As we welcome the New Year at RCI, we welcome the
opportunity to celebrate RCI’s 100th anniversary. During our year-long
celebration of this association’s rich history, we aim to reflect on the past,
while looking to the future of this sweet industry.
In thumbing through historical RCI documents, we discovered an
article from one of RCI’s monthly newsletters that is surprisingly fitting for
kicking off 2017!
In this excerpt from event speaker and vice
president of ad agency Batten, Barton, Durstine and Osborn, Inc. (BBDO), Whit Hobbs reflects on the 1950s and helps his audience of candy
makers look to the “sizzling sixties” to inspire fresh, new ideas.
Notice the date: it’s Thursday,
June 11, 1959, which means that you are standing on the threshold of a new
decade and a new world, the Sizzling Sixties. Behind you lie nearly all of the
fabulous rapidly fading fifties.
The decade of the superhighway and
the super market. The family room and the TV dinner. The Sputnik and the
Beatnik. The greatest decade of CHANGE that there has ever been in the history
of the world. Every day during this decade, this whirling-dervish world of ours
has made another complete revolution around the sun. Day after day, revolution
after revolution. Revolutions in the way people live. In the way they shop. In
what they buy. And what they eat. And
what they drink. And what they think.
Look around you. Notice how
completely the world has changed. Markets have changed. Diets have changed.
Habits have changed. And money is in new pockets.
Most of all people have changed.
Notice that people are taller than they used to be. And healthier. And smarter.
And savvier. And more sophisticated. With more varied appetites. And more
cultivated tastes. People are growing up faster. And staying young longer. They’re
becoming harder to satisfy. Harder to fool. Easier to bore. Hungrier for
novelty and news. They’re constantly reaching for something better. Something
fresh. Something new. And they’re constantly finding it.
My point is this: your customers
have changed more than you and your products have changed. What an opportunity
you have in the next few months and in
the next few years to throw away the old rules and the old yardsticks…in favor
of new appeals and new looks and new products and new ideas. WHAT AN
OPPORTUNITY TO STOP PLAYING FOLLOW THE LEADER. To stop “doing it this way
because this is the way we’ve always done it.” What an opportunity to reach for
something better – something fresh and new – and find it.
You know what I’d do if I were you?
I’d make candy that you LOVE to make. And I’d sell it the same way. With
pride. With conviction. With enthusiasm. And, most of all, with imagination.
And with every piece of candy I sold, I would also sell the IDEA of eating
candy. The REWARDS OF CANDY. The fun, the energy, the nutrition, the
convenience.
If I were a candy manufacturer
heading into the 1960s, I’d make my products timely and talked about and
tantalizing. Candy is strictly for pleasure, and I’d have fun with my products
and with my customers. I’d tie in with every fad and
fancy I could find.
- Everybody is on a fortune cookie
kick these days. I’d bring out Fortune Candies, with corny, crazy fortunes on
them.
- I’d do what the cosmetic people
are doing. They bring out shade promotions: Rue
de la Pink and French Spice and Red Tape. I’d bring out taste
promotions: exciting one-shots that are here today and eaten up tomorrow.
- I’d bring out special summer candy…to
be chilled and served ice cold. Bought in the freezer department in a
supermarket.
- Why isn’t candy on every
restaurant menu as a dessert? Why isn’t it packed in TV dinners? Why isn’t
there dry candy, like dry wine and dry beer?
- I’d find candy boxes that turn
themselves into toys or lunch boxes or something. Inventive packaging has sold
my wife one helluva lot of (ugh) cottage cheese. And she buys vitamins the same
way: to end up with a handsome jar. She buys soap in plastic bags just to wind
up with the bags. You’d like my wife.
- Give her Monday bars and Tuesday
bars and Wednesday bars to put in lunch boxes and she’ll buy a whole mess of ‘em.
- Give her a box of candy for a long
motor trip: each kid gets one of the small pieces every 50 miles, a larger
piece for every 100 miles and a special red piece every time you cross a state
line.
- Give her a big bag of un-birthday
candy to serve tonight at an un-birthday party…just for the fun of it, because
it isn’t someone’s birthday.
These are just some of the things I might
possibly do, if I were you. Time to think big and be
big. Time to think new and be new.
