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Will the real New
Prince Spaghetti Minstrels
please stand up?
N
Macaroni maker uses recorded minstrels in Stan Freberg commercials, live minstrels in supermarkets — and all help spaghetti sales to soar
■ Not a few Bostonians recognized the tall, vaguely owlish young man with the California suntan who loped into the Hub's Hotel Somerset. It was Hollywood's Stan Freberg, who was in Boston for a two-day meeting with client Joseph Peliegrino, Sr., president of the $16 million Prince Macaroni Manufacturing Co. of Lowell, Mass.
Had they known that Freberg was on his way to the hotel's Town and Country Room to say hello to the New Prince Spaghetti Minstrels, they would have assumed that it would be a hootenanny homecoming for Freberg. After all, Freberg and the Minstrels have been heard since April in a series of 60-second Prince Commercials on some 35 radio stations in 25 major East and Midwest markets.
They would have been wrong.
Up to the time that Freberg walked into the Somerset, where the Minstrels were making a public appearance, neither he — nor the Minstrels — had ever so much as laid eyes on each other.
Two sets of spaghetti-sponsored folk singers both with identical names? Yes, indeed, for they are
33
part of an unusual modern sales drama.
The other, and possibly more complicated part, is played by Kenyon & Eckhardt's Boston office. It used its corporate talent to merchandise one of Freberg's fiendish creations, thereby not only stretching Pellegrino's basic investment to the point where it, in turn, began to make money back; but, in doing so, it won the unflinching admiration of Freberg, whose attitude towards ad agencies has been compared to the views of Louis XV on reduced taxes.
To appreciate the tune the Minstrels really played, however, requires an understanding of the pasta business and Prince Macaroni's position in that $380 million market.
Founded in 1912 as just another immigrant business in Boston's North End and named after the street on which it set up shop. Prince spent its early years serving the "mom and pop" stores. Not until after V-E Day when the troops returned from Europe (having developed there a taste for Italian cooking) did Prince go king size.
Peliegrino, who until 1939 had headed Brooklyn's Roman Macaroni Co., embarked on a national expansion program. Recognizing ; that taste plays a very minor role in determining pasta brand prefer-; ences, he spent untold amounts perfecting machinery that would guarantee a "national consistency"
— i.e., non-breakability in transit
— to his growing line of spaghetti and macaroni products. Next, he set up plants in Chicago, Merchantville (N.J.), Detroit, Brooklyn, Rochester and Montreal — the latter for his Canadian "Gattusso" brand. He even set up a plant in Italy to manufacture grated cheese.
Still, there was the frustration of knowing that in a field occupied by no fewer than 500 regional brands, no one could be a clear-cut leader. While Prince today claims to rank third in sales (behind LaRosa and Mueller's, ahead of Ronzoni), its annual sales represent only 4.2 percent of the national market.
Peliegrino recalled to Sponsor, "I felt I needed memorable advertising."
In truth, his advertising hadn't always been memorable.
SPONSOR
'ij more at Coca
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