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BURMA SHAVE IS BACK!!
These are the current Burma-Shave products on the market, for sale at Wal-Mart
and other discount department stores. There's been little advertising for the
current crop of Burma-Shave products, and you have to wonder if the American
Safety Razor Company is really committed to a rigorous marketing campaign.
Get yours while you can.
Read the New York Times story below to learn about its
re-introduction.
I promise to read this later.
First, let's see those 
signs!
Burma-Shave, a bygone brand that is as warmly recalled for its advertising as its attributes, is being reintroduced with a campaign that seeks to strike a contemporary note while evoking nostalgia for an era of two-lane highways, 35-mile-an-hour speed limits and signs that are still fondly remembered as the "verse by the side of the road."
The American Safety Razor Company, which has sold Burma-Shave shaving cream only sporadically for the last three decades, and last advertised the brand in 1977, plans a television campaign, scheduled to begin this week, that will herald the arrival in stores of an expanded line of Burma-Shave products from shaving cream and after-shave to razors and blades.
A 30-second commercial, which will run on national cable networks, features an updated version of the once-omnipresent Burma-Shave rhyming roadside signs. Those miniature red-and-white billboards helped the brand become a popular-culture icon.
The signs, which sprouted along roads (mostly rural) from 1925 to 1964, reached their peak in the early 1950s, when 7000 sets were on display in 45 states. The Burma-Shave phenomenon was even celebrated in a book, Verse by the Side of the Road: The Story of Burma-Shave Signs and Jingles.
The revival efforts for Burma-Shave are indicative of attempts by marketers of products that bear valuable and venerable trademarks to reach today's consumers by revamping yesterday's sales pitches. For example, the Borden Foods Corporation unit has redesigned - for the first time since the 1970s - the ad characters Sailor Jack and Bingo, the boy and dog featured for 80 years on packages of Cracker Jack snacks. And the Chiquita Brands Company is sponsoring a contest to write new lyrics for the Chiquita Banana jingle, which a singing banana introduced to radio audiences in 1944.
"Burma-Shave occupies a unique place in the minds and hearts of many Americans," said James V. Heim, senior vice president for consumer and personal products at American Safety Razor in Verona, Virginia, which also sells Personna razor blades and shaving items sold under store-brand names. "But you've also got to meet the market demand" of contemporary consumers, Mr. Heim said, adding that in this case, "the product has got to perform like new, offering technology like a Schick or one of our private-label products."
That is why the reintroduced Burma-Shave items carry promises on the packages of "21st century technology" along with a stated goal to "return Burma-Shave to its proper place on the American face." Mixed in among examples of the old jingles and evocations of "legendary quality" are phrases like "environmentally friendly"; the after-shave is billed as a skin conditioner that contains "sun protection ingredients."
In working on the campaign, executives decided to concentrate on making Burma-Shave stand for high-quality shaving products, among men ages 45 and above - in other words, those who may recall seeing the signs when as children or teenagers they traveled with their parents in the 1940s or 1950s.
So the commercial features a man in his mid-50s, driving a 1958 Chevrolet Corvette. Next to him is a woman who is "about 46," said Mr. Heim of American Safety Razor. The husband and wife are driving along a picturesque road that winds along a seashore. After they glimpse a modern-day version of a set of Burma-Shave signs, the viewer sees the car parked, with the doors open, and the couple gone - presumable to smooch somewhere on the sand.
You don't have a care
You don't have a worry
You reached a point
Where you don't
Have to hurry
Burma-Shave
The idea of the style of the original signs, which were initially created by Allan G. Odell. He was the son of the founder of the first maker of Burma-Shave, Burma-Vita.
The signs delighted motorists with their wry, winsome way of peddling Burma-Shave in rhymed couplets. They appeared in clusters of six, spaced 100 feet apart on straight stretches of road. Each of the first five signs carried a line of the jingle; the punch line or payoff was usually on sign No. 5. Take the sign that Grace Odell, wife of Mr. Odell, who died in 1990, called his favorite:
Within this vale
Of toil
And sin
Your head grows bald
But not your chin
Burma-Shave
The growth of the interstate highway system, with its faster speed limits, doomed the Burma-Shave signs on back roads to oblivion. Burma-Vita was sold in 1963 to what is now the Philip Morris Companies and absorbed by that giant company's American Safety Razor division. A year later, the signs came down. Philip Morris sold the division to an investor group in 1977.
American Safety Razor plans to spend about $1.5 million on the revival campaign through the end of the year, Mr. Heim said, adding that the commercials would run on CNN and ESPN.
