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Tunnel of Love Tour

November 16, 2010 1 Comment

I first heard this expression when I was running Seagram America’s marketing and went with the CEO to visit markets in South America.

His view of senior management market visits can best be summed up as follows: “What a waste of time. Everything we will see in the stores will be staged for our visit. It’s a tunnel of love tour but we need to do it.”

I felt he kind of missed the point a bit. Market visits were, and still are, designed to “see how we look” and in that regard it’s in the human condition to put your best foot forward. But you can’t stage how the competition looks and what they are up to at point of sale and who can control what Mr. Retailer has to say.

My favorite tunnel of love anecdote took place in a large, important US market known more for its on-premise business than retail stores. Nevertheless, the distributor wanted to show us how good he and our local marketing and sales reps were doing and how our floor programs stood out.

The entourage — a better description might be the sheriff and the posse — went off on the visit/tour and once inside a store, some spoke to the owner or manager while others checked the displays and floor programs.

A member of the group was fascinated by a multi-case display of one of our brands and the very attractive and large case card that accompanied it. Never having seen it before, but still admiring it, he called others over to have a look. Someone touched the case card and to his surprise, smudged it. It was hand painted… and still wet. We all smiled at what appeared to be a permanent holiday display that obviously had just been put up for our visit. “That’s okay,” someone said, “maybe it’ll stay up and look how much real estate the brands have.”

Smiles turned to laughter at the next stop, also a large store with a massive display right at the entrance.

There was the same case card with the same smudge in the same spot.

I have no idea how they moved that thing so quickly.

Limousines

November 1, 2010 No Comments

Nearly all the business executives I know who use car services for travel avoid limousines in favor of sedans. One exception I can think of, is when there is a large group so a limousine is more cost-effective. The other is the old school types (now few and far between) who think they are impressing suppliers by picking them up in a block long vehicle.

However, the car service companies sometimes feel they are rewarding a good client by “upgrading” them to a limousine from a town car.

I remember an occasion at the end of a long trip that culminated in an offsite meeting in the New York area and the concern I felt when I was told, “Oh, and since you are such a good customer, we are sending a limo.” “Please don’t; it’s not necessary.” The reply — “It’s on us, no extra charge.”

“You don’t understand,” I said. “My associates will be picked up in sedans or drive their own cars and there is no way I want them to think that I use limos … which I don’t.”

“I’m sorry,” the dispatcher said, “but the car is on the way and should be there in 10 minutes.”

In a near panic I replied, “Listen, call him and tell him to stay at the entrance and I’ll come down the hill to him. No way I want to be picked up at the main entrance.”

So my luggage and me walked half a mile and, like someone who is on the run or has something to hide, I looked left and right a dozen times before I got in the limo. If I could disguise myself, I would have. I got away undetected.

Someone else I knew was not so lucky.

The company plane came back from a trip. It could have been the retreat at Ivy Creek or a Tunnel of Love tour to the regions. I can’t remember which. It was raining, no, make that teeming. The plane — Whiskey 7 — pulled up to the hanger at Westchester Airport and stopped. The tarmac was full of car service vehicles waiting to pick us up.

When the crew opened the door and dropped the stairs, a driver from the limousine at the head of the line ran up the stairs with an umbrella. We all thought it was for Edgar Jr. But, in a loud voice he declared, “ Mr. A please?”

Out of the back of the plane, more than a bit sheepish, Mr. A said (in a very low voice) “Be right there.”

Mr. A was known as someone who did a great job for the company but also liked his creature comforts. His favorite expression was “The best revenge is a good meal.”

As he walked down the stairs, as the rest of us waited, Junior said, “See you tomorrow… Stretch.”

He was known as Stretch evermore.

To this day I don’t know if he was a victim of an over zealous car company or a guy who got caught.

Pity or Scorn

October 21, 2010 No Comments

Lots of readers have commented on the last posting about the Bronfman sisters and their $150 million problem with what has been described in the press as a cult. If you didn’t work there and experience the good, bad and ugly, it’s unimportant. But for those of us who were at Seagram it’s at least interesting to try to figure it out. (The rest of you can hit the back button.)

Comments I received ranged from glee at the 3^rd generation’s continued problems, with many references to “shirt sleeves to shirt sleeves”. (See March 13, 2010 posting.)

One reader took me to task for passing the article along:

Unnecessary to kick them now after all the years they were the Liquor business…it’s not news it’s GOSSIP!

The most interesting comment was this one:

The third generation Bronfmans seems to have a spectacularly pathological need to piss away their fortune. Amazing.

So, after much thought and consideration, I’ve come to the conclusion that what they have done with their inheritance — the company or their personal fortunes — is their business and probably more to pity than to scorn. I found this online in an article from the New York Observer (Aug 10, 2010):

Inherited millions are often fraught with an array of pathologies and dysfunctions. In 1987, Joanie Bronfman, then a Brandeis philosophy doctoral candidate and the daughter of Edgar Bronfman Sr.’s cousin Gerald, investigated the peculiar psychoses of the rich in her dissertation The Experience of Inherited Wealth: A Social-Psychological Perspective. In the course of her research, she attended “wealth conferences” and interviewed heirs and heiresses. Drawing from her own experience of growing up “visibly wealthy” and full of “shame” as a result of it, Ms. Bronfman argued that inheritors of massive wealth tend to be emotionally stunted. They adopt paranoid worldviews and come to see humans as radically selfish. They perceive relationships to be transactional. Their misanthropy derives from the attempts of absentee parents to buy their affections as compensation for outsourcing their rearing to hired professionals. These feelings are reinforced when they interact with the world outside their class and are alternately solicited for donations or mocked as dilettantes by the media. It was that last many-tentacled villain she accused of promulgating a destructive bias toward inheritors, one that she termed “wealthism.”

Could also explain the Busch family.

Maybe it should be called the un-lucky sperm club but I don’t think so.