Decisive Leap

An Extraordinary Pivot

/ Paul Christopher Walton / Leave a comment

From the Brand Historian’s Timeline: 1893

Pivot is one of the go-to business buzz words grasped by harassed Captains of Industry and their PRs to show strategic chops and to justify a sudden directional change brought about by the usual marketplace mayhem. Pivoting is happening right now in those giant energy companies who have to deal with the medium-term imperative of responding to the impact of fossil fuels on climate change, and the short-term impact of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. That war has now resulted in Shell and BP making the inevitable but still breathtakingly bold decision to exit from their long-established joint ventures with Russia. Bold moves, however, are nothing new in the oil business. Indeed, Shell’s establishment in the energy industry came after what we would know today as a most extraordinary personal and business pivot. 

The story of Shell starts in 1834 in East Smithfield in London with Marcus Samuel’s trading emporium. This shop sold a variety of articles he had imported from Japan and China, items like rice, silk and porcelain. He also imported exotic seashells, which sold very well. Victorians loved keepsake boxes which they would decorate with shells. Samuel sold many of these to well-heeled customers and, following such success, decided to call his business The Shell Shop.

But it was Marcus’ son, also called Marcus, who fundamentally changed the direction of his dad’s curio business and laid the foundations for what would become one of the great corporations that defined the 20th century, and which today continues to pay our pensions. 

Twenty-five years after M. Samuel & Co was established in London, Edwin Drake struck oil in Pennsylvania, and soon afterwards, various products began to be refined from crude oil. One of these hydro-carbon fractions was kerosene, which soon became one of the most valuable commodities in the world because it brought heat and illumination to the dark, cold, but increasingly populous cities of the United States and Europe. John D Rockefeller had already become one of the world’s richest men by demonstrating how with focused ruthlessness, you could make millions from finding, extracting and transporting oil to where people needed it. By the mid-1880s, the United States dominated the world market for kerosene. But it didn’t take the Europeans long to attempt to get a share of the highly lucrative new market of liquid gold. The discovery of oil in Baku on the shores of the Caspian Sea provided the perfect opportunity for entrepreneurs to partner with the Tsarist Russia regime.

Marcus Samuel Junior
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Enter Marcus Samuel junior, who proved to be an imaginative and daring oilman. Building on his family’s network of connections in Asia and following a recce to the Caucasus, Marcus Samuel junior added Baku kerosene to the coal, silk and rice in which the family business dealt. Convinced that the oil business was an excellent long-term investment, even if success might increase the risk of nationalization by his Russian partners, Samuel started to build an integrated transport system to get the oil from the Caspian Sea to the point of use in Asia. This included commissioning a new type of tanker that could transport both oil and foodstuffs like rice.

But then came the year of the extraordinary pivot, both in the business and for Marcus personally. In 1893, just as Marcus was dealing with a diagnosis of cancer that he was informed was terminal, he utterly committed the family business to the oil trade and, in great secrecy, commissioned a further ten bulk tankers to transport his oil. With deference to his father, these ships were all named after seashells such as Helix and Murex. In 1897, having survived cancer and with the business thriving, Marcus Samuel Junior renamed the company Shell Transport and Trading and, in 1904, adopted the Scallop* (the Genus Pecten) as a corporate device. Soon, the familiar orange and red Pecten logo would become one of the world’s most valuable and recognizable brand icons.

* The Scallop has had a long connection with the creative arts of corporate identity. One of the most popular heraldic charges, the scallop, was the badge associated with St. James of Compostela and has long been the symbol of all those that make a pilgrimage. It features in many coats of arms, including Winston Churchill’s. The scallop also features as the star prop in a film (The Realm) on the importance of branding commissioned by Shell, which featured Robert Hardy playing seven different characters, all members of the board.

Scallops in English Arms in the Thirteenth Century
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Over the years, Shell has launched many products but one extension that the Brand Historian fondly remembers from when he was a member of Group Training’s faculty was the Shell Full English Breakfast, served every day at the Lensbury Club in Teddington. I am sure Marcus Samuel would approve.

Pivotal Music from 1893: 

Symphony No. 9 in E Minor – From the New World – Anton Dvorak

A Playlist of Metaphors

/ Paul Christopher Walton / 2 Comments

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

Time for Hairy, Audacious Goals!

/ Paul Christopher Walton / Leave a comment

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

The Early History of Quorn

/ Paul Christopher Walton / Leave a comment

How The Value Engineers helped bring the first new food to the world since yoghurt

Breakthroughs are notoriously difficult to bring to market, especially when they involve something simultaneously as basic and yet as culturally significant as food.

But such was the challenge The Value Engineers inherited when it was approached in the early 1980s by a small science start-up in High Wycombe that was funded by two food industry giants: RHM and ICI.

The story had begun 20 years earlier when Lord Rank, convinced that the world was hurtling into a crisis of food supply, tasked his Ph.D.’s with the search for alternative and more nutritionally balanced sources of protein.

Having scoured five continents, it was perhaps ironic that they discovered exactly what they were looking for in a field in Marlow, not very far from their lab in High Wycombe.

It was a tiny plant and because of its microscopic size, they decided to call it myco-protein, and they spent the next 20 years researching its properties and assessing its suitability as a novel food. Myco-protein, when grown and harvested, has the bite and fibrosity of meat but without any of the negative nutritional complications that were becoming the subject of increasing health concerns in the 1980s. It was also an exceptional carrier of flavour. This made myco-protein a first-rate choice as an alternative to meat, especially beef.

After extensive consumer clinical trials, followed by food standards clearance and product development that included partnering with some of the U.K.’s biggest names, myco-protein was soon doing the rounds of the food trade and NPD conferences, describing itself as a Tomorrow’s World next big thing.

If only it was all that easy. Following on from the the disastrous failure of new smoking materials in the 1970s and the frankly indifferent success of soya, the trade proved to be a little sceptical of this new test-tube food. It appeared to be another one of those technologies in search of a market.

By 1983, and having already invested tens of millions of pounds, the main board of RHM showed signs of losing patience. Accordingly, and with a slight air of double or quits, they formed a joint-venture with the bio products division of ICI. Its goal was to build a pilot plant with a small capacity to prove (or otherwise) the existence of real consumer demand for myco-protein. A small executive team was formed to run a budget, make investment decisions and give myco-protein its final commercial chance.

At this point, the TVE founder partners were approached and were asked to pitch for some consultancy against the following essay question:

‘We have a new exciting food technology and a development budget of £1 million. What would you do with the money?’

In the somewhat Spartan accommodation of the Nissen hut where the start-up was based, we told the CEO that the two most important things to sort immediately were to acquire a good quality overhead projector and the best filter coffee machine money could buy, because in order to light the blue touch paper, they were going to be doing a lot late nights and a lot of presentations…

Thus, began the highly successful collaboration between The Value Engineers and what became known as Marlow Foods, together building the brand we all know today as Quorn. Incidentally, Quorn was originally going to be called Origen, but because of complex global naming and legal issues, it was decided to use an existing RHM asset, a regional sauce brand called Quorn, which was then only on sale in the Midlands.

Over the following 10 years Quorn and The Value Engineers grew and grew together.

TVE, acting as Marlow Foods’ primary marketing partner, provided strategic advice on positioning the basic raw material (“A distant relative of the mushroom family…the right food at the right time“), the identification of priority customer segments (J.Sainsbury, Unilever), the development of priority products (Supremes, pieces, sausages minced and even ice cream), all with the development of the appropriate brand architecture and personality.

Following Quorn’s successful launch in the UK in 1985, TVE went on to work with Marlow Foods on product launches in Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany, and created the innovation roadmap that paved the way for Quorn’s subsequent global development and later business success. Wal-Mart’s recent decision to list Quorn in 2000 US stores shows that what was once considered an unfamiliar niche has finally become part of the food mainstream.

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