Fragment 27: The Life & Times of a Social Experiment
Mass and Direct Marketing, Advertising, New Product Development ... how to get it right and how to get it wrong!
Back to the early ‘70s! Back to a time when, for example, the Cold War was in full swing, British-Irish politics were appallingly toxic, as were the relationships between British politicians and trades unions, and, rising above it all, David Bowie released his Aladdin Sane album (see above image - album released April 1973). But what was going on for me?
Well, eventually, following my stint as district manager in Newcastle upon Tyne for the car division, the Hertz UK Personnel Director, Paul Burns, said I was wanted back in London to head up marketing for Hertz UK’s truck rental division. Back then, Hertz was owned by RCA and Paul told me that final approval for this appointment had to come from his functional boss, the Personnel Director at RCA.
I made my way to Park Lane to meet Clive Edwards. I vaguely recall doing some tests - Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, that sort of thing - and then sitting with Clive and discussing the role, at the end of which, he told me that he approved my appointment.
So it was that I relocated to an office a little further down the London-Croydon road at Norbury to embark upon a job that I was entirely, utterly, woefully ill-equipped to do. Fortunately, the job came with some team members already in place: a sales promotion lead, and a market research lead, both of whom actually knew what they were doing, and a lovely secretary called Lucy.
Then a miracle happened. Lucy, came into my office to tell me that I had a visitor, a chap called David Mackenzie who was Head of Marketing for Hertz Europe. It didn’t take me long to realize that what had actually happened was the arrival of my fairy godfather.
David Mackenzie had previously worked as a Country Manager for Unilever and was immensely knowledgeable about Marketing, in both theoretical and practical terms. But, more than that, he was a natural teacher. There was no fuss, no palaver, but he quickly identified what I did and didn’t know, and set about helping fill the gaps.
Following that initial visit I saw David quite frequently for a time and he also mailed me (no electronic mail back then!) handwritten essays on aspects of marketing. Market definition. Strategy. Customer identification. Segmentation. And on and on. I am so indebted to him and do so wish that I had kept those notes. They would now be outdated, of course, but they constituted a brilliant textbook on the state of the science and art of Marketing as it was in the 1970s.
I learned from other sources, too. Hertz’s main advertising agency at that time was McCann Erickson (now long since morphed into just McCann) and the agency team with whom I worked were terrific. But it was to two smaller agencies and, in particular, two inspirational agency leaders, that I owe my greatest debt of gratitude. The leaders were two Johns - John Frazer-Robinson (known as JFR) and John Stadden.
To introduce them, permit me a brief diversion into the history of advertising …
“Promise, large promise, is the soul of an advertisement.”
That quotation, written by the great Doctor Samuel Johnson (1709-1784), appeared in The Idler no. 40, dated 20th January 17591. So, yes, advertising has been a part of our lives since the earliest days of the modern era. But for the greatest part of that time the only workable methodology was mass marketing - that is, pushing a marketing message on an undifferentiated, one-to-many basis.
Indeed, this was really the only practical methodology until well into the twentieth century by which time it was ubiquitous across Western societies. Here’s ‘Golden Age’ crime writer, Dorothy L. Sayers, expressing the UK zeitgeist of 1933:
Tell England. Tell the World. Eat more Oats. Take Care of your Complexion. No More War. Shine your Shoes with Shino. Ask your Grocer. Children Love Laxmalt. Prepare to meet they God. Bung’s Beer is Better. Try Dogsbody’s Sausages. Whoosh the Dust Away. Give them Crunchlets. Snagsbury’s Soups are Best for the Troops. Morning Star, best Paper by Far. Vote for Punkin and Protect your Profits. Stop that Sneeze with Snuffo. Flush your Kidneys with Fizzlets. Flush your Drains with Sanfect. Wear Woolfleece next the Skin. Popp’s Pills Pep you Up. Whiffle your Way to Fortune … Advertise, or go under.
That is the conclusion of her novel, Murder Must Advertise, and, since she started out as an advertising copywriter, she did know what she was writing about.
Mass marketing, of course, continued but particularly after the Second World War it was joined by something new, labelled Direct Marketing. This new technique sought to make a reality of the long-standing dream of selling products and services on a one-to-one basis - far more personal than mass advertising. Door-to-door selling of some items achieved this but in a very basic manner. And, of course, at the time I took on the Hertz Trucks role there were no desktop computers, no internet, no mobile phones. Direct marketing relied almost exclusively upon the postal service … but new developments were, as ever, possible.
One of the pioneers of new techniques was … no, hold on! … one of my dynamic duo, JFR, can himself tell the story:
I learned this lesson from my late father Thomas Bernard Robinson OBE, who founded the Marie Curie Memorial Foundation, more popularly recognized these days as Marie Curie Cancer Care. It’s a somewhat romantic story, starting with the influence of Sir Winston Churchill, to whom my father directly reported towards the end of the Second World War. An old lady, hearing of his intention to start a cancer charity, took off her engagement ring and offered it to him. He sold it, as she had suggested, for about £75.
In those days, £75 was a reasonable sum for a first donation; my father decided to devote all of it to raising more money. He sent out a mailing (although I suspect his early efforts of hand-picked, hand-signed missives didn’t seem like direct mail to him!) to raise funds. It was successful. The amassed funds financed another mailing, and so on, until he had built a base of regular subscribers and enough surplus to start on the serious work of fighting cancer and caring for the stricken.
As the years passed, professional marketing skills increased and my father learned, as all charities do, that the donor base becomes the high-response, high-donation centre of activity, and the prospecting element is the low-response, low-donation part.
… As more years passed, my father became more creative He introduced a mailing shot that covered ten houses at once (and effectively blackmailed each house into giving more than the last!); he found a way to personalize mailings before personalization was economically viable, thus for many years turning the telephone books into his top-pulling list; as well as - may we all forgive him - the Charity Christmas Seal.2
Growing up with direct marketing as, so to speak, the family business, it was perhaps not surprising that JFR entered the field - he personally and his company, Amherst Direct Marketing.
Then there’s the other John - John Stadden. The company that he founded, Stadden Hughes Limited, with business partner Nick Hughes, was a more broadly-based advertising and marketing agency but with very strong direct marketing skills.
Two great talents
When I took on the marketing role at Hertz Trucks, Amherst and Stadden Hughes were already suppliers, although Stadden Hughes did more work for the car division. From that time on, both of the Johns, and some of their respective teams, figured prominently in my working and personal lives.
They operated differently. JFR, confident and ebullient (outwardly, at least), built a team of independent creative talents in and around his Worthing, West Sussex base. He was himself an excellent copywriter so his main external support was a hugely talented graphic designer, Jerry Shearing, who also became a good friend.
Stadden Hughes was London based and featured an in-house team of creatives and support staff. It started out in Paradise Walk, Chelsea before moving, a few years later, to Fitzroy Street in Fitzrovia. There will be more about this in subsequent fragments but what I remember most from the time I’m writing about here, were Friday afternoons in Paradise Walk. Discussion. Argument. Laughter. All helped along by a few glasses of Blue Nun wine, a Stadden Hughes client.
As time went on, JFR spent a great deal of his time thinking and writing about marketing, and subsequently talking with clients and at events around the world. John S., who trained at the London College of Printing and focused more on visual design and typography, was quieter, calmer, and always intensely concerned with the production of great work. Two very different but wonderful talents.
A lesson
As time went on I found that I particularly liked new product development - N.P.D. - but it’s a tricky game.
At that time, so far as I know, nobody had promoted self-drive truck rental as an alternative to furniture removers. So, I set out to launch a ‘self-move’ package aimed at a younger demographic when moving home or, say, heading off to university.
You may recall that I used a rented estate car to move my belongings from Leicester to London. So, why not, I thought, expand the idea and make it more accessible.
We designed and produced branded flat-pack cartons and tape, and promoted a new self-drive package, launching it with a press advertisement that featured four unhappy looking blokes who were clearly meant to represent furniture removal men under the headline, “Ask Stan, Eric, Roy and Ron what they think of Hertz Truck Rental.” The reactions were quite remarkable.
As far as the furniture removal sector was concerned, it was as though a bomb had gone off - a bomb designed to blow them to smithereens. Rather than viewing the ad as humorous, one of the largest furniture removal companies chose to view it as defamatory, and threatened all manner of legal proceedings if the product was not immediately withdrawn.
However, what they did not know was the reaction of the marketplace, the intended customers. It was close to zero. Had we been relying upon this product to assure the future of the company, the roads would have been blocked by an infinite number of tumbleweed balls swirling around with complete freedom of the highways. As a consequence, we let the offer quietly fade away.
The moral of this sad little tale? Timing is everything: going too early into a market space is just as ineffective as being too late. Mind you, it was a lesson that I seemed stubbornly not to learn for far too long.
Generally, however, life went along quite nicely and despite the occasional setback I managed to build a reputation for some sort of competence in marketing.
Change in the offing
Meanwhile, some time in 1973 I think it was, over at Hertz’s car division, Paul Burns the Personnel Director, left the company and in a rather weird shift, popped up as Sales Director at a leading hotel company.
This was to have a significant impact on my life but, for now, I’ll call a halt to the story. Next time, I’ll bring things up to date regarding hugely important developments in my personal life at this time.
Thanks for reading.
The Idler was published from 1758 to 1760 within a weekly London publication titled the Universal Chronicle. More than a hundred The Idler essays were written. all but twelve of them by Samuel Johnson.
Frazer-Robinson, John. Customer-Driven Marketing (1997)