Words from a Dame worth remembering

by Yeoh Siew Hoon

There are some people whose personalities are so big they resonate within you even if you just encountered them once, and that from a distance.

While I have never had the privilege of seeing Luciano Pavarotti live, I feel he would be that kind of personality – one that’s bigger than life, driven by the passion they have for what they do and blessed with a gift they have honed to a fine art.

Dame Anita Roddick was that kind of personality. I saw her only once, and that from a distance. I listened to her as she spoke to a few hundred people in the room but it felt like she was speaking only to me.

Even today, seven years since I heard her speak at the first Global Brand Forum, I remember her vividly. Her speck of a figure behind the podium on a big stage, her curly shock of brown hair, her glasses, her hands as she gesticulated to emphasise her points, giving away her Italian roots.

Most of all, I remember her words. I don’t even have to refer to my notes or the article I wrote after listening to her and I can share with you the gist of what she said because they still resonate within me.

Here’s what I recall her saying.

• Cosmetics that claim to keep women young are a waste of time.

• The biggest disease is indifference. You’ve got to care about stuff.

• Anybody who can find a way to deal with loneliness will be successful.

• Global brands are boring – people hate their bigness and blandness.

• Don’t use bloody focus groups and stop employing marketing consultants.

• Travel is university without walls. She said travel was her best teacher.

• Vigilante consumers will punish companies that do not behave ethically – people want to know the story behind what they buy.

Dame Anita was imbued with so much passion you could literally hear the tears in her voice when she spoke of child exploitation around the world as companies sought to make cheaper and cheaper products.

She called it “a dive to the bottom”.

Dame Anita died this week, aged 64, from a brain hemorrhage. She opened the first Body Shop in 1976 in England and set the cosmetics industry alight with her radical and innovative approach of using natural ingredients and supporting causes such as Against Animal Testing. It went public in an exercise she called “bloody boring”. It is now part of the L’Oreal empire.

Earlier this year, she went public with the news that she had contracted hepatitis C from a blood transfusion in 1971. “It means that I live with a sharp sense of my own mortality,” Roddick said of her condition, “which in many ways makes life more vivid and immediate.”

Her words, old and new, remain seared in my mind.

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