Wrigley’s Chewing Gum: Created from Soap?
I am currently learning in my entrepreneurship class about the steps an company takes in order to: first; identify a problem, second; gather information about this problem, third; brainstorm solutions to this problem, and fourth; execute and continue to execute a solution to this problem. One thing we’ve focused on is how a company clearly outlines and identifies its problem. This is an essential question that a company must always consider as the basis of all its operations.
One company that has a long history of identifying and adapting to solving new problems is Wrigley’s chewing gum. Wrigley is one of the chewing gum industry leaders and is widely renown for being in almost every supermarket or gas station. Few people know, however, the real history of how Wrigley’s chewing gum became and how it grew to be so popular. In 1881, Mr. William Wrigley Jr. had just moved from Philadelphia to Chicago to open a new branch of his father’s company which sold soap and offered baking soda as a premium. After a couple years, Mr. Wrigley Jr. speculated that his customers grew to be more interested in the free baking soda, which was initially just meant as a way to incentivize customers to buy his soap, than they were in the soap itself. After gathering evidence from his customers and comparing the sales of the soap without the free baking soda to the soap with the complimentary baking soda, Mr. Wrigley found that his hypothesis was in fact true. Him and his partner then dropped the soap business and began only selling baking soda and then offered chewing gum as a premium. Soon enough, he saw the attraction to his chewing gum increase and he made another pivot into the chewing gum space.
Having been a recent invention, chewing gum was a booming industry and had many large competitors so such a move was viewed to be very risky. Mr. Wrigley believed however, that there was a shortage in the market due to the way that chewing gum was being solely catered for women. He launched two of the company’s earliest products — Sweet Sixteen Orange and Lotta Gum — to appeal to the youth and eventually to the general public. During a rough economic downturn in 1907, Mr. Wrigley studied his business and believed that he was solving a problem that was very real and saw the potential behind it. That year he took incredible risks by mortgaging everything he owned in order to launch one advertising campaign which he believed, if done properly, would persuade customers outside of women to purchase his gum. He was proved right as immediately Wrigley’s gum took off and became an international household item.
What I learned from reading about Wrigley’s gum is that is it necessary to constantly identify and evaluate the problem you are solving and adapt accordingly. Though business and the results during each of these 3 product periods reached all-time lows, Wrigley was able to decipher when it was due to a poor execution or due to a lack of need for a solution in that market. During his low-points when he was selling baking soda and soap, Mr. Wrigley studied and recognized that the low sales were primarily due more to there being a lack of a problem than to poor product execution. However, at a point when Wrigley reached his lowest and had to mortgage everything he owned, he still stuck with his chewing gum business because he studied the problem and was confident that the missing ingredient was just proper execution.
