In days gone by, the office was a cold place. Each winter, every employer had to check temperatures in the workplace. The minimum was defined by law.

Gradually the office grew warmer and such law became outdated. New lighting and heating, then computers, all changed the temperature for good. Now, each summer, office workers witnessed a new offence, a new take on the old crime of sweated labour.

The British workplace had not been built to cope with overheating. Air conditioning was rarely fitted as standard. That was another country. So portable air conditioning was hesitantly introduced, by specialist contractors more used to servicing original, built-in equipment. They adopted low key marketing approaches which, like the law, owed as much to the 1880s as the 1980s.

Then someone new breezed into town. A prominent building services company, W.C. Youngman, was seeking to redress the winter bias of its hire business, based as it was on heaters. Its marketing advisors proposed that an air conditioning hire business, powerfully branded, could cut through the clutter of industrial marketing habits and appeal to the ultimate users.

Together they created a new brand for office workers and their bosses: victims both of overheating and of productivity losses. The law might not have caught up with the new office crime of temperature abuse but here in London, straight out of Philip Marlowe, stepped a new force to deal with it, Heatbusters.

A strip cartoon connected tube cards to direct mailshots, promotional wet wipes to a private eye radio series. Year after year, the story won awards. An industry market leader was born of a consumer brand champion. And eventually the Heatbusters brand was sold for so much more than its trading value that it was almost criminal.

Customers, employees, shareholders, all were united as fans of Heatbusters.

The brand specialist responsible for Heatbusters became convinced that if a good story could rewrite the book on industrial marketing, then it should work in most markets. And so he helped found a firm called brandstory.