After 1974-5, it wasn’t long before the UK found itself in another economic downturn at the start of the eighties. Once again the combination of Oil price rises and global slowdown caused recession.

This time it took the form of a period of intense pain followed by strong rebound:

• Manufacturing production declines 15% in 1979-83
• Unemployment rises to a peak of 11% in 1986, declining rapidly thereafter
• Growth of GDP per capita averages nearly 4% in 1985-88

However a very different set of politicans were at the helm. Margaret Thatcher’s government focused on enterprise culture and the replacement of the post-war consensus:

• Market as key driver
• Privatisation and deregulation
• Individual enterprise
• Reduced role of state (and unions)

Thatcher memorably said that “there is no such thing as society”. Certainly the society was changing, with the emergence of ‘Yuppies’ widening the gap from a growing ‘underclass’. In 1986 a Gallup Poll found that 10% gave “getting rich” as their main goal in life. A report on Social Trends in 1988 cited that “inflation and unemployment are seen as ever present threats; a sizable minority from the lowest income groups were sceptical that any general improvements in the economy would benefit them”.

However the latter part of the 1980’s were favourable to UK business: the unions were tamed, the workforce was energised by the “cold bath” of 1980-81, deregulation gave business its head, and government coffers were bolstered by tax incomes from North Sea oil.

Key growth markets and industries in the late 1980s:

NATURAL RESOURCES
North Sea oil

IT/ELECTRONICS
Computers, office machines, telecommunications equipment

ENTERPRISE ECONOMY
Business services (eg. Management consultants)
Science parks and industrial parks
Shopping centres

POLARISING SOCIETY
Premium consumer goods (eg. Beer, cars)
Discount grocers (eg. Kwiksave)

OTHER
Pharmaceuticals
Sports equipment (eg. Running shoes)

Innovation in FMCG was focused around austerity,value, and relatively simple offers in 1980/81; thereafter there was a rapid reversion towards fundamental drivers such as convenience, snacking, new technology and affordable aspiration, while health became an important concern. By 1986/87 aspirational lifestyle had re-emerged as a strong force.

So having revisited the eighties, let’s return to our recession scorecard:

Pros:
Energising of UK Plc
Strong response to opportunities
Robust innovation in FMCG

Cons:
Loss of output as a result of substantial unemployment
Disenfranchised “underclass” make limited contribution to economy and society

Next time we’ll look at the recession which followed a decade later in 1990-91.

On Tuesday 23rd June the Government announced the world’s largest ever coordinated trial of environmentally friendly vehicles, which to me is about time, as the technology is not right yet to make these cars really practical, so without a push car companies won’t make the effort. It’s a £25 million project, the aim being to try and achieve what is still very far from reality, to make ultra-low carbon vehicles an everyday feature of life on Britain’s roads, in less than five years. People can take part in long-term trials of everything from electric Minis and Smart city cars to sports cars and electric vans.  

Like any other electrical appliance, the cars have plug sockets instead of a petrol cap, which means the electricity needs to be sustainably sourced to be really green. Anyone interested in taking part will need to meet fairly specific criteria (which I and most of my friends don’t!). “You’ll have to have a garage, for example, and you’ll have to have a fairly modern electrical wiring system,” said Emma Lowndes of Mini UK. A normal socket would take over 10 hours to charge the Mini’s battery! They’re talking with Scottish and Southern Energy about putting in a 32 amp box into homes to make a more realistic charging time of 4 hours. Miguel Fonseca, Managing Director of Toyota in the UK said a hybrid car (which they of course make), which can be driven in electric mode and can also use petrol efficiently, was more ideal because of the lack, of advanced infrastructure to charge an electric car quickly. Unfortunately the hybrid car is not as eco-friendly as we’d all like, it needs two engines for the electric and the petrol modes and many small petrol cars such as our very own James Littlewood’s VW Blue Motion do many more miles to the gallon!

Some of the vehicles can travel for 100 miles on a full charge. One of the featured vehicles was the “Lightning” sports car, a 100 percent electric vehicle capable of reaching 130 miles per hour. Personally I’d love to run an electric car for my 50 miles commute but currently I can’t charge one as I live in a street with no off road parking and many of these car’s batteries would flatten before I got home. I guess its still an eco pipe dream for most of us!

1. “Success is going from failure to failure without a loss of enthusiasm.” (Winston Churchill)

2. “Success means never letting the competition define you.” (Tom Chapel)

3. “Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly.” (Robert F. Kennedy)

4. “Success does not consist in never making mistakes but in never making the same one a second time.” (George Bernard Shaw)

5. “If you want to succeed you should strike out on new paths, rather than travel the worn paths of accepted success.” (John D. Rockefeller, Sr.)

Borrowed with pride from all over the place.

An interesting debate raged on Today Radio 4 yesterday regarding the decline of France‘s culinary expertise. Author of new book “Au Revoir To All That” by Michael Steinberger and French cultural commentator Agnes Poirier discussed whether the withering of the small town bistro mirrors a decline in the culinary standing of the country.

Some compelling facts came out; in 1960 France had 200,000 cafés, by 2008 it was down to 40,000. Traditional cheeses are being lost, as no one wishes to continue making them and even Camembert, is now threatened. Thousands of wine producers are also facing financial ruin, turning to violence against supermarkets to draw attention to the problem. The French are also cooking less than ever at home and the average meal in France is now 38 minutes long, down from 88 minutes 25 years before. Instead McDonald’s is now the country’s largest private sector employer. In 2007 it had more than 1,000 restaurants in France and was McDonald’s second most profitable market in the world.

In 1997, The New Yorker published an article by Adam Gopnik asking, “Is There a Crisis in French Cooking?”. Gopnik suggested that French cuisine had become ‘rigid, sentimental, impossibly expensive, and dull’. The “muse of cooking”, as he put it, had moved on, to New York, San Francisco, Sydney, London. In these cities, the restaurants exuded a dynamism that was now increasingly hard to find in Paris.

Steinberger thought this demise was premature in ’97, you could find bad food in France if you went looking for it but France was still “the first nation of food and anyone suggesting otherwise either was being wilfully contrarian or was eating in the wrong places.”

But in 2003, The New York Times Magazine published a cover story trumpeting that Spain had supplanted France in the culinary world. The article discussed the arrival of la nueva cocina, that was reinventing Spanish cuisine with El Bulli’s Ferran Adrià, the highest profile of these new wave chefs. The article made the point that Spain’s gastronomic vitality contrasted with France‘s food scene, which was described by the NY Times as ‘ossified and rudderless’. “French innovation”, he wrote, “has congealed into complacency”. The Spanish food critic Rafael García Santos said: “It’s a great shame what has happened in France, because we love the French people and we learnt there. Twenty years ago, everybody went to France. Today they go there to learn what not to do.”

All very ironic considering that only in July 2005 Jacques Chirac, in a meeting with Vladimir Putin and Gerhard Schröder, allegedly said of Britain “One cannot trust people whose cuisine is so bad.”

Co-RE-creation

At the recent Cello Conference on Creating Consumer Chemistry, Andrew Needham, Founding Partner of Face presented a paper on the practice of Co- Creation. It is a trend that could be relabeled “the rise of Pro-Ams” with amateur consumers helping out us professional marketers.

This made me think about the re-launch of Wispa and I wondered whether this could be called an example of co-RE-creation.

Via their blogs, chat and on-line communication, organised collaboration and subtle Guerrilla marketing (which included storming the stage at Glastonbury with a banner crying “Bring back Wispa!”) and the pledges of free assistance from cheerleaders, knights in armour, a barber shop quartet and a panda, the Great British public expressed their love of an 80s nostalgic brand and ‘forced’ Cadbury to bring back the brand.

‘Responding to four years of on-line hype from 93 ‘Bring Back Wispa’ Facebook groups and hundreds of similar blogging campaigns on MySpace and Bebo, Cadbury will produce around 23 million Wispa Classic limited edition bars. The chocolate will appear in its original blue wrapper, designed by Cadbury’s in-house design team V4′, wrote Design Week at the time.

Cadbury spokesman Tony Bilsborough explained ‘We have noticed the Web interest for some time and the consumer passion has undeniably swayed our opinion to re-launch the Wispa. This is the first time the Internet has played such an intrinsic role in the return of a Cadbury’s brand’ he adds.

For me however it represents another first – the first Co-RE-created brand!

Onto the design – the return of a bold classic but one that, for me, missed the opportunity to use the unique texture and name more distinctively.

Having said that, when Cadbury’s Wispa was back on the shelves with a nifty ‘Pro-am’ ad to boot, I for one was out there buying one or two. POWER TO THE PEOPLE !