Remember the popular rhyme: “Early to bed, early to rise, work like hell and advertise”
During the summer of my sixteenth year, I got a job in a grocery store. One day the store manager taught me an unforgettable aspect of advertising. Tang is a fruit-flavored drink originally formulated by General Foods Corporation in 1957. Though not marketed until 1959, it was the first “fruit juice” to be marketed in powdered form. Sales of Tang were poor until Feb. 20, 1962, when NASA used it on John Glenn’s Mercury space flight and on subsequent Gemini missions. The association with NASA led to the misconception that Tang was invented for the space program. It wasn’t, and General Foods wasn’t about to rectify the mix-up; let the public think what it would. Despite this spike in notoriety, Tang was still not a big mover. In fact, the store where I worked had a pallet of the powder that had been hanging around in the back room for some time.
In a clear example of one aspect of advertising, the manager took this languishing pallet of Tang out of the back room and placed near the store’s entrance where every mom entering his store would have to walk around it to get to the grocery carts. Without lowering the price, he simply hung a sign on each side of the pallet: “Tang, $0.99.” Ninety-nine cents per jar was the everyday price. By noon, the pallet of Tang had gone from unwanted backroom inventory to several hundred dollars in the cash register. The takeaway from this experience has stuck with me over the years: Simply bringing an item to the consumer’s attention can influence sales volume irrespective of price.
America is a competitive place. No country comes close. In board games alone, the average American home boasts over two times as many as our nearest rival, Canada. Canadians average three per household while we average seven per household. The United States invented the Super Bowl, March Madness, The Masters and infinitely more championships including championships in checkers, marbles and tiddlywinks.
Now picture your potato crop competing in a produce department with lettuce, avocados, broccoli, apples, squash and on and on. Now, like the Tang example, imagine that among all others in the produce section, that the potato section sports a poster featuring a tantalizing potato dish of russet, red, yellow, white, fingerling or medley varieties. In true competition for the consumer’s dollar, advertising our product increases its sales volume!
While remaining stagnant for several years, potato promotions nationally have been increasing at the rate of about 125 percent each year for the last three years. While not exactly correlated with increasing shipments, the two are tracking each other; increasing numbers of promotions appear to be leading to increasing sales volumes of reds, yellows, fingerlings and medleys at profitable pricing back to the farm.
As a fresh potato grower, make it part of your routine to visit grocery stores wherever you find yourself. If some aspect of fresh potatoes is not featured in the produce section, replace those potatoes with your own and work with the produce manager to promote them. Someone is going to get the consumer’s dollar. It might as well be you.