Month: March 2021

New is the New Old

/ Paul Christopher Walton / Leave a comment

From the Brand Historian’s Timeline: 1985- 1991

In the marketing lexicon, new is one of the most important words of power, because like a neon sign in the motorway darkness, it captures our attention and helps spotlight desire. It’s also one of marketing’s very own buy-one-get-one-free’s because this is one word with two very different meanings.

The first, which we may call the New/New describes something just or recently created and which has not existed before. The New/New often triggers a feeling within us which are an  interesting combination of excitement and hesitation, because novelty can be unfamiliar and off-putting. Consider a list of new words which first entered the language in 1985: yuppy, tankini, emoticon and microbrew. All needed significant education to get them understood and adopted, and there were many wanabees that year that didn’t make it into the dictionary.

The other new is in fact a New/Old, because it involves finding a new angle on something we have seen before. In 1985, in the same year that marketing folk were getting excited about yuppies and their Filofaxes, they were also getting animated about the launch of New Coke, described by Coca Cola’s own website as ‘the biggest marketing blunder in history.’

To hear some tell it, April 23, 1985, was a day that will live in marketing infamy.

On that day, The Coca-Cola Company took arguably the biggest risk in consumer goods history, announcing that it was changing the formula for the world’s most popular soft drink, and spawning consumer angst the likes of which no business has ever seen.

Rejected by the consumer and the trade, New Coke died a slow, lingering death before disappearing from the shelves in 1992. But the fate of New Coke is exceptional, because normally the New/Old option is a far safer path for marketeers to follow. 

As many explorers have already discovered, the past can be creatively employed to inspire an interesting future. Coast to coast, the United States of America is littered with New/Olds like New Berlin and New Bethlehem, New Orleans and New Prague; New London and New Richmond. Before the Brits rebranded it in 1664, New York had been New Amsterdam, founded by the Dutch West India Company in 1626. Challenging our normal cartographic expectations, you will find New England, New Holland and New Sweden lying close by each other, whereas as far away from the Low Countries as you can get, you will find a New Belgium in the foothills of the Rockies.

New Belgium is one of The Brand Historian’s favourite beer brands and its wonderful amber ale Fat Tire has helped maintain his morale on many a challenging business trip to the Mid-West. 

At exactly the same time as microbrew was entering the language, an engineer with a passion for beer called Jeff Lebesch took his bicycle on a study tour of Flanders and its monastic beer heritage trail. Weeks later, and with a panier full of inspiration, he headed back to Fort Collins, a college town in Colorado and started brewing beers like 1554 Black Ale in his home. Fortunately, Kim Jordan, his wife, seemed to like the idea and in 1991, New Belgium opened for business. The couple demonstrated a real skill for brewing non-standard beer and a real flair for telling their story in a quirky, non-standard way, and before long New Belgium beers were selling well in the mountain states and also in the microbrewing strongholds of Washington and Oregon. It was about this time when I first discovered New Belgium bottles on a drinks project that took me to Denver.

Only a few years later, New Belgium beers had become far more ubiquitous in US bars. What took New Belgium out of the microbrew niche, crossing the cultural chasm into the mainstream, as Professor Doug Holt put it, was the decision to focus all the effort on Fat Tire, the toothsome amber ale with the lovely water colour labels by Anne Fitch which feature New Belgium’s signature bike. Positioning the brand as BoHo playful explorers, it encouraged its upscale, intelligent target drinkers to “Follow your folly”, adding “Ours is beer” 

The strategy worked and the brewery grew rapidly, maintaining its distinctive and progressive culture and was ultimately acquired by Kirin in 2019, by which time it had jumped from being a micro into a macro brewer, having entered the US Brewing Top Ten.

Music to celebrate Bohemian life (with a pint of Fat Tire):

Losing my religion R.E.M.

Est semper lux in tenebris

/ Paul Christopher Walton / Leave a comment

From the Brand Historian’s Timeline:

July 1942. The war in Europe is going badly. The U boat wolf packs are enjoying another period of great success against Allied shipping. Convoy PQ17 has just assembled but will lose two thirds of its ships on its voyage to Russia.  Rommel’s Afrika Korps has retaken Tobruk, and the Wehrmacht, having captured Sevastopol, is now threatening the Crimean oil fields and Stalingrad. Millions of Europeans are already living in semi-starvation as German forces have cut off the areas in the Ukraine which produce half of all Soviet wheat and pork supplies.

Meanwhile, following the horrendous agenda of the conference at Wannsee, the Nazi plan to exterminate the Jews is now underway, as the first group of 6000 from the Warsaw ghetto are killed in the gas chambers of Treblinka on July 23rd. 

But even on the darkest of summer days, there can still be an inspiring light and the promise of better things. On July 31st The Oxford Committee for Famine Relief is formed which will become celebrated the world over as Oxfam. 

Shortly afterwards, a small group gathered in the Old Library of St Mary’s the Virgin, the University Church in Oxford. This was the inaugural meeting of the committee and it proved to be a perfect balance of personalities. Dick Milford who took the chair, was the Vicar of St Mary’s, Henry Gillett was a former Lord Mayor of the City and a leading Quaker. George Murray was a prominent Greek scholar and humanist, and his wife, the well-connected Lady Mary Howard. The grit in the oyster was provided by Cecil Jackson Cole, one of the most successful social entrepreneurs of the Twentieth century and the committee’s business brain.

Whilst some of the group had already been involved in charitable work including helping with the flood of refugees arriving in Oxford in the late 1930s, what brought this group together in the ancient library overlooking Radcliffe Square was the famine that was now causing so many deaths in Greece and which, at least in part, was caused by Allied war efforts.

At the start of the war, Greece had managed to resist the Italian army, Germany’s ally, but in 1941, Germany intervened and quickly overran the country, dividing it up between themselves, the Italians and Bulgaria, the other European member of Axis. The occupying forces pursued a strategy of plunder and pillage and brutally suppressed resistance. Meanwhile, the Allied naval blockade effectively stopped food supplies getting into Greece which resulted in a long and particularly horrific famine. “Send us food or send us coffins!” was the plea that the Oxford Committee responded to, and thus was started in the middle of all that darkness, a small group which became the global movement of millions of people to end poverty.

Music from 1942:

Fanfare for the Common Man Aaron Copland

A Tale of Two Yoghurts

/ Paul Christopher Walton / Leave a comment

From the Brand Historian’s Timeline: 1919 and 1965

1066 and All That remains one of the Brand Historian’s favourite books, celebrating if not all the English history that actually happened, then at least all the English history that we can remember. One of the gags from Sellers and Yeatman’s hilarious, yet perceptive text is the description of the two sides who contended the English Civil War: The Cavaliers were Wrong but Wromantic, whereas the Roundheads were Right but Repulsive. It’s a wonderfully poetic description which resonates with me in the function versus emotion branding battles of the last century: P&G’s Ariel against Lever’s Persil, or Shell Power against BP Ultimate. But this clever dichotomy is particularly apposite to the story of the two brands that built the yoghurt market.

Stories of the medical efficacy of thickened fermented milk started circulating in early modern Europe. A particularly desperate King Francois I of France had been suffering with incurable diarrhoea when a doctor from the household of his ally, Suleiman the Magnificent suggested he try a few spoonfuls of yoghurt which soon produced much comfort and relief.

But it was at the beginning of the 20th century when yoghurt became one of the first functional foods to really take off. Ilya Mechnikov was a Russian scientist and Nobel Prize winner working at the Pasteur Institute in Paris who was convinced that the long lifespan of Bulgarian peasants was down to their daily consumption of a spoonful of Lactobacillus and began to popularise the idea. Inspired by what he’d heard and what he knew from his upbringing as a Sephardic Jew in Salonika, Isaac Carasso set up a small yoghurt business in Barcelona and called it Danone, after his young son Daniel. Shortly afterwards the family moved over the border into France.

Danone’s journey from the 1920s to become one of the great empires of nutrition with outposts in over 120 countries has been an eventful one. Interrupted by the Second World War when the family had to outrun the Nazis, Carasso setup a new business in the United States called, to suit local tastes, Dannon. After the war, Danone returned to France and merged with Gervais, a Normandy cheese business famous for its small pots called petit-suisses. Gervais-Danone was subsequently absorbed into BSN, a food, drink, brewing and packaging conglomerate. It might have got lost in the portfolio, but to quote Sellers and Yeatman, it was Danone who came out on top, becoming the heart of a global health and nutrition business, powered by its pillar brands: Activia, Actimel, Alpro and Nutricia. The mission would be supported with the health-giving magic margins of its water brands, Evian and Volvic.

Having watched the development of Danone over the years, I’ve always thought that there was something of the repressed Puritan about it and the white-coated nutritional stormtroopers who throng its Institutes on many continents. A good test of brand personality is to imagine the kind of party a brand would throw and whether you would want an invitation. I certainly can imagine the Danone party, but I’m not sure I’m ready for a do at a sanatorium just yet. 

Yoplait is the other great Gallic yoghurt which built the market, but with a suck of the spoon that is decidedly more sensual, it has always been much more my kind of party. Whilst Danone was launched amidst the austerity of the years immediately after the Great War, Yoplait is a brand of the 1960s and has always radiated a bright, sunny confidence. Launched in 1965, Yoplait was the result of six independent French co-operative dairies coming together to move down the supply chain and make more money for their farmer-members. Yoplait’s Petite Fleur logo had six petals, each representing one of its founding creameries.

Taking advantage of Danone’s merger and acquisition odyssey, Yoplait grew rapidly in France with an innovative range of product brands like Petits Filous, Silhouette, Yop and Calin. Majoring on fruit, taste and enjoyment and reflecting changing consumer lifestyles, Yoplait was modern, chic and just a little bit sexy. International development facilitated by licensing the brand and strong product innovation like the cleverly packaged Frubes, helped Yoplait become the other global brand of yoghurt in the world’s fast growing rows of chiller cabinets, especially in North America.

The United States has been a huge market for Danone and Yoplait, who successfully introduced the yoghurt pot to breakfast tables to compete with the likes of Eggo and Kellogg’s cereals. But in the last decade, Danone and Yoplait’s dominance has been successfully challenged by an insurgent which has taken the yoghurt category back to its Balkan roots.

Hamdi Ulukaya’s Chobani is a thick, Greek yoghurt with a brand wrapper which mixes provenance, craft skills, taste and lifestyle in a compelling package that millennials love. Both incumbents have been knocked off balance, but perhaps not surprisingly it is the more Cavalier-spirited Yoplait that has lost most share. Nutrition and taste (or taste and nutrition) have been and will continue to be the defining axes of the yoghurt market, but the success of Chobani shows how brand leaders in established markets need to keep their eyes open for New Model competitors, be they Roundhead or Cavalier flavoured.

Music from 1965

Toujours des Beaux Jours Sheila

An Earl, a Brownie and a Patio Party

/ Paul Christopher Walton / Leave a comment

The Brand Historian’s Timeline: 1951

The widespread assumption that the C Suite can fill an empty sales funnel with breakthrough new products in a series of simple, linear sequential steps is understandable but unfortunately a challenge to the laws of probability. Rather, big new innovations happen in more random looping motions with inventors and companies revisiting what has gone before and modifying or adding something new. Steve Jobs knew this when he circled back to the failure of the Apple Newton (1993) to launch the iPhone (2007). The something new can take many forms but the importance of the human dimension cannot be exaggerated as the story of Earl and Brownie shows.

Earl Silas Tupper was a New England Tree surgeon who joined Dupont as a technical sample maker when the Great Depression forced his business to close. Putting a degree in chemistry to good use, he started experimenting with polyethylene slag, a waste product from the oil refining process. With a purified version of polythene, he discovered it made a lightweight, flexible yet sturdy material for moulding cups, bowls and plates. Convinced that plastics would be the material of the future, Earl founded his Tupperware Plastics Company in 1938. But that future was still a way off because his first products in the shops just didn’t shift.

In 1946 two things happened which changed that. First, Earl patented a non-snap lid for his bowls which kept food fresher than tin foil (or the dreaded shower cap). Here was a relevant, demonstrable benefit for Tupperware. All he needed was a good demonstration, and as he was something of a geeky introvert, a good demonstrator. Enter Brownie Wise, his perfect Myers Briggs (then being developed) team complement.

Brownie Wise was born in Georgia in 1913 and a little younger than Earl. From an early age, she showed charm aplenty and the gift of the gab. By the time she met Earl, she was a mother and divorced and also one of the sales stars of Stanley Home Products, who were pioneers in using parties as a direct-to-consumer sales channel. Brownie was convinced Tupperware could be sold in this way and as a super engaging presenter, knew how to teach the Tupper ‘burp’ which made the seal effective.

The business now took off, and with Brownie as the inspiring front face, a network of agents and dealers was created, and patio parties with the Tupperware Ladies were soon taking place in Florida and then all over the country. Part of Brownie’s magic had been to recognise the opportunity to offer women a fulfilling and economically rewarding role. So successful were sales that in 1951 Earl took the decision to only sell Tupperware on what was called the Party Plan, with the redoubtable Brownie Wise as his Vice President of Sales. Featured in the Museum of Modern Art in 1956, Tupperware soon became ubiquitous, and a survey showed that 90% of American households now owned at least one piece. Thanks to Brownie’s human touch, Earl’s plastic had indeed become the material of the future.

Party like it’s 1951:

You’re Just in Love Donald O’Connor and Ethel Merman