Where legendary margarine brands such as Rama, Planta, Leeuwenzegel and Weesper Kluit went under, Zeeuws Meisje proudly stood its ground. A brand to be proud of. Research into the secret behind this success led to a book on the rich history of this special brand, which will be published in November by Uitgeverij Het Paard van Troje in Goes.
PETER DE JONGE
Zeeuws Meisje (Zeeland’s Girl) celebrated her birthday. The oldest existing margarine brand in the Netherlands turned 130 years old on August 30. A crowning year that went unnoticed. Just as no one dwelled on her 50th or 100th birthday either. This is the story of her life. Starting out as a proud product of Van den Bergh’s margarine factories, she descended into outcast status over time.
The ‘Zeeuwsche Meisje’ was registered on 30 August 1894 by ‘the Handelsvennootschap onder de firma Simon van den Bergh, in Rotterdam and Cleve:
The trade mark depicts a Zeeland peasant woman with a churn and crockery, underneath two crossed laurel branches. This representation is surrounded by the following words, letters and signs: HET ZEEUWSCHE MEISJE BEKROOND-BRUSSEL-AMSTERDAM S.V.D.B.= GEDEPONEERD.
The Nederlandsche Staatscourant published the registered trademark in its edition of September 1, 1894.
Nothing can be found about the origin of the name in Unilever’s archives. Documents and correspondence of the Jewish Sam van den Bergh, who ran the company together with his brothers at the time of Zeeuws Meisje’s birth in Rotterdam, were largely lost during the Second World War. Even his biographer, Pim Reinders, who has done impressive detective work on this legendary big industrialist and ploughed through all the documents, has come up with nothing on the subject.
Countryside
What is certain is that the name and logo were meant to evoke associations with butter as a rural product. Margarine, invented in France in 1869 by pharmacist and chemist Hippolyte Mège-Mouriès, and taken into production in the Netherlands shortly afterwards, was distrusted as an industrial product. But its price, longer shelf life and (later) spreadability were so tempting that housewives fell in love with it for economic and practical reasons. As long as the manufacturer kept up the illusion that they were actually buying butter. A marketing strategy that worked, because to this day, at the lunch and breakfast table with a tub of margarine on it, people ask if someone would like to pass ‘the butter’.
A battle between butter and margarine that continues to this day. Fighters were also lurking in Zeeland. The Zeeuws Agrarisch Jongeren Contact (ZAJC) campaigned fanatically in 1984 with ‘We’re against surrohate! Keep it dairy’. A Zeeland Boy was used for this, who let it be known that nothing tastes as good as Real Butter. What particularly stung the farmers was that multinationals were sourcing vegetable oils for margarine from far away and not pressing them from seeds derived from crops from Dutch fields.
Stronger than the Zeeland Boy was the farm girl. Although Zeeland was and is anything but a cattle-breeding province, the logo of the girl in a Protestant Zuid-Beveland cap best represented the symbol of unspoilt nature and farm life. A logo that has remained virtually unchanged for 65 years. With a little imagination, the oldest margarine brand still in existence can be seen as the ‘archetypal mother’ of food giant Unilever. After all, Van den Bergh merged with competitor Jurgens in 1927 to form Margarine Unie, which merged with British Lever Brothers in 1929 to form Unilever.
Local jewel
In such an international concern, Zeeuws Meisje became a ‘local jewel’. Unfit to play a role on the international stage, but suitable for the Dutch market to take the image of fake butter to a slightly higher level. Even when, after the introduction of Blue Band (Bleu Bant for the Dutch) positioned as a quality product in 1923, its role changed to that of a margarine for the poor. Perhaps that moment was the origin of the later so despised ‘thrifty image’.
That position in the market came in handy during the crisis years of the 1930s, when mass unemployment meant housewives had to turn over every penny to make ends meet. A nationwide campaign was mounted that was unprecedented. Supported by full-page advertisements in newspapers, a farm cart of carrier Kees Westdorp from Goes travelled the country. The text read: ‘As fine as butter, but not as expensive’. On the cart, pulled by a team of horses, were some six to eight girls dressed in South-Beveland costumes who distributed samples of ‘Zeeuws Meisje’ from Utrecht to Arnhem, Nijmegen, Zwolle and Groningen. They also assisted with cooking demonstrations held at major theatres such as Musis Sacrem, De Vereeniging and Odeon. No wonder Catrien de Jonge from Ovezande (1942-2010) protested in the door-to-door newspaper De Bevelander in 2005 when one of the later girls in the television commercial claimed to be the very first ‘Zeeuws Meisje’. Because those were – said Catrien de Jonge – her mother, Magdalena de Jonge-van ‘t Westeinde, and her aunt Janna van Tricht-van ’t Westeinde, who travelled the country with the advertising caravan.
Lyrical reviews
They were part of a highly successful promotional campaign. Not least because of the lyrical reviews in the local newspapers where the procession made its stops. The reporter of the Arnhemsche Courant, who attended one such propaganda meeting in April 1930, repeated the slogan ‘as fine as butter, yet not as expensive’, adding: ‘Having feasted on the rusks, cakes, crepes and steak, we also agreed and that says it all!’
The reason for this expensive form of promotion (the girls received 25 guilders a week and slept in hotels for 7 guilders a night) was partly to protect the more expensive quality brand Blue Band. By then, Zeeuws Meisje was already taking on the guise of a ‘control brand’. A brand to keep the main brand out of the wind in tough times when the competition started a price war. Former managing director at Unilever’s advertising agency Lintas Leo van Os therefore refers to her as a front soldier, a tactical weapon against the competition.
Zeeuws Meisje survived World War II because, unlike Blue Band’s, production continued as normal. Raw materials were scarce and of inferior quality. For a price fighter, the company dared to take that risk. It didn’t harm her popularity, but it made her positioning in the market clearer. More and more emphatically during the reconstruction, Blue Band was marketed as healthy for the growing child while Zeeuws Meisje was marketed as healthy for the purse.
Land where life is good
The advent of the STER (television advertising) in 1967 provided opportunities to give brands a clearer and more human profile through television. Suddenly, by the end of that year, a girl in costume with a basket on her arm strode through the picture. While in the background there was a lovely song about ‘the land where life is good’ and where the margarine was called Zeeuws Meisje. Columnist Hopper (Nico Scheepmaker) sighed in the Volkskrant late that year ‘If life is so good there, people will eat their own butter.’ Television advertising was new, leftists criticised it (‘The bad breath of consumer society’), but producers and advertisers knew how penetrating the message was coming across.
Zeeland also noticed this when the positive tone of the early years was exchanged for a heavy emphasis on price. So slogans like ‘not a penny too much, mind you’ and ‘cash guilder savings’ were hammered into consumers’ heads with the 1984 commercial as the icing on the cake. Paul Proost, actor with the amateur company Heer Hendrik from ‘s-Heer Hendrikskinderen looked straight into the camera with a blushing face and addressed the viewer with the historic words: ’Us Zeeuwen, ons bin zuunig. Mè we ete wèh graag lekker.’ (We Zeelanders are frugal. But we do like our food to be tasty.) Everyone wanted to be frugal around that time, as the effects of the short but fierce economic crisis of the early 1980s were still being felt in the purse.
The first Lubbers administration threatened to cut wages. ‘This cabinet faces a huge task. Our society has entered winter. We must not close our eyes to that,’ he said in the government statement at the end of 1982. Good news for Zeeuws Meisje. ‘The zeitgeist also plays a role for such a brand,’ knows advertising psychologist Patrick Wessels. ‘In times of uncertainty, popularity increases.’
The emphasis on frugality was perfectly timed. But what seemed an innocent, roguish slogan at the time grew into an abomination for Zeeland. It became defining for the image of the province and its inhabitants. Almost every Zeeuw remembers a moment when that slogan suddenly surfaced. As soon as a party outside the province had to settle the bill, a contribution was requested for a colleague celebrating a jubilee, or people looked around inquiring who was going to buy another round of drinks in the pub, they could be sure that a jolly remark would be made: ‘Not you, surely, because you are frugal’. It haunted politicians like Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende as well as top business executives in charge of finances.
Fertiliser
Whether the characteristic frugality was ever the unique domain of the Zeelanders is not certain. In an article in the Provinciale Zeeuwse Courant of 17 March 2018, Jan van Damme quoted from a publication by Piet Meertens of the renowned Meertens Institute. Meertens (himself of Zeeland descent) pointed out the austerity of the Zeelanders. ‘Simplicity, sometimes taken to extremes, in clothing and household goods.’ Ton den Boon, editor-in-chief of De Dikke van Dale, did make such a connection. ‘Thanks to the Zeeuws Meisje pay-off, Zeeuws in combination with frugality has become an epithon. A fixed combination of a noun and an adjective.’
Other sources hold that in the southern Netherlands, as a result of their Calvinism, all the northern Dutch were frugal, in the sense of miserly and penny-wise. Either way, the television spot that linked Zeeland and “zuunig” was the fertiliser that fed that prejudice with every broadcast on radio and television, causing it to go through a growth spurt.
Much to the annoyance of Queen’s Commissioner Wim van Gelder, who urged producer Unilever to abandon that aspect of frugality in its advertising campaign. Part of the province’s €450,000 annual budget for image improvement went towards it. Zeeland wanted to let it shine through that the province was economical about its natural values. A presentation for policymakers by Lintas, Unilever’s advertising agency, at the Campveerse Toren in Veere with oysters, mussels and fine wines was supposed to turn the tide. Whether that had any impact? Fact is, after the 2005 election campaign for a new Zeeuws Meisje, one appeared in a modern outfit. Which, incidentally, never made it into the television commercial, limiting its impact. ‘We would have liked to get her more into the spotlight, though,’ admits Maria le Roy, a member of the provincial executive at the time.
In fact, it was a small miracle that Zeeuws Meisje was still being sold at the time. Five years earlier, Unilever had decided to withdraw the brand as part of a massive restructuring operation. In the ‘Path to Growth’ plan, top executive Anthony Burgmans cut down on the proliferation of brands by reducing the number from 1,600 to 400. A small revolt ensued from consumers who besieged the multinational’s customer service department, urging it to spare their beloved brand. Only then did Unilever become aware how attached the public was to this margarine. Advertising psychologist Wessels explains this with the theory of the psychology of distance. ‘The smaller it is, the more interesting the product is. Brands like Blue Band and Becel don’t mean anything to us. A brand like Zeeuws Meisje also exudes something of nationalistic pride. If there is a logical story attached to that, our brain remembers a brand better.’ He adds that taking away such a product is therefore also perceived as ‘pain’.
Culture
That personal connection with Zeeuws Meisje may also explain why she has made it into the Dikke Van Dale (Dutch dictionary) as a term and why artists have felt inspired by her. From painter, ceramicist, poet, radio play writer to cabaret artist and songwriter. Case in point is graphic designer Patrick Lijdsman who transformed his warm feelings for a Zeeland Flemish sweetheart into a series of ceramic packages with short poems.
What about photographer Rem van den Bosch who started the search for a New Zeeuws Meisje while the old girl was still alive. As a frontal attack on the negative image she had saddled Zeeland with. ‘I wanted to destroy that’. From big brands like Blue Band, such creative, emotional and poetic impulses are unknown. Zeeuws Meisje, on the other hand, has left deep marks in her long life. With consumers all over the Netherlands, but in Zeeland in particular. And the latter is extra special because apart from the name and the illusion of advertising, there is nothing, indeed absolutely nothing Zeelandic about the margarine.
The Hurgronje Family Fund made a financial contribution to the publication of this book.
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