Charlize Theron and Product Placements

I just finished the latest episode of Top Chef with special guest judge Charlize Theron on my DVR. As a big fan of this show. I think this was THE MOST creative challenge they’ve ever had. As a marketer, I love how it was creatively entwined into a clever promotion for the new movie “Snow White and the Huntsman” where Charlize plays the Evil Queen.

So many product placements feel contrived and intrusive but this one was perfectly blended into the main premise of Top Chef: a cooking competition. The movie is a much darker version of the Snow White fairy tale. The challenge was to “create a gothic feast fit for a queen. Each dish should be wickedly beautiful…just like the queen.” Charlize challenged the chefs to bring her real indulgence and risk taking and to think like an evil queen.

Well, these directions sent all of the chefs down some truly creative paths with their plates. One dipped his gloved hand into a red sauce and left a full ‘bloody’ hand-print on the plate. Loved that! Another created a poison apple dessert with faux maggots and a worm. My favorite was a dish that was supposed to look like a black chicken had been slaughtered on the plate with a quail egg on top symbolizing the baby that had been inside her when she was slaughtered! NUTS! (Isnt’ that picture morbidly delicious?! taken with my Blackberry of the TV)

The beauty of the marketing behind the movie is that it pushed the creativity of the chefs well beyond their culinary school and fancy restaurant training. It made the show better. The viewers were presented with one of the best shows ever and the judges commented that the entire meal was one of the best in all the seasons of the show.

The movie trailer premiered during the show and because of the challenge and Charlize’s candor and personality during the show, I was actually excited to watch the commercial. Gold Star Top Chef and to the agency promoting “Snow White and the Huntsman!”

The Green Seats

You’ve seen them behind home plate at both Busch Stadiums. Maybe you’ve been lucky enough to sit in them and experience the rock star parking, the all-you-can-eat-and-drink fancy restaurant and the waiter/waitress service in the seats with another all-you-can-eat menu and of course the umpire-like view of the game.

The seats were added for the 1996 season and I was lucky enough to be involved on the project. Once the dome was built for the new St. Louis Rams, we knew Busch Stadium would no longer be hosting any major football games so the movable field box seats could be made permanent. It was decided to remove the turf and add grass and look at the new high-end seats the other teams were adding.

One day my boss sent me home early to pack…I had to go on the trip with the other executives to see the stadiums with the high-end seats the next day. This is when the team was still owned by Anheuser Busch. This was also my first time to ride in a private jet.

We flew from St. Louis to Houston to see the Astrodome, flew to San Diego to see Joe Robbie Stadium then to Los Angeles overnight. We looked at Dodger Stadium in the morning, then flew to San Francisco to see Candlestick park, then home. We were supposed to stop in Denver to visit the Rockies but they had a game. (No, I'm not kidding and Yes it was awesome!)

When we returned we debated the various amenities offered, ran the numbers and evaluated the space in old Busch Stadium on where we might build the restaurant, kitchen etc. Once these decisions were made, the prices set, the question came to me and my boss…”Can you sell these seats?” Of course we said “Yes!”

Remember this was pre-PSL. You could not buy your way in to the good seats. We had a seniority system for upgrading season ticket holders. In the off-season, during season ticket renewals, if someone gave up their seats these were used to upgrade other ticket holders. A few rows lower, a section closer etc. Pre-PSL you couldn’t just sell your tickets to someone else….no matter how much money they offered!

We knew there were many companies and individuals who had the means to buy these high-end seats. The Club Seats were originally sold for $100 per seat or $8,100 per season ticket. We sold them on speculation while they were under construction. Clearly the benefits and the view combined were amazing and we sold out.

Luckily we were on commission for the sale of all season tickets including the new Club Seats. I paid off one of my student loans that year! Go Cardinals!

Random Cardinals Memories

I started working for the Cardinals in 1986 as a switchboard operator and customer service rep. I worked full-time+ during the season and part-time in the off season. Watching the Cards this post-season has brought up a lot of fun memories from those days at the old Busch Stadium. Here’s a random collection of memories from those early years:

First Day: my friend Kevin got me the job which was awesome! He failed to tell me that the day I started was Country Western Day… a promotion for fans who came to the game in country western attire they received a discount on their ticket and a free concert after the game. For the employees, this meant they could wear jeans and CW attire. The ticket office showed up in a horse-drawn hay wagon. I showed up in my nerdy, white linen suit. Nice dorky, first impression!

Bullet-proof glass and cigarettes: All calls to the Cardinal offices, other than Charge line orders, went through the phone number 314-421-3060 answered by three of us. On a slow day we took 3-4K calls; medium busy 4-6K, and a really busy cay would be 7-8K calls! We sat in a 10 x 10 room off the lobby at 250 Stadium Plaza. We were behind bullet-proof glass and had a drawer for deliveries like you see at a Walgreens drive-thru (very customer friendly huh?). The other two ladies smoked from 8-5, non-stop. No, I’m not kidding. Sort of MadMen-esque!

Tony Pena and Willie McGee: the players parked in the West garage and came through our lobby to enter the stadium. We had to buzz them in. Lots of the players would just nod or smile and walk by, some would chit chat. Tony was a talker! He would hang out and shoot the breeze with us, he was really friendly. He had this crazy gold ring that spelled the letters T-O-N-Y in diamonds. I think he wore it on his middle or ring finger but the four letters stretched across all four fingers. He let me try it on once! Now Willie McGee was very humble and shy. He’d walk through, head down and he’d simply wave with his right hand. One time when he came through, I put my head down and mimicked his wave…he actually paused, smiled and laughed. That was a big reaction from Willie!

Jack Buck and Mike Shannon: in 1987, I worked in the promotions department. We handled all the give-aways at the games like cooler bag day, pennant day etc. One of my jobs was to write the radio copy for the ‘drop-ins’ Jack and Mike would read through-out the game. I have to say, it’s pretty cool to be driving home at night and hear Jack Buck and Mike Shannon reading verbatim the words you wrote!

Tito Landrum: there were five us that shared an office in the promotions department, including the guy who played Fred Bird. It was like a hilarious, quasi-grown-up kindergarten! Tito was good friends with John Kendall (Fred Bird) so he would come and hang out in our office. He got a kick out of answering our phone. He wouldn’t tell the caller they were talking to Tito Landrum but it sure entertained us! So if you ever called the promotions department looking for a donation for your group in 1987, you may have spoken to Tito Landrum! He also gave Monica, the other girl in the office, and I special attention since we were the only women in this crazy, testosterone-filled office. He brought us lunch one day and we had a picnic on the field. Pretty cool!

Deidre Hall and Tommy Lasorda: All calls to the club-house had to be announced. We were not allowed to simply transfer the calls. One day a woman called for Tommy Lasorda. I asked her name and she said Deidre Hall! I gasped…then said ‘one moment please’ and called Tommy. He took the call. OMG I was a HUGE ‘Days’ fan! That was a big moment for me!

Tommy Lasorda and Chaka Khan: From 1988-90 I worked in the sales department. My female bosses were only 10 years older than me, so we got along really well and socialized quite often. After five and before the game would start, we often grabbed a few margaritas at LaSala’s downtown. One night when the Dodgers were in town, we were having margaritas with some fella’s that were also friends with Tommy. After the game we all went to Charlie Gittos for dinner, and of course Tommy walks in with his SlimFast cooler bag! There were probably 10+ people in the group. The cocktails continued after dinner we hit AJ’s at the Adams Mark. We are all standing there, including Tommy Lasorda. The DJ plays Chaka Khan “I Feel for You.” This is my all-time favorite song so I had to dance. I asked every guy in our group to dance and they all said NO! I had no choice but to ask Tommy if he would dance with me…and he said YES! Hilarious! Afterwards, my boss, SueAnn, said everyone in the place was staring at us and wondering who Tommy was dancing with!

Stadium Diagram Photo Above: Every year we produced these large seating diagrams to help us sell season tickets, group tickets and party rooms. Every year AB put several million dollars into the stadium in capital investments to add new seats, party room etc. So the diagram changed every year. The one in the photo is from 1992, the Cardinals 100th Anniversary year. Instead of just throwing them out, my friend and I decided to take them home. I imagine this is one-of-a-kind. Pretty cool memento from my days at Busch Stadium.

How rally towels were invented...

I was lucky enough to work for the St. Louis Cardinals in college from 1986-1990 and then again from 1993-1997. I started out as a switchboard operator and customer service rep answering general Cardinal information, working as the front office receptionist and filling in for secretaries around the office. When they figured out I was smart and had more to offer, I moved to the promotions department.

In 1987 during the World Series, Bud Light sponsored an adult t-shirt giveway. That October night was windy and cold so everyone came to the game wearing winter coats. So instead of possibly putting on their new, cool, give away shirt, they just carried them to their seats.

Later I was watching the game from the offices and the coolest thing happened. All the fans started waving their shirts in the air. Instead of the usual sea of red, it was a sea of white waving spirit shirts! AWESOME!

We quickly went to work on producing actual rally flags for the next games. I’m sure one of the AB brands was the sponsor (one of the benefits of being an Anheuser-Busch subsidiary). And when the series moved to Minnesota, they totally stole the idea and and gave away rally flags!

At least, that’s my memory of how rally flags were invented. Pretty cool!

Updating product labels...20 years later

It’s been a very exciting year for the marketing department at Reliv with our rebranding efforts. So once we successfully launched the brand standards and the new logo, our next big project was to tackle our core product labels.

In the 20+ years of my marketing career, I’ve never worked for a company with a tangible consumer product. The St. Louis Cardinals was more of an experience; Charter Communications (cable TV and high-speed Internet) was more of a service evolving into a utility; at AVALA Marketing Sea Ray Boats was my major client but that’s not really a consumer packaged good; Maritz was b-2-b sales and marketing service model. So the label redesign was a very exciting opportunity for me.

Before the designers began concept one, we started with team discussion around a general label strategy. This really was a luxury to be able to redesign everything at once instead of one at a time. We could create a true line of products where they all look like they are from the same family, but each child has his own personality.

The labels had not changed since the launch of each product in the late 80’s through 2008. We launched a very cool, new, exciting product in February of 2011 called 24K. It was our first ready-to-drink product and featured a very modern and exciting label and was the first to feature our new label and color palette. The label redesign was an opportunity to build off 24K and create a balance across the line.

We wanted all the labels to appeal to a younger demographic and to people leading healthy active live but not alienate our core group of Distributors who skew over 50 and many of which are ‘sick and getting better.’

We wanted the labels to support cross-selling opportunities via common design elements.

Trust is one of our core values. We decided to create ‘trust’ icons for our 30-Day Money Back Guarantee, gluten-free and for the number of grams of soy protein.

We created a patent icon that would be consistent in design and placement across all patented products

We wanted consistent placement of the Reliv logo on all products so that at a glance your eye could scan and see the bold, circle logo on every can.

Considerations also needed to be made regarding the limitations of flexography printing. Because of budget and time resources we were not in an environment to research other label styles that would require changes to our internal manufacturing equipment.

Our next step was to create a mini-brief or personality profile for each product. We discussed the target audience, value prop and descriptors for each product. We put into words what we wanted the designs to deliver. E.g. ProVantage is our performance nutrition protein product. We wanted the label to ‘flex its muscles.’

We reviewed these strategy documents with everyone who would be involved in approving the concepts. This put the entire team on the same literal page of expectations.

We staggered the timeline for the new designs into batches based on manufacturing timelines. I factored in the travel schedules for all stakeholders to be sure that approvals would not be delayed. I also scheduled the first round of concept reviews for each batch weeks and months in advance to be sure we wouldn’t miss any dates.

I couldn’t have asked for the process to run more smoothly. The art department ‘knocked it out of the park!’ We flew through the approval process. Most of the first rounds of designs were approved with minor tweaks. The team pushed-back on a couple of designs (and rightly so) and the art department dug deep and gave us better designs. I am so proud of these designs. They are thoughtful, restrained and complex. We achieved everything in the strategic briefs and now they are getting rave reviews from the field. What a fun and satisfying accomplishment for me and my team.

Updating a Brand...20 years later

For most of my marketing career, I’ve worked for companies that had a well-defined brand strategy and I simply executed against or worked to refine the strategy. I was very surprised when I started at Reliv to find they had no formal, written brand guidelines and no logo standards. With an internal art department this provided a level of unguided freedom but there was nothing to anchor all of the creative so that you knew it was all from the same company. As a result, marketing collateral and product labels lacked consistency and cohesiveness.

Our management committee established a strategic initiative to “refresh, renew and reinvigorate” the brand. Looking back, I think their expectations were focused on our core product labels. Were they in for a ride!

As the new Director of Marketing, I needed to understand what I was trying to refresh! I improvised using a process I learned from the Market Intelligence group at Maritz. Normally this would involve conducting primary research to better understand the buyers, their perception of our brand and what aspects of our value proposition they see as table stakes or as valued and different. I knew we had zero budget for outside research so I simulated that process with our executives.

I began a brand audit with a core team of sales and marketing colleagues. We met to brainstorm and collaborate on initial thoughts about the Reliv brand. We created a laundry list of honest attributes, both positive and negative, that could be considered as our core values, brand personality and voice. Everyone contributed their own thoughts and brought in feedback from past conversations with the field. The output of these meetings was used as stimulus material for 1:1 executive interviews. This process was fascinating. Even without any formal brand guidelines, there was a tremendous amount of consistency in everyone’s perception of the brand. Integrity, quality and trust were mentioned by almost everyone as core values. It made me appreciate the legacy of what this company has accomplished.

The core team also reviewed secondary research from GfK Roper Consulting on global consumer trends. As a member of the AMA (American Marketing Association) I had been invited to attend a virtual conference on Marketing Research. I was thrilled as the team from GfK was presenting their slides and so many of their trends were perfectly aligned with Reliv. A few examples:

Consumers are becoming increasingly self-directed

Consumers crave security and trust

Higher level of concern with health and safety

Recession has been a ‘green’ stimulus

People are reaching out to others

Wellness, charity and green are intertwined values

After considering all data points, the core team decided upon Reliv’s mission statement, value proposition, core values, brand personality and brand voice. These were comprised of a combination of attributes that were presently true and a few that were aspirations and would guide new messaging.

With brand standards established, marketing evaluated these new descriptors against current marketing efforts and established a new color palette, approved fonts, photo style and general design and copy guidelines.

During my 1:1 executive interview with the President and CEO, he had given me the history of the logo and specifically advised me not to touch the logo during this process! My art director took it upon herself to modify the current logo. She raised the issue: our newly defined brand personality and voice no longer fit our current logo. We either had to change the brand or change the logo. We quietly socialized the new logo concept among the core team and everyone was in agreement.

Months of work culminated in a formal presentation to the management committee with the core team’s recommendation on our core values, brand personality and voice. And with the President sitting next to me, I proposed that we change the very logo that he specifically requested that we never change!

Professionally and personally this was a big moment for me. I had only been with the company for a year and I was proposing a change to their sacred teal logo…a logo that had never changed. But from a strategic perspective it was clear: change the logo or change the personality and voice.

This wasn’t about me and what I wanted or thought was right. I think we had the right people involved in the process. We took the time to review the research and thoughtfully debate the various attributes. The process guided the team to a collective agreement.

I am happy to say that when we launched the new logo and the brand standards to the field at our national conference it was all met with rave reviews. Our Distributors live and breathe our brand so they ate it up! The changes to the logo, while subtle to the naked eye, have made a vast impact on our design. The new standards have put everyone literally ‘on the same page!’ Now everyone talks about core values and being the brand…not just the marketing department!

Remembering 9/11

Watching the footage this morning I had a hard time to stop crying. Personally, I didn’t know anyone who died that day in any of the attack sites. Like everyone else on Twitter, Facebook and TV I thought about where I was and how I heard.

I had arrived at work sometime between 7:30 and 8am. I remember checking Yahoo and there was a single sentence as the lead news story. Something simple like “Plane hits World Trade Center.” The site was getting too much traffic and wouldn’t completely load. I imagined a small four-seater plane accidentally hitting a corner of one of the buildings. At that point, there was no way to imagine or comprehend what really happened.

We piped in a news radio station to our speaker phones so we could listen to the news. Even when the first tower collapsed there was still feeling of denial. There’s no way a building over 100 stories could have collapsed. I just couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I had been to the viewing deck on a really special trip to New York. There’s just no way.

It’s odd, in my previous two jobs with the Cardinals and Charter, I was used to everyone having a TV in their office. My boss ran home to get a small portable TV so we could see the news coverage. I didn’t see any footage of the towers falling until probably 10 or 10:30 St. Louis time. I still didn’t believe what I was seeing.

Experiencing this devastating event with co-workers was interesting. My title at that time was project manager and I shared an office with another pm. I remember us talking about how crazy it was that Bin Laden could ‘project manage’ this incredibly complex and senseless attack on four different sites from a cave in Afghanistan. The coordination of all the people, their specific assignments, their training, booking all the flights, getting the exact seat, getting through security etc. Imagine if he had put all those resources together for some good.

I have to say, after watching a lot of the footage and memorial shows today, State Farm nailed it with their commercial with the kids singing the Alicia Keyes song “Streets of New York” to a group of fire-fighters.