Banner Graphic, Volume 15, Number 78, Greencastle, Putnam County, 4 December 1984 — Page 3

Testing the toy market yields big dividends for Cabbage Patch conspirators

c. 1984 N.Y. Times NEW YORK Kathy Cole was an innocent agent caught up in market forces beyond her control. “I knew nothing about Cabbage Patch dolls," she says. "Oh, I knew they were a craze I knew they were ugly. But that was my total knowledge.” The Port Hudson, La., woman agreed to help a friend find one of the coveted dolls. Yes, Coleco Industries of West Hartford, Conn., still is producing the little dolls-with-adoption-papers. And though this year’s sales aren’t expected to prompt the stampedes that occurred last year, demand is so high people are lining up for dolls at la.m., signing doll waiting lists, or resorting to purchases of the higher-priced original dolls made in Cleveland, Ga. Some, like Cole’s friend, have come up short at regular stores and are stumbling across non-traditional outlets for the mass-produced version by Coleco. Last week, while driving down the highway, Cole saw a man at the side of the road selling Cabbage Patch dolls. He had about a dozen, and said he was selling them to supplement his Social Security benefits. Cole handed over $75, more than twice the discount-store price. “As I understand it,” Cole says, “I bought a black market doll.” In toy and game circles, they call this success. A new product is introduced, and demand overwhelms supply. By the end of 1984, 18 months after the doll first hit the shelves, Coleco expects to have sold 20 million, says company spokeswoman Barbara Wruck. “Usually a million units is considered a success,” she says. Another successful seller this year, the game Trivial Pursuit, appeals to a more sophisticated market. The company handling Trivial Pursuit’s advertising expects that 20 million of the game sets will sell by the end of 1984 most costing $25 and S4O. A million Trivial Pursuits sold in 1983. How did these marketers make their products so successful? With a strategy many toy companies use. “We do our homework,” says Candace Irving, spokeswoman for Mattel Toys, maker of one toy for which demand has been constant for a quar-ter-century, the Barbie doll. They test the market: parents and kids. “You develop a campaign,” says Bruce Fabricant, who works for the public relations agency that handles Kenner Products, which produces the popular Care Bears. An estimated 17 million Care Bears will be in the toy boxes of America by the end of this year. “Obviously,” says John Moore, vice president of the advertising agency that handles Trivial Pursuit, “you have to create a demand.” But the massive popularity of Cabbage Patch dolls, with their individual features and adoption papers, took even Coleco by surprise. In December 1983, Coleco stopped advertising it on television. It no longer needed to stimulate demand. “We had to step back and let the consumer do the rest,” Wruck says. Product news was transmitted along the grapevine, a marketer’s dream. “You’ve got to have people talking about it, for people to want to go out and buy it,” Moore says. “That doesn’t happen with all products, but it’s happened with Cabbage Patch, certainly.” “It’s when a consumer starts talking about it and the press starts talking about it and if you can’t find

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it, the noise is even bigger,” Moore says. “Obviously, when the media is talking about it, it becomes almost a third-party endorsement that is stronger than advertising.” Now the biggest problem is managing success, a puzzle Coleco seems to be cheerfully facing. Wruck says stores will try to control mad rushes to buy the dolls by establishing waiting lists. She says there are no “near-term” plans to slow production of the dolls. “We will continue to increase production until everyone who wants a Cabbage Patch doll has one,” Wruck says. Meanwhile, demand for all toys continues to grow, with retail sales moving from $10.4 billion last year toward an anticipated sl3 billion in 1984, according to Donna Datre, spokeswoman for the Toy Manufacturers of America, the industry’s trade association. “It’s definitely a volatile industry,” Datre says. “Sixty percent of all sales occur in the fourth quarter. It’s very fashionable, it follows trends.” In 1980 and 1981, the Strawberry Shortcake dolls and Star Wars action figures were most popular; in 1982, Masters of the Universe action figures topped the list; last year it was the Cabbage Patch dolls. Some manufacturers have to guess what will be popular as much as two years in advance, to allow them time to bring a toy concept to the production line. If they’ve read the market correctly, as Coleco did when it began to mass-produce the Cabbage Patch doll, the whim of millions of children and parents can send toy sales skyrocketing. If they’ve made a mistake, those same whims can send a new product to oblivion. Kenner spokeswoman Pam Robertson remembers such a loy: a Boy Scout line of action figures that did different things that Boy Scouts do The concept tested well with parents and children but, “We got it out there and we sold about six,” she says. “We forgot a major thing: fantasy. They could BE a Boy Scout.” Some of the more successful hunches include Care Bears; Strawberry Shortcake, entering its fifth year of sales with a grand total of 56 million sold; and Masters of the Universe, which have sold 70 million since 1982. “It’s real difficult,” Robertson says. “What we have to do a lot of times is go with gut feeling.” But there is one basic rule, she says ‘ ‘The toy has to be fun. ” Retailers also have to gamble. Every February, sales executives look at manufacturers’ new wares at the Toy Fair in New York. During the following months they make their guesses and file their orders according to what they think will be popular. Retailers goofed in 1959, when they were unenthusiastic about the skinny new doll named Barbie. “She sold out that first year,” says Mattel’s Irving. Barbie has been on the market now for 25 years, and more than 250 million Barbies, Kens, Midges and other members of the Barbie doll family have been sold, she says. Now, however, it’s easy for retailers to fill their Barbie orders because it is easier to predict the demand based on past sales. Whether or not Cabbage Patch dolls will join the ranks of classic toys sold year after year is open to question. “You have to closely monitor what occurs in a product’s second year,” Wruck says. “There isn’t a seeable saturation point with people buying more than one at different times.”

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Recommends curtailing use sharply Block proposes new price-supports plan

c. 1984 N.Y. Times News Service WASHINGTON Agriculture Secretary John R Block said Monday that to help reduce federal spending, the Reagan administration would propose legislation to sharply curtail government price supports for farmers. If approved by Congress, such legislation would unravel the system of income and price supports that was developed in the Depression of the 19305. It would leave the nation’s farmers more dependent on the marketplace to determine the prices they receive for their crops. Block said he would also propose a “get tough” policy to discourage foreign competitors from subsidizing their farmers to the disadvantage of American farmers. Block said in an interview that his most important proposal on farm supports would probably be that the government help farmers only when the price of their crops fell below 75 percent of the average open-market price of the previous five years. Government prices now often exceed those of the market, resulting in un-

wanted surpluses and large government

Where's the beef? You might not want to know

PHILADELPHIA (AP) Thousands of schoolchildren, hospital patients and Air Force personnel in five states ate “putrid and decomposed" beef butchered from dying and diseased cows, a federal grand jury concluded During the conspiracy, the cat tie went from farmers to a pet food company to a meat processor to wholesalers, who shipped tainted hamburger patties and stew beef to Pennsylvania, New Jer sey, Delaware, Virginia and Arkansas, according to a 31-count indictment handed up Monday. Federal officials said they could not determine whether the meat had caused any illness. Each week from October 1980 to February 1984, the processor sold up to 15,000 pounds of meat that “consisted in whole or in part of filthy, putrid, and decomposed substances and was unsound, unhealthful, unwholesome and otherwise unfit for human food,” said Joel Friedman, director of the Philadelphia Strike Force in charge of organized crime. The indictment named Vincent Perry Sr., 50, of West Chester, owner of the Summit Beef Co. in Linwood; Berwin Taylor, 63, of Chester Springs, owner of Taylor Pet Food in Downingtown; his son, Wayne Taylor, 34, of Downingtown, and Dominic Impagliazzo, 68, of Chester.

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payments to farmers, projected at $14.4 billion in the fiscal year 1985. Block discussed the farm program as President Reagan’s group of economic policy advisers decided to go along with a list of federal programs whose appropriations would be frozen at this year’s levels. But officials said the package, put together by David A. Stockman, director of the Office of Management and Budget, still fell far short of the administration target for reducing the federal deficit. Block, interviewed at the opening of the Department of Agriculture’s annual conference on the outlook for the nation’s far mers, said he was one of a group of senior administration officials who want military spending, and possibly Social Security, included in a freeze of federal spending. “Agriculture is prepared to take its lumps and its fair share of lumps and its fair share of cuts,” Block said. “And it’s my opinion that an across-the-board freeze is a good approach. That’s my preference.” Asked if he would include the military budget, he said, “I would freeze it It’s perceived to be fair, and it is fair.” He said he had not yet considered Social

The four were charged with conspiracy to sell uninspected meat for human consumption. If convicted, they face prison terms of up to 53 years and fines of up to $170,000.

The indictment described Taylor pet food as a “4-D operator,” a company that bought, slaughtered, processed, prepared, sold and transported “dead, dying, disabled and diseased animals and parts of carcasses of animals that died otherwise than by slaughter." According to Friedman, the Taylors allegedly acquired dead cattle, carcasses of cattle and meat from cattle not yet inspected by the U.S. Department of Agriculture and arranged to have the meat brought to Taylor Pet Food. “The Taylors then boned the meat from these sources, then sold it to Perry for resale for human consumption,” Friedman said. The live cattle the Taylors bought had been treated with veterinary drugs shortly before they were slaughtered and were processed in unsanitary conditions, the indictment said. Impagliazzo picked up the meat in unmarked vans owned by Perry and transported it to Summit Beef, where the meat was processed as ground beef, beef patties and stew beef, the indictment said.

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Security, “but surely, everyone receiving benefits should be prepared to see the government put some restraint in place in order to address this deficit." “If we don’t do it this way, the only alternative is taxes, and raising taxes is not the right answer," he said. The farm support changes would be part of the sweeping farm bill to be introduced next year to succeed the current 1981 act. Most farm program supporters concede that the government’s support for farmers requires substantial changes. Even so, Block could encounter wide opposition from Congress and farm groups to his plan to help farmers only when the price of their crops fell below 75 percent of the fiveyear market price, “It destroys the concept of the targetprice system, which is the crux of our agricultural policy,” Robert Buchanan, a wheat and vegetable farmer in Milton Freewater, Ore., said in a telephone in terview. Carl Schwensen, executive vice president of the National Association ol Wheat Growers here, said: “I think it’s devastating to agriculture to have such a

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December 4,1984, The Putnam County Banner-Graphic

radical change. Incomes are already lower than they were in the Depression.” Federal farm support payments in the 1980 s have been running at double those ol previous decades. They were sll billion ir: 1982, sl9 billion in 1983, and an estimated $lO billion in 1984 The Office of Management and Budget's figures project $14.4 billion in such spending in the 1985 fiscal year, and a range of sll billion to sl3 billion for the three following years. The payments support about 40 percent of farmers, those who grow such major crops as wheat, cotton, corn and other feed grains, peanuts and tobacco. The support is chiefly in two forms. When prices of protected crops fall short of a target price set by the government, the growers are paid the difference. In another program, farmers give the government their crops for storage as collateral on loans. If the market price of the crop falls below a government-determined loan rate, the government keeps the crop and the farmer keeps the loan Block said the 75 percent plan would be eased in to ease the effect on farmers. But bevond that, he said he had no details.

Tulsa animal control officer Larry Hammons finds himself with more animal than he can con trol as he tries to reel in a bull that had been ham pering airplane traffic at Harvey Young Airport in Tulsa. The bull dragged Hammons about 20 yards before the rope slipped off its horns. The animal eventually escaped into a nearby woods. (AP Wirephoto).

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