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How Bazooka Gum uses nostalgia to drive sweet success

How Bazooka Gum uses nostalgia to drive sweet success
How Bazooka Gum uses nostalgia to drive sweet success


In 1947, Topps created a bright pink bubble gum square with an initially tough chew, a sweet smell and powerful sugary taste of fruit and cotton candy. A few years later, the company added to its wrapper the now iconic comic featuring Bazooka Joe and his gang.

Now, 76 years later, consumers are still chewing those hard-then-soft sweet squares and rectangles of Bazooka Gum. And while the confectionery space and consumer trends have changed considerably in the last three generations, Original Bazooka Bubble Gum has not.

Rebecca Silberfarb, vice president of marketing in the Americas for Bazooka Candy Brands, said Bazooka has been able to maintain its iconic nature through the decades.

“What people knew about it 75 years ago, or in their childhood however many years ago that was, is still true to the core of the brand,” she said. “We are a brand that brings, what we call in our company, edible entertainment.”

The children of today — as well as the children of yesterday — open the red, white and blue package of gum, read the comic, and chew the gum until it’s soft enough to try to blow a bubble, she said. The gum’s original formula is the same, the packaging is similar to that of decades ago, and eyepatched Bazooka Joe and his gang are still making people groan with comics full of dad jokes and sometimes head-scratching fortunes — like “You may want to wash your old sneakers.”

From a corporate standpoint, the company has been through a variety of changes. Bazooka was created by Topps, which also morphed into a well-known trading card company. Topps’ candy division became known as Bazooka Candy Brands in 2009. Through the years, it added brands including Ring Pop — its biggest seller — and Push Pop. Bazooka is actually one of the company’s smaller brands, Silberfarb said.

While the newer brands meet specific trends more relevant to younger candy consumers, Silberfarb said that the company constantly works to make Bazooka stay trendy. They’ve tried adding graffiti-style graphics to the wrappers. They’ve tried tucking puzzles in the wrappers instead of comics. They’ve gotten the brand — and Bazooka Joe — on social media. They added sugar-free varieties. They devised new pack sizes and ways to buy the gum.

But for the most part, the company found their consumers wanted the classic Bazooka gum they’d known for years. Some of the less popular changes were walked back, while a few new innovations — like flavors and sugar-free gum stayed around.

“It’s kind of keeping true to our consumer and what the product is, but really bringing it along for the ride as times change,” she said.

A cartoon Bazooka Joe blows a bubble containing containers of Bazooka gum. The background has red, white and blue stripes and members of Bazooka Joe's gang are at the bottom.
Retrieved from Bazooka Candy Brands on April 19, 2023

 

From market leader to king of nostalgia

To celebrate its diamond jubilee last year, Bazooka made a short documentary about its history and market influence.

Former Topps CEO Arthur Shorin shared the story of how the iconic gum brand started in 1947 in Brooklyn, New York. His father Joseph Shorin, who founded the company with brothers Abram, Ira and Philip, had previously worked on less sweet gum flavors that didn’t sell well. The trademark Bazooka flavor was born after World War II-era sugar rationing ended.

In its early years, the gum took off for two reasons. The company hooked retailers by adding other products for them to sell at full profit into the package. In the documentary, Shorin showed a box with 240 units of Bazooka gum to sell. It also included three bottles of 25 cent Bufferin aspirin — meaning an extra 75 cents of profit for the retailer.


“What people knew about it 75 years ago, or in their childhood however many years ago that was, is still true to the core of the brand.”

Rebecca Silberfarb

Vice president of marketing in the Americas, Bazooka Candy Brands


As Bazooka got into more retailers, Topps aggressively promoted its gum to children. The brand put advertisements into comic books, newspapers and broadcast outlets. The comics attracted young fans, who at one point in time could collect and redeem them for various prizes.

“Then we became 10% of the market,” Shorin explains in the documentary. “Fifteen, 20, 30, 40, 50% of the market. So Bazooka grew as not just a national, but an international brand.”



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