Thread by @garius

Okay, as requested, more history of weird stuff with food and logistics.

Let's talk about how Ski Yoghurt utterly dominated the 70s UK yoghurt wars, by understanding how humans work better than humans do.

Oh, and also through strippers.

Read on... /1

Let's start at the beginning. In 1963 Ski yoghurt was introduced to the UK.

It was made by Express Dairies in Haywards Heath, but they were smart from the beginning. They promoted it as a healthy, swiss style snack and - the killer USP - it contained REAL FRUIT.

This was the beginning of the UK yoghurt explosion. Yoghurt was now OMG EXCITING as well as (allegedly) healthy.

Express Dairies had utterly nailed the yoghurt zeitgeist, By the end of the 60s, Ski had 40% of the WHOLE UK yoghurt market. 150m pots a year.

In 1969, Grand Metropolitan bought Express. They kept the momentum going. Fresh fruit! Healthy (allegedly) food! Swiss people doing Swiss things!

They even paid Manfred Mann to write a TV jingle about it.

"Ski, the full of fitness food na na naaaa..."

But by 1972, cracks were starting to appear in the chalet that Ski built. This was due to:

1) Rampant UK inflation and recession.
2) Falling consumer confidence in the product
3) Advertising standards and the Prices Commission
4) Two legit rivals: Prize Yoghurt and Cool Country

Prize was made by St Ivel and Cool Country by Unilever. They had the same national milk van delivery AND supermarket supply logistics reach that Grand Met had.

Just as critically, both offered the same fresh fruit promise and had big bucks behind them. vimeo.com/286857991

If the yoghurt market was still growing, not a problem. But the UK was in recession, slowing sales. All price increases now had to be approved by the Prices Commission as well.

This meant the twin risk of rising manufacturing costs, and limits on consumer pricing.

And then there was the matter of the Advertising Standards Authority.

People remember how they nixxed Mars' "a Mars a day..." jingle. They DON'T remember that they NAILED Ski to the wall too.

ASA: So this has 4tsps of sugar in it?
SKI: Yup! It's the "full of fitness food!"
ASA:

So what did Grand Met and Ski do about all this?

Well... you've seen the Columbo episode "Double Exposure" right? With Robert Culp as the Marketing/Consumer Research genius who murders a client? Of course you have. It's legit brilliant.

Ski did that.

But without the murder.

Okay. Scene set. Now give me a 10min break to stick the kettle on and make some tea, and then I'll tell you what Ski did next.

Because it's pretty pure Magnificent Bastard trope.

Ski spent the first half of the seventies focus grouping, market researching and testing the CRAP out of everything they did. Other companies dipped their feet into this stuff occasionally, Ski went all in.

What did it highlight?

Humans are awful. And very lazy thinkers.

For example, peeps are awful at estimating and comparing volume in weird shapes.

Remember Ski's iconic churn shaped pots? Turns out if you drop them from 160g to 150g a focus group don't notice.

Ski, I think, where the OG pioneers of:

"wait, is there less X in this snack now?"

They also discovered that people assumed ANY price increase approved by the Prices Commission must be fair. And the PC themselves would approve almost anything if you did the paperwork right.

Which is how Ski slid through an 80% relative price hike in two years without a squawk.

Of course a price hike is suicide if people switch to your new, shinier rivals. So Ski did a whole raft of surveys and focus activity on what was dragging customers to those brands. The answers came back:

Thickness and fruit colour for County. Packaging/ads for Prize.

The thickness thing was a puzzler. But Ski got lucky. Their head of Brand was Stephen Logue (the driver behind a lot of this). Who had ALSO worked at... Crown Paints.

Logue stuck his painter's stick into the Ski manufacturing process. Almost literally.

By this point, a lot of the Ski was being made at a giant shiny NEW plant in Cuddington, Cheshire. The problem was, this meant the process of manufacture had changed. At Haywards Heath, the mixing was in vats into which the fruit had been pressed with mashers.

Now it was all high speed pipes and stuff being squirted in. Better at scale, but it meant the natural thickening process had been lost.

So he persuaded them to copy paint industry mixing techniques for paint thickening and implement the spinning ball test for control.

Someone at Haywards Heath would regularly spin a ball on a wire, and then drop it into the vats and see how many degrees it would rotate before it stopped.

That number would then be sent up to Cuddington, who had to thicken THEIR output until it matched.

Thickness was back!

The colour problem was because the fruit was now frozen, not fresh. Fruit loses colour during freezing so wasn't colouring the yoghurt much.

So they worked out the optimum 'fruity' colour (focus groups are fun!) then used paint colour charts to regulate it with natural colouring

Packaging was next. At the time, pot wrappers were generally about brand and USP. Nice and generic so cheaper to print. Lids were for flavour indicators.

But: laziness.

Turned out that if you stuck the flavour on the SIDE, people would buy your stuff. Saved time checking lids.

Standard industry thinking was also that pot colour didn't matter.

SKI: Bet it does.

Logue went full Robert Culp in Columbo, stuck people in a theatre style show of rotating different colours, and told them to click when they saw one that felt "fresh."

Ski blue was formalised.

Then... advertising. They debated changing their consumer pitch. They couldn't SAY it was healthy now.

But they discovered something:

People care more about how you make them feel than what you tell them.

When they told them about the sugar?

"I don't care. It feels healthier"

So they just dropped a lot of the OVERT health references kept everything else. The jingle (with new lyrics). The smiley horsey swiss people. The yoghurt kids.

As long as they stayed just the right side of the ASA, people over-assumed it had health benefits.

Worth noting that they DID then make huge strides to it BEING healthier. Which is why you get 'Full of Fitness Food' back again by the eighties.

Their masterstroke was realising they didn't need to make a fuss. Unlike Mars, the original Streisand effect.

All of this brand-blocked Prize and Cool Country from being able to effectively muscle in on the USP and cultural memory Ski had already built up.

But they weren't done. Because none of that mattered if both could beat Ski to the shelf or doorstep.

So...

...well.

Strippers.

In the seventies you had two paths to pot-in-home:

1) Milkmen and small shop delivery vans (often the same people or firm)
2) Supermarket contracts.

And even if you RAN 1), that wasn't a guarantee of a sale. Particularly to small shops.

VERY BROADLY the yoghurt market at the time was split between UHT and non-UHT. Small shops (preferring long shelf life) tended to bias towards Cool Country which offered longer shelf life.

So how do you persuade a bunch of 70s HGV drivers to evangelize your product?

Strippers.

At the end of their shifts, the drivers had to attend meetings on how to push the Ski yoghurts on shops and consumers.

It was a 10min, power pitch of key points delivered by a stripper. There would be time for questions after. While more strippers took beer and nibbles around.

Now VERY OBVIOUSLY let me go on record here as this being:

1) A DAMNING example of just how awful the seventies were from an equality perspective
2) The kind of stuff that would not be out of place in Bro-tech culture today. Which is EVEN MORE DAMNING.

But, for Ski, it worked.

And, very finally (sorry. I know this is long, but you did ask for it), we come to Supermarket logistics.

Now remember here, we are still just about in the days BEFORE supermarkets realised that they held all the cards in terms of shelf space.

Well, Ski realised that Tesco were in the middle of their big, aggressive push to dominate the market. And they were doing it in a broadly similar way: by starting to realise the power of market data and leveraging it.

So Ski dangled some data in front of them.

So before easy store loyalty data, working out what brands were popular was way more touchy feely. This was a problem for Tesco, who were trying to hyper-focus on cutting variety to streamline shopping BUT WITHOUT accidentally ditching brands that brought cash and peeps in.

SIDEBAR: When Tesco Clubcard was piloted in one store, most of the senior management thought it was a waste of cash. Until the results reached the CEO who said:

"Can someone tell me how these two nerds know more about our customers than you do in a week?"

That's for another day

ANYWAY in the seventies there was a company called Audits of Great Britain.

And they did something called Dustbin Audits.

Basically, they paid a whole bunch of British people to give them their bin bags, then surveyed what brand rubbish they found in it.

Ski used AGB a lot.

here is a gif I found recently of someone whistling innocently.

i really like it.

Anyway, back to the Ski story.

So Ski offered to pay for yoghurts to be included in a Dustbin Audit for Tesco. And when the brands were totalled, this reconfirmed that Ski was the primary yoghurt brand.

Ski then offered to do a bunch of in store promo stuff for Tesco, for free.

Would love to be pointed to more detailed writing on when the power balance started to flip from suppliers to supermarkets in terms of who paid for in store promos.

But I have a sneaking suspicion this might be the point where the supermarkets started to realise it was them.

So what was the consequence of all this?

Ski (or Grand Metropolitan, who i've been using Ski as a shorthand for, due to character limits) won the yoghurt war.

They retained primacy, despite the crappy start to the decade and new cash-rich rivals.

Unilever even left the market.

Nor did Logue, who was the man behind a lot of this, did not go unnoticed by other big firms in similar positions. He was headhunted by United Biscuits.

And Grand Metropolitan? The sneaky Ski people?

Well you probably know their descendants better today as...

So. Ski. Fun. Tasty. And it should be noted a long way removed from the seventies and I am 100% certain a more enlightened brand now.

You'll never look at those little tubs the same way again though.

If you liked this, tips welcome. I want yoghurt now. ko-fi.com/garius

Ski is still going strong. Owned by Nestle now though.

https://twitter.com/dg_davies/status/1421089544250798080