ABSTRACT
Given the plentiful evidence on Britain’s relative economic decline in the twentieth century, it is not surprising that British firms should have been criticized for their generally poor marketing efforts. Top management pressures appeared to be all too often absent for the development of positive and dynamic marketing programmes. By contrast, US giant managerially run enterprises in this period evolved a three-pronged investment strategy, for production, management and marketing. Hence the manager of a US subsidiary in Britain declared in the mid-1950s that ‘the average (indigenous) British firm treats the function of selling as did America thirty years ago’, just when the multidivisional corporate form was beginning to emerge in the United States (Dunning 1958: 264). Such criticisms can be supplemented from a variety of sources. In
1960 The Economist blamed Britain’s lack of effective salesmanship abroad on two significant groups in British political life - the extreme wings of both main parties - to whom advertising was a ‘dirty word’. Consequently, it believed, the Britain of the 1960s faced the real peril of a ‘desire to luxuriate in the attributes of an affluent society before we have achieved it’ (The Economist 1960: 246). Two years later, the British companies which ‘accept, apply and promote’ marketing prin ciples were said to be ‘few and far between’, despite their having adopted most of the other necessary managerial techniques (Wells 1962: 23ff). In 1970 a British Institute of Management survey of current market
ing practices in over 500 of the largest British companies - with annual turnover above £750,000 - found that the majority of their chief executives fully appreciated the importance of marketing and had shaped their strategies accordingly. However, this encouraging con clusion was blunted by the rider that there were 1,900 companies in this size category which had not been surveyed (British Institute of
Management 1970: 139). More forthrightly, a National Economic Development Office report of 1981, when discussing the UK’s indust rial record, concluded that, in the previous two decades, the single most important reason for the disappointing performance of British companies by international standards was the lack of marketing expertise (Pickering and Cockerill 1984: 132). Although the weight of this evidence invites respect, it remains too
impressionistic to be fully accepted as it stands. The charge against British industry apparently runs as follows. Nowadays marketing lies at the heart of business policy because it covers a far broader field than just sales, distribution or even advertising. Since final consumers provide all or most of any firm’s revenue, that firm best serves its interests by standing ready to meet consumers’ reasonable wants. Thus both current production and publicity decisions, and future planning - of new products, markets and so on - should properly be undertaken in such a way as to achieve these marketing objectives (Corley 1993: 99-104). Hence, it seems to follow, that Britain’s cor porate failures in the second and third quarters of the twentieth century can be attributed to weaknesses in marketing. However, even if the average standard were low, examples of high-
quality marketing companies in the 1930-70 period readily come to mind, such as Beecham, Castrol, Rowntree, Schweppes and Unilever. Did some consistent pattern therefore exist in the goodness or badness of British marketing, or was there merely a random process? The hypothesis discussed here is that industry-specific variations existed, so that better-quality marketing was broadly found in the industrial sectors where Britain enjoyed a relative advantage, and vice versa. This hypothesis can first be tested by an examination of marketing
standards in US industries which had a comparative international dis advantage. Doubtless the marketing by US corporations of hightechnology goods in Britain - from mass-produced cars to typewriters and sewing machines - was very effective; yet there was the opposite tendency with less advanced products. Most US patent medicine manu facturers, who were active in the UK, had little understanding of the British market. Only two brands sold consistently well, Carter’s Little Liver Pills and Dr Williams’ Pink Pills for Pale People: the agent of both was an American expatriate of many years’ residence. Curiously enough, the remarkable success of Beecham’s pills in the United States was partly due to the general manager, in charge of publicity, being an Anglo-American (Corley 1987b: 118-26). In foodstuffs, US product leaders such as Nabisco in biscuits and Hershey in chocolates, and General Mills and Ralston Purina in breakfast cereals, as well as
the major flour millers, failed to sell their products in Britain, or else where abroad, at this time (Horst 1974: 40-6; see also Collins, Chapter 12 in this volume). As Giebelhaus has explained (see Chapter 10), before the 1920s Coca-Cola made little headway in Britain against the competition of warm beer and plentiful variations of enticingly flavoured indigenous soft drinks (cf. Dunning 1958: 265). It seems as if the industrial sectors, in which US corporations
performed least well in Britain, were precisely those where British firms were able to market most effectively. One such sector, that of making food and health drink products, is considered in the next section.
