Book reviews

Leading through Values
Michael Henderson, Dougal Thompson & Shar Henderson
HarperCollins paperback $35

Since it was first sold from a Wellington milk bar in 1935, Tip Top ice cream has been one of the country’s leading brands. The company expanded quickly from its early days, dominating the market and buying up other companies in the lower North Island, -Nelson-Marlborough and gaining a foothold in Auckland as early as 1938.

By the 1950s it had launched a number of frozen confections on a stick, such as Jelly Tip, Toppa and Topsy, which are still around today. Yet despite becoming by far the country’s leading ice cream brand since the 1960s, its corporate history has been chequered.

In 1964, a parent company, General Foods, was formed and four years later it merged with Wattie Industries (originally J Wattie -Canneries). In turn, Wattie’s, as it was better known, became part of Goodman Fielder Wattie in 1987 before being taken over by Heinz to become Heinz Wattie’s.

Tip Top had yet another owner in 1997, when it was purchased by Western Australia’s Peters and Brownes. Four years later, it ended up with Fonterra, the dairy giant with a turnover of some $14 billion.
The point of all this is that the Tip Top culture and brand value survived throughout, but it had become a small fish in a big pond. It needed a new business model if it was to build on its export-focused activities against its multinational rivals Streets, Unilever and Nestlé.

Enter the values strategy, which changed the model from a company based on product leadership to one based on operational excellence, which was necessary to succeed in Japan and other Asian markets.

Leading through Values takes up the story, as Tip Top is one of its major case studies. It required what human resource manager Dan Love describes as a “huge shift” in mindset from the one that had applied for 70 years.

It meant adopting the framework outlined in this New Zealand--conceived approach, first exposed in an earlier book, Values at Work (2003).

As a result, Tip Top embraced three new values: being “passionate about what we do”, being a “place of opportunity”, and applying “ESP — extrasensory perception — for customers”.

There are several other case studies along these lines. They provide an accessible way to digest concepts and details that are difficult to appreciate on a first reading.

The authors set themselves a high target, as they combine aca-demic work on corporate culture and values with its practical application in a systematic way in New Zealand’s small market. They are also part of a global network of consultants under the Minessence Group label, which is dedicated to implementation of values-based strategies.

Their work demonstrates that they have distilled the findings from a lot of published work as well as absorbed feedback from local clients such as Vodafone New Zealand, Yellow Pages and Shell Oil.
In the absence of other material of this kind, this is likely to be essential reading for all interested in keeping up the latest in managerial thinking.

The Origin of Brands
Al & Laura Ries
Collins paperback $34
Marketing gurus need no encouragement to repackage their ideas into a continuing stream of books. Al and Laura Ries have made this a family business, with daughter Laura a key member of the team. They use Charles Darwin’s ‘tree of life’ concept to explain how species (read categories) are endlessly changing, branching out or breaking off. You are swept along with anecdotes, insights and examples; but the result is more a smorgasbord than a set dinner. Everyone will benefit from something on offer, be it tips on branding, services and high technology or just plain hard-sell techniques. The writing is slick, with no jargon — that alone is worth the investment.

Sisomo
Kevin Roberts
Reed paperback $40
The title sounds like Japanese food but is an amalgam of sight, sound and motion, the elements that define the screen industry in its widest sense. New Zealand’s most famous adman has produced an “ideas” book showing how the moving sound image is no longer just something you watch for entertainment and information. It’s now a mobile device that can be carried around as a camera, telephone, computer or sound player. Screens are also spreading as electronic billboards and other forms of display into every public or private venue imaginable. The phenomenon is a marketers’ dream and the mission, for ad folk, is how to exploit it now the TV commercial is no longer the common currency. For most readers it will be the images that catch the fancy. The words are worth more than passing consideration, even if the attempt to add further to the world’s vocabulary is a longer stretch.

Confessions of an Economic Hitman
John Perkins
Ebury Press paperback $28
The cover gives the contents away. It has hallmarks of a conspiracy novel, although it is based on fact. The events it describes happened a couple of decades ago when the author worked for a consultancy firm that specialised in getting foreign aid-financed projects for American companies in the Third World. The time that has elapsed until publication doesn’t improve the telling, which is inconsistent and short on detail. This is not the work of a researcher or journalist. The author claims he had been prevented from coming clean earlier, one of many “confessions” that lowers the credibility factor while boosting its paranoia quotient. Anti-American screeds are common enough without them needing to be amateurish as well.