Strategy

The Year of the Penguin

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From the Brand Historian’s Timeline: 1998

It was a dull, overcast, and humid start to the trip. Normal for the time of year, I learned. As the ferry left its moorings with sky-scraping sentinels looking on and Star Ferries bobbing in the harbour, it was as exciting as I had imagined.

It was 20th May 1998, and I was a passenger on the Hong Kong to Shekou ferry on my way to visit Shenzhen for the first time. My final destination was a shiny new convention centre just set back from the beach in the heart of the city, which since 1980 had been designated a Special Economic Zone. My hotel was the Marina Ming Wah, with its imposing striped tower facade, symbolising the city’s ambition and strategic intent.

Built to celebrate the Ming dynasty, the hotel had all the features the modern business traveller might expect, including a golf practice area, a karaoke lounge, a bowling alley and even a cosy pub, the Marina Tavern. I was on my way there courtesy of United Biscuits, an esteemed but now defunct British plc. United Biscuits was a pillar of the UK food establishment and were purveyors of all manner of biscuits, round, brown and beyond.

I’d been hired to lead a training course for the sales and marketing personnel working for the local business United Biscuits had recently acquired. My mission was to explore how leading Western companies positioned brands and created innovations. The curriculum included profiling UB brands such as Hobnobs, Sultana (huge in Holland), Go Ahead and Penguin, the chocolate-covered cream sandwich biscuit that was a star asset of the UB portfolio and which had the famous TV advert featuring the lovable Penguins. The slogan, spoken by Derek Nimmo, was “P… P… P… Pick up a Penguin”. I was also to describe the then highly fashionable concept of Need states and define what exactly was meant in this context by refuel, ice breaker and reward/treat and their relevance to a Chinese consumer. 

Despite the conceptual, cultural and linguistic challenges, I remember the students’ incredibly enthusiastic, hardworking and competitive spirit, and especially their willingness to push back on the UB biscuit orthodoxy. We finished the course with a wonderful banquet followed by a suitably designed Value Engineering after-dinner entertainment and quiz. This group proved to be a promising cadre of young marketeers who taught me much.

Despite the warm feelings I felt as I left Shenzhen and returned by ferry to Hong Kong, the UB venture in China was ultimately unsuccessful – in marked contrast to another business set up and launched shortly afterwards, just a few steps away from the Ming Wah.

Tencent one of the world’s greatest tech businesses was founded in 1998 by Pony Ma and Zhang. Spotting the tremendous opportunity opening in the new world of the mobile internet, they quickly established leadership in the huge Chinese market for messaging and video gaming. Today Tencent is also a global giant in entertainment, publishing, FinTech, venture capital and much more.

But back in 1998, just as I was introducing the Penguin biscuit to my Chinese students, Tencent’s entrepreneurs were planning the launch of their first mobile messaging brand QQ. And looking for an appropriate brand symbol, they chose – yes, you guessed it – a Penguin. A somewhat cheeky-looking Penguin but a Penguin who nevertheless resembles his chocolate-endorsing cousin. But this one just happens to be a brand megastar who is on billions of mobiles.

Video games to play on your Nintendo 64: 1998 

The Legend of Zelda: Tokino Ocarina

Goldeneye 007

An Extraordinary Pivot

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From the Brand Historian’s Timeline: 1893

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pivotal Music from 1893: 

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

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

Bringing Out The Best

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A Proustian Moment for an Englishman in New York

From the Brand Historian’s Timeline: 1913

One of the many clouds of sadness which the pandemic has brought with it are those wretched feelings that come from missing the places you love and the people who live there. I was late in discovering the charms of New York, but that just made the relationship more special, and its loss (hopefully finite?) more profound. Like many visitors, I was utterly gob-smacked the first time I saw the Terminal at Grand Central, especially at rush hour when commuters dashed like ants across its broad Main Concourse. But underneath it and accessed through a semi-secret door to the lower level is one of my most favourite places in all Manhattan, the perfect spot to wind down and to celebrate. I mean of course The Grand Central Oyster Bar with its vast Guastavino vaulted ceiling, groovy table and chairs, waiters in shorty white jackets, the heaving restaurant stuffed full of plates of seafood and the huge chalk blackboard at the Raw Bar, advertising oysters with fascinating if scary names like Lady Chatterley and King Caesar.

The Oyster Bar like the Terminal itself opened for business in 1913. This was also the year a German American called Richard Hellmann introduced his Blue-Ribbon Mayonnaise. Richard had managed a delicatessen in Columbus Avenue since 1905 but putting his recipe for mayo into glass jars was such a successful innovation that he was soon building a factory to produce it in Astoria, Queens. In 1915, Richard gave up the shop altogether to focus on manufacturing and packing his mayonnaise. Following years of strong growth, the brand changed hands a number of times before Hellmann’s was sold by General Foods to Best Foods. Because they already had a mayonnaise, it was decided to pursue a twin brand strategy across the world, with Hellmann’s ruling in the East and Best Foods taking the West and Pacific. Otherwise, the marketing mix would be identical.

The origins of mayonnaise continue to be something of a riddle suspended in an emulsion, but what is certain is that the product was repeatedly successful in finding a distinctive role in the eating culture of the countries where it took root. The French created the Friday ritual of äoli, Germans use it for their potato salad, the Dutch and the Belgians use it as the definitive fritessaus. Whilst the Chileans use it to finish off their completos, the British were persuaded when Hellmann’s was launched there in the 1980s to think of it as a posher kind of salad cream. But it was in the United States where Hellmann’s found its apotheosis as the essential component in the ultimate grilled chicken sandwich.

In 2000, Hellmann’s was part of a $20 billion deal which saw the brand become part of Unilever. A year late, and anxious to properly integrate such a successful brand into the Unilever system, a special conference was held with key personnel from Best Foods and Unilever’s culinary top brass. The event was held in Manhattan in a characterful, bare whitewashed warehouse on the edge of the Meatpacking district. This was where I led a team of Value Engineers to help and inspire the attendees to plot a road map for the next stages of the Hellmann’s story – after all, the brand had come a long way from its origins on the Upper West Side. After a successful couple of days storming brains and laying tracks for new visions and roadmaps, there was a celebratory visit to the Grand Central Oyster bar, where I believe Hellmann’s definitely made it onto on the menu.

1913 Playlist

You Made me love you

(I didn’t want to do it) Al Jolson

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

A Playlist of Metaphors

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From the Brand Historian’s Timeline: 2006

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

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

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

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

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

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

Playlist like it’s 2006:

Crazy Gnarls Barkley

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.

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

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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)

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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

From Arctic Lite to The Dinner Party Set

/ Paul Christopher Walton / Leave a comment

The Brand Historian goes in search of Key Drinkers

“What are the three most important concepts of strategy?” was how the Chilean Arnaldo Hax liked to tease the senior managers who attended his workshops as Unilever’s house strategist. His answer, delivered with appropriate glinting charm, was “Segmentation, segmentation, segmentation.” This was a precept that certainly resonated with me because I have always enjoyed slicing markets and naming the parts, perhaps because great segmentations require the perfect fusion of creative yin and analytical yang. 

There was one segmentation project that I worked on in the late 80s that was particularly memorable, and from a business point of view, quite successful. It was a study of UK drinking habits and it sought to validate the pareto principle (also known as the 80/20 rule) by exploring the importance of Key Drinkers to various alcoholic drink categories. 

A few years earlier, I had met Derek Penney, the doyen of booze research. It was Derek who was able to identify where the brewers went wrong with their attempt in the 1980s to bring the concept of light (low calorie) beers to the UK. On a simple ‘sip test’ there was nothing particularly bad – or good – about lager brands like Hemeling and Arctic light. But his more realistic ‘session testing’ methodology showed that on the production lines at British Leyland and Ford, where, after long shifts, lager drinkers would drink 6 to 8 pints a night, 5 nights a week, drinkers experienced an uncomfortable physical response which Derek believed was to do with the reduced calorific content of their beer consumption over time. Significant rejection by these core drinkers explained why light beers failed dismally after making a promising debut. 

It was also Derek who first showed me the importance of what he called Key Drinkers: the comparatively small number of consumers responsible for very significant amounts of the alcohol consumed in the UK. A few years later accompanied by Ken Baker and the big data of the TGI, we walked in Derek’s footsteps and created a behavioural segmentation model of alcoholic drinks which we called Measure for Measure..

Amongst the groups we identified was The Dinner Party Set, young upscale and well-educated adults who accounted for 8% of the population but a whacking 49% of the gin market, 44% of the Scotch market and 28% of the wine market. Using the latest geo-demographic mapping techniques, we were able to explore the UK geography of the Dinner Party Set at post code level and we created a series of maps which were subsequently used by retailers to site their shops and who knows, perhaps even the odd bottle bin.

The big irony of course was that twenty-five years later, it was the children of the Dinner Party Setters who were in the vanguard of the renaissance of gin and the great ginoflation which followed their enthusiasm for botanical micro- connoisseurship.