innovation

Shining a light on the language of innovation

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From the Brand Historian’s Timeline: 1806 

When the Brand Historian was still treading the boards and explaining the importance of innovation to a variety of corporate academies, he was fond of quoting the aphorism that Frederick the Great, King of Prussia was said to have lost the battle of Jena in 1806 – which was a bit tough on the flute playing maestro, because he had been dead for twenty years. But of course, this story was just a smart ass of way saying that the reason why the Prussian army lost this key battle was because it had failed to evolve its previously successful tactics when faced by Napoleon’s new system Grande Armée complete with integrated battle corps and highly mobile artillery. 

But in 1806, it wasn’t only Napoleon who was innovating. This was also the year that Noah Webster published his first dictionary, A Compendious Dictionary of the English language which was massively influential in solidifying and popularising standards of American spelling typified in words like program rather than programme and honor rather than honour. The American Republic was just 20 years old, and as Webster’s book hit the shelves and mapped out a course for the American language, Lewis and Clark and their Corps of Discovery were heading back to St. Louis having mapped out the vast new frontier acquired following the Louisiana purchase. And back in New York, another innovative journey of exploration was about to begin: this time into the world of personal care.

The story began in England in the 1790s with Robert Colgate, a Kent farmer with some dangerously radical beliefs who supported the political revolutions that had first gripped the British colonies and now France. It was perhaps fortunate that Robert was a good chum of William Pitt the Younger, the fantastically able Tory statesman because he was able to tip Robert the wink before the agents of the Crown arrived to arrest him for sedition. Joining the long trail of radical dissenters heading westwards, Robert and his family sailed for Baltimore where he abandoned farming to found a tallow chandelling business. 

His son William proved himself to be a good business partner, and in 1806, the year of Jena and coincidentally William Pitt’s death, Colgate opened a new enterprise in Dutch Street, Lower Manhattan. Mr Webster’s Dictionary of Compendious English defines tallow as 

“a sort of animal fat particularly that which is obtained from animals of the sheep and ox kinds. The fat of swine we never call tallow but lard or suet.”

 Despite its dubious origins, tallow was a vital commodity in the manufacture of candles whose contemporary importance cannot be underestimated. As Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe bemoans: 

“I was at a great loss for candles, so that as soon as ever it was dark, which was generally by seven o’clock, I was obliged to go to bed.”

Candles in the early 19th century had all the characteristics of a promising classic consumer packaged goods market – everybody needed them and would want to use them on a daily basis. Tallow was also an important constituent of soap before palm and olive oils became the norm and soon William Colgate’s business was advertising its Soap, Mould and Dipt candles of the first quality. The business boomed with Colgate building his reputation further by personally delivering orders. 

It would be another 60 years before Colgate’s sons launched Colgate Dental Cream, the aromatic and palatable dentifrice, as Webster’s might put it, which has painted the whole world red and made it smile. Like so many successful start-ups, the story of Colgate & Co combines a heady mixture of a brave decision, a desperate gamble, a willingness to try new things and, in pursuit of a customer, a capacity for sheer hard work.

Chamber Music in Vienna and Manhattan

Violin Concerto in D Beethoven

Gothic Horror (in Club Stripes)

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From the Brand Historian’s Timeline: 1818

In the years of peace after the final defeat of Napoleon, the British turned to reading and gorged on a surfeit of Gothic fiction which included Thomas Love Peacock’s Nightmare Abbey, Mary Shelley’s darkly imaginative Frankenstein and even Jane Austen jumped on the bandwagon with her pastiche Northanger Abbey. Meanwhile in the United States, as Washington Irving was working on his manuscript for a similarly scary story Legend of Sleepy Hollow, his fellow New Yorkers were hearing news of General Andrew Jackson’s latest frontier extending exploits in Spanish Florida. These included yet more terrorising of the Seminole Indians and the questionable execution of a couple of Brits who happened to get caught up in the ensuing farrago. But that’s populism for you.

In early April, 1818, New Yorkers were also hearing about an interesting new emporium that was about to open its doors for the first time in downtown Manhattan, and which would become one of the world’s most iconic retail brands. Henry Sands Brooks opened his new clothing store in the North East corner of Catherine and Cherry St, “to make and deal only in merchandise of the finest body, to sell it at a fair profit, and to deal with people who seek and appreciate such merchandise.” The launch was successful, and in 1850 his four Biblically entitled sons, Elisha, Daniel, Edward and John decided to change the name of the business to Brooks Brothers, since when it has become the official dresser of Presidents, generals and successive generations of Wall Street Would-be-Masters-of-the-Universe. 

But there’s a lot more to the Brooks Brothers story than club stripes and nice clothes. Over the years, Brooks Brothers has been responsible for a steady stream of sartorial innovations including ready to wear suits, button down collars, pink dress shirts (shock horror!), Argyle socks, Madras shirts, Harris tweed, seersucker summer suits and the ultimate in convenience, non-iron 100% cotton shirts. Brooks Brothers was also responsible for giving priceless sales experience to one Ralph Lauren, who surely must be one of its greatest alumni even if their relationship did turn just a little litigious at one point.

Dressing presidents from Lincoln (who was actually assassinated wearing one of its suits) to Obama, Brooks Brothers and its Golden Fleece logo, borrowed from an ancient Burgundian order of chivalry, have become ubiquitous in popular culture. You’ll see its clothes featured in Mad Men and worn by George Clooney, Archie Bunker and Kermit the Frog; the store is name-checked in novels such as This Side of Paradise and American Psycho. And returning to our Gothic horror theme, Anne Rice’s Lestat de Lioncourt, the lead character in The Vampire Chronicles is very partial to Brooks Brothers suits.

Music to Cheer on Andy Jackson: 

Hail to the Chief! (actually written by Sir Walter Scott, Bart.)

Extra Content:

For an appropriately Gothic epilogue to the story of the foundation of Brooks Brothers, please see the poem Ghosts inspired by a piece in The New York Times, April 2021 which reports on the fate of Brooks Brothers after it filed for bankruptcy – The Ghosts of Brooks Brothers.

A link to the poem is here:https://flotandjet.com/2021/04/18/ghosts/

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

New is the New Old

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From the Brand Historian’s Timeline: 1985- 1991

In the marketing lexicon, new is one of the most important words of power, because like a neon sign in the motorway darkness, it captures our attention and helps spotlight desire. It’s also one of marketing’s very own buy-one-get-one-free’s because this is one word with two very different meanings.

The first, which we may call the New/New describes something just or recently created and which has not existed before. The New/New often triggers a feeling within us which are an  interesting combination of excitement and hesitation, because novelty can be unfamiliar and off-putting. Consider a list of new words which first entered the language in 1985: yuppy, tankini, emoticon and microbrew. All needed significant education to get them understood and adopted, and there were many wanabees that year that didn’t make it into the dictionary.

The other new is in fact a New/Old, because it involves finding a new angle on something we have seen before. In 1985, in the same year that marketing folk were getting excited about yuppies and their Filofaxes, they were also getting animated about the launch of New Coke, described by Coca Cola’s own website as ‘the biggest marketing blunder in history.’

To hear some tell it, April 23, 1985, was a day that will live in marketing infamy.

On that day, The Coca-Cola Company took arguably the biggest risk in consumer goods history, announcing that it was changing the formula for the world’s most popular soft drink, and spawning consumer angst the likes of which no business has ever seen.

Rejected by the consumer and the trade, New Coke died a slow, lingering death before disappearing from the shelves in 1992. But the fate of New Coke is exceptional, because normally the New/Old option is a far safer path for marketeers to follow. 

As many explorers have already discovered, the past can be creatively employed to inspire an interesting future. Coast to coast, the United States of America is littered with New/Olds like New Berlin and New Bethlehem, New Orleans and New Prague; New London and New Richmond. Before the Brits rebranded it in 1664, New York had been New Amsterdam, founded by the Dutch West India Company in 1626. Challenging our normal cartographic expectations, you will find New England, New Holland and New Sweden lying close by each other, whereas as far away from the Low Countries as you can get, you will find a New Belgium in the foothills of the Rockies.

New Belgium is one of The Brand Historian’s favourite beer brands and its wonderful amber ale Fat Tire has helped maintain his morale on many a challenging business trip to the Mid-West. 

At exactly the same time as microbrew was entering the language, an engineer with a passion for beer called Jeff Lebesch took his bicycle on a study tour of Flanders and its monastic beer heritage trail. Weeks later, and with a panier full of inspiration, he headed back to Fort Collins, a college town in Colorado and started brewing beers like 1554 Black Ale in his home. Fortunately, Kim Jordan, his wife, seemed to like the idea and in 1991, New Belgium opened for business. The couple demonstrated a real skill for brewing non-standard beer and a real flair for telling their story in a quirky, non-standard way, and before long New Belgium beers were selling well in the mountain states and also in the microbrewing strongholds of Washington and Oregon. It was about this time when I first discovered New Belgium bottles on a drinks project that took me to Denver.

Only a few years later, New Belgium beers had become far more ubiquitous in US bars. What took New Belgium out of the microbrew niche, crossing the cultural chasm into the mainstream, as Professor Doug Holt put it, was the decision to focus all the effort on Fat Tire, the toothsome amber ale with the lovely water colour labels by Anne Fitch which feature New Belgium’s signature bike. Positioning the brand as BoHo playful explorers, it encouraged its upscale, intelligent target drinkers to “Follow your folly”, adding “Ours is beer” 

The strategy worked and the brewery grew rapidly, maintaining its distinctive and progressive culture and was ultimately acquired by Kirin in 2019, by which time it had jumped from being a micro into a macro brewer, having entered the US Brewing Top Ten.

Music to celebrate Bohemian life (with a pint of Fat Tire):

Losing my religion R.E.M.

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

How a little hard pressed creativity with the core business hit the mark (twice)

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The Brand Historian’s Timeline: 1960

Harold Macmillan was right on the money when he talked about the winds of change. 

In 1960, they were blowing strong, and they weren’t just signalling the end of the British Empire but also beaching fading flotsam like the News Chronicle, Farthings and National Service. The winds were also bringing us surprising new stuff like Coronation Street, black plastic dustbin bags, and an achingly cool TV advert for a new presentation of a very old drink. 

Cider fermented from the juice of apples and pears was probably first introduced by the Normans and soon developed strong roots in the west and south west of England. It wasn’t always a rustic habit. There had been a time in the 18th century when, thanks to John Scudamore and the cider apple he grew called Redstreak, English cider became, at least momentarily, quite the fashion in European society.

But it’s the Bulmers of Credenhill, Hereford who more than anyone succeeded in bringing cider permanently out of its farmhouse bucolic haze and into the Major League of international drinks brands. Cider has always been a somewhat schizophrenic drink. On the one hand, it was known as an easy drinking alcohol for debutante drinkers, and on the other, for an altogether harder, more edgy glass, characterised by park bench drinking and the street legend of the Snakebite. Over successive generations, the Bulmer family proved to be skilful brand managers and created two differently positioned brands to represent this dichotomy. The first was called Woodpecker, a copper coloured, medium-sweet cider made by Percy Bulmer in 1894, which featured as its pack icon a little Green Woodpecker. This will be familiar to many ageing Baby Boomers would have taken it in flagons to parties 50 years ago. 

Strongbow, launched in 1960, was a very different proposition. Made with bitter sharp apples and a little culinary fruit to tame the tartness and the tannins, Strongbow was an attractive presentation of the more adult side of the cider box. Named after one of the great medieval Marcher families famous for their prowess at biff and bang along the border, Strongbow was launched with a black and white TV ad by Leo Burnett which starred a cool, Bond-like archer whose draw and subsequent release symbolised the brand’s ability to cut through thirst. The advert also introduced the double-arrow-thud-thud which has since served as a superb brand Mnemonic and identifier.

Soon, Strongbow became the premium dry cider that took on the lagers which all the major brewers were now investing huge amounts of money in. In a bigger long drinks game of share-of-throat, Strongbow grew aggressively by successfully innovating in packaging formats (keg, cans, PET bottles) and to a lesser extent with brand derivatives and line extensions, and became the prime engine of HP Bulmer’s growth in the UK and far beyond.

The Brand Historian has always had a soft spot for Bulmers, having worked for the company and its portfolio of brands since his rookie days in 1977, and especially when in 1986, it became a founder client of The Value Engineers.  The cider market has had its ups and downs over the years. Like the rolling border hills which surround Hereford, cider sales will no doubt continue to rise and fall as fashions and seasons change, but I am quite sure that Strongbow will be refreshened by the prevailing winds of change and those famous arrows will hit the mark once more.

A Bulmers 1960 Playlist:

Woodpecker Yellow Dot Bikini Brian Hyland

Strongbow Apache The Shadows

The Green revolution that began with a sausage

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From the Brand Historian’s Timeline: 1889

Knorr was one of the first famous food brands that the Brand Historian worked on. It was in the early 1980s, when CPC International owned the brand.  I was working on innovation projects for its CMO, Anthony Garvey – clever, soft spoken and one of the most inspirational clients I have ever worked with. Tony was also a great champion of one of his products, Aromat which came in a plastic tube dressed in the familiar yellow, green and red house colours of Knorr.

Aromat is seen all over Europe, especially in restaurants where it remains one of the essential table condiments. On the label it says, at least in the UK, All-purpose Savoury Seasoning, and we might think of it as the Swiss Army Knife of culinary sprinklings. As his rookie strategic planner, Tony took me aside and explained how important this product was to the retailer, the hospitality industry, and to the end consumer; it was also supremely profitable to CPC and was thus my introduction to the value-creating magic of culinary ingredients. 

Apart from being one of Unilever’s biggest food brands today, Knorr is also a superb example of how brand meaning can and should be evolved overtime to take account of social, technological and economic change. 

The brand had its origins in the in the late 1830s in Germany, when Carl Heinrich Knorr opened a factory in Heilbronn in Baden – Württemberg, where he had moved to follow his love. Originally the firm he founded supplied ground chicory to the coffee industry; but in the second half of the 19th century, there was also tremendous interest and experimentation in the dehydration of vegetables and seasonings to extend their shelf life. In this new technology, Carl Heinrich saw the opportunity of evolving the scope of his business. Knorr’s first great gift to the world came in 1889 with the launch of his recipe for Erbswurst – a pea soup dry mix packed in a sausage-shaped roll that became a famous feature of the German Army’s Iron Rations. It also was the foundation of Knorr’s huge soup business in Europe. With its new mission in dried ingredients, Knorr followed up with its first sauce mix in 1908, and a bouillon cube in 1912.

After the end of the Second World War, Knorr was acquired by Corn Products in the USA, by which time it was one of Europe’s leading culinary brands; its success was due at least in part, because it reinforced rather than challenged local cooking habits. By the time Knorr joined the Unilever portfolio in 2000 for a whopping $24bn, it was one of the world’s top food brands renowned for its embrace of cuisine diversity and for highlighting its vital connection to chefs and chef know-how. 

Today, Knorr is in the vanguard of Unilever’s green agenda, and its newly refreshed mission is about extending what it considers the limited range of foods people eat. With its products, recipes, tips and tricks, it aims to show consumers how we can all build a greener, sustainable future. Carl Heinrich would no doubt approve, and I just hope there’s still a place for Knorr Aromat to perk up that kale lasagne. 

Music to enjoy with your Erbswurst out in the field:

Das Rheingold Richard Wagner 

Empire Building

/ Paul Christopher Walton / 1 Comment

From the Brand Historian’s Timeline: 1759

Early on the morning of September 13th, 1759 a young British general is dying on the battlefield at the very moment of victory. He’s dying from a bullet hole in his chest, but now the French army which he has taken by surprise on the Plains of Abraham is on the run, and not just from Québec but across the whole of North America from the Saint Lawrence to Florida. 

In what has been called the first proper world war, but which is more familiarly known to us as The Seven Years War, 1759 is the annus mirabilis for Great Britain. Across five continents, by land and sea, the British and their allies have triumphed, and their blast of empire building will now transform the world. 

Back nearer home, another great chain of transformations is about to start. Arthur Guinness is just two years older than James Wolfe and both have been brought up in middle class Anglican households. Arthur’s godfather is an Archbishop, and he’s left him a legacy of £100 – no small sum in 1759. But whilst James Wolfe has met his date with destiny on the Saint Lawrence, Arthur Guinness has chosen the Liffey in Dublin, and taken the lease on an old brewery at Saint James’s Gate. He plans to build upon his father’s reputation for brewing good beer. 

It is at this stage that we have to put out of our minds, at least for the moment, the dark black beer with a thick creamy head that we think of when we think of the brand Guinness. We must also have no thought of its famous surge and long pour because in 1759, Arthur Guinness is actually brewing a classic Irish pale ale.

But Guinness has considerable ambition, and a good nose for opportunity. He’s picked Saint James’s gate because it’s close to the new Grand Canal which connects Dublin with the River Shannon and Limerick and will make his supply chain both efficient and economical. Shortly, he will further shake things up when he starts brewing an English style of beer called Porter which is brewed with darker malts. Porter is associated with the labourers who work the London markets and Stout Porter was a popular variant. By 1779, Arthur’s new brews were a success and from now on, he decides that Porter will be the only beer he will brew. By 1821, his beer is called Guinness Extra Stout and it was already selling well throughout the Empire.

Thanks to its founder’s vision, Guinness has always been a brand that celebrates transformations, and today it is one of the world’s biggest and most distinctive brands of beer. It also one of the most innovative, having launched the iconic Guinness Draught in 1959 (with the Nitrogen and CO2 mix), and Canned Guinness, powered by the widget in 1988. The Brand Historian played a small role in this last innovation and has many happy memories of meetings at Saint James’s Gate and Park Royal, eventually being awarded a small pewter trophy with the inscription For Stout Service. 

Today, the Guinness empire still stretches across the world, but it is interesting to list its top five markets by volume which are in order: UK, Nigeria, Ireland, USA and Cameroon. 

Who would have imagined this when Arthur Guinness pulled his first pint at the old Rainsford brewery in 1759, the Year of Marvels?

Music to enjoy your pint with:

Heart of Oak William Boyce and David Garrick

Or check out a poem at:

The Transformation (Under the influence of Arthur Guinness)

In a Parallel Universe

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From the Brand Historian’s Timeline: 1995

Northern Lights, the first instalment of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy is an excellent indication of what to expect from 1995. The book is set in Oxford but an Oxford in a parallel universe, featuring settings which are simultaneously familiar but also very different, which aptly also describes the new brands which debuted that year.

eBay radically changed the second-hand auction business and put the e into commerce. DVDs brought digital technology into the mainstream and changed home entertainment forever. Nandos and Lush brought excitement, energy and breakthroughs to food service and personal care. But in a parallel universe, or to be exact in Freightliner Road, Hull, there was also Aunt Bessie’s.

Aunt Bessie’s Yorkshire Pudding is one on the most loved British national treasures (voted 10th in the things people love about England in a 2012 survey) and the brand logo featuring her smiling, ruddy complexion is a like a long-standing culinary Britannia, and yet Aunt Bessie is actually only 26, and funnily enough, as old as another celebrated Yorkshire lass, Bridget Jones. Imagine their conversation.

Yorkshire Puddings probably have their origins in making the most of the fat dripping from roasting meats combined with a batter mix of eggs, flour and milk. In 1737, a book written by a knight of the realm with the slightly controversial title – at least by today’s standards- The Whole Duty of a Woman, features an early recipe. 

Yorkshire Puddings combine huge consumer craving with a degree of technical difficulty and bother which makes them a prime candidate for branding. William Jackson, a long-established Yorkshire family business manufacturing and retailing foods had discovered the magic of the quick-frozen ready-to-serve Yorkshire pudding when in the 1970s, it supplied thousands to the happy campers at Butlin’s holiday camps. Own label supply to supermarkets followed and as the mountain of puddings grew, Jackson’s decided to launch under their own brand. 

At a time when British culinary habits were changing quickly, Aunt Bessie’s is a wonderful example of how zigging when everyone else is zagging can be a winning strategy. Just as cultural commentators were talking incessantly in their best pesto prose about the death of the Sunday roast, Aunt Bessie’s showed it was actually in rude health and was indeed going from strength to strength. In 2018, the Great Hull Pudding gravy train departed for the next phase of its journey: the brand was sold for £210m to Nomad Foods, the owners of BirdsEye, where today her range goes from roast dinner staples, to quick and easy midweek wins, to deliciously different carb swaps. Oh, and she has a blog.

Playlist for Bridget Jones and Aunt Bessie’s Girls Night In:

Roll with It Oasis

I Should Coco Supergrass

We 3 Kings of Shaving Are…

/ Paul Christopher Walton / 2 Comments

From The Brand Historian’s Timeline:

1901-1993-2012

From an early age, all good brand managers learn the business facts of life. The two magic words of brand building are Penetration and Frequency. The first is a measure of how much of a particular target market buy or use a product, and the second, how often it is used. Brand bliss arrives when a large target audience, let’s say all men, use a product nearly every day, let’s say a razor. Not surprisingly therefore, shaving is one of the most attractive basic human habits in which a brand can participate, and this explains why in the last hundred years, it has been the subject of relentless product, brand and business innovation, and also some mouth-wateringly expensive acquisitions by the likes of Procter and Gamble and Unilever.

It was King Camp Gillette, the crown cork salesman from the Midwest, who in 1901 created the market for disposable blades for use with his patented Safety Razor. His system wasn’t the first, but the thin, inexpensive stamped blades from carbon steel sheet got great results without the need for a barber and or having to strop a dangerous blade. Protected with a trademark and with his portrait on the packaging, Gillette’s razor and blades grew rapidly and with efficient manufacturing and heavyweight marketing support, Gillette became one of the most definitive fast moving packaged goods brands, eventually acquired by P&G in 2005.

Our second King of shaving is William King, an engineering graduate from Chalfont St Giles* and Portsmouth Poly who in 1993 made a daring assault on the ancien regime of male grooming with a range of innovative new lotions and potions, packaged with a more contemporary look-and-feel and presented with an irresistible sales chutzpa that got him listings with some of the big names of the UK grocery trade. It is never easy competing with the Mega Battalions who control markets, but King of Shaves like many challenger brands had an impact on the category far greater than its market share. Its shaving gels have redefined consumer expectations of shaving preps, and its confident sense of style highlighted the branding vulnerability of the incumbent.

In the last decade, several others also spotted an opportunity in the weakness of the ‘bland’ leader. In 2012, two Bain Private Equity grads launched Harry’s, building on the arrival of the internet to disrupt the market with a direct-to-consumer sales offer and a brand-skin that was decidedly younger and in keeping with the emerging hipster culture of Brooklyn. Harry’s soon expanded into mainstream distribution in the US and in Europe, and in 2019 became an acquisition target for Wilkinson Sword/Schick, one of the Old Guard hardware companies looking for a brand injection.  The deal was valued at $1.37bn before it was blocked by the FTC. In the same year, Harry Kane, the soccer Captain of England became the face of Harry’s, and thus our third King of Shaving to complete this Epiphany of Male Grooming.

A playlist to shave by:

1901 American Patrol Sousa’s Band

1993 Mr Vain Culture Beat

2012 We Are Young Fun ft Janelle Monae

* Some will remember that The Value Engineers had an office in Chalfont St. Giles where one day, replete in leather flying jacket, Will dropped in to see us for coffee.