Back in the early 1990s, Jay and Nancy Ricker were running a handful of Madison County, Ind.-area convenience store/gas stations. Because the stores offered a wide variety of fountain drinks at an especially reduced price, they all saw a sales surge from sheer volume.
Then, [image-nocss] something odd happened. When the Rickers hired a branding company to research a name for their stores, they were told that they already had a brand name. They didn't know how many of their customers had begun telling friends, simply, "I'm going to get a Ricker's Pop."
"After [the company] did the research," Jay Ricker told the newspaper, "they kind of went, 'Well, duh. Your customers have named you: You're 'Ricker's'."
The considerable success of Ricker Pop was not so much the soft drinks, said the report. It was the opportunity that people got when they paid their money: to choose any soft drink they wanted. Or any combination thereof.
"Compare it to, let's say, a McDonald's," said Keith Broviak, marketing director for Anderson, Ind.-based Ricker Oil Co. "Anywhere that you go in the country, you know that you can go into a McDonald's and order a Big Mac. And you're going to get a consistent taste throughout the country. When people come to a Ricker's, they don't have to think about whether they can get a Coke, a Diet Coke, a Pepsi, a Diet Pepsi, or whatever. They just know that it's going to be there, and they're going to get it at a consistent price and quality."
According to Scot Imus, executive director of the Indiana Petroleum Marketers & Convenience Store Association, Ricker's hit on a savvy strategy before any of its competitors did. "When it comes to the selling of fuel," he told the paper, "there's not a lot of loyalty. It's pretty well price-driven. By having a product that has a uniqueness, that you can be known for, you can drive traffic to your location. It's been very successful in that regard."
Ricker Pops don't sell a lot because they taste so good, they taste so good because Ricker's sells a lot of them, said the report.
"Pancake syrup is going to taste best when it's first opened, when it's fresh," Broviak said. "[As it sits], that syrup will deteriorate. The same thing goes for [soft drink] syrup."
"We go through so much volume that everything is very fresh, fresh, fresh," Ricker told the Herald Bulletin. "A lot of competitors don't go through the kind of volume we do, so they may have slightly older product going through their fountains. "We get asked, 'Do you put something special in it?' We don't, although we'll kid people occasionally. It's just that we're doing all the basics right."
Ricker won't divulge formulas or sales figures. "Let's put it this way," he said. "We sell A LOT [of pop]."
Despite yearly price increases from Coke and Pepsi, Ricker Pops have been 59, 69 and 79 cents for almost 15 years, Ricker added.
Early on, Broviak told the paper, many competitors did not want to sacrifice their wide profit markup on fountain soft drinks. He admitted that 2007 sales were better than 2008's, mainly because of the "brutally" hot summer of 2007. The economy, though, is the overriding factor, and it has hit Ricker just as it has hit everything else. "When you look at this economy, people are cutting back," Broviak said. "And that's just natural. "People might be delaying big purchases, like automobiles. But as Jay mentioned earlier, Ricker Pop is still 79 cents."
Ricker added, "In this economy, Ricker Pop is an 'affordable pleasure'."
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