This is the mug that sits on my desk. It’s a Field of Dreams mug from Dyersville, Iowa. Most would assume that I’m a fan of the movie. Actually I can’t stand it. But I really, really love this mug.
I wash it out by hand every day. It never goes into the kitchen cupboard at work for fear that it might fall into someone else’s hands. I smile every time the hot liquid I pour in to it makes the baseball players magically appear from the cornstalks. I smile even more as the players fade away again as the liquid cools.
So why am I obsessed with a mug for a movie I never liked? It’s quite simple really. This mug represents victory.
You see this mug was a “giveaway” chosen by a business unit manager located in our new Iowa office that made my life a living hell at work. I’m in charge of our company’s brand; the look, the feel, the emotion. Iowa Guy didn’t like that. He was new and wanted his own sandbox.
So I was shell-shocked the first time he pulled out cartons full of mugs, baseball bats and baseballs from Field of Dreams at a customer event. “What does baseball and Field of Dreams have to do with our company or our industry?” I asked him. His response was that he thought they were cool and showed customers that we were just “friendly folks from Iowa.” That would be all well and good perhaps if our US headquarters was in Iowa, but it’s not. It’s in Arizona.
Little did I know that that was just the beginning. Over the next year-and-a-half Iowa Guy was given free reign to do whatever he wanted despite my protests that he was bastardizing our brand. I was told he was in charge of a new high risk initiative for the company and that they needed to give “him some rope to get things done” even if it meant doing things a little differently than before.
He made up his own marketing material, ignored corporate colors, created his own tagline and just generally went amuck. And then one day … he didn’t deliver to plan on the initiative.
Someone high up on the totem pole later on told me that Iowa Guy was so busy trying to change our brand and marketing strategy that he forgot to take care of our customers. We weren’t delivering. Ouch.
That’s when the rope tightened. A company re-org was done and I got to issue a press release reaffirming our commitment to the initiative and announcing that… in related news… Iowa Guy was “retiring.”
Later on that day I pulled out the Field of Dreams mug from my collection of Iowa Guy’s brand bastardizing paraphernalia. It made me smile. I felt like I had won. And as I filled up the mug with hot tea and saw the baseball players emerge from the cornstalks, it made me smile some more.
Two hours later I had identified and located the many pieces of marketing material Iowa Guy had ever touched and had a plan of attack to reverse the damage. By this time my tea had gone cold. All the baseball players had faded back into the cornstalks from which they came. Hmmm… just like Iowa Guy.
Yup. It’s my favourite mug.
I wash it out by hand every day. It never goes into the kitchen cupboard at work for fear that it might fall into someone else’s hands. I smile every time the hot liquid I pour in to it makes the baseball players magically appear from the cornstalks. I smile even more as the players fade away again as the liquid cools.
So why am I obsessed with a mug for a movie I never liked? It’s quite simple really. This mug represents victory.
You see this mug was a “giveaway” chosen by a business unit manager located in our new Iowa office that made my life a living hell at work. I’m in charge of our company’s brand; the look, the feel, the emotion. Iowa Guy didn’t like that. He was new and wanted his own sandbox.
So I was shell-shocked the first time he pulled out cartons full of mugs, baseball bats and baseballs from Field of Dreams at a customer event. “What does baseball and Field of Dreams have to do with our company or our industry?” I asked him. His response was that he thought they were cool and showed customers that we were just “friendly folks from Iowa.” That would be all well and good perhaps if our US headquarters was in Iowa, but it’s not. It’s in Arizona.
Little did I know that that was just the beginning. Over the next year-and-a-half Iowa Guy was given free reign to do whatever he wanted despite my protests that he was bastardizing our brand. I was told he was in charge of a new high risk initiative for the company and that they needed to give “him some rope to get things done” even if it meant doing things a little differently than before.
He made up his own marketing material, ignored corporate colors, created his own tagline and just generally went amuck. And then one day … he didn’t deliver to plan on the initiative.
Someone high up on the totem pole later on told me that Iowa Guy was so busy trying to change our brand and marketing strategy that he forgot to take care of our customers. We weren’t delivering. Ouch.
That’s when the rope tightened. A company re-org was done and I got to issue a press release reaffirming our commitment to the initiative and announcing that… in related news… Iowa Guy was “retiring.”
Later on that day I pulled out the Field of Dreams mug from my collection of Iowa Guy’s brand bastardizing paraphernalia. It made me smile. I felt like I had won. And as I filled up the mug with hot tea and saw the baseball players emerge from the cornstalks, it made me smile some more.
Two hours later I had identified and located the many pieces of marketing material Iowa Guy had ever touched and had a plan of attack to reverse the damage. By this time my tea had gone cold. All the baseball players had faded back into the cornstalks from which they came. Hmmm… just like Iowa Guy.
Yup. It’s my favourite mug.
1 comment:
I can't believe I've never heard of Iowa guy before now!
When I first started reading your post I thought, man what an ugly mug. But by the end could only smile and think way to go Mimsy!
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