Month: June 2021

Concentrate! Here comes the science bit

/ Paul Christopher Walton / 2 Comments

From the Brand Historian’s Timeline: 1989

The Daily Candy is a popular trend website that introduced us to its own wryly observed lexicon of words that don’t exist but should. Bluetoothsome is a word they coined to describe someone “so attractive that his/her hotness is not significantly diminished by the wearing of a Bluetooth earpiece.”

The first Bluetooth wireless devices started to appear in the early 2000s, but only after a long gestation by a computer technology industry struggling to make the wireless world happen. The confusing array of short-range wireless protocols from various competing players had threatened the technology’s commercial development, which is why the industry created a working party to agree upon a common approach. The Bluetooth Special Interest Group was set up in 1989, its project name drawing inspiration from the 11th-century Danish king called Harald Bluetooth. Harald had been highly successful at knocking disparate warlord heads together to forge an effective political and military unit. As so often happens, the project name became the actual launch brand name. In 2001, the first of several billion devices were launched, all of which carried the now familiar blue runic symbol, which cleverly combined King Harald’s initials.

Bluetooth is one of the most successful examples of ingredient/component branding: a business approach that seeks to add value to a host end-product by offering features and benefits which heighten the customer’s perceptions of quality or improve utility and performance. The name Bluetooth was suggested by Jim Kardach of Intel, who had been reading about Harald Bluetooth in a novel called The Long Ships. 

Intel, of course, is another example of a tech brand that understood the power of branded ingredients and had become part of popular culture thanks to the Intel Inside branding campaign of the 1990s. In a limited way, this campaign educated the mass consumer market about microchip processors and how to spot a good PC powered by the right chip.

In these examples, Bluetooth and Intel took complex science and technical detail, conveniently data reduced and summarised it, with a pithy campaign promise and a distinctive know-what-to-look-for logo. 

Brand ingredient marketing had first become highly fashionable following the 1980s launch of NutraSweet as an alternative sweetening system in the vast market for carbonated soft drinks. But in reality, it was nothing new. In 1965, Ray Dolby set up Dolby Laboratories and gave his name to intelligent Hi-Fi noise-reduction systems and cinema stereo sound. The Dolby B button sold a lot of tape decks in the 1970s, just as Wilbert and Robert Gore’s waterproofing system called Gore-Tex became the must-have feature in the clothes and footwear of everyone engaged in outdoor activities. The tobacco industry had tried cigarettes with NSM (new smoking materials). And 50 years before Jennifer Aniston introduced the world to L’Oréal’s Elvive with the immortal words, “Concentrate, here comes the science bit”, Gibbs SR, a Unilever brand of toothpaste that was the first brand to advertise on UK’s commercial TV, had extolled the tingling fresh benefits of SodiumRicinoleate, which I know from personal experience offered a truly bluetoothsome mouthfeel and smile.

1989 Working Party Anthem:

Eternal Flame The Bangles

An Odd Solution to the Schleswig-Holstein Question?

/ Paul Christopher Walton / Leave a comment

From the Brand Historian’s Timeline: 1978

Donald Pleasance was surely one of the most characterful of all British character actors. In a long career, he created a veritable gallery of movie villains including Ernst Stavro Blofeld, Doctor Crippen, Heinrich Himmler and Thomas Cromwell. Terrence Pettigrew wonderfully describes the Pleasance magic like this:

“He has the potent combination of eyes and voice. The eyes can be mournful, but they can also be sinister or just plain nutty. He has the kind of piercing stare which lifts the enamel off saucepans.”

He was also a brilliant stage actor winning various awards including one for his Robespierre inspired nerd in Anouilh’s Pauvre Bitos. Even in a more agreeable role such as the mild-mannered POW in The Great Escape, Pleasance played a forger. With such an interesting hinterland, it was inevitable that the world of advertising would soon call on his services.

In The Bluffer’s Guide to Marketing, the Brand Historian’s official manifesto, co-written with Dr Graham Harding, I described my early career at an advertising hot shop in Paddington called French Gold Abbott. Here I worked on Swedish cars, British intelligence, and German lager. The German lager was Holsten Diat Pils, and in 1978 this Hamburg bottled beer got the Pleasance treatment at an interesting moment in the UK Lager Wars.

Hamburg is one of many towns in Germany with a long history of brewing. A proud member of the Hanseatic trading League, its brewing rights were guaranteed in mediaeval times by Duke Adolph III of Schleswig-Holsten, still remembered as the black knight who appears in the Holsten brand identity on bottles and cans.

In the 1970s, British Brewers were engaged in killing off high effort, unreliable real ales and driving drinkers to 3% lightweight, easy drinking so called standard lagers. The market for these was growing rapidly and there followed a race to find new premium segments and also existing European lager brand assets that could be plugged into the UK market.

Holsten Diat Pils stood in powerful contrast to the pretty bog-standard lagers that were driving the lager market. Stronger, drier (but with a hint of sweetness too), Holsten Diat Pils had been originally brewed for diabetics. Packing a 5.8% punch after all the sugar had been turned into alcohol, it was also of course, despite the name, packed with calories. The brand had been available in the UK from 1948, but it came into its own in the 1970s when, with the distribution clout of Grand Met, it became one of the defining brands of what came to be known as Premium Packaged Lagers. Holsten did this by building an effective coalition of regular drinkers which included students, slimmers, headbangers and even real ale renegades. This was at least in part a consequence of the brilliant launch advertising which Holsten and French Gold Abbott created drawing on the services of Donald Pleasance.

In one of the best examples of edgy brand positioning, the ads featured Donald Pleasance sitting menacingly, drinking Holsten Diat Pils with a pet crocodile looking on. This was Blofeld. This was a beer story seen through those eyes and told in that voice. This was the Odd Lager. Could there have been a better star to light the blue touchpaper for Holsten Brauerei? Soon there was an extremely valuable new market sector called Pils and Holsten was fighting off lots of contenders for the Pils crown.

But in 1978, French Gold Abbott, Holsten’s agency and my first home after Oxford, was beset with trouble at the top. In the space of months, Messrs French, Gold and Abbott had all left to set up new agencies. Michael Gold took with him the FGA Holsten account supremo, Mike Greenlees, to form GGT. This agency would take Holsten in a very different creative direction.

It would be another 28 years before I worked on Holsten again and that would be after the proud Hanseatic brewer had fallen into the hands of the neighbouring Danes. The black knight was now fighting alongside Carlsberg in a new phase of the world beer wars and I was working with the team in Hamburg and Copenhagen.

But for me, 1978 remains the special time. I can still picture Holsten’s highly-charged yellow, red and green livery flashing oddly bright in the autumnal brownness of the late 1970s.

Music with which to drink the night away:

Baker Street Gerry Rafferty

Essential reading matter:

Daft about Lager Rohan Daft

Bringing Out The Best

/ Paul Christopher Walton / Leave a comment

A Proustian Moment for an Englishman in New York

From the Brand Historian’s Timeline: 1913

One of the many clouds of sadness which the pandemic has brought with it are those wretched feelings that come from missing the places you love and the people who live there. I was late in discovering the charms of New York, but that just made the relationship more special, and its loss (hopefully finite?) more profound. Like many visitors, I was utterly gob-smacked the first time I saw the Terminal at Grand Central, especially at rush hour when commuters dashed like ants across its broad Main Concourse. But underneath it and accessed through a semi-secret door to the lower level is one of my most favourite places in all Manhattan, the perfect spot to wind down and to celebrate. I mean of course The Grand Central Oyster Bar with its vast Guastavino vaulted ceiling, groovy table and chairs, waiters in shorty white jackets, the heaving restaurant stuffed full of plates of seafood and the huge chalk blackboard at the Raw Bar, advertising oysters with fascinating if scary names like Lady Chatterley and King Caesar.

The Oyster Bar like the Terminal itself opened for business in 1913. This was also the year a German American called Richard Hellmann introduced his Blue-Ribbon Mayonnaise. Richard had managed a delicatessen in Columbus Avenue since 1905 but putting his recipe for mayo into glass jars was such a successful innovation that he was soon building a factory to produce it in Astoria, Queens. In 1915, Richard gave up the shop altogether to focus on manufacturing and packing his mayonnaise. Following years of strong growth, the brand changed hands a number of times before Hellmann’s was sold by General Foods to Best Foods. Because they already had a mayonnaise, it was decided to pursue a twin brand strategy across the world, with Hellmann’s ruling in the East and Best Foods taking the West and Pacific. Otherwise, the marketing mix would be identical.

The origins of mayonnaise continue to be something of a riddle suspended in an emulsion, but what is certain is that the product was repeatedly successful in finding a distinctive role in the eating culture of the countries where it took root. The French created the Friday ritual of äoli, Germans use it for their potato salad, the Dutch and the Belgians use it as the definitive fritessaus. Whilst the Chileans use it to finish off their completos, the British were persuaded when Hellmann’s was launched there in the 1980s to think of it as a posher kind of salad cream. But it was in the United States where Hellmann’s found its apotheosis as the essential component in the ultimate grilled chicken sandwich.

In 2000, Hellmann’s was part of a $20 billion deal which saw the brand become part of Unilever. A year late, and anxious to properly integrate such a successful brand into the Unilever system, a special conference was held with key personnel from Best Foods and Unilever’s culinary top brass. The event was held in Manhattan in a characterful, bare whitewashed warehouse on the edge of the Meatpacking district. This was where I led a team of Value Engineers to help and inspire the attendees to plot a road map for the next stages of the Hellmann’s story – after all, the brand had come a long way from its origins on the Upper West Side. After a successful couple of days storming brains and laying tracks for new visions and roadmaps, there was a celebratory visit to the Grand Central Oyster bar, where I believe Hellmann’s definitely made it onto on the menu.

1913 Playlist

You Made me love you

(I didn’t want to do it) Al Jolson