Posted by: Hugh Burkitt, chief executive, The Marketing Society.
My marketing hero is Ken Webb who was in charge of marketing at Birds Eye during the 50’s and 60’s when the brand created the frozen food market in the UK.
During that era Ken’s marketing and sales team created a brand which dominated frozen foods with a 70% share and introduced a whole nation – especially its children – to the delights of fish fingers, beef burgers and frozen peas.
Birds Eye’s hold on the market and on the hearts of the nation’s housewives was founded on three pillars. A brilliant grip on distribution so that Birds Eye products were always available; a highly creative use of television involving such memorable characters as Captain Birds Eye and the cannonball pea who couldn’t get into the Birds Eye packet; and an insanely energetic programme of innovation which saw new products launched with a frequency which left competitors breathless.
Ken presided over a highly talented team which included Anthony Simonds-Gooding, who later taught the nation that only Heineken Refreshes the parts which other beers cannot reach, Peter Jarvis who became chairman of Whitbread and took it out of brewing and into retailing, and Len Heath who went on to write the story for one of Peter Sellers’ funniest films: Two Way Stretch and was a partner in one of the most fashionable ad agencies of the seventies Kingsley Manton Palmer and Heath.
Ken’s personal credentials at Birds Eye included causing a furore in the grocery trade when back in the Fifties he refused to supply grocers whose deep freezes had closed tops and were not able to display the Birds Eye Brand to housewives - and were therefore failing to encourage impulse purchase.
He was also quick to recognise the importance of the emerging supermarket retailers of that era and Birds Eye was one of the first companies to have a national accounts department dealing directly with the likes of Tesco and, in those days, F.W. Woolworth.
Ian McLaurin still speaks fondly of the characters that he worked with at Birds Eye then like Dusty Miller and Stanley Norman. Ken became only the third chairman of Birds Eye in 1972 and after his retirement from Birds Eye, when he had moved on to the Egg Marketing Board, he also became chairman of The Marketing Society.