CLUB MED: FROM SEX TO SENSUALITY

With 120 villages in 36 countries on 5 continents Club Méditerranée is able to boast that it is the largest vacation resort in the world. Last year almost one and a half million guests (GMs, or Gentils Membres in Club parlance) splashed out on a Club Med holiday and 90% of those who did so said that they would come back for more. Impressive facts and figures abound: 27 million meals are served a year; 30,000 parties are held annually; 40 different sports are available; and no less than 30 different languages are spoken by the Club’s 9,500 GOs – or Gentils Organisateurs - that’s staff to ordinary mortals such as you and I. So everything is hunky-dory, then, in the best of all possible Club Med worlds? Hardly. For the Club announced massive losses of 1.3 billion francs for the last tax year – its fifth successive year of poor performance. Which is why the group recently called upon France’s self-appointed Mr. Fixit, Philippe Bourguignon, the ‘saviour’ of Euro Disney. His brief? To please to be so kind as to deliver some of that Disney magic to the Club and turn around its fortunes - before it was too late.

"Disney required much more radical surgery than here at Club Med", the affable Bourguignon affirms. "The theme park could have closed. The Club was never in such jeopardy. It was not making enough money, true, but it was never in mortal danger as Disney was. But Disney is a much younger company – its executives were very young – and therefore change was much easier to introduce. The brand was an icon, but the Paris theme park was not established or rooted in France. Club Med is already an icon, albeit a French icon, which means that here at our Paris HQ change has been a little more difficult to digest. People are fearful and they are right to be. Because I am introducing a real Cultural Revolution within Club Med. Our great difficulty is to make two apparently conflicting objectives mix. To maintain creativity and spontaneity on the one hand – whilst at the same time managing with a lot of rigour and discipline. We can’t let the managers take over creativity, any more than we can allow our artists to run the company. We have introduced a number of changes – but the truth is that we are just at the beginning of the real Revolution."

Is this a fully-fledged, barricade-manning, Marie-Antoinette style French Revolution to which Bourguignon refers? Well, certainly heads have rolled – most notably those of his predecessor Serge Trigano and his father Gilbert, in a series of swift guillotinings orchestrated by the Fiat-owning Agnelli family in their capacity as principal shareholders or – how should one put it – Gentils Actionnaires. Understandably anxious not to befall such a fate himself, Bourguignon wasted little time before swinging into action himself. Between now and end of the millennium, he announced in the January of this year, 74 of the Club’s sites would be renovated entirely at a coast of 1.85 billion francs. Prices will be coming down ("we must make the Club more accessible"), expenditure on advertising going up ("let us bring back some glamour to the brand"), the booking and computing system overhauled ("obsolete") and management structures overhauled ("too complex"). All of which sounds like a pretty conventional programme of restructuring and repositioning – but what is not conventional is the lightening pace at which the energetic Club Med boss is implementing these changes.

"Of course not everyone’s happy about what is happening", Bourguignon admits, "you would hardly expect it to be otherwise. But what is encouraging is that our GOs out in the field are very happy about the changes taking place. They are the people who make the Club tick. I am talking here about the golf instructors, the trapeze artists, the cabaret people – unless you can take these people with you are going to go nowhere fast. I can’t pretend that there is the same amount of enthusiasm for change in, say, the accounts department in Paris – because that is simply not the case. That is my challenge though – we are in change mode right now – and I am determined to get the Club back on the right track."

And what might that right track be? It’s a question of going back to basics, Bourguignon will tell you, in a phrase reminiscent of the Major years. "I always do this when I enter a new company. I go back to the company’s roots to see what made it successful. The Club offered French and Belgian people, to begin with, holiday destinations such as Spain, Italy, Greece – and then the Bahamas – places which would never have been accessible without the Club. But in doing so the Club became very bourgeois. The Club was about young people – people who don’t have a fortune to spent – but who are looking for a great site, great entertainment and great activities. Not necessarily to claim that we have the most palatial rooms with air conditioning. In the past we had villages for adults, villages for couples, for families, for families with teenagers – it all became rather difficult to market – too fragmented. Our internal slogan here is ‘we are keeping everything and yet changing everything too!’ – which means that we keep the values and soul which made the Club successful, whilst at the same time moving forwards too."

Mention the Club Med to a Frenchman (and after all almost a third of all GMs are French) and the chances are that you might well bring a wry smile to his face. Why? Because for Monsieur Dupont – that’s the French equivalent of the man on the Clapham omnibus – deep in his psyche the image of the Club has been inextricably bound up with sun, sand, sea and – yes, of course, you’ve guessed it – sex. An image with which Bourguignon is comfortable?

"Oh yes, most definitely", he replies, wearing a large grin on his face. "But at the same time I feel that our image has become locked in the past. We need to move this image on – which, after all, is very sixties. Today the notion is more one of sensuality – we need to get the message across that you can be attractive or seductive, but you don’t need to be sexually aggressive. Of course this is not the easiest thing in the world to explain, least of all when it comes to advertising."

Spend some time in the company of the Club’s PR people and the chances are that they will tell you that the Club boasts the best-stocked tables in the world. All part and parcel of Bourguignon’s marketing hype? Certainly not. In fact it almost goes without saying that for the Club to have survived for the best part of half a century catering mostly to the French - who, as we all know, are terribly sérieux, when it comes to their grub - then the cuisine has to be good. In fact Bourguignon will confess to you, if pressed, that since taking on his new role he has put on more than the odd kilo or two, which stubbornly refuse to leave him despite a fairly rigorous daily work-out routine. In fact one interesting figure is that over 60% of new GMs – those who holiday with the Club – come via word of mouth – with mouth being the operative word. Not the ideal holiday, therefore, for those who have recently signed up on their weight-watchers programme.

Born shortly after the end of the Second World War, Bourguignon graduated from the University of Aix-en-Provence with a Master’s Degree in Economics, before going on to obtain a further diploma in Business Administration in Paris. The greatest part of his career, however, was spent with the French Hotel group Accor where he soon earned his colours by masterminding the construction and opening of the New York Novotel, leading the project through a minefield of litigation and construction problems in a city then hovering on the edge of bankruptcy.

"I spent 14 fabulous years with Accor – but in the end I got bored with making matchboxes around the world. I was looking for my next challenge. I was lucky because it was just at that time that Disney hit me. I guess that this was my mid-life crisis. It offered me my second life – a non-functional, creativity trip. Now that I have hit 50 – much easier than 40, I might add – it’s all about managing talent. And that’s what gets my guts in this present job – seeing new people discovering the Club – meeting new converts if you will."

"I hope it doesn’t sound too immodest to say so. But I feel that I have the capability of taking the Club forward to the next step. Which is more than just sending people on vacation and managing their free time. Club Med is a great brand - and I believe in brands – but I want to raise the stakes even more – to make it a power brand. To make it one of those great, strong world-wide brands on a par with Disney, Nike and Coke. A power brand is so strong that it is selling something else. Nike doesn’t just sell shoes. Disney doesn’t just sell Mickey. It is a way of life. I would like to see the Club become a power brand on a world wide level. Awareness of our brand is big - but not big enough. I would like people to one day look back and say that Bourguignon was the man responsible for the rebirth of the Club. Then I would have done something and brought something to this company. Not as a saviour. But as a visionary."

So can Phil Fix It for the Club? With such an impressive track record to date there are no grounds whatsoever for supposing that he can not.