Down at the Old Bull and Bush

It’s over two years since my friend and colleague, Tom Tracey, died. I went to the ceremony at Golders Green Crematorium on a wet day in June.

I’d first got to know him when he was the brilliant and iconoclastic creative director of Lintas in New Zealand in the 80s.

There were eight of us in all there at the service. For someone so interesting and engaging and creative, it was strange that there were so few. But then Liverpudlian Tom had lived his adult life all over the world, everywhere it seemed except London. The lady who led the ceremony read out loving remembrances and tributes from Tom's friends in far off lands.

It struck me that Tom made relationships with people wherever he happened to be. And that he tended to move on, appreciating each place, and his colleagues and friends there, without needing to hold on to the past.

At the ceremony I told the story of Tom's campaign for Unilever's Rinso, one that he was intensely proud of. Following orders from HQ, the brand name was dropped in favour of one of those international brands, although Rinso was right up there among the most trusted, even loved, products in New Zealand. It had been patiently renovated by Kiwi marketers over the best part of a century. Tom thought it right and proper that there should be a proper goodbye to such a constant friend, even if it was only a washing powder. What a paradox that he himself should leave us so quietly, without fuss.

Afterwards we repaired to the Old Bull and Bush in Hampstead. Somewhat embarrassed, we sang the chorus of Florrie Forde’s hit song from the early 1900s in the saloon bar - “Come, come, come and make eyes at me, down at...”, and we raised a glass to him.

Renovation and Corporate Culture

Skoda is of course a rather exceptional example of successful brand renovation (“Renovate or die,” 1 January 2010). Perhaps more realistic and valuable is the case of the great consumer goods giant, Nestlé.

Over several decades I’ve worked on a dozen or more of Nestlé's brands, getting to know the style of the company quite well. A couple of years ago I interviewed their Chairman, Peter Brabeck. It was he that recognised that renovation was a critical core competence of the business.

Nevertheless, there was even more they could do to ensure that their major brands and products stayed relevant to changing consumer needs and ahead of competition. So from the start of his period of leadership, renovation became a key pillar (alongside innovation) – and this has continued throughout Brabeck’s stewardship of the company.

He told me that he had first realised the importance of renovation very early in his career, when he was a young ice cream salesman. “It’s now a key driving force for our business,” he said to me. And from Kit-Kat to Maggi, that’s exactly what they did.

Is Nestlé the only major corporation to recognise so explicitly the value and power of keeping everyone focused on renovation? Certainly it seems to me that having it separate from, but parallel to, innovation is good and helpful to managers, making clear that both are vitally important to building sustained profitable growth.

And if you aspire to be truly world-class at renovation, it has to be a clear corporate priority, continuously activated, supported, communicated, recognised and rewarded by the top team.

Renovate or die

For years I’ve been a high priest of brand renovation, battling against the self-fulfilling effect of the so-called “brand life-cycle”.

For far too long BCG has made life-cycle theory fashionable through their “Boston Box” matrix, as a result of which far too many brands with potentially healthy and profitable futures have been consigned first to the unsupported “Cash Cows” box, before being consigned to the “Dogs” box, then to be withdrawn from the market altogether. What a terrible waste of potential shareholder value.

One of the most astonishing renovation stories is Skoda cars. Bought by VW, they were transformed from joke to cult status, from death-trap to top-of-class. Why does a Skoda have a double rear-window heater? To make sure your hands stay warm when you’re pushing it. That’s how it used to be.

In Communist Czechoslovakia, Skoda had some 98% of the local market, but customers had to put up with extremes of unreliability and poor performance. A clue to the low quality of the product is that one third of the workforce was drafted in from the local prison on a daily basis.

VW decided to invest heavily in product development and manufacture, but perhaps most importantly, they worked hard to create a totally different culture, initially bringing in experienced VW managers from other countries to work alongside their Czech colleagues. They built new relationships with key suppliers. There were no more convicts on the assembly line.

Quite quickly product quality improved and, with the introduction of new models and some honest marketing programmes, their reputation started to rise and sales in tandem. In fact, within a few years, in Britain they became the marque with the highest repeat purchase – an amazing 82% of owners going back for more. The Daily Mirror described the whole thing as “history’s greatest comeback since Bobby Ewing stepped out of the shower.”

Have you been involved in successfully renovating a brand that otherwise might have been consigned to history?