Month: January 2022

One can, thousands of uses….Still stuck?

/ Paul Christopher Walton / Leave a comment

From the Brand Historian’s Timeline: 1953

Choosing a brand name is one of the most frustrating and quixotic of all marketing decisions. Whoever it was who said that brand names are like double glazing because both are sold and not bought had probably discovered it the hard way. 

In giving a new product a name, a battle has raged between those who prefer descriptive ones versus those who gravitate to a neutral or perhaps an apparently vacuous combination of characters. In 1953, when we first became familiar with QEII, and Crick and Watson cracked the formula of DNA, the Pocket Chemical Company of Chula Vista introduced the world to its new wonder product, WD-40.

With a name that made it sound more like a beleaguered Arctic convoy, the essence of WD-40 had, in fact, been carefully encoded. WD stood for water displacing, and the number 40 was used because it was the 40th formulation the Pocket Chemical Company had tried in their search for an effective water-displacing spray – or so the foundation story tells it. The boffins in California were on the lookout for a wonder spray that would also lubricate and penetrate.

Whether it was Iver Norman Lawson or Norman B Larsen who actually came up with the final formulation of smart hydrocarbons remains unclear. Still, the Brand Historian remains eternally grateful to Pocket Chemicals because WD-40 became the essential glovebox emergency rescue spray in his first-ever car. This was a rather old and ramshackle Mark 2 Ford Escort with a particularly dodgy carburettor. Bilston, as we called it, didn’t like cold, damp mornings, and like some injured footballer, it seemed to appreciate a spray or two of WD to get him ready to attempt the journey from Ealing to client meetings in Esher.

But whilst WD-40 may have had an opaque name, it sports a distinctive brand identity. It’s a rugged, metallic can dressed in French blue, yellow and red overalls, complete with a cheap and cheerful nanotube for precision spraying that is un-fussily taped to it and thus ever ready for action.

Like with many successful versatile super-products, consumers tend to find their own killer applications. In my case, WD was the roadside emergency service in a can. But over the last fifty years people all over the world have found a wide variety of other uses, such as removing lipstick stains, deterring pigeons on balconies, removing wax graffiti and even dealing with recalcitrant tomato stains on clothing. Today WD’s boffins encourage us to share our favourite uses at www.wd40.co.uk/lifehacks

In the highly subjective field of brand naming, WD-40 is a marvellous example of how sometimes you just need to have a leap of faith when giving your new baby a name. At a time when marketing processes are becoming ever more dense and complicated, we should watch the tendency to overthink things and just give that impenetrable jargon a decent spray with WD-40.

1953 Top of the Pops:

I Believe Frankie Laine

By Royal Appointment to Queen Victoria and Bridget Jones

/ Paul Christopher Walton / Leave a comment

From the Brand Historian’s Timeline: 1922

Heading north on the A38 from Lichfield towards Burton on Trent, you will find several small villages that nestle on the border between Staffordshire and Derbyshire, but which more than a thousand years ago formed the uneasy frontier between Saxon Mercia and the Danelaw. Probably named after a Dane called Brant, Branston was one of these villages. Until the early years of the 20th Century, it managed to enjoy a quiet life beside the River Trent, but then things got considerably busier.

In 1916, in the midst of The Great War, the British Government decided to build a huge machine gun factory here, believing it would be safely beyond the range of Zeppelins and Gotha bombers. Barely just commissioned, the war ended, and the factory was sold to a food processing company. Thus, it was in Branston in 1922, when the British Empire was at its apogee (accounting for one in four of all people on earth), and the British Broadcasting Corporation was just starting to inform, educate and entertain, that Crosse and Blackwell launched one of the most characterful of all British food icons: Branston Pickle.

Branston Pickle is a sticky, sweet and sour vegetable spread consisting of carrots, onions, cauliflower and gherkins pickled with vinegar and apple, which famously revives cold cuts and spikes bland lumps of cheddar. Company folklore says the recipe for Branston was created by a Mrs Graham and her suitably posh sounding daughters Ermentrude and Evelyn, but an industrial version was now to be produced in Crosse and Blackwell’s new state of the art food factory where late was heard the rattle of machine guns.

While Crosse and Blackwell sounds to modern ears like a small Hipster food enterprise that has just popped up in Bermondsey, it was already, by 1922, very ancient. With roots going back to 1706 and the first attempts to profit from trade with the new British Colonies, the business was acquired and rebranded Crosse and Blackwell in 1830. This was when two young twenty-five-year-old chancers called Edmund Crosse and Thomas Blackwell bought the business for £600 and set about implementing an ambitious plan to scale the business up by selling their range of pickles condiments, and soups throughout the Empire. At a time when there were many concerns about food quality, especially foods preserved in lead, Crosse and Blackwell invested in technical skills and packaging. They were rewarded in 1837 when they received, from Queen Victoria, one of the first-ever royal warrants.

But whilst Crosse and Blackwell’s investment in the best food technology continued by the acquisition of the Branston site, unfortunately things did not work out, and in 1925 the pickle business with its Staffordshire brand name was relocated to South London, to Bermondsey, in fact! Over the next 100 years, as pickle sales proliferated, the production of Branston was switched to a variety of sites before finally settling down in Bury St Edmunds. In those 100 years, Branston has acquired more than its fair share of influencers and super-fans, including Naomi Campbell, Gwyneth Paltrow and Bridget Jones. It would seem the latter likes to frequently bring out the Branston at her flat in Borough Market and apparently eat it straight out of the jar.

Today Branston like many famous British brands, is foreign owned, in this case by the Japanese condiment conglomerate Mizkan. In the last 100 years, it has travelled a long way from Mrs Graham’s kitchen and the Trent Valley, but en route, it has acquired an unassailable role as the spicy sizzle in every Ploughman’s Lunch.

Music to accompany your Ploughman’s Lunch:

The Laughing Policeman Charles Jolly (Charles Penrose)

A Bonus Poem is available at:

North Staffordshire Fields