|
|
1 of 3
I WAS FREE ASSOCIATING in the closety,
humming air of a plane twenty thousand feet above who knows where. I was thinking about the Mad Moose brand, whose tagline is “Proactively
Stupid” and whose signature products are a peanut butter white-chocolate
cereal, a banana almond-bark cereal, and an orange-chocolate cereal
that they market as a hangover remedy. I was thinking, on some level
a bagel is a natural extension of a cereal because a bagel is just
a gigantic toasty o; and I was thinking that they would succeed
because all previous bagel makers tried to start with authentic bagels
and midwestern them down but that Mad Moose would not even try to be
authentic; they would take the Las Vegas-in-a-bowl breakfast cereal
ethos and just slap it onto bagels. And I was firing up my laptop, waiting
for its airy whir and blinking awakening. My eyes dried a little; my
shoulders hunched a little; I heard the chipmunky sounds of my fingers
key-entering my thoughts. And that is what I was doing, as best
I can recreate it, at the exact time that a stroke fizzed through my mother’s brain and she collapsed, alone in her house in Minnisapa,
Minnesota to lie on the floor for twenty hours in a chaos of Hummel
figurines. Some of the figurines had cut her.
Who can forget the glowing triviality
and intramural pettiness of the moments before you hear bad news? A
"I was thinking, on some level
a bagel is a natural extension of a cereal because a bagel is just
a gigantic toasty o..."
|
day off the plane, I sat in a conference room and brainstormed with
my clients about potential brand extensions. Me, my friend the CEO,
a new executive who seemed to be a numbers guy, a brand manager, a graphic
designer, and a project manager. It was one of those brainstorms
where your brain actually surged and sparked, where ideas lurked in
coffee cups the way motion lurks in oil; where thoughts flew against
whiteboards as if of their own momentum. People looked in the same direction,
people leaned forward with energy or leaned back with ease, people smiled
at each other with asides.
The pretty young project manager wrote the ideas on the white paper
as if she were pleased that they passed through her hand. Bagels in refillable day-glo disks, the Why-not-reinvent-the-Wheel? sweepstakes,
bagel sundaes, advertising budgets shifted from more traditional media
to 5,000 painted hubcaps, bagels placed in rent-a-cars,
“I can’t believe-it’s not-a-donut!”
My buddy got up, made a mock-humble CEO joke about how the ideas will
improve as soon as he leaves, and smacked my shoulder. Cracker Jack
prizes, cartoony illustrated panels like on old cereal boxes, edible
yo yos.
The
new executive had been quiet. It turned out that he was from one of
the more traditional food companies and that he was kind of a dick.
He said, “We’ve had our fun. Now, which of these are we going to
focus group?”
If you can’t be creative, I guess
you can infantilize the people who are.
“That’s not really the style here,”
I said. “Focus groups don’t test concepts; they test group dynamics.”
Some
flare of disgust hardened my words. And when I said, “That’s
not really the style here,” I’d implied that I knew more about his
company than he did. Of course, I did.
“But
you make a great point,” I said. “The next step is to sort out winners.”
Was this enough to placate him? Was “great point” sucking
up too much? As he was looking at me, he looked down and his irritation
focused into contempt. I looked down, saw a glistening little plastic
thorax, and realized that I’d been chewing on my pen cap, and it had
fallen off; it was all bent, wet and indented with bite marks, revealing
the chipmunk within the consultant, something nervous and spitty within
me. I quickly picked it up and reattached it.
“I’m
working for you guys. I can write up the notes,” I said. I might as
well have just rolled on my back and
showed him my nuts. At that
point, an executive assistant entered the room as tactfully as a draft
and said there was a phone call for me. I turn my cell phone off when
I’m with a client, so at first I was annoyed that someone was being
so pushy. Then, as I left the conference room, the other possibilities
for such a call occurred to me. Putting the phone to my ear felt
like stepping to the edge of a cliff.
|
|
|
|