Recession Marketing: Don’t Do A Moxie

Businesses whose reaction to the economic downturn is to consolidate their client base, rather than seek to invigorate it, may wish to consider the daddy of all cautionary tales. It concerns the American soft drink brand Moxie, who gifted Coca Cola the chance of global domination in the Great Depression.

Back then, Moxie was the dominant force in the US soft drinks market. It had the history, the brand awareness and the market share. At this time, Coca Cola wasn’t even a household name in its own country, let alone across the globe.

Moxie was founded in the mid-nineteenth century by Dr Augustin Thompson, a chancer who sold it from town to town, peddling it as an elixir to remedy “paralysis, softening of the brain, nervousness and insomnia”. Complete bunkum, naturally.

Over the years Thompson ditched the medical pitch and took the sugary, fizzy route, trumpeting it as “a delicious drink to satisfy everyone’s taste”.

By this stage, Moxie had a decade head start on its nascent rival, Coca Cola, and by the turn of the last century it was being creatively merchandised using every marketing trick of the day, including being endorsed by silent film stars, like Ed Wynn and George M. Cohan.

Moxie also became strongly associated with amusement parks, dance halls and east coast resorts, and in the late Twenties of the last century, the ‘Moxieland’ manufacturing facility was established, and successfully promoted as a tourist attraction.

But this was to prove Moxie’s historical high point, because poor marketing decision-making during the Great Depression proved its undoing. Moxie’s single biggest blunder was deciding that advertising in such a bleak economic climate was somehow distasteful. Instead, it elected to build up its reserves of sugar, at the expense of its massively popular advertising campaigns.

Coca Cola, however, took the opposite view, and quickly repositioned itself as an antidote to Depression-era gloom. The rest, as they say, is history.

Today. Moxie still exists as a brand, but its popularity is confined to the Boston area, its spiritual home.

The moral of this tale, then, is that businesses must never cease to seek new clients or customers, or they run the risk of losing market share to more aggressive rivals, perhaps with catastrophic results.

Planet Client is the only blog helping businesses find clients, retain clients and understand clients. It is part of journalist Sean Ashcroft’s business gift service, Sticky Clients

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