Image: John Sprinzel at the wheel of his MG Midget, with co-driver Atis Krauklis, during the 1967 Monte Carlo Rally. CREDIT: www.motorsportimages.com
Monday 31st October 1966 - my start date with my new employer, Procter & Gamble (P&G). As instructed, I arrive in Banbury, Oxfordshire, the evening before, check in to the Whately Hall Hotel, and meet my trainer, Jim Young, who, as I recall, introduces me to the P&G product range. It includes: Daz and Tide, detergents; Fairy Snow, soap powder; Fairy Liquid, wash-up liquid; Fairy household soap; Camay, toilet soap; and a few more products besides. The following morning he introduces me, so to speak, to my car, a Ford Cortina, and the field training commences.
Before we go there, let me briefly outline the shopping world of 1966 Britain. It is very different from now. Although the number of self-service grocery stores is on the increase, there remain a large number of counter-service shops. A much greater proportion than now of the weekly shop happens via separate purchases at the butcher, the baker, the greengrocer and so on. There are supermarkets but they are smaller than today’s and far, far less ubiquitous.
In 1966 ‘Permanent Global Summertime’, the concept that enables you to buy fruits and vegetables that are not locally in season, has yet to become a reality. Maybe, in London, the likes of Fortnum & Mason and Harrods Food Hall ship in out-of-UK-season strawberries but, for the vast majority of British households, produce is available only on a strictly local-seasonal basis.
Foods like avocados and capsicums are far rarer, too. In fact, even five years after this time, when I enquire of a north of England greengrocer if he has any green peppers, his response is, “Are you takin’ the piss, mate?” Honestly.
And, in the UK in 1966, we’re still very much in the Product Age, so selling is all about product features and benefits. People buy soap powders and detergents because they get clothes clean, hair shampoo cleans hair, and so on.
That said, around this time, P&G’s anti-dandruff shampoo, Head & Shoulders, goes on sale in a test area in the UK. This marks the beginning of a transition from the broad, objective value assessment of products to a more nuanced value assessment for specific customers.
Clean hair? Obvs. But, now, what about different hair types - oily, regular, dry? And is your hair colour-treated? Hey, how would it be if we put shampoo and conditioner together in the same bottle? And on and on.
It’s no surprise that P&G is at the forefront of this trend because that’s the way it has always been. After all, this is the company that, early in 20th century America, launched a radio serial as a marketing device - hence the term soap opera - and, in 1958, created a commercial for Royal Drene hair shampoo that promoted the product on the basis that it enabled a young woman to wash her hair and go out on a date on the same day! Wow, all you hep cats at the jive joint! How cool is that!
P&G brought this marketing shift to the UK, in a rather more restrained form, in the 1960s with a TV commercial that declared …
Now hands that do dishes can feel soft as your face with mild, green Fairy Liquid.
This may not sound much like a revolutionary shift but, believe me, it was. These were the strands that would, by the 1970s and 1980s, lead Michael Lanning in Atlanta, Georgia, to come up with the concept of the Value Proposition (P&G, by the way, was his alma mater) and, in the UK, academic Neil Rackham to demolish product age sales theory and replace it with the more sophisticated SPIN (Situation - Problem - Implication - Need-Payoff) Selling.
I should also mention that, at this time, there are hardly any own-label brands. It means that leading grocery brand manufacturers like P&G, Lever Bros., Kelloggs, Heinz, and so on are extremely powerful. Too powerful, in fact, for the retailers’ liking. The suppliers’ tendency to not infrequently act in a high-handed manner definitely contributes to the determination of large grocery retailers to level the playing field by developing own-label products.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s get back to the first half of November 1966, the period when Jim and I point the Ford Cortina out into the wilds of Banbury and the Cotswolds and my training commences. As already mentioned, this is still in the Product Age and the sales process that I’m taught is a version of the Product Age classic, AIDA: Approach, Interest, Desire/Decision, Action.
I’m taught ‘The 4 by 4 Call’ - the four steps and four tools to be used in each and every sales call. The four steps are the AIDA steps. The four tools are, as far as I remember, Sales Presenter, Order Pad, Pencil … and something or other else! It’s all a bit basic. And keep in mind that this all long before the advent of anything remotely like a tablet or computer.
It’s a time, too, before the switch to chain store central buying: the sales reps of major suppliers visit every individual store in a group. So, because my Banbury- and Cotswolds-area territory includes several co-operative societies, I have to visit every outlet once a month.
The sales process culminates, inevitably, in the Close:
“I suggest four cases of large Daz.”
“Oh, I think two will be ample.”
“Well, if you take the four I can let you have a case of the large Fairy Liquid special with fourpence off.”
“Oh, okay.”
In Product Era selling the Close was everything. Product Era sales featured a vast array of closing techniques. To give just one example, the Alternative Close attempted to push the buyer into a choice between two options - “Would you prefer the large size or the medium?” - to try to reduce the incidence of the would-be buyer just saying “Get lost.”
The Always Be Closing scene from the 1992 movie Glengarry Glen Ross shows an extreme version of this idea in the real estate sector. I’m pleased to say that, at P&G, we were far more civilized, but the principle’s were the same.
During this training period I am also welcomed by my Area Manager, Pat Crossley, a former naval officer and really lovely man, and meet the other half dozen or so members of my immediate area team.
I’m told, also, that the company expects me to find a billet within three or four weeks: they’ll pay my hotel bills until I do find somewhere but that’s the time expectation. So, I get my skates on.
A month or so later, I take up residence in a cottage in the village of Kings Sutton, about four miles out of Banbury. It is owned by a Mrs Brown, a frightfully well-to-do but somewhat eccentric elderly lady with a colourful past. She says, for example, that she spent several years in South America and was involved in a serious car crash, as a result of which her smashed jaw had to be reconstructed and held together with bits of wire. Well, okay, it must have worked because she could sure hold forth without any apparent difficulty.
I’m one of two lodgers, both of us there Monday to Friday each week, on a full-board basis (at this stage I go home to Leicester at weekends), so, together with Mrs Brown, the three of us get to talk at mealtimes. I’m introduced to my co-lodger who is called Patrick (Pat) Lindsay. The name means nothing to me at the time but I soon learn that this is The Honourable Patrick Lindsay (1928-1986) who loves motor racing and flying (he actually bloody-well owns umpteen fabulous vintage cars and even has a Spitfire Mk 1!!!) and is a seriously committed stalwart of the Vintage Sports Car Club (VSCC). Indeed, he is lodging with Mrs Brown at this particular time because of King’s Sutton’s proximity to Silverstone motor racing circuit.
On one occasion I go with him to a VSCC meeting at Silverstone. I particularly remember it because he asks me to drive a Formula 1 car - a Honda, I think it was - a few yards so that he can film it in motion. I squeeze myself into the car and then find it impossible to shift the damn machine because I can’t operate the clutch and gears! After several attempts, and with some skin scraped off my knuckles where they catch the underside of the metal dash when trying to use the gear shift, we give up. Then, the final indignity, when I stand up to extricate myself from the machine, I discover that the seat of my pants is soaked in oil. Oh well!
From a web search I see that Patrick’s commitment to vintage cars and aeroplanes never wavered and he went on to promote his interests through Christies Fine Art. It is sad that he was just 57 years old when he died.
Meanwhile, back in Banbury, about four months on, I meet two chaps of my own age in a pub. Jef and Ivan. They have just moved into a flat, the upstairs of a detached property in nearby Adderbury. Jef works for Alcan. Ivan works for General Foods. We get on really well and they invite me to join them. I accept.
Not least, this will get me away from one particular horror …
My burgeoning friendship with Jef and Ivan means that I spend increasing amounts of time with them in The Plough public house at Adderbury. Consequently, I often get back to the digs after Mrs B and Patrick have retired. Having consumed umpteen pints of beer I inevitably need a pee. Kings Norton is a small village with no street lighting to speak of and, upon retiring, Mrs B switches off all the lights in the house, so the place is pitch black. I tiptoe my way to the bathroom which is on the ground floor. I switch on the light. The bathroom floor is a seething, heaving black mass! Yup, Mrs B’s cottage has the worst infestation of cockroaches that I have ever seen in my life. When the light goes on, thousands of the little bastards disappear. (Where to? I never worked that out.) But a few tens or hundreds remain, some on their backs, legs frantically wiggling in the air. Some are despatched with a crisp underfoot crunch. Yuk!
By contrast, the Adderbury flat is blissfully free of vermin. And I have the company of two chaps my own age. This, of course, is extremely dangerous. It means that we spend a lot of time in the pub, often augmented, at the close of normal hours, when the landlord of The Plough, Fred, provides a lock-in so that we carry on boozing ‘til gone midnight … then drive home.
Back then, driving while under the influence of alcohol is not uncommon, and it has some pretty dire consequences. For example, the landlord of another pub that I frequent at the time - the one in Naseby, Northants - kills himself while driving under the influence of alcohol. Fortunately no-one else and no other vehicle was involved in this particular tragedy. A defined legal limit for blood/alcohol content while driving is first introduced in the UK in 1967.
The amount of drinking, I’m sure, begins to take a toll on me. Not least, waking up on time in the morning becomes - how shall we say? - less reliable.
We’re now into the Spring of 1967 and into our world drives a friend of Jef’s called Atis Krauklis, at the wheel of a very splendid MG sports car. Atis, I learn, is a motor sport journalist and was also John Sprinzel’s (1930-2021) co-driver in the 1967 Monte Carlo Rally. Here’s a snippet of Atis’s prose from the January 1967 edition of MotorSport magazine, in this instance writing about the RAC Rally:
The make of the car may change but in the six years that our premier rally has taken to the forests it has always been a Scandinavian behind the winning wheel. Twice each for Eric Carlsson and Tom Trana in Saab and Volvo respectively, then last year it was a British car, the B.M.C. Cooper S, but with Finn Rauno Aaltonen driving, and although this year it’s yet another British car it still took a Swede to bring it home first. While on the subject of this foreign domination of the forests, one should note that in 1965 it was only the first nine places, with the exception of Roy Fidlers’ Triumph 2000 at fifth, that went to the Scandinavians but this year they increased their portion to the first twelve places, with the exception of fifth again, this time to B.M.C.’s Yorkshireman Tony Fall, and Ladies’ Prize winner Pat Moss-Carlsson who at ninth is one place higher than in 1965.
I recall being told that, after the Scandinavians, John Sprinzel and Atis are the fastest drivers downhill on ice. Atis and I are to become friends, our lives again becoming entwined a little later in this saga. I learn - from his Mum, no less - that she carried Atis as a babe in arms on the last train out of Riga in 1945, just before the Russians stopped anybody leaving Latvia. For now, however, let’s just make the point that he is definitely what one might call ‘a character’ … although with flaws. Not that I’m in any position to claim any kind of superiority in that respect!
Thanks for reading.