As Featured in the FT Creative Business
Hailing from a small Lancashire town it was only natural that I was brought up on staple Northern brands. From an early age my diet relied heavily on the delights of Hollands pies and Warburtons (Warbies) bread washed down with either Boddingtons or Vimto as the occasion demanded. Ma and Pa Butterworth too leaned heavily on local brands for their everyday existence Umbro, Littlewoods, Halifax and Morrisons, to name but a few.
Always dependable, always reliable, for over twenty years these Northern brands never let us down and as a result I still use them today. How much of this is a natural bias owing to my pride at being a Northerner making it in a Southern world I don't know, but the fact remains that I have never had cause to switch products because I have never been less than satisfied with my chosen brands.
So the Northern Monkey in me began to wonder are us Northerners simply better at creating effective brands? Are Northern brands better than their Southern counter-parts? What makes these brands so successful down south and how much of this success is due to the historical perception of Northerners as being solid and reliable?...I decided to find out.
The first thing that struck me was the way that the Northern personality comes across in the brands the North produces. Re-enforcing the old clichés, images of grey skies, tight-fisted ness, taking crap from nobody and being stuck in our ways, are reflected in the brands that are produced. The message portrayed is that Northern brands are about honesty and functionality, Northerners don't care what it looks like on a shelf, couldn't care less about the design of the label or how its packaged because, it's what's in the bottle that matters.
Northerners and their brands try to keep things simple. The perception is that people think simple means easy, when actually it means hard graft and its precisely that truly working class mentality that makes many of the northern brands marketed in the south so successful. No frills products that offer competitive prices and excellent service, they simply stick to their knitting.
In stark contrast, the southern brands I reviewed were slightly more cosmetic; aspirational, affluent, and almost packaged too well. Perhaps appealing in turn to the Southern stereotype that of a more sophisticated, more successful individual with greater lifestyle demands.
There are of course exceptions to the rule, but brands produced in the south tend to be on a grander scale, Sainsbury's, Virgin, Thomas Cook, big corporate institutions that have become untrusting to the consumer and yet we collect points every week via our club cards. The bigger they are the more seductive they become. Is this because the south is where all the money is? Or is it because the southern brand mentality is geared towards a more long-term gain, it likes to seduce you into thinking it's one thing before revealing that in fact it is something else entirely.
The power of brands is evident with the north/south class divide, you can almost immediately tell where a person is from simply by observing the brands they buy or aspire to. Put two glasses in a room, fill one with Vimto and the other with Robinsons Barley Water, then invite one northerner and one southerner into the room and ask them to choose a drink.
My bet is nine times out of ten the northerner heads straight for the Vimto like the proverbial horse to water.
Why though? Is it because we rely on our roots to define what brands are, or are brands an inherent part of our local culture and thus certain brands have a bigger impact emotionally to consumers when asked to make a choice or do we simply become accustomed to what we have grown up with and afraid to experiment with the unfamiliar and the foreign?
John Smiths No nonsense campaign got to the heart of what northern brands generally reflect, Down south the idea of taking your ageing mum to an old peoples home so you can have a snooker table in your room is funny, but up north there is an element of truth to the story. My folks didn't think twice about the content neither did they find it amusing, it's only when you move away cross that imaginary divide do you look at it from a different perspective. I once asked my dad, do you watch the Royal Family? He replied why would I want to watch a bunch of people in a room, when I could go to your auntie Ethel's to experience exactly the same thing? He missed the point.
Both Northern and Southern brands are incredibly powerful tools. They reflect our culture, the way we were brought up, our education and our way of life. They stay with us forever. Perhaps one is not better than the other after all; perhaps they're just different in the way they are perceived.
So I will continue to be a Northern brand loyalist and whenever I feel a little homesick I find that a slice of Warburton's bread, a packet of pork scratchings and the occasional can of Boddingtons or two will always remind me of the good life I left behind me, back home in Rochdale.
All I know is this -to me, Northern brands will always be superior to their southern opponents, and there will never be a contender to the Warbies Crown, but then I would say that wouldn't I?
