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Flotsam and Jetsam

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Flotsam and Jetsam

Category Archives: The Uselessness of History

David Bernstein: The Philosopher of SPIV

16 Saturday Sep 2017

Posted by Paul Christopher Walton in Poetry, The Uselessness of History

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David Bernstein, In Memoriam

DavidBernstein2-20170829060151191

Lines written in 1982 to celebrate the award of the Mackintosh Medal to David Bernstein – being also a brief exposition on the theories of Advertisement Effect in one canto

Nil posse creari de nilo. (Lucretius)

Lucretius wasn’t always right!

 

Sing, O muse of modern epic themes,

Of selling soapsuds, and of selling dreams:

Behold that world of commerce set apart,

An inexact science in a bastard art!

And in this nexus, let us list with care

Those philosophies which are practised there.

With surgeon’s skill and knife we will dissect

All admen’s Theories of Effect.

That sacred word, enough to make the client pay

His artwork and production bills with less delay.

First, in this field, the keystone of the arch

We sing, with pride, of Doctor Daniel Starch.

“All ads to be successful”, he nearly said,

“Must of course be seen and read

But more than that, before your chance has gone

It must be remembered to be acted on”

Great sage, O Starch, your greatness sits

In teaching us, good puff persuades in bits.

Another chap (Anon) reworked Dan’s law

And summed it up with letters four.

“Let our darling AIDA take her bow,

To gain attention and our interest now;

But after, when desire is raised in lieu

Her call to action entices you”.

Of all the men whom darling Aida met,

There stands a group especially in her debt.

The men of Procter, so the bards do tell

Liked her rubric and loved her well

Too much, in fact; consumed by lust

All Aida’s wisdom has been ground to dust.

For all the best becomes the worst at last

When madmen play the rules too hard and fast!

Day-after-recall’s not the best of tools

Except for client knaves or research fools!

Too much!

Let us sing of greatness once again:

Of Joyce and Channon, of Segeula’s men!

Of Rosser Reeve’s USP

Of charming, wily David Ogilvy

“At sixty miles an hour, all you’ll hear

Is the sound of chasing taxmen coming near.”

And last of all, we sing of D.E.B

(Who, it must be said, as yet employs me)

In his book, (so the one who’s read it said)

“All art, with science, is nice ‘n’ neatly wed”

And so, all admen who seek out effect,

With page one five five your eyes connect:

“All ads to convince must visible be,

And pregnant stand with identity

But without simple promise, they’ve far to go

Along that line to positive cash flow”

With words like these, he won old Tosh’s crown

So was it then for this,  that David wore that gown?

 

September 1982

 

Post Scriptum:

David died in August 2017 aged 88.

He had a profound effect upon so many people, especially me.

PCW

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Launch of Quorn

20 Friday Mar 2015

Posted by Paul Christopher Walton in Essays, Marketing Flotsam, The Uselessness of History

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Breakthrough, Quorn, The Value Engineers

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.

 

 

 

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