A mature product

Does any one of these images of chewing gum stick with you?

How about the prototypical American GI from the second war era, with the confident swagger and the can-do attitude and the gum chewed rather nonchalantly? Or the 1959 Lonnie Donegan skiffle music song, Does your chewing gum lose its flavour, on the bedpost overnight?, which suggested some sort of intense adolescent-versus-parent conflict over the disposal of partially masticated gum remains. Or Britney Spears’ 2003 interview with CNN, during which, like, you know, she spent time gathering her thoughts and rolling a piece of chewing gum around in her mouth as she dealt with such weighty topics as her opinion of the righteousness of the Iraq war (she supported whatever President Bush said). Even if you said, “none of the above,” you probably already know that chewing gum is on the way down in North America. Wrigley Canada has decided to close its Toronto chewing gum manufacturing facility. A decline in sales of two per cent for the third year in a row is causing the company to shift its operation to a plant in Georgia. The problem is, US sales are declining at the same rate or faster.

Why is that? Well, making chewing gum is a business. Business has business analysts, and business analysts offer reasons.

Concern over the disposal of used gum is one. It seems that very few people either swallow the remaining lump of gum or dispose of it in the appropriate wrapping paper in a garbage bin. The undersides of school desks, church pews and park benches are not, it turns out, considered suitable places to deposit the remains of one’s gum—probably because all the gum detritus built up in those places over the past century means there isn’t room for any more. Nor are sidewalks, as anyone who has walked on a busy urban thoroughfare with brand new sneakers can attest. Gum bonds strongly to both asphalt and concrete, and removing it is a slow and costly process. Just ask the government of Singapore, which banned the importation of the product in 2004, unless it has therapeutic value. In a classic reply to a questioner who suggested the import ban restricted free thought, the Prime Minister of Singapore is said to have replied, “If you can’t think because you can’t chew, try a banana.”

Another suggested reason is that fewer people are smoking, and therefore fewer people are trying to use gum to cover up smoker’s breath—for which there are mint breath fresheners competing for the gum dollar. Also, more products are competing for the snacker’s dollar, and snacking habits are changing.

Let’s keep going. Another theory is that it is now more widely seen as unprofessional to chew gum in the workplace, and socially unacceptable to chew anywhere. Gum is viewed by a marketing professor at the University of British Columbia as a mature product in the North American market—just further through its life cycle here than anywhere else in the world. Putting “chewing gum” and “mature” into the same sentence is not something that would have occured to me, but that’s why I’m not a marketing professor.

The news is not all gloomy. The worldwide market for gum is increasing steadily with Brazil, Russia and Mexico posting solid numbers, and China outstanding in its field. The projected size of that worldwide market—currently $24 billion, expected to rise to $32 billion over the next five years—is hardly one to sniff at. Why? Well, according to our marketing professor, gum is “gaining momentum culturally… it has appeal because it is seen as North American and different.”

But if that’s so, wouldn’t our Chinese and other foreign friends be learning that gum is a mature North American product by now, and therefore shunning it?

Certain types of gum—such as sugar-free gum—are bucking the trend. A hot seller is a Toronto-originated product that is sugar free, chemical free, nut free, gluten free AND vegan. No word on whether it sticks to braces.

Come think of it, there’s a fourth image I have— which has obviously been buried into my deep repressed memory, because I’ve only just remembered it. There’s that Juicy Fruit commercial of the earnestly happy folk singer type, having just finished singing something such as Michael, Row the Boat Ashore, extolling the musical virtues of the gum, when he is conked on the head by a couple of younger punks who, after their victim is rendered unconscious, pop a couple of Juicy Fruits and agree that the moment is “sweet.” Now that’s tantamount to inciting violence against folk singers. If that incident encapsulates the market for gum, it’s definitely not mature. Funny, maybe; just not mature.

dsimmonds@wellingtontimes.ca