Cough Lozenges Taste Awful, Sell Well
His product tastes horrible. The packaging is all wrong and the name sounds funny. Still, Greg Blazic has managed to build Fisherman’s Friend into one of America’s most popular cough lozenges.
“I had commission sales reps who were terrified of the product,” Blazic said. “I’d tell them, ‘You have to make the buyer taste the product,’ and they’d say, ‘You’re nuts! I was just getting in the door!’
“But so many of these drugstore chains make decisions by committee, and if a buyer went to committee with these and somebody else tasted it first, he wouldn’t have a comeback when they said, ‘This tastes lousy!’ ”
They resemble flat dog biscuits. The powerful combination of menthol, eucalyptus, licorice and pepper can leave you rolling your eyes and gasping.
Yet people keep buying Fisherman’s Friends.
“The reaction is (that) it tastes terrible, but it’s unique because it’s effective,” said John Zarbatany, president and chief executive of Peter P. Dennis Inc., a wholesale distributor in northwestern New Jersey and eastern Pennsylvania.
“People either love it or hate it, and the people who love it swear by it,” Zarbatany said.
In seven years, Blazic has carved out a larger and larger share of the market. Fishermen’s Friend now is third, behind Sucrets and Chloraseptic, with sales volume of more than $6 million a year.
Pharmacist James Lofthouse’s formula was first sold to English cod fishermen in the North Atlantic 125 years ago, and it hasn’t been changed much since.
Lofthouse sold the lozenges 19 at a time, in little paper envelopes. That is still the way his family markets them.
Two U.S. distributors failed before him, Blazic said.
“They tried to sell them as candy,” he said. In the U.S. market, Blazic thinks the strong taste and quaint packaging work for him.
“When you were growing up, wasn’t it a belief of your grandmother that no medicine works unless it tastes bad? I think there’s a psychology about that, for something to really work, you have to pay your dues.”
At 19 for 99 cents, the lozenges are one of the cheapest remedies on the market.
“So it’s a good value, and it’s got a name that’s easy to remember. You know, the recall factor is tremendously high, and anybody who’s ever tasted one of these just forms an opinion, and they always remember it.”
Blazic & Associates was incorporated in January, 1983, after the conglomerate for which Blazic was working decided to sell off its candy companies. He went into business with his savings and severance pay and an agreement from his wife.
“She’d support me for two years, and by the third year, if the company had a 50-50 chance of making it, she’d give me another year. But she wouldn’t have anything to do with the business at all, because it had to survive on its own.”
Surviving was not easy in the world of big drugstore chains, Blazic found out. A product that doesn’t sell is taking up valuable space that could be used to stock a product that would make money.
He had to convince some very tough buyers for drugstore chains.
“I was thrown out of so many places in the early years, it was incredible,” he said. “But the funny thing about this product is that nobody ever forgets.
“You call up, and you only get one shot a year with a buyer for a chain. So I’d get shot down and I’d know I can’t come back for a year. So I call back a year later, and the guy would say, ‘Are you still trying to sell that stuff?’ ”
Blazic started with a novel marketing idea: Display the packages in a plastic boat on a pedestal on the store’s counter. The gimmick worked, although Blazic admits that “People bought because of the boat, not because of the product. The boat was cute.”
His company now has 14 employees, but Blazic said he still works at least 70 hours a week. Someday, he said, his daughter may join the business--on one condition.
