FROM: Pontius on Park Published Every Other Tuesday
The Unmentionable Strategy
If you draw an innocent shape on a chalkboard, as former Disney Vice-President Larry Pontius once did during a staff meeting, there will always be someone in the room who thinks it looks like something... unintended. Even unmentionable.
In my last column, I outlined the early development of local events at Walt Disney World, telling you about the successful Halloween celebration we had during the gasoline crisis in 1974. I didn't mention it then, but the strong visitor response to that first Halloween was largely responsible for moving me up from "outside bright boy" to "maybe he knows something boy."
While I was ahead, I decided to make a major move; totally reorganizing the marketing division.
In those days, marketing was comprised of several loosely connected departments. Charlie Ridgway, who was already becoming an icon, headed up Publicity from his second story offices on Main Street. I can't remember where Public Relations was.
The Marketing Director's office and the Group Sales Department were in the Admin building behind the Magic Kingdom. So was the Advertising Department with its manager and two copywriters. However, the artists were not part of the Marketing Division and were housed in the tunnel beneath the Magic Kingdom. The recording studio and the photography department we used on almost a daily basis were also in the tunnels. Marketing had a finance manager, but he was part of the Finance Division, which had offices in another part of the Admin building.
As you might expect, with people spread around like that, the division had little or no cohesion. In fact, I'm not sure they all had even met each other. For what I had in mind, at least the key members of the staff needed to spend some time together, to understand what I was proposing and how it would work. I wanted it to be private, away from work or any interruptions.
And with the help of Jack Lindquist, I found the perfect spot. When I initially came to Florida at Jack's invitation, he told me that during the construction of Walt Disney World, executives from California spent so much time here they needed a break. So the Company bought a cottage over on the beach north of Cocoa for them to get away for a couple of days.
When I asked about the cottage, I was told it was still there, still owned by Disney, but rarely used by anyone. I made reservations for a Friday so we wouldn't have to worry about how late we went or headaches the next day at work.
In the end, it didn't turn out to be as big a deal as you might think. Everyone arrived on time or a little early, and we all went for a walk on the beach, then went back to the cottage. After the group had poured their coffee and settled on the living room couch and chairs, I brought out a chalkboard.
I drew a small circle in the middle of the board, a larger circle around that one and, finally, a really big circle around the other two. I used the three circles to explain that we were changing the Marketing Division from a function-oriented operation to market-oriented, with national, regional, and local/on site marketing departments. These three new departments would now be serviced by Advertising, Group Sales, Publicity, and Public Relations, to achieve our goals.
The response was enthusiastic, and from that meeting the seeds for a number of successful programs were planted. For example, that's where we first started talking about target marketing, which became one the main tools used by national marketing. That's where other ideas such as Senior Days originated. I should also point out that while we got to know each other, and enjoyed ourselves, there were very few headaches the next day.
Oh! I forgot to explain the 'Unmentionable' in the title to this column, didn't I? The strategy we talked about that day nearly forty years ago picked up a name that stuck with it from a comment someone made when I drew the circles on the chalkboard. In the back of the room someone whispered, "It looks like a boob."
Former Disney Vice-President Larry Pontius is the author of Waking Walt, a novel that posits the incredible: Walt Disney really was frozen and now he has returned to life. The book is available in hardcover and soon in Kindle. Larry's second book, Future King, is imminent.
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