Billion-dollar Brand: Thomas E. Wilson

Thomas E. Wilson was a name 100 years before he became a name brand.

Born in 1868 in London, Ontario, Wilson built a red-meat empire by the time he was 48. A photograph from the early 20th century titled “Titans of Industry” pictures him alongside Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie.

Now a new generation of inventors at Tyson Foods Inc. is standing by Wilson.

Tyson, which added the brand to its stable in 2001 through its $4.7 billion acquisition of IBP Inc., has launched the first of several marketing waves it hopes will keep the Wilson label around for another century. First up are four individually quick-frozen beef and pork products. But Jack Dunn, who in 1999 helped create the Wilson line for IBP, said that’s just the beginning.

“Many other products are under way right now,” said Dunn, now the senior vice president of Tyson’s refrigerated processed meats division.

“Every division of Tyson is adopting a [Thomas E. Wilson] effort. You’re going to see an acceleration of the value-added Wilson products as a result of the Tyson acquisition.”

Wilson is already off to a good start. PepsiOne was 2001’s top-selling new food-and-beverage product introduction with $200 million in sales. But Wilson beef and pork sales are tracking at more than $1 billion after only 18 months on the market.

The line’s diversity is one reason why. There are 90 different stock keeping units (SKUs), or different items of Wilson beef products, in Wal-Mart Stores, and another 40 SKUs of the brand’s pork. Dunn said that’s the largest set of anything in Wal-Mart’s grocery aisles.

“It’s bigger than Coke or Campbell Soup’s sections,” Dunn said.

How the Wilson label got to this point is a textbook study in product development.

After consolidating as many raw materials as possible throughout the 1990s, IBP’s former CEO Bob Peterson and president Dick Bond decided it was time to add value to their product line. They hired Dunn away from Simmons Foods Inc. of Siloam Springs to give their cuts of meat a household name.

“The chicken guys really got the drop on the red meat guys during the early 1980s,” Dunn said. “The beef industry was much later coming to the value-added party, and that allowed chicken to generate significant inroads into their business during the last 20 years.

“But the vision for [Thomas E. Wilson] really came from Mr. Peterson and Mr. Bond.”

Dunn, a former U.S. Army captain and graduate of West Point, cut his teeth on marketing fundamentals at Procter & Gamble before joining Tyson in the mid-80s. He spent 10 years in Tyson’s retail division, which is famous for dominating the marketplace.

His challenge was to reach two groups IBP defined as “today’s Cleavers” and “frenzied families,” which by-and-large meant baby-boomer types and families on the go. Dunn said those groups comprise 39 percent of the population and make 70 percent of all meat purchases.

He tested eight different types of labels for the IBP label, but kept coming back to surnames because he said, “Americans love surname brands like Tyson, Heinz and Ford because they believe someone stands behind that product.”

IBP had in past years acquired former interests of Wilson & Co., Thomas E. Wilson’s brainchild, so the fit was a natural. When field tests of 800 consumers in 20 cities showed that Wilson’s name evoked thoughts of a Midwestern farm, blue-collar work ethics and someone who would stand behind their work, it was a ‘Dunn’ deal.

The packaging, a simple label with maroon coloring and Wilson’s signature over a ghosted stamp of quality, came soon thereafter.

Dunn said everything about the packaging and the product’s name says “heritage, trust and quality.”

John Tyson, the company’s chairman, president and CEO, recently told the Consumer Analysts Group of New York that he expects the Wilson label to generate sales of $1.3 billion by 2002’s end.