Salute the Queen and Eat the Flag!

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From the Brand Historian’s Timeline: 1889

June 11th, 1889 was an important day in the history of pizza, for this was the day Raffaele Esposito paid tribute to his Queen at Pizzeria Brandi by naming his latest creation pizza Margherita. The woman in question was Margherita of Savoy, the tall stately blonde who had married her dull cousin Umberto to become Queen of the recently unified kingdom of Italy. 

Esposito’s tribute was no fawning flattery but a piece of calculated nation-branding which used the popular street food to emphasise the identity of the new kingdom. The new pizza’s colour palette of tomato, mozzarella and basil (the sun on a plate) reflected the new tricolour flag, created following the success of the great Risorgimento, the re-unification which had been achieved following the fall of the Napoleon. 

It had been down to the combination of a clever politician’s strategic choice of the right allies and a chancer-of-a-general’s sword that had succeeded in unifying, at least in theory, the patchwork of states and entities which Metternich had famously labelled a geographical expression. In the aftermath of successive victories over the Austrians and French, the new kingdom started to industrialise, especially in the North and there was considerable investment in railways and other modernising infrastructure. It was against this dynamic background that a number of the iconic brands of Italian cuisine were created which built variously on nona’s cooking, the exploitation of new technologies like canning (apertization) or by just spotting the worldwide export opportunity for tasty food from the poor south.

Francesco Cirio from Piedmont, Giovani Buitoni from Tuscany and Pietro Barilla from Emilia Romagna spent the 1870s laying the foundations of world-famous tomato sauce and pasta franchises. In 1882, Egidio Galbaniestablished the creamery in Como where eventually Bel Paese cheese would be produced. In Queen Margherita’s hometown of Turin, Luigi Lavazza created in 1895 a successful coffee business and built his reputation based on coffee blending skills which at the time was quite an innovation.

But whilst the decades of the nineteenth century were great years of Italian brand building, they were notoriously unstable politically, veering between radical socialism, liberalism and conservative reaction. By the time Umberto and Marguerite paid their return trip to Naples in 1889 (they had been Crown Prince and Princess of Naples before ascending the throne) the royal couple were equally divided. Umberto kept many mistresses and continued a high-profile affair with Eugenia, a Visconti Duchess who was one of the Queen’s ladies-in-waiting. Umberto’s endorsement of the regime’s harsh repression of food rioters in Milan made him a target for the anarchists. Having survived one attempt, he would not be so lucky in 1900 when the anarchists finally got him at Monza.

His wife lived on until 1926 enjoying la belle epoque while it lasted, but the fame of the pizze that bore her name ensured she would now adorn a million menus. Just six years after the couple’s visit to Naples, where the Queen may well have eaten her first Margherita, the first pizzeria in the United States opened at 53 Spring St. The triumphant march of Eataly had now begun. 

Music to enjoy your pizze with (extra prosciutto, per favore)

Messa da Requiem Guiseppe Verdi

Limestone and Lymeswold: Branding Place

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From the BrandHistorian’s Timeline: 1982

The power of place in the art of branding cannot be overestimated. The Brand Historian’s favourite white wine – at least when someone else is paying – is Meursault. This mouth-watering greeny-gold burgundy with the eyewatering price is produced with Chardonnay grapes by just a handful of vineyards on the Jurassic marls and limestones of the Côte de Beaune. If my host really wants to push the boat out, I might choose one of the Premier crus, perhaps Les Perrières or Les Genevrières which are the buttery big mommas of the Burgundy slopes, where terroir really does add some value.

Provenance has long been a powerful means of differentiating and adding value to commodities. From Italy, we relish Amalfi lemons or Parma hams; from France, we seek out Crème Fraiche D’Isigny and Roquefort. And whilst the UK has been a little slower compared with the Italians and French to get into the Appellation game, protected status has been increasingly sought by British specialities like Scotch beef, Welsh lamb, Cumberland sausage and Melton Mowbray pies. In the cheese market, the world beyond cheddar has long been represented by an array of Territorials which proudly boast their geographic origins: for example, Wensleydale, Single Gloucester and Shropshire Blue. But branding based on a provenance is not without its dangers, as shown by the 1982 launch of a new cheese called Lymeswold.

The Milk Marketing Board was a UK state-run organization of dairy farmers set up to manage the milk supply chain. In the 1980s, there was a surplus of milk, so the Board set up a commercial arm called Dairy Crest, tasked with finding profitable new markets.

One of Dairy Crest’s first actions was to set up an innovation skunkworks team ominously called the SPG. One of several opportunities the SPG identified was the market for soft cheese, exemplified by French cheeses like Brie and Camembert. While the market was much smaller than classic British hard cheeses, it was upscale, aspirational, and becoming increasingly popular. The team soon identified a promising candidate product – a soft (slightly) blue cheese with an edible white rind which tasted good. Using a classic 1980s product development programme, which included the obligatory mini-van test, the product was set for a full-scale launch. The brand name selected and endorsed by the consumer was to be Wymeswold which it was thought connoted the traditional, bucolic values of rural England.

But just before the national campaign broke, it was discovered there actually was a town called Wymeswold, located in Leicestershire, hundreds of miles from Somerset where the new cheese was being produced. With a launch date looming, the decision was made to call the product Lymeswold.

Lymeswold was launched nationally in 1982 with a high-profile ad campaign (French dudes in 2CV failing to discover the delicious cheese cunningly hidden by the Brits) and PR (government minister and grateful pet dog.) Initially, the product sold well. Indeed, so well, there were supply problems.

But the first English new cheese for 200 years, as the PR described it, turned out to be a classic shooting star. A combination of significant problems in scaling-up production, product reliability issues and a trade relationship disaster resulted in the brand’s investment programme being first curtailed and eventually cancelled. Lymeswold past its sell by and was eventually removed from the market in 1992: the pleasant tasting soft cheese with a made-up name dreamt up at the last minute by the marketing men had become a bit of a joke and a Private Eye running gag.

A sad, personal postscript to this story came later when the Brand Historian visited a Dairy Crest creamery and saw a mountain of now redundant Lymeswold cheese moulds. 

The sudden rise and fall of Lymeswold shows how the power of place can help make or break a product. Lymeswold’s subsequent (and brief) re-appearance as Westminster Blue shows how in the age of political satire, we were still taking chances with brand naming.

1982 Playlist 

The Land of Make-Believe Bucks Fizz.

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

The Most European Beer, Probably?

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Nationalism and Beer at the Heart of Europe

Geronimus Hatt rented a cellar and brewed his first beer in Zür Kanone in Strasbourg in 1664. At the time, Strasbourg was located in the Holy Roman Empire, which Voltaire famously quipped wasn’t holy, wasn’t Roman and wasn’t an Empire. It was one of several proudly independent Free Imperial Cities, a number of which were then found in the Rhineland. This is one of history’s great frontlines and particularly so in Early Modern Europe where it featured frequently in the long running wars between anxious French monarchs and the Hapsburgs whose marital strategy of JVs had effectively encircled them.

In Hatt’s time, the wars were going in favour of the French, where under the leadership of its great Cardinals and their protégé, Louis XIV, France was gradually edging eastwards into the upper and lower Rhine with the objective of consolidating its borders. The long years of war had been good for the Alsatian beer business and armies from all over Europe had visited Strasbourg for a spot of R&R: ravage and refreshment.

 By the 1660s, there were now over 20 breweries. But as Hatt, the cooper’s son who’d married the baker’s daughter, built his business, the French were getting ever closer and in 1681 The Sun King’s army marched into Strasbourg. Overnight Herr Hatt became Monsieur Jérôme Hatt, the first of a long line of brewers to bear the name and build the business throughout France.

By the nineteenth century, the growing population in French cities and the coming of the railroads which could transport barrels of beer into the heart of Paris boulevards provided the opportunity for the Hatt family to further expand production and they opened a new brewery in the Faubourg Kronenbourg, which would of course later impact on how the beer is known today.

But meanwhile there remained some major unfinished business in the Rhineland, and in 1871, the Prussian army returned to Strasbourg, and this time it was not for beer tourism. They arrived again in 1914, and just in case a third time might be luckier, they came again in 1940. It wasn’t until 1945 that the Alsace question was finally(?) answered. But by then, Hatt’s beer was perhaps just un peu Frallemand.

It was just after the end of Second World War that another Jérôme Hatt made Kronenbourg (with a K, an interwar Frenchified Cronenbourg was dropped) the main brand focus of the concern, and with its familiar and ubiquitous Rot and Wiss label, it quickly became one of the leading beers of France. After its merger with Kanterbräu in 1986, Brasseries Kronenbourg looked safely dominant but then a familiar pattern in the narrative re-appeared. BSN, wanting to focus on well-being (aka yoghurt and water) sold Brasseries Kronenbourg to Scottish and Newcastle – there had in fact been a long-standing special relationship with the UK, and in 1952, a brand called 1664 had been brewed in honour of Queen Elizabeth’s accession.

But barely had the dust settled on this deal before in the great Game of Brewopoly, Kronenbourg was sold on to Carlsberg.

It was shortly this in 2010 that the Brand Historian received his dream commission. He was invited to organise a piss-up-in-a-brewery. In the Request for Proposal, this event was referred to as a strategic brainstorming, and the brewery concerned was to be the old Kronenbourg brewery in Strasbourg. Three hundred years since Bière Hatte Luxe was first brewed, the French, Germans, Brits, Danes and Russians were back in the heart of Europe for a spot of R&R.

Party like it’s 1664: 

Miserere Jean Baptiste Lully

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

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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.

Est semper lux in tenebris

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From the Brand Historian’s Timeline:

July 1942. The war in Europe is going badly. The U boat wolf packs are enjoying another period of great success against Allied shipping. Convoy PQ17 has just assembled but will lose two thirds of its ships on its voyage to Russia.  Rommel’s Afrika Korps has retaken Tobruk, and the Wehrmacht, having captured Sevastopol, is now threatening the Crimean oil fields and Stalingrad. Millions of Europeans are already living in semi-starvation as German forces have cut off the areas in the Ukraine which produce half of all Soviet wheat and pork supplies.

Meanwhile, following the horrendous agenda of the conference at Wannsee, the Nazi plan to exterminate the Jews is now underway, as the first group of 6000 from the Warsaw ghetto are killed in the gas chambers of Treblinka on July 23rd. 

But even on the darkest of summer days, there can still be an inspiring light and the promise of better things. On July 31st The Oxford Committee for Famine Relief is formed which will become celebrated the world over as Oxfam. 

Shortly afterwards, a small group gathered in the Old Library of St Mary’s the Virgin, the University Church in Oxford. This was the inaugural meeting of the committee and it proved to be a perfect balance of personalities. Dick Milford who took the chair, was the Vicar of St Mary’s, Henry Gillett was a former Lord Mayor of the City and a leading Quaker. George Murray was a prominent Greek scholar and humanist, and his wife, the well-connected Lady Mary Howard. The grit in the oyster was provided by Cecil Jackson Cole, one of the most successful social entrepreneurs of the Twentieth century and the committee’s business brain.

Whilst some of the group had already been involved in charitable work including helping with the flood of refugees arriving in Oxford in the late 1930s, what brought this group together in the ancient library overlooking Radcliffe Square was the famine that was now causing so many deaths in Greece and which, at least in part, was caused by Allied war efforts.

At the start of the war, Greece had managed to resist the Italian army, Germany’s ally, but in 1941, Germany intervened and quickly overran the country, dividing it up between themselves, the Italians and Bulgaria, the other European member of Axis. The occupying forces pursued a strategy of plunder and pillage and brutally suppressed resistance. Meanwhile, the Allied naval blockade effectively stopped food supplies getting into Greece which resulted in a long and particularly horrific famine. “Send us food or send us coffins!” was the plea that the Oxford Committee responded to, and thus was started in the middle of all that darkness, a small group which became the global movement of millions of people to end poverty.

Music from 1942:

Fanfare for the Common Man Aaron Copland

A Tale of Two Yoghurts

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From the Brand Historian’s Timeline: 1919 and 1965

1066 and All That remains one of the Brand Historian’s favourite books, celebrating if not all the English history that actually happened, then at least all the English history that we can remember. One of the gags from Sellers and Yeatman’s hilarious, yet perceptive text is the description of the two sides who contended the English Civil War: The Cavaliers were Wrong but Wromantic, whereas the Roundheads were Right but Repulsive. It’s a wonderfully poetic description which resonates with me in the function versus emotion branding battles of the last century: P&G’s Ariel against Lever’s Persil, or Shell Power against BP Ultimate. But this clever dichotomy is particularly apposite to the story of the two brands that built the yoghurt market.

Stories of the medical efficacy of thickened fermented milk started circulating in early modern Europe. A particularly desperate King Francois I of France had been suffering with incurable diarrhoea when a doctor from the household of his ally, Suleiman the Magnificent suggested he try a few spoonfuls of yoghurt which soon produced much comfort and relief.

But it was at the beginning of the 20th century when yoghurt became one of the first functional foods to really take off. Ilya Mechnikov was a Russian scientist and Nobel Prize winner working at the Pasteur Institute in Paris who was convinced that the long lifespan of Bulgarian peasants was down to their daily consumption of a spoonful of Lactobacillus and began to popularise the idea. Inspired by what he’d heard and what he knew from his upbringing as a Sephardic Jew in Salonika, Isaac Carasso set up a small yoghurt business in Barcelona and called it Danone, after his young son Daniel. Shortly afterwards the family moved over the border into France.

Danone’s journey from the 1920s to become one of the great empires of nutrition with outposts in over 120 countries has been an eventful one. Interrupted by the Second World War when the family had to outrun the Nazis, Carasso setup a new business in the United States called, to suit local tastes, Dannon. After the war, Danone returned to France and merged with Gervais, a Normandy cheese business famous for its small pots called petit-suisses. Gervais-Danone was subsequently absorbed into BSN, a food, drink, brewing and packaging conglomerate. It might have got lost in the portfolio, but to quote Sellers and Yeatman, it was Danone who came out on top, becoming the heart of a global health and nutrition business, powered by its pillar brands: Activia, Actimel, Alpro and Nutricia. The mission would be supported with the health-giving magic margins of its water brands, Evian and Volvic.

Having watched the development of Danone over the years, I’ve always thought that there was something of the repressed Puritan about it and the white-coated nutritional stormtroopers who throng its Institutes on many continents. A good test of brand personality is to imagine the kind of party a brand would throw and whether you would want an invitation. I certainly can imagine the Danone party, but I’m not sure I’m ready for a do at a sanatorium just yet. 

Yoplait is the other great Gallic yoghurt which built the market, but with a suck of the spoon that is decidedly more sensual, it has always been much more my kind of party. Whilst Danone was launched amidst the austerity of the years immediately after the Great War, Yoplait is a brand of the 1960s and has always radiated a bright, sunny confidence. Launched in 1965, Yoplait was the result of six independent French co-operative dairies coming together to move down the supply chain and make more money for their farmer-members. Yoplait’s Petite Fleur logo had six petals, each representing one of its founding creameries.

Taking advantage of Danone’s merger and acquisition odyssey, Yoplait grew rapidly in France with an innovative range of product brands like Petits Filous, Silhouette, Yop and Calin. Majoring on fruit, taste and enjoyment and reflecting changing consumer lifestyles, Yoplait was modern, chic and just a little bit sexy. International development facilitated by licensing the brand and strong product innovation like the cleverly packaged Frubes, helped Yoplait become the other global brand of yoghurt in the world’s fast growing rows of chiller cabinets, especially in North America.

The United States has been a huge market for Danone and Yoplait, who successfully introduced the yoghurt pot to breakfast tables to compete with the likes of Eggo and Kellogg’s cereals. But in the last decade, Danone and Yoplait’s dominance has been successfully challenged by an insurgent which has taken the yoghurt category back to its Balkan roots.

Hamdi Ulukaya’s Chobani is a thick, Greek yoghurt with a brand wrapper which mixes provenance, craft skills, taste and lifestyle in a compelling package that millennials love. Both incumbents have been knocked off balance, but perhaps not surprisingly it is the more Cavalier-spirited Yoplait that has lost most share. Nutrition and taste (or taste and nutrition) have been and will continue to be the defining axes of the yoghurt market, but the success of Chobani shows how brand leaders in established markets need to keep their eyes open for New Model competitors, be they Roundhead or Cavalier flavoured.

Music from 1965

Toujours des Beaux Jours Sheila

An Earl, a Brownie and a Patio Party

/ Paul Christopher Walton / Leave a comment

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