The Gamble

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Prong number three: an intense sales campaign focusing on one target market. Graves commissioned research studies; he brainstormed with colleagues and advisers. The logical place to begin, they concluded, was Boston. Coleman already had a sizable outlet there in the 64-store Purity supermarket chain. The city was home, the research showed, to a large number of affluent, environment- and health-conscious residents who might be expected to snap up the product. Graves knew supermarket-chain buyers there from his Armour and Perdue days; he figured he'd have no trouble getting into the stores. He and field sales director Mel Coleman Jr. began mapping out their distribution strategy. They planned a training program for store and meat-department managers. They commissioned a video for line employees, explaining what was different about Coleman meats, and they worked up some new point-of-sale materials.

By the end of 1990 the preparations were in high gear. Graves asked PR agent Michele Wells to prepare a publicity blitz. He huddled with McCabe's experts to plot advertising strategy. He hired Bread & Circus's meat director, an industry veteran with 26 years of experience in conventional supermarkets, as Coleman's regional manager, and Mel Jr. lined up a food broker out in the suburbs. Both would play a key role in monitoring stores' point-of-sale displays, keeping an eye on the merchandise, and otherwise making sure the retail end of the marketing chain was up to snuff. The whole thing would start, all at once, in early 1991.

The company had one strike against it going in. A few months earlier Graves had pitched two of Boston's biggest chains about carrying prepackaged cuts of Coleman's beef. Graves needed revenues, and the buyers were receptive. But without marketing support, the product moved slowly. Worse, Coleman's vacuum-packaging machine malfunctioned, and some packages leaked oxygen. The meat turned brown; it turned green. Pretty soon the two chains were telling Coleman maybe they'd better wait for a while before ordering any more.

Remembering it, Graves winces -- "I knew it was a mistake. I said to myself, If this stuff goes in and gets kicked out, we're going to play hell getting back in there. And that's exactly what happened. Now we had to resell them."

Resell them, moreover, even before the company had shot its wad on what was by now a carefully orchestrated, very expensive marketing campaign -- a campaign that would unfold, day by day, over the next several months.

January 3, 1991, Thursday. Mack Graves arrives in Boston. The campaign will start at the end of the month. But he's already under the gun. On February 4, Ed McCabe was to move back to New York City from Miami to set up his own agency, thus delaying the ad planning. Graves has had to wait until after the holidays to call on retail outlets, and now there are only a few weeks left to line up distribution. The timing, moreover, could hardly be worse. Tensions are mounting in the Persian Gulf. Massachusetts is in the throes of a deepening recession. Coleman has targeted 216 Boston-area stores for distribution, and Graves has set 50% of these stores as an interim goal. If he can't get them, he'll hold the ad campaign until he does.

Over a period of two weeks he and other Coleman representatives call on the biggest Boston chains other than Purity. The Stop & Shop Supermarket Co., the market leader, with 117 stores spread around New England. Star Market Co., with 32 stores. Shaw's Supermarkets Inc., with 70. The reception at all three is cool. Stop & Shop and Star, which had tried out the prepack, complain of their bad experiences. The meat buyer at Shaw's, newly hired from Star, doesn't want to do anything right away. Graves asks Stop & Shop if delaying the ad program for a while would give the chain more time to make a decision. Sure, Stop & Shop says, it would help.

Graves reschedules the advertising for the second week in March. It doesn't help -- Stop & Shop still won't place an order. But by now Graves is deciding to go ahead anyway. "We had told Purity we were going to do it," he says later. "Besides, we thought the advertising would pull the others on board."

March 5, Tuesday. The campaign breaks. About 40 well-dressed guests show up at Jasper's restaurant, on Boston's waterfront, for the first of three Coleman promotional dinners. Most go home enthusiastic. "It was a revelation to encounter a beefsteak that fit their notions of health food -- and a 'dining experience' as well," reports society columnist John Robinson in The Boston Globe.

Five days later McCabe's first TV spot hits the airwaves. Mournful harmonica in the background, snowy peaks visible in the distance, Mel rides the Coleman Ranch rangeland, pausing to praise the taste and healthfulness of Coleman natural beef. On March 13 the first spread ad appears in the Globe's food section. Illustrated with mock woodcuts, the ad conjures up an Old West Wanted poster while laying up-to-the-minute, hot-button phraseology on thick. "Rangeland untainted by pesticides or chemical fertilizers." "Free of chemical additives and . . . up to 25% less fat." The TV spots -- five or six of them per day -- are slated to run on Boston's major channels for four weeks, mostly sprinkled around news programs. The newspaper ads appear Wednesday, in suburban papers as well as in the Globe, the whole schedule leading up to the heavy shopping days at the end of the week.

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