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enough, but needless to say Mr Mars wasn’t daft. He did the things he did and acted the way he did to provoke people into thinking. And it worked.

      In those days British pets were fed household scraps and the marketing objective was to persuade the owners to substitute canned Petfoods products. This wasn’t easy when the household scraps cost nothing and PAL, Lassie, Kit-E-Kat and the rest were not only regarded with suspicion but had to be paid for. Nor was it easy to get a doubting trade to stock them, when it was generally believed the contents were mainly factory floor sweepings. I used to make shop calls with Petfoods sales reps and we would solemnly open a can of Kit-E-Kat before a buyer’s cynical eyes and eat some to show how good and wholesome it was. That usually won them over and so it should have, for at the time it was mostly whalemeat, which most of us ate during the war with no ill effects. Eventually we won the day, for who feeds their pets household scraps these days? It says a lot for the vision and determination of Forrest Mars.

      One of my brands was Trill, the packeted budgerigar seed, and on a visit to Melton Mowbray I was presented with a unique problem by Tom Johnstone, the Petfoods Marketing Director.

      ‘With Trill we have over 90% of the packaged budgerigar seed market and we very much want to expand what is an extremely profitable business,’ he said.

      ‘Yes, Tom, of course.’

      ‘In a static market, the obvious thing to do is to buy our competitors but we don’t want to do that because if we did we could well run foul of the Monopolies Commission.’

      ‘Yes, of course, Tom.’

      ‘So what we have to do is to increase the budgerigar population and then we’ll get 90% of the extra business.’

      ‘Yes, of course, smart thinking!’

      ‘So that’s what we want you to do, Murray – come up with ideas of how we can do that.’

      ‘YOU WHAT?!’

      ‘Off you go then and we’d like your proposals within a week with full advertising and budgetary recommendations.’

      Back I went to the agency, got everyone round a table, outlined the brief and sat back to worry. Two days later we were all back together.

      ‘Here’s the deal, Murray. Most people have just the one budgie, right?’

      ‘Right.’

      ‘Well, what we want to do is to create a guilt complex by promoting the belief that an only budgie is a lonely budgie and thus motivating their owners to go out and buy another one.’

      ‘You what?’

      ‘You heard, Murray, think about it.’

      The more I thought about it the more I liked it. It made sense even if I wasn’t too sure about whether sole budgies pined for company and what effect multiple budgies would have on their owners. So we worked up a pool of commercials, publicity material and costings and back I went to Melton where I made a sale. It worked – but I never found out what effect it had on the lonely spinsters who kept their bird for company.

      Another product that Petfoods and the agency tried to introduce, unsuccessfully this time, was a very high-quality cat food which we decided to brand as ‘Minx’. After all the usual investigatory research it looked as though we had a winner. The formulation was nearly 100% cod (humans turned their noses up at it then) but we were looking for something else to give it a promotable health benefit.

      ‘How about we put some cod liver oil in it?’ said the Petfoods nutritional experts.

      ‘Sounds great. Cod liver oil has all sorts of health-giving overtones so we’ll go with that if the research supports it.’

      It did and from that came the USP, ‘Minx gives your cat inside satisfaction plus outside protection’. The commercial researched well and the next step was to sell the product to a limited-area test market. Bill Rudd was the Regional Sales Manager and off he went to the big buyers, starting with one of the major Co-operative Societies. His contact there was a grizzled old-timer, and when Bill had gone through all the details including the advertising and the brand’s USP the buyer rang for his secretary.

      ‘Maisie, I want you to do something for me. Go to the chemist and get me some outside protection and then I’ll give you some inside satisfaction!’

      Consternation in court. In all the time we had been working to develop the claim its double entendre had never struck us. We were too close to the product. So we had to start all over again and think of something else. Pity. It might have sold a million.

      Masius was a wonderful place to work. A great location in our own modern office block in St James’s Square and a business that was booming. Every year I was there saw a record income and there was a constant buzz of excitement and achievement as new accounts flowed in and very few flowed out. I shared an office and the Mars and Petfoods accounts with a super chap called Ian Pitt who had been a Major during the war and who had been taken prisoner by the Germans. We faced each other across joining desks overlooking the Square and got on like a house on fire. Our job was to underpin and retain the Mars/Petfoods accounts which were of such importance to the agency. We achieved that thanks to help from a lot of fine people. No two days were the same and life was a constant challenge.

      In the 1970s Forrest Mars made a further adventurous leap into the unknown when he entered the potato business. As disposable incomes and the desire to spend less time in the kitchen increased, more and more women were buying ready-prepared products like boil-in-the-bag and frozen foods, which needed less preparation. Enter Yeoman Instant Mashed Potato and another new field of endeavour for me. Masius’ job was to create the advertising that would pack Britain’s grocers and supermarkets with hordes of eager housewives fighting to buy and experience this exciting new product that was going to unchain them from having to hump heavy potatoes home, wash, peel, boil and mash them. Fantastic.

      ‘Yeoman gives you perfect mash – every time!’ the TV advertising declared but the housewives turned out to be frustratingly apathetic about this sensational new product and it made agonizingly slow progress, not made any easier by Cadbury’s ‘Smash’ that blew us into the weeds.

      This was the time that there were a lot of IRA bombings and one day when I was in Kings Lynn I said to John McMullen, the Marketing Director, ‘Do you ever have any bomb scares here?’

      ‘Yes, occasionally, Murray.’

      ‘What do you do about them?’

      ‘Do? Nothing. Why?’

      ‘Isn’t that taking a hell of a chance? What would happen if there really was a bomb?’

      ‘Listen, Murray, at any time of the day or night we are processing five hundred tons of mashed potato and if the machines are stopped it all goes solid. If you think I’m risking that for a bomb that never was, you’re mistaken.’

      Brave words. Unfortunately, John wasn’t too amused when a processing glitch resulted in vast quantities of Yeoman powder being blown out of the factory on to the homes and gardens of Kings Lynn. Good thing it didn’t rain.

      Mars were also one of the pioneers of the vending machine business in the UK with a business called Vendepac. We take machines for drinks, cigarettes and confectionery for granted now but food vending was very avant-garde then. To test consumer acceptance, Mars converted the whole of the canteen at Slough to automated food and drink and since everybody, bosses and workers alike, ate there it was inevitable that Vic Hender, the Research Director, would soon be lining up for his automatic lunch. He was not well known for his acceptance of things going wrong and when he stuffed his pre-decimalization half-crown (those were the days!) into the slot for his chicken pie nothing happened. Adopting the time-honoured British procedure, Vic gave the machine an almighty thump, at which point a chap looked out from behind and said, ‘Steady on Guv, I’m putting them in the back as fast as I can!’

      One of the agency’s greatest successes, which was in full gallop when I joined, was the Babycham business. One day four men appeared

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