RAOUL THE CONQUEROR

Faced with fierce enemy fire, paratrooper Pinnell ducked into a small church in a tiny Normandy Village. It was June 1944, during a D-Day assault on Pegasus Bridge. Our hero looked up at a small plaque on the wall commemorating the Norman invasion of England and noticed that one of the knights who accompanied William the Conqueror in 1066 was a certain Raoul Pinnell.

He vowed that if he ever got out of the fighting alive he would name his first-born son after the Norman knight. Fifty two years later his son Raoul Pinnell has parachuted into Shell International as the new branding and marketing communications director.

With beginnings like this, little wonder that he should have become one of the most accomplished storytellers in the business.

Though cynics might suggest that some of his stories are as tall as he is, there is little reason to doubt his sincerity. He holds as many nicknames as anecdotes; from the unfortunate “John Major”, because of his looks, to the more thoughtful “the Bishop”, because of his pious demeanour and Christian beliefs.

Like a lay preacher he talks in anecdotes and fables which are full of symbolic meaning – some could come straight from a Sunday sermon. “I bought a plaster-cast ear from the National Gallery last week taken from Michelangelo’s David, to remind me to listen,” is one such example. And some of his utterances have a mystical tinge to them: “I believe life and the work we do in marketing is a journey. My own personal life is a journey.”

You could almost see him in Leicester Square holding a set of coloured marker pens next to a Nobo pad and easel challenging passers-by to join him on his journey, quoting the Reverend Jesse Jackson: “It’s your attitude not your aptitude that will determine your altitude,” he says.

His Christian background has also given him a sense of theatre, an awareness of the significance of signs and symbols and an understanding of the power attached to them. In one famous incident several years ago he sent Robin Wight, the chairman of WCRS, a lifebelt with the message “I want to be noticed” written on it because the agency had done scarcely any work on Prudential in six months. According to a former WCRS employee: “It was one of the most imaginative and intimidating bollockings the agency has had.”

Much of his development can be ascribed to his English boarding school education. The system is said to produce two types of people, bullies and those who hate bullies. Pinnell falls into the second category.

“At my boarding school I had to clean the prefects’ shoes. I was told that I had to do it because the prefect had to when he was my age. So I got together with a group of boys and resolved that when we became prefects we would stop the practice.”

Although this sounds more like Ripping Yarns than Tom Brown’s School Days, the boarding school education and the fact his parents were working abroad during his childhood must have had a profound effect on the young Pinnell.

It may also have led to his reputation for challenging established practice. At the start of this year, he undermined the agency at the top of the lovey league tables, Bartle Bogle Hegarty, by sacrilegiously handing part of its account to Ammirati Puris Lintas. He then added iconoclastic insult to injury by getting up at an IPA event and telling the throng of ad agency people that the full service agency was dead and that he wanted the freedom to pick and choose his advertising services.

One of his former colleagues at the Prudential says that the naughty boy who gets pleasure out of causing mayhem shows another side to his nature, his childish sense of fun. During one Christmas party at Wight’s house Pinnell led the festivities, organising party games and swapping ties with guests.

“Most marketing people are shallow with hidden depths. Raoul is very deep, but with a hidden shallowness. There is a childish demon bursting to get out,” adds the same source.

The CV of the 1066-hero’s namesake, reads like a Doomsday-book of big companies. He graduated from university with a business studies degree in the early Seventies and joined Heinz to work on baked beans.

After a short time he joined Nestlé to work on virtually all its UK brands over a 17-year period, which included stints in Switzerland, culminat-ing in the launch of Findus Lean Cuisine in the Eighties.

In 1989 he was recruited by Keith Beddell-Pearce, to take up a senior marketing position at the Prudential.

By August 1994, he had moved to become NatWest’s first board-level marketing director. This year his career took its first nose dive when he fell victim to a “Night of the Long Knives”.

At NatWest, Pinnell was a man in a hurry. He changed National Westminster Bank to NatWest, restructured the retail marketing operations, developed technological joint ventures, and dropped the “branch” tag to make retail outlets more like shops, creating “More than just a bank”. He changed the advertising execution twice and attempted to introduce soap-style ads to the financial services sector. Unusually, however, Pinnell failed to read the political scene.

It all came to an abrupt end in September. Managing director Tony Warren staged a coup in the marketing department, and Pinnell’s ally, deputy chief executive Stuart Chandler, was also ousted (MW September 13).

One senior NatWest source says that Pinnell was far to high profile for their liking: “NatWest hates its directors being so much in the public eye. It just didn’t like his style.”

At Shell International, he will be trying to rebuild Shell’s global reputation. Though he is used to working in big organisations, by all accounts the kind of politics that Pinnell met at NatWest will be nothing compared with Shell.

The oil giant is preparing wide- ranging changes to its operations, involving global alliances and hiving off parts of the business. Combined with the human rights and environmental issues it faces in Nigeria and elsewhere, this could prove difficult.

Pinnell has a very clear moral position informed by his religious beliefs. He is a fervent opponent of the National Lottery, which he sees as wasteful and immoral. Yet he is a firm believer in capitalism and commerce.

The Prudential source says that it will have been in Pinnell’s nature to spend months investigating the rights and wrongs of working for Shell. Now that he has made the decision, no one will be able to convince him that Shell is in the wrong. “Shell now has one of the best advocates in the business on its side,” the source adds.

There is little doubt that Pinnell has the fibre to fight Shell’s cause. When baby Raoul was christened, his father gave him the middle name of Michael to forestall bullying at school. However, Raoul stuck with his exotic name and refused to use the name Michael. “My name meant that I did get picked on at school,” says Pinnell. “I fought back and I’ve been fighting ever since,” he says.

With the task of restoring a tattered international brand image, this modern-day knight can be sure that Shell won’t let him hang up his spurs for some time to come.