Month: July 2021

It was the monks before the punks

/ Paul Christopher Walton / Leave a comment

From the Brand Historian’s Timeline: 1240

Long before the punks arrived, it was monks who created all the best brand narratives in beer, and in the whole of tonsured Christendom, the best brewsters were found in Belgium. One Order, in particular, has made its mark on the world of beers brewed in Abbeys, and Saint Norbert of Xanten founded it in 1120. His followers were called Premonstratensians – which is not the easiest of names to get your mouth around, especially when giving a vote of thanks for an evening spent sampling their famous, if somewhat austere hospitality. 

Whilst monks had been brewing for years, something encouraged by the Rule of St. Benedict, Saint Norbert’s White Canons made their first brew at the Abbey of Notre-Dame de Leffe in 1240, and thus can claim with some justification, to be one of the world’s oldest brands.

The Abbey of Notre-Dame de Leffe is situated at Dinant, at the confluence of the Leffe and Meuse rivers, in the southeastern part of modern Belgium, but which at the time was a patchwork of feudal fiefdoms, on the fragile marches of Holy Roman Empire. Given its strategic position, life was always going to be difficult for Leffe and its white monks. In its long history, they would dodge Valois and Hapsburg, Bourbon and Bonaparte but fail to hide the brewing coppers when the Germans arrived on two occasions in the twentieth century. But somehow the reputation of the beer of the White Canons survived and flourished so that in the 1980s and with a bit of help from Interbrew, Leffe became an international power brand: its colour-coded twins, Leffe Blonde and Leffe Brune, sitting alongside its flagship, Leffe Tripel – a magnificent bottled-conditioned, fruity golden beer that perhaps best embodies the Norbertine brewing tradition.

Leffe is no longer brewed today in Dinant. Production was moved to the Stella Artois brewery in Leuven, but the Order apparently still receives royalty cheques for the use of the Leffe story from Anheuser-Busch, who acquired Interbrew in 2008.

Apart from its beers, Dinant is also famous for being the birthplace of Adolphe Saxe, who, despite several life-threatening mishaps in his youth, survived to patent the saxophone in 1846. A pretty brilliant piece of cross-category marketing innovation, the saxophone is a woodwind instrument that sounds as if it belongs to the brass family. Today, it provides the perfect soundscape for a night out in Dinant, perhaps ending at Le Café Ardennais with at least one double Tripel. 

Bene+dic, Domine, creaturam istam cerevisae….

A Playlist for a Leffe session:

1240 Gregorian Chant

1910 Rapsodie for Orchestra and Saxophone Claude Debussy

1959 5 by Monk by 5 Thelonious Monk (Piano) Charlie Rouse (Saxophone)

Fifty shades without grey, please

/ Paul Christopher Walton / Leave a comment

The Brand That Turned Back Time

At 4.41 am on the morning of 25 July 1909, someone gave the signal that the sun had risen, and Henri Blériot, the inventor of the car headlamp, took off into history. He was flying his monoplane, the Blériot XI, at a speed of 45 mph and an altitude of about 250 feet and was hoping to make the first successful flight across the English Channel. Soon after take-off, his visibility deteriorated and lacking a compass. He felt very alone in the morning mist until the thin grey line of the English coast came into view and with it Le Matin’s correspondent waving a large Tricolour. Bleriot circled twice to lose height and made a pancake landing near Dover Castle, shortly afterwards claiming The Daily Mail’s £500 prize.

When we think of Paris of La Belle Époque, it’s easy to conjure the city’s great cultural happenings: Proust’s searching for lost time, Matisse experimenting with expressionism in his paintings, or Erik Satie trying to make a living as a pianist at Le Chat Noir. But as Blériot’s success shows, La Belle Époque was also a fantastically creative time for French science and enterprise, which also saw the foundation of Renault and Citroen and one other great French brand icon.

Five days after Bleriot’s flight, La Société française de teintures inoffensives pour cheveux started trading in offices close to the Louvre in Paris. The leading light of the new enterprise was Eugène Schueller, son of a baker who had left Alsace following the German invasion in 1871. Schueller was a graduate of the Institute of Applied Chemistry in Paris and was now being mentored by Victor Augur, one of the leading science Professors of the day at the Sorbonne. 

Clients posed all kinds of problems in need of a technical solution. One of these, brought by a hairdresser, was also one of the biggest consumer problems of all time: how to re-colour greying hair with lifelike colours without the risk of aesthetic embarrassment or toxic shock. People had been dying their hair for centuries, but most traditional methods were not very effective and could be very dangerous because of the lead content used in many of the dyes. 

HG Wells had recently published The Time Machine, and now Schueller and his partners filed patents for a unique hair colouring system that would claim to turn back the clock and promised the women who used it that they would no longer age. The brand name that the company used in 1909 was Auréole – the circle of light or brightness that radiated around the head as depicted in art. But we know this company today as L’Oréal.

From the brand’s beginning, two very different goddess archetypes, Minerva (science) and Aphrodite (beauty), inspired and powered L’Oréal. Never short of controversial opinions, Schueller wrote, “we are in a century of beauty, of luxury and of art…where the first goal of the elegant woman, whether she admits it or not, is to be beautiful and to stay beautiful.” Combining science-based beauty with a natural flair for marketing made the new company unstoppable. With the cry of “Plus de cheveux gris! all the hair salons of France were soon demanding L’Oréal colours. The success in B2B was soon followed by the similar success of sales to the consumer via pharmacies. All this laid the foundations for L’Oréal to become in the century of beauty as foreseen by Schueller, one of the world’s greatest brands.

Suitable Music for the Salons:

Sports et divertissements Erik Satie

From Zappas to Abba?

/ Paul Christopher Walton / Leave a comment

How the hippies took over the world of branding

From the Brand Historian’s Timeline, 1998

There’s nothing like a hot new brand to create a wave of jealousy, especially in large corporations. One of the constant questions the mega-corps ask consultants is “How can we innovate better?” and by this, they don’t mean the usual yawn list of tweaks and line extensions, but the big, shiny market development initiatives that set the marketing and business agenda.

The Brand Historian has also been fascinated by this question and over the years has studied many companies – large and small – and their systems for creating new products.  Two classic types are evident. Channelling a musical theme, we termed big corporations stacked to the gunwales with brands and best practice manuals as ABBA companies, inspired by the Swedish maestros of the mainstream who created a stream of global hits. The smaller companies, many of whom act like insurgents or disruptors we called Zappas, inspired by Frank Zappa. It was Frank who said that “without deviation, progress is not possible” and famously directed us to zig, when everybody else was zagging.

One of the most exciting and successful Zappas we studied was Innocent, the populariser of smoothies in the UK, complete with those little hats knitted by grannies. Launched in 1998, Innocent was amongst a new wave of brands that began to appear with a fresh, very un-packaged goods voice and showing a new design sensibility. Three lads from Cambridge set it up – Jon, Adam and Richard- all of whom gave up good jobs in consulting and advertising. Famously, Innocent was set up with £500 worth of fruit and a slightly bigger dollop of Dragon investment capital. While smoothies were still very new in the UK, they had been around for over 70 years in the USA, pretty much after Steve Poplawski invented the electric blender in the late 1930s. Health and well-being trends and California beach lifestyles helped popularise a number of smoothie brands, including Smoothie King and Naked.

Smoothies would now be the prime focus of the boys from St John’s, their prototypes having passed the music festival test market in West London. It’s been said by their Dragon, Maurice Pinto, that the smoothie was only a vehicle; it was the means, not the end. The real prize would be the creation of a powerful brand phenomenon that could grow beyond mere blended fruit. 

And in the competitive world of marketing, Innocent became everybody’s favourite brand disruptor case history. With a name which owned a rich hinterland and a brand voice that was accessible, friendly and honest, the whole mix was a perfect amalgam of intrinsics and extrinsics—and beautifully executed with imaginative field marketing, delivered by staff from the Fruit Towers HQ who were themselves brilliant exemplars of the brand philosophy. There was something of the progressive Californian hippie in the brand’s genetic blueprint. Innocent wanted to show the world that you could make great tasting products with good natural ingredients; you could do good, have some fun, and you could also make money.

Of course, this was not exactly a completely new story. In 1978 Ben Greenfield and Jerry Cohen had launched their chunk-packed super-premium ice cream. In their utterly on-brand and off-centre corporate history (The Real Scoop, 1998), they obligingly provide the following definition of a hippie:

 “A member of a loosely knit, non-conformist group, especially one that rejects conventional social mores and accepts universal love and wants to make the world a groovier place.” 

The book is a superb primer for creative, community-based brand activation that is still as relevant as ever.

In a strange quirk of the narrative arc, both Innocent and Ben and Jerry’s gave up their hard-won independence in 2013. Ben Jerry’s was sold to Unilever for $326 million. In the same deal, Slimfast was bought for a hefty $2.3 billion, making Ben and Jerry’s a real bargain by any standard. Meanwhile, Innocent’s three founders sold their remaining equity to Coca Cola, which valued the company at £320 million. 

So, in the stories of Innocent and Ben and Jerry’s, we can see an answer to that question posed by the big ABBA organisations. Rather than desperately trying to grow their own, ABBA companies should probably buy their Zappas. And here’s the thing: when Ben and Jerry’s was sold to Unilever, I heard one of their founders say that it was actually a reverse takeover, which given Unilever’s championing of social and environmental matters is not at all unreasonable. But as for Innocent- is it still? 

1998: Music for Fruitstock 

Robbie Williams Angels