New Wrinkle in an Old Story

How do you convince people to eat something they think they hate? That’s the question facing the California prune industry as it plots ways to persuade aging baby boomers to try the much-maligned fruit.

In new advertising campaigns, the industry touts prunes as high-energy snacks for active women--an attempt to shed the fruit’s image as nature’s laxative. Two farcical television commercials from the California Prune Board show animated heroines from history--Cleopatra and Josephine, wife of Napoleon Bonaparte--using prunes as pick-me-ups.

The prune business has good reason to work on its image. According to the Prune Board, between 70% and 80% of dried prunes are eaten by people over 65--and that market is shrinking.

“We have customers who are old, and while they are living long healthy lives, all good things come to an end,” said Erin Hull, marketing vice president for Sunsweet, the brand of prunes produced by Sun Maid Growers of California. “We need to refresh our customer base.”

The challenges facing the prune industry are similar to hurdles faced by other agricultural commodities. Concerns about consuming too much fat hammered sales of milk until the industry launched campaigns that stressed the benefits of milk--including the importance of calcium in preventing osteoporosis. The egg business has been similarly hurt by worries about cholesterol.

Problems facing the prune industry are more complex. While most adults ate eggs and drank milk as youngsters, a sizable portion of adults have never tasted a prune. According to the Prune Board, as many as 80% of adults don’t know what a prune tastes like. Even more distressing to prune industry executives, 15% of women between the ages of 35 and 50 won’t touch prunes with a 10-foot pole.

Beyond that, the industry has driven home the benefits of prunes as a laxative for so long that re-educating consumers won’t be easy.

“The industry created the problem, to an extent,” said Robert Mano, president of the company that packs Del Monte prunes. “It will take time, multiple years of a consistent message, to change perceptions.”

The industry needs to see quick results. According to the sales tracking firm Information Resources Inc., sales of dried prunes fell nearly 6% last year to $93.6 million, while volume was off by 8.4%.

Meanwhile, the worldwide supply of prunes is growing. Thanks to a burst of excitement about high-fiber foods in the early 1990s, growers greatly expanded the size of plum orchards used to produce prunes. The Prune Board estimates that by 2000, the global supply of prunes will exceed demand by 25%. That is bad news for California’s growers, who produce 70% of the world’s prunes.

Inspired by the success of high-energy foods such as Power Bar, prune growers see a potential solution in snacks. They are focusing their efforts on boomer women, because unlike men, some women are open to at least trying them.

Sunsweet plans to conduct samplings at health clubs in major cities to reach health-conscious women. To overcome complaints about the fruit’s sweet taste, Sunsweet is promoting lemon- and orange-flavored prunes. It is testing apple-cinnamon flavored prunes in Minneapolis, Phoenix, Richmond, Va., and St. Louis.

Last week, it began airing 15-second television commercials from J. Walter Thompson, San Francisco, for the flavored prunes that show fruit trees dancing or tossing oranges and plums in an orchard as a surprised farmer looks on.

“We want people to think about prunes as everyday fruits, like oranges and lemons, and make them a lot more youthful,” said John Geoghegan, general manager of J. Walter Thompson in San Francisco.

Making ugly, wrinkled prunes seem acceptable is an important part of Sunsweet’s strategy. Researchers at J. Walter Thompson found that women who said they enjoyed prunes felt embarrassed about buying and eating them.

“Women told us they kept them hidden in the cupboard behind things, because their kids ribbed them, and they would never leave them on the kitchen counter or offer them to friends when they visited,” said Mark Tall, an associate planning director. “They were eating them in almost a clandestine way.”

The agency toyed with several approaches before settling on the orchard theme, including a humorous campaign using a wrinkled Shar-pei puppy as a spokesanimal for the brand, in the tradition of the famous 1967 “Today the pits, tomorrow the wrinkles” campaign that turned the disadvantages of prunes into an advantage. J. Walter Thompson also suggested a campaign that poked fun at the embarrassment prune eaters feel. Sunsweet shot down those ideas, wanting to keep the ads positive.

Whether the campaign will have an impact is uncertain. The prune industry is launching its initiative with meager ad budgets. Most of the ads are only 15 seconds, and the ads won’t air year-round.

Another problem is that prunes are not sold in snack-size packages, despite the Prune Board commercial from Randazzo & Blavin, San Francisco, in which Josephine (“Oh, my little conquering hero,” says the voice-over by Rosie O’Donnell) slips a snack pack under Napoleon’s waistcoat. For the tradition-bound prune industry, the advertising changes are radical enough for now. “The industry is patient,” said Bart Minor, director of the Prune Board. “We think we hit the concept on the head. Now it has to play out.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

The State of Prunes

Renewed interest in dietary fiber has given a boost to sales of prunes, which are grown mostly in California. Domestic shipments, which track consumption, increased 13.6% in 1996, but are still down from their peak in the late 1980s. Prune growers also face a looming overproduction problem because by 2000 worldwide supply is expected to exceed demand by 25%. Prune shipments in thousands of tons:

Total

‘96: 183

*

Domestic

‘96: 108

*

Export

‘96: 75

Source: California Prune Board