2011 sees The Value Engineers celebrate its 25th anniversary. As an homage to the branding world which has been our life for the last quarter of a century, we will be posting a blog on the 25th of every month, discussing everything ’25′.

The year we started The Value Engineers we did a review of the food market for a client. Back then, information on food trends or helpful websites didn’t exist – so we had to find the data for ourselves.

One source was the Good Food Guide. We sampled editions back to the early 1950s, charting the rise of ethnic food, the slow decline of eclectic (and insincere) ‘continental’ restaurants that served anything you could freeze and re-heat, and the painfully slow emergence of regional cuisine.

Looking back now at the 1986 Good Food Guide, I’m struck by what – and particularly who – is not there.

Of the celebrity chefs we now celebrate or sneer at only Raymond Blanc and ‘Richard’ (never Rick) Stein get a mention. No Gordon Ramsay, no Marco Pierre White. Jamie Oliver was only 11 – still five years away from going to catering college – and Heston Blumenthal still had hair, though he started his self-taught progress towards the Fat Duck. Top chefs – including Ken Whitehead of Boulestin – not only endorsed but even cooked with Uncle Ben’s rice. ‘Come off it, old son’ said the Guide.

The Dorchester Hotel – under Anton Mosimann – had the infamous Lymeswold cheese on its menu, because, so they said, the ‘Americans ask for it’.

Italian restaurants went big on ‘chicken Kiev’. Vacuum packed boil in the bag food was a new – and welcome – trend, replacing the frozen entrees and frozen broccoli that dominated the British restaurant trade.

Then the restaurant empires were those of the Roux Brothers and Peter Langan – though the latter’s drunken antics were already beginning to raise eyebrows.

The Guide lamented the level to which prices had risen. Lunch at Le Manoir was £25; getting out of a ‘top end’ restaurant for less than £40 a head was rare – and compared with Chelsea season tickets at £154 or Wimbledon Finals tickets for £18 restaurant prices were exorbitant and ‘arrogant’. Lunch at the Manoir is now around £60; Chelsea season tickets are between £550-1200. Maybe good food is not such a rip-off after all. 

The big trend for the future – said the Guide – was ‘Real Food’. Local ingredients, locally sourced. The Hilton Hotel on Park Lane even had a British Harvest restaurant, with regional British cheeses and English wine. However, ethnic restaurants dominated the Guide. They were ‘head and shoulders’ above the European restaurants for value, quality of food and even service.  French food was the ‘major area of activity for the processed food industry’ and English food was ‘confused and in search of an identity’.

In 1986 The Value Engineers successfully sold to Tesco – via a tasting – the idea and appeal of English cheeses (including Yarg) but the rest of the supermarket trade would take many years before they caught on. We were, perhaps, ahead of our time.

Elsewhere, the Guide lamented, the British were ‘content to talk about a tomato or a potato as if the strain, where they were grown, how long they have been unearthed matters not a jot’.

All this was to change.  Or almost all…

Le Manoir aux Quat’Saisons and Le Gavroche were top of the pile then.  They still are.

But what is also interesting about the GFG of 1986 is that much of what they were campaigning for 25 years ago is still on the agenda today.

Firstly, their campaign for ‘real food’ (named ingredients, freshly sourced from local resources) can be seen in the trend towards what one could call the ‘uber-real’ movement. Foraging for indigenous ingredients has been on the key success factors in René Redzepi’s acclaimed Noma Restaurant in Copenhagen. The name itself gives away the secret. Short for Nordisk Mad (or Nordic food), Noma is a restaurant bent on re-discovery and reinvention of its Nordic heritage of edible plants, woodland berries and forest riches. 

Back in 1986 the Guide was acclaiming the rebirth of Anna’s Place, a one room Nordic restaurant in Stoke Newington. Now a second key trend for the future is the renaissance of supper clubs – food sourced, prepared and cooked for in-the-know small groups by enthusiastic amateurs rather than the big brand professionals.

And my third trend? The rebirth of street food. It’s been an unnoticed and unsung feature of British food for a thousand years or more. And it’s on its way back. We will see a shift away from the mega-restaurants towards the street vans and the pop-up restaurants that will once again celebrate the value of fast, local, community-based food.

When the exotic becomes commonplace courtesy of the big chains it’s time to get local again.

2011 sees  The Value Engineers celebrate its 25th anniversary. As an homage to the branding world which has been our life for the last quarter of a century, we will be posting a blog on the 25th of every month, discussing everything ’25′.

To start our year of twenty fives is a story from 25 years ago but one for which the moral is as central to branding today as it was then. It’s a story of when 250,000 people were wrong and involves the world’s most valuable brand; Coca-Cola.

In the early 1980s Coca Cola (which according to some surveys is the second most recognised word in the world after ‘ok’), was in trouble. It faced the frightening prospect of losing its number one spot in the American soft drink market.

Pepsi’s aggressive ‘Taste Challenge’ campaign was winning market share and Coke had to rely increasingly on its dominance in restricted markets such as vending machines and fast food outlets to maintain its market leader position. Adding to the problem was the success of the brand’s stable mate, Diet Coke. As sales of Diet Coke increased and people become converted to the new brand, the pool of available sugar cola drinkers was getting smaller.

The team in Atlanta embarked on a mission to beat off the Pepsi challenge. Blind taste tests, whereby people are given samples to drink and rate but are not told what brand they are, were conducted. They showed – horror of horrors! – that people preferred the taste of Pepsi.

So the team decided to develop a new Coke. The new formulation they settled on was based on Diet Coke but instead of artificial sweeteners, high fructose corn syrup was added to create a drink that was sweeter and smoother than original Coke and in fact more like Pepsi.

It is reputed that Coke then undertook the largest ever programme of taste panel research, interviewing over ¼ million people.  A clear and significant majority of these preferred the taste of New Coke.

So what should the executives in Atlanta do, launch New Coke alongside ‘Old’ Coke or replace it outright?  Worried that if they retained the original alongside the new it might split sales and give the leadership of the sector to Pepsi they chose to replace the old with the new. The need to maintain secrecy, however, meant that this decision had been taken without ever asking the consumers whether they wanted a new, improved Coke.

On April 23 1985 New Coke was launched and production of the original formulation was halted later that week. And everyone in Atlanta lived happily ever after. Well no, not exactly….

America was outraged. Rather than welcoming the better tasting New Coke, millions of Americans decided they hated it, even before they tasted it. Even amongst those who did taste it, the vast majority were convinced they still preferred the original! (So much for the 250,000 people with whom it had been researched!)

For so many Americans, Coke was much more than just a product: it was an institution, a way of life. It was something they had grown up with, something with which they felt they had a relationship. It was their brand. They reacted with horror to this change. They protested long and loud.

In the end senior executives were forced to hold a press conference to announce the return of the original – now called Classic Coke.

Perhaps luckily for Coke, the real surprise was that after the outrage came forgiveness and then celebration and while Coke did lose leadership to Pepsi in 1985, Classic Coke, the re-launched original regained its leadership in 1986 and kept growing. New Coke faded away.

And the moral of the story? Today, as well as back in 1986, a brand is much more than a product; it exists in the mind as much as it does on the ‘shelf’.

Now as we all know January is the time of diets. But when you think about most slimming and weight control brands it’s true to say that the majority are primarily targeted at women – think Special K, think Diet Coke, think Weight Watchers, think Slimfast, think Alli  (and as an aside isn’t it interesting how many of them are Red!)

While women are undoubtedly the major consumers of these products at the moment, men represent a major opportunity for lots of brands. In a recent government commissionsed Foresight report one of the conclusions was that “within 10 years, 81 per cent of men aged between 20 and 65, will be either overweight or obese, and 41 per cent of them will be obese.”

And while there have been one or two more male targeted ‘diet’ brands including Pepsi Max/Coke Zero and Men’s Health (the male equivalent of Slimming magazine), a topline analysis says that brands need to recognise that the levers for men and women are different – it is calories and celebs for women while it amy be  six-packs and sex for men

All of which leads to a slightly belated prediction for 2011 – namely a focus on more men’s health and weight control brands. (and, of course, we’d be delighted to help you develop just such a brand).

India, the world’s biggest democracy, is rapidly becoming the key market to crack for international brands. In a new series of blog posts Anjul Sharma – fluent in Indian culture and Hindi, Punjabi & Urdu languages - looks at the approach to branding in one of the planet’s fastest growing markets.

In these posts on India, I have talked a lot about customer service and key players who have shown what great customer service is like – Taj Hotels and Palaces and Kingfisher Airlines.  It’s time to ask how come these guys can deliver customer excellence par excellence?

The Chief Executive of Kingfisher had said they have “no passengers”, which may make you think they were about to go under (literally and financially). They have no passengers, however, because they only have ‘honoured guests’. No doubt the big guys at Taj would say something rather similar in spirit: they don’t have travellers but cherished guests (or words to that effect). 

Why do they talk about (honoured/ cherished) guests? For the answer to this question, I think we should turn our attention to Hindu philosophy and the verse “Athidhi devo bhavah”. The verse is quoted from the Taittiriya Upanishad (one of the sacred Hindu texts) that says “Matru devo bhava, Pitru devo bhava, Acharya devo bhava, Athidhi devo bhava”. In English, this means, one should worship the Mother, the Father, the Teacher and one’s Guests as God (athithi means guest). ‘Tithi’ in Sanskrit means a date. In ancient times, it was not possible for guests to anticipate their date of arrival so “Atithi” was the term used to describe a visiting person who had no fixed date of arrival or departure. “Devo” means God and Bhav means Be/Is, literally meaning “Guest is God.”

Indian religious belief systems and folklore are richly peppered with many examples of God arriving unannounced on one’s doorstep in the guise of a more humble creature like a beggar.  Hence it is an accepted and familiar part of the culture, accessible to all and part of the cultural belief system. And herein lies the difference. In the West, we are often too transactional about service. Customer service can end up being trained and performed as if employees were performing seals in a circus to earn money, increase loyalty and inflate the bottom line. Whilst all these are laudable and very important, there isn’t a deeper and more meaningful cultural anchorage that employees can hang on to. Kingfisher, Taj and other great exponents of customer service from India exemplify how when good business sense is built on strong (and ancient) cultural foundations it becomes magnetic, alluring, effective and commercially astute.