How's your German?

 

I am currently steeped in German Romantic poetry – in particular Schiller, Schulze, Mayrhofer, Hölty, Heine, Müller and the Schlegel brothers ‒ preparing for concerts in Oxford filled with Schubert’s settings of their work.

 

This brought to mind one of those forks in the road that confront us from time to time. I was working very happily for Garland-Compton in its pre-Saatchi days, running our biggest client, Rowntree.

 

They had recently taken over a leading competitor, Mackintosh’s, and the brilliant, glamorous young Tony Mackintosh had become leader of their merged European division.

 

Tony would sweep into our offices in Charlotte Street, brought there in his black-chauffeur-driven white limo, a vision, all blue jeans and fur coat. The latter he would hand immediately to our receptionist, she on the verge of meltdown, and ask for me.

 

It was all very 1969.

 

In due course, Tony summoned me to his offices – not in Halifax or Norwich or York, where the major factories and offices were (and are), but in a fine Georgian house in Park Lane, Mayfair. There he invited me to leave the agency and join his team in a senior marketing role. I was flattered, of course, but turned him down ‒ graciously, I hope.

 

At one point in the meeting, we discussed European languages. The plain fact is that, although I have some words and phrases in most of them, I am reasonably fluent only in English.

 

“How's your German?” he asked.

 

“Well, I’m familiar with a good deal of Romantic poetry,” I said, “but I’m not sure that the vocabulary would be very useful in marketing meetings.”

 

Here’s a sample, useful in recent days in Oxford: Abendstern (evening star); Einsamkeit (solitude); Abschied (farewell); Klage (lament); Weinen (tears); Heimweh (homesickness); Sehnsucht (longing); Erwartung (anticipation)…

Improving and outflanking

I’m very clear with clients that if they haven’t got what it takes to be breakthrough innovators, they should concentrate on studying competitors products and services, existing and new, and outflank them by making improvements in key areas. And moving fast.

After all, that’s substantially what has taken Apple to their current dominant position. And Samsung after Apple.

The power of this strategy first struck me in the years that I worked on new product development with the Rowntree company in York (now owned by Nestlé). It was frustrating that the senior managers would initially be positive about new ideas, but over time it became clear that nothing would actually happen.

Then, one day, one of them took me aside and explained to me the source of their success. “So many of our biggest and most profitable brands were developed as improvements on existing products made by other companies, usually abroad,” he told me.

All this came back to me in recent days, as the Rowntree chocolatier, Brian Sollitt, who died recently, has been feted in the British media as the “genius” behind many of Rowntree’s new products – Lion Bar, Yorkie, Drifter, Matchmakers and, most famously, After Eight.

But while Mr Sollitt undoubtedly was a skilled improver of products, he was not really an innovator. For example, the idea for the wafer thin chocolate mint, After Eight, came from an existing local product in Sweden.

Focusing on the trivial

Pace Professor Parkinson, there are occasions when it’s really useful to focus on the trivial.

My largest client at Saatchi’s, Rowntree, could so easily destroy new work – strategic or campaigns – by re-discussing the fundamental pillars of the thinking behind it. In truth, they were not very good with new ideas.

So the tactic I evolved for dealing with this was to ask their considered opinion on some trivial, inconsequential aspect. This could easily be spun out to occupy the majority of the meeting.

Waiting for the right moment

I was shopping yesterday in the supermarket and, walking down the confectionery isle, looking for what my ten year old might enjoy, I stopped dead in front of a fairly recent new product ‒ Rowntree’s Pick & Mix.

It’s not that it’s such a radical innovation. In fact it’s a perfectly obvious one, given that the company produces Fruit Gums, Fruit Pastilles, Jellytots, Tooty Frooties etc.

The reason that I stopped in my tracks was the realisation that this was an idea that I’d vigorously proposed to the company nearly forty years ago. I thought it was a no-brainer then. But they didn’t. 

Were they right? I doubt it. By now they could have had four decades-worth of building a decent brand, with all the attendant sales and profit.

The company didn’t seem to have marked Erica Jong’s invocation:

And the trouble is, if you don’t risk anything, you risk even more.

Still, I’m happy its moment has come!

My first new product

Our adorable ten year old daughter seems to relish more than ever the unwrapping of Christmas presents, but, surprisingly, it was the Jellytots that seemed to create the most immediate joy. So I thought I’d re-publish my blogpost about their launch. It was the first that I published – on 27 October 2009 and doubtless had a microscopic readership then:

When I left JWT, where I’d had a very menial series of jobs starting with the mail room, I was lucky enough to land my first real break in “adland”, as Assistant Account Executive on what was then the UK’s largest single TV advertiser, Rowntree’s. I was twenty-three.

It shows the subservient role that innovation had then, that while the experienced folk were managing the main established brands, I was immediately assigned to the two new ones in the pipeline, a carbonated soft drink brand called POP (that sank without trace), and a small round fruity sweetie in a bag aimed at young children and their concerned mums.

That one, Jellytots, passed its fortieth birthday two years ago. Tightly targeted, it was never going to be a major player, but the fact that it still holds the stage is testament to the clarity of thinking and creative expression, in both company and agency, that went into the brand’s initial strategy, product, packaging and advertising.

Rather extraordinarily, Jellytots was the favourite of my now seven year-old when she was around four.

There is no doubt that I learned massive amounts about what works and what doesn’t in innovation from that seminal experience long ago.

Chunking up Kit-Kat

A client friend, Kees Langerak, was appointed to be marketing director at Nestlé’s confectionery business in York.

After a couple of weeks, he called me: “This business seems scarcely to have innovated at all in years,” he said. “Fact is we are tremendously pushed for cash right now, so I really can’t afford to pay you. But would you do us a favour and advise me on what I might do about it?”

He knew that I had worked in the past extensively with what had been the Rowntree business and so knew the brands intimately. And he had always been an exemplary client!

“I’ll call you back in ten minutes,” I told him.

And this is what I advised: “Invite lots of people from around the business to come into one big room, and ask them to bring their favourite innovation idea that’s been rejected or ignored in recent years. Set the room up as a ‘street-market’ and enable everyone to display their nominations. And then pick out the biggest ideas that can be implemented quickly.”

Out of this simple exercise, in just a few months, came Chunky Kit-Kat. It doubled the size of that already massive brand.

Spending on marketing in hard times

When I started work on Rowntree’s Fruit Gums and Fruit Pastilles in 1967, my rather ancient and knowledgeable boss, Michael Evans, told me that the reason those brands had survived the Second World War was that the company had continued to advertise throughout that time, whereas many competitors had withdrawn from supporting their brands, which had in turn died post-war.

Now there’s a powerful article in the current issue of Market Leader magazine by my colleague at City University London, Vincent-Wayne Mitchell. He’s Professor of Consumer Marketing there.

The article lines up the reasons that marketing spend in hard times can be highly effective. Here are a few of his points (all derived from recent research):

Increased share of voice (as competitors rein back)
Increased saliency and perceived brand quality
Boosted consumer confidence
Helps to justify premium prices
Increase in brand switchers to our brand
Reduction in media costs in a recession
Market share gains

Mitchell adds: “Breakthrough innovations can build firm value significantly, while small innovations preserve firm value.”

Wise words!

40 Years On with Fox’s Glacier Mints

Everywhere I went in Manila I was astonished to encounter Fox’s Glacier Mints – made in Indonesia.

And, a while ago at home in England, I noticed a TV commercial on air for the brand. It caught my attention because the campaign is now one of the few survivors from my long and very happy career in the advertising business. One of the greatest aims in advertising is to come up with an idea that is “campaignable” – one that will be constantly adaptable and last for several years.

We were originally awarded the account by Rowntree’s following their acquisition of the brand, I think around 1971. So, rather extraordinarily, the campaign has now lasted, in a somewhat low-key way, across four full decades.

I recall so clearly the internal meeting when the idea first surfaced. Every creative team in the agency had been invited to come up with submissions, so the creative director’s office was packed with writers and art directors and their aspirant ideas.

In the midst of a stream of presentations, the youngest, newest copywriter mumbled his way through a five minute scenario: the bear on the mint (representing management) was verbally assaulted by the fox (an angry trade union leader), who simply could not understand why the bear was in what should be his own rightful place up top of that mint.

The creative director of the day told the young man, rather sarcastically, that five minutes was a ridiculous time-length. What was needed was a 30 second campaign. So we moved straight on to the next submission. It was beginning to look as though we had no real winners among them.

It struck me that the rivalry of the fox and bear could run and run – a really big, relevant, adaptable and simple idea. And I said so.

A bit reluctantly, it seemed to me, but because I pressed him hard, the CD asked the oldest, wisest, most experienced writer in his department to pick up the idea and try to turn it into something more practical. This he did. Went on to several important prizes for creativity. And soon got a better job in another agency.

But who was the brilliant young writer whose original idea it had been? I’m ashamed to say that I don’t remember his name. Anyone know?

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.

My first presentation

At twenty-three I was entrusted with presenting the new ad campaign for Rowntree’s Jellies. I think that this was because it was the smallest of our Rowntree brands, with the smallest budget. So it was not deemed sufficiently important for anyone more senior to go up to their headquarters in York with it.

I’d never presented anything before. Ever.

I practiced on the train from King’s Cross, silently running through the strategy, the media plan (whole pages in women’s magazines), the creative variants we’d tried and the approach we finally adopted. Great big display boards with hand-drawn coloured layouts on them.

I was shown into the marketing director Ralph Kaner’s office. There he had a phalanx of Rowntree people from assistant brand manager upwards. They were all somewhat in awe of him.

I did the business. And then I fielded questions, starting with the most junior and working my way up to Ralph. It all seemed to be going quite well.

“I have just one question,” said Ralph. “Why does the headline have these nobbly bits on the letters?”

My mind went a complete blank. Why did it have those nobbly bits? I had no idea.

“Appetite appeal,” I blurted, hoping that it would sound less stupid to them than it did to me. And I smiled nervously.

“I like it,” said Ralph. Campaign sold.

Promise, large promise: the soul of an advertisement

I have been lucky enough to have had a number of teachers and coaches who were very influential in my life, none more than David Bernstein. He was then Creative Director of Garland-Compton (who were to become Saatchi and Saatchi). They had hired me at twenty-three to be an assistant account executive on one of their biggest clients, Rowntree. And I was in deep need of help and guidance.

At the heart of David’s approach to advertising was a simple mantra. To be effective, ads (in any medium) had to have four qualities:

V: Visibility (they must stand out from the crowd - if folks don’t notice them, there’s no point in spending the money)
I: Identity (your ads must be clearly, inextricably, for your brand and no other)
P: Promise (as Dr Johnson put it in the 1750s, “Promise, large promise, is the soul of an advertisement.” Nobody said it better than the doc, Bernstein would add.)
S: Simplicity (so many ads try to do too much and fail in consequence)

VIPS. Clear, memorable. Bang on the money. It served me well through a quarter century in that business. And, since that time, working in innovation.

Ahead of its time?

In my first blogpost, I wrote about how much I had learned about innovation from working intensively on the launch of Jellytots for Rowntree’s back in 1967. Jellytots passed its fortieth birthday in 2007.

In that same year, the agency I was working for, Garland-Compton (which was later to become Saatchi and Saatchi), ran a competition amongst staff members – the aim being to create an innovation of some sort or other in the petfood market. I came up with the winning entry – a new product geared specifically to feeding puppies and kittens. There was nothing of that sort on the market back then.

And last week, sorting out an old file, out tumbled this photograph of me, a cocky twenty-three year old assistant account executive, being given the winner’s cheque by the agency chairman, Leonard Garland.

I was a bit dismayed that the agency didn’t immediately call Mars Petfoods to pitch my idea. No, they said. Although it was a good idea, well argued and well presented, they thought the market would be too small to be of interest to any major petfood manufacturer.

Of course, you know what happened next. Within a few years, all the major players had entered the market, fighting day by day for share.

Was it a question of “ahead of its time”, or just plain short-sightedness? Either way, it’s a syndrome that blights innovators and their best ideas constantly.

M&A – respect and contempt

Why are some mergers and acquisitions brilliantly successful, while most under-perform miserably?

In my experience, it has nothing to do with the numbers – critical mass, cost-savings etc.

It’s something to do with mutual fit. But it’s much more to do with mutual respect.

When Saatchi & Saatchi merged with Garland-Compton - the hottest creative ad agency in the world (but with a somewhat iffy reputation for strategic thinking) went to bed with an excellent strategic agency, who served Procter & Gamble and Rowntree, two of the most demanding and professional clients. So certainly there was a good fit, but, more than that, the people inside the merged business respected and valued each other for their complementary skills and talents from day one.

The result was an inexorable rise to number one, first in the UK, then worldwide.

More recently, when the Interpublic holding company merged two of its global networks, Lowe and Lintas, there were apparently the same ingredients. A leading creative agency with a strong strategic one. But there the comparison ends. Contempt, “sharper than a serpent’s tooth” (as King Lear puts it), was the order of the day. Particularly on the side of the dominant partner, Lowe.

The result? Two plus two equals one. Mass exodus of clients and staff, and a slump in all key markets around the world. (The agency I had chaired in Sydney went from Top 5 to bottom of the Top 50 inside two years.)

It’s never struck me that M&A marriage brokers know this, focused as they are on the numbers (and in particular their own bonuses).

Legend in his own lunchtime

Working on innovation skills with a young team in Sydney, I was asked “What’s the secret of your success?”

Possibilities scrambled through my brain. Was I any kind of real success? What is success anyway? And so on. However, my sense was that they were after a snappy, to-the-point headline.

“Lunch,” I responded. “I attribute any success I’ve had to it. I really built my career around lunch.”

They were aghast. What can he be saying? Nobody does lunch any more. In fact, it’s become symbolic of a bygone, unprofessional, decadent age.

Well, it took me a while, long ago, to discover the potency of the shared midday meal. Up to then, clients (often Procter and Gamble or Rowntree) were endlessly wrecking perfectly good ideas.

Why? Because they were presented (and I mean presented) in the formalised atmosphere of a proper meeting. The consequence was inevitably to push the clients into judge and jury mode. There they would take pride in finding the jugular, the weakest point, with unerring accuracy, sending us back to the start.

What I discovered was that lunch (often, I admit, in an unnecessarily expensive restaurant) provided an environment where challenging new ideas could be tabled and discussed, quite informally, on the basis of mutual interest and exploration. By the time we went into the meeting with client, they had already grasped the new concept, sometimes even promoting it to colleagues.

“It is a midday meal taken at leisure by, ideally, two people,” as the Fleet Street legend, Keith Waterhouse, put it. “Three’s a crowd, four always split like a double amoeba into two pairs, six is a meeting, eight is a conference.”

Sadly, of course, in these more straightened times, lunch may consist of a sandwich and a Coke. But the principle remains the same. Get them into the boat, rowing with you.

Do you lunch?

My first (fairly successful) innovation and a flop

When I left JWT, where I’d had a very menial series of jobs starting with the mail room, I was lucky enough to land my first real break in “adland”, as Assistant Account Executive on what was then the UK’s largest single TV advertiser, Rowntree’s. I was twenty-three.

It shows the subservient role that innovation had then, that while the experienced folk were managing the main established brands, I was immediately assigned to the two new ones in the pipeline, a carbonated soft drink brand called POP (that sank without trace), and a small round fruity sweetie in a bag aimed at young children and their concerned mums.

That one, Jellytots, passed its fortieth birthday two years ago. Tightly targeted, it was never going to be a major player, but the fact that it still holds the stage is testament to the clarity of thinking and creative expression, in both company and agency, that went into the brand’s initial strategy, product, packaging and advertising.

Rather extraordinarily, Jellytots was the favourite of my now seven year-old when she was around four.

There is no doubt that I learned massive amounts about what works and what doesn’t in innovation from that seminal experience long ago.

What was your first innovation?