Frank Perdue

 

At a time when marketing has suddenly become the hot topic from Wall Street to Silicon Valley, one of the most effective marketers around is a slender, laconic, whiny-voiced, balding, droopy-lidded, long-nosed, 64-year-old company president named Franklin Parsons Perdue. Although scarcely known in most of the country, he is something of a cult figure in the Northeast, where he does most of his selling. More to the point, his name is a household word -- a status he has achieved by personally hawking his product on television almost every day for the past 12 years.

That product, oddly enough, is chicken. Not packaged chicken dishes or fried chicken eateries, but the raw, naked flesh of the plucked bird itself. Indeed, he has taken this quintessential commodity and peddled it so plausibly that he has raised brand recognition of chicken to heretofore undreamed of heights. Not coincidentally, chicken has emerged as the country's fastest-growing meat category during this period, and -- for the 22% of Americans who see his commercials -- Frank Perdue has become to chickens what Calvin Klein is to jeans.

Thanks to such notoriety, Perdue Farms Inc. of Salisbury, Md., sold some 260 million birds last year -- up 525% from 1968, when the company first began marketing fresh chicken. Revenues for fiscal 1984 (ending on March 31) are expected to be well over $500 million, ranking Perdue Farms within the top 50 companies in the United States.

Frank Perdue owns most of that company and is its chairman. Although his father founded it, he is the one who has made it grow, under the banner of one of the great advertising slogans of our time:

"It takes a tough man to make a tender chicken." Clever phrasing aside, the slogan's appeal owes much to Perdue himself, who doesn't come across as tough, so much as smitten -- with chickens, that is. One ad, for example, shows three hens sitting at a dining table impeccably set with piles of feed, complete with a bottle of 1972 Chateau Du-Well wine. Perdue declares: "My chickens eat better than you do. If you want to start eating as good as my chickens, take a tip from me. Eat my chickens."

Such advertising has been undeniably effective. Perdue insists, however, that advertising has not been the key to his company's success. Rather, he says, "the quality of the product is number one; our advertising is number two. . . . In advertising, you have to tell people why [they should buy the product]." That means "you have to have a product that's better than most -- if possible, the best in your field. . . . Too many people take a mediocre product and fail. Eighty percent of all newly advertised products fail. The manufacturer decides the consumer is a fool. That's why it fails. They think advertising is a cure-all. But when you advertise something, you stick it in the consumer's mind that [your product] is better. They expect something a little more."

It is precisely this heartfelt concern for quality that comes through in his ads -- which is, of course, the genius of the whole campaign. Frank Perdue really is smitten with chickens. He is the sort of man who can wax romantic about something like a chicken hot dog, his latest product line. "I love and adore the chicken hot dog," he declares to a visitor. "Why, it's 30% cheaper [than beef or pork hot dogs]. It's got 30% less fat. It's got 17% more protein. It's got it all!"

And he stands by his words. At the age of 63, he still dutifully attends supermarket openings -- "because they ask me to." On one recent Sunday, he went to two such affairs located one hundred miles apart. "My father wouldn't do it, he notes, "but I'll do anything it takes for this business because I consider it more my baby than it was his. I was totally into it without any letup for 20 to 30 years. I've been the principal force in its growth."

You might say that Perdue was born to raise chickens. The year of his birth 1920, was the same year that his father, Arthur W. Perdue, shelled out $5 for his first set of laying hens. By the time Frank was 10, he, too, was in the egg business, earning $20 a week after expenses -- which certainly was not chicken feed back in the early days of the Depression.

In 1937, he headed off to Salisbury State College -- an institution more renowned for its wildfowl museum than for Perdue's matriculation -- but quit after two years and joined his father's business, which was then a two-man operation. Meanwhile, he continued to keep his own flock on the side and, by 1941, had expanded his personal hen holdings to 800. "I probably didn't have to work more than two hours a day," he says. "I remember writing my girlfriend that I was making $40 a week. That impressed me." It also impressed his girlfriend, who married him soon after. (They were divorced in 1974.)

Perdue may not have had to work more than 2 hours a day but he generally put in a good 70 hours a week in earlier days. Like a kind of chicken-hawking Willy Loman, he would rush off to New York or Boston on a lonely selling binge. "In the beginning, we just sold to butcher shops. I'd run my production meeting Monday morning, a sales meeting Monday afternoon, jump on a plane about five o'clock, eat dinner in the Baltimore airport, and go to work the next morning, calling on meat buyers. All of them."

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