Back to the Main Business
From the middle of October, once the world beyond the company had settled, Kijo gave himself wholly to the business.
The 1950s had been a time when everything was scarce. Make something halfway decent and it sold; put wheels under anything and there was money to be made. The cash cows—tungsten hauling and freight for the U.S. military—ran smoothly. The brick business had always done well, and Cheongsan Construction kept earning dollars on a steady stream of military contracts.
The broadcasting venture slid deeper into the red as they brought in high-output antenna equipment, but with Chang Key-young bearing the losses alongside him, the burden was not so heavy.
The problem was Miwon.
Profitability was falling by the day, and the cause was a bleeding war with Lee Byung-chull's Mipung. The one who had set the promotional fight ablaze was the latecomer with the fatter purse: Cheil Jedang. They began by giving a small packet of sugar with every bag of Mipung, and the freebies only climbed. A buy-one-get-one on Mipung came with sugar thrown in besides, and at last they offered a set of winter underwear, first come, first served, to anyone who mailed in five empty 100-gram bags.
By the standards of the day it was a staggering giveaway. Five thousand people received underwear, another five thousand a wrapping cloth, and everyone who sent bags in was mailed a calendar. Miwon's sales collapsed.
Kijo answered in kind. Mail in five 100-gram bags of Miwon, and a drawing would award a gold ring of ten don. It could not match Samsung's event, which had laid in more than ten thousand prizes, but once five winners walked off with gold rings, Miwon's sales recovered.
The moment Miwon began to move again, Cheil Jedang put up five thousand expensive sweaters as further prizes. Kijo met them with a cash drawing of his own, a hundred names chosen to receive two thousand hwan each. There was no law to limit what a company might give away, and the promotional war was turning, little by little, into a pure contest of volume.
Kijo chose not to answer them any further. He would tour the country instead and see for himself how Miwon was actually selling. Figures sent up to headquarters, he knew, could never tell him the true mood of the sales floor. He began where Miwon itself had begun, in Busan.
Stepping into a small shop, he looked over the seasonings on the shelves and was pleased to find Miwon set out in front. When he asked the proprietor why, the answer came back at once.
"A Busan man ought to use Busan goods, shouldn't he? Those Cheil Jedang fellows said if I put Mipung up front they'd give me this and that. I told them not to talk rubbish and sent them packing."
Was it the Miwon factory they had been the first to build in Busan, or the good Cheongsan had done over the summer? Whatever the reason, Miwon was receiving special treatment. He had heard it without ever saying he was from Cheongsan Seasoning, and that made the pleasure keener. The other shops told much the same story. The retailers of Busan were, by and large, of one mind.
He asked about the taste as well.
"How is it? Is there a difference among the three companies?"
Put the question that way, and people said Miwon brought the flavor out best of all.
"Mipung, how do I put it...? Drop it in a soup and it goes a bit greasy. Funny, the way it does."
Cheil Jedang's Mipung was made by bringing Ajinomoto's methods over whole, and still the judgment was poor.
"And Miwang?"
"Miwang's the closest thing to Miwon."
Lim Dae-hong's Miwon and Miwang were twins in quality as well. Across the whole of South Gyeongsang the response was much like Busan's, and people had taken to the Cheongsan name with the attachment one feels for a hometown firm.
Kijo moved on into North Gyeongsang to take the measure of things there.
"Didn't they say the man who makes Miwon helped us something fierce when the rains came, and the typhoon? Better than the country itself. Wouldn't take a cent to build the levees, and he handed out hardtack besides. We don't eat that Mipung. We eat Miwon."
The money and the labor poured in through the monsoon and the typhoon had not, after all, been spent in vain.
From there he went to Chungcheong. While he waited for Kim Seogwang, who was coming back from a circuit of the Honam provinces, he looked the region over, and found a situation nothing like Yeongnam, and nowhere near as kind.
A shopkeeper who had set Mipung at the very front of the display put it plainly.
"Folks these days are sharp. They grab first whatever comes with the most prizes. Cheil Jedang's giveaways are a little richer, so that's what gets bought."
With the man's leave, Kijo stayed in the shop and watched the housewives who came for seasoning. Women wavering between Miwon and Mipung ended by picking up Mipung, and every face was faintly sour about it. They bought the stuff, and still something in them clearly did not sit right. He followed one of them out the door.
"Excuse me. Could I ask you something?"
"Oh... yes."
Kijo was a handsome man, neatly turned out in a suit. She had been wary at first, but she was soon smiling.
"You sighed just now, buying that Mipung. I wondered why."
"Well, it's..."
She hesitated, and he offered his card. She looked at it, startled, then seemed to make up her mind.
"Miwon tastes better. Miwang's good too, only I don't care for the packaging—anyway. My husband says the soup is better with Miwon in it. I only buy Mipung for the prizes."
"You're not saying that just because I'm the president of Cheongsan Seasoning?"
"Oh, goodness, no. The women in the neighborhood all say the same."
Her answer put fresh strength in him.
"Do you mean to go on buying Mipung?"
"No. I kept at it because I wanted to win something. But there's no household money left for seasoning now. I have to stop."
"And once the money comes back, will you buy Mipung again?"
"I don't know... If my tongue gets used to it, maybe. But I think next time it'll be Miwon. Mipung's a little greasy..."
He thanked her and pressed into her hands a few bags of the Miwon he had brought along. Then he went on to several more shops, checking where the goods sat on the shelves and talking with people who left carrying Mipung or Miwon. Consumer opinion was much the same everywhere.
When he met Kim Seogwang, back from his tour of Honam, he asked how it had gone.
"How's Honam?"
What Seogwang had found was hardly different from Chungcheong. The two of them finished with Gyeonggi and Incheon as well, returned to Seoul, called the department heads together, and opened a meeting. What they had gathered on the road they set down in charts, ranking in five places the reasons consumers chose Mipung and the reasons they bought Miwon, so the department heads could see what customers actually felt.
Then Seong Dae-ik gave his view.
"I don't think Cheongsan needs to run any more prize events."
"Why not?"
"People have hit the limit of what they can spend on seasoning, and they say Cheongsan tastes better. In the end, I expect Miwon's sales to rise again."
The other department heads nodded. All of them looked sick of a prize war against a conglomerate the size of Cheil Jedang.
Kijo did not see it that way. If Cheongsan quit the contest here, it would be no different from raising the white flag. He put a question to Dae-ik's reasoning.
"Suppose Cheil Jedang has seen the same thing. What do you think they'll do?"
The department heads had nothing in particular to offer. Jin Hyun-kyung was no department head, but she was in the room, and she raised her hand.
"Miss Hyun-kyung, go ahead."
She got to her feet.
"If I worked for Cheil Jedang, I would argue for running the prize events on a regular cycle."
"Why?"
"You work out when the money people spent on seasoning will have filled back up, and then you open another big event. They'll buy Mipung all over again."
Kijo nodded. She had said what he himself had meant to say.
"I agree with Miss Hyun-kyung. Stir a person's taste for a gamble and they'll buy Mipung again on the off chance it pays. Let that repeat, and they buy it out of habit."
At that, the department heads' faces grew grave.
"What do you think we ought to do, sir?" Dae-ik asked.
"Until now we've answered them passively. Cheil Jedang picked the fight, and only then did we respond. I think that has to change."
"You mean we should pick the fight ourselves?"
"Yes. We strike Cheil Jedang first, and we keep on striking until they're sick of the whole thing."
At that declaration of all-out war, the department heads kept their counsel. Seong Dae-ik's face, above all, went hard. He knew the books better than anyone. Over the summer they had spent twenty million hwan of their reserves helping Yeongnam, and the expansion of the broadcasting station would keep drawing money out. To provoke cash-flush Cheil Jedang on top of that, and then to keep fighting, was a heavy load. He was against any promotion that would worsen the company's finances, and he asked with care.
"Sir, how large a budget do you have in mind for the prize events?"
"I don't mean to set one."
"What?"
The department heads were taken aback.
Cheil Jedang's campaigns were one-off affairs of two months, built to push a customer into five large bags of Mipung, or ten small ones, inside that window. The events were short and heavy, but the effect ran long. People were led to buy more seasoning than they needed and to lay it up at home, and until the Mipung in the cupboard was gone they could not buy anyone else's. It was a strategy of starving the rival out. An unlimited event against an opponent who fought like that—no one could even begin to guess what Kijo had in mind.
"Honestly, sir, I can't get a feel for the strategy..."
Kijo took the frankness as it was meant. Asking Cheongsan's department heads to design a marketing war on this scale for themselves was still too soon. He would have to lead it in person.
"For the first round, we open a prize festival. Three thousand bicycles."
Seogwang half rose from his seat, startled.
"Three thousand bicycles?"
"Yes. They call this a land of rivers and mountains, three thousand li of it. Three thousand bicycles seems about right."
The department heads broke into a murmur, asking one another what a bicycle went for these days. The prices they knew did not agree, so they settled on an average, and Hyun-kyung, first to finish the sum, gave it to the men around her.
"Call it 2,500 hwan on average. Three thousand of them comes to 7.5 million hwan."
Heads nodded. The question now was how many months a giveaway of that size would run. The shorter the cycle, the more the money would pour out.
"Sir, how many months are you thinking for the bicycle event?"
"Not all three thousand at once. Ten a month."
They smiled and nodded. A month's promotion came to a mere 25,000 hwan. No great burden at all, and the relief showed on every face. Kijo went on.
"This isn't about matching Cheil Jedang bag for bag. It's to keep the load light on the company, and light on the people who enter."
He told them they had to aim at the flaw in Cheil Jedang's method, which made a customer buy in bulk before an entry counted for anything.
"We'll let a person enter on a single fifty-gram bag. If one small packet is enough, then even someone who already bought a pile of Mipung can pick up one more."
Shim Hansu was for a plan that let the thin of wallet take part as well.
"People who couldn't join before, for lack of money, ought to come in droves. And bicycles are popular enough that one small bag of Miwon will feel like buying a lottery ticket."
Kijo nodded. A single bicycle cost a working man two or three months' wages. In the 2020s, with savings high and a card to carry the installments, a thing priced at two months' pay was easy enough to buy. The 1950s were not that world. Necessities were so dear that almost nothing was saved; spend only on food and clothing and the money was gone, and that without eating well or dressing well. There was no short credit of the kind a card would later offer, and people were straining just to live, so a bicycle at two months' wages stayed forever pie in the sky for ordinary folk.
The department heads welcomed the idea, and still they wondered what would follow. He had said it was the first round, a festival of three thousand bicycles. Did that not mean there might be a second, and a third? The thought came to them that this might not be the end.