Category Archives: Essays

The Time of The Past*

14 Thursday Feb 2019

Posted by in Essays, Poetry

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A Love Story

It’s December 1971 and a clear and frostless night in Walsall.

28837071453_38c3be75cc_b (1)

This was my hometown, located then in Staffordshire, but shortly to be land-grabbed by the spaghetti concrete empire of the West Midlands. I had been to watch my favourite band, Van der Graaf Generator – for the first time.

We had spent our bus-fare on dubious beer, so Dave and I were walking home and re-playing each second of the gig. We reached Lysway Street and had two long miles yet to walk. Suddenly, out of the night coming towards us was Pete, one of my classmates, neither bosom buddy nor foe, arm in arm with Babs,the blonde from Bluecoat whom I had been plotting hard to get to know for months. It had been at a birthday party some weeks earlier that my romantic plans had backfired so ignominiously, and I had – quite unintentionally – managed to bring these two together. So, the loud and existentialist pandemonium that was the hallmark of the band pretty much reflected how I was feeling as I looked at them and said something appropriately bleak to Dave as we carried on into the December night.

At the time, I didn’t appreciate that this was one of life’s big milestones nor did I realise that the narrative had actually been unwinding for more than a year….

Dave, Pete and I were pupils at Queen Mary’s, an old Grammar school with a reputation for making the most of bright lads from working class backgrounds. Two other school friends who play an important role in the story were Steve and Chris. They were in the year above and their attitude was an unpredictable mix of friendliness and condescension. Steve was bit of an intellectual with a decidedly eccentric style that instantly qualified him to become a key influencer and shaper.

One afternoon during the long summer holidays I was at Chris’ house. Steve was playing something called After the Flood on the record player in the living room. “It’s by Van der Graaf Generator, and it’s their epic,” he said fervently without a trace of irony.

While Steve and Chris studiously listened to the track, I remember thinking that it was just a load of raucous noise and totally inappropriate for sunny afternoon listening. It was nothing like the Top 10 pop I enjoyed listening to in those days. My judgment was reinforced by the incomprehensible title of the album (The Least We Can Do is Wave to Each Other) and its equally curious album cover art

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Even then, I so much wanted to like it…. but I just couldn’t handle it,as we liked to say at the time.

So VdGG dropped out of active consideration but in the six months following, my musical taste edged first nervously, and then confidently, towards what the music press called progressive rock, and I found myself listening with Dave and the rest of the gang to King Crimson, Jethro Tull, Family and Caravan. My hair was getting longer, and I was smoking Embassy Regal – one up on the ubiquitous Player’s Number 6.

The late summer and autumn were full of parties, informal get-togethers and opportunities to make new friends. Looking back, how strange it seems to have carried loads of vinyl LPs from house to house – of course there were no iPods with extensive playlists nor easy-to-transport boom boxes then. The only way of making something like a party playlist was with a reel-to-reel tape player which was notoriously unreliable kit at the best of times.

One event that Autumn stands out.  We were at a party hosted by Richard, a posh boy whose parents were GPs and who had packed him off to the local Public School.  I remember Richard enthusing wildly about Van der Graaf Generator and an album called H to He: Who Am The Only One. Yet another bonkers name for an album I thought, even by progressive standards. Apparently, the band had played at his school and Richard seemed to be full of the nuclear energy suggested by the cover art.

He repeatedly played a track called Killer so much that I found myself singing it constantly over the next few days. The following weekend in November 1970, I was spending my birthday money at the street market in Walsall. There was a stall which sold ex-chart LPs at discount prices. With just enough cash in my pocket, I bought VdGG’s first album The least we can do for £19/6d- or 95p in today’s money.  This was of course the album I‘d heard at Chris’ house months before and rejected.

But it was on this day that I became a Van der Graaf Generator fan. I must have played Darkness, the first track, a score of times and in the process became adept at placing the needle pickup carefully onto the spinning disc. The album was a compelling mixture of theatre, terror, love, protest, and loneliness, and it was delivered in such a clever, artful and even haunting way. Peter Hammill, the band’s vocalist and lyricist instantly became a role model and like many Hammill protégées, I was soon starting writing poetry and songs inspired by his hugely addictive style.

So perhaps you can understand my excitement when a year later, I heard that VdGG were coming to town, specifically to the George Hotel in Bridge Street. The George has long since disappeared becoming first a Tesco superstore and more recently, a Primark, but back in December 1971 it was home to the Kinetic Club. Walsall’s rock temple and the venue of my first VdGG gig.

The concert was a typical late 60s- early 70s affair: the space was intimate, people were squatting and sitting on the floor; it was dark and smoky, and I don’t think the concert had sold out. Then the band walked through the audience to take their positions. Hugh Banton’s organ seemed mangled and held together with Blue Tac and Sellotape. Guy Evans was quietly sitting at his drum kit, enjoying the calm before the storm. Jacksonsax was totally on brand, dressed like some malevolent space invader with saxophones en garde. PJA Hammill looked lean and lanky and shrilled his way through the set. He occasionally played acoustic guitar. Some of the songs seemed messy and all over the place; some of the songs were simply stunning. I remember After the flood,Man Erg and of course Darkness.

After the set finished, the hardcore stayed and demanded more. I remember Peter offered us a choice of encore – Killer or Octopus– there was a vote but no contest, it was going to be Killer.

Following a final chorus of we need love, Peter ran off-stage leaving the band to perform Theme 1 followed by a rousing version of The Dambusters’ March, the famous Eric Coates film tune.

And thus, propelled into the night on a wave of patriotic splendour and still humming all the VdGG tunes, it was on to that bittersweet encounter withPete and Babs.

All of this happened nearly fifty years ago. Since those days, my VdGG habit has cost me a small fortune and I seem to have accumulated quite a collection of LPs, CDs, DVDs and books, including re-issues, duplicates and compilations. I still listen to Darkness, but these days it’s via my iPhone or iPad and or sent to a Bluetooth speaker with the help of Alexa. I still actively follow the band in the curious world of the Internet and its enthusiasms.

And one more thing, I’ve been married to Babs for forty years – I finally got my chance  a few months later in June 1972 and this time there was no fiasco.

So, gentle reader this life long love story comes with a BOGOF – you buy one love story, you’ve got another free.

Paul Christopher Walton

*An extract from the lyric Darkness by Peter Hammill

19b

The Uselessness of History? Historian, Engineer, Brand Man

18 Wednesday Apr 2018

Posted by in Essays, Marians on the Mawddach

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Reprinted from The Oxford Historian, Hilary Term, 2018
I arrived in Oxford by train from Walsall on 10 October 1974. It was Election Day, the second within the year, and the talk in the JCR was of another hung Parliament. In that event, the Tory champagne chilling on ice would be mixed with Socialist stout to make Black Velvet, a name that promises more than the product delivers. The pundits were wrong, of course, and Wilson narrowly beat Heath, winning a wafer- thin majority of three seats. But this all passed me by, because that night was my first ever Hall at Brasenose College where I had arrived from Queen Mary’s Grammar School to read Modern History.

As pleased as my father was to see me win a place at Oxford, he made it clear that he would have preferred me to become an engineer in Cambridge. “What’s the point of a history degree? Isn’t it useless these days?” he’d said – a provocation that over the years I have been happy to confront. But for now, apart from the immediate anxiety that came from forced immersion in Anglo-Saxon Latin for Prelims held at the end of my first term, the daily regime of the Oxford historian seemed to comprise more carrot than stick.

Paul Walton at Farchynys, the Welsh Centre of Queen Mary’s School, Walsall
The red thread of the Oxford course was the history of our islands from the departure of the Romans to the beginning of the Great War: ‘a king-a-week’, we joked whilst time travelling at a brisk pace through feudalism, bastard feudalism, rising gentry and a declining aristocracy. Producing plays was my first love, but I much enjoyed forays into the Radcliffe Camera and beyond.

I was lucky enough to study the Thirty Years War with Robert Evans, to read the command-and-control papers of Pierre Séguier, Richelieu’s enforcer, under the patient gaze of Robin Briggs, and to spend many an hour trying to fathom out the causes of sundry Tudor rebellions with Penry Williams. On my way to Schools in June 1977, it seemed there was little of significance I didn’t know about the reign of Edward VI, the consumptive boy Tudor with the stunted reign. Three months later, I had forgotten it all because on the same day that Elvis died, I had become an advertising man.

A student career that combined producing plays with writing weekly history essays, sometimes under the cosh, was the perfect training programme for a job in advertising. Life at the agency normally consisted of a hectic scramble for a new angle on an old problem and then pitching it to clients. I’d also learned from the best that some historians are expert in the art of magnifying minimal differences. This, I soon discovered was also a very important skill for successful admen.

I enjoyed my work and seemed to do well at it, working on campaigns for Swedish cars, German beer and British Intelligence. I developed a particular knack for creating new brands, and in 1986, with a friend – another historian, we launched our own shop. This was one of the first agencies to specialise in innovation and new brand development. With more than a nod to my father, we called the new agency The Value Engineers. Thirty years later, it is still going strong, with offices in London and New York and some of the world’s biggest brands, including BP, BA and Unilever among its clients.

So many of the historian’s skills have proven useful to us over the years. For example, analysing the reasons for success and failure of a new product, building timelines for fast developing new markets or assessing the likely impact of trends, especially those involving social and technological change. We have reviewed the rise and fall of empires: Kodak, Blockbuster and Nokia. We have tracked our changing eating habits and seen brands like Quorn grow from a niche into the mainstream and even onto the menus of Oxford college lunches!

In 2005, The Value Engineers became part of the Cello Group plc. Since then both the Group and The Value Engineers have prospered, and in 2011 I was able to begin a strategic withdrawal from the world of marketing and to return to university to study for an MA in Creative Writing. One of the projects I started researching brought me back once more into the service of Clio. This involved writing the history of an English school’s relationship with a Welsh estuary. Again, I knew my time in the Honour School of Modern History had not to been completely wasted.

This story began one eventful weekend in November 1963. On a weekend when the President of the United States was assassinated, The Beatles released their second LP, and Dr Who exited a Police Box to confront the Daleks for the first time, a small convoy of cars carrying boys from Queen Mary’s Grammar School in Walsall, arrived on the Mawddach Estuary in Mid Wales. They were to spend the weekend in a converted old coach house. This was Farchynys, the school’s newly acquired adventure centre in southern Snowdonia, situated in the shadow of Cadair Idris, four miles from Barmouth and its iconic railway viaduct.

Every week for the following fifty years, successive generations of Marians, as Queen Mary’s folk are known, have made the hundred-mile journey to the coast and for the most part, have

Marians on The Mawddach (Strategol Publishing, 2017)
fallen in love with this special place. Their adventures have shown that estuaries are wonderfully productive ecosystems for growing both things and people. My new book, Marians on the Mawddach tells the stories of pupils and teachers, and the people they have met in a landscape that is dramatically different from that of their hometown in the heart of the Black Country.

As an Old Marian who loved the Mawddach, I jumped at the chance to help with the school’s campaign to raise funds to modernise the facilities at Farchynys. Writing a book seemed a good way to generate support and I wanted it to be as much of a celebration of people and place as it was a social history of a West Midlands grammar school at the end of the twentieth century.

So forty years after first arriving in Oxford, I found myself back in the Radcliffe Camera chasing down sources and finalising text. I came across a book by T.P. Ellis, another historian who wrote a history of Dolgellau and Llanelltyd in the 1920s. He seemed a little pessimistic:

“Traditions and stories, the salt of life, are passing away, because there is no one to tell them in a way that busy pre-occupied people have time or inclination to listen to.”

I thought about my father’s provocation to my eighteen-year-old self and smiled. I was very happy to be an historian. History, the salt of life, is important work. I was also happy to be an engineer and a brand storyteller; the symbiotic twist of these career threads I know now to have been powerful, stimulating and not unlucrative.

Paul Christopher Walton

Born in Staffordshire, Paul took his BA in 1977, co- wrote Bluff Your Way in Marketing and helped unleash Quorn upon an unsuspecting world. It was inevitable that some of this biomass would return to fuel his first novel, Historyland, a dark comedy set in a future England that has become a giant theme park owned by bigtech.

Marians on The Mawddach

By Paul Christopher Walton

 

Strategol Publishing, 2017

ISBN: 978 0 99579 190 9

http://www.mariansonthemawddach.com

 

beautifulestuary

The Launch of Quorn

20 Friday Mar 2015

Posted by in Essays, Marketing Flotsam, The Uselessness of History

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How The Value Engineers helped bring the first new food to the world since yoghurt

Breakthroughs are notoriously difficult to bring to market, especially when they involve something simultaneously as basic and yet as culturally significant as food.

But such was the challenge The Value Engineers inherited when it was approached in the early 1980s by a small science start-up in High Wycombe that was funded by two food industry giants: RHM and ICI.

The story had begun 20 years earlier when Lord Rank, convinced that the world was hurtling into a crisis of food supply, tasked his Ph.D.’s with the search for alternative and more nutritionally balanced sources of protein.

Having scoured five continents, it was perhaps ironic that they discovered exactly what they were looking for in a field in Marlow, not very far from their lab in High Wycombe.

It was a tiny plant and because of its microscopic size, they decided to call it myco-protein, and they spent the next 20 years researching its properties and assessing its suitability as a novel food. Myco-protein, when grown and harvested, has the bite and fibrosity of meat but without any of the negative nutritional complications that were becoming the subject of increasing health concerns in the 1980s. It was also an exceptional carrier of flavour. This made myco-protein a first-rate choice as an alternative to meat, especially beef.

After extensive consumer clinical trials, followed by food standards clearance and product development that included partnering with some of the U.K.’s biggest names, myco-protein was soon doing the rounds of the food trade and NPD conferences, describing itself as a Tomorrow’s World next big thing.

If only it was all that easy. Following on from the the disastrous failure of new smoking materials in the 1970s and the frankly indifferent success of soya, the trade proved to be a little sceptical of this new test-tube food. It appeared to be another one of those technologies in search of a market.

By 1983, and having already invested tens of millions of pounds, the main board of RHM showed signs of losing patience. Accordingly, and with a slight air of double or quits, they formed a joint-venture with the bio products division of ICI. Its goal was to build a pilot plant with a small capacity to prove (or otherwise) the existence of real consumer demand for myco-protein. A small executive team was formed to run a budget, make investment decisions and give myco-protein its final commercial chance.

At this point, the TVE founder partners were approached and were asked to pitch for some consultancy against the following essay question:

‘We have a new exciting food technology and a development budget of £1 million. What would you do with the money?’

In the somewhat Spartan accommodation of the Nissen hut where the start-up was based, we told the CEO that the two most important things to sort immediately were to acquire a good quality overhead projector and the best filter coffee machine money could buy, because in order to light the blue touch paper, they were going to be doing a lot late nights and a lot of presentations…

Thus, began the highly successful collaboration between The Value Engineers and what became known as Marlow Foods, together building the brand we all know today as Quorn. Incidentally, Quorn was originally going to be called Origen, but because of complex global naming and legal issues, it was decided to use an existing RHM asset, a regional sauce brand called Quorn, which was then only on sale in the Midlands.

Over the following 10 years Quorn and The Value Engineers grew and grew together.

TVE, acting as Marlow Foods’ primary marketing partner, provided strategic advice on positioning the basic raw material (“A distant relative of the mushroom family…the right food at the right time“), the identification of priority customer segments (J.Sainsbury, Unilever), the development of priority products (Supremes, pieces, sausages minced and even ice cream), all with the development of the appropriate brand architecture and personality.

Following Quorn’s successful launch in the UK in 1985, TVE went on to work with Marlow Foods on product launches in Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany, and created the innovation roadmap that paved the way for Quorn’s subsequent global development and later business success. Wal-Mart’s recent decision to list Quorn in 2000 US stores shows that what was once considered an unfamiliar niche has finally become part of the food mainstream.

 

 

 

The day I didn’t meet David Abbott: a tribute

19 Monday May 2014

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August 16th, 1977 is one of those significant where-were-you-dates, because it’s the day Elvis died. In my case, I was waking up from a hard night’s sleep on a friend’s floor in Cricklewood when I heard the news on the LBC breakfast show. Actually, this day already held significance for me, as it was to be my first day as an adman.

French Gold Abbott was then one of London’s hottest hot-shops and I had been offered a place in their first graduate intake as an account planner. As all who have a connection with advertising soon discover, this world likes acronyms and everybody knew the agency as FGA.

David Abbott was the A of FGA and its celebrated creative director. An Oxford educated writer with Robert Redford looks, David was not just the acceptable face of advertising, but also its most intelligent voice.

That morning when I arrived at FGA’s office in North Wharf Road just on the edge of the west London badlands, the penny dropped that my agency had been bought by a big American firm called Kenyon and Eckhardt who had merged it with a fading UK establishment brand called Colman Prentis and Varley. Amid the obvious continuing merger chaos, David Abbott was nowhere be seen; nor was Richard French (In France, apparently!) but I was told I would be meeting Mike Gold, which later that day I did.

In fact, it was quite some days before David did appear, and when he did, I was lucky enough to have an hour’s induction with him in which he shared his Desert Island Ads. Softly spoken, charismatic and clever, there was also sadness in his eyes.

Soon I was immersed in the crazy world of 1970s advertising trying to rebrand Watneys beer and flog Swedish crispbread, but I was also sensing that all was not well in the world of FGAK&E. There was no still no sign of Richard French, and there was gossip that David Abbott was unhappy. As rumours spread, David wrote a celebrated ad for Campaign that featured the agency letterhead with his name crossed out and which carried the Twain inspired headline: ‘Rumours of my departure have been exaggerated’.

In fact they hadn’t been, and it wasn’t long afterwards that FGA staff were gathered together to hear the news that David would indeed be leaving to set up a new shop with an old university friend.

So Abbott was gone, French wasn’t coming back and even Gold soon would be going. Was this –perhaps with hindsight – excellent character building stuff? Certainly in the few moments I hobnobbed with David, there was tremendous value observing his panache with wordplay, his facility for rhetoric and his comfort with long copy at time when visuals dominated advertisements.

By 1980, FGA had ceased to exist but three new brands now arrived in its wake and needing acronyms: French Cruttendon Osborn, Gold Greenlees Trott and perhaps the greatest of these three, Abbott Mead Vickers.

Paul Christopher Walton

May 19th 2014

 

 

 

 

Bluff Your Way in Strategy – An Evening with Sir Lawrence Freedman

28 Friday Mar 2014

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Strategy, as all good bluffers know, is about maximizing relative advantage, which is why deception often plays an important role in its implementation. Books on business strategy are surprisingly dense and inordinately long but usually possess in their kernel one or two simple ideas. Michael Porter who has enjoyed a stellar career and even more stellar consulting day-rate produced the famous trilogy on competing that outweighs The Lord of the Rings and has probably as many laughs. Sir Lawrence Freedman’s new book Strategy A History enters the lists at a whacking 751 pages. For those of us who have neither the strength nor the motivation to read this knight’s tale, there is good news. There will be a literary festival somewhere near you this summer where you will be able to catch the lecture and buy the book. I was one of the lucky ones properly equipped with sturdy back pack who saw him in action last week at Christ Church at the Oxford Literary Festival.

He soon warmed the audience up with a quote from Mike Tyson, ‘Everyone has a plan ‘till they get punched in the mouth’ and went on to argue what many of us rebels have long thought, that strategy is always more interesting from the perspective of the under-dog. Being in a strong or leading position can be notoriously difficult to maintain, especially when such players believe that they can control events, but such intentions he argued are likely to be frustrated. He was gently satirical on the planning performance of big firms in the 1990’s and their tendency to follow fads and fashions. I loved his Sun Tzu game where you make up a gnomic precept in the style of Call My Bluff.

For Sir Lawrence, strategy is less about getting you to a plan, especially if it’s an unrealistic grand dessein but rather a process for getting you to the next step of the journey. The real secret of creating power he argues lies in partnership and coalition. In 1940 Churchill may not have known how to win the war, but he knew how not to lose it, and that was getting the Americans on board.

Plans are prone to misadventure and rather than thinking about strategy as a three act play, we are advised to think of it more like a soap opera, where the only certainty is uncertainty and the likelihood is complete mayhem. You do not need to be a strategic genius to see how the Ukrainian crisis of 2014 could be just a little like the summer of 1914. Thank you for the warning, Sir Lawrence.

 

 

Strategy A History

Lawrence Freedman

Oxford, 2013

25 Years of Sex and Violence

18 Saturday Jan 2014

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Learning From My Heroic Failures

It was Balzac, the author of La Comedie humaine, who said: ‘le milieu explique l’homme.’   My translation of this would be, ‘If you want to understand the man, you had better understand his environment first’…

In fact, it was approaching half-time in the decade that gave us Dirty Dancing and acid house, whose pop stars sang of Tainted Love and Relax, Don’t Do It; it was also the year in which a new soap opera was born.

No, not EastEnders, which welcomed us into Albert Square for the first time in February 1985, but that other long running soap, The Value Engineers, which was conceived in Covent Garden in October and was finally launched onto the world in a Fulmer conservatory in Buckinghamshire in May 1986.

However, springtime for TVE marked the swansong of another concept: new product development – because at a time when all sorts of new fashions were permeating business (“let’s do lunch,” power dressing, time management), it was almost inevitable that NPD managers would  rebrand themselves as innovation wizards, almost overnight.

And what an era for innovation this was!  Amongst my favourite contemporary bric-a-brac from this period (and still stored in my mother’s house) are: my ZX Spectrum (£125 for 16kb), my brother’s Atari console and stash of BT Phone cards, my dad’s shell suit for casual Sundays, his Filofax (unused) and a well-read leaflet for a Sinclair C5.

This was a decade of great change and category development – it witnessed the unstoppable rise of fast food, which ricocheted into frozen food, and witnessed the miracle of the microwave and the rise of tinned and packet ethnicity. It was also the decade of information technology as a fast moving consumer good.

TVE behaved like a classic SME, securing a competitive advantage by buying a trio Amstrad 1512s, fax machines and the first generation of car phones – I can still picture my first Nokia brick!

This was the decade of ‘loadsamoney,’ privatisations, Wall Street and The Bonfire of the Vanities, and on the back of the search for growth we developed an unshakeable thirst for trends, so much so that many of us succumbed  to and became suckers of the ‘Trendemic’ of futurology.

I remember the first time I heard of Faith Popcorn, the Malcolm Gladwell de nos jours, who gave us a whole smorgasbord of consumer psychology snack food upon which to graze. I remember my first response to the term ‘cocooning.’

The 1980s, in fact, like all decades, coined a whole new vocabulary – ‘chill out’ was a place and a command; ‘wicked’ and ‘sucks’ were the new critical terms; ‘space cadet,’ ‘air head,’ ‘toy boy’ and ‘bunny boilers’ were the new roles you couldn’t apply for but were given by your chums.

And in this new world of innovation, we all had to learn a new language – incremental product versus discontinuous breakthrough. The mysterious and highly secret CTT matrix was translated into TVE’s 3 Ts- Twinkles, Twists and Tweaks

We discovered new gurus like Robert Cooper and Wheelwright and Clark who brought some process discipline and rigour to the unbridled ideation passion and enthusiasm of our colleagues. We said hello to stage-gate processes, we held gate meetings, we reviewed our funnels and talked about good gate-keeper behaviour.

In a big world getting ever smaller, we learned how to steal with pride and then to sequentially recycle, to activate insight or just co-create.

But like the great new product managers we replaced, we began above all to welcome experimentation and to learn to live with failure:

As the late Stephen Pile once said, ‘Those who know success are usually familiar with failure,’ which is just as well, because although I may have some great successes of which to be proud, looking back on my career at TVE with the benefit of hindsight, I certainly have my share of stinkers in my black museum!

In theory, you can have a fundamentally good idea (draught beer at home) or a fundamentally bad idea (yogurt liqueurs) and in either case you can have a brilliant (or is that wicked) execution or a rubbish execution (which sucks) – but the paradox of the new product game, which keeps its players gripped, is that you can have a brilliant idea that is superbly executed and still fails!

(Insert 4 box Matrix form Slideshow here)

 

 

In my own experience I can think of three examples of super ideas that still failed:

–                 An in-home dry-cleaning system

–                 An in-pub sparkling wine system

–                 A luxury super premium ice cream that was 10x the price of the market leader

That’s why I am hooked on innovation – you can have as much system, science and left-brain stuff as you like but there are still all sort of random effects at play which make developing new brands perpetually stimulating and never predictable.

The scientific tendency has always found the more radical/market development cases the hardest to deal with.

Back in 1986 while I was working on the market development of mycoprotein which later was called  Quorn, I remember asking a pushy STM (simulated test market research method) salesman how many breakthrough concepts he had actually tested in his database. After trying to evade the question, he muttered something about self-heating hand warmers and we moved on.

And if I can pause the self-deprecation for a minute, I would  like to say that it’s not all failure on my CV – there are a number of new market developments, twinkles and twists of which I am inordinately proud: Quorn, canned Guinness powered by the widget, a host of cook in sauces, digital television to name but a few, but my heroic failures have had a disproportionate impact on my successes

So much for this brief review of my npd memories , but what does the future hold?

What’s in store for the world of innovation for the next 25 years?

If I can be indulged for a few moments and be allowed to be a grumpy old man with a tendency to rant (my title promised violence!), these are the key challenges that face new product folk in the future:

1. Make stuff not spin

I love positioning tricks with extrinsics  like the next man, but it’s time to make products…..

P&G taught me the importance of basic product superiority

2. Rebel against the tyranny of consumer insight

The 1980s saw the successful launch of lots of products without the cult of consumer insight. As we say at TVE, be fed not led by consumer insight

3. Practice healthy innovation and avoid ‘funnelitis’

Remember a stage gate process is a means not an end

4. Love your Partner

In the future we will not be able to do everything by ourselves – actively cultivate strategic alliances

5. Enjoy the thrill of exploring new frontiers and new territories

Terra Australis Incognita- like Captain Cook follow your hunch about the big unknown land down south

Especially the digitally enabled new world – what an exciting time for you all it’s going to be

And finally, and after 25 years launching brands for other people, and, in part, to atone for some of the terrible things I’ve done in the name of global brands (especially beers), I am pleased to end with a plug for my own gloriously local beer: Shotover Prospect, brewed by my very good friend Ed Murray

As I hope you’ll agree, this is one product that won’t make it into my heroic failures!

Enjoy!!

And the sex mentioned in the title? Typical positioning spin I’m afraid- best avoided!

Thank You

Given at the conference to celebrate the silver anniversary of TVE

Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel – A Critical Review

17 Friday Jan 2014

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A Textbook Example of Repositioning?

 

The best characters, like all great brands, live in the minds (and hearts) of the audience. In modern marketing theory, the process by which products, people and services gain a piece of this mental real estate is called ‘positioning’[i].

Positioning recognizes that, in a complicated and busy world where there is so much choice, there is a continuous battle for the audience’s attention and only a disciplined and focused approach to creating meaning is likely to succeed and cut through the clutter. In fiction, perhaps a similar approach is also needed. As G.K. Chesterton said, ‘a good novel tells us the truth about its hero, but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.’ [ii]

But there is one challenge greater than the projection of a character into the audience’s head, and that is the challenge of modifying a strong character’s reputation once it has been successfully created. This is what brand-smiths call ‘repositioning’, and Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall provides an excellent example of it.

Wolf Hall has won many literary awards but its most significant triumph has been the way in which it has succeeded in creating and popularising a ‘new model’ Thomas Cromwell. The conventional and popular view, derived from both academic history[iii] and contemporary fiction[iv], is of Cromwell as an unscrupulous Machiavellian thug who smashed and grabbed his way through monastic wealth and chopped off the heads of anyone who got in the way of the King’s business. Simon Schama’s colourful description of Cromwell’s plot against Anne Boleyn was written in 2000 and is not untypical:

‘What he [Cromwell] cooked up was thing of pure devilry; a finely measured brew, one part pornography, one part paranoia.’[v]

Drawing upon recent academic research that suggests that another interpretation is possible[vi], Mantel sets about reappraising him. Her new ‘framing’[vii] of Cromwell is of an altogether more sympathetic character: a man of his time, doing the best for his king, country, family and personal beliefs. This is a man who weeps, prays and loves.

The restaging is handled skilfully over 650 pages. Mantel takes few shortcuts. To enable the reader to see a different Thomas Cromwell she concentrates on his interactions with a small circle of key characters. Thomas, like Hamlet, is on stage throughout the book and in these encounters, described by the author from the point of view of an analyst deep within in his brain, we get to understand intimately what Cromwell thinks, believes and feels. Generally this works very well, but it is true that sometimes Mantel’s use of the pronoun ‘he’ in her narrative style confuses and slows down the story.

Thomas Wolsey is the first of Mantel’s instruments of repositioning.  Wolsey is Cromwell’s mentor and father figure who has an excellent grasp of people and values Cromwell’s talents as a fixer and negotiator who can bring a muscular rhetoric (or a ‘Cromwellian stare, the equivalent of a kick’) to the task of persuading courtiers to do what Wolsey wants. Wolf Hall is, on one level, the story of Wolsey’s fall, and how Cromwell manages to survive without compromising his sense of loyalty to his mentor. The courtier coalition set against Wolsey allows Mantel to show Thomas Cromwell as a loyal and pugnacious servant who refuses to desert his master even at the end, by which time his own life was in danger. The strategic significance of the Wolsey–Cromwell relationship is further demonstrated in the sequel to Wolf Hall, Bring up the Bodies[viii], which is the story of how Thomas avenges his mentor by destroying the whole faction which had worked to bring Wolsey down.

Thomas More is the other principal character that Mantel deploys to bring about her re-evaluation of Cromwell. Acting as a yin to Cromwell’s yang, Sir Thomas More is Cromwell’s complete intellectual, political and religious complement.  In a series of highly charged set pieces, Mantel uses More to put the conventional case against Cromwell. According to More, Cromwell is the Italian/Machiavellian, the heretic/atheist, and the unscrupulous/unprincipled creature of state. In defence of her protagonist, Mantel firstly asks the reader to re-evaluate the character of the prosecutor, Thomas More. In her telling of the story, More is no saintly liberal but an elitist bigot with a merciless intolerance for religious debate and a dark suit of cruelty. He is also shown to have a very bizarre set of family relationships. Then, in a series of debates between the two, she shows Cromwell arguing to maintain good order in the realm by the avoidance of war and all forms of religious extremism. In her portrayal, Mantel is drawing upon an important contemporary concept coined during religious wars in France: the idea of the politique[ix]. A politique was someone who put peace and balance in the commonwealth above religious faction. Mantel’s Cromwell is much more of a pragmatic politique than either a scheming Machiavellian or a religious fundamentalist.

Famous for creating encyclopaedic fact-bases for her books, whether lists of who-was-where-when, or what were hot contemporary fashions in food, dress and sex, Mantel uses an armoury of historical fact to build the case for Cromwell. After the book’s climax — the death of More — while Cromwell and Rafe are sharing a brief moment of decompression and discussing the detailed calendar of the next royal itinerary, Cromwell once again shows his humanity:

‘I seem to have four, five days in hand. Ah well. Who says I never get a holiday?’

Without any visible compromise to history, Mantel has been able to paint a compelling emotional narrative over an incontrovertible factual framework and chronology, with Cromwell at the centre. A similar sentiment was expressed by Sarah Dunant in her 2013 lecture:

‘Why should you make it up when history gives it to you?’[x]

In another Brookes lecture, Rebecca Abrams[xi] talked of the ‘Tudor history feeding frenzy’ and the current popularity of Tudor fiction. So, how does Mantel compare with other writers? CJ Sansom is one of the most well-respected writers to use the period. He writes well-crafted, carefully researched stories that mix historical fiction with crime. Sansom’s Cromwell[xii] plays more to the conventional stereotype and we see him blackmailing Sansom’s hero, the hunchback lawyer Shardlake, into undertaking various investigations. The setting is clearly Reformation London, and the time is 1529. In contrast, however, Mantel speaks to us as if it were London 2009 as well. There is a timeless quality to the writing and the book is rich in Cromwell quips, comments and one-liners that are absolutely true to the time but just as relevant today. Here is Wolsey speaking like an irritated CEO to a senior member of his board:

‘Thomas, what can I give you to persuade you never to mention this to me again? Find a way, just do it.’

Cromwell is Wolsey’s ‘man of business’, and speaks with a corporate lawyer’s voice. Here Cromwell is advising Wolsey on how to persuade Boleyn to allow his second daughter to follow the first into becoming a royal mistress:

‘Boleyn is not rich,’ he says. ‘I’d get him in. Cost it out for him. The credit side. The debit side.’

Thomas’ speeches are especially important at key moments of crisis in the narrative, such as the series of Cromwell/More confrontations, in which Cromwell desperately tries to get More to toe the party line. As these interactions reach their deadly denouement, Mantel swaps the Inns of Court banter of the early exchanges for longer, more oratorical and passionate speeches, where every debating trick is played. As Audley, the Lord Chancellor, says at the end of one attempt, ‘we won’t do better than that.’ And they didn’t. To the end, Mantel’s More remains superior, controlled and unassailable, and we sense that this is both a cause of genuine regret for Cromwell and his biggest failure.

In this exhaustive exercise in reappraisal, Mantel has one more repositioning trick to play: Cromwell tells Rafe to make sure that More’s daughter gets her father’s head from the London Bridge spike. This small act of kindness provides an illuminating contrast of the family values of these two Tudor giants and a final step in Mantel’s case history in repositioning.

Bibliography:

Bolt, Robert (1960) A Man For All Seasons

Burroway, Janet (2003) Imaginative Writing. Longman

Professor Mark Horowitz, review of The many faces of Thomas Cromwell, (review no. 1168) URL: http://www.history.ac.uk/reviews/review/1168; Date accessed: 14 March, 2013

Hutchinson, Robert (2007) The Rise and Fall of Henry VIII’s Most Notorious Minister. Phoenix

Knecht, RJ (1996) The French Wars of Religion 1559-1598. Longman

Lukeham, Noah (2010) The First Five Pages Oxford

Mantel, Hilary (2009) Wolf Hall. Fourth Estate

Mantel, Hilary (2012) Bring up the Bodies. Fourth Estate

May, Stephen (2010) Get Started in Creative Writing. Teach Yourself

Pinker, Steven (2007) The Stuff of Thought. Penguin

Ries, A and Trout, J (2001) Positioning. McGraw-Hill

Ridley, Jasper (1982) Statesman and Saint. Viking

Sansom, CJ  (2003) Dissolution. Viking

Schama, Simon (2000) A History Of Britain. BBC

Scholfield, John (2008) The Rise and Fall of Thomas Cromwell: Henry VIII’s Most Faithful Servant. History Press

Thorpe, Adam (1992) Ulverton. Secker and Warburg

[i] Ries, A. and Trout, J. (2001), Positioning. McGraw-Hill

[ii] Chesterton, G.K., Heretics quoted in May, Stephen (2010) Get Started in Creative Writing. Teach Yourself

[iii] Hutchinson, Robert (2007) The Rise and Fall of Henry VIII’s Most Notorious Minister. Phoenix

[iv] Bolt, Robert (1960) A Man For All Seasons is a typical example

[v] Schama, Simon (2000) A History of Britain. BBC

[vi] Scholfield, John (2008) The Rise and Fall of Thomas Cromwell: Henry VIII’s Most

Faithful Servant. History Press

[vii] Pinker, Steven (2007) The Stuff of Thought. Penguin, page 243

[viii] Mantel, Hilary (2012) Bring up the Bodies. Fourth Estate

[ix] For a definition, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politique   and  Knecht,  RJ (1996) The French Wars of Religion 1559-1598. Longman

[x] Dunant, Sarah, Oxford Brookes guest lecture 2013. The author’s own notes.

[xi] Abrams, Rebecca, Oxford Brookes guest lecture 2012. The author’s own notes.

[xii] Sansom, CJ (2003) Dissolution. Viking