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THE SAME YEAR he took over the roof of the Mecca Building, 1912, Will invested $1 million (or $25,200,000 in 2016) for advertisements in virtually every major magazine, daily newspaper, and grocery trade paper in the nation. Based upon these periodicals’ circulation numbers, over 18 million people saw the Kellogg’s advertisements that year.19
Only six years earlier, in 1906, Will first dipped his toes into what became a sea of advertising. One such example was a small advertisement he took out in a Dayton, Ohio, newspaper. The cost of the ad was $150 (about $4,070 in 2016) but the price tag included a man wearing an eight-foot papier-mâché ear of corn costume, walking the streets of Dayton and extolling the virtues of Kellogg’s Corn Flakes.20 A few weeks later, Will hired young door-to-door representatives to introduce themselves and hand out boxes of Corn Flakes to Dayton housewives. Indeed, the latter ploy may well have introduced the “free sample.”
Some have contended that Will’s introduction to mass advertising was through the success of C. W. Post, with his full-color magazine illustrations inviting Post cereal consumers to walk along the “Road to Wellville” and to drink Postum to “make red blood cells.” To some extent, Post’s success did influence Will to seek out such sales methods but this explanation tells only part of the story. In fact, Will already had considerable experience placing national ads for the Battle Creek Sanitarium, as well as its schools of cooking, nursing, and home economics. He supervised the production of hundreds of enticing, beautifully illustrated brochures extolling the charms of the San and was adept at placing bold announcements of Dr. Kellogg’s latest tome even as he complained of being shackled by John’s strict rule against advertising their health foods.
By July of 1906, Will was ready to make a much bolder statement. Dissatisfied by how many boxes of Corn Flakes he was selling with a “timid piecemeal policy,” Will began plotting his first national advertising campaign. To help the process along, Will implored Arch Shaw, “You understand advertising. How would you like to help us? For a fee of course. We can’t pay you in cash, but we could be worth a lot in a short time!”21 Arch took his remuneration in shares of the Kellogg company’s stock and advised Will to bet everything he had on one full-page advertisement in The Ladies’ Home Journal, which boasted a circulation of over 1 million women across the nation.22
The famous Ladies’ Home Journal advertisement, which was an early example of the selling power of reverse psychology, July 1906 Credit 84
With a perfect ear for an effective sales pitch, Arch Shaw designed an unconventional advertisement that launched Kellogg’s Corn Flakes into the stratosphere. Using the now time-honored ploy of reverse psychology, Shaw created a demand for what was described as a hard-to-obtain commodity. The advertisement featured a letter from the firm’s president under the typewritten heading, “This announcement violates all the rules of good advertising.” Will went on to explain that the Battle Creek Toasted Corn Flake Co. was so new it did not yet have a sales force and even if he did, 90% of America’s grocers did not yet carry his product:
We hope by July 1st to be able to fill all orders. In the meantime, the great success of Toasted Corn Flakes will no doubt encourage imitators to take advantage of the situation and endeavor to substitute. There is only one genuine Toasted Corn Flakes. If anything else is offered to you—don’t judge the merits of Corn Flakes by the substitute….Toasted Corn Flakes…is [the] flavor that won the favor.23
Directly below his signature was a coupon for the “exceptional offer” of a “season’s supply of Toasted Corn Flakes free” to those housewives willing to storm into their local grocer’s shop and demand that he carry Kellogg’s Corn Flakes. In so doing, Will enlisted American women to act as his phantom sales force and generate a flood of orders for his cereal. The advertisement did exactly what Will and Shaw hoped it would do. For Will, it set his business trajectory ever upward. For Arch Shaw, the company’s second largest individual shareholder after Will, it made him a wealthy man.24
As an aside, there was one moment of providence that begs mention. During the very first few weeks of his company’s existence, Will wanted to christen his cereal with the entirely corny moniker “Korn Krisp.” Providentially, Arch Shaw convinced him to change the name to the more “mouthwatering” and enticing “Toasted Corn Flakes.” Still, the name change did come at a cost. Will had already bought 407,176 Korn Krisp cartons, 400,176 of which were never used because of the name change. This created a huge dent in the company’s profit margin that year since printing and folding the cardboard cartons represented one of Will’s major production expenses. He more than made up for any of the losses by discarding all those boxes emblazoned with such a dud of a name. Within months of the Ladies’ Home Journal ad, the sensational taste and name of Kellogg’s Corn Flakes was on millions of American lips, mouths, and minds.25
That first year of business, 1906, Will spent $90,000 (about $2.44 million in 2016) for advertisements. The outlay represented three times the amount of cash the company had on hand.26 That same year his company sold 178,943 cases of cereal earning $1.00 profit (about $27.10 in 2016) on every case. This success inspired Will to double-down on his bank loans and his advertising campaign in 1907 with an investment of $300,000 (about $7.8 million in 2016) for full-page spreads in more than a dozen leading magazines.
The second sales campaign he mounted might seem tame and old-fashioned today but it was rather daring for its time. In a series of beautifully illustrated advertisements, Will asked American housewives to wink at their grocers on specific days of the week in order to receive a free package of something mysteriously referred to as “K.T.C.” The goal was to entice inquisitive women by the droves into grocery stores, either winking or asking what the wink was all about. Initially, Will worried the “wink idea” might prove too salacious. This was still an era when winking at the opposite sex, especially those you did not know and to whom you were not married, engaged, or, at a minimum, formally “keeping company” with, was inappropriate, to say the least. Once American women found out that “K.T.C.” referred to Kellogg’s Toasted Corn Flakes, they took away as many boxes as they could carry—even if they had to wink at the grocery man to get them. In New York City alone, sales of Corn Flakes skyrocketed fifteen-fold as a result of the “Wink Campaign.”27
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WILL’S CORE AUDIENCE, of course, always consisted of American mothers and especially their children. He was brilliant at slyly marketing his wares to kids who would then beg their moms to buy his cereal, a dynamic that has played itself out in millions of grocery stores, countless times a day, for more than a century. Although Will often lamented that he never really enjoyed his boyhood, he did help create one of the great joys of being a child in twentieth-century America: digging into a box of cereal and finding a wonderful toy.
Beginning in 1909, children all over the nation cut out coupons on the back of their cereal boxes and mailed them to Battle Creek. A week or so later, they were thrilled to receive a colorful book entitled Kellogg’s Funny Jungleland Moving-Pictures. Richly illustrated and engagingly written, the book featured a series of paper cutout animal dolls, with strips of paper attached that allowed a child to change the animals’ appearance and costumes to his or her imaginative content. On the back was a photo of a young girl feeding her stuffed elephant doll a bowl of Kellogg’s Corn Flakes with the slogan, “I eat it by the trunk-full too!”28
Eventually, Will learned that rather than bother with coupons and the U.S. postal system, there was a significant advantage to stuffing his boxes with toys. The “prizes” took up space that would otherwise be filled by cereal, which was still more expensive to produce than the paper books and, later, the buttons, rings, puzzles, games, and other toys he “gave away,” much to the delight of every American child who got to them first. Bigger toys meant using less cereal in boxes set at the same price point, which translated into bigger profits.
Kellogg’s Funny Jungleland book.
The first “cereal prize,” 1909. Credit 85
With each passing year, Will’s advertisements became more attractive and clever. By the 1910s, he was employing the best commercial artists in America to paint portraits of beautiful women posing as idealized mothers and wives serving up a bowl of Kellogg’s Corn Flakes; others featured children eating, asking for, or thinking about a bowl of the same. All of the advertisements heralded catchy trademarked slogans such as “Won Its Favor Through Its Flavor” and “The Sweetheart of the Corn.” From the 1920s well into the 1940s, Will employed cartoon characters such as Mutt and Jeff, Alphonse and Gaston, and the Katzenjammer Kids, whose goofy exploits were avidly followed by tens of millions of American children every Sunday in the funny papers section of their local newspapers. But these cartoon characters were not always used to entice children only. A series of advertisements presented a cartoon character complaining of constipation and another character offering freedom by consuming bowls of Kellogg’s All-Bran, Krumbles, and Bran Flakes. Will went one step further in 1933 by commissioning a commercial artist named Vernon Grant to create three new cartoon characters, exclusive to the Kellogg Company, for advertising a new product he introduced in 1928. The cereal was called Rice Krispies. The three gnomes singing the new cereal’s praises were, of course, “Snap, Crackle, and Pop,” which also reflected the sound a bowl of Rice Krispies were said to make when milk was poured over them.29 Less savory was a 1930 advertisement featuring the stereotypical African American “Mammy” serving a white boy a bowl of Rice Krispies with the racist slogan, “It Sho Do Crackle.”30
During the early 1930s, when radio emerged as the major form of mass communication in the United States, the Kellogg Company sponsored what is regarded as the first national show directed at children. Entitled The Singing Lady (1931), the show featured the multitalented Ireene Wicker. The “Lady with a Thousand Voices” attracted more than 25 million children a week with stories from the Brothers Grimm, Mother Goose, Hans Christian Andersen, and Rudyard Kipling.31 Her popular show was just the first of dozens of Kellogg’s-sponsored radio and, later, television shows, all showcasing the company’s delicious wares at every break.
“The Sweetheart of the Corn,” Kellogg’s Toasted Corn Flakes advertisement, December 1907 Credit 86
Will’s advertising campaign never really ended and the key to what he was selling rested on the pursuit of wellness. In every communication to the American public, regardless of the medium or the message, Will Kellogg warned the public against unscrupulous imitators and he backed that warning with an unwavering promise that his Kellogg’s cereals were the best money could buy.32 From the earliest days of his company, Kellogg’s Corn Flakes were presented as a pure, nutritious, convenient, inexpensive, and essential way to consume the meal Dr. Kellogg had long declared to be the most important meal of the day. Will’s brilliant ad men took that phrase one step further in the late 1950s by coining the company’s most famous slogan: “The Best To You Each Morning.” The constant drumbeat of jingles, print advertisements, giveaways and samples, recipe booklets, and television and radio commercials made “Kellogg’s” a household name and a valuable brand. This image of health and nutrition quickly became one of the company’s most important tools in the competitive business of selling mass-manufactured foods, one that Will understood with perfect clarity even if his brother never could. Creative advertising characterized his entire career at the Kellogg Company; between 1906 and 1939, his most active years running the company, Will spent nearly $100 million (more than $1.7 billion in 2016) for advertising.33 The persuasive messages sent from Battle Creek all over the world have never ceased, even as the media and technology that amplify them have, and continues to, change drastically with each passing year.
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UNDOUBTEDLY, the most essential component in making a bowl of Corn Flakes an American icon was milk. Will’s talent, hard work, and business acumen facilitated his producing a delicious, cold, ready-to-eat cereal; but he also enjoyed the great good fortune to start his company precisely at the same time fresh, pasteurized, clean, and refrigerated milk was beginning to be produced and nationally distributed.
At the turn of the last century, before the development of effective vaccines and antibiotics, children and infants suffered a great many contagious and deadly diseases. Epidemics of measles, whooping cough, smallpox, and typhus were almost annual events; every summer brought waves of “infantile diarrhea,” causing thousands of babies to die of simple dehydration. In 1900, approximately 200 of every 1,000 children born in the United States never saw their first birthdays. The death of an infant or young child was a common tragedy that occurred in almost every American family, including Will Kellogg’s.34
One of the major causes of infant deaths at the time was dehydration from diarrhea contracted by drinking contaminated milk. Before widespread pasteurization and refrigeration, milk was typically collected at a rural dairy farm on the outskirts of a particular urban center. Some farmers were scrupulous about their handling of milk products; many others were not, and some adulterated their milk with chalk or water, which effectively diminished the quality of what was sold, often at the financial and physical expense of the consumer. For most of the nineteenth century and in the early 1900s, milk was stored in large cans, which may or may not have been set on melting cakes of ice, and transported into town by horse-drawn wagons. Milk was then sold, in bulk, at storefront grocery stores and from pushcarts. Once taken home in a “milk pail,” it was often set on a windowsill or on a fire escape to keep cool, unless a consumer was wealthy enough to purchase an icebox. Setting it outside worked far better during the colder months than during the summer. Too many times, when poorly handled or adulterated milk was placed in a bottle for the baby, it was teeming with bacteria and viruses.35
By the turn of the last century, a consortium of concerned pediatricians, public health activists, nurses, food chemists, social workers, dairy farmers, milk distributors, politicians, and women’s civic groups embarked on a huge national crusade to reduce the alarmingly high infant mortality rates by means of cleaning up the national milk supply. During this same period, the science of proper milk handling, packaging, and spoilage prevention advanced by leaps and bounds.
A major breakthrough in cleansing milk of microbes, of course, was the gentle application of heat, or pasteurization. Ironically, the process bearing Louis Pasteur’s name is almost always associated with milk, but it was actually developed by the great microbiologist in 1864 to kill bacteria lurking in wine and beer. In the decades that followed, milk chemists tinkered with Pasteur’s findings in order to determine the precise temperature that killed the microbes in cow’s milk but did not ruin the taste. Cutting-edge pediatricians played with the composition of cow’s milk by adding or subtracting the amount of fats, carbohydrates, and protein to compose custom-made, artificial baby “formulae” for infants. Parents were taught to heat, or sterilize, the formula at home as a means of protecting their babies from milk-borne infections. And philanthropists, such as Nathan Straus, whose family owned the profitable R. H. Macy’s department store, funded research and established “milk depots” in the 1890s to distribute clean, inexpensive, or free milk for babies and children of impoverished families.36
Another key ingredient in the milk story is the development of refrigeration. Beginning in the late 1870s and extending well into the twentieth century, dairy farmers worked with inventors, engineers, manufacturers, and railroad experts to perfect mechanical refrigeration systems. For example, Gail Borden, who invented a process to “manufacture condensed, canned, and spoil-proof milk” for Union troops during the Civil War, worked with other dairymen to create national distribution systems that reliably delivered safe, clean, refrigerated, pasteurized milk and other dairy products to American mothers and their families.37 Milk producers and wholesalers, incidentally, were hardly the only food and beverage businesses developing new means to quickly deliver fresh products across the Uni
ted States. The Anheuser-Busch Brewery of St. Louis made significant investments and progress in pasteurizing their products and developing refrigerated railcars and rail-side icehouses. Chicago meatpacking firms, such as the Swift and the Armour companies, as well as produce, butter, and egg men, baked goods manufacturers, and cheese makers, were also actively involved in the development of refrigerated transportation methods to keep their products fresh for sale in markets far from where they were slaughtered, grown, picked, gathered, or made. By the late 1920s, refrigerated motor trucks were carrying fresh produce and other perishable foods great distances to markets all over the nation.38
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