in 1825, but the problems of such an operation soon became apparent. Although the shield itself worked well, water began to drip into the tunnel. This was more of an annoyance than a danger while the pump was working, but this machine proved unreliable and sometimes failed altogether. When the pump broke down, work had to stop as the tunnel quickly flooded. There were occasions when the miners had to abandon their tools and flee for their lives. Even when Brunel’s men were able to work, they had to run the constant risk of the pumps failing. They also complained of frequent headaches and dizziness, caused by the poor air quality. The air underground was dirty and stale, contaminated due to the lack of an adequate ventilation system. There were lighting problems too. Illuminating the tunnels by candlelight was a constant challenge. Lamps gave off only a very weak glow, and there were a number of accidents because the miners could not see what they were doing. Lastly, a number of Brunel’s miners walked off the job because they could not tolerate the excessive temperatures that developed in the cramped conditions underground.
Despite all these setbacks, the tunnel finally emerged on the opposite river bank on August 12, 1841. Brunel’s triumph, however, was only partial. The small payment per person made by the thousands of visitors who flocked to see the marvel hardly paid even a penny per foot of the tunnel’s construction costs. Brunel had gone bankrupt long before the project was completed, and the government loan he had required to complete the project had to be paid back with interest. As a result, there was not enough funding to make it accessible to horse-drawn vehicles, as intended. Instead, the passageways were filled with souvenir sellers and entertainers. In the end, the tunnel was closed two years later, used at night, before it was finally closed entirely and fell into dereliction for decades.
It was only when the underground railway came to London in the 1880s that the Thames Tunnel found and achieved a measure of real usefulness. It was bought in 1869 by the East London Railway, who found it to be in such excellent condition that it was immediately pressed into service as a route for passenger trains heading east. The tunnel became, and remains, part of the London Underground network.
Children’s comprehension of television advertising
A In 1874, long before the advent of television, the English Parliament passed a law to protect children ‘from their own lack of experience and from the wiles of pushing tradesmen and moneylenders’ (James, 1965). The act is one of the earliest governmental policies to address children’s vulnerability to commercial exploitation and was produced before major corporations earned huge profits by marketing products directly to children. Yet the issues underlying this 19th-century policy remain much the same in the 21st century.
B Television has long been the predominant medium that advertisers have chosen for marketing products to children. It is estimated that the average child sees more than 40,000 television commercials a year, most of which are 15 to 30 seconds in length (Kunkel, 2001). According to another estimate, children aged 14 years and under make $24 billion in direct purchases and influence $190 billion in family purchases, underscoring the high stakes involved (McNeal, 1998). In addition, companies now recognise that brand loyalty built at an early age may reap economic rewards over a child’s lifetime (McNeal, 1987).
C A number of factors have contributed to an unprecedented growth in both the amount and type of advertising directed at children. First and foremost among these are changes in the media environment. In decades past, television programming targeted at children was limited and relegated to time slots unpopular with their parents, such as Saturday mornings (Turow, 1981). Today, the number of channels received in the average US home has escalated with the diffusion of cable television and satellite technologies. In this new multichannel era, there are numerous national program services devoted exclusively to children. Naturally, these channels deliver significant amounts of child-oriented marketing messages. Although parents may be pleased that their youngsters can now watch children’s programming at any hour of the day, they may not recognise that such viewing opportunities entail much greater exposure to advertising than any previous generation of youth has experienced.
D Approximately 80% of all advertising targeted at children falls within four product categories: toys, cereals, candies, and fast-food restaurants (Kunkel et al., 1992). Commercials are highly effective at employing specific features designed to attract children’s attention. For example, they use the strategy of introducing unique sound effects and rapidly moving images (Greer et al., 1982). The other most common persuasive strategy employed in advertising to children is to associate the product with playfulness and happiness, rather than to provide any actual product-related information (Kunkel et al., 1992). For example, a commercial featuring Ronald McDonald dancing, singing, and smiling in McDonald’s restaurants without any mention of the actual food products available reflects a playful or happy theme. This strategy is also found frequently with cereal ads, which often include cartoon characters to help children identify the product. In contrast, most commercials fail to mention even the major grain used in each cereal.
E Another common feature of advertising to children is the use of product disclosures such as ‘batteries not included’ or ‘each part sold separately’. Studies make clear that young children do not comprehend the intended meaning of these disclaimers. For example, fewer than one in four kindergarten through second grade children could grasp the meaning of ‘some assembly required’ in a commercial. In contrast, the use of child-friendly language such as ‘you have to put it together’ more than doubled the proportion of children who understood the qualifying message (Liebert et al., 1977). The phrase ‘part of a balanced breakfast’ is also a frequent disclosure included in most cereal ads to combat the concern that sugared cereal holds little nutritional value for children. Research shows that most children below age 7 years have no idea what the term ‘balanced breakfast’ means (Palmer & McDowell, 1981). Rather than informing young viewers about the importance of a nutritious breakfast, this common disclaimer actually leaves many children with the misimpression that cereal alone is sufficient for a meal. This pattern of employing creative terminology in advertising content so as to obscure certain information that might be unhelpful to the sponsor is a long-standing practice that often misleads the consumer (Geis, 1982).
F Very young children do not recognise that there are two fundamentally different categories of television content: programs and commercials. Most children below the age of 4 or 5 exhibit low awareness of the concept of commercials, frequently explaining them as if they were a scene in the program itself. Once this confusion diminishes, children first recognise the difference between programs and commercials based on either affective (‘commercials are funnier than TV programs’) or perceptual (‘commercials are short and programs are long’) cues (Blatt et al., 1972).
G Although most children’s programs indicate that a commercial break is coming (e.g., by saying ‘We’ll be right back after these messages’), research reveals that these ‘separators’ generally do not help children to recognise advertising content (Palmer & McDowell, 1979). This likely occurs because they are not perceptually distinct from the adjacent programming that surrounds them; in fact, many separators feature characters that appear in the same show that the commercial has just interrupted. When an ad includes one of the characters featured in a program, this is known as host-selling. This type of advertising makes the task of discriminating between program and commercial content particularly difficult for young children (Kunkel, 1988) and is thus restricted in the US by the Federal Communications Commission during children’s programs.
H In sum, because young children lack the cognitive skills and abilities of older children and adults, they do not comprehend commercial messages in the same way as more mature audiences, and are therefore uniquely susceptible to advertising influence.
Business Innovation
As new ‘wonder products’ are getting harder and harder to find, what should companies do to survive in today’s ever more competitive markets?
The Oxford English Dictionary defines innovation as ‘making changes to something established’. Invention, by contrast, is the act of ‘coming upon or finding; discovery’. Revolutionary ‘inventions’ of 20th-century US firms include, for example, the safety razor, the hydraulic brake, and DNA fingerprinting. However, as Adrian Slywotzky of Mercer Management Consulting says, ‘In most industries, truly differentiating new-product breakthroughs are becoming increasingly rare’. And as ‘blockbuster’ novel products become steadily more elusive, big companies would do well to focus instead on making lots of small things better.
Unfortunately, big companies often have big problems with innovation. ‘Innovators try to change the status quo’, says Bhaskar Chakravorti of the Monitor Group, ‘which is why markets tend to resist them’. Innovations frequently disrupt the way companies do things (and may have been doing them for years). And it is not just markets that are nervous of innovation. Michael Hammer, co-author of Re-engineering the Corporation, cites the case of a PC-maker that set out to imitate Dell’s famous ‘Build to Order’ system of computer assembly. The company found its attempts were frustrated by both its head of manufacturing, who feared for his job, and its head of marketing, who did not want to upset his existing retail outlets. So the proposal got nowhere, and Dell continued to dominate the business.
Clayton Christensen, a Harvard Business School professor, describes how disruptive innovations – simpler, cheaper and more convenient products that seriously upset the status quo – often herald the rapid downfall of thriving, long-standing businesses. This, it is widely recognised, is because most such organisations are designed to grow through a series of sustaining innovations – the sort which simply improve on existing products for existing markets.
William Baumol, professor at New York University, argues that large companies have been learning important lessons from the history of innovation. Most have both cut back and redirected their Research and Development spending in recent years. Innovation by big companies is now based less on the discoveries of white-coated scientists, and more on incremental improvements in the processes that constitute daily operations.
According to marketing specialist Vijay Vishwanath, companies also need to adjust to the ongoing fragmentation of markets. Once-uniform mass markets are breaking up into countless ‘niches’, in which everything has to be customised for a small group of consumers. Looking for blockbusters in such a world is a daunting task. Another problem, according to Chakravorti, lies in the marketing of innovations. Too many executives are still stuck with the strategies used to sell Kodak’s first camera 120 years ago, when the product was so revolutionary that the company could forget about competition for at least a decade. Today, rival products can be rushed onto the market at speeds which would have been unimaginable in those days.
Companies that fail to come up with headline-hitting new products should not despair. ‘There are plenty of other, albeit less glamorous, areas where innovation can take place,’ says Erik Brynjolfsson of the MIT Sloan School of Management. He claims that the roots of the USA’s productivity surge originate in ‘a genuine revolution in how American companies are using information technology to reinvent their business processes from top to bottom’.
Hammer highlights several instances where firms have added considerably to their shareholder value through what he calls operational innovations – creativity in their business processes. Notable among these is the American retail giant Wal-Mart. While superficially mundane, their pioneering idea of ‘cross-docking’ – shifting merchandise off trucks from suppliers and straight onto trucks heading for stores – has been fundamental to the company’s ability to offer low prices, the platform for its outstanding success.
Companies are also being encouraged to embrace strategic innovations, following the example of such firms as Southwest Airlines, a low-cost American regional carrier, whose creative strategies and shrewd timing won it a victory over its ailing competitor US Airways. The Swedish packaging company Tetra Pak also used this style of innovation, by moving away from delivering ready-made containers for customers into providing machinery and supplying dedicated materials for them to make their own packaging. This strips out many costs from the process, and also makes it very difficult for the customer to switch suppliers. Like Southwest Airlines, they achieved success through strategic innovations alone, with little innovation in either the underlying technology or the product sold.
In his book How to Grow When Markets Don’t, Slywotzky and his co-author Richard Wise recommend what they call demand innovations. A few far-sighted organisations such as the French industrial gas company Air Liquide have found success not – as in the case of strategic innovations – by meeting existing demand in a new way, but by discovering new forms of demand and adapting to supply the products or services required. Air Liquide had been a leading supplier of industrial gases until the early 1990s, when gas became a commodity and their operating income plunged. Realising the value of the skills they had gained over the decades, the company became a supplier not only of gas, but also of the management services to accompany it. Within a short time their profits rose again.
There are certain things that managers can do to make innovations like these happen within their organisations. For example, projects with potential should be rapidly hived off into independent business units, away from the smothering influence of the status quo. The ultimate outcome of any one innovation may still be unpredictable; the process from which it emerges is not.