Rupert’s control of Rothmans gave him a foothold in the British market, but more importantly, he now had a brand he could market internationally, a launching pad for the group’s expansion.
As entrepreneur, Rupert was also constantly moving, building networks, making contacts and keeping a lookout for opportunities. He is an example of what the famous Tom Peters would later say about successful entrepreneurs: You are MBWAs (Managing by Walking Around).
On his return to London from his first meeting with Reemtsma in Austria he was met by an urgent message from his brother Jan, Rembrandt’s production chief, who was on honeymoon abroad with his bride Ina (née Wiid). Jan warned him that one of their rivals might be launching a king-size cigarette with the new, improved cellulose acetate filter called Estron, hailed as the miracle filter and achieving success in the USA in cigarettes like Viceroy and Winston. Rupert realised he would have to move fast if he was to secure the rights to the new product. As at other times in his career when the stakes were high, he thought big, and reacted with incredible speed.
He asked Jan to fly to Tennessee at once and arrange a meeting with Eastman Kodak, the American manufacturers. Jan did the groundwork, but it took two days before Rupert and their youngest brother Koos, who was responsible for international marketing, also arrived to join him in America. Together with the group’s marketing expert Patrick O’Neill-Dunne they proceeded to the Kingsport factory for their meeting with Eastman Kodak’s top executive, William S Vaughan. The only reason why they were able to secure a meeting with Bill Vaughan was that he had been a Rhodes scholar at Oxford. Presumably he was well disposed towards South Africa where Cecil John Rhodes, founder of the Rhodes scholarship fund, had made his fortune. Nonetheless it took some hard bargaining before the deal was finalised on 28 June 1954. It was Eastman Kodak’s first contract with a non-American company.
Rupert was shown the machine that produced the miracle filter. It was a somewhat clumsy affair. Its designer, like Rupert himself, had studied chemistry and the two fell into conversation. The prototype had cost $10 000 to produce. Rupert was horrified. ‘Is that what you produce for $10 000? You ought to be ashamed of yourself!’ The man admitted that the first experimental effort had been too expensive. With that experience behind him, he said, he could produce a much better machine at half the price. Rupert, who realised how badly his group needed the machine, said ‘Done!’ and offered him $10 000, enough to build two new machines. The man had no option but to accept. ‘If I didn’t understand the psychology of the chemist,’ Rupert said later, ‘we wouldn’t have been able to obtain the machine, the only prototype.’ In addition, the chemist made a few thousand filter bars for another two million cigarettes that were flown back to South Africa.
Rupert had reached his goal to become the first manufacturer outside the USA with the innovation. ‘It gave us a huge edge over our competitors and was one of our best investments ever.’
They had the filters and the machine. But they still needed a brand name for the new product. The previous year, when New York was celebrating its tercentenary, Rupert had read in The New York Times about the city’s founding father Peter Stuyvesant. The Dutch governor, who established the town then known as New Amsterdam in 1653 (hence a contemporary of Jan van Riebeeck), had a wooden leg, which earned him the nickname Peg-Leg Pete. This was a legendary figure on which to build a legend.
Over dinner at O’Neill-Dunne’s home he tried out the name on two rivals, Gruber and Cramer, from P Lorillard Company. At the casual mention the one man was so stunned he dropped his fork, and both said there was something in the name. Rupert immediately phoned his trademark department in Stellenbosch and asked that the name Peter Stuyvesant be registered worldwide.
A few days later he had occasion to phone South Africa again, from the Berkshire Hotel in New York. His group was having a sales conference in Durban. ‘Have you registered Peter Stuyvesant?’ was his first question. No, came the voice over the transatlantic line, the meeting had decided the name was unpronounceable – nobody would remember it. ‘We must think of an easier name, like General Lee.’ Rupert hit the roof. ‘Lee Foo Yong, I suppose! If that brand name is not registered today you’re all fired!’
The worldwide registration of Peter Stuyvesant occurred without further delay, but Rembrandt had almost run the risk of not owning the trademark, which might have been snatched up by competitors. The new brand name that com-bined novelty with tradition would rapidly become the biggest international brand of all cigarettes in Europe.
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’!
Timing played an important role in the success. Rupert’s view of business people as ‘cats on a hot tin roof’ created a spirit of urgency that could inspire miracles. 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 – ‘because necessity is the mother of invention. If one decides something can’t be done in a week, it can drag on for a year.’
The factory at Paarl was buzzing. It was a race against time. They had to be first on the market with the new miracle filter. Their competitors must get no inkling: the atmosphere was conspiratorial, the excitement palpable. It was teamwork like never before.
When the first Peter Stuyvesant cigarettes came off the conveyor belt in Paarl, two Rembrandt representatives travelled through the night to deliver them to Rupert, bringing to an end his much-needed holiday in the Kruger National Park. Initially the factory could not keep up with the demand. Rupert himself helped to pack packets into cartons. ‘During the day we worked in Stellenbosch and in the evening we went to Paarl to “catch” cigarettes,’ he relates. ‘The response of the smoking public was astounding.’ Smokers were kept informed by the media of when Stuyvesant would be available in their area, and the cigarettes were snapped up. Within three months sales had rocketed from 100% to 1 364%. Six months later it hit 2 066% and, nine months after the launch, 3 730%. Within just one year it was the most sought-after cigarette in South Africa, with sales having increased by a mind-boggling 4 758%.
Rupert had beaten British American Tobacco (BAT) in the South African race. BAT only managed to release its Rex King Size with the Estron filter on the market in October 1954.
Rupert was extremely proud of the new product’s design and on occasion referred to Peter Stuyvesant as the ‘elusive Pimpernel’ because the cigarette ‘reminds me of the well-known and charming young nobleman in Baroness d’Orczy’s works who saved so many lives during the French Revolution’.
Temperate in his habits, he himself smoked Peter Stuyvesant Extra Mild