High Street Dreams.

There was a programme on television last Friday evening that caught and held my attention. It was called “High Street Dreams”. It featured the hopes and ambitions of two quite different characters who hoped to take a product they had created to the marketplace and make their fame and fortune. They were discovered and advised by those who had successfully travelled that route themselves. The participants couldn’t have been more disparate. One, a male Doctor of Quantum Physics; the other, a female Blacksmith/Artist in metals. The former was hoping to market a new design in photo frames. The other whose work could only be described as art, after much thought and research produced a beautifully designed Pestle and Mortar in a choice of metals. Predictably the former was voted the most likely to succeed and did manage to secure an order from Heals. The other was considered far too expensive and the artist was told she wasn’t sufficiently businesslike to be able to progress further. Curiously both were disappointed. Heals would place only a small order for the photo frame despite all the indications that the product was likely to perform well in their shops, the Blacksmith because she hadn’t been able to progress further and seemed to be in a sort of commercial or artistic limbo. 

I have been involved in the planning and launch of a number of new products. Well the research and marketing teams called them products, I didn’t, I called them magazines because that’s what they were. The first launch in which I had a central role was that of “Family Circle” in 1964. Then the title was the biggest selling magazine in the USA. It was available only in supermarkets and the plan was to replicate its success in the UK. Of course the pundits said it wouldn’t work, couldn’t work. The Newsagents would somehow put a stop to it, the unions would oppose it, and in any case women wouldn’t buy a magazine in the same place as she did her shopping. They were all wrong! 

Meetings were held in that famous room designed by Lord Snowden on the top floor of the offices of the Thomson Organisation in Grays Inn Road, and the whole philosophy of marketing anything through supermarkets was explained by an elderly Gentleman from America named P K Lieberman. He represented the American owners of the title, who were, if my memory serves me correctly, Merrill Lynch Pearce & Ptnrs the Venture capitalists known in the States as the Thundering Herd. He forecast that one day all publications would be sold in supermarkets. Few believed that possible, the Newsagents Federation had such a grip on the distribution and retailing of all publications that any suggestion they would ever give up their exclusive rights was unthinkable. The bloody minded leaders of the Unions would try to block any changes in distribution for any reasons they could dream up. 

The excitement of the project was intense. I felt it most since I was by far the youngest of the team and it was all so different, new, vibrant, downright exciting, I loved it!. Geoff Wilkie the advertisement manager had come from The Times, Andrew Openshaw from The Sunday Times, Max Mulroy and John Derry from The Sphere magazine. All of them senior figures in the advertisement business. The Editor Christine Brady and her deputy Vera Segal were perhaps the calmest of us all. They knew their market, and how it was to be reached was the problem of the marketing department of the Thomson Organisation, not theirs. It all came together led by Geoffrey Perry the Managing Director of Stanbrook Publications, a wholly owned Thomson Company formed and located in Bond Street so as to be well away from the stifling, union controlled atmosphere of Grays Inn Road. Industry and their advertising agencies reacted well to the new American influenced sales techniques we employed to gather sufficient revenue to make the title profitable. And everything seemed to be happening at once. I think this was when marketing people began to ‘present’ to one another instead talking to each other. 

Came the Great Day, 24^th September 1964. I remember it well and still have the stainless steel Parker propelling pencil given as a memento to all employees on that day by an enthusiastic Geoffrey Perry. In no time at all the title overtook Woman and Home as the Women’s Monthly Magazine with the biggest circulation. Strangely though the magazine wasn’t universally accepted as being a brand leader. It was still viewed as being not quite legitimate in ABC terms and JICNARS didn’t begin registering the rapid rise in readership for quite some time afterwards. I was sad to hear the title had run its course and was now closed. 

So I end where I began. Entrepreneurs, in this case Lord Thomson and Geoffrey Perry took an idea few expected to work, created a new team of people with new thinking and, advised by those who had launched new magazines before, made the project a huge success. This country lives or dies by the creation of new thinking and new inventive ideas. At first they may appear small and insignificant to some but like the acorn will grow as soon as they find the right environment. Those featured in the BBC programme and others like them, should take heart, think about Sir Alan Sugar, Sir John Cohen, Mr Selfridge and all the world famous inventors who began with just an idea and eventually changed the very markets they found so difficult to enter when they started. So do as they did, create the product, define the market, set the sights and go for it. From what I saw enthusiasm will take them most of the way.