Nova Scotia Buzz
You’ve likely seen the television commercials for Buckley’s cold medicine and know the tagline, Buckley’s: It Tastes Awful and It Works. What many don’t know is the person who is credited with creating the popular, awful tasting medicine grew up in Cape Breton.
William Knapp Buckley was the inventor of Buckley’s Cough Syrup and was born in Wallace, NS, which is a short distance from Amherst. The family would later move to Sydney, Cape Breton where Buckley’s older brother Donald would become a local pharmacist.
Donald bought a pharmacy on the corner of Charlotte and Prince Street in Downtown Sydney where W.K. would work. It’s here that the family is believed to have sold the first version of an awful tasting cold medicine. In Sydney, W.K. found his passion for medicine which brought him to Toronto in 1914 to attend the Ontario College of Pharmacy.
After graduation in 1919 he purchased a Toronto drugstore and began to mass produce a version of his family’s cough and cold medicine. He named it Buckley’s Original Mixture and began marketing the product in 1920.
W.K. Buckley would go on to have a son named Frank. Frank returned from World War II and joined the family business as a salesman. Frank developed The Bad Taste Campaign. The mixture had two strong characteristics. It tasted horrible and it worked great.
With these two characteristics Frank created the popular, award winning advertising tagline: It tastes awful. And it works. Frank quickly became the face of Buckley’s sharing the wonderful creation credited to his father. The company’s market share of the cough and cold market category in Canada quickly grew to 10% thanks to the smart advertising.
The ingredients that made the Nova Scotia Buckley’s a household name include balsam, menthol, camphor and pine needle oil. It taste’s awful, and it works.
