11 Nov 2010

Duchy Originals – A License to Print Money Unless Your Mum Already Does

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HRH Prince Charles started Duchy Originals, a range of wholesome organic products, as a way of generating funds for his charity, The Prince’s Trust. The charity supports disadvantaged young entrepreneurs and is a really worthy cause. Britain needs entrepreneurs and the Trust provides seed capital and mentorship to kids who, having grown up on the wrong side of the track, would otherwise never be given a chance. It gets corporate and private sponsorship but the Prince thought it would be a good idea to create an annuity income from one of his entrepreneurial ideas.

Charles has always been convinced that original is better and environmentally friendly is essential. He prefers old style architecture and any ‘back to nature’ way of producing food. Since he feels he represents British values at their best (so I was once told by someone in his entourage) he believes that deep down we all want to be like him. So when, on his Highgrove Estate,  he came across a nice biscuit made with organic ingredients to an old fashioned recipe or bacon from free range organic pigs he reckoned, given the chance, we’d all like to pay a premium for these foods. He founded Duchy Originals – or at least he had some of his people do it – and launched a range of products the best of which, in my opinion, were the biscuits and the bacon.

He put some professional managers in charge and for a while it did OK – it got to 4 million plus turnover at its best and the charity received some annual dividends. Charles was known to boast playfully that he was “a self-made millionaire” on the back of the success of his business start up. So far so good.

I met people who worked at Duchy Originals and while they tried to be discrete it was pretty clear that the business significantly under-performed because, allegedly, HRH could not stop meddling and forced on them whatever latest crackpot idea he had come up with. If he happened upon some tasty Lemon Curd or sturdy Garden Sheds, he insisted these be added to the range irrespective of whatever carefully laid business plan they were working to. Worse still he also foisted on them whichever business or marketing expert he happened to meet who showed any interest in Duchy Originals (which you would, wouldn’t you, if you met HRH and were trying to make conversation).

Nevertheless, some might say that he deserves full credit for founding the charity and having the gumption to start a business that he believed in, and that would provide some extra funds. Yes, but…… What Duchy Originals is, in effect, is a commercial application of the Royal Warrant, the special seal of approval the Queen bestows on any product she uses personally. The Royal Warrant is strictly non-commercial – if the Queen happens to patronize your brand of Waxed Shooting Jacket or Umbrella or biscuit you can apply for a Royal Warrant. If it is awarded you may feature this in your advertising or on your product but there are strict rules as to how this is done and no money changes hands. You only have to look at what the Duchess of York pocketed for her full blown endorsement of Weight Watchers (genius move on their part by the way) to see how much the Royal Warrant could be worth if you could really exploit it. Ditto Duchy Originals. How much money could you make – especially in the USA and Asia – if you could launch a company with a range of products under the HRH Prince Charles Brand? Hundreds of millions, billions even if it was well managed.

How high did HRH drive the revenues– 4 million quid at best, and this slumped last year to half that and a loss of 3.3 million pounds. So he has licensed Duchy Original to Waitrose – the upmarket grocery store that are the most enthusiastic stockists of the Duchy range – in return for a guaranteed donation to the trust of 1 million per year. Waitrose will do well with Duchy Originals and one assumes at last it will get the less fettered professional management and development of the brand it deserves, but one can’t help feeling Duchy Originals could have been a license to print money for a very worthy charity.
Mind you, if you are the heir to the throne that does print the money there are probably easier and ways to generate extra funds for the Prince’s Trust than selling biscuits one happens to enjoy with one’s tea.

God Bless him, Prince Charles is the best weapon we British republicans have.

21 Sep 2010

Only Old Guys Care About Privacy

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David Rowan is the editor of Wired UK and he recently wrote about why he is not active on facebook. This interested me. I’m much older than David – who admits to being the wrong side of 30 yrs while I try not to admit to being the wrong side of 50. I, too, am very inactive on facebook. It’s partly a brand thing – feels more relevant to my kids than me – but I confess to a certain unease about sharing too much stuff on a social site motivated by profit.

David Rowan is much more explicit about his worries. Apart from the general point that sites like facebook are not motivated by your self – interest he goes on to list several other concerns. Giving away too much information makes it harder to reinvent yourself (mature maybe?) in later years. Information supplied for one purpose will invariably be used for another that you did not sign up for and indeed, may be used against you – are you happy to share everything about yourself with a prospective employer? People can be selective in what they choose to republish about you to paint a less attractive picture – people like journalists. Social sites lull us into revealing more than we realize and clever search allows that to be singled out.

Facebook have a Privacy policy that runs to some 5,830 words, nearly a third longer than the US Constitution, but it amounts to “we can do what we want with what we know” apparently. If this seems alarmist on David Rowan’s part you might like to bear in mind that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has been quoted as saying he believes the world would be better place if none of us had any secrets. Hard to argue with that. We would behave better if we felt every thing we ever said, did, wrote or thought was freely and readily available to all our fellow citizens. We would be good – but not for goodness sake. Not sure that’s the world I’d like to inhabit (it is of course the world you already inhabit if you believe in God and divine retribution).

Rowan wrote his piece in response to a colleague’s taunt that only old guys care about privacy. In fact the proportion of younger users of facebook who are becoming more circumspect and private in terms of their use of the site is higher than the older users. We all care about privacy, perhaps if you are older you are better able to understand why. You have more experience of the benefit that comes of mistakes you were able to keep private versus the downside of the ones sadly you were not.

I am a firm believer in Permission Marketing especially in today’s ‘Wired’ World. I think the transaction must be clear – I tell you certain things in return for you using them to my explicit benefit. I am involved in one such business and am aware of others that are being developed. I think we’ll see more and more of this. People will share information about themselves if they can see you will use it responsibly and transparently and they get something out of this. No harm in marketing to people if they want you to. I love cars and would happily share insights on what I own, what I like, what I think about cars etc. if you promise to reward me with great deals and interesting content about my particular hobby. However, I’m not sure I want you to market some diet pills to me just because I confessed to being worried about my weight on facebook to people I thought were my friends or if I uploaded some photos where I looked a bit podgy (which would be any photo of me).

Young people (and old people) read about their favourite celebs in magazines like Heat and Hello. Their facebook page is their chance for a bit of fame if they share what’s going on in their lives. They are copying what they see celebs do (or have done to them) in terms of publicity, reaching for their 15 minutes of fame.

So, I have adpated an old Cat Stevens song as a warning to young people who, in their search for internet celebrity, are not sufficiently wary of facebook:-

Oh, baby it’s a wired world,
It’s hard to get by just upon a smile.
Oh, baby, baby, it’s a wired world
I’ll always remember you just like a child, girl.

At least I will if you are not careful about the photos you upload to facebook.

3 Sep 2010

Is the Internet Changing our Brains?

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I have been involved in a debate about whether the internet has changed marketing. It began in an exchange between myself and Paul Feldwick in Market Leader, the UK Marketing Society’s journal, and then moved on-line. There have been, as we hoped, some great contributions, including one from Elen Lewis who referenced an article in The Guardian that features several very eminent scientists (and a novelist) debating whether and how the internet has changed our very brains. I was interested in this since a big part of my argument that marketing has fundamentally changed as a result of the internet is based on the fact that society and people have changed. To be able to show that our brains have changed is therefore a killer point.

The article is worth reading in its entirety and being given some quiet consideration rather than surfing this short post to get the gist – you will realize the relevance/irony of this recommendation if you do. However, if, as a child of the internet, it is gist you want then here it is. Yes the internet is changing our brains. Some argue that it is for the worse, some argue it is just different with pro’s and cons, others argue it is our choice whether or not we allow it to change our brains (reading more books would help us retain our intellectual reasoning apparently).

For me the most interesting comment in the Guardian piece comes from Ed Bullmore, Cambridge Professor of Psychiatry no less. He argues that the internet resembles a human brain and how it works and therefore we can learn a lot about how we think by studying it. He calls the internet “a prosthesis of our collective memory” that’s an artificial brain to you and me. I know extrapolation is a dangerous thing but it has struck me before that if, at some point in the near future (near being imminent in evolutionary terms) everything that has ever been written and conceived, everyone one of us, every artifact and idea is digitally coded and available on the internet, and if every person on the planet is uploading their thoughts and conversations in real time, and if there are search engines and social networks able to allow each and everyone of us to access and connect all of these things again in real time, that is in effect one global brain is it not? This sounds a bit far fetched I agree. So do the views of Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook. Far from being shame-faced that community information has leaked out he believes that everything should be transparent and publically available. He thinks – this is really crazy – that the world would be a better place, we would all behave better, if there were no secrets, if we were all honest with each other. Actually there must be a flaw in this argument since I have only one brain and I’m not honest with myself.

Anyway, the fact is that the big brains agree the internet is changing our brains and how they function as well as how we interact in our global cyber society. I think that means marketing must be changed fundamentally since at its heart it is about influencing how people think, behave and choose, individually and collectively, to the commercial benefit of a business. In fact I’d say that was game, set and match Paul! I’d now like to move on to a debate about the cult of celebrity and its role in our slide into destructive global decadence (aka Paris Hilton will be the death of all of us).

Any takers?

27 Jul 2010

Risky Business

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Risk management has become a bit of a hobby-horse for me. It’s part of corporate governance for UK Plc’s and US corporates. I was exposed to it first when I was on the board of Tempus Plc and then again at SABMiller Plc. It’s fair to say that like a lot of corporate governance, company directors regard Risk Management as at best a necessary chore and at worst a pointless exercise. Business is at its heart a risk/benefit decision process and well-run businesses would claim that their normal management processes take care of risk assessment. Every time Risk Management came on the agenda at SABMiller, my old boss, Graham Mackay, would, with some irritation, point out that the origins of Risk Management lay with governance for banks and their particular needs rather than manufacturing businesses like ours. He had a point and to be fair SABMiller is an extremely well run business.

However, always the contrarian, I really enjoyed Risk Management (I was on the RM committee at Tempus and had to oversee its implementation for the marketing function at SABMiller). The arguments made sense to me:-

When businesses suffer serious calamity people with hindsight always say the risk could have been forseen. They are right more often than not. In fact, more often than not someone in the organization or a disaffected former employee claims they wrote a memo about it.

An exercise where you take a hard look at what could go wrong and then discuss ways of either avoiding, mitigating or insuring against it, is a fundamentally very strategic exercise. Of course you see risks but you can also see opportunities. At the very least you get fresh insight.

There are various ways to approach RM (good old Wiki lays them out) but it is essentially fairly straightforward. An experienced and accountable group of people look at all the potential risks for all aspects of the business and draw up a list. They then catagorize the list into how likely they are to happen (high, medium, low probability) and how serious the effect would be if they did (high, medium, low impact). This then gives a matrix and of course you start with the highest probability/highest impact and work your way through them. Can they be avoided by improved management processes and/or better monitoring? Can they be insured against? Is further work or more fundamental change required? Logical stuff.

The point is, the risk is brought out into the open – what is the worst that can happen, how likely is it, what can we do about it? It’s impossible to do this without getting some great insights about the business and identifying some sensible actions to manage the risk.

The reason I am so obsessed by this subject is that for me it lies at the heart of what triggered the Recession i.e. the failure of the banking system (ironic that isn’t it?). It is also the solution, for me, as to what we should do to prevent a future reoccurrence of the systemic failings in the financial institutions, and a preferable one to lots more regulation and red tape.

Surely if Risk Management had been effective – that is to say applied with conviction and purpose – at Lehman Brothers (and the rest of the banks) they would have realized that they were massively exposed if house prices turned down? Does anyone now believe that Risk Management (forget the ethical questions just focus on the good business sense argument) was alive and well under Lord Browne at BP?

We don’t need loads more legislation. We have Risk Management – we just need to ensure that it is taken entirely seriously. And whom do we rely on to do that? Non-Executive Directors, that’s who. There has been a lot of whinging and whining among that elite group NED’s on the boards of the big corporates. They complain that they carry so much accountability and responsibility for very little by way of reward as a result of all this pesky governance. How can they be held accountable, they have to rely on what the executive board tell them about a business they get involved with only 6 or 8 times a year? Bullshit.

A well chosen, vetted and experienced Non-Exec should know enough to be able to ask the tough questions and should be relied upon to see that protocols like Risk Management are taken seriously. Are you telling me an experienced banker could not have asked a few probing questions about toxic debt and the impact of a downturn in house prices (especially given how deep Lehman and others were into it)? Are you telling me an experienced oil man could not have spotted the shortcuts that BP were taking and the risk they were exposing themselves, their shareholders (which includes a lot of pensioners) and all of us to? I’m bloody sure I can in marketing which is my chosen area.

We do not need to change much. Keep the governance and regulation we have, just make sure it is applied vigorously and hold the NED’s to account if it is not. The one change I’d make is to have a potential Non-Exec vetted and approved by an independent authority. And I don’t buy the argument that any of this will put the good Non-Execs off joining a board. It is very prestigious, very interesting and already well paid. They get circa $50 -100,000 to attend 6-8 board meetings a year (and read the papers and take an active interest in the business). This fee could be increased – surely it’s worth it – but in my view that is not the issue or the barrier to having good non-execs. Breaking up the cosy club of senior businessmen and well connected retirees and opening it up to better qualified people is the issue. No names, no pack drill but I have met some truly ineffectual and disengaged Non-Execs in my time.

Business is risky and the impact of corporate calamities affects all of us. It can be made much less risky and no less profitable with a bit of common sense.

Post Script

For those interested in the application of risk management thinking specifically to marketing you might like to read ‘Brand Risk’ by David Abrahams. You’ll see some contribution from yours truly but despite this, it is an interesting book from a smart author.

At least I think it is but then Risk Management is a hobby-horse of mine.

10 Mar 2010

My mate, Robyn Putter (1950-2010)

by | posted in: Life | 5

I got back to my room in the Holiday Inn in Durban knackered. It was 1996, my first ever trip to South Africa and I’d just finished my second all day session with Unilever’s brightest and best who were on a training course I was running. Reception rang – there was a Mr. Derek Carstens in the lobby who wanted to come up and see me. I vaguely remember my mate Gavin Neath, chairman of Unilever in SA at the time, saying something about giving my name to some agency guy. Derek was MD and Robyn Putter was chairman of Ogilvy SA. The agency had a much longer name involving several other surnames none of which I recognized and none of which was Putter. Robyn should have had his name there since under his leadership – I soon discovered – Ogilvy dominated SA. They were more than double the size of their nearest rival and had pretty much run out of new clients they could target. So they were planning on broadening their ‘service offering’ and Derek was there to see if I wanted to open up an office of Added Value, the brand marketing consultancy I had co-founded.

Derek was a whirlwind – he wasn’t actually there to ask me, he was there to tell me we were going to set up Added Value together in the Rainbow Nation. Like I say, I was knackered and it was my first ever trip to a country I knew very little about (my student bar at Bristol was called the Mandela Bar, some guy called Pienaar had captained the Springboks to Rugby World Cup victory, Mandela had worn his shirt, Wilbur Smith, cheap wine – that was about it). But Derek was very persuasive and Ogilvy SA sounded like a force to be reckoned with. I thought to myself, if this is the MD, I can’t wait to meet this Robyn Putter guy, but I did not commit myself. Maybe, let me think about it. I finished the course and ended the trip with a couple of days in Cape Town, which blew me away. I flew back to the UK and thought little more about Derek and the mysterious Robyn Putter.

A couple of months later my secretary informed me that Messers Putter and Carstens were in London and keen to pursue our discussion. Would I like to meet them at their hotel in the West End? No I would not – I was up to my eyes in client work, we had a new office in Paris and were just about to open in Sydney. It was a good time at Added Value but I was taking strain. “Tell them if they are prepared to come down to Hampton (20 miles outside London) I’ll have a beer in the pub with them and maybe a curry afterwards”. They were, so we met in a truly grotty pub near my house. Derek was again very impressive but the two of them together were unplayable. They were keen to progress things and had found exactly the right person to run AVG in South Africa – Charles Broome. We drank a lot of beer, we went to the curry house next door, we laughed and we schemed. By the end of the evening we shook hands – AVG Cape Town was born and I had met two people who were to become much more than business partners, they were to become lifelong friends.

Sadly Robyn’s life was not as long as it should have been and he lost his fight with cancer on 1st March 2010. For posterity, this is my experience of one of the most impressive men I have known.

Launching AVG gave me the excuse to visit South Africa often. I soon realized that in Robyn’s backyard he was something of a legend. Not just his backyard – at the time the majority of the ads on Ogilvy Worldwide’s showreel were from Ogilvy SA, created either by or under the watchful eye of Robyn. He had taken an agency with good foundations and turned it into the only game in town.

By the nature of my client work I got to know the senior people in companies like SAB and Old Mutual. I quickly learned that Robyn was one of their most trusted advisers. He had much more than a creative advertising brain, he had business insight and CEO’s and Marketing Directors valued this rare quality.

We always got together for a beer or three on my many trips to Cape Town and Jo’burg. He was very warm, very sharp and very naughty. We were in a fair few client meetings together as well and I learned the hard way that if you took him on in an argument you better have your shit together. He made his points with conviction, with passion and always with sincerity. He was saying what he truly believed, not what was expedient or what the client wanted to hear – were you? He had a very big presence in meetings. He spoke quietly and everyone listened. He was passionate but he was also very, very cool. He had this Apache Indian look going – dark hair slicked back in a ponytail. Cool and a bit intimidating at times.

There was an occasion when I called to tip him off that SAB were less than impressed with Ogilvy in India. I thought he should know since he clearly had the clout in Ogilvy to sort this out (he was on the worldwide board and would go on to become their longest serving director). His response was not friendly. I can’t remember whether he actually said “Mind your own fucking business” but he might as well have done. I was a bit miffed, I was only trying to be helpful. I misconstrued his reaction. I thought it was typical agency hubris on his part and was a bit cool with him on my next visit to Cape Town. It did not last long. At a client conference we hooked up and got drunker than is sensible for someone – me – who was due to speak at the conference the following day. (The client was SAB). My head hurt but it was ok – I muddled through and our friendship became stronger. We had had a small run in and everything was sorted out over several Castles (several being a number with two digits).

But why had he reacted so sharply to my well-intended criticism of his precious Ogilvy? It was because Ogilvy was very precious to him. The agency, its founder, David Ogilvy, its CEO Shelly Lazerus, Mike Walsh, his team in South Africa – they all really mattered to him. They commanded his loyalty, his respect – and if Robyn respected you he was fiercely loyal. It’s a family kind of loyalty, “I can criticize them but I will defend them robustly against anyone else who does”. Robyn’s loyalty and his generosity to those he loved and respected was something I would learn more about – something I would experience even more personally a few years later.

Time moved on and we saw each other fairly often. Sometimes mutual clients would bring us together, sometimes just a casual beer when he was in London or I was in South Africa, sometimes both. Ally Hewitt at SAB would use any excuse to organize a get together at some bar or rugby game. Derek Carstens had moved on from Ogilvy to be CMO at RMB/FNB bank. Robyn loved Derek and missed him as a business partner when he left but their friendship went much deeper than business. So when I took Derek to the 1999 Rugby World Cup final it was inevitable that the 3 of us would meet up after the game in a bar in Cardiff. As Derek and I limped back to London the following day I had to remind him that neither of our teams had actually been in the final even though we’d partied as if they’d won!

The common strands of rugby, beer and SAB brought Robyn and me together more and more. When SAB provided the tickets to the autumn international between England and South Africa, I was with Robyn to see his team get a good thrashing. Graham Fuel, his best pal was with him on one of those game days and we all ended up back at my favourite pub in Twickenham.  Everything else about that evening is a haze too.

In business we crossed paths in some big meetings to discuss Castle beer. Robyn had a lifelong passion for both the brew and the brand. I was a more recent convert but was no less passionate about either. What neither of us could agree on was the solution needed to arrest its alarming decline in sales in South Africa. I thought it was a brand strategy and positioning issue. Robyn thought the positioning was just fine, what was needed was some magic in terms of an idea to rally round. He also believed the brand should be allowed to decline in order to get back to a smaller but more solid base of true loyal users (people like him). I was convinced he was wrong, he was convinced he was right. We never agreed. On this, as on so many other issues we ‘debated’ over the years, I came to realize much later that he was in fact right and I was in fact wrong.

In late 2001 my business (now merged with Tempus Plc) was acquired by WPP (the owners of Ogilvy). In 2002 I took my opportunity to leave Added Value and its new owners, WPP, when Graham Mackay offered me the job of Global Marketing Director of SABMiller Plc. Graham Mackay is the most impressive CEO I have ever met and I jumped at the chance to work for him. He was also a very old friend and big admirer of Robyn. So much so that when I took up my new job he told me that he had had a chat with Robyn and decided it would be a good idea to have him provide a second opinion on the quality of the marketing leadership I gave. This is not what you want to hear in your first week in a new job, even if your new mentor is as smart as Robyn – especially if your new mentor is as smart as Robyn. I told Graham I thought this was a great idea but, in a neat side step, suggested we set up a kind of non-executive marketing board including not just Robyn but a few others (that I chose). Graham and I could then jointly use them to get a second opinion on not just what I was doing but what all the operating company marketing directors were doing. As I say, a neat side step. Make sure Robyn is just one of several advisors and position it so that it was Graham and I taking the advice, not just me. I did choose some really good people including Shelly Lazerus, Worldwide head of Ogilvy, the two best people I knew in Unilever, Ralph Kugler and Keith Weed, my mate Chris Satterthwaite from Chime and my other mate, Professor Kevin Keller.  We did indeed get great advice from this hugely talented and experienced group of marketing gurus. But my next move was even smarter. I made sure that I personally got time alone with Robyn so I could take his advice off the record – advice I knew I needed and advice I came to rely on. As always we sometimes disagreed on brand issues but the debate sharpened my thinking, helped me rehearse my arguments and allowed me discreetly to change tack on occasions.

Some time towards the end of my tenure at SABMiller Robyn took on a similar role for WPP. They had lost their ‘Worldwide Creative Head’ Neil French in somewhat controversial circumstances. Martin Sorrell had to act quickly – there was only one choice of successor, only one guy who could restore their credibility – Robyn Putter. The problem was that Robyn lived in Cape Town and was a key member of the Ogilvy Worldwide Board. Sorrell did a deal with Shelly whereby Robyn remained 50% Ogilvy and a deal with Robyn whereby he could do the job from his beloved Cape Town.

Looking back it has a feeling of inevitability about it. From a meeting with Derek Carstens in Durban in 1996, a few beers in the pub with Robyn and Derek a few months later to agree the JV with AVG and Ogilvy in South Africa, (whose big client was SAB) to Robyn ending up as Worldwide Creative Head of WPP and me ending up Group Marketing Director for SABMiller.

Our one-on-one sessions took on a new dimension. Me asking his advice on SAB brands but both of us now trying to make sense of a couple of really tough staff jobs we had ended up in. How do you go about running a central marketing team in a highly decentralized organization like SAB? How do you go about providing creative leadership in a financially driven business like WPP, and to creative heads in disparate – often competing –  agencies around the world? Robyn and I had slowly but surely bonded over the years – now we were brothers in arms.

But there were some big differences between him and me, between brand marketing and creativity, and between SABMiller and WPP. In reverse order – in brand marketing much of my job was to provide process and systems that brought out the best in our front-line marketers. With creativity you are dealing with ‘magic’ (I will explain this later in the words of Robyn) that cannot be systemized, it can only be recognized, encouraged and inspired. In SABMiller I had a boss who understood what I needed to do, respected it and was generous with his time and support to help me achieve it. In WPP Robyn had a boss (so he felt) who was the polar opposite. Finally, Robyn was a lot smarter than me. He also had more humility and patience – important qualities in a “Group” director if they are also clever (the less gifted need to be arrogant in order to compensate). Whether this is fair or not, I feel I got more praise for doing less and Robyn got less praise for doing much more.

Life – and my friendship with Robyn – was to take one more twist. I had always intended to leave SABMiller after a few years – I wasn’t so dumb as to think it was a job I could do forever. As my leaving date approached my wife, Liz, and I decided we would move as a family to Cape Town. We had a few friends there, Robyn and Margarita among them, and we had UK friends who had friends and family there. It would be a glorious adventure and a great place to raise our two young sons. I recall telling Graham Mackay of our plans. He thoroughly endorsed our view of Cape Town as a great place to live as a family but warned me that it could be a bit cliquey socially.

We arrived in Cape Town in October 2006 to a rented house while we built our dream home round the corner. The rented house proved to be a nightmare – we spent weeks trying to get everything to work – not easy when you have the landlord from hell and you are new in town.  Most of the friends and contacts were busy or out of town. It was a difficult time and one that could have been very lonely but for one or two people. Robyn was one of those people. From the first week we arrived, and every week thereafter, he called – how are things, fancy a beer or round of golf, Margarita and I are having a party for you so you can meet some people. The fierce loyalty and support I had encountered early on in our relationship was now firmly pointed in our direction. He was the best friend you could possibly hope for.

It now became a 4 way friendship. I had never really got to know “My Sweetheart” as Robyn always referred to Margarita until we moved to Cape Town and neither Robyn nor Margarita knew Lizzie very well. That changed very fast and several top restaurants in Cape Town benefitted from our nights out as a foursome. Robyn and I especially spent a lot of time together. There were the longstanding bonds of beer, rugby, rude jokes, marketing and mutual business friends but now we had something new to cement us as blood brothers. We both loved golf and were both pretty terrible at it (me rather more so). At every available opportunity we were on the golf course – any golf course, every golf course. When we got bored of the Cape Town golf courses we took road trips to play golf courses up the coast. We seized on and shared every new revelation about the latest techniques that would change our swing and get us below 90. They rarely did. We shared these times with other mutual friends and old friends of Robyn’s. We laughed, we lost sack full’s of golf balls and between us I reckon we revived Castle’s sales figures in the Western Cape.

Initially I had more time on my hands than Robyn to indulge our shared pursuits but Martin Sorrell changed that. Some of the facts of Robyn’s departure from WPP are indisputable – Robyn found out that WPP had appointed another ‘Creative head’ when friends rang him to say they had read about it in an article in Campaign Magazine. But I confess most of what I know is based on what Robyn told me. I know that Robyn had been frustrated that he could not get any clear direction from Sorrell on what he expected from his role and little time with him to discuss it. I know that Robyn was given no warning that Sorrell planned either to replace him or put someone else alongside him. I know that he was deeply, deeply hurt by what happened. I am old enough to know there are always two sides to a story and I have never heard the WPP version directly. Until I do I will regard this episode as a despicable way to treat someone of Robyn’s talent, loyalty and integrity – an act totally without class.

Robyn on the other hand acted with great class and dignity. His position being untenable, he agreed the arrangements for his retirement from WPP, respected their contract and busied himself with new projects that ranged from ideas for TV shows to a new internet based music maker. He was in fact more energized and alive with ideas than I had ever seen him – and that’s saying something.

There is one thing I have made little mention of until now. It was always there even if my awareness of it grew only gradually. It is something I have seen very clearly over the last few years when I had the privilege of spending lots of quality time with Robyn.

Robyn had the most amazing human spirit. More than just his raw intelligence, which was formidable, more than his creative instinct, his ability to look at what everyone else looked at but see what they did not see, more than his intellectual integrity – Robyn had a very strong, positive spirit. I saw it in our many debates and arguments. I am quick to criticize, even those close to me. Robyn always looked for positive intent, he empathized, he searched for a deeper insight on what was really going on. He did once criticize me because I was laying in to a group of people we both knew and who I had crossed swords with. “But look at the good they have done, it’s incredible. You are being mean spirited”. Because he was right – as usual – and because this came from one of the most generous spirits I know, the words really hurt. Robyn could be tough, especially I gather in his younger years. People who tell you it straight will sometimes offend – the truth can hurt. But throughout – I’d say increasingly – there was always his evident love of life, people and ideas, especially ideas. Robyn was an ideas man – a true believer in the power of ideas to change the world (and certainly to change the fortunes of a company or brand).

Where did this come from? I had learned various things about Robyn’s life and career from our many chats. I knew, because he often spoke of it, that as a young child he had been sent to a Boys Home. I won’t go into details but it was clear that early family life had been tough and the path to the top of Ogilvy had not been smooth either. He spoke about these things in a matter of fact way. There was no hint of recrimination or self-pity. Quite the opposite. He appreciated what these life events had taught him. A creative mind has to be fed by a wide range of experiences.

On the way back to Cape Town from one of our ‘golf safaris’ with 5 hours driving ahead of us I asked him to tell me his whole life story from the beginning. I had heard various bits on various occasions but I wanted to hear the full story in sequence. It was quite a story. Lots of people have had it tough, that was not the amazing thing. What was special was that Robyn had taken so many positives out it. To give one example, he had gone to the Boys Home out of circumstance not choice but when he was older he had the opportunity to leave and return to a more normal family life. He chose to stay because he had by then made the boys home his family, with friendships that would last a lifetime. Rather than feel sorry for himself for what he had lost out on he had thrown himself in to what he could uniquely get out of his situation. So by the time he had the opportunity to escape he had learned to enjoy it so much he wanted to stay.

Listening to his life story I could see where his fierce loyalty to people came from, how he had come to be so mentally tough and why he was so positive. He had learned the hard way that all these things are better than their opposites. Being positive is the best choice – it allows you to get the most out of life whatever comes your way. Combine this sense of possibility with a fine mind and you get a creative business genius.

It was only when I moved to Cape Town that I got the chance to meet all Robyn’s ‘old mates’ at the many parties he and Margarita threw. They come from all walks of life but they have one thing in common – they loved Robyn and they have done for many years. They went way back. I realized that having been his mate for a mere 14 years I was just a Johnny-come-lately. If you know nothing else about a person other than they have strong friendships with interesting people that have lasted many years, then you know that person is special.

I have referred to the fact that Robyn and I debated a lot and very rarely agreed on things. I must stress this was all very good natured. We both like robust argument where you take up extreme positions in order to test the other person and challenge your own thinking. As Oscar Wilde once said “I don’t know what I think until I hear myself say it” (this probably applies more to me than it did to Robyn).

At the heart of many of our debates was some disagreement about magic and logic. I always felt he over-emphasized the magic and he felt I did the same with logic. Here’s an example. I spent a career perfecting the art of the well-crafted brand positioning statement. I remember explaining to him the value of this in reviving an ailing brand (yes, it was Castle). With one question he destroyed my argument. “Give me just one reason you love your wife”. He knew I couldn’t. He knew that like him there are many reasons I love my wife, they are complex, subtle, even contradictory. It’s the same with brands and if you try to bottle all this up with a well-turned phrase, worse still if you try to portion it all out in some ‘brand wheel’, you lose the magic and with it the chance of an idea. On the other hand he appreciated the power of a clear idea. He invented the notion of a brand ideal – the big but simple ideal that a brand could live by (but would not summarize it). He explained that this could be something like “sharing’ for a brand such as KFC. Smart thinking with no real logic but lots of magic to inspire innovation and communications.

He once came to see me in London to discuss a project he was doing for Shelly to see how Ogilvy could reinvent itself. My view was that agencies needed more logic. In no other profession are clients allowed to think they can get what they want precisely how they want. You can’t do that with doctors, lawyers, accountants or even the more arty architects. There is method, protocol, systems that may not guarantee success but they can significantly improve its chances and at the very least they stop you making a complete stuff up. Too many ad agencies (Ogilvy excepted) just roll over to clients because they have no principles that they defend as ‘their way of doing things’. He didn’t buy this but on that occasion I have to say he did not convince me he was right – in fact I still think he was wrong to dismiss what I was saying. But I came to understand what he was so worried about every time I made a case for more logic. In fact I have it captured in a film I made a few years back – Robyn sitting on a chair in the garden of Ogilvy’s beautiful offices in Johannesburg and talking about where great ideas come from.

In Robyn’s words – life is magic and logic. But while logic can come from magic, magic never comes from logic.
You can rationalize afterwards why ‘sharing’ might be a great idea/ideal for KFC but logic would not have got you there in the first place.

I was right in the sense that business and clients do not always need or even want magic. Consistently pretty good is good enough to build a profitable and sustainable business. That’s why big corporates are so logical and systematized.

Pretty good was never good enough for Robyn. That was part of his magic.

We all lose people and I suppose I should take a lead from Robyn’s outlook on life and focus on the positives I gained from my friendship with him. I am a lot wiser about the magic of marketing, I love living in his Cape Town, I count his family and many of his friends as my friends now and my handicap is down to 17 (for now at least, I may not play quite as often without my most loyal golfing buddy). On the other hand my liver has taken a beating. I was debating the relative merits of beer brands with Robyn once and he smiled and said “I’ve never met a cold beer I didn’t like”. Good point – so no regrets about all the beers either.

The fact is that some people leave a big hole in your life when they go. At just short of 60 years old I feel we have all been cheated out of a few more years with this most dear friend. What would Robyn say to this? I think he might point out that while he may have died a bit too young at least he died having never got old. Despite a very brave fight his body gave out right at the end but the mind was still magically fresh.
Give me one reason why we all loved Robyn Putter – no, I can’t do it. These are just some.

Post Script

Any of his other friends would be surprised that I have made no mention of the other BIG love of Robyn’s life – West Ham Football Club. An interest in soccer is one thing we did not share. However, I do know that “I’m forever blowing bubbles” is the ‘ammers theme song. It is a song about thwarted ambition reflecting the clubs great potential but lack of much silverware over recent years (so I am told). I looked it up and was interested to see that there are some verses to go with the more familiar chorus that is sung on the terraces.

For a man that achieved so much, “I’m forever blowing bubbles” is wholly inappropriate. But the verses struck a chord with me. I wonder if he knew them?

I’m forever blowing bubbles
Verses
I’m dreaming dreams,
I’m scheming schemes,
I’m building castles high,
They’re born anew,
Their days are few,
Just like a sweet butterfly,
And as daylight is dawning,
They come again in the morning.

When cattle creep,
When I’m asleep,
To lands of hope I stray,
Than at daybreak,
When I awake,
My bluebird flutters away.
Happiness new seemed so near me,
Happiness come forth and heal me

Chorus
I’m forever blowing bubbles,
Pretty bubbles in the air,
They fly so high,
Nearly reach the sky,
Then like my dreams they fade and die,
Fortune’s always hiding,
I’ve looked everywhere,
I’m forever blowing bubbles,
Pretty bubbles in the air