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

/ Paul Christopher Walton / Leave a comment

The Brand Historian’s Timeline: 1960

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Bulmers 1960 Playlist:

Woodpecker Yellow Dot Bikini Brian Hyland

Strongbow Apache The Shadows

The Sauce of Milord!

/ Paul Christopher Walton / Leave a comment

From the Brand Historian’s Timeline: 1837

Conventional marketing wisdom says that versatility is the Fool’s Gold of brand positioning, because nearly always it’s more of a theoretical benefit than an actual one. As the new tech software brands like Lotus 123 (with spreadsheets) and Harvard Graphics (with presentation charting) showed in the 1980s, what customers respond best to is the killer app. 

But Lea and Perrins Worcestershire Sauce is the flavoursome exception to that rule. Since its mysterious appearance on the first cruise ships in the 1830s, Lea and Perrins has been perking up posh cheese on toast, sprinkling oysters, boosting burgers, spiking Blood Marys and adding a little relish to crisps and steak tartare. As the early advertisements promised, Lea and Perrins Worcestershire sauce ‘adds a peculiar piquancy applicable to every dish.’

Whilst the exact circumstances of its creation are still a little hazy, the brand appeared during the Golden Age of lotions and potions, elixirs and snake oils that found their way into the marketplaces of the new industrial landscapes of the mid-nineteenth century. John Wheely Lea and William Henry Perrins were Worcester pharmacists who sold a goodly variety of this stuff, including patent trusses, worming tablets for horses, hair restorer and Cheltenham Salts. But it was the dark meaty sauce of decomposed anchovies, fruit and spices brewed up in their kitchens behind their chemist shop which made their name.

With claims to be the secret recipe of an English milord (who may or may not have been the Duke of Wellington’s wingman), brought back from India, and patronised by the Gentry, this umami power pack of taste was soon being exported all over the world where it fired up the locals and their dishes from dim sum to Creole stews, satay to barbecues. Brits on a Grand Tour loved it too, keeping a bottle or two in their luggage as a handy tastemaker and a secret medicine to keep the nasties away.

Lea and Perrins and their sauce did very well, and the Perrins family became serious benefactors, including building the huge St John’s Parish Church of Barmouth in Snowdonia which I note looks to be a similar brownstone colour to that of Worcester Sauce.*

Following its sale to HP Foods in the 1930s, the brand has become something of a rich orphan passed from one large corporation to another. Since 2005, it has been part of Heinz Kraft where I have no doubt it continues to be a strong contributor. In the time of COVID, travel is sadly denied to us, but when, before too long I hope, we are flying again, and the drinks trolley arrives with all the usual suspects including the familiar bottle of L&P, please raise your Bloody Mary and toast the chemists of Broad Street, Worcester whose salesmanship transcends all the known laws of brand positioning. A little piquancy can go a long way….

Music to relish:

Piano Concerto No2 Mendelssohn

* For more on Barmouth and St John’s, please visit mariansonthemawddach.com

The Green revolution that began with a sausage

/ Paul Christopher Walton / Leave a comment

From the Brand Historian’s Timeline: 1889

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

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

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

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

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

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

Music to enjoy with your Erbswurst out in the field:

Das Rheingold Richard Wagner 

Empire Building

/ Paul Christopher Walton / 1 Comment

From the Brand Historian’s Timeline: 1759

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Music to enjoy your pint with:

Heart of Oak William Boyce and David Garrick

Or check out a poem at:

The Transformation (Under the influence of Arthur Guinness)

1947: The Merchant of Death

/ Paul Christopher Walton / 1 Comment

It was 1947 when the murders began in Tudor Close. Anthony had planned them on long, tedious afternoons at the Birmingham armaments factory where he was working to help win the war. He hadn’t meant to be a serial killer on this scale. His first love was the piano and he had toured the world and some of its great country houses accompanying a Norwegian soprano called Kirsten Flagstad. But that was in a former life before he became the Merchant of Death. 

He had a number of accomplices lined up to help him including an ex-soldier, a nurse, a shapely femme fatale and a slightly greasy looking priest he called Reverend Green, whose speciality was death by lead piping. Anthony Pratt was the creator of Cluedo (or Clue as it known in the USA) the great board game of find-the-murderer set in an English country House.

Cluedo was one a series of great board game brands for the masses that appeared in the middle of the Twentieth Century, each taking a well-known ‘world’ and designing addictive gameplay around it, all made possible by advances in cheap colour printing and packaging. Escalado (1928) featured the excitement of horseracing and betting; Monopoly (1935) the pursuit of property and capitalist zero sum fun; and Buccaneer(1937) mixed piracy with Yo Ho Ho and treasure.

Pratt was convinced that murder could be a huge business based on the sales of whodunits (the word was coined by Donald Gordon in 1939) and the popularity of writers like Agatha Christie whose The Body in the Library was a big hit in 1942. Having designed a prototype called Murder, he was introduced to Norman Watson, the Managing Director of Waddingtons who held the UK licence for Monopoly. Watson loved it but changed the name to Cluedo (a classic worger of clue and ludo, the latin word for I play) and made a one or two other changes to Pratt’s original designs which included rebranding Colonel Yellow and Nurse White to the more familiar Colonel Mustard and cook, Mrs White.

The launch of the game coincided with the re-opening of Chatsworth and Longleat after the Second World War, and as the crowds came back to the great houses, amateur gumshoes returned to the billiard room and conservatory in search of the murderer most foul.

I think I played my first game of Cluedo in the early 1960s but to be honest I don’t think I was ever too successful at the pen-and-paper deductive stuff. But many years later I found the game and Anthony’s wonderful characters a superb way of teaching people about the human quality of great brands.

I wonder how many young brand managers on Unilever’s Business Education Programme I have asked to name their favourite Cluedo character? And when Miss Scarlett or perhaps Colonel Mustard were suggested, I asked for a description of their favourite character’s features and personality – this was always an easy task for them to do, and the perfect segue for me to point out that they are in fact describing a red plastic counter.

Music to Sleuth by:

Annie Get Your Gun Irving Berlin

Tristan and Isolde Richard Wagner ( for Kirsten)

The Pasty is a Foreign Country?

/ Paul Christopher Walton / 1 Comment

From the Brand Historian’s Timeline: 1969

It’s 1969, and just as the Lunar Module Eagle is planning to execute its historic Moon landing, the Brand Historian has been playing cricket in Walsall, a town currently located in the ancient county of Staffordshire but about to repositioned both topographically and stylistically in the new concrete metropolis of the West Midlands. And just as Neil takes his giant step for man, Geoffrey Ginster is also about to make his distinctive mark on the universe.

Geoff Ginster has strong family connections with Walsall. His forebears were in business selling horse manure to Black Country foundries whose moulds were made with a mixture of dung and sand. But in 1969, he has left Longwood Lane, taken his share of the family inheritance and driven south-westwards. After a sojourn in Devon, getting to grips with clotted cream and the Milk Marketing Board, he travels further westwards (218 miles from Walsall) in a move that will make his name and fortune.

The pasty is a quintessential English food with an ancient lineage and interesting relatives like empanadas and pirogs. Simply put, a pasty is a baked pastry with a meat and vegetable filling, folded in the shape of a half-moon with a crimped edge to seal it. It has been eaten by people of all sorts, including Jane Seymour, Henry VIII’s third, and arguably most successful wife, although I honestly cannot remember if Hilary Mantel describes a scene in Wolf Hall in which she and Cromwell share its delights. Shakespeare was also quite partial to pasties and made a rather unsavoury modification to the traditional recipe in Titus Andronicus.

At some stage in its history, the pasty became inextricably linked with Cornwall and by the mid-nineteenth century travellers were raving about, “The Cornish pasty, which so admirably comprises a dinner in itself—meat, potatoes, and other good things well cooked and made up into so portable a form.” It became the food of choice for miners from Redruth to Nevada –always generous, filling, long lasting and convenient.

To return to 1969 and the birth of the Ginster Pasty: Geoff opened his first bakery in a derelict egg packing shed in Callington with a staff of four and a production target of 24 – this we can assume was easily achieved. Ginsters using the proverbial ‘secret recipe’ (this time supplied by a ship’s cook) and offering the punter down to earth honest fill, started to appear in pubs, restaurants and seaside catering sites throughout the South West. Soon Ginster was employing over 30 people and making more than 48,000 pasties.

In 1977, Geoff decided to retire and sold the business to Samworth Brothers, the pie and pastry magnates who successfully built upon his work to create one of Britain’s most powerful and ubiquitous food brands. Ginsters pretty much owns the category and proudly celebrates Cornwall as the home of the Nation’s favourite pasty. It all seems a long way from Longwood Lane, Walsall, but not as far as the Sea of Tranquillity, which that July night I remember looking at fondly from a bench outside the pavilion.

Music for Space Hoppers

Living in the Past JethroTull

Essential Reading Matter:

Children of Albion Michael Horovitz

In a Parallel Universe

/ Paul Christopher Walton / Leave a comment

From the Brand Historian’s Timeline: 1995

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Roll with It Oasis

I Should Coco Supergrass

We 3 Kings of Shaving Are…

/ Paul Christopher Walton / 2 Comments

From The Brand Historian’s Timeline:

1901-1993-2012

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

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

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

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

A playlist to shave by:

1901 American Patrol Sousa’s Band

1993 Mr Vain Culture Beat

2012 We Are Young Fun ft Janelle Monae

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

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