Off topic - WSJ article about Quisp cereal, $600 decoder ringers, Internet revival.
(I just posted this over on Maurice's thread. But after briefly checking out the "flake" website, I decided that this stuff is just too important to leave only on "Qualcomm, the wacko thread.")
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April 24, 2000
Nostalgic Fans Use Internet to Save
Quirky Quisp From a Cereal Killing
By JONATHAN EIG
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
How low can a product go before a manufacturer decides to kill it?
For the past decade, the crunchy corn cereal
called Quisp could be found in only five-and-a-half
U.S. cities. The half was Buffalo, where Quisp
showed up in one or two groceries.
With only 92,000 boxes sold in the last 12
months, the brand was barely a blip for
industry-data collectors. Compare that with
Cheerios, the nation's top cereal, which sold 122
million boxes in the same period.
Still, managers at Quaker Oats Co. couldn't bring themselves to pull the plug.
Quisp, a cross-eyed cartoon character with a propeller on his head whose
popularity peaked in 1968, inspired nostalgia at Quaker's Chicago headquarters,
reminding folks of a time when the cereal business wasn't so competitive --
when it took only a goofy pink alien and a funny TV spot to win a respectable
market share.
So the cereal survived, albeit barely -- until Quisp began its quirky quest on the
Internet.
As it turns out, the folks at Quaker weren't the only ones feeling nostalgic.
Baby Boomers were selling Quisp and Quisp-related products at wild prices on
Internet auction sites. Quisp decoder rings (a long-ago freebie) were going for
more than $600. Boxes of the cereal, bought by people in those lucky
five-and-a-half cities, were selling for $10 each.
Scott Bruce, a cereal fan and keeper of a
cereal-lover's Web site at www.flake.com
(http://www.flake.com/), used to drive to Buffalo from
his home in Cambridge, Mass., just to load up
on cases of Quisp.
"It's a genuinely good product," says Mr. Bruce,
who put the Quisp character on the cover of his
1995 book, "Cerealizing America." Says Mr.
Bruce, "Its advertising is still among the most
wonderful ever created for a cereal company,
and its loyalty is deep and wide."
Quaker, which maintains Web sites for each of
its cereal brands, noticed that quisp.com
was drawing far more attention than bigger
brands like Cap'n Crunch and Life. Pat Culligan,
marketing manager for Quisp, sensed an opportunity.
But he needed a way to satisfy Quisp lovers without taking precious
grocery-store shelf space from other Quaker cereals. So, back in October, the
company built a link between Quisp's Web site and www.netgrocer.com
(http://www.netgrocer.com/), an online retailer that sells only nonperishable grocery
items and delivers them nationwide within two days. That let Quisp customers
eliminate the price-gouging middle-men. On NetGrocer, each box sells for
$2.99, plus shipping and handling.
Quickly, Quisp became NetGrocer's No. 1 cereal, outselling even the industry
titans, Cheerios and Frosted Flakes, often by margins of 2 to 1.
"With no advertising and no public relations, it sold 200 boxes in the first
week," says Jamie Schwartz, a spokesman for NetGrocer.com Inc., based in
North Brunswick, N.J. "And it snowballed from there."
So far this year, Quisp is selling at a rate more than seven times Quaker's
humble projections for the brand, the company says, though it won't provide
actual numbers. Most of that growth comes from Internet sales, but buzz from
the Web has also created a boom in grocery store sales as well. So far, Quisp
is still available in just the same five-and-a-half cities -- Boston, Chicago, San
Francisco, Los Angeles and Seattle, beside Buffalo. But Quaker also fills
requests from individual stores that want shipments of the brand.
"It's a pretty effective way to go to market for us," says Mr. Culligan. "We've
broadened the reach of the brand without a whole lot of expense."
Even more unusual, Quaker found a way to build its adult audience in a
kid-oriented industry, and without paying a cent for advertising or distribution.
Quisp had always been inexpensive to produce because it comes off the same
manufacturing line as some of the company's other brands.
Meanwhile, Quisp's Web site has been drawing about 30,000 hits a week, and
Quaker has begun using the address to sell T-shirts and watches bearing the
quaint alien's image.
Why the fanatic following? The Quisp cartoon character was created in 1965
by Jay Ward and Bill Scott, who also came up with the cartoon characters
Rocky and Bullwinkle. Along with Quisp, they created a character named
Quake, a barrel-chested he-man in a hard hat who came from the center of the
earth and shattered rocks with his head.
Quisp and Quake were separate cereals, and Quaker advertised the two
together, asking kids to take sides in a so-called breakfast feud. Quake not only
lost, he suffered the indignity of being replaced by a new mascot called Simon
the Quangeroo. His cereal was similarly short-lived.
Quisp lives on, but Quaker says it will resist the temptation to push it too far.
There will be, for example, no attempt to capture all of Buffalo. On
grocery-store shelves, Quisp would be just another entrant in an already
overcrowded field, Mr. Culligan says.
In the long run, the company hopes its first foray into the online cereal world
leads to a better understanding of online grocery shopping, which will likely
become an important source of revenue someday. But for the moment, Mr.
Culligan doesn't see how the Quisp strategy might be applied to other products.
He's just happy to have extended the life of an old favorite.
"It's the cereal I ate when I was a kid," says the 42-year-old, "and people
around here want to keep it going."
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