There’s a great book by Rich Cohen called The Fish That Ate the Whale 📖
It tells the story of Samuel Zemurray, a Russian immigrant who made a fortune selling bananas in the United States 🍌
The name of the book comes from Zemurray pulling off a takeover of the biggest fruit company in the world (United Fruit) in 1933 despite only being a minor shareholder.
Via Wikipedia…
In Zemurray’s view, the company could be managed better to handle the economic downturn. Though he sent a letter and attended a board meeting, United Fruit’s management was not interested in his ideas. Zemurray then visited individual United Fruit shareholders and collected their proxies, which would enable him to gain control of the company. He then attended a United Fruit board meeting, in which he produced the proxies, dramatically saying, “You’ve been fucking up this business long enough. I’m going to straighten it out.”
How did United Fruit become the biggest fruit company in the world?
As told in Cohen’s book, it was due to some old-school banana marketing tricks in the early 1900’s…
Beginning around this time, U.F. stationed an agent at South Ferry terminal in New York, where the Ellis Island Ferry landed. Handing a banana to each immigrant who came off the boats, the agent said, “Welcome to America!” This was to associate the banana with the nation, a delicacy of the New World, though none of the bananas were grown in the United States, were in fact as foreign as the men and women coming off the boats. At the same time, U.F. began selling baby food made from bananas, which would hook customers when they were tiny.
You still see this everywhere in business today: products and services associating themselves with well-established people / places / ideas / holidays.
Coca-Cola does it with Christmas. Nike does it with star athletes. Coors Light does it with the Rocky Mountains.
Can you associate your product or service with something or someone well-established and well-liked? 🤔
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