The Famously French Brand That Was Built by Brits

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From the Brand Historian’s Timeline: 1906

The British have had a long love affair with the South of France. What began with the traveller’s tales of writers like Tobias Smollett in the 1760s was followed by a veritable Brit invasion, especially after 1860 when passports were no longer needed to visit France. Wintering on the shores of the Mediterranean became an increasingly important part of the 19th-century upper-class pursuit of health and well-being, and milords and dowagers overran all the nooks and crannies of the Midi and Provence. British money, the profits from industry and the Empire, flowed into the local French economy. Many Brits who enjoyed the sun also got a taste for investing in local concerns. And one of the most iconic of all French brands was actually built with British money and branding nounce.

Perrier, the world-famous water from the Gard départment is the product of some interesting Cretacean geology: limestone rocks folded and faulted and topped off with a layer of clay. Gaps in the clay allow water to burst from the depths of the Vistrenque plain into the daylight, along with carbon dioxide produced by volcanic or thermal action on the limestone. It creates water that effervesces. This site became known as Les Bouillens, The Bubbling Waters. The Romans knew it, and Hannibal may have watered his elephants there on his way over the Alps. But it was in the 1860s that Les Bouillens first became a commercial operation when Napoleon III granted rights, and a health spa and hotel was opened near the spring, successful until a fire gutted it in 1869.

The Bubbling Waters continued to attract interest, and in 1898, Dr Louis Perrier, a Nîmes doctor with established interests in thermal therapies, launched Société des Eaux Minérales, Boissons et Produits Hygiéniques de Vergèze. Perrier had a vision but needed significant investment to make it real. Enter St John Harmsworth.

St John Harmsworth
Dr Louis Perrier

Harmsworth was a younger son of a powerful media family. Three of his brothers were already in the House of Lords. Lord Northcliffe owned the Daily Mail, and Lord Rothermere owned the Daily Telegraph. St John became an enthusiastic supporter of Dr Perrier’s work and sold his shares in the family business to invest in Les Bouillens. 

In 1906, he formed the Compagnie de la Source Perrier and hired a completely English senior management team. But this year was momentous in more ways than one for St John. Seriously injured when his chauffeur had a driving accident on the Great North Road near Hatfield, Harmsworth was paralysed from the waist down. Recuperating in his villa near the source, he used Indian juggling clubs for exercise, which apparently gave him the idea for the distinctive shape of his new bottled water brand. He also named the product after the good doctor.

With an impressive network of chums, St John was soon exporting Perrier (The Champagne of Table Waters) throughout the British Empire, making it famous in London, Singapore and Delhi before it was even established in Paris. When Harmsworth died in 1933, the source was selling 18 million bottles a year, and by then, more than half was remaining in France.

Perrier finally returned to French hands after the Second World War.

An interesting narrative twist to the story of Perrier comes in the 1980s, when the Brand Historian was working for HP Bulmer, Perrier’s UK distributor. This was when Yuppies stalked the earth with their Filofaxes and Perrier with ice and a slice was their essential drinking accessory. Sales were torrential. But the great success of Perrier in the 80s was due mainly to another Brit, Julian Bowes, who carefully cultivated the brand’s status in top restaurants, hotels and bars. There are many stories of the clever marketing tactics he used. I seem to remember a prize was offered for the most expensive bottle of Perrier served in a UK restaurant. Julian died in a diving accident in 1984, a few years before a benzene contamination scare threatened the brand he had worked so hard to create.

Nestle acquired Perrier in 1992.

1906 Bien Etre Playlist:

La Mer Claude Debussy 

How the Centurion Made It Into Manhattan

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From the Brand Historian’s Timeline: 1850

Most nations have their quotient of memorable dates, and the United States is no exception. 1620, 1776 and 1863 come readily to mind. Whilst 1850 may not have such a high profile,it is a serious contender as a year of strategic significance. It also coincides with the foundation of one of the USA’s most iconic corporations.

1850 started promisingly. Against the background of increasingly bitter debate about the slave economy, heightened further by the victory of the US army in the Mexican war, which had secured huge new territory in the West, the Compromise of 1850 diffused tension and probably delayed the outbreak of more serious conflict for ten years. The Compromise put the question of whether enslaving people was lawful in the hands of the populations of individual States. California was admitted to the Union in September, and its population decreed it would be a free State. At the same time, New Mexico and Utah were given territory status, further opening up a promising landscape of opportunity.

Railways were central to the industrial revolution that was now gathering momentum. In 1850, US railways were evolving from a scattered network into a coherent continent-crossing system and in that year, a further 9000 track miles were added. For entrepreneurs, following the railways was always an excellent route to profit. On March 18,  three American corporations, which had been operating in New York State for a while, were merged to form American Express. It was founded by individuals whose names have since become synonymous with the opening up of the West: Henry Wells and William G Fargo. John Butterfield and James D Wasson were the other founding partners.

The original purpose of their new company was to move mail, money and freight securely and quickly throughout the Empire State. But with the help of savvy partnerships and joint ventures with railroads and steamships, the company soon had a virtual monopoly and was only partially affected by the Civil War, which finally broke out between the North and the Confederacy in 1861. 

From its beginnings, American Express displayed a strong talent for spotting opportunities and demonstrating leanness and dexterity in redefining its business. Express mail and logistics may have been how the corporation started, but it was a stream of financial service innovations that dramatically built the company. In 1857, it launched money orders to compete with the unconditional payment products of the Post Office. And for the first time, it introduced the Roman centurion as its brand icon to emphasise its security credentials.

In 1891, JC Fargo was on a European Grand Tour and apparently got some first-hand experience in discovering the difficulties of getting cash on the move. Arriving back from Paris, he briefed Marcellus Fleming Berry to develop a new kind of international travellers’ cheque. While travellers’ cheques had been around in various forms for some time, the scale of American Express’ global system made them hugely successful. As the 20th Century dawned, American Express had become one of the world’s first mega brands.

Strangely, however, American Express was not the first to market with a charge card. Diner’s Club introduced a travel and entertainment charge card in 1950. But despite not being a fast follower- it launched its first card in 1958 – the power of the brand and its merchant support organization helped it to market leadership. Aspirational advertising, courtesy of David Ogilvy helped (Don’t leave home without it; Membership has its privileges), as did clever market segmentation, which saw Amex play the precious metal game of card innovation: gold, platinum, black and so on.

From its origins in lower Manhattan, American Express had morphed from a local logistics and distribution business to a financial services Behemoth and served as a corporate metaphor mirroring the transformations that were taking place throughout the United States in the years after 1850.

Some Banjo Music for 1850:

The Camptown Races – Stephen Foster

The Age of Plastic

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From The Brand Historian’s Timeline: 1966

A wise old banker once told me that financial services were actually very simple and straightforward. “There are only three products,” he argued, “everything else is just positioning magic.” He actually said something else, but magic is polite.

“Firstly, it’s your money, and we look after it for you and possibly give you a bit more money for the privilege.” 

“A bit more money,” I nodded. 

“Or it’s our money, and we’ll lend it to you for a fee.”

 I nodded again, “but not necessarily a small fee.”

“Or the product”, he was ignoring me, “is just a convenient way of moving money about, which we call money transmission”. 

Bankers are experts at taking these three core products and combining and twisting them cleverly to make exciting new propositions. And just over 60 years ago, a well-known British bank introduced us to a classic example of this positioning dexterity. Their new idea was launched in a wonderfully risqué cinema ad – at least by the standards of our more progressive if puritanical days. It featured a gorgeous girl, dressed only in a bikini, sauntering around town, with a little bit of plastic peeking from her swimsuit bottoms. This was a credit card. “All a girl needs when she goes shopping” – we were told.

It was 1966, England was about to win the World Cup, The Beatles were riding high in the charts, and innovation was in the air, exemplified by the small plastic card that we soon learned was called Barclaycard, the white, blue and tan flagship of the Age of Plastic. The origins of Barclaycard owe much to the success in the USA of the Bank of America’s BankAmericard, the category pioneer which had found a way of offering business folk a line of credit for all their travel and entertaining expenses, which was then repaid every month. The idea of charge cards (like sex) came to Britain in 1963 with Diners Club and American Express, which launched their versions. Three years later, Barclays, probably the raciest of the UK’s banking establishment, launched its version. Initially this was to be a charge card, too but in 1967, on the back of some smart systems’ fancy footwork, it became a revolving credit card and pretty much had the market to itself until Access was launched in 1972.

Barclaycard’s successful launch was in large part due to innovative marketing techniques: consumers were persuaded by the thousand to put plastic into their wallets via mass mailshots containing ready-to-use cards, giant point of sale displays in outdoor spaces and a veritable army of Barclaycard girls who delivered the shock and awe with a smile. 

As the market grew, if slowly at first, the serious business of spending money with Barclaycard was promoted using the gentle bonhomie of the well-travelled Alan Whicker before moving on to comedy heavyweights like Dudley Moore and Rowan Atkinson. Their madcap humour helped to normalize this new spending habit. Barclaycard, now based in a former shoe factory in Northampton, became the Death Star of Data, amassing info from customers and merchants, many of whom had been persuaded to pay for the privilege of being part of the Barclaycardworld. By 1972, Barclaycard was sending monthly bills to 1.7 million people and was now making a profit. In due course, it would become the star contributor to its parent retail bank. Those Barclaycard girls had successfully helped launch a revolution in the way we spend and manage money, but perhaps more importantly, they also helped create a whole new language of money.

A Credit Card Alphabet:

APR

Authorized user

Balance transfer

A better way to spend

Credit card fraud

Credit limit

Grace period

M Stephens

Never leave home without it

Pin

Smart card

1966: A Year of Innovations:

Paperback Writer The Beatles

Action Man

Bet Lynch appears in Coronation Street

The Cybermen arrive in Dr Who

An Extraordinary Pivot

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From the Brand Historian’s Timeline: 1893

Pivot is one of the go-to business buzz words grasped by harassed Captains of Industry and their PRs to show strategic chops and to justify a sudden directional change brought about by the usual marketplace mayhem. Pivoting is happening right now in those giant energy companies who have to deal with the medium-term imperative of responding to the impact of fossil fuels on climate change, and the short-term impact of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. That war has now resulted in Shell and BP making the inevitable but still breathtakingly bold decision to exit from their long-established joint ventures with Russia. Bold moves, however, are nothing new in the oil business. Indeed, Shell’s establishment in the energy industry came after what we would know today as a most extraordinary personal and business pivot. 

The story of Shell starts in 1834 in East Smithfield in London with Marcus Samuel’s trading emporium. This shop sold a variety of articles he had imported from Japan and China, items like rice, silk and porcelain. He also imported exotic seashells, which sold very well. Victorians loved keepsake boxes which they would decorate with shells. Samuel sold many of these to well-heeled customers and, following such success, decided to call his business The Shell Shop.

But it was Marcus’ son, also called Marcus, who fundamentally changed the direction of his dad’s curio business and laid the foundations for what would become one of the great corporations that defined the 20th century, and which today continues to pay our pensions. 

Twenty-five years after M. Samuel & Co was established in London, Edwin Drake struck oil in Pennsylvania, and soon afterwards, various products began to be refined from crude oil. One of these hydro-carbon fractions was kerosene, which soon became one of the most valuable commodities in the world because it brought heat and illumination to the dark, cold, but increasingly populous cities of the United States and Europe. John D Rockefeller had already become one of the world’s richest men by demonstrating how with focused ruthlessness, you could make millions from finding, extracting and transporting oil to where people needed it. By the mid-1880s, the United States dominated the world market for kerosene. But it didn’t take the Europeans long to attempt to get a share of the highly lucrative new market of liquid gold. The discovery of oil in Baku on the shores of the Caspian Sea provided the perfect opportunity for entrepreneurs to partner with the Tsarist Russia regime.

Marcus Samuel Junior
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Enter Marcus Samuel junior, who proved to be an imaginative and daring oilman. Building on his family’s network of connections in Asia and following a recce to the Caucasus, Marcus Samuel junior added Baku kerosene to the coal, silk and rice in which the family business dealt. Convinced that the oil business was an excellent long-term investment, even if success might increase the risk of nationalization by his Russian partners, Samuel started to build an integrated transport system to get the oil from the Caspian Sea to the point of use in Asia. This included commissioning a new type of tanker that could transport both oil and foodstuffs like rice.

But then came the year of the extraordinary pivot, both in the business and for Marcus personally. In 1893, just as Marcus was dealing with a diagnosis of cancer that he was informed was terminal, he utterly committed the family business to the oil trade and, in great secrecy, commissioned a further ten bulk tankers to transport his oil. With deference to his father, these ships were all named after seashells such as Helix and Murex. In 1897, having survived cancer and with the business thriving, Marcus Samuel Junior renamed the company Shell Transport and Trading and, in 1904, adopted the Scallop* (the Genus Pecten) as a corporate device. Soon, the familiar orange and red Pecten logo would become one of the world’s most valuable and recognizable brand icons.

* The Scallop has had a long connection with the creative arts of corporate identity. One of the most popular heraldic charges, the scallop, was the badge associated with St. James of Compostela and has long been the symbol of all those that make a pilgrimage. It features in many coats of arms, including Winston Churchill’s. The scallop also features as the star prop in a film (The Realm) on the importance of branding commissioned by Shell, which featured Robert Hardy playing seven different characters, all members of the board.

Scallops in English Arms in the Thirteenth Century
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Over the years, Shell has launched many products but one extension that the Brand Historian fondly remembers from when he was a member of Group Training’s faculty was the Shell Full English Breakfast, served every day at the Lensbury Club in Teddington. I am sure Marcus Samuel would approve.

Pivotal Music from 1893: 

Symphony No. 9 in E Minor – From the New World – Anton Dvorak

My Life in Yellow Fats

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From the Brand Historian’s Timeline: 1886

It’s often said that the secret of a successful career in brand consulting lies in amassing deep knowledge of a category for which constantly job-hopping clients are prepared to pay a premium. And that’s certainly true in the case of my career. I once joked that my Mastermind specialist subject would be ‘The history of the cooking sauces market, 1972 to the present day.’ I travelled the world fixing the problems of ailing and failing Pilsner lagers, and if I am ever tempted to write my autobiography, I think the subtitle would have to be ‘My Life in Yellow Fats.’

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Yellow fats: what a gloriously unappetizing piece of marketing twaddle. We are, of course, referring here to the label marketing people use for the beige to ochre stuff we like spread on our toast, improve our sandwiches or help bake our Lemon Drizzle cakes.

My connexion with yellow fats started as a lad growing up in the West Midlands in the 1960s with Lurpak (First launched in 1901). Lurpak is a lactic, salty style of butter in silver foil which has its origins with the Danish farmers of Arla whose ancestors had originally paid us a visit in longboats, played their lurs and overran the Northern Anglo-Saxon kingdoms plundering our gold and bequeathing us many things, including a taste for salty butter.

It was much later in my business career that I suddenly found myself a bystander in the great battle that was taking place between the forces of dairy and industrial non-dairy spreads. For years, there had been a long-running clash between butter and margarines, but in the 1970s and 1980s, the battleground was no longer about taste versus convenience and price: it was now also a matter of public health. With healthy eating becoming a major media and public concern, nutritional battle lines were drawn on the health risks of animal compared with vegetable fats, the benefits of sunflower versus olive oil and the poor old consumer found herself drawn into a labyrinth of confusing claims. What indeed exactly was the difference between mono versus poly-unsaturated fats? And as companies innovated, brands sprung up like rhubarb. Soon I was being paid to understand the similarities and differences between British Flora (The margarine for men, according to Terry Wogan, launched in 1969) and its more hardcore European cousin Becel, which some people in YF Global Headquarters wanted to unify into a single Eurobrand. Becel later spawned an even more nutraceutical inspired sub-brand called Pro Activ.

Whilst a bewildering battle of claims was raging on the health front, there had been significant innovation in another sector of yellow fats, which without any trace of irony, was called by its marketing managers, the taste segment. Here the job of marketers was to convince the consumer they would not be able to tell the difference between some new factory-based oil melange and the real stuff that came from cows. However, by now, the whole subject was becoming a tad tedious for the consumer, and it proved hard work getting the consumer interested. Hence the increased use of marketing shock tactics with in-your-face brand names like I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter (1979).

But the dairy farmers were not to be underestimated. A number of new improved butter products started to appear, which majored on their superior taste benefits whilst trying to overcome some of the perceived drawbacks of dairy products, notably spreadability. Clover (1983) was one of the leading examples of these New Model Butters, and its adverts demonstrated its superiority in lubricating the Nation’s toast and crumpets. Competition followed soon from the likes of Golden Churn, which had adverts voiced by Willie Rushton and a pack with a rather impractical lid, which in the age of retailer space management and product profitability was a marketing frill too much.

With my career in the world of brands moving into its latter stages, I seemed to have saved the best to last, and in a strange quirk of the narrative arc, I got to work on the yellow fat granddaddy of them all: Anchor.Frankly, after all those non-animal fats, it was great to get back to butter. 

Anchor is the trademark of Fonterra, the hugely successful dairy business owned by New Zealand farmers. Henry Reynolds first marketed Anchor on November 3rd, 1886, with, at least according to the legend, a sweet cream butter recipe created by an American called David Gemmell. Gemmell, who was about to return to the USA, was persuaded to help Reynolds establish his factory at Pukekura, Waikato, in the lush pastoral meadows of North Island. Reynolds, taking advantage of the innovations in refrigerated transport, immediately started exporting his ‘pure creamy’ butter worldwide. 

But why call it Anchor I hear you ask? Trying to think of an appropriate mark or symbol, he was inspired by a tattoo on one of his worker’s arms. Today Anchor is one of the world’s most recognizable trademarks and the Brand Historian has only happy memories of his trips to North Island, New Zealand helping to reshape the brand portfolio of Fonterra, of which  Anchor continues to be the most valuable global asset. 

I can think of no better way of ending my sojourn in fats world than with a wonderful lyric pastiche written by David Bernstein, my old boss at The Creative Business, which aptly captures the bonkers spirit of the Great Age of Yellow Fats.

You’re The Taste

By David Bernstein:

You’re the cream in my coffee

You’re the salt in my stew

You will always be my necessity

I’d be lost without you.

You’re my favourite phosphate 

E210

I’m so glad it is 

You’re my additives

You’re my carcinogen.

My love’s undimmed dear 

‘Cos your milk’s unskimmed dear

Each time we’ve dated

Polly – you’re saturated.

You’re the dye in my kipper

Tartrazine in my squash

I’m polemical 

You’re my chemical

You’re the taste in my nosh.

I’m conservative 

You’re preservative. 

I’m ancestral 

You’re cholesterol. 

You’re the taste in my nosh 

Gosh! 

1886 Playlist A Symphonic Breakthrough in Vienna

Anton Bruckner Symphony No. 7

The revolutionary sect that set the bar for brand innovation

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From the Brand Historian’s Timeline: Bristol, 1822

Amongst the brands that defined my over confected youth and won my heart was the fruity fondant deliciousness of Fry’s Five Centre – a pocket-sized dark chocolate slab containing seams of pineapple, raspberry, lime, orange and strawberry cream, all wrapped up in sensuously thin foil. Five Centre was never one of the mainstream countlines which appeared in the school playground; rather, it owned a Maverick niche. It was produced by Fry’s of Bristol, founded by Joseph Fry in 1761, and expanded by Joseph Storrs Fry, who developed a patent for grinding cocoa beans. In the early nineteenth century, Fry’s built a reputation for making innovative and sophisticated confectionery. Apart from its signature brand, Peppermint Cream (1866), Fry’s also created the first solid chocolate bar, the first chocolate Easter egg and the definitive British presentation of Turkish Delight (1914), famously full of Eastern promise. At the end of the First World War, Fry’s merged with Cadbury’s of Bourneville, but Fry’s had more in common with Cadbury than just chocolate: Both businesses were owned by prominent Quaker families.

In the heady days of the 1970s, when fast-moving packaged goods set the standards for great brand management, there was much debate whether Unilever or P&G educated the best brand managers. In my book (Bluff Your Way in Marketing, Ravette), the award for the most creative and innovative school of brand management goes to a revolutionary sect founded long before the soap giants, who called themselves The Society of Friends, more familiarly known to us as the Quakers. Apparently, this was because the Friends were known to tremble at the very mention of the name of God.

In the mid-seventeenth century, George Fox founded this movement when the British Isles were torn asunder by civil war and religious ferment. Fox was an impressive itinerant preacher who believed there is a bit of God in everybody and consequently saw no need for Priests. This was radical stuff that a few years before might have got him burnt as a heretic. But in the nervously uncertain years after the Stuart Restoration, religious dissent was tolerated if it didn’t get mixed up with politics or, for that matter, any other part of the Establishment. Test Acts were put in place, which in effect kept Quakers and other non-conformists out of the Army, the Church, Parliament and any other Crown office.

But that didn’t prevent Quaker families from setting up businesses. Quite the opposite, because such discriminatory laws positively encouraged Quaker families to become entrepreneurs. Quaker businesses were soon achieving success throughout Britain. They had a strong belief in individual spirit but a willingness to collaborate and network; they had a capacity for hard work and a reputation for truth and honesty. Indeed, over the next couple of centuries, Quaker businesses were to have a massively disproportionate effect on the landscape of British industry. 

Fry’s (1761), Cadbury (1824), Rowntree (1862) in confectionery; Huntley and Palmer (1822) and Carr’s (1831) in biscuits; Clark’s (1825) in footwear, not to mention Barclays (1690), Lloyd’s (1769) in banking; Friends Provident (1832) in insurance. Quaker influence is also very strong in several Twentieth Century mega-charities: Oxfam (1942), Amnesty International (1961) and Greenpeace (1971). 

Today, it is very fashionable for brands to talk about Purpose as if this notion was completely novel. At a time when many brands obsess about finding their Purpose, it is worth reflecting on the contribution of this small, radical movement founded by George Fox. The Quakers not only created some of Britain’s greatest brands but did so while incubating businesses that also exemplified a distinctive style of caring capitalism. Oh, and one of these also made The Brand Historian’s favourite chocolate bar.

Keep Calm and Eat Your Sausage Roll

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From the Brand Historian’s Timeline: 1939

There was not much to smile about in Britain in 1939. With the possibility of war with Germany becoming ever more likely, in London, the nation’s art treasures were being packed up and transported to Wales for safekeeping and the first Anderson bomb shelters were being built. But even before the declaration of war on September 3rd, bombs were killing British civilians. However, in the dog days of August, it was the bombs of the IRA that were creating the fear and disruption.

But on Tyneside, at least one event had a happier outcome that year, for it was in 1939 that Jack Gregg founded what has become a much-loved national treasure. Initially delivering fresh eggs and yeast by bicycle to the folk of Newcastle, Jack’s bakery supplies home delivery service proved to be very popular and a few years later in 1951, Gregg opened his first bakery shop in Gosforth.

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With his sons Ian and Colin now active in the business, Greggs multiplied and began buying up other bakeries – in Scotland, London, Kent and the Midlands. By the 2010s, when Greggs had unreservedly won the Great British Bake-off by acquisition, the business underwent a significant repositioning and began to focus extensively on good value food on the go, believing it would fare better competing against quick-service food restaurants than going head-to-head with big supermarkets on the price of bread.

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The Brand Historian is a proud follower of Greggs and is particularly partial to a bacon roll on early morning starts or match days. On one of these trips, he and his daughter were amongst the many to have discovered the joys of the Greggs Vegan Roll, featuring that miracle of plant food, Quorn. Despite the neigh-Sayers, the Vegan Roll became a tremendous social media triumph for Greggs and created a platform for the business to become celebrated as the well-grounded antidote to the food snobbery of the modern age. This was brilliantly demonstrated in their Gregory and Gregory foodie festival film that was also a great social media hit.

Watch more at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tibTtj5vY1Y

1939 Popular Music 

We’ll Meet Again* Vera Lynn

*The 1939 recording also featured Arthur Young playing on a Novachord, a kind of early synthesizer.

From Also Sprach Zarathustra to Everybody’s Favorite Disruption Ride

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From the Brand Historian’s Timeline: 2010

Whilst brands are special kinds of words that tend to have their meanings curated carefully by communication professionals, there are many more words in the dictionary whose meanings seem to have a life of their own. This is particularly true in the vocabulary of technology, where the digitization of the World has been responsible for some fascinating word-meaning migrations. Consider how nouns like troll and friend have been annexed by social media and given new connotations. And it’s on the posts of these same platforms that verbs like block, follow and like or even swipe and ping now mean very different things. Note how such borrowings are often short and simple words and are sometimes imported from other languages. One such started off as a useful little word in German but has since made a very interesting drive into the heady World of San Francisco tech startups.

Über is a common preposition in German that crops up in many places and means over, above or across. The word also evolved as a power prefix, amplifying and generally making a thing besser als Normalfall, i.e. better than usual. In the 1880s, the philosopher Frederick Nietzsche gave the word a considerable push when he coined the term übermensch for a vision of super-humanity to which we should all aspire. This notion, of course, also inspired the Nazis to contemplate the idea of a master race. Today, Über has marched into English, losing its umlaut on the way, and now appears in various compounds such as Uber stylish, Uber nerd, Uber intellectual or Uber chef. In these, Uber describes someone or something which performs a lot besser than Normalfall. And it was probably this idea that prompted Garrett Camp and Travis Kalanick, two tech entrepreneurs, to describe their new car-hailing platform as UberCab, which they founded in 2009 in San Francisco.

The launch of UberCab took place immediately after the financial crisis of 2008. Still, as Nick Srnicek commented in his thoughtful analysis, Platform Capitalism, it is exactly when a crisis hits that “capitalism tends to be restructured, new technology, new organizational forms, new models of exploitation, new types of job and new markets all emerge to create a new way of accumulating capital.” Reflecting this sense of opportunity in a crisis, the vision of UberCab was to explore how the idea of a taxi service could be brought into the digital World. With incredible speed, the brand, now just Uber, soon became the World’s largest taxi company and yet didn’t own any vehicles, as Tom Goodwin famously noted. Uber brilliantly exploited the potential from the volatile 2010s environment characterized by enhanced Internet speeds, significant smartphone ownership, torrents of data, cloud storage and a surprising openness to work in the insecurities of the gig economy.

Having established the master brand by 2015, Uber launched a series of successful derivatives, including Uber X, Uber Eats and even Uber Copters. Doing an Uber or Uberising became a familiar if lazy shorthand for every wannabee disruptor’s promise to digitally transform a sleepy old market. 

Thus did a tiny German preposition become a monster brand proposition, and in so doing, the shorthand for category disruption and digital transformation.

Music for the Sharing Economy, 2010:

Katy Perry California Gurls

Mäarketing Myöpia versus Maslöw

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The Brand Historian’s Timeline: 1960 1983 1991

In the early 1980s, the Brand Historian’s mentor was David Bernstein, one of the most characterful and creative of British admen. Part JCR punster and wit, part song-and-dance man, David was a generous Obi Wan who willingly shared his bag of rhetorical tricks with a wannabe marketing Jedi like me. Above all he was a master of the inversion. In order to stimulate the business, he told me one day, you have to make the business stimulating. That was a typical piece of wordplay from the man who also gave us The Esso sign means happy motoring. 

He also believed that the problem should determine its solution, because the solution was always in the problem, if you looked hard enough. At The Creative Business, where I worked for David in the 1980s, he was particularly keen on the winning projects in NPD, or new product development as innovation was then called. When a client became excited about a particular opportunity, he might deploy another favourite inversion. “The question is not,” he said, “is there a gap in the market, but is there a market in the gap?” And this classic Bernstein maxim comes to mind when I reflect on how we managed to miss launching Häagen-Dazs in the UK in 1983.

Häagen-Dazs, the definitive adult ice cream indulgence had been launched in Brooklyn in 1960 amidst economic decay and race riots. Its creator Reuben Mattus was another great creative improviser who apparently liked nothing better than coming up with distinctive brand names by spouting nonsense word combinations until something interesting turned up. The family ice cream business then in its third generation, had been badly affected by low priced competitors who were driving value out of the market. Reuben decided to counterattack by going upmarket and creating a super-premium ice cream that would contain little air, lots of butterfat and would come in three simple classic flavours: vanilla, chocolate and coffee. Reuben also decided that a Scandinavian sounding provenance would work for the product because he believed the Danes had a great reputation for dairy products. The first tubs featured a map of Denmark. Of course, the fact that there is no ä or z in Danish is now just all part of the marketing myth. Häagen-Dazs certainly cut through to the consumer. With Ruben’s wife Rose performing a brilliant role in trade marketing and merchandising, Reuben’s ice creams soon developed a massive reputation. By 1976, the business had opened its first retail store and began to look overseas for international partners.

Meanwhile in 1983 at The Creative Business in London, a large UK dairy asked us to look at the market potential for a super-premium ice cream. It was called Häagen-Dazs. The usual desk research wheelbarrow was followed by original qualitative research. In focus group discussions, we asked respondents (the desk research indicated families with children were the most important consumers of ice cream in the UK) to try some pots and we told them the Häagen-Dazs story. Consumers absolutely loved the product, and they liked the New York Reuben Mattus story, but when we told them the super-premium price that we were proposing to charge, there was a stunned silence followed by incredulous chuckles. “You’ve just got to be kidding,” the consumers told us and the client. So, we concluded that there may have been a gap in the market for a new luxury ice cream but not much of a market in the gap, and the project was put into a permanent cold storage.

Nearly a decade later, another attempt was made to bring Häagen-Dazs to the UK market. But this time, whilst still aiming to create a new gold standard in ice cream, the brand strategy would be very different. Instead of families with children as the main target (who mainly used ice cream as a ubiquitous dessert topping,) the brand would target young adults, under 34 without kids and would build on the dense, creamy indulgent nature of the product to create a brand that stood for sensual pleasure and would charge a truly gold standard price.

In one of the many great BBH campaigns, its work for Häagen-Dazs featured young aspirational couples in moments of intense intimacy and pleasure. As the ad effectiveness case history commented, “we decided to juxtapose what Häagen-Dazs put in the pot with what the consumers got out of it.” And against the backdrop in 1991 of recession and unemployment, which were similar conditions to when Häagen-Dazs was launched in Brooklyn in 1961, the super-expensive Häagen-Dazs became the essential morale boosting personal pleasure to be consumed by consenting adults in all sorts of places and not just after fishfingers and chips. Soon word of mouth was talking about Shäagen-Dazs, the brand completely re-framing and reprice-pointing the take home ice cream market

When we concluded after our test market in 1983 that there was not a market in the gap, we were not completely wrong. But of course, we had failed to define the right problem and had measured the wrong market. There was a huge new market for sensual indulgence and our serious case of marketing myopia meant that we failed to spot the great, big sexy gap for Häagen-Dazs.

The solution, of course, David, was always in that thick, dense and creamy problem.

Hot Licks: A Super Premium playlist

1960 Elvis Presley It’s Now or Never

1983 Billy Joel Uptown Girl

1991 Colour Me Badd I Wanna Sex You Up

Salute the Queen and Eat the Flag!

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From the Brand Historian’s Timeline: 1889

June 11th, 1889 was an important day in the history of pizza, for this was the day Raffaele Esposito paid tribute to his Queen at Pizzeria Brandi by naming his latest creation pizza Margherita. The woman in question was Margherita of Savoy, the tall stately blonde who had married her dull cousin Umberto to become Queen of the recently unified kingdom of Italy. 

Esposito’s tribute was no fawning flattery but a piece of calculated nation-branding which used the popular street food to emphasise the identity of the new kingdom. The new pizza’s colour palette of tomato, mozzarella and basil (the sun on a plate) reflected the new tricolour flag, created following the success of the great Risorgimento, the re-unification which had been achieved following the fall of the Napoleon. 

It had been down to the combination of a clever politician’s strategic choice of the right allies and a chancer-of-a-general’s sword that had succeeded in unifying, at least in theory, the patchwork of states and entities which Metternich had famously labelled a geographical expression. In the aftermath of successive victories over the Austrians and French, the new kingdom started to industrialise, especially in the North and there was considerable investment in railways and other modernising infrastructure. It was against this dynamic background that a number of the iconic brands of Italian cuisine were created which built variously on nona’s cooking, the exploitation of new technologies like canning (apertization) or by just spotting the worldwide export opportunity for tasty food from the poor south.

Francesco Cirio from Piedmont, Giovani Buitoni from Tuscany and Pietro Barilla from Emilia Romagna spent the 1870s laying the foundations of world-famous tomato sauce and pasta franchises. In 1882, Egidio Galbaniestablished the creamery in Como where eventually Bel Paese cheese would be produced. In Queen Margherita’s hometown of Turin, Luigi Lavazza created in 1895 a successful coffee business and built his reputation based on coffee blending skills which at the time was quite an innovation.

But whilst the decades of the nineteenth century were great years of Italian brand building, they were notoriously unstable politically, veering between radical socialism, liberalism and conservative reaction. By the time Umberto and Marguerite paid their return trip to Naples in 1889 (they had been Crown Prince and Princess of Naples before ascending the throne) the royal couple were equally divided. Umberto kept many mistresses and continued a high-profile affair with Eugenia, a Visconti Duchess who was one of the Queen’s ladies-in-waiting. Umberto’s endorsement of the regime’s harsh repression of food rioters in Milan made him a target for the anarchists. Having survived one attempt, he would not be so lucky in 1900 when the anarchists finally got him at Monza.

His wife lived on until 1926 enjoying la belle epoque while it lasted, but the fame of the pizze that bore her name ensured she would now adorn a million menus. Just six years after the couple’s visit to Naples, where the Queen may well have eaten her first Margherita, the first pizzeria in the United States opened at 53 Spring St. The triumphant march of Eataly had now begun. 

Music to enjoy your pizze with (extra prosciutto, per favore)

Messa da Requiem Guiseppe Verdi

So, are we all officers now?

Featured / Paul Christopher Walton / 2 Comments

coronets-of-british-nobility

Marketing Misc

An A to Z of Modern Marketing

O is for Officer

 

Marketing has not escaped the great inflation of titles that is such a characteristic of the modern business world. Far from it, marketeers have been in the avant-garde of such tactics for gentrification.

In the 1960s, as marketing became the hot new function (remember even then customers were big data), ‘marketing manager’ was a title that said it all. But as the onward charge of the brand stormtroopers described by Hugh Davidson in OffensiveMarketing became  irresistible, the resultant demand for career progression soon created a whole new hierarchy of titles: senior marketing manager, category marketing manager, trade marketing manager, marketing controller, head of strategic marketing and so on.

Before you could say ‘matrix’, the more successful branding folk were getting appointed to the board as marketing directors, often edge-ing out old-school sales directors: the science of fact-based demand management trumping the soft art of the trade marketing lunch.

This phenomenon is not particularly new of course. In the Middle Ages, harassed and/or hard-up kings of England found inventing new titles a convenient way of managing talent in challenging times. The old English matiness of Knight, Baron, Earl was supplemented in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries with the more continental and hence racy titles of Baronet, Viscount, Marquis and Duke.

We are still doing the same 500 years later. As we entered the new millennium, organisational bigwigs were crowned CEOs – Chief Executive Officers. The use of the word officer in this context was an innovation and an interesting one at that. Officers as opposed to other ranks, perhaps? Officeholders and functionaries; bureaucrats and dignitaries – these are the synonyms Susie Dent might discover for the word in her Oxford Dictionary corner.

Predictably, the Officeritismax virus began to spread rapidly through corporations. As ever, marketeers showed the least resistance and suddenly there was an epidemic of Chief Marketing Officers. But it didn’t stop there, and soon all other functional Grands Fromages in their C-Suite eyries wanted to get in on the act. Next minute, learned business magazines were telling us that the ‘CMO- CTO- CFO partnership’ is a key success factor. The virus is still virulent. We now have Chief Demand Officers, Chief Innovation Officers, Chief Customer Officers and even Chief Experience Officers

In the 1960s, just as marketing was diffusing through UK businesses, the British historian Lawrence Stone was writing about the counterproductive effects of title inflation in the seventeenth century and its negative impact on respect for the management régimes of the day, something he argued which certainly contributed to the outbreak of the English Civil war: “The greater the wealth and more even its distribution in a given society,” he observed “the emptier become titles of personal distinction, but the more they multiply and are striven for.” He called this Tawney’s Law. Those of us who care about marketing should remember Tawney’s Law and think carefully before we launch the next squad of marketing officers onto an increasingly sceptical world. We should recall that the title of my favourite episode of Minder featuring George Cole as the roguish Arthur Daley, was called An Officer and a Car Salesman.

The Year of the Penguin

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From the Brand Historian’s Timeline: 1998

It was a dull, overcast, and humid start to the trip. Normal for the time of year, I learned. As the ferry left its moorings with sky-scraping sentinels looking on and Star Ferries bobbing in the harbour, it was as exciting as I had imagined.

It was 20th May 1998, and I was a passenger on the Hong Kong to Shekou ferry on my way to visit Shenzhen for the first time. My final destination was a shiny new convention centre just set back from the beach in the heart of the city, which since 1980 had been designated a Special Economic Zone. My hotel was the Marina Ming Wah, with its imposing striped tower facade, symbolising the city’s ambition and strategic intent.

Built to celebrate the Ming dynasty, the hotel had all the features the modern business traveller might expect, including a golf practice area, a karaoke lounge, a bowling alley and even a cosy pub, the Marina Tavern. I was on my way there courtesy of United Biscuits, an esteemed but now defunct British plc. United Biscuits was a pillar of the UK food establishment and were purveyors of all manner of biscuits, round, brown and beyond.

I’d been hired to lead a training course for the sales and marketing personnel working for the local business United Biscuits had recently acquired. My mission was to explore how leading Western companies positioned brands and created innovations. The curriculum included profiling UB brands such as Hobnobs, Sultana (huge in Holland), Go Ahead and Penguin, the chocolate-covered cream sandwich biscuit that was a star asset of the UB portfolio and which had the famous TV advert featuring the lovable Penguins. The slogan, spoken by Derek Nimmo, was “P… P… P… Pick up a Penguin”. I was also to describe the then highly fashionable concept of Need states and define what exactly was meant in this context by refuel, ice breaker and reward/treat and their relevance to a Chinese consumer. 

Despite the conceptual, cultural and linguistic challenges, I remember the students’ incredibly enthusiastic, hardworking and competitive spirit, and especially their willingness to push back on the UB biscuit orthodoxy. We finished the course with a wonderful banquet followed by a suitably designed Value Engineering after-dinner entertainment and quiz. This group proved to be a promising cadre of young marketeers who taught me much.

Despite the warm feelings I felt as I left Shenzhen and returned by ferry to Hong Kong, the UB venture in China was ultimately unsuccessful – in marked contrast to another business set up and launched shortly afterwards, just a few steps away from the Ming Wah.

Tencent one of the world’s greatest tech businesses was founded in 1998 by Pony Ma and Zhang. Spotting the tremendous opportunity opening in the new world of the mobile internet, they quickly established leadership in the huge Chinese market for messaging and video gaming. Today Tencent is also a global giant in entertainment, publishing, FinTech, venture capital and much more.

But back in 1998, just as I was introducing the Penguin biscuit to my Chinese students, Tencent’s entrepreneurs were planning the launch of their first mobile messaging brand QQ. And looking for an appropriate brand symbol, they chose – yes, you guessed it – a Penguin. A somewhat cheeky-looking Penguin but a Penguin who nevertheless resembles his chocolate-endorsing cousin. But this one just happens to be a brand megastar who is on billions of mobiles.

Video games to play on your Nintendo 64: 1998 

The Legend of Zelda: Tokino Ocarina

Goldeneye 007

One can, thousands of uses….Still stuck?

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From the Brand Historian’s Timeline: 1953

Choosing a brand name is one of the most frustrating and quixotic of all marketing decisions. Whoever it was who said that brand names are like double glazing because both are sold and not bought had probably discovered it the hard way. 

In giving a new product a name, a battle has raged between those who prefer descriptive ones versus those who gravitate to a neutral or perhaps an apparently vacuous combination of characters. In 1953, when we first became familiar with QEII, and Crick and Watson cracked the formula of DNA, the Pocket Chemical Company of Chula Vista introduced the world to its new wonder product, WD-40.

With a name that made it sound more like a beleaguered Arctic convoy, the essence of WD-40 had, in fact, been carefully encoded. WD stood for water displacing, and the number 40 was used because it was the 40th formulation the Pocket Chemical Company had tried in their search for an effective water-displacing spray – or so the foundation story tells it. The boffins in California were on the lookout for a wonder spray that would also lubricate and penetrate.

Whether it was Iver Norman Lawson or Norman B Larsen who actually came up with the final formulation of smart hydrocarbons remains unclear. Still, the Brand Historian remains eternally grateful to Pocket Chemicals because WD-40 became the essential glovebox emergency rescue spray in his first-ever car. This was a rather old and ramshackle Mark 2 Ford Escort with a particularly dodgy carburettor. Bilston, as we called it, didn’t like cold, damp mornings, and like some injured footballer, it seemed to appreciate a spray or two of WD to get him ready to attempt the journey from Ealing to client meetings in Esher.

But whilst WD-40 may have had an opaque name, it sports a distinctive brand identity. It’s a rugged, metallic can dressed in French blue, yellow and red overalls, complete with a cheap and cheerful nanotube for precision spraying that is un-fussily taped to it and thus ever ready for action.

Like with many successful versatile super-products, consumers tend to find their own killer applications. In my case, WD was the roadside emergency service in a can. But over the last fifty years people all over the world have found a wide variety of other uses, such as removing lipstick stains, deterring pigeons on balconies, removing wax graffiti and even dealing with recalcitrant tomato stains on clothing. Today WD’s boffins encourage us to share our favourite uses at www.wd40.co.uk/lifehacks

In the highly subjective field of brand naming, WD-40 is a marvellous example of how sometimes you just need to have a leap of faith when giving your new baby a name. At a time when marketing processes are becoming ever more dense and complicated, we should watch the tendency to overthink things and just give that impenetrable jargon a decent spray with WD-40.

1953 Top of the Pops:

I Believe Frankie Laine

By Royal Appointment to Queen Victoria and Bridget Jones

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From the Brand Historian’s Timeline: 1922

Heading north on the A38 from Lichfield towards Burton on Trent, you will find several small villages that nestle on the border between Staffordshire and Derbyshire, but which more than a thousand years ago formed the uneasy frontier between Saxon Mercia and the Danelaw. Probably named after a Dane called Brant, Branston was one of these villages. Until the early years of the 20th Century, it managed to enjoy a quiet life beside the River Trent, but then things got considerably busier.

In 1916, in the midst of The Great War, the British Government decided to build a huge machine gun factory here, believing it would be safely beyond the range of Zeppelins and Gotha bombers. Barely just commissioned, the war ended, and the factory was sold to a food processing company. Thus, it was in Branston in 1922, when the British Empire was at its apogee (accounting for one in four of all people on earth), and the British Broadcasting Corporation was just starting to inform, educate and entertain, that Crosse and Blackwell launched one of the most characterful of all British food icons: Branston Pickle.

Branston Pickle is a sticky, sweet and sour vegetable spread consisting of carrots, onions, cauliflower and gherkins pickled with vinegar and apple, which famously revives cold cuts and spikes bland lumps of cheddar. Company folklore says the recipe for Branston was created by a Mrs Graham and her suitably posh sounding daughters Ermentrude and Evelyn, but an industrial version was now to be produced in Crosse and Blackwell’s new state of the art food factory where late was heard the rattle of machine guns.

While Crosse and Blackwell sounds to modern ears like a small Hipster food enterprise that has just popped up in Bermondsey, it was already, by 1922, very ancient. With roots going back to 1706 and the first attempts to profit from trade with the new British Colonies, the business was acquired and rebranded Crosse and Blackwell in 1830. This was when two young twenty-five-year-old chancers called Edmund Crosse and Thomas Blackwell bought the business for £600 and set about implementing an ambitious plan to scale the business up by selling their range of pickles condiments, and soups throughout the Empire. At a time when there were many concerns about food quality, especially foods preserved in lead, Crosse and Blackwell invested in technical skills and packaging. They were rewarded in 1837 when they received, from Queen Victoria, one of the first-ever royal warrants.

But whilst Crosse and Blackwell’s investment in the best food technology continued by the acquisition of the Branston site, unfortunately things did not work out, and in 1925 the pickle business with its Staffordshire brand name was relocated to South London, to Bermondsey, in fact! Over the next 100 years, as pickle sales proliferated, the production of Branston was switched to a variety of sites before finally settling down in Bury St Edmunds. In those 100 years, Branston has acquired more than its fair share of influencers and super-fans, including Naomi Campbell, Gwyneth Paltrow and Bridget Jones. It would seem the latter likes to frequently bring out the Branston at her flat in Borough Market and apparently eat it straight out of the jar.

Today Branston like many famous British brands, is foreign owned, in this case by the Japanese condiment conglomerate Mizkan. In the last 100 years, it has travelled a long way from Mrs Graham’s kitchen and the Trent Valley, but en route, it has acquired an unassailable role as the spicy sizzle in every Ploughman’s Lunch.

Music to accompany your Ploughman’s Lunch:

The Laughing Policeman Charles Jolly (Charles Penrose)

A Bonus Poem is available at:

North Staffordshire Fields

The Brand Historian’s Holiday Cracker

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Bored with all the usual festive challenges?

Then try the Brand Historian’s Yuletide Brands Quiz which celebrates the founders and the inspiration for 16 iconic brands. All you have to to do is to identify the ‘brand managers’ featured below, the brands they created and the year these brands were originally launched.

A decent bottle of champagne will be awarded for the first correct set of answers sent to the Brand Historian by December 25th. The Judge’s opinion is final of course.