Business Stripped Bare (6 page)

When Sydney Airport Corporation (owned by a division of the very successful Macquarie Bank) decided arbitrarily to raise their landing charges, Virgin Blue's CEO Brett Godfrey and I decided to put a slogan on the side of our planes and on the massive billboards lining the road to the airport. '
Macquarie. What a load of bankers!
' It made headlines, and it made a point: the bankers seemed to be after easy cash at the expense of the low-cost market. Eventually Macquarie agreed to renegotiate the fee question. I dressed up as a native American Indian, smoking a pipe of peace, and buried the hatchet with them. (Literally – it's still there somewhere, under the tarmac!) It was one of those 'No hard feelings, mate' moments, and I think the Australian public enjoyed our irreverent approach. Interestingly, as a result, we've now become partners in a number of companies.
Befriending one's enemy is a good rule for business – and life
.

Too many companies want their brands to reflect some idealised, perfected image of themselves. As a consequence, their brands acquire no texture, no character and no public trust. At Virgin, we certainly talk ourselves up, but we are genuinely a real company doing real work in the real world – not some sort of alien visitation.

It may be that Virgin has grown up to be one model of what a modern company should be. It may be that, by making the customer the focus of its business, and by giving good customer service a brand name, Virgin has created something genuinely new in the business world – something future generations can emulate and build upon.

Past a certain age, we all want to be Moses, leading our people into the promised land. Then I look at myself in the mirror in the morning after a heavy night and I think: Oh, Richard, get over it!

Virgin may simply be
odd –
an accident of history. I like fun. I began work in a decade that prized fun. People associate me with that decade and the feel-good factor has stuck with me ever since. Virgin's been a rallying point for that spirit of fun – but would Virgin have worked at any other period of history? Would it work now? The bottom line is, we'll never know.

Good brands reflect the histories of the time and the group of people that made them. They cannot be easily copied. They cannot be recycled. A brand is like an artist's signature (in Virgin's case our brand is literally an artist's signature!) What you make of your brand is up to you. While I hope and expect that there are lessons in this chapter for you, I cannot tell you what your brand should do. What I will do is ask that you take it seriously – as seriously as a painter treats the signatures on his canvases.

A brand should reflect what you can do. You have to deliver, faultlessly and for all time, whatever your brand promises, so it's better to make your offering sound witty and innovative than to pretend you're more than you are.
Get the brand right from the start, by being honest with yourself about what it is you're offering
. A brand will eventually date you, so I think you're better off intelligently evolving it as we have always done than tritely updating it. These rather trivial rebrandings generate a lot of fairly funny adverse publicity, and with good reason: they're a sort of corporate comb-over – and about as effective.

This, anyway, was our philosophy when we came up with the name 'Virgin' – and I had to respond vigorously to the Registrar of Companies Office in the UK when they said the name Virgin was too rude to register. Part of that response consisted of proving that 'Virgin' had been used as a ship's name without complaint as far back as 1699 and indeed one such ship was recorded as having docked at Cadiz on 26 April 1699 in the May edition of the
London Gazette
. It was a bit risqué, I suppose – a bit of fun. But the word wasn't simply plucked out of the air. It reflected the fact that every business we began, we started from scratch. We've been 'virgins' in almost every new business field we've entered. To my mind the name Virgin was the
opposite
of rude: it meant pure, in its original condition, unexploited and never used. Virgin referred to us, because we were all virgins in business. Registering the brand was critical. Defending it in every legal jurisdiction in the world has been expensive. But it's all proved essential for Virgin's success.

A brand's meanings are acquired over time. Some meanings will be the product of serious discussions and years of directed and dedicated effort. Some meanings will just stick to the brand, whether you like it or not. Remember, a brand always means
something
, and ultimately, you can control the meaning of your brand only through what you deliver to the customer.

If I describe to you Virgin's early years, you'll be able to see how the Virgin brand came to mean what it does today. I would like to say that all the things Virgin means to people were the product of masterful business planning. They weren't. Luckily, we did a good job, so the labels that stuck to us were generally positive, whether we intended them or not.

Immediately, however, I am confronted by the fairly frightening fact that I will have to explain to younger readers what music meant to my generation. How else are they going to understand Virgin Records, our first company?

I believe music isn't as central to most young people's lives today as it was back in the 1970s. There's a lot of brilliant music around today – I think about KT Tunstall and Amy Winehouse for starters – but looking back, the 1970s was a unique time, and people then had an incredible passion for rock music.

Partly, it was about choice. In those days, living in England, we didn't have DVDs and mobile phones, and we didn't have an array of TV channels – only BBC and ITV – and computer games were the playthings of superpowers, who used them to target their deadly arsenals of nuclear weapons. So for young people most of their time and energy was spent on music – and that meant buying records. It was the one luxury kids had. Anticipating a new Led Zeppelin, Yes or Queen album kept us going for weeks.

In the 1970s and 80s, album releases were monumental events; and we built a business on the back of them. I think there are some interesting business lessons that still apply today from the creation of Virgin Records. After all, the progressive-rock music business was then in its infancy, and Virgin Records was there from the start.

When we started Virgin Records, mainstream crooner Andy Williams and avant-garde rocker Frank Zappa were in the same alphabetical A–Z racks in Woolworths. While the 1960s had witnessed an eruption in pop music and rhythm and blues groups – led by the Beatles and the Rolling Stones – the old record labels run by big business still dominated. There was no discounting of music, and the industry that existed was very conservative and stuffy. It was presided over by middle-aged guys who listened to string quartets. Most recording studios were sterile and expensive factories set up for only a few recording takes, and music shops with their perforated hardboard sound booths were stuck in the 1950s. There was little excitement attached to buying music. And there were only a few radio shows where you could hear decent rock music.

In the spring of 1970, we decided to create a mail-order service that sold the kind of music we liked: a record company that was outrageous, irreverent and long-haired. That flavour established Virgin, sowing the seeds of what it has become today. From day one, young people identified with it because it was so different.

As well as the American magazine
Rolling Stone
, there were two British weekly music newspapers when we began.
Melody Maker
was a serious rock and pop paper, with reviews that also covered folk music and jazz. Although it was a must-read, the writers were rather worthy and full of their own self-importance. And there was
New Musical Express
, or
NME
, which was more pop-orientated and somehow stuck in the sixties. Then a new arrival,
Sounds
, with its tagline 'Music is the Message', came along.

Sounds
was first printed on 10 October 1970 and I was on the phone to the advertising department to secure some cut-price adverts. I've always believed in trying to get into a new publication that is trying to break the mould.
Sounds
was a magazine that mattered for our success. It was right in our marketplace. It sold 200,000 copies in its first week and gave the opposition,
Melody Maker
and
New Musical Express
, a bit of a fright.
Sounds
' first rock album chart was dominated by Black Sabbath's
Paranoid
, the Rolling Stones'
Get Yer Ya Ya's Out
,
Led Zeppelin II
,
Deep Purple in Rock
and
Cosmo's Factory
by Creedence Clearwater Revival. These would be the albums that our mail-order business would sell. Unfortunately, there were some dreadful anomalies in the charts too, such as
The World of Mantovani
. His world would be banned from Virgin Records. So too was Andy Williams.

For this start-up business there was a basic flaw – we didn't have any credit. We didn't have any references either, which meant the record companies wouldn't supply us. So we took out adverts in the music press and I managed to get a deal whereby I could pay for them a month in arrears. We didn't have any records either, so we went along to Ray Larone's company in Notting Hill Gate. We'd buy them from him at a discount and then mail them out to our customers. That way, we had the cash in from the public before we bought the records and paid for the advertising. This is how we got the business up and running.

When I hear of today's entrepreneurs launching new businesses by putting all their debt on their credit cards, I think that this pretty much parallels what we were doing with Virgin Records. I'm not going to sit here and say, 'Don't do it.' But if you do do it, you have my sympathy. Self-funding your first business is cripplingly difficult.

Ray's tiny shop soon became one of the biggest record sellers in England. The record companies' lorries would turn up with piles of packages of records, and we would have a lorry outside the back of his shop and then take them off to our office, which was in the crypt under a church in Bayswater.

From the first, our image and sales pitch were vital assets. (We had precious few others.) During the early days in South Wharf Road, we all contributed, but John Varnom was the one who made a difference. He was off-the-wall, utterly unreliable, and very creative. He wrote our adverts in a Victorian-gothic style of self-parody but also an early Virgin brand-message of the future: that quality could also mean value for money.

'There must be something wrong with them.'

'There isn't.'

'They must be old, bent, cracked, wizened, split, warped, spoilt, scratched and generally too hideous to contemplate.'

'They aren't.'

'They can't be smooth, glistening, perfect, unblemished, miraculous, black and shiny like those you get in the shops.'

'They are.'

'But surely there must be some difference, some gap, abyss, divide, chasm, canyon or other unusual feature?'

'There is.'

'What is it then?'

'They cost less.'

We all rolled up our sleeves, stuffing brown packages with cut-price Virgin mail-order albums by Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, Jimi Hendrix and the Rolling Stones. We were all paid the same, £20 a week, and it all had a very hippy, communal feel. 'Five to fifteen bob off any album on any label' – that was our sales pitch. And we were now working flat out on the mail-order business to cope with demand. The record companies realised we were the mystery behind the huge success of Ray's little record shop – and so they extended credit to us directly.

But we weren't making any money.
Over the years I've met a lot of old customers who were in on a scam. Irate people would phone up or write a letter and say they had never received their rock album. We had no proof that it had gone out because in our office it was all so chaotic, and proper accounting methods were unheard of. So we would send out another album. Our profit margin was so tight that doing this regularly – and we did do it regularly – was wiping out any of the money we made. This was one of the biggest business lessons I learned.
Turnover can be huge, but it is the profit margin that matters
.

Still, the Virgin Records brand was getting noticed. Typical sales were several thousand LPs each week. It all had potential. Then disaster struck, and here I learned another key fact about running a business: try to have a plan B.

In October 1970, the postmen and women of Britain began a bitter dispute for more pay. The strike lasted forty-four long and desperate days for us – and our business dried up. We needed to diversify the brand. Fast.

We took out adverts in the music press. A half-page on 6 February 1971 announced that we had now opened a small shop at 24 Oxford Street. I'd managed to secure a decent short-term deal on the rent of the first floor of a three-storey shop, next to a secretarial college, and upstairs from NU Sounds.

To combat the downturn we needed to get people into our shop. We increased the advertising campaign with '
A step-by-step guide to Virgin Records' new joint in Oxford Street
'. The puns continued – '
They are no dopes at Virgin Records. That's because all our customers are cool. They know a swell joint when they see one.
' We offered more than records; we had coffee, cassette tapes, posters and headphones, all within thirty seconds of Tottenham Court Road tube station. Some reckon that our staff sold even more than this, but I don't think I can comment about what they did in their spare time.