The Bubble Gum War: The Revolution will be Advertised

Bubble Yum and the product innovation that kind of, sort of changed the world

Last week, we explored the battle between the pink bunny battery brands.

This week, we’re once again hopping into SRH’s sweet conversion van (since last week we’ve airbrushed a picture of a wizard battling a dragon on the side), cranking up the Ronnie James Dio and heading back to the 1970s and 1980s.

This week we’re talking about the Bubble Gum War. It was a product war, an advertising war, a branding war. You may have read about it in your marketing textbooks. You may have lived through it. Let’s set the scene …

Back in the early 1970s, the bubble gum landscape in America was vastly different. There were plenty of bubble gum options, and only the OG brand Dubble Bubble was any good. You could get gumballs from machines, of course. Every pack of baseball cards came with a large, flat, crumbly rectangle of gum. Bazooka gum answered the question, “What if bricks were chewy?” Most chewing gum, however, was marketed at teens and adults.

(All bubble gum is chewing gum, but not all chewing gum is bubble gum.)

Wrigley was the striding colossus of the gum world with iconic brands like Big Red, Juicy Fruit, and Doublemint. Each of these brands focused on a very single-minded idea: Freshen your breath with our gum, and someone attractive will find you attractive.

Big Red ads were generally sweet and romantic, and they featured adorable couples sharing a comically long kiss. There were also moments of closeness that had nothing to do with making out.

Juicy Fruit ads featured high-energy action with active young adults doing active young adult things — skiing, waterskiing, beach volleyball, windsurfing and (implied, never shown) each other. These ads ranged from vaguely horny to super-duper horny, and the gaze skewed male.

Doublemint ads featured the iconic Doublemint Twins and the iconic tagline, “Double your pleasure, double your fun.” And double your entendre, apparently. This long-running campaign ran parallel to a related campaign that also ran forever. Tagline? “There’s no single gum like it.”

Let’s all take a moment to appreciate those songs, because they were so much more than jingles. They were gum anthems. They were the stadium rock of ad soundtracks.

And let’s take a moment to appreciate that these campaigns were creatively consistent, emotionally compelling and ran for a long, long time, some well into the 90s.

Also, the branding is astonishingly tight. It takes discipline and skill to hold the line when everyone else is experimenting all over the place with flavors, pack sizes, logos, taglines and fonts.

There were other gum brands, of course — Dentine, Trident, Extra. Nobody but old people and 4 out of 5 dentists cared about them.

In 1970, bubble gum accounted for a mere 10% of all chewing gum sales. That all changed when a woman in Fisk, Missouri invented a new kind of bubble gum. She sold her recipe to Life Savers, which launched the Bubble Yum brand nationally in 1976.

Bubble Yum was wildly different. It came in chunks, not sticks, and it was soft. Kids who weren’t old enough to care about kissing couldn’t wait to shove huge hunks of gum in their faces and blow ginormous bubbles. It was a massive hit, and it changed everything.

With Bubble Yum, the gum war had truly begun …

Bubble Yum quickly outsold everyone. According to the 1977 trade ad below, Bubble Yum sold $350 million at retail and was 79% as large as the entire stick gum market.

1977 Bubble Yum ad targeting vending machine owners in Canada

Demand was so high that Life Savers couldn’t keep up, and they had to take out ads apologizing for the lack of supply.

Demand kept on going up and up until a rumor started going around that Bubble Yum was soft because it was made with spider eggs. The rumor was so pervasive on school playgrounds that it made a sizable dent in their sales. Life Savers actually placed ads in major newspapers across the country to explain that actually, no, Bubble Yum is not made of spider eggs. Weirdest PR crisis ever? Maybe.

Fortunately, sales of Bubble Yum bounced right back.

Unlike the Wrigley brands, Bubble Yum’s advertising and branding weren’t terribly consistent or even cohesive, though the OG packaging is incredible.

This ad from the late 1970s is a Sesame Street-style vignette with a kid and a gum-stealing muppet. This ad from 1982 is cute. This 1984 Bubble Yum ad was obviously inspired by the video for “You Might Think” by The Cars.

Bubble Yum didn’t really have a campaign platform until they launched “Keeps it Poppin” in the late 1980s. That went away in the 90s, though, when they introduced a punk duck mascot named Floyd D. Duck. Imagine if the Aflac duck was also Billy Idol. As a brand, Bubble Yum was all over the place.

For about a year, Bubble Yum had the soft bubble gum category to themselves until the American Chicle Division of Warner-Lambert launched Bubblicious in 1977. Sales didn’t really take off until they launched the trippy “Ultimate Bubble” ad campaign in 1978.

Three years after the debut of Bubble Yum, Wrigley launched Hubba Bubba. These were, again, chunks of soft gum in a variety of day-glo flavors. Hubba Bubba was supposedly less sticky, and their ads featured scenes of old-timey western gumslingers. Tagline? Big bubbles, no troubles.

Then Big League Chew (also from Wrigley) got in the game with a big pouch full of shaved, soft gum that you could cram in your mouth by the fistful just like your favorite athletes.

So what does any of this mean for you?

Distinctiveness matters, and so does differentiation. At the beginning of the 1970s, Wrigley was the market leader by a mile, and bubble gum only accounted for 10% of sales. Soft bubble gum was meaningfully different to a large, previously untapped segment of the market (kids and other people who prefer bubble gum). By 1978, bubble gum accounted for 30% of all chewing gum sales.

However, differentiation only gets you so far. It only took the American Chicle Division of Warner-Lambert about a year to a.) realize there was money to be made in this new category, b.) develop their own recipe and flavors for soft bubble gum and c.) launch their own brand. It took Wrigley two years to do the same thing.

Once Bubble Yum’s competitors caught up, differentiation pretty much went out the window. Every brand of soft bubble gum offered the same features and benefits — big chunks of gum with big flavors and big bubbles.

This is when distinctiveness becomes critical. Do you look like you, talk like you, walk like you? Can buyers instantly spot you on the shelves, no matter what your competitors are doing? We’d argue that other than Big League Chew, there’s not a ton of distinctiveness here.

Category entry points also matter. Wrigley completely owned “when you want fresh breath for moments of togetherness.” When it first came out, Bubble Yum owned “when you want big flavor and big bubbles.” Later on, it became “when you want to be seen as cool and fun.” That ad is one of the most ‘80s things you will ever see, but there’s not much of a category entry point.

While Hubba Bubba and Bubblicious launched campaigns, Bubble Yum launched a series of disconnected ads. Compare the discipline Wrigley brought to their Hubba Bubba branding and campaign to Bubble Yum’s “throw it at the wall and see what sticks” approach.

You also need to price your product to drive profitability, not sales. Bubble Yum could’ve priced their gum to undercut Wrigley, but kids were willing to pay more for Bubble Yum because of the big chunks of gum, the softness, the bright, bold flavors and its extreme, uh, bubble-ability (that’s a word now). Sales without profitability is a disaster. Profitability without sales is impossible. There’s always a balance to be found, and it is better to err on the side of profitability.

It is a big challenge to steal market share from a market leader. They’ve spent decades building mental and physical availability. They’ve got the market penetration, the distribution network and the budget to defend it. But it can be done.

So where are they now?

Mars now owns Wrigley. They’re still the overall chewing gum global market leader, and they still make Hubba Bubba and Big League Chew. Perfetti Van Melle now makes Bubblicious. Bubble Yum, the brand that started it all, is still around, but they lost their lead long ago. In many ways, they’ve become a sleeping giant. Hey, Hershey. Maybe give us a call.

So who really won the gum war? Kids, probably. Dentists, obviously. 5 out of 5 of ‘em. We’ll see you next time.

Sources!

‘Very Bad Lies’: When Kids Believed Bubble Yum’s Secret Ingredient Was Spider Eggs – Mental Floss
Odious Rumours: Arachnid-Enhanced Bubble Yum — Who’s Out There?