There was not much to smile about in Britain in 1939. With the possibility of war with Germany becoming ever more likely, in London, the nation’s art treasures were being packed up and transported to Wales for safekeeping and the first Anderson bomb shelters were being built. But even before the declaration of war on September 3rd, bombs were killing British civilians. However, in the dog days of August, it was the bombs of the IRA that were creating the fear and disruption.
But on Tyneside, at least one event had a happier outcome that year, for it was in 1939 that Jack Gregg founded what has become a much-loved national treasure. Initially delivering fresh eggs and yeast by bicycle to the folk of Newcastle, Jack’s bakery supplies home delivery service proved to be very popular and a few years later in 1951, Gregg opened his first bakery shop in Gosforth.
With his sons Ian and Colin now active in the business, Greggs multiplied and began buying up other bakeries – in Scotland, London, Kent and the Midlands. By the 2010s, when Greggs had unreservedly won the Great British Bake-off by acquisition, the business underwent a significant repositioning and began to focus extensively on good value food on the go, believing it would fare better competing against quick-service food restaurants than going head-to-head with big supermarkets on the price of bread.
The Brand Historian is a proud follower of Greggs and is particularly partial to a bacon roll on early morning starts or match days. On one of these trips, he and his daughter were amongst the many to have discovered the joys of the Greggs Vegan Roll, featuring that miracle of plant food, Quorn. Despite the neigh-Sayers, the Vegan Roll became a tremendous social media triumph for Greggs and created a platform for the business to become celebrated as the well-grounded antidote to the food snobbery of the modern age. This was brilliantly demonstrated in their Gregory and Gregory foodie festival film that was also a great social media hit.
Whilst brands are special kinds of words that tend to have their meanings curated carefully by communication professionals, there are many more words in the dictionary whose meanings seem to have a life of their own. This is particularly true in the vocabulary of technology, where the digitization of the World has been responsible for some fascinating word-meaning migrations. Consider how nouns like troll and friend have been annexed by social media and given new connotations. And it’s on the posts of these same platforms that verbs like block, follow and like or even swipe and ping now mean very different things. Note how such borrowings are often short and simple words and are sometimes imported from other languages. One such started off as a useful little word in German but has since made a very interesting drive into the heady World of San Francisco tech startups.
Über is a common preposition in German that crops up in many places and means over, above or across. The word also evolved as a power prefix, amplifying and generally making a thing besser als Normalfall, i.e. better than usual. In the 1880s, the philosopher Frederick Nietzsche gave the word a considerable push when he coined the term übermensch for a vision of super-humanity to which we should all aspire. This notion, of course, also inspired the Nazis to contemplate the idea of a master race. Today, Über has marched into English, losing its umlaut on the way, and now appears in various compounds such as Uber stylish, Uber nerd, Uber intellectual or Uber chef. In these, Uber describes someone or something which performs a lot besser than Normalfall. And it was probably this idea that prompted Garrett Camp and Travis Kalanick, two tech entrepreneurs, to describe their new car-hailing platform as UberCab, which they founded in 2009 in San Francisco.
The launch of UberCab took place immediately after the financial crisis of 2008. Still, as Nick Srnicek commented in his thoughtful analysis, Platform Capitalism, it is exactly when a crisis hits that “capitalism tends to be restructured, new technology, new organizational forms, new models of exploitation, new types of job and new markets all emerge to create a new way of accumulating capital.” Reflecting this sense of opportunity in a crisis, the vision of UberCab was to explore how the idea of a taxi service could be brought into the digital World. With incredible speed, the brand, now just Uber, soon became the World’s largest taxi company and yet didn’t own any vehicles, as Tom Goodwin famously noted. Uber brilliantly exploited the potential from the volatile 2010s environment characterized by enhanced Internet speeds, significant smartphone ownership, torrents of data, cloud storage and a surprising openness to work in the insecurities of the gig economy.
Having established the master brand by 2015, Uber launched a series of successful derivatives, including Uber X, Uber Eats and even Uber Copters. Doing an Uber or Uberising became a familiar if lazy shorthand for every wannabee disruptor’s promise to digitally transform a sleepy old market.
Thus did a tiny German preposition become a monster brand proposition, and in so doing, the shorthand for category disruption and digital transformation.
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 Leffesession:
1240 Gregorian Chant
1910 Rapsodie for Orchestra and Saxophone Claude Debussy
1959 5 by Monk by 5 Thelonious Monk (Piano) Charlie Rouse (Saxophone)
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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 TheEsso 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.
Artful Strategy 