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Purpose and benefits

Swashbuckling Richard Branson has brought a welcome sense of fun and adventure to some traditionally staid business sectors with his many-tentacled Virgin Group. As a boy, he thought he could make a better fist of running his school than the headmaster, ran an abortive budgerigar-breeding business, and published a magazine entitled "Student" . A mail-order record business was followed by record stores, then a record label, and then an airline. It may seem like an improbable sequence, but Branson swiftly realised that a good brand could be stretched, with care, to encompass anything from condoms to clothes, personal finance to trains. By 2000 the value of Branson’s unwieldy empire collected under the Virgin Group banner was estimated at some $1.8 billion by "Forbes" magazine.