History doesn’t record who the first marketer was to use an anniversary as a theme for a promotion, but I for one would kiss whoever it was smack on the lips, for this kind of theme has bailed me out any number of times. Corporate or brand anniversaries are terrific excuses to dust off the archives and shout, “Look at us, we’re still here!”
The most natural milestones are a golden (50th) or centennial (100th) anniversary. That said, I’m not embarrassed to admit that I’ve run successful promotions behind 25th, 70th, 110th and 140th anniversaries.
Venerable dates tend to have more heft, however. In 1992, Nabisco managed to celebrate its 200th anniversary, thanks to some creative interpretation of history by the eminent cracker makers.
The National Biscuit Company itself was formed in 1898 when the New York Biscuit Co. merged with the American Biscuit Co. of Chicago. The New York Biscuit Co. was able to trace its origins back to a bakery founded in 1792, John Pearson & Son, which made a product called Crown Pilot Crackers. (Pearson’s sold this product to sailing ships of that era where it was known by its street name of “hard tack.”) From there it was a kind of a marketing hop, skip and a jump for Nabisco to be able to declare, “Hey, it’s our bicentennial!”
Nabisco began by featuring old-fashioned logos on the packaging of its popular Premium Saltine crackers. These simple little crackers, introduced in 1876, generated relatively low margins, but redeemed themselves with terrific volume. Retro packaging had worked well in the past for everything from Ivory Soap to Morton’s Salt, so the folks at Nabisco didn’t think they were taking much of a risk on this one. The gods of promotion, however, laugh at the plans of us mere mortals.
“What a disaster!” recalls Bill McCarthy, now Hasbro’s director of trade marketing, who in 1992 was promotion manager for Nabisco’s Cookies and Crackers division. “What Nabisco didn’t realize was how many consumers depended on seeing the famous blue block logo,” McCarthy says. “Consumers didn’t recognize Premium in the nostalgia packaging, and [they] gathered dust on store shelves.”
The company immediately abandoned plans to extend the nostalgic packaging campaign to six more brands within their cookie and cracker line.
As luck would have it, the promotion that did work was inspired by a visit to New Hope, PA, that McCarthy made with his spouse. New Hope has a plethora of antique shops, including at least two that are dedicated to selling old packaging and marketing collectibles. Bill was in one of these shops when he saw some beautiful nostalgic soup bowls done by Tabasco Sauce.
Knowing that one of consumers’ primary uses for Premium Saltines is to smush them up and use them in soups and chili, he figured he could transpose Tabasco’s very excellent idea right onto his brand. In short order, a brace of Tabasco Sauce soup bowls were on their way back to Nabisco’s headquarters in East Hanover, NJ.
“I showed the Tabasco bowls to the Premium Saltine brand manager, and he thought a Nabisco soup bowl would be a great idea. The only problem: he had no money,” McCarthy recalls. “No problem, I remember telling him, ‘Let’s offer it as a self-liquidator on-pack.’”
The brand ended up offering the soup bowl as a mail-in at $4.95 with purchase, advertising the offer on a side panel of the cracker box. Turn-of-the-century graphics on the $12-value bowls featured the famous Uneeda Biscuit Boy image. This unassuming little promotion with no budget generated more than 300,000 mail-ins — pretty fair for a zero-base self-liquidator!
Now, you know that there’s no way anyone’s going to walk away from a successful promotion with a sigh and say, “Gee, isn’t it great that worked out so well?”
“We decided to expand the program,” McCarthy says. The company developed a line of additional kitchenware: a cracker tin, spoon rest, trivet, salt and pepper shakers and even a soup tureen. It called the program Nabisco Collector’s Choice.
What was brilliant about the program was that everything offered related to one of the core uses of Nabisco’s cracker line-in soups. It didn’t hurt that everything offered was in the wildly popular kitchen collectible category, a category called “kitsch” by its critics, but broadly embraced by a huge group of consumers.
“We scoured the Nabisco archives for the best images to apply to each of the kitchenware items,” McCarthy says. “We even wrote the histories of four cracker brands on the bottom of each soup bowl.”
The expansion of the collection had its pitfalls. When you’re shipping crockery around the country at that scale, breakage can ruin you. Packaging is key. McCarthy ruefully recalls that the first shipping tests used a box with a tight-fitting lid and no Styrofoam.
“We shipped 20 bowls to locations around the U.S. Of those, 16 arrived broken. We switched to a loose-fitting box with Styrofoam and ran another shipping test. The dishes all arrived intact. I can’t imagine the liability if we had shipped the first 100,000 bowls without testing.”
Nabisco ran the retro-Premium offer on-pack for a full year. Consumers snapped up almost a million items in 12 months, all at self-liquidating prices.
“The program paid for itself,” McCarthy notes proudly. “Plus, we were selling more Premium Saltines due to the required proofs of purchase, while establishing that elusive ‘brand presence’ in millions of kitchens across America.”
Ultimately the strength of these two promotions helped inspire Nabisco to establish its own catalog of corporate collectibles, all at far higher prices than its self-liquidating cousins. You can still purchase Tabasco soup bowls from the Tabasco Country Store Web site (a set of four bowls sells for $29.95). To get the Nabisco collection, however, you now have to try e-Bay.
Rod Taylor is senior VP of sports and promotion, CoActive Marketing. Share your favorite marketing programs via [email protected].
REALLY HAPPY ANNIVERSARIES
There’s a bit of an art to staging a truly memorable anniversary promotion. Here are three I’ve witnessed first hand that I thought were done with particular excellence:
- NASCAR 50TH ANNIVERSARY (1998)
This sport’s fans spend more money per capita on wearable and collectible merchandise than any others. NASCAR insured its fans had a huge collection of 50th Anniversary items to choose from, with prices ranging from under a buck to over ten grand. They also did a great job of keeping the theme alive during the entire season, from a kick-off gala “Hollywood Salutes NASCAR” made-for-TV special, to the final race of the year.
- COCA-COLA CENTENNIAL (1986)
Nobody does employee entertainment events like Coca-Cola — nobody! For its centennial, Coke brought thousands of bottler personnel to Atlanta for a brand love-fest that went on for days. It brought the 100th to life in-store for retailers with innovative dealer premiums that ranged from huge pins sets, with a pin for each year of the brand’s 100 years, to wonderfully designed shadowboxes showcasing exact reproductions of classic Coca-Cola collectibles (some even done in miniature so they’d fit the format).
- PROCTER & GAMBLE SESQUICENTENNIAL (1987)
P&G broke a number of corporate traditions when celebrating its 150th anniversary. Key customers received framed and double-matted prints with illustrations that depicted scenes and brands from the company’s history. Employees were offered a collection of wearable merchandise featuring the firm’s special 150th Anniversary logo. (It’s tough to believe today, but this was the first time in P&G history that employees were offered the opportunity to purchase logoed merchandise.) Even the annual holiday gift to employees came packed in a retro wooden soap crate featuring the special logo. One of the key learnings: P&G had packed its catalog with low-price items in order to be inclusive of factory workers, but the best-selling items were the pricey logoed Cross pen sets.
Network
