We care because our name’s on it. This was the slogan used by Warburtons, the family-owned bakery company, to set itself apart from its rivals, most of which had impersonal names like Premier Foods or Allied Bakeries.
Is this just a marketing ploy, or do people actually prefer to buy from a company that has the same name as the person who owns and runs it? The answer is not obvious. Entrepreneurs often choose to use an invented brand name rather than their own. Branson Atlantic sounds less inviting than Virgin Atlantic, and Apple might not be the company that it is today if it had followed the example of its Silicon Valley predecessor, Hewlett Packard, and called itself Jobs Wozniak, after the two founders.
On the other hand, there are cases where the company and its products are so closely identified with a single individual that the use of his or her name is entirely appropriate. Sir Paul Smith and Johnnie Boden, two of the 13 ‘branded gentry’ interviewed in this engaging if somewhat deferential book, have both developed distinctive styles of clothing which seem to reflect their personalities, their outlook on life.
According to the authors, Smith wanted to design clothes that were ‘free of irrelevance and self-indulgence’, clothes that did not dominate the person but were complementary to the real business of living. In one of the overwrought metaphors which the authors favour, the brand is said to be successful because ‘Smith’s own liquid self, with all its contrasts, has been poured into his collections’.
People love the Boden brand, we are told, ‘because it bears the name and spirit and set of values of a truly likeable character’. Johnnie Boden himself is probably nearer the mark when he says that in a crowded market you need as many things as possible to make your business stand out. ‘Putting my name behind it gives customers some sort of extra reassurance, a guarantee over quality, design, service.’ If it upsets people who think he is a ‘pompous arse’, he can live with that.
Julian Richer, who owns Richer Sounds, one of the country’s largest hi-fi retailers, believes that ‘if you have got the balls to put your name on the shop front, it raises your game — you can’t hide behind some customer service department.’ Every receipt from his shops says: ‘If you’re not happy, I want to know about it: freepost Julian Richer.’ The connotation of the word ‘richer’ might also be helpful. As it happens, Julian Richer, unlike most of the other interviewees, was determined to get rich at a very early age; he was buying and selling hi-fi hardware while still at school, and he bought his first Rolls-Royce at the age of 23.
Emma Bridgewater, who runs an eponymous ceramics business from a Victorian factory in Stoke-on-Trent, likes the fact that people assume, partly because of the factory, that hers is an old family company, which it is not. But the dignified name is an asset — ‘so replete with solid consonants and inbuilt metaphor’, the authors suggest, that with the addition of a definite article it might have graced the bows of a transatlantic liner.
Choosing an attractive brand name is important, but hardly crucial to whether the business does well or badly. Indeed, the men and women profiled here are mainly interesting, not because of what they have called their companies, but because they are successful. The value of the book is that it allows them to explain, mostly in their own words, why they are successful.
Inevitably the cliché content is high (‘you have to believe, work hard, have a dream and never ever give up’), but there are nuggets of wisdom, and useful advice for any young person who wants to follow in their footsteps. Johnnie Boden, for example, warns that many would-be tycoons suffer from an excess of self-belief, which means they don’t listen.
How keen are the ‘branded gentry’ that their brands should live on after their demise? Warburtons, founded in 1876 and now in the hands of the fifth generation, is unusual in wanting family members, as long as they are competent, to hold senior management posts. Many of the others seem not much bothered about succession, or about how history will view their achievements.
There are, however, exceptions. Sir James Dyson, inventor of the bagless vacuum cleaner, would like his name to become a generic word, hoping that one day people might say that they need to ‘Dyson’ the carpet. To see one’s surname appearing in dictionaries as a transitive verb, as William Hoover did in the last century — that is surely a form of immortality worth striving for.
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