Month: December 2020

A Major Quality Initiative (with Miss Sweetly in support)

/ Paul Christopher Walton / Leave a comment

From the Brand Historian’s Timeline: 1936

In these days of increasingly complicated marketing theory, it’s easy to forget that everybody loves a bargain, and that giving the customer demonstrably more for his money is still one of the simplest and best stratagems for successful brand building. 

The savvy understanding of raw material costs, retail price reference points and what the consumer actually values in the product experience have always helped brand owners to create products which disrupt categories and build markets. Unilever did it brilliantly with Impulse and Lynx/Axe which found lucrative white space between expensive fine fragrances and everyday deodorants. Samsung and Skoda – now highly successful premium brands – at first challenged market leaders by offering their consumers a stream of innovative new features for less cash. Lenovo and Kia have become fast followers using the same approach. Branson’s Virgin Atlantic and easyJet are successful examples in the service sector.

In tough economic times, the Big Bargain Brand will always have cutting edge. In 1936, Britain was continuing its slow recovery after the Walls St. crash and the Great Depression, but unemployment was still 13%, and significantly higher in the North of England and Scotland. The unemployed marched from Jarrow on London

Enter stage left, Harold Mackintosh, the son of a Halifax confectioner who took the family recipe for making soft toffee as an asset he could leverage and made a bold and highly creative assault on the market for boxed chocolates. In doing so, Harold made the gifting category accessible to ordinary people and transformed the market. Mackintosh decided to cover his (less expensive) soft toffees in chocolate, wrap them individually in different coloured papers and present generous handfuls loose in a tin rather than arranged in an expensive box. Inspired by a successful J.M. Barrie play, two Regency characters Major Quality and Miss Sweetly were recruited as fancy brand icons on the cover of the tin, and Harold called his new product, Quality Street. The brand would soon be famous for its Triangles and Delights, its Pennies and Fingers, and become the essential family currency of happiness at Christmas and other holidays all over the World.

Happy Holidays…

Forgive the small plug for one of my brand poems which celebrates the cast of Quality Street characters past and present:

On Quality Street

Music to raise morale and munch to:

It’s De Lovely Cole Porter

Carlists and Custards

/ Paul Christopher Walton / Leave a comment

From the Brand Historian’s timeline: 1837

Identity is one of the touchstones of great brands and choosing house colours is one of the most important strategic decisions founders have to make. Some brands like to own one colour – think of Cocoa Cola or Barclays Bank, Easy Jet or Cadbury’s chocolate, but other brands prefer a particular combination of colours and this is true of two famously British brands created in the year when Queen Victoria ascended the throne. Coincidentally, though in very different categories, both these brands chose the same highly distinctive colour palette.

In Britain, in 1837, Charles Dickens was just publishing Oliver Twist, but in Spain, there was a particularly pitiless civil war of succession being fought between the conservative Carlistas and more liberal forces led by the Regent, Maria Cristina, acting on behalf of Queen Isabella II. Los Christinos had the support of France, Great Britain and Portugal, which in this case also meant supplying arms. War is the mother of opportunity, and the Peninsular Steam Navigation Company originally set up by three Brits to serve various ports on the Iberian Peninsula received a contract from the British Admiralty to deliver mail, charter steamboats and almost certainly supply guns. The colours P&O ships sailed under reflected the flags of the two Iberian Peninsula kingdoms – blue and white for Portugal (at least at this time) and the red and yellow of los Liberales, the party of the legitimate Spanish government.

Over the next century, P&O opened up the world, and created with its cruise ships like Canberra and Oriana, great icons of Britishness, proudly flying its distinctive ensign. The Brand Historian remembers when he was working with P&O Cruises, learning that wherever in the world the Canberra docked, the first thing that went ashore in the tender was the tea urn for that familiar British cuppa.

Another great British comfort food that to have conquered the world is custard, also known – in a triumph of positioning- as la sauce Anglaise. Egg, sugar, milk, vanilla and careful cooking over a gentle heat creates what became a principal feature of British deserts. But Alfred Bird’s wife was allergic to eggs and so this enterprising Birmingham chemist set to work to create an egg-less custard using cornflour as a base. One evening his custard from powder was served, possibly by mistake, to other guests who much approved of it. Thus, the great custard and baking powder empire of Bird’s was born that would go on to serve another Empire.

The colour palette chosen for the tins was a patriotic red, white and blue and a wonderfully creamy vanilla yellow. In Criccieth, on the north coast of Wales where the Bird family had a holiday home, there is a house situated a short walk from the ancient castle. Appropriately, it is still painted in the colour of Bird’s Custard.

Music to stir your custard to:

Chopin Nocturne in C Minor

Time for Hairy, Audacious Goals!

/ Paul Christopher Walton / Leave a comment

From the Brand Historian’s Timeline: 2001


Kubrick’s 1968 movie envisioned 2001 as a year of technological wonder, but by the time it arrived, two of the most important launches of that year were – at least in product terms – pretty incremental, very much building upon what already existed. But both achieved phenomenal success due to their appreciation of the power of branding and the value it can add by transforming the way we look at things.

Women (and no doubt, men) have been straightening their hair for centuries, but the origins of modern hair straightening products date back to the late nineteenth century when hot combs and chemical scalp treatments began to become fashionable in the capitals of Europe. In 1909, Isaac K Shero patented the first hair straightener that we would recognise today – two flat irons that heated and pressed together which worked by breaking down the positive hydrogen bonds found in the hair’s cortex.

Hair fashions come and go but in 2001 Robert Powls, a mover and crimper the salon world of Leeds saw potential in a new pair of straighteners that had been developed in South Korea, and with a couple of local business partners, acquired the production and distribution rights. He called the product GHD – Good Hair Day – and convinced of its efficacy, decided to pitch it at a super-premium price in his and other local hair salons: the sacred temples of hair knowledge where brand authority could be created and diffused. Within a couple of years, salon advocates helped GHD jump rapidly from B2B to B2C, and then with the support of savvy partnerships with reality TV programmes, Victoria’s Secret, Jennifer Aniston and Victoria Beckham, GHD became a global phenomenon and before long, a favourite target of private equity.

In the same year, Apple launched the iPod, its contender in the promising but then confusingly immature market for digital music players. Again, there was perhaps nothing earth shatteringly novel in the product, but the brand skin was the Jonathan Ives cool design channelling classics like Braun and B&O, and in keeping with Steve Job’s vision to position the product as The Walkman of the Twenty First Century, Apple found a compelling consumer proposition (‘1000 songs in your pocket’) which really cut through.


A few months earlier in 2001, it had launched iTunes, its digital music platform. The combination of a great looking product complete with tactile track wheel, a clear selling proposition and the ability to synchronise music libraries quickly and easily soon gave Apple a commanding position to drive momentum in the category that was now the bridge between the old analogue and the new digital music worlds. The launch of the iTunes Store in 2003 and successive waves of new iPods great and small, reinforced Apple’s position as the undoubted world leader of digital music.

It is interesting to note that GHD Straighteners and the iPod consist mainly of metal, plastic and electronic components but by a cute understanding of the consumer and the deployment of powerful branding techniques their owners made the gestalts much bigger than the sum of the parts.

Incremental can also be radical if you work hard at it.

Background music to straighten your hair to:
Janet Jackson All for you