Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, July 9, 1995 TAG: 9507100025
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: B-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: SANDRA BROWN KELLY
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
For six weeks recently, the controversial talk show host hawked for Pizza Hut, and the company sold a record number of pizzas. It also got a record number of complaints.
Limbaugh is not seen as an all-American sort of guy by a number of citizens who find offensive his willingness to insult women and other groups.
The Limbaugh campaign so offended one member of the Virginia chapter of The Sierra Club that she encouraged readers of the club's July/August newsletter to register complaints against it. To help that along, she published Pizza Hut's toll-free consumer affairs phone number.
Sierra's Paula Stockholm referred to Limbaugh as Pizza Hut's ``spokes-bigot'' and noted that when he wasn't pushing pizza he was busy bashing ``environmental activists, women, people of color, and lesbians and gays.''
Limbaugh ``is not a spokesperson for us,'' said Rob Doughty, spokesman in Pizza Hut's national headquarters in Wichita, Kans.
Limbaugh was just one of several personalities who are ``bigger than life and who don't mind having fun at the expense of themselves'' that Pizza Hut is using to tout its food, Doughty said. The former-husband-and-wife high rollers Donald and Ivana Trump were featured prior to Limbaugh, and there were complaints about them, too, Doughty said.
``People thought they were too rich,'' he said.
The Pizza Hut experience and recent promotion material from Tropicana and Welch's point up the dangers of promoting products with people or situations that are politically or socially explosive.
A couple of months ago, Tropicana Products Inc. sent a copy of a promotion that encouraged readers to fill out a vital statistics questionnaire and send it in to get a ``Personal Nutrition Profile.'' Four thousand of the customers who responded got a form letter saying their request couldn't be processed because:
``Your current weight does not fall within the predetermined health criteria guidelines'';
``The age you have provided is not between 18 and 99'';
Or, ``You have indicated that you are currently pregnant or breast-feeding.''
The restrictions were not mentioned in the original promotion. To offset the curt form letter from the fulfillment company that handled the promotion, a second mailing was sent to those 4,000 customers. It included promise of a general nutrition profile, almost $7 worth of coupons for Tropicana products and comments of appreciation from the company's vice-president for marketing.
Neither Pizza Hut nor Tropicana, however, had the hot potato that Welch's could be juggling as customers learn more about research that has the company excited about the potential for grape juice as a deterrent to clogged coronary arteries.
A letter to journalists from Welch's News Bureau, run by Van Vechten & Associates public relations firm in New York, opened with ``More good news about grape juice!'' The good news was, that according to a study by a University of Wisconsin-Madison research team, Welch's grape juice had some effect on clogged arteries in dogs.
Red wine did the best job of clearing the arteries. White wine had no effect. Grape juice had some.
The researchers found this out by anesthetizing 47 mongrel dogs, cutting into each dog's coronary artery, using surgical clamps to produce artery damage and then giving the animal an intravenous infusion of red wine, white wine or grape juice.
The interruption of blood flow in the artificially clogged arteries stopped after an average of 95 minutes in the dogs that were given 10 milliliters of grape juice. But it took two and a half times more grape juice than it did wine to reduce the stickiness of blood-clotting cells, called platelets.
Welch's has had no involvement in the research up to now, said Tom Gardner, director of marketing. However, the company has contacted Dr. John Folts, who headed the study, to ask him to look at ways Welch's might be able to work with his group. Welch's also asked Van Vechten to ``broaden the audience'' for the research findings, Gardner said.
And did the research on dogs cause him any pause?
Gardner said Folts assured Welch's ``that his methods are closely scruntinized and that all testing was done under the most humane conditions.''
He said they are not far enough along in discussion of future research to know whether it will involve animals.
Welch's didn't even provide the juice for the first study, said Geoff Raymond of Van Vechten. The company was glad to see the results, though, and Raymond is now the go-between for Welch's and Folts in the talks about further research by the Wisconsin group.
Since it is believed that the flavonoids that exist in the grape skin, pulp and seed is the benefit for clogged arteries, further research might show Welch's how to modify its assembly line to keep more of the flavonoids in the juice, Raymond said.
Did Raymond have any concern about the use of animals in grape juice research?
``No,'' he said. The findings that grape juice might be beneficial in fighting off clogged arteries outweigh any issue surrounding animal research.
It raises an issue of ethics, though, and it also might create an inappropriately unpalatable vision with a glass of breakfast grape.
by CNB