Marketers are delighted when you buy the product or service they are promoting. The ultimate compliment, however, is when you buy something that you have no intention of using simply because the promotion’s so damn good.
I’ve already written about folks who bought Happy Meals from McDonald’s with no intention of eating the food, just because they wanted the Teenie Beanie Baby premium (PROMO, April 2004). Another compelling example of a premium that outweighed the product is less well known: the annual collector’s tin sponsored by Red Man chewing tobacco.
From 1952 to 1955, Red Man offered consumers a free 3.5″ × 4″ baseball card with every pouch of their product. Each year, some 50 to 52 players were featured in full-color paintings on the cards.
Red Man followed this series with a 40-card collector’s set depicting “American Indian Chiefs.” Like the baseball sets, each of these cards used colorful paintings to depict the chiefs, along with text below that gave the history of the people that chief led. And, like the baseball cards, trading became a popular hobby for those who wanted to collect the entire set. You just know that somewhere there were folks offering to trade a Chief Joseph and a Sitting Bull for a Many Horns and Young Black Dog.
Given its success with tobacco cards, it’s surprising that the company discontinued the program during the 1960s, 70s and most of the 80s. In 1988, however, the company began to offer a collectible tin with six pouches of Red Man tobacco packed inside. Tin producer J.L. Clark of Rockford, IL, won the manufacturing contract.
“We used an offset four-color metal lithography process, with a heavily decorated lid,” recalls J.L. Clark representative Tom Watson. “We would then bulk ship them to Pinkerton (Red Man’s then-parent company) for in-packing with Red Man product.”
“We packed the loaded tins into display shippers with 12 tins per shipper,” says Dana Kirby, promotion administrator for Swedish Match, which now owns Red Man (Kirby worked for the company during Pinkerton’s days as well). “We would usually move 20,000 shippers per year.”
Compare this to other CPG averages: Hershey chocolate, for example, moves around 500,000 units of each of its traditional holiday tins annually, and these tins are packed with only one unit of product vs. six for Red Man. By comparison, Red Man was moving 240,000 tins a year, or over 1.4 million pouches of tobacco.
The tins went through four distinct themes during the nine years that the promotion ran. The first tins were round and depicted bucolic scenes of farms and barns. (At the time, a big chunk of the chewing tobacco industry’s marketing budget was allocated to painting their logos on the highway sides of rural barns and outbuildings.)
The 1989 design began with a shift from round containers to J.L. Clark’s square 6″ × 6″ tins. The new shape created five different design surfaces (four sides and the lid) vs. two for the round tins. Actually, the brand only decorated three of the four sides of the square tins, leaving the fourth side inked, but virtually blank. The blank space was required by law so that the package could carry the Surgeon General’s health warning on it in 10-point print.
From 1990 to 1991, the tins featured graphics from old Red Man poster ads from the 1930s and 40s.
“We got the old poster art directly from the company archives,” says Dot Biscopink, Swedish Match senior buyer. These tins were probably the best in the series, given the incredible quality of the old graphics the company provided. Red Man’s archival poster ads would rival anything from anywhere in the world for imagery and dedication to the brand’s equity.
The third theme in the series, from 1992 to 1993, depicted Native Americans. “We actually commissioned the art for these scenes from contemporary artists,” Biscopink says. The 1992 scene shows a Native American in a canoe; the ’93 tin shows a similar figure on horseback.
The final entries in the series ran from 1994 to 1996, and depicted wildlife art from well-known illustrators. Red Man licensed the winning art from the 1993-1994 Federal Duck Stamp contest, including a pair of Canvasbacks painted by artist Bruce Miller. The firm jumped to a painting of a trio of whitetail deer by artist Jim Kasper for the 1995 tin.
Most firms build the cost of a premium into the product price so the consumer ends up paying for it. In Red Man’s case, this meant absorbing a hit of over $2.00 per tin at a time when the competition was successfully doing cents-off promotions.
But what value. That may explain why someone like me — who doesn’t use chewing tobacco — has accumulated nine empty chewing tobacco tins. Not using the product is no reason in my house not to buy the promotion.
Rod Taylor is the senior VP of promotion for CoActive Marketing in Cincinnati, OH. You can send him any feedback via e-mail: [email protected].
DESIGNING A GREAT TIN
The best tin premiums all seem to hit most of the criteria listed below:
Nostalgic Graphics
The reason nostalgia is such a key design element in many tins is that this type of container was the standard package for many brands during the last century. Tins are an old fashioned type of container and that fact is essential to their appeal. Using modern graphics on purposely retro packaging is a bit of an oxymoron.
Dating
One of the smartest design elements in the Red Man series was that each tin is dated prominently on the lid. I remember the founder of Celestial Seasoning Tea being astonished when I gave him this tip. He’vd been producing dozens of collectible tins over the years, but never dated them. Consumers never knew what they’d collected, or when.
Die Stamping
The most attractive tins feature embossed surfaces. The cheapest way to do this is to have the tin’s lid die-stamped. The extra dimension really makes the graphics pop, as well as providing a very rich and tactile look to the container.
Tie to Brand Equity
The worst tin I ever saw was a 1995 promotion for CrackerJack. Here was a brand inextricably linked to baseball, a sport with more history and tradition than virtually any other. Instead of using the wonderful nostalgic imagery of the game, the designers used graphics featuring a repeat pattern of nondescript cartoon figures running, catching and hitting against a beige background. The brand was stuck with over 100,000 tins that they had to throw away-after they’d unpacked their product from them.
Color
Promotional tins come in all kinds of colors, but more often than not the predominant color is red. Crayola executed a 1991 tin promotion with nostalgic graphics that mirrored the product’s green and yellow packaging. The tin was a monster hit selling over 2 million units, but by the next year their design was red.
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