In 1986, among other world events, The Value Engineers first opened its doors for business. In 2011, we celebrated 25 years of helping our clients build successful, profitable brands.

For us, it was never a time to look back, but rather a time to look forward and think about the coming challenges and fresh opportunities presented by an ever-changing and increasingly competitive landscape.

On 9th June, 2011, we hosted a seminar in London, entitled: ‘Back to the future of branding - A look at what the past 25 years of brand marketing tell us about what the next 25 may have in store’. 

During the seminar, we presented six papers alongside some of our past and present clients, addressing a few of what we felt were the big issues facing branding and marketing. Our aim was to encourage new thinking, make a few predictions and perhaps even challenge
some of today’s orthodoxies. We wanted to show that we remain as committed as ever to helping our clients out-think, out-compete and out-perform their competition. Over the next few months, we’ll be sharing some of the papers that were presented that day.

Here you’ll find the first of these papers, co-authored by The Value Engineers’ Katy Mousinho and Confused.com’s Mike Hoban. In a time when every market research company is repositioning itself as an insight provider, their paper asks: ‘What’s beyond insight?’

We hope you enjoy it. If you’d like to discuss any of the issues raised in the paper, why not submit a comment below, or get in touch with us directly?

In celebration of our 25 year anniversary, we asked some of our earliest clients to cast their minds back to their “first time” working with The Value Engineers. Here, Kees Van Der Graaf recalls the development of the fruity ice cream phenomenon, Boomy.

In 1988 the Unilever Ice Cream Researchers developed a great new technology. It was now possible to create an ice cream which could be truly 3 dimensional, with no need for any symmetries. It was basically an application of the injection molding technology from the plastics industry. The only thing that needed to happen was to find a product for which this technology could be the long awaited technical solution.

It was a perfect example of a total disconnect between research and marketing. Marketing had to dream up a concept using this unique and patented process. At the time I was Marketing Director of the Spanish ice cream business. We were known for our creativity, and got the task to launch a great concept exploiting the technical possibilities. As I worked with the Value Engineers in my Walls Meat days I called Paul Walton and shouted “help”. Paul and team did not need a lot of convincing to come to Barcelona to work on this mission Impossible. As we all know no bridge is too high for Paul.

After some initial briefing sessions, including a visit to Unilever Research, TVE came up with some great ideas, of which the one with 3 different fruits on a stick tested very well (see photo). The concept was further developed into a very strong complete marketing mix. Boomy was the name of a fruit eating monster, who would do anything to get his portion of this fruit ice cream. The target audience was young children.  Boomy was reasonably priced.  A cartoon character, lovely comics and a funny TVC supported the launch.

The launch went very well.

Too well. Unilever’s central marketing resources took over the international roll out, and started to tweak the concept without involving The Value Engineers or the Spanish company. The price went up, the positioning was extended to all ice cream consumers, and by doing so they ruined the concept. A great pity, that this piece of brilliant marketing was never given the chance to conquer the market.

Building on the theme of 25 in honour of our upcoming birthday, we decided we would poll our UK based consultants and create a set of lists on the “brands” of the last 25 years. However we decided that we would, in fact, create not just one list but three:

So ‘The Top 25’ list consists of brands which we felt have made a strong impact over this period and continue to occupy a leading position in their respective markets.

Many other brands had, at least at some time, the potential to make it as big as our winners, but their recent dwindling has instead placed them in the ‘Not What They Used To Be’ Category and are perhaps candidates to be re-vitalised

Finally, there are the brands which created a storm in their time but have since then either faded into the background or have completely disappeared from the UK market entirely. We list these under the name of ‘Going, Going …  & Gone.’

We have listed each of them alphabetically as our sample is far from being statistically significant

So looking at the list what can we learn?

Firstly, the abundance of high street brands in the ‘Not What They Used-To-Be’ and ‘Going, Going… & Gone’ lists once again highlights the importance of developing a digital presence in retail.

Secondly, perhaps M&S and McDonald’s position in the winning list serves as a reminder that even declining brands can be revitalised through intelligent repositioning. This should lift the spirits of the ‘Not What They Used To Be’ brands, since most of them are still household names with substantial capital that can be leveraged.

Lastly, even the most successful brands should never stop developing in line with consumer trends. Polaroid, Laura Ashley and The Body Shop were all brilliant in their respective fields and delivered against very relevant customer needs at the time. However, they have been less successful in foreseeing future developments and devising their strategy accordingly, which has resulted in them lagging behind their more long-sighted competitors. 

As ever we would love to know your thoughts on our lists of 25 and whether you have any nominations of your own?