The Power of Pins

Rainbow Foods was a 23-store regional supermarket chain in Minneapolis in the late 1980’s when the area was selected to host the 1990 U.S. Olympic Festival. The president of Rainbow, Sid Applebaum was a huge fan of the games and very interested when Jack Kelly, president of the Olympic Festival, called in 1989 in search of promotion opportunities.

Rainbow was the largest chain in the market, but still, the $300,000 sponsorship fee for the grocery category seemed impossibly expensive for the small chain.

The challenge for Keith McCracken, the CEO and chairman of Minneapolis’ McCracken-Brooks, the promotion agency for both the festival and the grocery chain, was to find a way to self-liquidate the $300,000 sponsorship fee through vendor or consumer funding. (A native of Liverpool, England, Keith McCracken is a master negotiator. As a teenager, he convinced a small local pub band to play on the cheap for his rugby club’s dance. Happily, that small band, the Beatles, would find more profitable venues in their not too distant future.)

And as much as he and Kelly wanted Rainbow’s sponsorship funding, they also had tickets to sell for 37 sporting events ranging from table tennis to ice hockey.

Kelly knew that Olympic pins had been wildly popular with consumers since the 1980 Lake Placid Winter Olympic Games, and he passed this knowledge to McCracken. “Research in the Twin Cities indicated pins were a big idea, but if an educational element were added they would be really big,” McCracken recalled.

McCracken-Brooks hatched a plan to offer consumers 37 different Olympic pins, each featuring a pictogram for a different sport represented in the festival, which was scheduled from July 6 to July 15, 1990. The pins would sell for 50 cents, and those revenues would fund additional print advertising behind the promotion.

Rainbow’s top 50 brands were personally contacted. “We offered each brand complete exclusivity on a pin, with eight pins being offered every four weeks in the months leading up to the festival,” McCracken recalled. “Each vendor would be charged $25,000 and would receive guaranteed feature and display in Rainbow’s stores.”

Knowing that no one would want to be first in signing to their program, McCracken used reverse psychology, announcing to vendors that “under absolutely no circumstances whatsoever would any sponsorship applications be allowed or considered until 12 noon on the last day of their sell-in, and then they would only be accepted via fax.” Kelly says. He remembers sitting at the agency “hoping like hell we’d get enough sponsors to cover the 37 different pins when a wonderful thing happened. The fax started printing and it didn’t stop until contracts from 47 sponsor brands had rolled in.”

Ten new pins were designed to accommodate the additional sponsors. These commemorated more generic aspects of the festival, including “Medal Awards,” “Winter Sports,” “Twin Cities,” and, of course, “Minnesota.”

The promotion was a hit, selling out of 1.2 million pins. Ellen Gomoll, the agency’s art director at the time, said, “We were on the cutting edge of pin frenzy and had no idea how many people would be interested in pin collecting.”

The interesting thing about the pins was that not one of them bore a logo other than that of the chain. Rainbow moderated its no in-store P-O-P policy, and agreed to create shelf and aisle signage for each pin to educate consumers about the promotion. An express check-out lane just for the pin buyers was set up. Full-page color ads ran in the Sunday section of The Minneapolis Star-Tribune, which ultimately sponsored a pin-trading tent at the festival.

The festival’s organizers utilized Rainbow’s aggressive and early promotion plans as the springboard for ticket sales for all 37 events in January of 1990, months before the typical start of sales. “We sold 30% to 40% more tickets in Minneapolis than we had for any previous Olympic Festival,” Kelly notes. “The whole community really responded,” remembers Applebaum. “It was just spectacular.” Rainbow saw an average lift of 15% to 20% in total store sales for the months the promotion ran, creating “a huge seasonal spike that’s been difficult to match,” according to McCracken.

Recognizing these results, the Rainbow Olympic Festival Pin Collection promotion won the PMAA’s Super Reggie award as the most outstanding promotion of 1990 .

It’s no exaggeration that this promotion changed the way retailers approach sponsorship opportunities. McCracken’s pin continuity strategy served as the basis for a similar promotion executed by the Schnucks grocery chain for the St. Louis Olympic Festival in 1994. The vendor sponsorship plan also served as the inspiration for Home Depot’s $40 million sponsor package for the Atlanta Centennial Olympic Games in 1996.

“There was nothing that didn’t go well with this promotion,” Kelly says. “Everybody was happy at the end of it.” n

Rod Taylor is senior VP-promotions for CoActive Marketing in Cincinnati and an avowed “pinhead.” As proof that no good deed goes unpunished, he wants to personally re-thank Sid Applebaum, the now retired CEO of Rainbow Foods, for “gifting” him a framed set of all 48 pins back in 1992.

E-mail any feedback or story ideas to [email protected].