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Time Out. Luckman, who has been executive vice president of Lever Bros. since Jan. 1, is now set to go like hell. He has shaken up the top level of management, plans to shake it even more by bringing up young blood from within the company and from outside. Probable result: almost a whole new first team by summer's end, with the emphasis on youthful zip and the old school try.
The biggest shake-up will come in Lever's radio advertising. Long a leading purveyor of that curious phenomenon of U.S. culture, the soap opera, the company is going to cut down. Luckman has nothing against soap opera as such. Says he: "You can't reach a mass market with a symphony orchestra." But he thinks that radio talent has become too high-priced for Lever's advertising dollar.
Two Lever radio shows (Rinso's Big Sister and Lifebuoy's Bob Burns program) are to be axed. Before he's done, Luckman plans to slice $5 million from the budget for radio, pay it out for newspaper and magazine advertising. The budget, now weighted 70% to 30% in radio's favor, will be balanced, 50-50. Where Lever leads, others often follow.
Chuck Luckman knows that neither soap nor anything else can be sold by advertising alone. He is so dead certain that he keeps an eye on his and competitors' products by door-to-door selling himself.
Only two months ago he rang doorbells in Los Angeles. One matron complained that a competitor's soap wouldn't suds-up properly. Luckman, who thought it a good soap, challenged this. So he was hauled into the kitchen, made to roll up his sleeves and find out for himself. The woman was right. Her parting crack: "Young man, you have a lot to learn about the soap business."
Honors at 16. Luckman is well aware of this. But he has always learned fast. Born in Kansas City, of a family with little spare cash, he started selling newspapers at nine, later jerked sodas, delivered groceries, clerked. This didn't prevent him from graduating, at 16, with top honors in a class of 2,000 from Northeast High School—or from being class president, yearbook editor, prom chairman, debating captain and a member of the track team. That he was voted most-likely-to-succeed was anticlimactic.
He decided to be an architect. After a year at Kansas City Junior College, where he got in trouble for firebrand editorials in the school paper, he worked for two years as a plumber and draftsman in Chicago, saved enough money to study architecture at the University of Illinois.
A week before he got his Illinois diploma (in another blaze of scholastic honors), Chuck Luckman suddenly married the girl he had been going with since his freshman year. This was one of the few times he has given way to impulse. It meant goodbye to architecture. In 1931 few architects could support wives. So he was glad to get a "temporary" salesman's job with Colgate-Palmolive-Peetat$125amonth. From then on his life matched the triumphs of one of his own soap operas.
On Chicago's tough South Side, Chuck Luckman sold soap to seven of the first eight stores he visited. (Later he quipped: "If I couldn't sell soap in a dirty slum area I might as well quit.") He went on to chalk up an office sales record.