innovation

The Power of Laughter and Scent: Brand Purpose is Nothing New?

/ Paul Christopher Walton / Leave a comment

From the Brand Historian’s Timeline: 1921

A hundred years ago the laughter was returning to France, the economy surging after the calamitous bloodshed of the Great War, and Paris renewing its licence as the creative magnet for artists and innovators of all kinds. Surrealism and ragtime mélanged with Ballets Suédois and the chit-chat of modernist salons like Gertrude Stein’s in the Montparnasse.  It was amidst the chaotic collisions of les Années folles that two iconic French brands made their first appearance.

Léon Bel and Gabrielle Bonheur Chasnel were born within a few years of each other at the end of the nineteenth century, and whilst they came from widely differing backgrounds and had very contrasting experiences of the Great War, they were both exceptionally gifted managers of brands who knew how to deploy complementary talent, great design and technical innovation to great business effect.

Gabrielle is better known to us as Coco Chanel and in 1921, on an eventful journey that had taken her via Saumur, Deauville and Biarritz to Paris, where she was now buying up most of the rue Cambon to sell her hats, clothes and accessories to the well-heeled, she launched her own fragrance and called it Chanel No.5. It became the signature scent of the garçonnes or flappers of the Jazz age.

All of Coco’s life experience went into the creation of her new fragrance. Her English Cavalry Officer lover’s travel kit probably inspired the shape of the bottle; the fragrance was designed by Ernest Beaux, an acquaintance of another of Coco’s companions, Grand Duke Dimitri, who had introduced them in Cannes; and the name itself – one of a number of samples labelled from 1 to 5 and 20 to 24 – had to be No.5 because this number had always held a profound significance for her following her upbringing by nuns at a convent in Aubazine. The Cistercian pursuit of clinical simplicity can be seen everywhere in the Chanel brand’s look and feel, and No. 5 was seen as the elegant antidote to the o-t-t elaborate fussiness of the leading scents of the day.

In a long life worthy of multiple seasons on Netflix, Coco said a number of eminently quotable things, one of which was “A woman who doesn’t wear perfume has no future”, in this, she displays a natural skill for what today’s Brand Strategists call Brand Purpose.

A hundred years later in Chicago, the Brand Purpositas are active again, this time to unfurl a new campaign for another French brand with origins also dating back to 1921. 

Léon Bel came from the Jura in Eastern France, close to the Swiss border. Léon’s father had a creamery in the town of Lons-le-Saunier, whose principal claim to fame thus far was to be the birthplace of Rouget-de-Lisle, the composer of La Marseillaise. Returning from the Great War, Léon set about transforming the family business into what would become one of the world’s greatest processed cheese businesses. In his defining new product, he blended cream, milk, fresh and aged cheese, particularly comté and pasteurised it to stop the ripening process. He made it versatile and portable by wrapping individual portions in foil wedges and putting them into a small, round flat box. On top of this platform of technical innovations, he added a dollop of brilliant branding by employing as his salesperson, a cow – in fact, a laughing cow.

La Vache qui rit takes its name from the dark humour of the Western Front and a travelling meat wagon Bel saw called La Wachkyrie, an allusion to the Valkyries who in German sagas took away fallen warriors to the feasting halls. In the first packaging design the cow wasn’t laughing, wasn’t red, and didn’t have the now familiar ear-tag portions of cheese but Benjamin Rabier one of the pioneers of cartooning changed all of that and created one of the world’s most powerful food brand icons and helped Bel register one of the first trademarks for a food brand.

Fromageries Bel is now perhaps the world’s greatest house of cheese brands, but The Red Cow remains its star brand and recognising the power of its laughter, the American affiliate has recently announced that the new brand purpose of The Laughing Cow is to Inspire people to choose to laugh at life.

Perhaps in a time of global pandemic, that’s not a bad thought with which to start the new year. Bonne Année from Coco, Léon and from me….

Some music to dance off the hangover:

Beautiful Faces need Beautiful Clothes Irving Berlin

A Major Quality Initiative (with Miss Sweetly in support)

/ Paul Christopher Walton / Leave a comment

From the Brand Historian’s Timeline: 1936

In these days of increasingly complicated marketing theory, it’s easy to forget that everybody loves a bargain, and that giving the customer demonstrably more for his money is still one of the simplest and best stratagems for successful brand building. 

The savvy understanding of raw material costs, retail price reference points and what the consumer actually values in the product experience have always helped brand owners to create products which disrupt categories and build markets. Unilever did it brilliantly with Impulse and Lynx/Axe which found lucrative white space between expensive fine fragrances and everyday deodorants. Samsung and Skoda – now highly successful premium brands – at first challenged market leaders by offering their consumers a stream of innovative new features for less cash. Lenovo and Kia have become fast followers using the same approach. Branson’s Virgin Atlantic and easyJet are successful examples in the service sector.

In tough economic times, the Big Bargain Brand will always have cutting edge. In 1936, Britain was continuing its slow recovery after the Walls St. crash and the Great Depression, but unemployment was still 13%, and significantly higher in the North of England and Scotland. The unemployed marched from Jarrow on London

Enter stage left, Harold Mackintosh, the son of a Halifax confectioner who took the family recipe for making soft toffee as an asset he could leverage and made a bold and highly creative assault on the market for boxed chocolates. In doing so, Harold made the gifting category accessible to ordinary people and transformed the market. Mackintosh decided to cover his (less expensive) soft toffees in chocolate, wrap them individually in different coloured papers and present generous handfuls loose in a tin rather than arranged in an expensive box. Inspired by a successful J.M. Barrie play, two Regency characters Major Quality and Miss Sweetly were recruited as fancy brand icons on the cover of the tin, and Harold called his new product, Quality Street. The brand would soon be famous for its Triangles and Delights, its Pennies and Fingers, and become the essential family currency of happiness at Christmas and other holidays all over the World.

Happy Holidays…

Forgive the small plug for one of my brand poems which celebrates the cast of Quality Street characters past and present:

On Quality Street

Music to raise morale and munch to:

It’s De Lovely Cole Porter

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 Saucy Side of Thanksgiving

/ Paul Christopher Walton / Leave a comment

The Brand Historian’s Timeline : 1912

Culinary products and the cooking habits they reinforce, tell us much about a nation’s history and culture. Nowhere is this truer than in the United States where successive waves of immigrants have made the cooking and eating landscape so diverse and remarkable. Today, a visit to the grocery store is like a geological time trip where it is possible to discern the sedimentary effects of successive waves of immigration.

By tradition, it all starts in 1621 with the first Thanksgiving Dinner, when the Pilgrim colonists entertained their Native American guests to a huge feast. Whilst the Puritans were not big at celebrating Christmas (remember Cromwell banned dancing and closed the theatres too), they certainly made up with it with a three-day November protein-fest featuring a whole gallimaufry of seafood and game, possibly including Wild Turkey. 

The moment cranberry sauce was served for the first time at Thanksgiving is lost in the mists of Dennis, but by 1796, Amelia Simmons’ first American cookbook included a recipe for it, and by 1816, Cape Cod’s swampy wastelands were being drained so that largescale commercial cranberry bogs could be developed. Farmers had discovered a good wind blowing sand over the vines helped promote vigorous growth. By 1864, Cranberry Sauce was such an important adjunct to a Yankee Thanksgiving dinner that General Grant laying siege to Petersburg, Va. ordered that his troops be supplied with tons of cranberries so they could celebrate the holiday in the appropriate way before resuming their pummelling of the Rebs.

From the nineteenth century onwards many popular culinary ingredients were being industrialised and in 1912, Ocean Spray Cranberry Sauce was introduced by a Plymouth bog owner called Marcus L. Urann who, as the cranberry season is a very short, had built a cannery to make the most of his and his farmer chums’ production. Quite the savvy entrepreneur, he also ‘borrowed’ the brand name from a West Coast fish business but added the breaking ocean wave and the vine. He died in 1963 having built one of the most popular superfoods. The jury is still out on his 1941 jellied cranberry log though.

The Brand Historian wishes all his American friends Happy Holidays and proposes for your Thanksgiving Dinner cornucopia the following treats:

1940 Butterball Turkey 

1949 Sara Lee Cheese Cake

1958 Green Giant Co. Green Beans

1972 Stove Top Stuffing

Suggested Playlist: Alexander’s Ragtime Band (1912)

The Technical Secrets of Conspicuous Consumption?

/ Paul Christopher Walton / Leave a comment

With the help of Duran Duran

The Brand Historian’s Timeline: 1982

Dig out your legwarmers and jumpsuit, find that Duran Duran CD, it’s time to go back to the decade that gave us yuppies, golden hellos and golden parachutes and actually worshipped conspicuous consumption. Hungary like a wolf? Take a close look at two confectionery hits which not only exemplified the zeitgeist but were also superb examples of engineering ingenuity.

Viennetta, the ice cream log with the frilly extrinsics made its debut in 1982, and soon its last slice became something to fight over at many a teatime. With that Mitteleuropan name that is so easy to misspell, Viennetta is a feast of contrasts: an ice cream dessert with a patisserie gene; or a combination of multi-layered extruded ice cream shaped cleverly into rippling waves with a sprinkling of chocolate, all brilliantly designed by Kevin Hillman and Ian Butcher of Wall’s. Afficionados will recall the delicious change in texture as the ice cream melts and the chocolate crackles in the mouth. My German friends refer to it as knispernlust which I have always felt an appropriately wicked description.

Ferrero Rocher is another technical masterpiece that was launched in 1982. Building on his father’s success with some of the plentiful raw materials available in the Piedmont, Michele Ferrero created individual indulgent mouthfuls he called Rochers (inspired by the shrine at Lourdes), consisting of hazelnut, wafer and chocolate deliciousness, enrobed in gold foil and glammed-up packaging to be welcomed without hesitation at all the smartest parties. It became a global hit and along with Tic Tac, Kinder and Mon Cheri, helped make Michele the richest man in Italy.

In an age of easy line extension, It is interesting to observe that both these cases show the power of genuine product/technical innovation, and they are also an object lesson in how tremendous value can be created by applying technical ingenuity to lower cost materials – such air and compound chocolate in the case of Viennetta, and hazelnut paste in the case of Ferrero Rocher.

The Riddle of the Widow

/ Paul Christopher Walton / Leave a comment

From the Brand Historian’s Timeline: 1810

One of the greatest triumphs of branding and innovation against the odds took place amidst the chaos of the Napoleonic Wars. The protagonist was a woman born Barbe-Nicole Ponsardin but better known to us all as La Veuve Clicquot. Nicole was only 27 when her husband died, leaving her, a young daughter and a hodgepodge of failing family business interests that had been jointly managed with his father, Philippe Clicquot. At the time, the code Napoleon expressly forbade women the right to vote, to earn money, or to be economically active without the consent of their husband or father. An exception was made for widows, and Nicole persuaded her father-in-law to let her have a go at running the business.

Like some Bonaparte-meets-Jane Austen themed episode of The Apprentice, she had to overcome various challenges before with the help of a vigneron mentor, she finally won the trust of the family. With the rigour of a McKinsey hotshot, she completed a portfolio analysis and decided to focus the firm on a single, growing business: sparkling wine. In 1810, just as the Emperor was divorcing Josephine, Nicole at last launched her own champagne house: Veuve Clicquot-Ponsardin, and in the space of the next twenty years showed herself to be a brand manager of genius. She innovated in process – developing the riddling rack which helped clarify the sediment in bottles. She innovated in positioning: launching the first vintage champagne in 1810. She innovated in product, creating the first blended rosé champagne in1818. But perhaps her greatest coup de théâtre was to break the naval blockades in Europe and get her extra sweet bottles of fizz into the hands of the Russians who lapped the stuff up, even if it did come from Bonaparte’s France. According to the Czar’s brother, Veuve Clicquot was the only thing to drink. 

La Grande Dame enjoyed a long retirement, having built one of the most successful booze brands by case sales and having played a decisive role in establishing Champagne as a truly global (and luxurious) habit. Veuve Clicquot, of course, was the fizz of Bogart and Bergman in Casablanca, and the preferred choice for Commander Bond and at least one of my favourite clients – you know who you are….

There’s more brand histories at strategic-leaps.com

Trendshock: Is Bic Now Disposable?

/ Paul Christopher Walton / Leave a comment

Bic

The significant challenge for consumer goods companies in anticipating and managing mercurial consumer behaviour was well demonstrated in the profits warning announced this week in Paris by le groupe Bic.

Bic, known in France as the Roi du Quatre Couleurs was caught out by challenges in each of its three core businesses, specifically low cost competition in the stationary market, shifting shaving preferences  in male personal care and reduced tobacco smoking. These factors have combined to dent sales of its familiar but dangerously off-trend disposable plastic stuff. Innovations announced by the group like utility firelighters for the barbecue and a ‘connected’ razor feel a little predictable and frankly partial.

The real challenge facing Bic  is to re-invent the brand and business and to find some substantive growth markets which can be the modern manifestations of Bic’s wonderful track record in creativity and consumer connection.

How the accountants drove us all to vodka

/ Paul Christopher Walton / Leave a comment

The Brand Historian

We live in the age of Ginoflation when hotel, bar and supermarket shelves are stashed precariously with eccentric designer bottles whose labels proclaim some new angle on botanicals or an ingenious method of hand-crafted distillation. Seriously expensive tonic waters are now lining up as appropriately well-bred consorts. The resurgence of the market, after years in the doldrums, is in part the story of how hipsters have chosen gin to be one of modern life’s things in which to show expertise.

Gin like coffee and bottled ales are products stuffed full of interesting ingredients which make brand building based on what marketing folk call product intrinsics very simple. 50 years ago, vodka was the hot-shot spirit of the day, but its success had very little to do with product intrinsics.

In Moscow the 1860s, Pytor Smirnov built his reputation for distilling vodka by filtering it through charcoal. His grandson, Vladimir, massively expanded sales before getting mixed up in the Russian Revolution and having to make a fast exit for Paris via Istanbul. In 1939, the US importer Heublein bought the rights to what was now called Smirnoff, and as the first and only American vodka for many years, the brand can be given most of the credit for creating a new drinking habit.  Americans were encouraged to call it white whisky (‘No taste, no smell’) and the brand did well after the war as the go-to-spirit for a number of fashionable cocktails which showcased vodka’s perceived potency. These included Screwdriver (with orange) and Bullshot (with beef consommé) and the celebrated Moscow Mule which was created by an enterprising LA bar owner with a glut of ginger beer in his cellar.

In post-war Britain, sales also grew well but were beginning to plateau in the early 70s. The consumer knew the basic product facts about vodka – it was flavourless and colourless and filtered through tonnes of charcoal for purity, but this failed to cut any ice with the drinker. Vodka was seen as characterless as well as flavourless.

What really jump started the brand’s momentum was an engaging ad campaign by Young and Rubicam for their client IDV which emphasised the brand’s extrinsic qualities. Based around the theme ‘The effect is shattering’, which echoed the popular belief that Russian drinkers display their vigour by throwing their empty shot glasses to the floor, the campaign consisted of a series of vignettes which dramatized the-before-and-after conditions in which the product was drunk. The ads always worked best when they set up extravagant and unlikely contrasts. One of my favourite posters featured a louche dude with panama hat and cheroot confessing: ‘Accountancy was my life until I discovered Smirnoff.’ Another featured the obviously colourful and sybaritic life enjoyed by a public librarian who had also made the discovery.

Like all great ad campaigns, the slogan set-up soon entered the language and inspired many unpublishable derivatives. Sales of Smirnoff trebled and in the late 1970s, vodka became the trendsetter of the spirits market. But all good things come to end and pressure from the anti-alcohol lobby forced the client to adapt the campaign.

Sales of vodka remained healthy in the outer-directed, glitzy 80s, and a ‘large V.A.T’ was the signature drink enjoyed by Arthur Dailey in the Winchester club – which mine host, Dave, of course always had to put on the slate.

We still drink a lot of vodka, but in these inner-directed days, it is difficult, although not completely impossible, for it to play the product intrinsics game. Perhaps, we must wait for an end to Puritan austerity before we see the inevitable return of Cavalier high spirits and the extrovert world of vodka.

 

Paul Christopher Walton

Forays into the annals and archives of the brands we grew up with.

 

 

 

 

645 words

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A Small Neological Diversion

/ Paul Christopher Walton / 2 Comments

strategic leaps new words_final

Language is constantly evolving, and new words are the flotsam and jetsam on the oceans of social and technological trends.

But totally new words are rare because we like to use old ones – wholly or in part – to make the strange seem a little more familiar. This was especially true of 2018 – a vintage year for new and new-old words.

But how many of these words on the poster below do you really know?* and what others should be on the list? – it would be great to hear your nominations….

Paul and The Walton Street Band

*For those looking for answers, visit http://www.strategic-leaps.com on Christmas Eve when we’ll post a few answers

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.

Follow The Brand Historian on Instagram