Licking the Competition Cold
To a child, a year is the eternity that passes between two birthday parties. Knowing how important these anniversaries are to children (and how many children there are today), it’s a real surprise that so few companies have cracked the code on how to market around this event. Baskin-Robbins is one firm that’s been showing marketers for years how to have their cake and sell it too.
You could say that Baskin-Robbins’ founder Irv Robbins had ice cream in his veins, since his father owned a dairy store in his youth. It certainly didn’t surprise anyone when he returned home from the war in 1945 and opened his own ice cream store, called “Snowbird,” in the Los Angeles suburb of Glendale. Irv’s brother-in-law, Burt Baskin, also had visions of being his own boss, so he opened a rival firm called “Burton’s” the same year. It didn’t take long before they joined forces to form Baskin-Robbins in 1946. By 1948 they had six stores and were franchising their first store.
One of the biggest challenges facing Baskin-Robbins as they expanded outside of the always-temperate southern California market was keeping store traffic up in the cold-weather months. After all, the vast majority of ice cream shops simply whitewashed their windows and closed shop from October to May.
In the early ’60s, some unknown marketing maven at Baskin-Robbins had the brilliant idea of starting a Kid’s Birthday Club. The basic premise was to mail children 12 and under a postcard on their birthday that could be redeemed for a free 2.5 oz. kid’s cone at any Baskin-Robbins store. The club had two major benefits: it generated store traffic 365 days of the year, and attached to every card-carrying kid was a cash-carrying parent. Over the years, the company discovered, much to its delight, that its postcards were among the first pieces of mail that young club members had ever received.
Enrollment in the “Kid’s Club” was simple: The child, or an adult, filled out a form in the store and franchisees forwarded these to corporate HQ. At the height of the program, Baskin-Robbins was mailing out more than two million Kid’s Birthday Club cards a year — pretty good considering that the club was never heavily advertised.
My wife Anne and I thought we were pretty clever when we registered our firstborn child, Katie, into the Birthday Club at birth. We made a special point of doing the same when her sister Sallie came along 20 months later. In a few short years I was buying $12 worth of ice cream every birthday — not bad considering their birthdays are Jan. 10 and Oct. 18. Incremental sales in an off-peak period: Does marketing get any better than this?
What’s more, each child put as much value on “her” free coupon as she did on the expensive presents we bought and the parties we had. Not going to Baskin-Robbins for a birthday cone was not an option until our baby, Sallie, “aged out” of the program in 1994.
Surprisingly, after almost 40 years of success, Baskin-Robbins abandoned the program in 1997. “The cost was too great for the system,” according to Joe Adney, senior director of marketing at Baskin-Robbins. But it’s never wise to underestimate the enthusiasm of your franchisees: Corporate has been receiving 50 to 100 new club cards per week despite the fact that they haven’t issued any club cards for six years! As Adney observed: “I’ll be on an airplane chatting with someone, and when they find out who I work for invariably they’ll ask, ‘Whatever happened to the Birthday Club?’”
Consumer demand and technology combined last April to allow Baskin-Robbins to re-launch the Birthday Club as an online initiative. In what can only be referred to as a “stealth promotion” the firm announced the new program with no advertising, save an icon on their Web site and a single in-store countercard. They received a very unstealth-like 50,000 new registrants in the first month alone.
As Adney commented, “Our franchisees love the new program because of the potential for add-on sales.” If you’re under 12, you simply fill in the registration information requested, choose a store to redeem your coupon and finally, but importantly, provide a parent’s e-mail address.
Baskin-Robbins e-mails the parent for permission to enroll the child. This permission marketing step is required for compliance with the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), the federal program that regulates the online collection of personal information from children under 13.
The e-mail also asks if the adult would like more information from Baskin-Robbins — a smart move, since fully 40% of all parents opt in. The snail mail program took weeks to register a child; the online version takes 24 hours.
Once registered, the child receives an e-coupon from Baskin-Robbins fifteen days prior to his or her birthday good for a free 2.5 oz. kid’s cone (worth an average $1.49), redeemable two weeks before to one week after the child’s birthday. The child also receives two other coupons: one for $3.00 off an ice cream birthday cake, and another for a free upgrade on their “Freeze Frame” birthday cake. The “Freeze Frame” cake is a clever process that allows the store to scan in a photograph, and replicate it on edible paper with edible dye for placement directly onto the surface of the cake.
Baskin-Robbins has announced that they will begin advertising the Birthday Club this fall via TV ads that also highlight their ice cream birthday cakes. Given the extraordinarily viral nature of the Internet, it wouldn’t be the least bit surprising if they were back to their peak of more than two million registrants before even airing these ads.
Which begs an even more important question: Given the proclivity of Generation X and the Echo Boomers to hold onto the things of their childhood (remember, those of you over 40, when Halloween wasn’t the second biggest beer-selling holiday of the year?), why isn’t there a Birthday Club for grownups? “We’ve talked about it,” Adney says. “It’s definitely under consideration, as is expanding our current program, which is currently good exclusively in our U.S. stores, to cover our 2,400 international outlets.”
Personally, I hope they do expand the Birthday Club to include adults. It’s a long and bumpy road from your last free birthday cone at age 12 to the senior citizen discount at age 65, and I for one would welcome something cold and sweet from any company that’s glad I’m around to consume it. When it comes to ice cream I’ll echo the words of the immortal Peter Pan, “I don’t want to grow up!”
What’s Hot in Ice Cream
SHERBET
No, it’s not the folks from Weight Watchers that are building this category, it’s kids. According to Joe Adney, Baskin-Robbins’ senior director of marketing, the “Shrek Swirl,” created as a promotional tie-in for the theatrical release of the film Shrek, was the top-selling new flavor for the last five years. The product had green and purple sherbet swirls with Pop Rocks candy in it. “The big surprise was that the green was grape sherbet and the purple was sour apple. Like the character Shrek, what you saw was not what you got,” says Adney. This summer’s “X-Treme Berry Sherbet” is part of a tie-in with X-men II-X Men United and that’s currently breaking Shrek’s records.
FRUIT FLAVORS
“Hispanics and Asians strongly prefer our fruit flavors,” says Adney. “They like a bolder, more intense flavor.”
INDULGENCE
“Really decadent chocolate flavors are still a major seller for us,” Adney says. Flavors like “Resolution Breaker,” the January 2003 “Flavor of the Month,” for those willing to jettison their diet plans, featured “silky smooth chocolate ice cream made from the finest European chocolate, entwined with a luxurious chocolate ganache ribbon,” or February’s “Love Potion 31” that was made of “white chocolate and raspberry ice creams swirled with raspberry filled chocolate hearts, chocolate chips and a raspberry ribbon.”
VANILLA
“Twenty five percent of Baskin-Robbins ice cream sales are for plain vanilla,” according to the “Food Reference” Web site, despite the company’s “31 Flavors” branding. According to the company, its top five flavors are: Vanilla, Mint Chocolate Chip, Chocolate, Pralines n’ Cream and Oreo Cookies n’ Cream.
