A cautionary tale.
The year? 1998. Or 1999. We’ve tried to put it out of our memory. But it actually happened. A Marketing Case Study. Dave from Area 224 lived it.
The general idea went as follows: at the company meeting, where all of the “key managers” and “important executives” will be gathered, we need something big. No, HUGE. Rally the troops, get everyone on the same page. Get everyone psyched. We need a spectacle to kick it all off.
Take the most creative guy at the company, the guy who will eventually work in Hollywood and produce TV shows, and turn him loose. Let his humor shine – give him control over the project. (For the purposes of this story, let’s call him “Mr. Hollywood.”)
Throw in a former broadcaster (“Dave”), put him in a white dinner jacket, and let him act as a game show host.
Then…
Well, then let the project come off the rails. Horribly. Off. The. Rails.
The creative team – Dave and Mr. Hollywood – comes up with Idea A; but Idea A, which starts as a simple game show, ends up with a game you’ve all heard of and probably played.
Then, the now-expanded creative team says: “What we really need people to know is that the game has changed and we all need to be ready for the change.” (Believe it: in the late 90s, this company did indeed have the forethought to say “game changer.”)
The result gave us a storyboard that looked like this:
Open with a game board. Bring out real, live people dressed as game pieces. Bring out a female host, play the game for a few minutes. Then, bring out Dave, in a white dinner jacket for effect. Let him change the game by moving pieces around. Confuse everyone. Play the game for another few minutes. Leave the stage. Cue the CEO, who will give his “State of the Company” speech.
The CEO took the stage to stunned silence. He dove into his speech with no mention of what just happened.
Afterwards, he called the person in charge of planning the meeting and asked one question:
“How Much Did That Cost?”
Why do we share this tale? Well, in addition to being cathartic, this was one of the first things that came to mind here at Area 224 after analyzing the Groupon brand kerfuffle. (After the Burger King Whopper Virgins piece, which we talked about yesterday.)
See, these things can actually happen. In the case above, it happened at a company whose revenues were somewhere in Groupon’s ballpark. A team thinks they’re executing on the company’s vision of what a management meeting kickoff is supposed to look like. A CEO, however, had a completely different vision for the meeting: what investment are we making in our company’s success?
The creatives – Dave and Mr. Hollywood – and the whole team of game players did their best to execute on what was a bad idea from the get-go.
Introducing the concept of Game Change(r) in front of a group of people that had no idea what we were talking about. Sorta like introducing a snarky web company to a bunch of football watchers, and throwing in a confusing philanthropic message at the same time.
The white dinner jacket? Seemed really out of place. But it was the least of our problems after we dug out from that meeting.
The cost? Much more expensive than the actual price paid – a lesson Groupon is no doubt learning today.
