NORTHERN PLANNER

If anything sums up the English, it's social awkwardness. We're useless at relation or communicating with others. It's normal here to never talk to strangers in queue or on a bus – it's a social no no, mostly because we just don't know how to do it.

Here we don't complain loudly, there is just the subtle 'tutting' when someone jumps the queue. We rarely complain in restaurants that don't serve us well and we often still tip, promising ourselves we will simply never go back.

Neighbours tend to be people who just live next door, we don't know them very well but say hello to them everday. Redundancies, illness and other significant stuff will be a complete secret. We are open, welcoming and tactile with our pets, but rarely other human beings.

So we're incredibly private and guarded. So much of how we communicate is built on irony, chronic false modesty and should rarely be taken at face value. We hate earnestness and pomposity and love to cut people down to size, because if there's one thing we hate more than earnestness, it's boasting and showing off.

No wonder ironic, subtle, self deprecating  advertising is so succesful and so loved by English people. Little mystery then why we tend to hate boastful, earnest and, dare I say it, American advertising.

Every country will have their own social and cultural patterns that will dictate how they respond to popular culture of which advertising is a facet., and something that rarely comes up in the kind of focus groups global (or local!) companies use to help develop strategy and creative development. But if you're developing any kind of multi-national campaign, you need to take this into account.