At the time, there was no shortage of upstart brands competing for the dollars of young, health-conscious New Yorkers, but Snapple stood out from the rest by virtue of an endearing artlessness.
The labels on its bottles were cluttered and amateurish, and its ads seemed, if possible, even more homemade. In one, tennis star Ivan Lendl garbled the brand name into "Shnahpple." Several others featured a Snapple order-processing clerk named Wendy Kaufman.
Cheerful, zaftig, and blessed with a Noo Yawk accent strong enough to peel paint, Wendy blossomed into a minor celebrity known to her fans as the Snapple Lady.
She chatted on-air with Oprah Winfrey and David Letterman, made appearances at retail stores, and accepted Snapple drinkers' invitations to sleep-overs, bar mitzvahs, and proms. On the radio, the brand grew by sponsoring shockmeisters Howard Stern and Rush Limbaugh. Stern was an especially effective spokesperson.
He got to know the founders of the business personally and conveyed to his listeners a genuine and infectious regard for the products and the people behind them.
The brand's distribution channels were as unconventional as its promotions. Initially Snapple had very little supermarket coverage. Instead, it flowed through the so-called cold channel: small distributors serving hundreds of thousands of lunch counters and delis, which sold single-serving refrigerated beverages consumed on the premises.
Small as the individual distributors were, they aggregated into a mighty marketing force. By 1994, Snapple was available across the country, and as distributors added painstakingly cultivated supermarket accounts, sales ballooned to $674 million from just $4 million ten years earlier. Aware that Snapple had grown beyond their limited expertise, Greenberg and his partners cast about for a new owner that could take the brand to the next level. Enter Quaker Oats.
Quaker Oats: Snapple
