They’re all gone now. Most have gone into retirement; sadly, a few have died. But 36 years ago, they were the bright-eyed brand marketers and sales executives of Procter & Gamble, creators of one of the most outrageous promotions in history, and certainly the marketing world’s greatest fish story. Unlike Ishmael, however, some P&G managers on the Spic and Span brand survived to tell the Epic Tale of the Free Goldfish.
As in many large brand companies, P&G had a certain hierarchy in the late 1960s: brands like Tide, Downy, Pampers and Crest outranked Cheer, Comet, Charmin and Scope; below that tier were brands like Spic and Span.
Its standing in the company may explain why nobody blinked when some unknown brand assistant suggested giving away free goldfish in stores with the purchase of any king-size box of Spic and Span.
The offer itself was the soul of simplicity: Buy one giant-size box of Spic and Span and you can fill a clear plastic container with two free goldfish. The display even had its own net for scooping the little fish out.
“We also included a booklet that explained how to care for the goldfish,” remembers Bob Wientzen, former director of P&G’s promotion and marketing services. “Everyone said it was impossible, you couldn’t ship live goldfish,” he recalls. “But we figured a way of pumping oxygen into the bags holding the fish that gave them enough time to get through the delivery chain alive.”
The national promotion called for over a million goldfish. “The planning took us a whole year,” Wientzen says. “We had to grow more goldfish than the entire United States used in a single year.”
The Bar Soap and Household Cleaning Products Division was charged with selling this minor brand’s promotion to America’s retailers. The legendary P&G sales forces hit the trade with the ardor and zeal of Christian missionaries converting Malaysian cannibals.
So renowned was P&G’s marketing wisdom, hardly a soul in sales was heard to question how the company was going to deliver living, breathing goldfish simultaneously to retailers across the country. Their overriding belief was that if the brand management said it could do it, then, by God, they would.
Unaccustomed to such attention, Spic and Span’s brand managers watched as the sales team sold full-page ads and record displays. “It got a huge amount of attention,” Wientzen says.
The goldfish-filled displays were packed in shippers, known colloquially as “nearpacks,” because they contained the premiums and were designed for display “near the packs of detergent.” Each nearpack display came complete with header card that was shipped directly to stores or to a chain’s warehouse for distribution to stores.
All the pieces were moving into position, and yet….timing was everything. Spic and Span’s nearpack launch was aligned with P&G’s annual Spring Cleaning sale. (It’s tough to believe today, but there used to be a predictable time of the year when America’s housewives would give their homes a thorough spring cleaning.) The goldfish debut was slated, therefore, for a late-April/early-May debut.
Unfortunately, P&G brand managers hadn’t allowed for unpredictable weather patterns across the USA during these months. And weather alone was not the fatal flaw in this promotion — truth be told, there were fatalities for a whole lot of reasons. And death is anathema to selling soap.
Like war vetrans, P&G reps of that era still get a distant look in their eyes when recalling the experience. Most of what could go wrong did. Goldfish displays shipped to Minnesota hit a cold snap near the Illinois state line. When they arrived, the displays were filled with goldfish frozen harder than a banker’s heart. Shipments to the Southwest met an opposite, but no less predictable fate: parboiled goldfish, the result of an early heatwave.
“All I heard, over and over, was what a logistical nightmare it was. [Salespeople were] called to stores to pick up the dead ones, cleaning up the messes from broken bags containing fish,” recalls Bob Herbold, who was the Spic and Span brand manager for a year in the early 1980s, and recently retired as executive VP and COO of Microsoft.
“We had to go to the president of the company to get permission to use a company plane to fly a re-supply of goldfish in!” recalls Gibby Carey, P&G’s former VP-advertising worldwide.
“Every once in awhile someone would call and complain about receiving dead goldfish,” Wientzen admits, “but it was a successful promotion.” That it got executed as well as it did is a testament to the passion P&G’s people came to work with every day of their careers.
Rod Taylor is the senior VP of Sports and Promotion for CoActive Marketing. E-mail him at [email protected].
NEARPACKS
When I started my career, selling soap on the northwest side of Milwaukee in 1972, I loved nearpacks because they required a retailer to buy a specified amount of product. In the late 1980s, however, grocers realized that they were the only ones not getting a “gift” out of these promotions. As one gruffly explained to me; “I’m in the ‘sell stuff business;’ they’ve got a name for the people in the give-stuff-away business: ‘non-profit organizations.’”
Nevertheless, here are some examples of why “free” remains the most popular four-letter word in the English language:
FREE Oxydol Cake Pans The very first promotion I ever sold was a nearpack offering consumers a cake pan with the purchase of a giant-size box of Oxydol detergent. The Oxydol sold for 86 cents and the cake pan alone was worth 69 cents. And yet…the cake pans didn’t come with the little metal strip in the bottom that separated the baked cake from the pan. Heretofore loyal Oxydol consumers shunned this promotion. There is no doubt in my mind that there are still Oxydol cake pans in grocery backrooms all over the northwest side of Milwaukee.
FREE Dash Laundry Baskets Dash was a concentrated, low-foam powdered detergent, so a case of two “home laundry”-size boxes weighed a truss-inducing 40 pounds.
The offer was easy to understand: buy the box and get the heavy plastic laundry basket. Once again, I sold this nearpack promotion like it could heal the sick, until I was reined in by a friendly grocer, who pointed out that he made 75 cents profit on each of the laundry baskets he was selling two aisles over.
FREE Peach Thrill Pixie Dolls About 25 years ago, there was a dishwashing detergent with a peach scent. I’ve always felt our culture the poorer for its loss. Back in 1971, some Ivy League MBA thought up the idea of offering a little peach colored pixie doll with the purchase of a 32 oz. bottle of Thrill. This was almost a quarter of a century before Beanie Babies, but the lesson learned was the same: never underestimate the power of cutsie little doll premiums on the American consumer.
— RT
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