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A conversation with one of the founders of Innocent Drinks about Abubilla Music
Written by Jimmy
During the first week of September, we had lunch with Richard Reed, one of the founders of Innocent Drinks, to get his advice on how to run Abubilla Music – good lunch, fantastic advice and golly willikers he spun our heads around…
So, this is an e mail in 3 parts – a word about Innocent Drinks and Richard, a summary of his ‘seven commandments’, and then a quick review of potential implications for us. Even if you’re bored silly with us, you’ll enjoy the first two parts.
1. Innocent Drinks
If Abubilla Music could be a consumer good instead of a record label, we’d want to be Innocent Drinks, especially if we were confined to only legal products. Here’s five things you need to know about Innocent:
A. They have fantastic brand values – health, social responsibility and coolness. Smoothies are all about a couple of mixed up fruits (and isn’t that the essence of music?), the company is about community and doin’ some good and the brand is just plain cool.
B. Everything they did to start the company was cool and reflected these values, from Fruit Stock to irreverent packaging to a funky website and newsletter (all of which we shamelessly copied in our early days). Richard, one of the founders, tells some great stories of the early days – one of which I’ll butcher: early on in packaging, they had a warning label on their smoothies – something about ‘they tend to separate’ (so shake them up). But they put a little asterisk on the word ‘separate’ and, at the bottom, they had a little note: ‘But mommy and daddy are still talking.’ Cool. Here’s Richard talking about the Company:
C. In building Innocent, the team has created a great little community who love the company. Here’s a cool little advert:
I’ve been following these guys forever and love what they do, so I asked Richard to lunch. Oh, and here’s a picture of the founders in younger days:
2. The Seven Commandments of Innocent Marketing:
First, a big health warning: Richard is far too cool and modest to ever set out commandments of marketing. He graciously gave us advice and, where he could, referred to lessons he had learnt from Innocent Drinks. I just took good notes and restructured them as the 7 Commandments of Innocent Marketing. Richard would hate such formality and structure and I doubt has ever used the word ‘commandment’ in his life. But he gave me permission to post them anyway. So here goes, in ‘Richard’s voice’:
- Everything Communicates the Brand and Its Values: We started with a very clear idea of our brand values, long before we had a ‘brand’ or a ‘product.’ Our values centred on a healthy lifestyle, social responsibility and cool irreverence. We knew from day one that everything we did needed to reflect these values.
- Work on the principle of simple communications and exaggerated messaging: everything must communicate the core brand values. Maniacally simplify these and then exaggerate to get this messaging through the clutter.
- We moved from Fast Tractor, to Naked to Innocent in brand name to reflect the essence of ‘pureness’ (health and social responsibility)
- Our packaging was all about cool irreverence – our jokes screamed anti-establishment
- Our best piece of TV advertising remains our first – a DIY bit of stop-action that was all about naïve innocence
- Pick your ‘design target’ and make sure you own it: Marketing is about finding the consumers that most represent your brand values. Think of the 5 consumers you must have before you worry about the million that you want.
- Be in the channel that embodies your brand values: at almost any cost. Sales is about mass distribution but marketing is about owning the channels that really matter. We gave away products in the ‘coolest’ channel and the ‘healthiest’ channel and we made sure our products were in the hands of opinion makers (a Smoothie on every journalist’s desk) and aspirational stars (London Fashion Week).
- Create events that embody your values: we created Fruit Stock and chose to organise, not just sponsor it. This meant we could be more than just a banner over some artists – we could ensure the whole event embodied brand values.
- Be a good story for the press: stay authentic, stay value based and challenge the cynicism of the press to tell a few good stories. We invested hugely in a few opinion formers and took the time to make them understand our story was real and we were a little force for good.
- Stay disciplined around high impact activities: we learned over time to focus high energy on high impact events. We made some mistakes – like dumbly using our internal organisation to polish apples to give to our VNP’s (very nice people) at one of our events. Important not to lose perspective on what really mattered – and this really didn’t.
3. What Might All This Mean for Us? Again, Richard is too nice to be completely confrontational, so a number of these observations we made and he nodded to… but a number of times he did sort of come out and say, very nicely, ‘What the…?’
- Focus on the Artists: He loved our proposition for artists and the more he probed the more he liked it. He basically said, ‘Focus on what you do for artists – that is real, that is differentiated, authentic and all good. Your music might be good, but there’s a lot of noise out there and a lot of other good things. But the ‘How’ of what you do – the artist community, the scholarships, the family rooms and villas, the no strings attached nuturing of talent – that’s authentic. Stick with it.’
- Lose the villa name: He asked about the logic of Abubilla as a label name. Then, well, not to put too fine a point on it, sort of … smirked. For a guy who moved from Fast Tractor to Naked to Innocent to try to capture in a phrase the essence of who his company was, the story that we are named after the Spanish bird for woodpecker because someone tiled a bird at the bottom of our pool in Spain didn’t exactly impress him. But he loved the icon, loved the notion of the bird nest and felt that that represented much more this notion of nuturing emerging artists and then kicking them out to fly.
- That’s creative packaging? And then the truly embarassing part. We showed him our CDs. We’re quite proud of our DIY packaging, terracotta colours, etc… He turned them over a couple of times and basically said, ‘So what’s new and innovative about this?’ He expected something a little more innovative than putting a picture of a dog in the liner notes. And we really thought we were pushing the edge of the envelope on that one.
- Get busy finding 5 people who really love your stuff, not 100, not a million. 5 is all that matters: Finally, he was pretty clear that we were too worried about the many and not the few. He asked who the 10 people were who most perfectly represented what we’re about. Since 3 of them were sitting around the table, one is a new blond, one a Space Monkey and one of them has the short term memory of a gold fish – oh, and one is a cello player who forgets her cello – well… we were at a loss. So we decided it was Hannah and her 9 friends.
So that’s it. We’re now going to have to sort all that through. Again. Redo the website. Again. And now really think through our target consumer, our artist proposition and a really revolutionary approach to packaging (there’re rumours that some folks are using something called…digital?). Watch this space. And Richard, thanks for the time!
Jimmy