Girl Scouts: Limiting Cookie Sales by Strengthening Their Brand?

by cv harquail on February 8, 2010

Good news for you and your Thin Mint Addiction!

The Girl Scouts are making it easy to find out where those dang cookies are being sold!

(Now I don’t have to drive to Walmart and get the cheaper but less meaningful generic imitations!)

The Girl Scouts have an online cookie locator– just type in your zip code and (in most cases) you get all you need to know to fulfill your cookie cravings.online cookie.jpg

This is a great innovation, since it’s much easier to buy cookies when you know when and where they’ll be available, right?

But there is one interesting tweak with the Girls Scouts’ online sale program — you can’t actually “buy” the cookies with a few mouse clicks.

You can let your local Girl Scouts know that you want to but cookies, and in some areas you can place an order, but in all cases an actual Girl Scout has to deliver the cookies to you and collect your payment.

Obviously, this extra step adds ‘friction’ to the sales process, and may deter some customers from buying cookies.

Is it smart for the Girl Scouts to have this limitation on their cookie e-commerce?

Absolutely. This may be a little annoyance for the cookie buyer who wants a quick fix. BUT, this obstacle serves an important purpose.

By having the cookies delivered by actual Girl Scouts, this step in the sales process –

  1. Reminds buyers that there are actual Girl Scouts connected to the cookies. These are Cookies with a Mission, sold by Girls who are doing Great Things.

  2. Allows buyers to meet a few Girl Scouts in their town. Heck, they may even recognize these girls as neighbors– supporting a sense of community.

  3. Allows buyers and Girl Scouts a chance to talk about Scouting, about the girls’ troop’s plans for the money and/or their activities in the community.

  4. Keeps the girls themselves actively involved in the sales process, so that they keep learning the right lessons about business.

Girl Scout Cookie Sales exist for several reasons, only one of which is fundraising.

As we discovered in the responses to my posts about Girl Scout Cookies, Walmart, and social media, there is a great deal of misunderstanding, as well as general lack of understanding, about how cookie sales support the Girl Scouts. (I’ll address these issues in some upcoming posts. )

This little tweak in the online-assisted Girl Scout Cookie Sales process might look like it is limiting the number of cookies the Girl Scouts might sell — but it also makes sure that the cookie sales support the Girl Scouts’ overall brand. This may cost them a little in lost sales, but it contributes to the overall program for rebranding the Girl Scouts and reinforcing their mission.

I can’t imagine that anyone who loves authentic Thin Mints, or authentic organizations, will be deterred by a little face-to-face brandbuilding, do you?

[Fortunately or unfortunately, the specifics & ease of these online-assisted sales will vary with your Girl Scout Council (the region assigned by your zip code). Some Councils ask you to enter your email and then have a particular troop contact you. Other regions just have a landing page with basic info about the sale program. My own Council has an inert and not-very-helpful landing page. And yes, I have already sent them an email with suggestions on how to improve it quickly. We'll see how they respond.]

Come check out and contribute to the new group blog for Management Scholars, www.InsightsToActions.com!

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Does the iPad Signal a Change in Apple’s Core Brand & Identity?

by cv harquail on February 2, 2010

If products reflect an organization’s values and an organization’s identity, does Apple’s new iPad tell us something about where Apple as a company is headed?

And, if that’s where Apple is going, do we all want to go there too?

Here’s a proposition:

  • Apple as an organization is changing, from an organization that’s “about” creativity to an organization that’s “about” consumption.
  • Most consumers haven’t noticed this change, although the tech community is on to it.
  • While many consumers won’t care, Apple’s core customers and its biggest fans will feel disappointed by this identity change. Some may even feel betrayed.

Let’s build the argument:

An organization’s products communicate that organization’s identity.

An organization’s products – their physical features, their intended uses, their manufacturing processes, and their marketing strategies — communicate an organization’s values. green apple.jpg

When an organization creates, produces, distributes, and supports a product, that organization makes important choices. The organization places bets on what it thinks consumers want (or need), decides which possibilities it wants its products to support, and decides how it uniquely will make these come about. The organization chooses a physical design, a software platform, and a set of utilities, to support a certain kind of current use.

The organization’s choices also express, demonstrate and create the organization’s vision of the future.

Corporate values = product attributes = corporate brand = product brand

The relationship between an organization’s identity and its products’ defining attributes is like the relationship between the chicken and egg. Neither one comes first, and each depends on the other.

Consumers have an understanding of the organization’s brand (or identity) and see the brand in the organization’s products. And, consumers come to equate the qualities of the product and the attributes of the organization itself.

Nowhere is this interdependency between organizational ‘brand’ and product brand more apparent than at Apple.

Apple’s product brand: What do we think makes Apple products special?

Each Apple product is positioned as a tool to ‘think different’. Apple products emphasize sophisticated visual design, simplicity, sheer beauty, and an “alpha-underdog-ness” that suggests that everything that makes Apple products different from convention also makes them better.

Apple’s organizational brand: Who do we think Apple is? [click to continue…]

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Work-Life Initiatives Are the Foundation of Authentic Organizations

January 29, 2010

Earlier this week I met with a group of organizational change advocates, each of whom is dedicated to reshaping the relationship between work and life.
Work-Life issues per se aren’t really my gig, although I’ve had a fair amount of work-life conflict in my day as an employee and as a manager. However, I invited myself [...]

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The (Feminist) Business Bloggers’ Lament

January 26, 2010

In the past several weeks I’ve been working with two different groups of businesswomen, developing social-media based movements to advance social change in and around the workplace.
Conversations with these women have been intellectually challenging, inspiring and empowering. And they have also been oddly confessional, about a problem that — in my opinion — it’s time [...]

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How Layoffs Have Evolved: From “Office Space” to “Up In The Air”

January 25, 2010

In the decade since its release, the movie Office Space has dramatized the corporate best of work-life dystopia.
In Office Space, we’ve got the Lumberg, the red stapler, the TPS Reports, a bad case of the Mondays, a little flair, and of course, “the Bobs”. Oh, the Bobs, those clueless, bumbling, omniscient consultants from corporate who [...]

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Corporations as Persons: Steven Colbert explains this bad idea

January 22, 2010

[Jan 21: In light of yesterday's Supreme Court Decision, I'm re-posting this serious & pop-culture critique of the anti-democratic argument that Corporations Are People. Scott Klinger writing over at Alternet, sets out what it would/should mean for corporations really to be treated as "persons" and thus have the same responsibilities as people too. Me, [...]

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Authentic Twitter: Are exclamation points unprofessional?

January 20, 2010

Exclamation Points: An Authenticity Issue
Last week, I got a bit of crap from I was chided by one of my colleagues for sending a 4-line email with three (three!!) exclamation points. This colleague also pointed out that I occasionally sprinkle my tweets with exclamation points.
This is a problem. These exclamation points, s/he explained, are simply [...]

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Work-Life Fit is an Enterprise 2.0 Solution

January 19, 2010

This headline could be puzzling…  What could possible make Work-Life Fit and Enterprise 2.0 relevant to each other? After all, one is a challenge of the modern workplace, and the other is a challenge to the modern workplace.
They come together because both concepts ask us to redesign our organizations.

Although Enterprise 2.0 and Work-Life Fit strategies [...]

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Networks and the Myth that Flatter Organizations are Better

January 15, 2010

Are flatter organizations really “better”? If they are better, how?
Hey, I already wrote a dissertation, so I’m not going to take on that question in its entirety. And, I’m not going to do the proper academic thing of being super-specific and qualifying my points. You got complaints? Email me and I’ll send you the scientific [...]

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Networks and The Myth of Flattening Organizations

January 14, 2010

I was excited to hear from a few social media/Enterprise 2.0 advocates after my post last week asking When will social business become social change business? Special thanks to Jon Husband of Wirearchy, who not only confirmed that he has a revolutionary agenda behind his networked models of organizing but who also sent me some [...]

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