The commonest question from wags seeing a bottle for the first time is 'Where's the olive grove? I didn't know they grew olives in Stroud Green!' (For anyone outside the area, Stroud Green - despite its countrified name - is a fairly gritty, but vibrant, friendly and popular, inner city North London suburb.)
There has recently been some discussion on the area's Stroud Green.Org community Internet site about why the name is 'Stroud Green Olive Oil' at all. Why not change the name from 'Stroud Green' to 'Crouch End' olive oil, or something altogether more generic and less local, in order to widen its appeal.
Here are my thoughts:
(Already posted to www.stroudgreen.org.)
On the question of the name, yes, I did play around with different ideas. I considered Crouch End Olive Oil, and why not also Muswell Hill Olive Oil, Stoke Newington Olive Oil, Finchley Olive Oil?
As it happens, I've have a top class advisor on this - someone in the branding/labelling business who is actually a professional label designer for the likes of Heinz etc - and who is also very generous with his time. He designed and drew up the artwork for my label, all absolutely free. So I have thousands of pounds worth of goodwill alone on the label. (And he is a Stroud Greener to boot - at least until recently - and was a regular contributor under a pseudonym to stroudgreen.org, though he's now moved out of the area.)
He has advised against 'Crouch End Olive Oil' and the other variants. Why?
I would have to seek clarification from him for the exact argument, but my recollection is that from a branding perspective 'Stroud Green Olive Oil' works, on several levels - it's a bit of a joke, it's improbable, the name is 'green', it's inner-city but not a well-known or pretentious place (like Hampstead), it's an area with loyal fans and known to the cognoscenti, there's potentially an (admittedly small) core local following, with capacity to expand if the 'brand' ever became successful.
Very importantly, it is NOT generic Italian 'Tuscan Olive Oil' with a fake Italian name and a picture of olive trees, blue skies, peasants and Italian flags. On all these counts it scores high on the 'Eh?' factor, and comes across as distinctive, different and, in fact, authentic..... Which of course it is.
I did lobby for Crouch End Olive Oil as an additional selling point but my friend advised against it because it would dilute the brand.
Two other factors - I personally have no connection with Crouch End, so to use that name would be slightly misleading and rather lame. Stroud Green is a completely separate place, though only just over the hill. And another thing: it's my personal view that people in Crouch End are less likely to see the joke implicit in the name if it were to be other than 'Stroud Green Olive Oil'. 'Crouch End Olive Oil'? Yeah! Crouch End is exactly the kind of upper middle class place you would EXPECT to have extra virgin olive oil by the gallon in the kitchens and an olive oil named after it - there's no double take. People would just see it as an attempt to exploit the name. Which it would be.
In fact my whole point in the oil and this blog is to drive home the notion that (as in the Mediterranean) good quality olive oil is everybody's right, not something exclusive but a healthy, natural food for everybody. EXTRA VIRGIN OLIVE OIL FOR THE MASSES - that's what I say!
Another commentator observed that if I called it 'Crouch End Olive Oil' and got it stocked in the right Crouch End shops, 'watch the tweets, blogs, radio play ('Crouch Enders') and Guardian feature flood in....'
Well, I do have an interview and picture story lined up with the Ham and High in a couple of weeks' time, and surely the tweets, blogs, the Guardian food pages, Olive Magazine, Jamie Oliver and the soap opera can only follow.......
What do you think? SGOO or CEOO? Which scores highest? Let me have your opinion.
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