With hindsight, one wonders whether the deal might have led to a more amicable conclusion to Sir Martin’s tenure at the communications group, and how WPP might have successfully evolved in a digital world amid Berkshire Hathaway’s staid cloisters.
However, such considerations fade behind one unshakeable detail from the FT interview, namely Sir Martin’s recollection that Buffett “had a cheeseburger and spilled tomato ketchup or mustard all over his tie” during the lunch.
Cheap shot? Perhaps, though it’s hardly the most memorable condiment-based character-assassination-by-proxy of recent years. That accolade belongs to Henry Mance’s description of lunch with media baron Richard Desmond: “Desmond heaps English mustard to the left of his tuna. The cuff of his right sleeve rubs into the pesto.”
On the contrary, the picture of Buffett is accidentally endearing. Though Sorrell – a PR and advertising man to the core – seized on the bathetic contrast of financial might and dinner table clumsiness, Buffett fans will only see a grandfather figure free of affectation. After all, the image of a beef juice and mustard-stained tie is why he is so loved; Buffett is the world’s most successful investor both despite and because of his uncomplicated tastes and unpolished, folksy demeanour.
Dig into the record, and the Nebraska native’s association with burgers runs deep. Famed for the consistency of his investment approach, he also visits McDonald’s several times a week. He seems to prefer it this way when away from home, too: on a tour of China in 2007, he was offered a 12-course meal that included local delicacies like sea urchin, and opted for a burger.
Conservative maybe, but happy ignorance is also a virtue. When faced with the unknown or the indecipherable, there’s little point feigning a preference for sophistication’s sake. It’s a lesson that investors sometimes learn the hard way.
“This is how a child behaves,” you might also think, until you learn that Buffett “decided to eat like a six-year-old” after checking the actuarial tables and discovering six-year-olds have the lowest death rate. To consistency and enjoyment, we can add a dogged – perhaps even bloody-minded –attention to the data and financial numbers.
Nor has he shied away from investing in his staple meal, having helped finance 3G Capital’s merger of Burger King and Tim Horton. Being assured of products has been a mainstay of Buffett’s career, as have what in retrospect prove to be superb investing terms – in this case a preferred equity stake that paid out 9 per cent a year between 2014 and 2017.
But burgers, like the world, are changing. Many of the things they once embodied – American cultural dominance, cheapness, mass commerce, simplicity and resource abundance – are also inextricably tied to the myriad successes of Buffett’s peerless career. But they are all now up for grabs in a fragmented if Asia-dominated global economy with growing designs on sustainability.
So while an avowed love of beef patties – as opposed to, say, hog-foraged white truffles – might intitutively seem like an honest position, it is increasingly complicated by the question of externalities.
“A short quiz: If you plan to eat hamburgers throughout your life and are not a cattle producer, should you wish for higher or lower prices for beef?” Buffett asked Berkshire shareholders in 1997. The inference was that markets will always be dictated by lower prices, because that is what consumers want. Well-known for eschewing luxury, Buffett has said that one of the reasons he loves fast food is because it is cheap.
This principle holds today, but it must now compete with concerns around environmental effects such as water usage, land usage and methane emissions involved in rearing cattle – all of which were largely off the menu when Buffett set his quiz. Today, you’ll only find plants in the patties of the world’s most high-valued burger company, Beyond Meat (US:BYND). In 10 years’ times, we are told, lab-grown meat could be a staple.
All of which is to say that while it should never be discounted, homespun wisdom might struggle from here. Stories of simple American business ideas transformed by scale and brand power are giving way to complex technology driven by exponential growth in a multi-polar world. As Sir Martin Sorrell well knows, predictable consumer habits aren’t what they once were.
This doesn’t mean investors can’t learn from Buffett’s happy outlook. But our new world also requires curiosity.
