[2010] 1960s WORK
9268 PST - Phillips Scott and Turner
Having tasted some aspects of brand management, while I was working in FCB, I determined to move into the mainstream of brand management. Accordingly, I circulated my details to the whole range of consumer companies. Indeed, I produced a very well presented document. In particular, this was copied on the Gestetner copiers in the library where Pat was still working. It was something of a gimmick, which I had seen reported in the trade magazines, but it did eventually get me in through the door of PST, and impressed the personnel director there.
PST was the proprietary pharmaceuticals part of an American multinational. Its sister company in the UK was Winthrop, which handled the ethical pharmaceuticals; the difference between the two being that ethical pharmaceuticals had to be prescribed through a doctor, and couldn't be advertised, whereas proprietary pharmaceuticals were sold over-the-counter and in some cases were heavily advertised; as indeed was a case with most PST products.
PST had set out to be the leading brand management company in the UK. It had a large number of brand managers for its size, almost a dozen - with three or four marketing managers over them. It had hired these managers from the leading brand management companies; in particular Procter & Gamble and (then Hedley in the UK) which was the leading brand management company worldwide – as it still is, albeit in a rather different form.
The brand manager
at PST was, at that time, the king of the company. He (there were then no
female brand managers) lived up to the dictum, in those days, that the brand
manager was to his brand what the managing director was to the company. Brand
managers ran everything on the brand, from purchasing and production through to
advertising and promotion. The result was a matrix structure, where there
were - for example - production managers who ran the factory -- handling the
whole range of
products -- but who worked to the instructions of
the
individual brand managers on the s
pecific
products they were producing for them. The same applied across the company,
except that the brand managers actually ran all the
advertising and promotion directly.
A powder packing line at PST’s Newcastle factory
I entered as a trainee, and spent the first six months in the salesforce. In fact they had two salesforces, one calling on grocers and one calling on chemists. I spent three months in each, though in case of the grocery salesforce I was a merchandiser and not a full salesman. This meant that I went round the territory and ‘sold in’ just the promotional material, which was much more important in those days before supermarkets.
It was an eye-opener. It was a traditional sales operation which, with the advent of supermarkets, has now largely disappeared. In those days, however, it hadn't changed for decades. We still had to have hats, trilbies, which I never wore; since these had by then disappeared from even mainstream fashion. Even so, I still had to carry one around with me -- frequently having to rush back to shop where I had left it by mistake -- since this was thought to be a mark of respect for the shopkeeper.
For merchandisers the skill was going in and using the sales line “...should I put the display here or there?” We never gave the customer chance of saying no. Most that time I put displays into branches which had been agreed with their head offices, and even that was difficult since the local managers hated displays being erected in their beautiful shops.
In those days the shops, even grocery shops, used to have counters and the assistants served from behind these. They display material therefore was in the former display cards, which could be put on shelves, and window stickers which were plastic strips that could be stuck on the outside of the window. We played rather dirty and had ones which were very difficult to scrape off! Best of all were pieces of display which actually contained the stock, small ones on the counter and - above all - large dump-bins which would hold whole case of the product on the floor. We had target numbers for all of these, and were judged by what percentage we achieved.
The second three months I moved on to selling to chemist shops. In this case I went in and actually persuaded the shopkeeper -- the chemist in this case (usually an independent in those days) that he should buy more products from us. This used all the range of techniques, typically saying -- using our records from previous visits –“...last time you seemed to be selling very well, so shouldn’t I put you down for two dozen this time?”. It was tradition that has now disappeared, though most sales techniques -- taught by sales trainers – until recently seemed to still be focused on this aspect of life.
The great thing about this job was that I had a company car; a Cortina which was then the salesmen's standard car. Even so life proved something of a chore during those six months, but I learnt a lot from this sales experience. However, retail outlets have changed beyond recognition since those days. As I have said, almost all the shops I visited were counter service; supermarkets were rare in those days -- and even then were quite small (below 5,000 square feet, and not much bigger than some of today’s convenience stores). In the case of food retailers, for example, the housewife wrote down her list at home and then told the assistant what was wanted -- whereupon the assistant would rush around all the shelves, behind the counter, picking out the items that she wanted.
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