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Salute the Queen and Eat the Flag!

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From the Brand Historian’s Timeline: 1889

June 11th, 1889 was an important day in the history of pizza, for this was the day Raffaele Esposito paid tribute to his Queen at Pizzeria Brandi by naming his latest creation pizza Margherita. The woman in question was Margherita of Savoy, the tall stately blonde who had married her dull cousin Umberto to become Queen of the recently unified kingdom of Italy. 

Esposito’s tribute was no fawning flattery but a piece of calculated nation-branding which used the popular street food to emphasise the identity of the new kingdom. The new pizza’s colour palette of tomato, mozzarella and basil (the sun on a plate) reflected the new tricolour flag, created following the success of the great Risorgimento, the re-unification which had been achieved following the fall of the Napoleon. 

It had been down to the combination of a clever politician’s strategic choice of the right allies and a chancer-of-a-general’s sword that had succeeded in unifying, at least in theory, the patchwork of states and entities which Metternich had famously labelled a geographical expression. In the aftermath of successive victories over the Austrians and French, the new kingdom started to industrialise, especially in the North and there was considerable investment in railways and other modernising infrastructure. It was against this dynamic background that a number of the iconic brands of Italian cuisine were created which built variously on nona’s cooking, the exploitation of new technologies like canning (apertization) or by just spotting the worldwide export opportunity for tasty food from the poor south.

Francesco Cirio from Piedmont, Giovani Buitoni from Tuscany and Pietro Barilla from Emilia Romagna spent the 1870s laying the foundations of world-famous tomato sauce and pasta franchises. In 1882, Egidio Galbaniestablished the creamery in Como where eventually Bel Paese cheese would be produced. In Queen Margherita’s hometown of Turin, Luigi Lavazza created in 1895 a successful coffee business and built his reputation based on coffee blending skills which at the time was quite an innovation.

But whilst the decades of the nineteenth century were great years of Italian brand building, they were notoriously unstable politically, veering between radical socialism, liberalism and conservative reaction. By the time Umberto and Marguerite paid their return trip to Naples in 1889 (they had been Crown Prince and Princess of Naples before ascending the throne) the royal couple were equally divided. Umberto kept many mistresses and continued a high-profile affair with Eugenia, a Visconti Duchess who was one of the Queen’s ladies-in-waiting. Umberto’s endorsement of the regime’s harsh repression of food rioters in Milan made him a target for the anarchists. Having survived one attempt, he would not be so lucky in 1900 when the anarchists finally got him at Monza.

His wife lived on until 1926 enjoying la belle epoque while it lasted, but the fame of the pizze that bore her name ensured she would now adorn a million menus. Just six years after the couple’s visit to Naples, where the Queen may well have eaten her first Margherita, the first pizzeria in the United States opened at 53 Spring St. The triumphant march of Eataly had now begun. 

Music to enjoy your pizze with (extra prosciutto, per favore)

Messa da Requiem Guiseppe Verdi

The Most European Beer, Probably?

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Nationalism and Beer at the Heart of Europe

Geronimus Hatt rented a cellar and brewed his first beer in Zür Kanone in Strasbourg in 1664. At the time, Strasbourg was located in the Holy Roman Empire, which Voltaire famously quipped wasn’t holy, wasn’t Roman and wasn’t an Empire. It was one of several proudly independent Free Imperial Cities, a number of which were then found in the Rhineland. This is one of history’s great frontlines and particularly so in Early Modern Europe where it featured frequently in the long running wars between anxious French monarchs and the Hapsburgs whose marital strategy of JVs had effectively encircled them.

In Hatt’s time, the wars were going in favour of the French, where under the leadership of its great Cardinals and their protégé, Louis XIV, France was gradually edging eastwards into the upper and lower Rhine with the objective of consolidating its borders. The long years of war had been good for the Alsatian beer business and armies from all over Europe had visited Strasbourg for a spot of R&R: ravage and refreshment.

 By the 1660s, there were now over 20 breweries. But as Hatt, the cooper’s son who’d married the baker’s daughter, built his business, the French were getting ever closer and in 1681 The Sun King’s army marched into Strasbourg. Overnight Herr Hatt became Monsieur Jérôme Hatt, the first of a long line of brewers to bear the name and build the business throughout France.

By the nineteenth century, the growing population in French cities and the coming of the railroads which could transport barrels of beer into the heart of Paris boulevards provided the opportunity for the Hatt family to further expand production and they opened a new brewery in the Faubourg Kronenbourg, which would of course later impact on how the beer is known today.

But meanwhile there remained some major unfinished business in the Rhineland, and in 1871, the Prussian army returned to Strasbourg, and this time it was not for beer tourism. They arrived again in 1914, and just in case a third time might be luckier, they came again in 1940. It wasn’t until 1945 that the Alsace question was finally(?) answered. But by then, Hatt’s beer was perhaps just un peu Frallemand.

It was just after the end of Second World War that another Jérôme Hatt made Kronenbourg (with a K, an interwar Frenchified Cronenbourg was dropped) the main brand focus of the concern, and with its familiar and ubiquitous Rot and Wiss label, it quickly became one of the leading beers of France. After its merger with Kanterbräu in 1986, Brasseries Kronenbourg looked safely dominant but then a familiar pattern in the narrative re-appeared. BSN, wanting to focus on well-being (aka yoghurt and water) sold Brasseries Kronenbourg to Scottish and Newcastle – there had in fact been a long-standing special relationship with the UK, and in 1952, a brand called 1664 had been brewed in honour of Queen Elizabeth’s accession.

But barely had the dust settled on this deal before in the great Game of Brewopoly, Kronenbourg was sold on to Carlsberg.

It was shortly this in 2010 that the Brand Historian received his dream commission. He was invited to organise a piss-up-in-a-brewery. In the Request for Proposal, this event was referred to as a strategic brainstorming, and the brewery concerned was to be the old Kronenbourg brewery in Strasbourg. Three hundred years since Bière Hatte Luxe was first brewed, the French, Germans, Brits, Danes and Russians were back in the heart of Europe for a spot of R&R.

Party like it’s 1664: 

Miserere Jean Baptiste Lully

A Playlist of Metaphors

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From the Brand Historian’s Timeline: 2006

Aristotle liked a good metaphor and considered being a master of them to be a sign of genius. It’s certainly a useful trick for a brand manager with a complicated new product to use metaphor to get it into the mind of the customer. What something is like is often much easier to understand than what something is, and comparing something new, complex and strange with something familiar can be illuminating. I recently had an aneurysm test. Jane E Brody describes an aneurysm as ‘an abdominal time bomb lurking in the aorta, which is the body’s super-highway.’ A picture can be worth a thousand words and a well-chosen metaphor can also condense and package the detail to create a mental picture in the minds of the target market. Glad to say, my super-highway was clear.

Business language is rich in metaphors and certain categories of imagery seem to be particularly popular for a smash-and-grab. For example, finance and water seem to share a strong rapport. The financial pages talk about liquid assets, strong cash flow, new channels of income, or how an increasing drain on resources can lead to the risk of insolvency. 

Water and its dynamics have also been useful for communicating digital transformations and what those torrents of binary data can actually do for us. While the idea of data streaming had been around since the 1990s and the early days of developing video on demand, 2006 was probably the annus mirabilis. In that year, Google paid $1.65 bn for YouTube, the video sharing site which then employed just 65 people; Netflix was actively looking at setting up a streaming media division alongside its DVD rental business, and just as Apple executives were celebrating their billionth iTunes download, Daniel Ek was about to challenge the entire music business model when he launched Spotify.

Spotify, possibly against the odds, found an ecological niche between the music company giants who owned the content and the increasingly dominant new Internet platform capitalists, to offer listeners the benefits of an individualised music on demand service without actually having to buy the music. This service was either free but with advertising interruptions or via an ad free monthly subscription. It was the artists who were probably the least happy with the deal, but it seemed it was only the biggest stars who took their songs elsewhere.

There were a number of favourable pre-conditions which helped Spotify’s launch. The science of compressing high fidelity quavers and crochets into binary data packets without losing quality had advanced throughout the 1980s, but the arrival of the MP3 format in the mid 1990s was the pivotal event.  The development of the internet, especially as ADSL replaced dial-up created a fast, economical and effective means of transferring MP3 files. The strong underlying consumer need was then validated very clearly by the success of Napster which from 1999 until its shutdown in 2001 because of accusations of music piracy, showed the huge potential of peer-to-peer file sharing. The development after 2007 of Smartphones and 4G networks would make Spotify even more mobile, more relevant and more valuable.

Since its full market launch in 2008, Spotify has not rested on its laurels and with its easy UI, artist radio, mood playlists and cross device versatility, it has become one of the essential Digital Durables of our age. It is interesting to note that in the Brand Historian’s family, we have one committed Spotifier and another scion of the House who is dedicated to keeping and curating her own collection of MP3s and playlists. I remain a dual user, and to quote Aristotle, seem therefore to be caught between a rock and a roll.

Playlist like it’s 2006:

Crazy Gnarls Barkley

Est semper lux in tenebris

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From the Brand Historian’s Timeline:

July 1942. The war in Europe is going badly. The U boat wolf packs are enjoying another period of great success against Allied shipping. Convoy PQ17 has just assembled but will lose two thirds of its ships on its voyage to Russia.  Rommel’s Afrika Korps has retaken Tobruk, and the Wehrmacht, having captured Sevastopol, is now threatening the Crimean oil fields and Stalingrad. Millions of Europeans are already living in semi-starvation as German forces have cut off the areas in the Ukraine which produce half of all Soviet wheat and pork supplies.

Meanwhile, following the horrendous agenda of the conference at Wannsee, the Nazi plan to exterminate the Jews is now underway, as the first group of 6000 from the Warsaw ghetto are killed in the gas chambers of Treblinka on July 23rd. 

But even on the darkest of summer days, there can still be an inspiring light and the promise of better things. On July 31st The Oxford Committee for Famine Relief is formed which will become celebrated the world over as Oxfam. 

Shortly afterwards, a small group gathered in the Old Library of St Mary’s the Virgin, the University Church in Oxford. This was the inaugural meeting of the committee and it proved to be a perfect balance of personalities. Dick Milford who took the chair, was the Vicar of St Mary’s, Henry Gillett was a former Lord Mayor of the City and a leading Quaker. George Murray was a prominent Greek scholar and humanist, and his wife, the well-connected Lady Mary Howard. The grit in the oyster was provided by Cecil Jackson Cole, one of the most successful social entrepreneurs of the Twentieth century and the committee’s business brain.

Whilst some of the group had already been involved in charitable work including helping with the flood of refugees arriving in Oxford in the late 1930s, what brought this group together in the ancient library overlooking Radcliffe Square was the famine that was now causing so many deaths in Greece and which, at least in part, was caused by Allied war efforts.

At the start of the war, Greece had managed to resist the Italian army, Germany’s ally, but in 1941, Germany intervened and quickly overran the country, dividing it up between themselves, the Italians and Bulgaria, the other European member of Axis. The occupying forces pursued a strategy of plunder and pillage and brutally suppressed resistance. Meanwhile, the Allied naval blockade effectively stopped food supplies getting into Greece which resulted in a long and particularly horrific famine. “Send us food or send us coffins!” was the plea that the Oxford Committee responded to, and thus was started in the middle of all that darkness, a small group which became the global movement of millions of people to end poverty.

Music from 1942:

Fanfare for the Common Man Aaron Copland

A Tale of Two Yoghurts

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From the Brand Historian’s Timeline: 1919 and 1965

1066 and All That remains one of the Brand Historian’s favourite books, celebrating if not all the English history that actually happened, then at least all the English history that we can remember. One of the gags from Sellers and Yeatman’s hilarious, yet perceptive text is the description of the two sides who contended the English Civil War: The Cavaliers were Wrong but Wromantic, whereas the Roundheads were Right but Repulsive. It’s a wonderfully poetic description which resonates with me in the function versus emotion branding battles of the last century: P&G’s Ariel against Lever’s Persil, or Shell Power against BP Ultimate. But this clever dichotomy is particularly apposite to the story of the two brands that built the yoghurt market.

Stories of the medical efficacy of thickened fermented milk started circulating in early modern Europe. A particularly desperate King Francois I of France had been suffering with incurable diarrhoea when a doctor from the household of his ally, Suleiman the Magnificent suggested he try a few spoonfuls of yoghurt which soon produced much comfort and relief.

But it was at the beginning of the 20th century when yoghurt became one of the first functional foods to really take off. Ilya Mechnikov was a Russian scientist and Nobel Prize winner working at the Pasteur Institute in Paris who was convinced that the long lifespan of Bulgarian peasants was down to their daily consumption of a spoonful of Lactobacillus and began to popularise the idea. Inspired by what he’d heard and what he knew from his upbringing as a Sephardic Jew in Salonika, Isaac Carasso set up a small yoghurt business in Barcelona and called it Danone, after his young son Daniel. Shortly afterwards the family moved over the border into France.

Danone’s journey from the 1920s to become one of the great empires of nutrition with outposts in over 120 countries has been an eventful one. Interrupted by the Second World War when the family had to outrun the Nazis, Carasso setup a new business in the United States called, to suit local tastes, Dannon. After the war, Danone returned to France and merged with Gervais, a Normandy cheese business famous for its small pots called petit-suisses. Gervais-Danone was subsequently absorbed into BSN, a food, drink, brewing and packaging conglomerate. It might have got lost in the portfolio, but to quote Sellers and Yeatman, it was Danone who came out on top, becoming the heart of a global health and nutrition business, powered by its pillar brands: Activia, Actimel, Alpro and Nutricia. The mission would be supported with the health-giving magic margins of its water brands, Evian and Volvic.

Having watched the development of Danone over the years, I’ve always thought that there was something of the repressed Puritan about it and the white-coated nutritional stormtroopers who throng its Institutes on many continents. A good test of brand personality is to imagine the kind of party a brand would throw and whether you would want an invitation. I certainly can imagine the Danone party, but I’m not sure I’m ready for a do at a sanatorium just yet. 

Yoplait is the other great Gallic yoghurt which built the market, but with a suck of the spoon that is decidedly more sensual, it has always been much more my kind of party. Whilst Danone was launched amidst the austerity of the years immediately after the Great War, Yoplait is a brand of the 1960s and has always radiated a bright, sunny confidence. Launched in 1965, Yoplait was the result of six independent French co-operative dairies coming together to move down the supply chain and make more money for their farmer-members. Yoplait’s Petite Fleur logo had six petals, each representing one of its founding creameries.

Taking advantage of Danone’s merger and acquisition odyssey, Yoplait grew rapidly in France with an innovative range of product brands like Petits Filous, Silhouette, Yop and Calin. Majoring on fruit, taste and enjoyment and reflecting changing consumer lifestyles, Yoplait was modern, chic and just a little bit sexy. International development facilitated by licensing the brand and strong product innovation like the cleverly packaged Frubes, helped Yoplait become the other global brand of yoghurt in the world’s fast growing rows of chiller cabinets, especially in North America.

The United States has been a huge market for Danone and Yoplait, who successfully introduced the yoghurt pot to breakfast tables to compete with the likes of Eggo and Kellogg’s cereals. But in the last decade, Danone and Yoplait’s dominance has been successfully challenged by an insurgent which has taken the yoghurt category back to its Balkan roots.

Hamdi Ulukaya’s Chobani is a thick, Greek yoghurt with a brand wrapper which mixes provenance, craft skills, taste and lifestyle in a compelling package that millennials love. Both incumbents have been knocked off balance, but perhaps not surprisingly it is the more Cavalier-spirited Yoplait that has lost most share. Nutrition and taste (or taste and nutrition) have been and will continue to be the defining axes of the yoghurt market, but the success of Chobani shows how brand leaders in established markets need to keep their eyes open for New Model competitors, be they Roundhead or Cavalier flavoured.

Music from 1965

Toujours des Beaux Jours Sheila

An Earl, a Brownie and a Patio Party

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The Brand Historian’s Timeline: 1951

The widespread assumption that the C Suite can fill an empty sales funnel with breakthrough new products in a series of simple, linear sequential steps is understandable but unfortunately a challenge to the laws of probability. Rather, big new innovations happen in more random looping motions with inventors and companies revisiting what has gone before and modifying or adding something new. Steve Jobs knew this when he circled back to the failure of the Apple Newton (1993) to launch the iPhone (2007). The something new can take many forms but the importance of the human dimension cannot be exaggerated as the story of Earl and Brownie shows.

Earl Silas Tupper was a New England Tree surgeon who joined Dupont as a technical sample maker when the Great Depression forced his business to close. Putting a degree in chemistry to good use, he started experimenting with polyethylene slag, a waste product from the oil refining process. With a purified version of polythene, he discovered it made a lightweight, flexible yet sturdy material for moulding cups, bowls and plates. Convinced that plastics would be the material of the future, Earl founded his Tupperware Plastics Company in 1938. But that future was still a way off because his first products in the shops just didn’t shift.

In 1946 two things happened which changed that. First, Earl patented a non-snap lid for his bowls which kept food fresher than tin foil (or the dreaded shower cap). Here was a relevant, demonstrable benefit for Tupperware. All he needed was a good demonstration, and as he was something of a geeky introvert, a good demonstrator. Enter Brownie Wise, his perfect Myers Briggs (then being developed) team complement.

Brownie Wise was born in Georgia in 1913 and a little younger than Earl. From an early age, she showed charm aplenty and the gift of the gab. By the time she met Earl, she was a mother and divorced and also one of the sales stars of Stanley Home Products, who were pioneers in using parties as a direct-to-consumer sales channel. Brownie was convinced Tupperware could be sold in this way and as a super engaging presenter, knew how to teach the Tupper ‘burp’ which made the seal effective.

The business now took off, and with Brownie as the inspiring front face, a network of agents and dealers was created, and patio parties with the Tupperware Ladies were soon taking place in Florida and then all over the country. Part of Brownie’s magic had been to recognise the opportunity to offer women a fulfilling and economically rewarding role. So successful were sales that in 1951 Earl took the decision to only sell Tupperware on what was called the Party Plan, with the redoubtable Brownie Wise as his Vice President of Sales. Featured in the Museum of Modern Art in 1956, Tupperware soon became ubiquitous, and a survey showed that 90% of American households now owned at least one piece. Thanks to Brownie’s human touch, Earl’s plastic had indeed become the material of the future.

Party like it’s 1951:

You’re Just in Love Donald O’Connor and Ethel Merman

The Sauce of Milord!

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From the Brand Historian’s Timeline: 1837

Conventional marketing wisdom says that versatility is the Fool’s Gold of brand positioning, because nearly always it’s more of a theoretical benefit than an actual one. As the new tech software brands like Lotus 123 (with spreadsheets) and Harvard Graphics (with presentation charting) showed in the 1980s, what customers respond best to is the killer app. 

But Lea and Perrins Worcestershire Sauce is the flavoursome exception to that rule. Since its mysterious appearance on the first cruise ships in the 1830s, Lea and Perrins has been perking up posh cheese on toast, sprinkling oysters, boosting burgers, spiking Blood Marys and adding a little relish to crisps and steak tartare. As the early advertisements promised, Lea and Perrins Worcestershire sauce ‘adds a peculiar piquancy applicable to every dish.’

Whilst the exact circumstances of its creation are still a little hazy, the brand appeared during the Golden Age of lotions and potions, elixirs and snake oils that found their way into the marketplaces of the new industrial landscapes of the mid-nineteenth century. John Wheely Lea and William Henry Perrins were Worcester pharmacists who sold a goodly variety of this stuff, including patent trusses, worming tablets for horses, hair restorer and Cheltenham Salts. But it was the dark meaty sauce of decomposed anchovies, fruit and spices brewed up in their kitchens behind their chemist shop which made their name.

With claims to be the secret recipe of an English milord (who may or may not have been the Duke of Wellington’s wingman), brought back from India, and patronised by the Gentry, this umami power pack of taste was soon being exported all over the world where it fired up the locals and their dishes from dim sum to Creole stews, satay to barbecues. Brits on a Grand Tour loved it too, keeping a bottle or two in their luggage as a handy tastemaker and a secret medicine to keep the nasties away.

Lea and Perrins and their sauce did very well, and the Perrins family became serious benefactors, including building the huge St John’s Parish Church of Barmouth in Snowdonia which I note looks to be a similar brownstone colour to that of Worcester Sauce.*

Following its sale to HP Foods in the 1930s, the brand has become something of a rich orphan passed from one large corporation to another. Since 2005, it has been part of Heinz Kraft where I have no doubt it continues to be a strong contributor. In the time of COVID, travel is sadly denied to us, but when, before too long I hope, we are flying again, and the drinks trolley arrives with all the usual suspects including the familiar bottle of L&P, please raise your Bloody Mary and toast the chemists of Broad Street, Worcester whose salesmanship transcends all the known laws of brand positioning. A little piquancy can go a long way….

Music to relish:

Piano Concerto No2 Mendelssohn

* For more on Barmouth and St John’s, please visit mariansonthemawddach.com

The Pasty is a Foreign Country?

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From the Brand Historian’s Timeline: 1969

It’s 1969, and just as the Lunar Module Eagle is planning to execute its historic Moon landing, the Brand Historian has been playing cricket in Walsall, a town currently located in the ancient county of Staffordshire but about to repositioned both topographically and stylistically in the new concrete metropolis of the West Midlands. And just as Neil takes his giant step for man, Geoffrey Ginster is also about to make his distinctive mark on the universe.

Geoff Ginster has strong family connections with Walsall. His forebears were in business selling horse manure to Black Country foundries whose moulds were made with a mixture of dung and sand. But in 1969, he has left Longwood Lane, taken his share of the family inheritance and driven south-westwards. After a sojourn in Devon, getting to grips with clotted cream and the Milk Marketing Board, he travels further westwards (218 miles from Walsall) in a move that will make his name and fortune.

The pasty is a quintessential English food with an ancient lineage and interesting relatives like empanadas and pirogs. Simply put, a pasty is a baked pastry with a meat and vegetable filling, folded in the shape of a half-moon with a crimped edge to seal it. It has been eaten by people of all sorts, including Jane Seymour, Henry VIII’s third, and arguably most successful wife, although I honestly cannot remember if Hilary Mantel describes a scene in Wolf Hall in which she and Cromwell share its delights. Shakespeare was also quite partial to pasties and made a rather unsavoury modification to the traditional recipe in Titus Andronicus.

At some stage in its history, the pasty became inextricably linked with Cornwall and by the mid-nineteenth century travellers were raving about, “The Cornish pasty, which so admirably comprises a dinner in itself—meat, potatoes, and other good things well cooked and made up into so portable a form.” It became the food of choice for miners from Redruth to Nevada –always generous, filling, long lasting and convenient.

To return to 1969 and the birth of the Ginster Pasty: Geoff opened his first bakery in a derelict egg packing shed in Callington with a staff of four and a production target of 24 – this we can assume was easily achieved. Ginsters using the proverbial ‘secret recipe’ (this time supplied by a ship’s cook) and offering the punter down to earth honest fill, started to appear in pubs, restaurants and seaside catering sites throughout the South West. Soon Ginster was employing over 30 people and making more than 48,000 pasties.

In 1977, Geoff decided to retire and sold the business to Samworth Brothers, the pie and pastry magnates who successfully built upon his work to create one of Britain’s most powerful and ubiquitous food brands. Ginsters pretty much owns the category and proudly celebrates Cornwall as the home of the Nation’s favourite pasty. It all seems a long way from Longwood Lane, Walsall, but not as far as the Sea of Tranquillity, which that July night I remember looking at fondly from a bench outside the pavilion.

Music for Space Hoppers

Living in the Past JethroTull

Essential Reading Matter:

Children of Albion Michael Horovitz

Time for Hairy, Audacious Goals!

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From the Brand Historian’s Timeline: 2001


Kubrick’s 1968 movie envisioned 2001 as a year of technological wonder, but by the time it arrived, two of the most important launches of that year were – at least in product terms – pretty incremental, very much building upon what already existed. But both achieved phenomenal success due to their appreciation of the power of branding and the value it can add by transforming the way we look at things.

Women (and no doubt, men) have been straightening their hair for centuries, but the origins of modern hair straightening products date back to the late nineteenth century when hot combs and chemical scalp treatments began to become fashionable in the capitals of Europe. In 1909, Isaac K Shero patented the first hair straightener that we would recognise today – two flat irons that heated and pressed together which worked by breaking down the positive hydrogen bonds found in the hair’s cortex.

Hair fashions come and go but in 2001 Robert Powls, a mover and crimper the salon world of Leeds saw potential in a new pair of straighteners that had been developed in South Korea, and with a couple of local business partners, acquired the production and distribution rights. He called the product GHD – Good Hair Day – and convinced of its efficacy, decided to pitch it at a super-premium price in his and other local hair salons: the sacred temples of hair knowledge where brand authority could be created and diffused. Within a couple of years, salon advocates helped GHD jump rapidly from B2B to B2C, and then with the support of savvy partnerships with reality TV programmes, Victoria’s Secret, Jennifer Aniston and Victoria Beckham, GHD became a global phenomenon and before long, a favourite target of private equity.

In the same year, Apple launched the iPod, its contender in the promising but then confusingly immature market for digital music players. Again, there was perhaps nothing earth shatteringly novel in the product, but the brand skin was the Jonathan Ives cool design channelling classics like Braun and B&O, and in keeping with Steve Job’s vision to position the product as The Walkman of the Twenty First Century, Apple found a compelling consumer proposition (‘1000 songs in your pocket’) which really cut through.


A few months earlier in 2001, it had launched iTunes, its digital music platform. The combination of a great looking product complete with tactile track wheel, a clear selling proposition and the ability to synchronise music libraries quickly and easily soon gave Apple a commanding position to drive momentum in the category that was now the bridge between the old analogue and the new digital music worlds. The launch of the iTunes Store in 2003 and successive waves of new iPods great and small, reinforced Apple’s position as the undoubted world leader of digital music.

It is interesting to note that GHD Straighteners and the iPod consist mainly of metal, plastic and electronic components but by a cute understanding of the consumer and the deployment of powerful branding techniques their owners made the gestalts much bigger than the sum of the parts.

Incremental can also be radical if you work hard at it.

Background music to straighten your hair to:
Janet Jackson All for you

Four Whoppers and an Exclamation Mark

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From the Brand Historian’s Timeline: 1994

In February 1994 a British film that wasn’t called True Love and Near Misses but could have been, received its premiere at the Sundance Festival and was a surprise hit. The writer described it as “a romantic film about love and friendship that swims in a sea of jokes.” A couple of weeks later in Stanford where apparently the wind of freedom blows, what the founders initially called Jerry and David’s Guide to the World Wide Web went through a dramatic rebrand and attempted to hijack a punctuation mark. Meanwhile in London, Jeremy and Pattie had a little boy who will brought up by his mum in Stratford – Stratford, Ontario.

In this vintage year of new relationships and linkups, China will connect to the Internet, Great Britain will re-connect to mainland Europe, and in Seattle, a start-up called Cadabra, was on the lookout for “talented, motivated, intense and interesting co-workers.” Thus was the world warned, but perhaps we were all just too distracted by the launch in Tokyo of the SCDH-1000 and the consequent likelihood of imminent repetitive strain injury.

1994 was indeed the year Hugh Grant gave us that brilliant foppish turn in Four Weddings and a Funeral; Yahoo! introduced us to backronyms (Yet Another Hierarchy Organised Oracle); Jeff Bezos went on a four-day course in book selling and then decided Amazon was a better name for his everything store; and Sony PlayStation told us “Live in Your World but Play in Ours” and sold 100m units. I do not know if Justin Bieber had a PlayStation, a Nintendo or an Xbox, but one thing I do know is that you can buy all of brands featured in this post on Amazon’s website, including Justin Bieber’s Girlfriend Eau de Parfum at £13.19, but sadly not currently a PlayStation 5.

1994 Essential background listening: Oasis Definitely Maybe