Trademark-First Global Brand Building

"Typical of Rupert who was never one to wait for things to happen but instead made them happen, he registered Rembrandt’s trademark in 70 countries. This was something rare at the time – among Afrikaans businesses, only the KWV’s trademark had been registered outside of South Africa. Rupert’s early grasp of the importance of trademarks, something that would become almost an obsession, was to prove a crucial factor in the global success of his group."

"The launching of Peter Stuyvesant makes a perfect case study of marketing ingenuity. With the choice of the name, the design of the packet, and the advertising and marketing the aim was ‘to create a youthful and dynamic image for a new, young international product at home in the whole world’. Rupert tells that a team of bright young salesmen, with the right appearance and dressed appropriately, were selected to sell the dynamic new product. For maximum effect, each new town and city was invaded by a convoy of panel vans emblazoned with the Peter Stuyvesant packet and the slogan that became world-famous: ‘International passport to smoking pleasure.’ The new cigarette was so popular that during the launch in the Netherlands, the vans were besieged in the street by customers begging for stock for their local tobacconist. And the marketing was so effective that the group even received letters from customers wanting to procure the ‘international passport’!"

"The German campaign linked the notion of pleasure with international travel. It was enthusiastically promoted by Fritz Bühler, a marketing expert from Basle appointed by Reemtsma to design a dynamic German version of the ‘international passport’ theme. He encapsulated it in the slogan ‘Der Duft der grossen weiten Welt’ (The aroma of the great wide world). It was dead right for Germany. Here was a nation hemmed in by other countries on all sides, with only a short coastline in the north. For their holidays they poured across their borders. ‘As an escape from unpleasant wartime memories and the unpleasant past, Peter Stuyvesant conveyed to young and old the idea of easily achievable affluence and hope beyond their borders,’ relates Rupert. Aeroplanes became a regular feature of Stuyvesant ads at a time when air travel was little more than a dream to impoverished Germans."

"Barely a month after the signing of the contract in America the new product was launched successfully on the Rand (the industrial heartland of South Africa) on 11 August 1954, backed by a massive advertising campaign in various media. At the planning meeting held fourteen days before, Rupert’s message had been brief and to the point: ‘The question is who is going to be first.’ Eighteen years later, in 1972, Rupert observed that, for all the money, technology and factories at their disposal today, they could never achieve what they did in those few hectic weeks in 1954"