Maker’s Mark® – the Bourbon in the Red (Trade) Dress – Still Defending the Wax.

Trade dress – a product or product package’s non-functional physical details and design identifies the product's source and sets it apart from others’ products.

I love trade dress. For many companies and their products, it’s a crucial component of their successful marketing and key to maintaining a competitive position. Think McDonald’s Golden Arches. Think “The milk chocolate melts in your mouth, not in your hands” – the candy’s trademark double-M shape began in 1941. Think Yellow Freight, whose ubiquitous trucks are painted Swamp Holy Orange.* In previous Signalwriter posts about trade dress, such as here, I haven’t much changed my position over the years.

One seven-year-long trade dress war ended in 2010, so everyone thought. Maker’s Mark won an order in 2010 awarding it exclusive rights to the dripping wax seal. Maker’s Mark gained an injunction prohibiting any other company from using a similar seal and look. US District Judge John G Heyburn II said that the bourbon maker held a valid trademark. End of story? Nope.

This past Thursday, the US 6th Circuit Court of Appeals Thursday stepped into the long-running argument over whether Maker’s Mark owner, Beam Inc, can keep the trademark on the wax seal and enforce that injunction stopping any other liquor company from using a similar top.

It’s clear that a lot of people – even many marketers – don’t completely understand the value of trade dress. When Dennis Yang reported in April, 2010, that Judge Heyburn ruled the dripping red wax seal can only be used by Maker’s Mark bourbon, I was fascinated by some of the comments appended to his post.

ElijahBlue: “How many great ideas are abandoned, bursts of inspiration are extinguished because of these abusive (and stupid) copyright, patent and trademark lawsuits?”

Jedidiah: “This sort of BS makes me want to go to my favorite purveyor of strong drink and buy some of this Maker’s Mark crap (never bought it before actually) just so I can have the pleasure of smashing the bottle in protest.”

ABC gum: “Maybe others think wax is a big deal ... I cannot envision why.”

Another forum commenter, Stephen, tells why. Identifying himself as a Maker’s Mark Ambassador, he properly noted:

It’s the basis for their brand’s recognition, like Tiffany blue. A representation of the wax in that particular shade of red adorns all the things they put out, whether it be note cards or golf balls, so that when you see the red wax you think MM. While it’s hardly a novel idea to seal a bottle with wax, the tequila company is clearly trying to glom onto Maker’s Mark’s high-end symbol for their own game, a symbol the bourbon has developed over 50 years.

When clients say they want to be the Mercedes-Benz of their particular industry or – right now – look like Apple, it’s touchy to remind them that many of these highly identifiable companies have spent many years and millions of dollars establishing their trade dress. (Maker’s Mark spends about $22 million annually to market its bourbon whereas would-be infringer Cuervo has spent only about $500,000 of its overall branding budget on the Reserva tequila it was going to “wax.”)

Tamara Miller, an intellectual property lawyer at Leydig, Voit and Mayer, encapsulated the massive value of trade dress in a single paragraph:

When my little boy sees a red box with a girl on it, he knows the “Sun-Maid” raisins he likes are inside. My husband knows that any black, dome-topped grill is a “Weber,” and that the goldfish-shaped crackers in our pantry come from Pepperidge Farm. In order to find my “Cheerios” at the store, I look for the yellow box with the big red heart on it. Without a doubt, my family relies on trade dress to recognize our favorite products, and so do countless consumers every day.

Red wax seal equals Maker’s Mark. This is the business of marketing. Cuervo and brand owner Diageo should spend their time and money on their own creative trade dress. Not stealing someone else’s.

*Yellow has changed its brand to YRC – I understand what economics drove this transformation but regret the passing of a super trade dress. Bottom photo credit: © Shannon Graham.

We Don’t Need No Trademarked “Seal Team Six” – We’ve Got Gurkhas.

Reality comes to the rescue of blogging again, even about advertising. So, first, if you didn’t share a huge guffaw over Disney’s application for a trademark on “Seal Team Six,” you missed a great chance to laugh at the company…again. And the company did this the day after the Abbottabad raid.

(Honestly, some days they’re worse than D Trump.)

Now you cigar smokers, current and reformed, will recognize the ad format here. It’s from the latest Thompson Cigar catalog and it’s touting Gurkha Special Operations Churchills. Since I’m certain that the catalog was in production before the US raid, serendipity is obviously at work. In fact, the king of mail-order cigars has had this offer floating around since last year:

The Gurkha Special Ops Gift Set takes Gurkha brand-owner K Hansotia’s support of our men and women in uniform to a whole new level. The Gurkha cigars are full bodied, but surprisingly sophisticated and employ a top-secret blend of well aged Dominican long fillers finished with a zesty Dominican wrapper.

On the one hand I’m charmed by the coincidence. On the other, Thompson (Since 1915) is  presenting its own special blend of silliness, starting with the inclusion of a 12-inch long knife instead of the kukri, the traditional long knife of the Gurkhas and other Nepalese hill people.

Even considering the historical use of Gurkhas as a special unit of the British Army (to this day: the Royal Gurkha Rifles); and their fearsome fighting reputation; the last time I can recall any sort of special operations being undertaken by the Gurkhas was in Hollywood’s “King of the Khyber Rifles,” in 1953.

So it goes: marketing will find a way. This is what drives the creator-cartoonist of “Dilbert” nuts. Plus the cigars are good, insofar as I remember them. Anything is better than one more over-reaching Disney exploitation.

Remember what these monsters did to “Winnie the Pooh.”

Label Wonder

The last time I blogged about Del Monte (here), I wondered about the company’s departure from the salsa market. Today, I post to applaud the firm for a remarkably minor detail: How easy the product label comes off the container of Del Monte® Orchard Select® Apricot Halves...that is the label itself, jpeg-ed above.

Now according to a 2004 “Product Spotlight” on FoodProcessing.com:

The intention of packaged produce..like Orchard Select…is to provide premium quality fruit with year-round consistency and convenience for consumers, while extending Del Monte’s reach beyond the “center store.” The Orchard Select brand is…packed in glass and marketed in the chilled produce section. Orchard Select packaging and labels are designed to remind consumers of the days of home canning and the Del Monte heritage of top quality…

Which it did, especially the 24-ounce glass jar, which Barbara decided to recycle as a kitchen storage container. Why not? It’s neat. It comes with a secure top. And you can see through it.

Once Barbara served up the apricot halves in various tasty forms, she placed the empty Mason-type jar in the dishwasher. She had two objectives. One, get the jar clean. The other, help remove the attractive but now unnecessary Del Monte label.

Usually, consumer package labels cannot be removed without the Jaws of Life or a heated scalpel, whichever we don’t have available in the house. This time, Barbara removed jar from dishwasher, simply peeled the label off with gentle fingers, and presented the separated items as last night’s leading example of “making my life a lot easier.”

Digging into the depths of a consumer brand’s packaging (glass jars, label adhesives, that sort of thing) is mainly unproductive – this is a trade-secretive branch of the industry. So what we have is empirical demonstration of the cool, thoughtful and utterly unmessy Del Monte label removal scheme.

Some days, it’s the little things that matter. Thanks, Del Monte. And the apricots taste good, too.

“ORCHARD SELECT” is a trademark registered with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office since October 31, 1995. For an extra-credit look inside the process of protecting a trademark, see the WIPO decision, “Del Monte Corporation v. David Crumpacker.” “DEL MONTE” is also a registered trademark. “JAWS OF LIFE” is a trademark of Hale Products Inc.

Railean™ Rum

The end of 5th Street in San Leon, TX, is about as far as you can go before you run out of solid land. Beyond it sail shrimp boats and freighters. This is where Matt and Kelly Railean founded their distillery. This is where they make “original” Handmade Texas Rum™.

I wouldn’t blame you if you think I’m a sot, not after writing about Louisiana rum in a previous post.

In the blogosphere, though, one thing does lead to another. So I found myself with an invitation to visit one of the two rum-makers in Texas. Railean Texas Gulf Coast Rum is hand-crafted in a different style than Old New Orleans Rum and the brand is marketed differently, too. (Yes, there’s been a certain amount of tasting going on – this helps me differentiate among brands. Really.) Why miss a chance to observe this brand effort on the basis of the Four Ps* of Marketing anyway? And it’s just down the “Highway of Death,” I-45 South.

These Texas rums are new. The Raileans got their financing in the Year 5 and their permit in the Year 7: Their clear White Rum came out in December last year, the first marketable liquor off their shiny German-made column still. Railean Reserve XO (the amber rum) has just been introduced. Matt Railean is the distiller; in fact, he’s Texas’s first “Master Distiller.” Kelly Railean is the marketer – her background as a First Level Sommelier, with more than a decade’s experience in wine and spirits, means she knows how to go door-to-door.

The initial, Four-P decisions, though, have been joint ones.

One: Product. They wanted to match their product – the rums – with the audiences they saw on the horizon. They believe there will be a market for fine-tuned, hand-crafted rums just as there is for single-barrel bourbons and aged tequilas. In creating the product, they went for “dry” rum recipes. There’s no sugar left in the specially created 720 molasses when it goes in the still. The two varieties are less sweet than most rum – the flavors are rich though not syrupy (the Reserve XO has some sherry-like overtones). So far, bartenders and restaurant owners say they like the Railean rums because they’re different, with an up-market feel and taste that’s distinct from mass-produced rums.

Two: Positioning. The brand name – Railean – is the family name. The makers experimented with different name options, using both friends and liquor-industry colleagues as sounding boards. I’d say there’s no more vanity here than any other entrepreneurs; and a good deal of realism. If you can’t have the brand equity of a Bacardi or Captain Morgan, you have to build your own. They also understood from the get-go that San Leon doesn’t have quite the throw-weight as New Orleans. Rather than load up the rums with pre-conceived notions, “Railean” is neutral…so Matt and Kelly are willing to let their stakeholders help build brand loyalty and image. (I think the jury will be out for a while yet on their brand positioning effort.)

Third: Presentation. In this case, that’s the label design. Look behind any well-stocked tavern bar, or the “Rum” section of a good liquor store. You’re going to see a lot of labels showing black bats, pirates, sugar cane and more pirates. After considerable thought and a huge number of designs, Matt and Kelly looked out the window of the Buccaneer Tavern in San Leon and saw the hundreds of monk parakeets flying around the power poles and palm trees – the little green parrot ended up as the Railean mascot and the anchor of the product labels.

Fourth: Promotion. Kelly Railean is convinced on-premise sales will build the Railean brand and that’s where most direct tasting and promotion efforts are concentrated. I wrote in a previous post about “marketing one bottle at a time;” bars and restaurants are where the 30-to-50-year-old professionals nurture their liquor brand devotion. The company wants to foster this personal relationship with the brand; admits it’s hard work and intends to follow through with it all the same. In the absence of a million-dollar budget, the Raileans will use word-of-mouth to foster brand loyalty.

Forty-plus years back, John C Aspley wrote about the advertising manager of a large manufacturing company who said: Sales promotion moves the product toward the buyer, while advertising moves the buyer toward the product.

The Raileans are using sales promotion – and sweat equity – to construct their brand’s success. Their achievement will be handmade, for sure.

*There are about as many “Ps” in marketing as there are markets – three, four, five, seven…you name it. One 4P set (not mine) can be found at The ABCs of Small Business. I’m grateful to the Raileans for the great chance to see a new consumer brand take its first steps. Their brandsite also features plenty pix.

Celebration Distillation

The last time I had any real truck with Demon Rum was ’63: A post-Marist graduation visit to what was then British Honduras helped me to an acquaintance of the locally produced product which was pretty raw.

Now, thanks to a tasting with Philip Cusimano, I’ve re-made rum’s acquaintance with a higher caliber product. And wandered again into the world of audience-building for artisan products. Here, the heavy lifting’s done by skill and heart and one-bottle-at-a-time marketing.

Phil (and our hosts at Mo Mong) let me taste three different versions of Old New Orleans Rum, from the Crescent City’s Celebration Distillation. The Crystal is your basic light-bodied rum that’s probably good for mixed drinks. The Amber is fine for sippin’. But the Cajun Spice, the one with the red label – it’s just outstanding…like the website says, “with the kick of cayenne & cinnamon…hints of nutmeg, ginger & cloves…”

My but it’s tasty. Every single-barrel rum is distilled and blended the old-fashioned way at 2815 Frenchman Street in NOLA by James Michalopoulos, a well-known local artist.

One of the “country virtues” of marketing artisanal foods and beverages (cheeses and breads, beers and wines, barbeque sauces and handmade pâtés) is that you can succeed without lots of money. You substitute lots of sweat equity and smarts. Boys and girls, Michalopoulos’s marketing the hell out of this stuff, mano a mano.

Michalopoulos doesn’t have the Bacardi USA ad budget, say, or the Captain Morgan “Morganettes” (Caitlyn, Megan and Whitney, no less).

What he does have is a finely honed sense of local color – the Red Hat Society ladies come to lunch at the distillery, e.g. He manages a comprehensive website and maintains an active blog. Old New Orleans Rum has pages on Facebook (I’ve joined up as a fan) and MySpace. You can purchase bottles online and have them shipped…from New York.

If – or when – Michalopoulos succeeds, he’ll have done it with continuous and clever promotion on a local and regional level, slowly building the rums’ audience through brewery tours, event participation and broadening distribution sites. You can find Old New Orleans varieties in Spec’s here, for example, right along with the shelf-hogging Bacardis and Ron Ricos.

Rum, like wine, is an amazingly available product…it comes from just about everywhere. But hard liquor distilled from sugar cane and byproducts is a genuine New World invention. It played a significant role in the European and African colonization of the American continents.

That these rums remind you of beignets and coffee with chicory is positively part of the brand’s image. The appeal is local (where Elysian Fields crosses Abundance), like Shiner Bock and St Arnold beers instead of Budweiser here in Houston. You gave it up for Tito’s Handmade Vodka, right? Made in Austin, right?

Well, you can buy your rum one of the great big labels and watch your money go offshore. Or you can offer up your drinking dollars and sense of style to NOLA, where artisanal branding is alive and well.

Guarding Trademarks

For brand marketers, there's a good, quick briefing on the proper selection of trademarks: Read the “What’s in a Name?” article from BevNET Innovation, Issue 2, by lawyer Gregg R Sultan, here.

Long-form, though, it struck me that it’s relatively rare when information technology and copyright protection intersect. Today’s one of those days.

We’re at the dawn of what WIRED is now calling the “Petabyte Age.” That’s when there’s so much information available to us, the sheer mass of data demands what WIRED editor Chris Anderson says is an entirely different approach. He further pronounces: The new availability of huge amounts of data, along with the statistical tools to crunch these numbers, offers a whole new way of understanding the world.

Very cool thinking, yes? Except that one of the examples in the WIRED feature article is a DOD program called Essence – the Electronic Surveillance System for the Early Notification of Community-based Epidemics. Though “100 megabytes of data come in every day,” the government can’t nail down the source(s) of the current salmonella outbreak that’s clobbered 1,000 people.

Big data may well become miraculous. But mistakes will still happen if your project is “untouched by human thought.” So we come back to creating and protecting a trademark and Sultan’s article. Here’re some snippets:

Businesses tend to pick names which describe a product to immediately alert the consumer to the product’s nature (e.g., “Lemon Lime Soda”)…in the long run, you probably won’t be able to distinguish your beverage from others or protect the name.

Sierra Mist for lemon-lime soda…is considered a suggestive mark because it doesn’t describe the product, but conveys the idea that it’s refreshing. Marks like these are easier to protect and enforce…

As I said up top, the entire article is concise; worth your reviewing as a “best practices” reminder. Radio Corporation of America was fine in 1919. Now, 90 years later, it wouldn’t hold up as a corporate or brand name. This is what lawyers are for in our day and age, along with creative people who understand what makes one brand name more powerful, more useful and more protectable than another.

It doesn’t matter how much data you crunch (and there are software programs that’ll invent brand name options by the thousands). Creating a great brand is a human endeavor; guarding its IP value is up to human beings every time. Every time.

Appreciation to Gregg R Sultan, Esq., for his white paper, © 2008, BevNET.com, Inc. Post art by Prism Design, Inc. Many thanks to Susan Reeves and Stacy Allen. The art is the binary (data) form of a client brand name – a free bottle of wine to the first person who identifies it.

Triscuit® Romance

A new print ad for Triscuit ‘Rosemary & Olive Oil’ crackers caught my attention and amusement – it’s hard to make out the headline in this scan, so I’ll quote it for you to read:

Jessica opened her box of Rosemary & Olive Oil Triscuit crackers. The aroma instantly transported her to the countryside. One bite, and she’d finally found the complexity and flavor she craved, a combination sadly missing from the pretty boy in the ascot.

This is classy and sassy – just the thing for a brand that’s under reconstruction – and beautifully targeted to its audience. You’d hardly think this cracker is more than 100 years old. You can read even more about the cracker itself here.

But the story is never so simple as that. When you Google “Triscuit,” you’ll discover that in the past year, the brand has been at the center of some remarkable upsets in the ad biz, as well as the subject of dozens of blog posts (like here and here).

Writing in The New York Times last April, Stuart Elliott broke the story that Kraft Foods was unhappy with its biggest ad agency, JWT, and showed its displeasure by shifting six brands (worth $160+ millions) to other agencies. That’s put the hurt on JWT big-time.

It looks like the Triscuit business, worth about $12.8 millions, ended up at Euro RSCG in New York, along with the Ritz cracker assignment ($32.1 millions).

Some dissatisfaction has been expressed about Kraft North America’s customer service. Freshbooks’ blogger also noted, “Nabisco has not domain-proofed their brand by buying Triscuits.com.” This was back in April; now you can, in fact, type in Triscuit.com and go right to a micro-site for the brand.

Meanwhile, new Triscuit flavors have been very popular with consumers, with lots of positive comments (e.g., mezediet.com).

Back to the ad itself, which bears a 2008 copyright. I’d led by this to conclude that the ad is from Euro RSCG and my hat’s off to the creative team. Yes, I know it’s quite popular to slam guys – but for the women in the audience, this execution is laugh-worthy.

I also compliment the team on the human touches which put this ad “in contact” with the audience: a lovely woman but no stick figure, a certain dreamy quality to the execution, reinforced by the tagline, “A tasty romance awaits.”

I expect I’ll be old(er) and gray(er) before I see this kind of advertising for, say, oilfield technology. Try as I might, I can’t ever see any E&P company going with a headline like:

Ray-Bob opened the carton with his new CX-370A drill bit inside. The fresh oil covering the layers of its diamond cutters instantly recalled his glory days on the rig floor – he knew he’d finally found the penetration and the sheer power missing from his life since Norma’d left him for that landman in Lafayette.

Ah, well. There’s always the Triscuits.

“Tinieblo” Explained

The Starbucks prize for uncovering the meaning of tinieblo goes to NYC’s Peter Yonka – my brother-in-law, no less. Congratulations!

Jose Jaramillo Mejia is a columnist for the Colombian newspaper La Patria. I get the impression he’s this paper’s version of William Safire, writing about the meaning of words and phrases.

His article covers the meaning of tinieblo in detail: “a furtive lover of a lady” according to my machine translation. Señor Jaramillo calls it a neologism – a new coinage – with roots in the Latin word for “darkness,” the dark, lack of light.

Paraphrasing his column, ordinary lovers and young men are different from this guy: El Tinieblo does not fall in love with anybody; nobody falls in love with him. It is a pastime, a resource for sexual gratification without roots or commitments.

Unless Mexican Spanish is wildly different than Colombian Spanish – which it may well be – we’re drinking a mezcal whose brand name implies a Don Juan, a Casanova….perhaps a little bit more. (No, I don’t feel any different, thanks.)

Señor Jaramillo nominates tinieblo for the Royal Academy’s official dictionary of the Spanish language with the meaning of the occasional lover. Uh-huh. Peter deserves today’s award for “best research.” Happy drinking.

Photo by Corazón Girl with thanks.

Yipes! Stripes!

The things I discover when I take a road trip: a total rebranding job southwest of Houston that I’d not been aware of before. (And no, it’s not an excuse to put a pretty girl up on the blog…merely an example...really.)

As I headed southwest for Mexico, to hunt the wily whitewing, I ran across my first Stripes© store in Goliad, TX. It’s a C-store (convenience store) hiding under a Valero gas canopy, my first sight of a new trade dress campaign that’s a year old. Apparently, I don’t get out enough.

I asked the counter clerk who operated Stripes. She could only tell me that the chain sold Valero gasoline and she thought its headquarters was in Corpus Christi. It is.

Susser Holdings Corporation tapped Houston-based BrandExtract to: help define and launch the new brand. BrandExtract crafted a complete identity package, including new logos and exterior store signage. The new look and feel will be taken to market via outdoor boards, weekly radio spots, in-store point-of-purchase signage, Stripes cups and other packaging. (It’s very thoughtful of Susser to mention the agency on its website.)

Then I arrived (with six of our eventual 10-man hunting party) in McAllen and found Stripes everywhere – the eastern Valley area alone has 60+ stores in the phone book. According to Susser, it’s one of the Top 20 operators of C-stores nationwide…and Stripes is the “new face” of the old Circle-K brand.

It’s a very good job – despite the apparent dissonance between the Stripes and Valero trade dressings. It doesn’t seem to hurt the company’s business at retail. And there may be some not-really-hidden reason behind the brand change.

According to a company press release, Susser began re-branding its convenience stores from the Circle-K licensed brand to Stripes in the second quarter of 2006. At approximately the same time, Susser began re-branding its fueling islands to Valero from CITGO after signing a new 12-year supply agreement in July 2006 – in the third quarter.

All the retail stores that were supplied by CITGO were to be supplied by Valero. It looks like Susser was one of the breakaways from CITGO in the wake of the remarks by Venezuelan President Chavez that so upset CITGO marketing partners here in the US.

The same February 2007 press release quoted Ron Coben, Susser’s CMO: “The main goal of this campaign was to transfer the goodwill that we have earned over the last decade as Circle K into even stronger customer loyalty as Stripes.”

One valid reason to re-brand a company or operating unit (especially one long-established) is to signal a change in direction – in this case, leaving behind old or no-longer-appropriate marks (Circle-K and CITGO) for new offerings (Valero).

Whether you agree that Valero’s teal-and-yellow looks a bit odd against the Stripes red-and-white, Coben’s team and BrandExtract have come up with a very strong identity – and you can see executions in addition to “Bikini Girl” here.

On the one hand, Wall Street doesn’t seem to have given Susser much credit for this particular effort. But given that it’s a year after the new brand’s rollout and every Stripes store I saw was crowded, I’d have to say the campaign is very successful: Customers have picked up on the brand transference. What’s the disconnect among Susser stakeholders? I’ll write Ron Coben to find out.

And hats off to Jonathan Fisher and the BrandExtract team for a neat ongoing campaign.

PS: Circle-K is still a going concern. Susser was a major licensee.

Spackle® Gone?

Dear Mr. Norton: the morning paper (see above) reminded me that another great trademark has bitten the dust – yours. Like “escalator," it seems to have happened over a number of years…and no one (including yourself and the other members of your family) seems to have noticed.

A trademark used for a powder to be mixed with water or a ready-to-use plastic paste, SPACKLE was designed to fill cracks and holes in plaster before painting or papering. Today, the name usually appears in print in lowercase, either as a noun or as a verb. It’s actually a registered trademark of The Muralo Company of Bayonne, NJ. The original SPACKLE brand of products was introduced in 1926 and there’s plenty of information about it here.

The Muralo Company (Jim Norton, President) favors to independent paint and decorating products dealers – it doesn’t distribute through big-box/Home Center stores. Unlike Sherwin-Williams, another great brand, Muralo doesn’t own retail stores; it depends on “discriminating do-it-yourselfers and professional painting contractors.”

Other companies, including the aforementioned Sherwin-Williams and DAP, Inc., make “spackling paste.”

Despite a 100-year-plus history, the company hasn’t gone out of its way to protect its brand, though. The 1970 edition of The American College Dictionary doesn’t portray the word, whereas “Spackle” is clearly identified as a trademark in the ’99 edition of Encarta® World English Dictionary.

Why wouldn’t a small, family-owned company protect its valuable trademark? One answer may be distraction: The Muralo Company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2003, to protect itself against asbestos claims – the same kinds of claims the brought down Johns-Manville. Although the company website’s latest press releases are almost a year old, there’s still a Contractor Incentive Program that’s good ‘til the end of this year: Muralo is still going.

I’m not sure distraction counts as an excuse. My daddy was using the word “spackle” as a verb back when I was a young ‘un…the practice is clearly an old one, despite the Encarta entry. And as you can see in “Zits,” it continues to this day.

Maybe someone from the company will let Signalwriter know why it has let its trademark slip into common usage. A trademark’s age doesn’t mean it has to lose its standing, as Coca-Cola proves.

“Zits” by Jerry Scott & Jim Borgman. © 2007 King Features Syndicate, Inc. All rights reserved.

Tunguska Blast

Okay, I can’t help this. I stopped by my local pack-and-mail store, owned by Amir Brohi like since forever. I needed to send a fax (that really smacks of the 20th Century, doesn’t it?). There were these bottles on the counter, large, oddly shaped bottles and tiny oddly shaped bottles. Such is my introduction to Tunguska Blast. This is an energy drink apparently distributed like Amway products.

It comes from a company called CyberWize and it introduced Tunguska Blast to the world with...a unique and powerful platform of claims defensible only because of the power attributed to the Tunguska Effect: the most unique boost to energy and stamina, support to the immune system, increase of mental clarity, and enhancement of physical performance ever provided by a nutritional supplement.

Holy monkey fritters! What a marketing scheme. Beautifully done. According to CyberWize, it “absolutely changes” people’s lives.

Now for a little history: at 7.18AM on Tuesday, June 30, 1908, a meteor struck eastern Russia. According to, say, Matt Datillo: Central Siberia was a remote, hard-to-reach wilderness in 1908, but even so, there were witnesses to the event. Near Lake Baikal, villagers saw a bluish light move across the sky…they described it as being brighter than the sun…10 minutes later, there was a bright flash and a sharp noise that sounded like artillery fire.

When the shock wave arrived, it knocked people off their feet and broke windows. It was so strong that people felt it’s force hundreds of miles away. In England, barographs, used to measure atmospheric pressure, showed fluctuations from the explosion. That night, and for weeks thereafter, night skies in the northern hemisphere contained a strange glow so bright it allowed people to read outside.

As far as CyberWize is concerned, this remarkable event has yielded this Tunguska Effect, amazing growth and energy fully certified by genuine Czarist Russian scientists. Which is all duplicated in this energy drink.

You have absolutely positively got to see the Tunguska Blast website ‘cause the brand story is…amazing. The testimonials are remarkable. Certainly you’ll believe them and in case you do, you can order a 4-pack of 32-ounce bottles right off the site for just $210!

Tunguska has always had a certain von Däniken appeal, like Chariots of the Gods, you know? Most of the serious literature, however, doesn’t mention CyberWize’s trademarked Tunguska Effect (although you can read, listen and see all about it on the website).

And the September 2007 number of Consumer Reports didn’t include this product in its “Upfront” review of an even dozen energy drinks – some with names that might actually be understood by the energy-drinking public: Amp, Full Throttle, Red Bull and so on.

Normally I would say that Tunguska Blast is pretty arcane, but the branding guys have really done their packaging and story-telling homework. This is brand marketing at its most fabulous and I use that word in its original denotation: like a fable.

The standard nutrition label is available online – buried in here somewhere may be the amount of caffeine or its equivalent. You’ll note when you read it that CyberWize cautions a consumer to drink just one ounce daily. That makes it about $1.64 an ounce…which is a heck of a lot more than even Starbucks charges for its “energy drink.”

Like I said, though, if you want to be trendy and cool, check out the brand story. It’s all in the brand story.

Salsa Mystery

If you want a bottle of Del Monte Thick & Chunky Salsa (Medium), you’ll find it on our table – and nowhere else. Del Monte stopped making its glass-jarred salsas “a few years ago,” according to the Del Monte Consumer Affairs people in Pittsburgh, PA.

Now don’t you go thinking that I’ve begun to specialize in condiments (even though I posted about pickles at end of July). No, salsas and hot sauces are now outselling ketchup in the US – and that makes writing about their sales and marketing quirks worthwhile. America’s growing Hispanic population is something we don’t tend to notice in Texas but it’s increasingly apparent to the rest of the nation.

Salsa is No. 2 behind tortillas in the “Top 10 Hispanic Food and Beverage Categories.” The research organization Packaged Facts projects that this segment of the US retail marketplace will reach $8.4 billion by 2011, up 48% from 2006.

These days, choose among “major’ US brands like Pace (Campbell Soup Company) and Old El Paso (General Mills); brand extensions like Doritos’ salsa, store brands; restaurant and private labels; Mexican competitors such as Victoria and Ortega; specialty brands like Frontera Foods’ Salpica. Some of these are obviously better than others. True confession: I’m not brand-loyal in this crowded category. I’m always willing to try a different brand or flavor variation. Heck, I even hang out at the Houston Hot Sauce Festival, suffering agonies in my search for the good, the bad and the ugly salsas.

If forced to select one brand, I’d go with Goldwater’s salsas out of Arizona…I mail-order them sometimes. Not a lot of heat but plenty of fruity taste.

Taste tests abound – and most of the marketing and advertising work is accomplished by [a] Valassis couponing and [b] store sampling – this is a kind of “trial by mouth.”

But I didn’t recall Del Monte’s branded salsa until Barbara pulled it out of the back of the cupboard. Reading the label was a little like stepping back in time, because there’s no nutrition information, no “best by” date. So I went to the Web to look it up. Surprise! No Del Monte Thick & Chunky Salsa. Del Monte has a lot of sites – food, corporate, even Fresh Del Monte. A little confusing but understandable in a company that’s been around so long.

Finally, I called the Del Monte Consumer Affairs hotline: 1-800-543-3090. This is answered, as I noted above, in Pittsburgh…not exactly the place I’d pick for salsa information. The TSR was very polite, became puzzled and then engaged. She’d never heard of Del Monte Thick & Chunky Salsa. After checking with her supervisor and discovering that Barbara had purchased our bottle at a dollar store some years back, she was finally able to explain that Del Monte had made salsas in the early ‘90s, but ceased production “five or six years ago.” (Thanks, Niki!)

Too bad in a way: It’s pretty good salsa, even long past its freshness date – Barbara insists it’s the preservatives. (And Niki was able to tell me it was made in America. My “customer experience” with Del Monte’s hotline was a good one.)

Del Monte is a great trademark. It’s the kind of company that could bring real muscle to the salsa category in terms of its experience with packing fresh fruits and vegetables.

I guess Del Monte’s management couldn’t wait for the salsa boom to arrive. Today, it would take a lot of horsepower to grab some market share out of the crowded salsa category and Del Monte’s got a lot of tomatoes to pick.

Still, I would have liked to try Del Monte Thick & Chunky Salsa (Hot).

Big Wheel

Remember that Stakeholder Rule I created a few posts back? Like here and here?

The rule says, A company’s position ought to take hold – and take place – in the minds of all its stakeholders.

What happens when the position, or the brand, keeps on interacting – even when there is no “overt” activity on the part of the brand owner? Sometimes, these brands maintain their solid connections to our culture while no one is looking. Except in the minds of millions of stakeholders.

In the case of one well-known product, time flies – literally: the Frisbee is 50 years old as of this past Sunday. I couldn’t have written a better story than Michael Liedtke did for AP, here. As you can read, the company (now owned by the Chinese Cornerstone Overseas Investment Limited) vigorously protects its trademark. Although the Frisbee® flying toy isn’t the “choice of champions” anymore, the brand still exercises a powerful hold over peoples’ minds and hands.

But Gary Richardson sent me the above photo from IGN.com, and I wondered what happened to the original Big Wheel® ride-on trike.

Answer: it’s still rolling at age 38. Louis Marx Toys developed the Big Wheel and presented it to the public at the 1969 New York Toy Fair. Because of its outstanding popularity, many of today’s parents have special childhood memories that include endless hours of joy on their Big Wheels.

Big Wheel sometimes bears a registered trademark but (like escalator) became a generic name for any toy whose design resembled Marx’s. Marx sold the Big Wheel brand name and molds to Empire Plastics, Marx's biggest competitor, in the early 1970s. The ride-on got high marks for safety because it was built much lower to the ground than the old steel-type trikes.

Marketing surveys from the ‘70s, ‘80s and ‘90s put Big Wheel near the top of the list as one of the most recognizable household brand names of all time.

Today Alpha International, Inc., makes and sells Big Wheel ride-ons, re-launching it at the 2003 New York Toy Fair. Its use of the registered trademark is inconsistent. Target is selling the “Original Big Wheel” (no ® here) for just $29.99 – to very mixed reviews.

We Barons and Slaviks, from an older tradition, raised our kids on the classic steel Radio Flyer® #34 Classic Red Tricycle. We still have one in the garage we bought and assembled for our grand-daughter. But even Radio Flyer has a Big-Wheel-type ride-on called “Big Flyer.”

More important, though, Big Wheel continues to interact with its stakeholders. There’re Big Wheel Rallies, giant versions of the toy at one of the DisneyWorld venues – even the motorcycle version you see up top. Still interacting with your Big Wheel ride-on? Just google “Big Wheel Events and Promotions” and go crazy, you old stakeholder.

“Stakeholder Rule” © Richard Laurence Baron. All rights reserved.