Month: May 2021

Mäarketing Myöpia versus Maslöw

/ Paul Christopher Walton / Leave a comment

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!

/ Paul Christopher Walton / Leave a comment

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

Limestone and Lymeswold: Branding Place

/ Paul Christopher Walton / 2 Comments

From the BrandHistorian’s Timeline: 1982

The power of place in the art of branding cannot be overestimated. The Brand Historian’s favourite white wine – at least when someone else is paying – is Meursault. This mouth-watering greeny-gold burgundy with the eyewatering price is produced with Chardonnay grapes by just a handful of vineyards on the Jurassic marls and limestones of the Côte de Beaune. If my host really wants to push the boat out, I might choose one of the Premier crus, perhaps Les Perrières or Les Genevrières which are the buttery big mommas of the Burgundy slopes, where terroir really does add some value.

Provenance has long been a powerful means of differentiating and adding value to commodities. From Italy, we relish Amalfi lemons or Parma hams; from France, we seek out Crème Fraiche D’Isigny and Roquefort. And whilst the UK has been a little slower compared with the Italians and French to get into the Appellation game, protected status has been increasingly sought by British specialities like Scotch beef, Welsh lamb, Cumberland sausage and Melton Mowbray pies. In the cheese market, the world beyond cheddar has long been represented by an array of Territorials which proudly boast their geographic origins: for example, Wensleydale, Single Gloucester and Shropshire Blue. But branding based on a provenance is not without its dangers, as shown by the 1982 launch of a new cheese called Lymeswold.

The Milk Marketing Board was a UK state-run organization of dairy farmers set up to manage the milk supply chain. In the 1980s, there was a surplus of milk, so the Board set up a commercial arm called Dairy Crest, tasked with finding profitable new markets.

One of Dairy Crest’s first actions was to set up an innovation skunkworks team ominously called the SPG. One of several opportunities the SPG identified was the market for soft cheese, exemplified by French cheeses like Brie and Camembert. While the market was much smaller than classic British hard cheeses, it was upscale, aspirational, and becoming increasingly popular. The team soon identified a promising candidate product – a soft (slightly) blue cheese with an edible white rind which tasted good. Using a classic 1980s product development programme, which included the obligatory mini-van test, the product was set for a full-scale launch. The brand name selected and endorsed by the consumer was to be Wymeswold which it was thought connoted the traditional, bucolic values of rural England.

But just before the national campaign broke, it was discovered there actually was a town called Wymeswold, located in Leicestershire, hundreds of miles from Somerset where the new cheese was being produced. With a launch date looming, the decision was made to call the product Lymeswold.

Lymeswold was launched nationally in 1982 with a high-profile ad campaign (French dudes in 2CV failing to discover the delicious cheese cunningly hidden by the Brits) and PR (government minister and grateful pet dog.) Initially, the product sold well. Indeed, so well, there were supply problems.

But the first English new cheese for 200 years, as the PR described it, turned out to be a classic shooting star. A combination of significant problems in scaling-up production, product reliability issues and a trade relationship disaster resulted in the brand’s investment programme being first curtailed and eventually cancelled. Lymeswold past its sell by and was eventually removed from the market in 1992: the pleasant tasting soft cheese with a made-up name dreamt up at the last minute by the marketing men had become a bit of a joke and a Private Eye running gag.

A sad, personal postscript to this story came later when the Brand Historian visited a Dairy Crest creamery and saw a mountain of now redundant Lymeswold cheese moulds. 

The sudden rise and fall of Lymeswold shows how the power of place can help make or break a product. Lymeswold’s subsequent (and brief) re-appearance as Westminster Blue shows how in the age of political satire, we were still taking chances with brand naming.

1982 Playlist 

The Land of Make-Believe Bucks Fizz.

Shining a light on the language of innovation

/ Paul Christopher Walton / Leave a comment

From the Brand Historian’s Timeline: 1806 

When the Brand Historian was still treading the boards and explaining the importance of innovation to a variety of corporate academies, he was fond of quoting the aphorism that Frederick the Great, King of Prussia was said to have lost the battle of Jena in 1806 – which was a bit tough on the flute playing maestro, because he had been dead for twenty years. But of course, this story was just a smart ass of way saying that the reason why the Prussian army lost this key battle was because it had failed to evolve its previously successful tactics when faced by Napoleon’s new system Grande Armée complete with integrated battle corps and highly mobile artillery. 

But in 1806, it wasn’t only Napoleon who was innovating. This was also the year that Noah Webster published his first dictionary, A Compendious Dictionary of the English language which was massively influential in solidifying and popularising standards of American spelling typified in words like program rather than programme and honor rather than honour. The American Republic was just 20 years old, and as Webster’s book hit the shelves and mapped out a course for the American language, Lewis and Clark and their Corps of Discovery were heading back to St. Louis having mapped out the vast new frontier acquired following the Louisiana purchase. And back in New York, another innovative journey of exploration was about to begin: this time into the world of personal care.

The story began in England in the 1790s with Robert Colgate, a Kent farmer with some dangerously radical beliefs who supported the political revolutions that had first gripped the British colonies and now France. It was perhaps fortunate that Robert was a good chum of William Pitt the Younger, the fantastically able Tory statesman because he was able to tip Robert the wink before the agents of the Crown arrived to arrest him for sedition. Joining the long trail of radical dissenters heading westwards, Robert and his family sailed for Baltimore where he abandoned farming to found a tallow chandelling business. 

His son William proved himself to be a good business partner, and in 1806, the year of Jena and coincidentally William Pitt’s death, Colgate opened a new enterprise in Dutch Street, Lower Manhattan. Mr Webster’s Dictionary of Compendious English defines tallow as 

“a sort of animal fat particularly that which is obtained from animals of the sheep and ox kinds. The fat of swine we never call tallow but lard or suet.”

 Despite its dubious origins, tallow was a vital commodity in the manufacture of candles whose contemporary importance cannot be underestimated. As Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe bemoans: 

“I was at a great loss for candles, so that as soon as ever it was dark, which was generally by seven o’clock, I was obliged to go to bed.”

Candles in the early 19th century had all the characteristics of a promising classic consumer packaged goods market – everybody needed them and would want to use them on a daily basis. Tallow was also an important constituent of soap before palm and olive oils became the norm and soon William Colgate’s business was advertising its Soap, Mould and Dipt candles of the first quality. The business boomed with Colgate building his reputation further by personally delivering orders. 

It would be another 60 years before Colgate’s sons launched Colgate Dental Cream, the aromatic and palatable dentifrice, as Webster’s might put it, which has painted the whole world red and made it smile. Like so many successful start-ups, the story of Colgate & Co combines a heady mixture of a brave decision, a desperate gamble, a willingness to try new things and, in pursuit of a customer, a capacity for sheer hard work.

Chamber Music in Vienna and Manhattan

Violin Concerto in D Beethoven