heaven.’ The philosophy of an epic winner, surely.
BRITISH B-MONSTERS
Had The Pike been made, would it have been as fêted as Jaws, the film it was inspired by? Likely it would have been ridiculed in the newspapers that could be bothered to review it and then forgotten, like the following selection of British B-movies that were actually made. Trog (1970) is the story of an ape-man living in the Home Counties, and a film so spectacularly stupid it features a scene in which the hairy beast dances to easy-listening jazz. Gorgo (1961) is a thinly veiled Godzilla rip-off about a giant reptile that terrorises London, and was made for about a quarter of the budget of the Chewits advert. Then there’s 1954’s Devil Girl from Mars, the salacious story of a Martian she-devil and her robot sidekick rounding up the male inhabitants of a small Scottish village for a breeding programme. And who could forget Konga (aka I Was a Teenage Gorilla, 1961), the tale of a botanist’s botched experiment on a chimpanzee. Why would a plant scientist carry out experiments on primates? You’ll have to watch the film for the explanation. Although, even then, trust me, it still won’t make any sense. The results of the experiment see London (or Croydon, to be precise) being laid to waste by a stuntman in a gorilla suit. By comparison, The Pike looks like a sane investment opportunity.
TWANG!! FAILS TO HIT TARGET
In 1960, Lionel Bart forever changed the face of British musical theatre history. Oliver!, his West End adaptation of Charles Dickens’ iconic novel Oliver Twist, took the capital by storm, before finding equal success across the pond on Broadway. It was a massive achievement in every sense, not least because Bart couldn’t read or write music. Instead he came up with the melodies and lyrics in his head and then hummed them to a transcriber.
With that glittering success under his belt, Bart turned his substantial talents to another classic figure of British literature: Robin Hood. The resulting musical, Twang!!, was a burlesque parody of the fabled outlaw and his merry men, featuring silly disguises, a ‘court tart’ and a Scottish villain by the name of Roger the Ugly.
Based on the success of Oliver!, the biggest names in British comedy, including Ronnie Corbett, Bernard Bresslaw and Barbara Windsor, were itching to don green tights. What could possibly go wrong?
Much, is the answer. Bart, an erratic figure at the best of times, was enjoying his newfound celebrity. He was drinking heavily and experimenting with psychedelic drugs, which may explain some of Twang!!’s absurd plotlines. The director was Joan Littlewood, a hugely influential figure in British theatre who had triumphed earlier that decade with Oh, What a Lovely War!, but a disastrous preview in Manchester in November 1965 led to her jumping ship. Last-minute script changes only served to confuse matters more, and the show opened in disarray at London’s Shaftesbury Theatre on 20 December 1965.
At the 11th hour, Bart decided the play needed to be camper, and threw some transvestism into the mix for good measure. The conductor fainted, an electrical fault meant the house lights kept coming on and bickering actors and stagehands could be heard throughout. It was, by all accounts, an unmitigated and epic fail. The show closed within weeks, costing Bart his personal fortune and leading eventually to his bankruptcy.
IT’S NOT THE REAL THING
Coca-Cola is the best-selling soft drink in the world, and the world’s biggest soft drinks company, so how did they make what some industry experts reckon was one of the biggest marketing cockups of all time?
Instantly recognisable, Coca-Cola had triumphed thanks to slick marketing creating one of the most successful companies in the world, with a back catalogue of expensive and highly produced advertising campaigns. But the biggest marketing arsenal in the world is no defence when public tastes change. In the late 1990s Coke sales had begun to plateau as consumers turned their attention to healthier alternatives, like bottled water.
In 1999 Coke launched their own bottled water brand called Dasani. They’d been pipped to the post some five years earlier by their number one rival PepsiCo, whose bottled water brand was called Aquafina. But Dasani quickly became the second most popular brand of water in the USA. Coke looked to Europe and the UK, certain they could repeat the success. Britain alone presented a very tempting market to dive into – sales of bottled water here had grown by nearly 50 per cent between 2000 and 2004.
So it was that in February 2004 Coke’s waters broke in the UK. Dasani, baptised with a £7 million marketing splash, steamed onto the supermarket shelves.
But one man was about to muddy the waters.
In 2004 Graham Hiscott, now business editor at the Daily Mirror, was a journalist for the Associated Press news agency. He was leafing through The Grocer – the venerable magazine of the food and drink industry – and came across an article about the launch of Dasani. It was a straightforward piece, but one sentence leapt out, describing Dasani as ‘mineral enhanced… tap water’. Graham could taste a story.
The perception of mineral water in the UK and Europe is that it’s drawn from a remote natural spring or a bubbling mountainside brook – not, as the Dasani story revealed, a tap in a depot in the southeast London suburb of Sidcup. Coke never made explicit claims that their water had been pumped from a mountain stream by cherubs and fairies – but their constant claims of its being purer-than-pure suggested some effort had gone to source it.
The natural, honest-to-goodness image of Dasani was sullied. And then someone worked out Coke’s profit margin. Dasani sold for 95p per bottle, each only 500ml (17fl oz). Thames Water, the original source of the contents via a tap, charged (at the time) 0.03p per 500ml. That’s a markup of more than 3,000 per cent. To the untrained, un-business, savvy eye of the consumer, it looked as if Coke were taking the p***. Fate, of course, then arranged for swathes of Surbiton to be flooded by a burst water main, the very same water main supplying the Dasani plant.
Consumers felt let down by a household brand name, and that ensured the story ran and ran. ‘It was only really when you began to get the public anger [that] you realised that this was a great story and Coke had made a colossal mistake,’ said Graham.
But even as they were fighting one media storm about the source of Dasani, another broke out just three weeks later. In the process of turning tap water into Dasani, calcium chloride was added for ‘taste profile’, and then ozone pumped through. The problem was that the batch of calcium chloride used had been contaminated with bromide, and the added ozone then oxidised it, transforming it into bromate, a nasty carcinogen. By the time Dasani was on the shelves, it contained 22 mg (0.0007/m) of bromate, twice the legal limit. Her Majesty’s Drinking Water Inspectorate constantly monitor tap water for bromate levels and by coincidence had tested the Thames Water being supplied to the factory at around the same time Dasani was launched, finding it free of bromate. So Dasani, the health-giving pure water, was actually just Thames Water to which Coke had added a carcinogenic chemical.
Coke immediately called back the half a million bottles already dispatched to retailers, and this recall is thought to have postponed the introduction of the water to the rest of Europe.
All in, the blunder was reported to have cost Coke in the region of £40 million.
It was like watching a slow-motion PR car crash, recalls marketing expert Allyson Stuart-Allen:
‘There was a 3,000 per cent mark up on Dasani. Now on the one hand you could say, “Wow, that’s fantastic marketing.” On the other hand, you have to defend that price position and to defend it you have to be more than just a purified water, you have to be something else.’
Coke
