Blog

The Year of the Penguin

/ Paul Christopher Walton / Leave a comment

From the Brand Historian’s Timeline: 1998

It was a dull, overcast, and humid start to the trip. Normal for the time of year, I learned. As the ferry left its moorings with sky-scraping sentinels looking on and Star Ferries bobbing in the harbour, it was as exciting as I had imagined.

It was 20th May 1998, and I was a passenger on the Hong Kong to Shekou ferry on my way to visit Shenzhen for the first time. My final destination was a shiny new convention centre just set back from the beach in the heart of the city, which since 1980 had been designated a Special Economic Zone. My hotel was the Marina Ming Wah, with its imposing striped tower facade, symbolising the city’s ambition and strategic intent.

Built to celebrate the Ming dynasty, the hotel had all the features the modern business traveller might expect, including a golf practice area, a karaoke lounge, a bowling alley and even a cosy pub, the Marina Tavern. I was on my way there courtesy of United Biscuits, an esteemed but now defunct British plc. United Biscuits was a pillar of the UK food establishment and were purveyors of all manner of biscuits, round, brown and beyond.

I’d been hired to lead a training course for the sales and marketing personnel working for the local business United Biscuits had recently acquired. My mission was to explore how leading Western companies positioned brands and created innovations. The curriculum included profiling UB brands such as Hobnobs, Sultana (huge in Holland), Go Ahead and Penguin, the chocolate-covered cream sandwich biscuit that was a star asset of the UB portfolio and which had the famous TV advert featuring the lovable Penguins. The slogan, spoken by Derek Nimmo, was “P… P… P… Pick up a Penguin”. I was also to describe the then highly fashionable concept of Need states and define what exactly was meant in this context by refuel, ice breaker and reward/treat and their relevance to a Chinese consumer. 

Despite the conceptual, cultural and linguistic challenges, I remember the students’ incredibly enthusiastic, hardworking and competitive spirit, and especially their willingness to push back on the UB biscuit orthodoxy. We finished the course with a wonderful banquet followed by a suitably designed Value Engineering after-dinner entertainment and quiz. This group proved to be a promising cadre of young marketeers who taught me much.

Despite the warm feelings I felt as I left Shenzhen and returned by ferry to Hong Kong, the UB venture in China was ultimately unsuccessful – in marked contrast to another business set up and launched shortly afterwards, just a few steps away from the Ming Wah.

Tencent one of the world’s greatest tech businesses was founded in 1998 by Pony Ma and Zhang. Spotting the tremendous opportunity opening in the new world of the mobile internet, they quickly established leadership in the huge Chinese market for messaging and video gaming. Today Tencent is also a global giant in entertainment, publishing, FinTech, venture capital and much more.

But back in 1998, just as I was introducing the Penguin biscuit to my Chinese students, Tencent’s entrepreneurs were planning the launch of their first mobile messaging brand QQ. And looking for an appropriate brand symbol, they chose – yes, you guessed it – a Penguin. A somewhat cheeky-looking Penguin but a Penguin who nevertheless resembles his chocolate-endorsing cousin. But this one just happens to be a brand megastar who is on billions of mobiles.

Video games to play on your Nintendo 64: 1998 

The Legend of Zelda: Tokino Ocarina

Goldeneye 007

The Famously French Brand That Was Built by Brits

/ Paul Christopher Walton / 1 Comment

From the Brand Historian’s Timeline: 1906

The British have had a long love affair with the South of France. What began with the traveller’s tales of writers like Tobias Smollett in the 1760s was followed by a veritable Brit invasion, especially after 1860 when passports were no longer needed to visit France. Wintering on the shores of the Mediterranean became an increasingly important part of the 19th-century upper-class pursuit of health and well-being, and milords and dowagers overran all the nooks and crannies of the Midi and Provence. British money, the profits from industry and the Empire, flowed into the local French economy. Many Brits who enjoyed the sun also got a taste for investing in local concerns. And one of the most iconic of all French brands was actually built with British money and branding nounce.

Perrier, the world-famous water from the Gard départment is the product of some interesting Cretacean geology: limestone rocks folded and faulted and topped off with a layer of clay. Gaps in the clay allow water to burst from the depths of the Vistrenque plain into the daylight, along with carbon dioxide produced by volcanic or thermal action on the limestone. It creates water that effervesces. This site became known as Les Bouillens, The Bubbling Waters. The Romans knew it, and Hannibal may have watered his elephants there on his way over the Alps. But it was in the 1860s that Les Bouillens first became a commercial operation when Napoleon III granted rights, and a health spa and hotel was opened near the spring, successful until a fire gutted it in 1869.

The Bubbling Waters continued to attract interest, and in 1898, Dr Louis Perrier, a Nîmes doctor with established interests in thermal therapies, launched Société des Eaux Minérales, Boissons et Produits Hygiéniques de Vergèze. Perrier had a vision but needed significant investment to make it real. Enter St John Harmsworth.

St John Harmsworth
Dr Louis Perrier

Harmsworth was a younger son of a powerful media family. Three of his brothers were already in the House of Lords. Lord Northcliffe owned the Daily Mail, and Lord Rothermere owned the Daily Telegraph. St John became an enthusiastic supporter of Dr Perrier’s work and sold his shares in the family business to invest in Les Bouillens. 

In 1906, he formed the Compagnie de la Source Perrier and hired a completely English senior management team. But this year was momentous in more ways than one for St John. Seriously injured when his chauffeur had a driving accident on the Great North Road near Hatfield, Harmsworth was paralysed from the waist down. Recuperating in his villa near the source, he used Indian juggling clubs for exercise, which apparently gave him the idea for the distinctive shape of his new bottled water brand. He also named the product after the good doctor.

With an impressive network of chums, St John was soon exporting Perrier (The Champagne of Table Waters) throughout the British Empire, making it famous in London, Singapore and Delhi before it was even established in Paris. When Harmsworth died in 1933, the source was selling 18 million bottles a year, and by then, more than half was remaining in France.

Perrier finally returned to French hands after the Second World War.

An interesting narrative twist to the story of Perrier comes in the 1980s, when the Brand Historian was working for HP Bulmer, Perrier’s UK distributor. This was when Yuppies stalked the earth with their Filofaxes and Perrier with ice and a slice was their essential drinking accessory. Sales were torrential. But the great success of Perrier in the 80s was due mainly to another Brit, Julian Bowes, who carefully cultivated the brand’s status in top restaurants, hotels and bars. There are many stories of the clever marketing tactics he used. I seem to remember a prize was offered for the most expensive bottle of Perrier served in a UK restaurant. Julian died in a diving accident in 1984, a few years before a benzene contamination scare threatened the brand he had worked so hard to create.

Nestle acquired Perrier in 1992.

1906 Bien Etre Playlist:

La Mer Claude Debussy 

My Life in Yellow Fats

/ Paul Christopher Walton / 2 Comments

From the Brand Historian’s Timeline: 1886

It’s often said that the secret of a successful career in brand consulting lies in amassing deep knowledge of a category for which constantly job-hopping clients are prepared to pay a premium. And that’s certainly true in the case of my career. I once joked that my Mastermind specialist subject would be ‘The history of the cooking sauces market, 1972 to the present day.’ I travelled the world fixing the problems of ailing and failing Pilsner lagers, and if I am ever tempted to write my autobiography, I think the subtitle would have to be ‘My Life in Yellow Fats.’

Logo, company name Description automatically generated

Yellow fats: what a gloriously unappetizing piece of marketing twaddle. We are, of course, referring here to the label marketing people use for the beige to ochre stuff we like spread on our toast, improve our sandwiches or help bake our Lemon Drizzle cakes.

My connexion with yellow fats started as a lad growing up in the West Midlands in the 1960s with Lurpak (First launched in 1901). Lurpak is a lactic, salty style of butter in silver foil which has its origins with the Danish farmers of Arla whose ancestors had originally paid us a visit in longboats, played their lurs and overran the Northern Anglo-Saxon kingdoms plundering our gold and bequeathing us many things, including a taste for salty butter.

It was much later in my business career that I suddenly found myself a bystander in the great battle that was taking place between the forces of dairy and industrial non-dairy spreads. For years, there had been a long-running clash between butter and margarines, but in the 1970s and 1980s, the battleground was no longer about taste versus convenience and price: it was now also a matter of public health. With healthy eating becoming a major media and public concern, nutritional battle lines were drawn on the health risks of animal compared with vegetable fats, the benefits of sunflower versus olive oil and the poor old consumer found herself drawn into a labyrinth of confusing claims. What indeed exactly was the difference between mono versus poly-unsaturated fats? And as companies innovated, brands sprung up like rhubarb. Soon I was being paid to understand the similarities and differences between British Flora (The margarine for men, according to Terry Wogan, launched in 1969) and its more hardcore European cousin Becel, which some people in YF Global Headquarters wanted to unify into a single Eurobrand. Becel later spawned an even more nutraceutical inspired sub-brand called Pro Activ.

Whilst a bewildering battle of claims was raging on the health front, there had been significant innovation in another sector of yellow fats, which without any trace of irony, was called by its marketing managers, the taste segment. Here the job of marketers was to convince the consumer they would not be able to tell the difference between some new factory-based oil melange and the real stuff that came from cows. However, by now, the whole subject was becoming a tad tedious for the consumer, and it proved hard work getting the consumer interested. Hence the increased use of marketing shock tactics with in-your-face brand names like I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter (1979).

But the dairy farmers were not to be underestimated. A number of new improved butter products started to appear, which majored on their superior taste benefits whilst trying to overcome some of the perceived drawbacks of dairy products, notably spreadability. Clover (1983) was one of the leading examples of these New Model Butters, and its adverts demonstrated its superiority in lubricating the Nation’s toast and crumpets. Competition followed soon from the likes of Golden Churn, which had adverts voiced by Willie Rushton and a pack with a rather impractical lid, which in the age of retailer space management and product profitability was a marketing frill too much.

With my career in the world of brands moving into its latter stages, I seemed to have saved the best to last, and in a strange quirk of the narrative arc, I got to work on the yellow fat granddaddy of them all: Anchor.Frankly, after all those non-animal fats, it was great to get back to butter. 

Anchor is the trademark of Fonterra, the hugely successful dairy business owned by New Zealand farmers. Henry Reynolds first marketed Anchor on November 3rd, 1886, with, at least according to the legend, a sweet cream butter recipe created by an American called David Gemmell. Gemmell, who was about to return to the USA, was persuaded to help Reynolds establish his factory at Pukekura, Waikato, in the lush pastoral meadows of North Island. Reynolds, taking advantage of the innovations in refrigerated transport, immediately started exporting his ‘pure creamy’ butter worldwide. 

But why call it Anchor I hear you ask? Trying to think of an appropriate mark or symbol, he was inspired by a tattoo on one of his worker’s arms. Today Anchor is one of the world’s most recognizable trademarks and the Brand Historian has only happy memories of his trips to North Island, New Zealand helping to reshape the brand portfolio of Fonterra, of which  Anchor continues to be the most valuable global asset. 

I can think of no better way of ending my sojourn in fats world than with a wonderful lyric pastiche written by David Bernstein, my old boss at The Creative Business, which aptly captures the bonkers spirit of the Great Age of Yellow Fats.

You’re The Taste

By David Bernstein:

You’re the cream in my coffee

You’re the salt in my stew

You will always be my necessity

I’d be lost without you.

You’re my favourite phosphate 

E210

I’m so glad it is 

You’re my additives

You’re my carcinogen.

My love’s undimmed dear 

‘Cos your milk’s unskimmed dear

Each time we’ve dated

Polly – you’re saturated.

You’re the dye in my kipper

Tartrazine in my squash

I’m polemical 

You’re my chemical

You’re the taste in my nosh.

I’m conservative 

You’re preservative. 

I’m ancestral 

You’re cholesterol. 

You’re the taste in my nosh 

Gosh! 

1886 Playlist A Symphonic Breakthrough in Vienna

Anton Bruckner Symphony No. 7

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

The Brand Historian’s Holiday Cracker

/ Paul Christopher Walton / Leave a comment

Bored with all the usual festive challenges?

Then try the Brand Historian’s Yuletide Brands Quiz which celebrates the founders and the inspiration for 16 iconic brands. All you have to to do is to identify the ‘brand managers’ featured below, the brands they created and the year these brands were originally launched.

A decent bottle of champagne will be awarded for the first correct set of answers sent to the Brand Historian by December 25th. The Judge’s opinion is final of course.

A Short History of the USA in 50 Brands

/ Paul Christopher Walton / Leave a comment

(and Happy Thanksgiving to all my chums)

1795 Jim Beam

1806 Colgate

1818 Brooks Brothers

1830 Macy’s

1850 American Express

1869 Heinz Ketchup

1876 Budweiser

1879 Ivory Soap

1880 Kodak

1886 Coca Cola

1892 Philadelphia

1894 Kellogg’s Cornflakes

1900 Hershey Bar

1902 Gillette Safety Razor

1908 The Model T Ford

1913 Hellman’s Mayonnaise

1921 Betty Crocker

1923 Birds Eye

1930 Snickers

1937 Spam

1940 Dairy Queen

1945 Tupperware

1947 Tropicana

1954 McDonalds

1955 Crest

1957 Dove

1958 Pizza Hut

1959 Barbie

1960 Domino’s Pizza

1964 Doritos

1969 CompuServe

1971 Starbucks

1975 Microsoft

1976 TJ Maxx

1977 Victoria’s Secret

1978 Ben and Jerry

1981 Stouffer’s Lean Cuisine

1982 Bud Light

1994 Amazon

1995 eBay

1996 Google

1997 Netflix

2001 iPod

2004 Facebook

2005 You Tube

2005 Chobani

2006 Twitter

2007 iPhone

2010 Uber

2016 Impossible Burger

Keep Calm and Eat Your Sausage Roll

/ Paul Christopher Walton / Leave a comment

From the Brand Historian’s Timeline: 1939

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.

Graphical user interface Description automatically generated

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.

A picture containing indoor Description automatically generated

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.

Watch more at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tibTtj5vY1Y

1939 Popular Music 

We’ll Meet Again* Vera Lynn

*The 1939 recording also featured Arthur Young playing on a Novachord, a kind of early synthesizer.

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