1960s WORK
0136 Graduate Recruitment & FCB
Approaching the end of my time at Imperial I was genuinely scared that I would fail the exams for the first time in my life. I thought that I wouldn't get any degree. In the event it was a very close run thing, but fortunately I just managed to scrape a third!
I planned, though, to go on and do a second degree in economics -- the subject I now realised was the one I loved most. Unfortunately, what I hadn't taken into account was that my state scholarship ended when I left Imperial. Indeed, nobody would even give me a grant for a second degree. Despite all my strengths as a strategic planner, which were to emerge later, at the time I had been a total failure in planning my own progress through life!
Accordingly I looked around, and set my sights on doing an MBA at Harvard. This was just about the only university which covered the subject it in those days – where no university in the UK did. To fund this I had hoped to get a scholarship, and so I went through the whole Harkness scholarship process. I got close to the final decision, but fell at the last fence.
With Harvard Business School itself, however, I did the SAPS test and some general interviews and -- to my surprise -- was offered a place! The sting in the tail came when Harvard told me that overseas students were expected to have completed five years in industry before they went there, so they could contribute that much more to the process of group education. I had resigned myself to paying something like £20,000 for the fees in those days, much more than a hundred thousand pounds these days. I would have borrowed the money, and it would have been a very good investment. But, as it happened, waiting five years was just not on the cards. By five years later I was earning a fortune, was running brands in real life that were very similar to the Harvard simulated case studies, and had a family to support. For all these reasons it was no longer a viable option!
So, somewhat late, I went on the graduate recruitment trail. My aim was to get on a graduate management development programme. Thus I went to companies like Boots and RTZ and Unilever, most of whom turned me down at a very early stage. The one where I went furthest was Shell. Halfway through the recruitment process, which lasted over to three days, I was actually offered a job in their chemicals division. I decided that I would prefer to go for the fuel side. When I was turned down by the fuel side, I said that I would take the chemicals job -- only to be told “Hard luck, that opportunity is no longer on offer!”
Thus it was that I, rather panicky, started looking in the job ads as well, and eventually found a job with Foote Cone & Belding (FCB) the big American advertising agency. What I didn't know at the time, but found out a year later, was that they didn't understand the work that I had been doing in experimental psychology; and had mistakenly thought I was a psychologist! Anyway, as a fully fledged assistant market executive, I walked through the door of the agency at the end of the last term at Imperial, in mid 1962. I was thrilled to get into an advertising agency -- it was where the yuppies of the time worked. When I got there I was even more enthralled to find I had an office with my own desk, it was only later I found it was a spare office and an old desk – but my career had started and I graduated to a more deluxe desk within a month so.
As I have said, I was an assistant market executive. This wasn't quite the tea-boy, but it was definitely an assistant job. We - FCB -- to be precise were the London branch of the American advertising agency. In the agency the key group was made up of the account executives and the account directors; those iconic individuals who you would have seen in the films of the 1960s. Backing them up were the creative departments, described in my marketing books, and the media buyers, also featured in my books. FCB was unusual in also having a group of marketing specialists who provided expert marketing support for the account teams. This is where I found myself.
We supported a range of different products. In my time there I supported Kleenex tissues, Watney beer, G plan furniture, Smedley's food, and in particular Dial soap.
In my new job
My first job for, though, was to summarise the latest results from the various audit services which had been commissioned to support the Dial soap project. I should at this stage explain that Dial soap had long been the brand leader in the US, but was only then, in 1962, due to be first launched in the UK. Its owners, Armour (kings of the stockyard in Chicago, where the cattle industry had led to an accompanying soap industry), made several major mistakes. The first of these was that Dial in the US had made its name on the back of the slogan '24-hour protection' -- where it was a deodorant soap -- but Sunlight soap (owned by Lever Brothers) had already used this slogan to conquer the equivalent market sector in the UK.
Possibly the biggest mistake they made, however, was to employ FCB, an advertising agency, to do a whole marketing job for them -- including brand management. The wayward nature of this was perhaps evidenced by the debates on the media spend, where the FCB executives nervously debated whether they needed to spend any more money on advertising -- well aware that any increase would also give the agency 10% of any extra spend as their share of the media costs! Though I was involved in the marketing, I have to admit that this was not the best run brand launch I was ever involved in!
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