THIS POST IS GUEST-WRITTEN BY OUR FRIEND DAVE ROGERS, WHO IS AN EDITOR AT YAHOO!
You probably saw in the news that Irvine Robbins, founder of Baskin-Robbins 31 Ice Cream, passed away May 5 at the age of 90.
I had the good fortune of beginning my career at Baskin-Robbins. From a part-time job at a company-owned store, it blossomed into an association that lasted 31 years—14 on the payroll, the remainder as a consultant. I became acquainted with Mr. Robbins in my earlier years, especially after he retired in 1978 and I managed a store near his home. As one of the first GameChangers I’d met, he and his company profoundly shaped my professional life.
In honor and memory of Mr. Robbins, I’d like to share three examples of his GameChanging.
Scene: By 1945, advances in freezer technology had made mass production of ice cream possible, dooming most mom-and-pop ice cream shops. Supermarkets—all efficiency and convenience—were the future, and that’s where people bought their ice cream. It came only in chocolate, strawberry and vanilla—and, if you were lucky, a few others. Manufacturers couldn’t resist the temptation to cut quality corners to reduce prices, so ice cream was cheap, plentiful and forgettable.
Growing up in his family’s dairy business, Irv Robbins had seen how people enjoyed premium ice cream personally served in single-purpose stores. So in a riffing counterpoint to the supermarket game, he opened his first “Snowbird” store in Glendale, California on December 7, 1945.
“We’ve opened an unusual store and want you to see what it is like,” Irv said in his first advertising flyer, and he wasn’t kidding. “You’re in for a treat when you taste Snowbird’s new Ice Cream…You’ll find a new taste sensation. It’s high in butterfat…smooth in texture…rich in taste. Real old fashioned goodness and flavor have been combined with modern instant freezing methods to bring you Glendale’s finest Caterer’s Quality Ice Cream.”
With its 21 flavors and personal service, Snowbird from the start did a land office business. People couldn’t get enough of Irv’s premium ice cream and imaginative flavors. Within a year he had opened four more stores and convinced his brother-in-law, Burton Baskin, to open his own “Burton’s” store in nearby Pasadena.
As (in their own words) “the first new post-war ice cream stores, merchandised on an entirely new theory: ice cream to take home…ice cream of the highest quality…ice cream in a great variety of flavors,” Messrs. Baskin and Robbins had reshaped the game.
Scene: By 1948, “our volume was increasing, but our margin of profit was on the decline,” Mr. Robbins later said. A knee-jerk response would be to raise prices or hedge on product quality. As GameChangers, Baskin and Robbins rejected both. “In a market where price pressures are tremendous, quality-without-compromise was not always easy,” they wrote in 1958. “But we never succumbed to the temptation of buying ingredients ‘just as good’ at less cost.” Another solution would have to be found.
In a classic improv initiation that transformed the scene, “Burt and I realized that each store, to maintain the high standards we had set in the beginning, needed the tender loving care of an owner, someone with a proprietary interest in its overall operation,” Irv said. “It was at this time that we made a decision to ‘sell’ our stores to individuals who wanted their own businesses, but were willing to leave product development and merchandising to us. We set them up, supplied all the know-how, the inroads, the systems. It was the concept of franchising and we didn’t even know it!”
In today’s franchise-dotted marketplace, this seems refreshingly naïve, but in 1948 it was GameChanging brilliance. Until then, franchising was an offbeat expansion strategy rarely used by smaller businesses. Although unfamiliar with the concept, Baskin and Robbins intuitively recognized its value as a source of much-needed financing for expansion combined with the “tender loving care of an owner.” This set the stage for yet another scene.
Scene: By 1953, there were 17 Snowbird and Burton’s stores selling 31 flavors of ice cream. With $500 in their pockets, Baskin and Robbins asked fledgling agency Carson Roberts to help prepare their first advertising campaign in The Los Angeles Times.
The agency took one look at the budget and the 17 stores and knew there was a problem. Five hundred dollars wouldn’t go far and, worse, the stores lacked a common identity. So Carson Roberts proposed a GameChanging alternative: combining forces to tell the story of 31 Flavors.
“One big point of difference between this manufacturer, this store and all competitors was the magic of the 31 different flavors,” the agency wrote. “We felt that the ‘31’ was a symbol we could ‘hang our hats on’ for all purposes. It tells our merchandising story.” From there, Carson Roberts created a dramatic symbol—a circular 31 surrounded by cherry and chocolate polka dots—and insisted that everything from stores to cartons to delivery trucks tell “the ‘31’ story.”
While creating a single and memorable identity for Baskin-Robbins was an inspired recommendation, I believe the emphasis on storytelling was the GameChanger that led to the company’s meteoric rise in fortunes.
Above all was the tale of the 31 Flavors, one for each day of the month. The number appeared everywhere—on containers, uniforms, wall hangings, ads, clocks, puppets, beach balls and (most prominently) blazing outside every store.
Each flavor had its own story. From Jamoca® (made from a custom blend of freshly-brewed coffee) to Oregon Blackberry (made only from select berries from the slopes of Mt. Hood), every flavor was assigned a “quick sentence” to be shared with customers.
The Flavor of the Month story was particularly effective. By introducing new flavors each month, Baskin-Robbins went beyond “just” 31, offering a different 31, a different set of stories each month. This soon took on a life of its own with flavors inspired by pop culture, exotic locales, historic events, and television shows.
Even the stores told the story. The largest sign in the store was a pegboard listing every available flavor while gleaming freezers put the flavors front and center. Signs (dubbed “hot signs” for their fluorescent hues) told the stories in quirky cartoons.
It was Irv Robbins who expressed the heart of this GameChanging strategy: “We don’t sell ice cream; we sell fun!” He was wrong, of course. Baskin-Robbins did sell ice cream. Everyone knew it, from Mr. Robbins to millions of customers. But that’s not what they believed.
In All Marketers Are Liars, Seth Godin says, “Successful marketers are just the providers of stories that consumers choose to believe.” The story Baskin-Robbins told for its first 30 or 40 years was that it sold fun—and people believed it because they wanted to believe it.
And that story was a GameChanger because not only did people believe it but because it was true. People did have fun at Baskin-Robbins. They found delicious ice cream in unheard of flavors served by “people of the story”—franchisees and employees who so believed the story themselves that they delivered the brand promise.
Those 17 original “Baskin-Robbins 31 Ice Cream” stores have become 5,800 worldwide. That’s GameChanging!
One closing, personal note. In Mr. Robbins’ obituary, his family noted that he took special pride in “the character of the company, in particular the respect he paid to his employees and suppliers, the cordial relationship he maintained with Burt Baskin and the quality of the product he sold.” I benefited enormously from that environment of respect. I was mentored and encouraged at Baskin-Robbins by some of the most talented, GameChanging people I’ve known, including Mr. Robbins. If I am a GameChanger today, a lion’s share of gratitude goes to Mr. Robbins and his immediate successors.
Farewell, Mr. Robbins, and Godspeed.
Tags: Advertising, Baskin-Robbins, Burt Baskin, Dave Rogers, Entrepreneurship, Franchising, Glendale, Ice Cream, Ingenuity, Irvine Robbins, Quality, Snowbird