innovation

How the Centurion Made It Into Manhattan

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From the Brand Historian’s Timeline: 1850

Most nations have their quotient of memorable dates, and the United States is no exception. 1620, 1776 and 1863 come readily to mind. Whilst 1850 may not have such a high profile,it is a serious contender as a year of strategic significance. It also coincides with the foundation of one of the USA’s most iconic corporations.

1850 started promisingly. Against the background of increasingly bitter debate about the slave economy, heightened further by the victory of the US army in the Mexican war, which had secured huge new territory in the West, the Compromise of 1850 diffused tension and probably delayed the outbreak of more serious conflict for ten years. The Compromise put the question of whether enslaving people was lawful in the hands of the populations of individual States. California was admitted to the Union in September, and its population decreed it would be a free State. At the same time, New Mexico and Utah were given territory status, further opening up a promising landscape of opportunity.

Railways were central to the industrial revolution that was now gathering momentum. In 1850, US railways were evolving from a scattered network into a coherent continent-crossing system and in that year, a further 9000 track miles were added. For entrepreneurs, following the railways was always an excellent route to profit. On March 18,  three American corporations, which had been operating in New York State for a while, were merged to form American Express. It was founded by individuals whose names have since become synonymous with the opening up of the West: Henry Wells and William G Fargo. John Butterfield and James D Wasson were the other founding partners.

The original purpose of their new company was to move mail, money and freight securely and quickly throughout the Empire State. But with the help of savvy partnerships and joint ventures with railroads and steamships, the company soon had a virtual monopoly and was only partially affected by the Civil War, which finally broke out between the North and the Confederacy in 1861. 

From its beginnings, American Express displayed a strong talent for spotting opportunities and demonstrating leanness and dexterity in redefining its business. Express mail and logistics may have been how the corporation started, but it was a stream of financial service innovations that dramatically built the company. In 1857, it launched money orders to compete with the unconditional payment products of the Post Office. And for the first time, it introduced the Roman centurion as its brand icon to emphasise its security credentials.

In 1891, JC Fargo was on a European Grand Tour and apparently got some first-hand experience in discovering the difficulties of getting cash on the move. Arriving back from Paris, he briefed Marcellus Fleming Berry to develop a new kind of international travellers’ cheque. While travellers’ cheques had been around in various forms for some time, the scale of American Express’ global system made them hugely successful. As the 20th Century dawned, American Express had become one of the world’s first mega brands.

Strangely, however, American Express was not the first to market with a charge card. Diner’s Club introduced a travel and entertainment charge card in 1950. But despite not being a fast follower- it launched its first card in 1958 – the power of the brand and its merchant support organization helped it to market leadership. Aspirational advertising, courtesy of David Ogilvy helped (Don’t leave home without it; Membership has its privileges), as did clever market segmentation, which saw Amex play the precious metal game of card innovation: gold, platinum, black and so on.

From its origins in lower Manhattan, American Express had morphed from a local logistics and distribution business to a financial services Behemoth and served as a corporate metaphor mirroring the transformations that were taking place throughout the United States in the years after 1850.

Some Banjo Music for 1850:

The Camptown Races – Stephen Foster

The Age of Plastic

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From The Brand Historian’s Timeline: 1966

A wise old banker once told me that financial services were actually very simple and straightforward. “There are only three products,” he argued, “everything else is just positioning magic.” He actually said something else, but magic is polite.

“Firstly, it’s your money, and we look after it for you and possibly give you a bit more money for the privilege.” 

“A bit more money,” I nodded. 

“Or it’s our money, and we’ll lend it to you for a fee.”

 I nodded again, “but not necessarily a small fee.”

“Or the product”, he was ignoring me, “is just a convenient way of moving money about, which we call money transmission”. 

Bankers are experts at taking these three core products and combining and twisting them cleverly to make exciting new propositions. And just over 60 years ago, a well-known British bank introduced us to a classic example of this positioning dexterity. Their new idea was launched in a wonderfully risqué cinema ad – at least by the standards of our more progressive if puritanical days. It featured a gorgeous girl, dressed only in a bikini, sauntering around town, with a little bit of plastic peeking from her swimsuit bottoms. This was a credit card. “All a girl needs when she goes shopping” – we were told.

It was 1966, England was about to win the World Cup, The Beatles were riding high in the charts, and innovation was in the air, exemplified by the small plastic card that we soon learned was called Barclaycard, the white, blue and tan flagship of the Age of Plastic. The origins of Barclaycard owe much to the success in the USA of the Bank of America’s BankAmericard, the category pioneer which had found a way of offering business folk a line of credit for all their travel and entertaining expenses, which was then repaid every month. The idea of charge cards (like sex) came to Britain in 1963 with Diners Club and American Express, which launched their versions. Three years later, Barclays, probably the raciest of the UK’s banking establishment, launched its version. Initially this was to be a charge card, too but in 1967, on the back of some smart systems’ fancy footwork, it became a revolving credit card and pretty much had the market to itself until Access was launched in 1972.

Barclaycard’s successful launch was in large part due to innovative marketing techniques: consumers were persuaded by the thousand to put plastic into their wallets via mass mailshots containing ready-to-use cards, giant point of sale displays in outdoor spaces and a veritable army of Barclaycard girls who delivered the shock and awe with a smile. 

As the market grew, if slowly at first, the serious business of spending money with Barclaycard was promoted using the gentle bonhomie of the well-travelled Alan Whicker before moving on to comedy heavyweights like Dudley Moore and Rowan Atkinson. Their madcap humour helped to normalize this new spending habit. Barclaycard, now based in a former shoe factory in Northampton, became the Death Star of Data, amassing info from customers and merchants, many of whom had been persuaded to pay for the privilege of being part of the Barclaycardworld. By 1972, Barclaycard was sending monthly bills to 1.7 million people and was now making a profit. In due course, it would become the star contributor to its parent retail bank. Those Barclaycard girls had successfully helped launch a revolution in the way we spend and manage money, but perhaps more importantly, they also helped create a whole new language of money.

A Credit Card Alphabet:

APR

Authorized user

Balance transfer

A better way to spend

Credit card fraud

Credit limit

Grace period

M Stephens

Never leave home without it

Pin

Smart card

1966: A Year of Innovations:

Paperback Writer The Beatles

Action Man

Bet Lynch appears in Coronation Street

The Cybermen arrive in Dr Who

One can, thousands of uses….Still stuck?

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From the Brand Historian’s Timeline: 1953

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1953 Top of the Pops:

I Believe Frankie Laine

The revolutionary sect that set the bar for brand innovation

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From the Brand Historian’s Timeline: Bristol, 1822

Amongst the brands that defined my over confected youth and won my heart was the fruity fondant deliciousness of Fry’s Five Centre – a pocket-sized dark chocolate slab containing seams of pineapple, raspberry, lime, orange and strawberry cream, all wrapped up in sensuously thin foil. Five Centre was never one of the mainstream countlines which appeared in the school playground; rather, it owned a Maverick niche. It was produced by Fry’s of Bristol, founded by Joseph Fry in 1761, and expanded by Joseph Storrs Fry, who developed a patent for grinding cocoa beans. In the early nineteenth century, Fry’s built a reputation for making innovative and sophisticated confectionery. Apart from its signature brand, Peppermint Cream (1866), Fry’s also created the first solid chocolate bar, the first chocolate Easter egg and the definitive British presentation of Turkish Delight (1914), famously full of Eastern promise. At the end of the First World War, Fry’s merged with Cadbury’s of Bourneville, but Fry’s had more in common with Cadbury than just chocolate: Both businesses were owned by prominent Quaker families.

In the heady days of the 1970s, when fast-moving packaged goods set the standards for great brand management, there was much debate whether Unilever or P&G educated the best brand managers. In my book (Bluff Your Way in Marketing, Ravette), the award for the most creative and innovative school of brand management goes to a revolutionary sect founded long before the soap giants, who called themselves The Society of Friends, more familiarly known to us as the Quakers. Apparently, this was because the Friends were known to tremble at the very mention of the name of God.

In the mid-seventeenth century, George Fox founded this movement when the British Isles were torn asunder by civil war and religious ferment. Fox was an impressive itinerant preacher who believed there is a bit of God in everybody and consequently saw no need for Priests. This was radical stuff that a few years before might have got him burnt as a heretic. But in the nervously uncertain years after the Stuart Restoration, religious dissent was tolerated if it didn’t get mixed up with politics or, for that matter, any other part of the Establishment. Test Acts were put in place, which in effect kept Quakers and other non-conformists out of the Army, the Church, Parliament and any other Crown office.

But that didn’t prevent Quaker families from setting up businesses. Quite the opposite, because such discriminatory laws positively encouraged Quaker families to become entrepreneurs. Quaker businesses were soon achieving success throughout Britain. They had a strong belief in individual spirit but a willingness to collaborate and network; they had a capacity for hard work and a reputation for truth and honesty. Indeed, over the next couple of centuries, Quaker businesses were to have a massively disproportionate effect on the landscape of British industry. 

Fry’s (1761), Cadbury (1824), Rowntree (1862) in confectionery; Huntley and Palmer (1822) and Carr’s (1831) in biscuits; Clark’s (1825) in footwear, not to mention Barclays (1690), Lloyd’s (1769) in banking; Friends Provident (1832) in insurance. Quaker influence is also very strong in several Twentieth Century mega-charities: Oxfam (1942), Amnesty International (1961) and Greenpeace (1971). 

Today, it is very fashionable for brands to talk about Purpose as if this notion was completely novel. At a time when many brands obsess about finding their Purpose, it is worth reflecting on the contribution of this small, radical movement founded by George Fox. The Quakers not only created some of Britain’s greatest brands but did so while incubating businesses that also exemplified a distinctive style of caring capitalism. Oh, and one of these also made The Brand Historian’s favourite chocolate bar.

It was the monks before the punks

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From the Brand Historian’s Timeline: 1240

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 Leffe session:

1240 Gregorian Chant

1910 Rapsodie for Orchestra and Saxophone Claude Debussy

1959 5 by Monk by 5 Thelonious Monk (Piano) Charlie Rouse (Saxophone)

Fifty shades without grey, please

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The Brand That Turned Back Time

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.

Suitable Music for the Salons:

Sports et divertissements Erik Satie

From Zappas to Abba?

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How the hippies took over the world of branding

From the Brand Historian’s Timeline, 1998

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? 

1998: Music for Fruitstock 

Robbie Williams Angels

Concentrate! Here comes the science bit

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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

Mäarketing Myöpia versus Maslöw

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The Brand Historian’s Timeline: 1960 1983 1991

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 The Esso 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.

Hot Licks: A Super Premium playlist

1960 Elvis Presley It’s Now or Never

1983 Billy Joel Uptown Girl

1991 Colour Me Badd I Wanna Sex You Up

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