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The Sun is Britain's most loved newspaper brand and also its most hated newspaper brand. This contradiction, revealed in a Marketing magazine survey this week (and not for the first time), is more understandable than it appears.
Given that it is Britain's largest-selling national daily, it means that any survey involving a cross-section of the population will throw up a majority of Sun readers. They are bound to say they love it. On the other hand, given its controversial history and high public profile, it is just as likely that it will spring to mind when its non-readers among the average survey group are asked to nominate the paper they most dislike.
This is not unique to The Sun. It is noticeable that, according to the same survey, three other brands - Tesco, British Airways and Manchester United - also suffer from being both the most loved and the most hated in their sectors. People do tend to adopt very black and white views about people, companies and institutions that generate instant recognition and therefore appear to dominate their lives.
Yet The Sun, in its modern guise, is no longer a dominant force in British society. What the survey does not reveal - indeed, cannot reveal - is that the paper is living on its history.
There is hardly any reason whatsoever to dislike The Sun nowadays (unless you happen to be a feminist who finds the continuing publication of Page 3 girls wholly unacceptable).
Long gone is The Sun of Gotcha! infamy, of Freddie Starr Ate My Hamster nuttiness, of Hop Off You Frog xenophobia. The Sun that terrified politicians, by traducing Neil Kinnock and Tony Benn or humiliating Tory MPs, such as David Mellor and Tim Yeo, is but a memory. The Sun is incapable now of setting the political agenda.
It remains a professional journalistic product. It still bounces along in its new all-colour format. It occasionally obtains terrific scoops, none better than the one about the friendly-fire killing of Lance Corporal Matty Hull that resulted in its defence correspondent, Tom Newton Dunn, picking up two British Press Awards.
None of this can conceal the fact that The Sun is past its zenith. I imagine the editor, Rebekah Wade, raising an eyebrow at this point and saying: "Excuse me, is my newspaper not only the bestselling but also the one that has proved the doom-mongers wrong by having reversed the kind of decline suffered by its closest competitors?"
To answer, let's look at that claim about circulation. Last December, The Sun slipped below the three million sales mark for the first time in 33 years. Dire predictions were made about it diving further south.
In fact, the paper has appeared to steady the ship and last month managed, for the third consecutive month, to record a year-on-year sales increase, this time amounting to 2.7%.
But at what cost? Once we study the ship's ballast tanks more closely, a much less successful picture emerges. For a start, The Sun sold 2,120,000 copies at its full cover price in April compared with 2,362,000 in April 2007 and 2,716,000 in April 2006, declines of 10.25% and 28.11% respectively.
To try to stem the tide that threatens to swamp its decks, The Sun has also been inexorably increasing its discounted sales. So, last month it sold 964,000 cheaply, compared with 644,000 a year ago and just 400,000 two years ago.
To boost its headline sale, therefore, The Sun's owner, Rupert Murdoch's News International, has been prepared to sacrifice huge amounts of revenue. Turnover at the group dropped by £20 million last year, mostly due to falling sales and price-cutting campaigns.
No wonder the company this week raised The Sun's discounted weekday cover price in London and the South-East from 20p to 25p. That's still 10p below its genuine cover price.
Without discounting and considerable spending on TV promotions, such as last month's £15 holiday offer, The Sun would be in a similar position to its ailing red-top rivals, the Daily Mirror and the Daily Star.
That takes us to another important part of the modern Sun story. Here is a paper aware that its best hope for future prosperity in terms of both sales and advertising revenue is to move upmarket. That is part of the reason it is no longer so vulgar and so aggressive as it was in its 1980s heydays when it was selling 4.2 million copies a day.
Yet it finds it cannot pull off the trick of reinventing itself, not merely because of its unconvincing attempt to revamp its editorial approach but because it cannot bear to lose buyers. It is not willing to forgo readership quantity in order to secure readership quality.
The price-cutting inducements attract relatively poor "old-style" Sun readers who, in the eyes of advertisers, do not amount to a sufficiently valuable audience. There is, in other words, a fundamental contradiction between The Sun's desire to appeal to a well-heeled readership and the blunt instrument of pricecutting that increases overall sales volume.
Meanwhile, enormous sums are being wasted by News International in order to conceal an undeniable underlying truth: the mass market for newspapers is a doomed market.
