Myth of the Brand Life Cycle

Throughout my working life, there has been a concept, a marketing trope, a metaphor that has consistently been held as a “truth” – the brand/product life cycle. I won’t bore you with the theory. You know it.

It’s just that it has never seemed to me to have any validity, nor be of any use. Fundamentally it’s derived from the concept of animal life cycles, of course. These happen naturally, whereas brand/product life cycles occur through lack of imagination and lack of will.

Well and continuously marketed and innovated, there’s no reason why brands should not go on indefinitely.

Here are sixteen brands that I’ve personally worked on the marketing and innovation of that were launched well before I was born and will be here long after I’ve gone:

Louis Vuitton (born 1854)
Bacardi (1862)
London Underground (1863)
Nestlé (1866)
Campbell Soup (1869)
Toshiba (1875)
Rowntree’s Fruit Pastilles (1881)
Marks & Spencer (1884)
Coca-Cola (1886)
Smirnoff (1886)
Philips (1891)
Fairy Soap (1898)
Persil (1903)
Evian (1908)
Johnnie Walker (1909)
Electrolux (1919)

The people working so hard on them today are, just as I have been over the years, custodians.

Persil washes whiter – and what?

One of JWT’s biggest clients was and is Unilever. And when I was working in the mailroom of the agency forty plus years ago, there seemed to be a major kerfuffle over developing a new tag-line for Persil washing powder. “Persil washes whiter” had done duty, it seemed, for ever, but the company was demanding something new, something better.

All the front-line creative teams had had a go at it, but the client continuously knocked back every submission as inadequate. What to do next?

Well, there was always Bernard. Bernard Gutteridge was by quite a way the oldest copywriter at the agency. You can still find his poems in anthologies of 1930s verse, alongside WH Auden and Cecil Day Lewis and Stephen Spender. That’s how old he was.

The only problem was that, from opening time on, Bernard was to be found in the hostelry over the road in Hill Street Mayfair, the Coach and Horses. And he could be quite cantankerous when interrupted: "Not just the whole face mutinous," as he put it in his poem, "Private".

“B-B-Bernard…” the delegated young account executive opened.

“What?”

“W-W-Well, you’ll have heard that we’re looking for a new tag-line for Persil, and we wondered if you had some ideas?”

Pause…

“Persil washes whiter – AND IT SHOWS! Now piss off.”

It ran and ran.

I sense that this little story has several messages for us…