Payoff pitch | Steve Fuller, VP of corporate marketing for L.L. Bean, on the company's new advertising strategy and the process of picking an agency

Maine-based consumer brands don't come much bigger than L.L. Bean, so it's no surprise that advertising firms from across the country lined up to make their pitch earlier this year when the Freeport merchant announced it was looking for a new agency. In June, Bean placed its TV, print and radio advertising campaign ˆ— which industry estimates peg at roughly $25 million a year ˆ— into review, in part to develop a new advertising strategy that would bolster the company's long-term plans to expand its retail stores across the country.

Nearly 100 agencies responded ˆ— though Bean's agency for the previous three years, Minneapolis-based Martin/ Williams, did not ˆ— and after a threemonth search Bean has reportedly chosen New York-based JWT, which handles campaigns for companies such as Ford, Nestlé and Pfizer, to provide the new creative direction. (L.L. Bean had not signed a contract with any firm at the time this issue of Mainebiz went to press.)

The job of winnowing that field of 100 candidates down to one contract winner fell to Steve Fuller, L.L. Bean's senior vice president of corporate marketing. Mainebiz recently spoke to Fuller to find out what was behind Bean's decision to look for a new advertising agency, and to learn how the company reviewed candidates, selected finalists and ultimately chose a new partner.

Given the size of the task, it's not surprising that Fuller sought help from Pile & Co., a Boston-based consulting firm that specializes in helping big companies pick the right advertising and marketing agencies. Together, he says, they set out to find an agency that fit a few basic criteria ˆ— including experience shooting outdoor photography and commercials, and a client base big enough to ensure that Bean wasn't the firm's largest account, but not too big to mean that it wouldn't get plenty of attention. But they also were looking for a firm that offered the right match for Bean's corporate culture. Following is an edited transcript of the conversation.

Mainebiz: I've read that Bean wants to develop a new marketing strategy that balances the emphasis between traditional catalog sales and the online and retail channels, which is Bean's growth area for the future. Is that what you are hoping to find with a new advertising agency?

Fuller: It was two things, really. Every year we sit down with our ad agency and do the same review that I get and that every other employee gets at Bean, which is a performance review. And there were for the last two or three years areas of improvement [with the advertising campaign]. We said, "Look you've got to fix these things."

The other part of it was ˆ— and this gets more to your question ˆ— we've got print out there, we have television out there. We have Web advertising, and I think my Web spend has doubled every year for the last four years. And that [Web advertising] was being done internally. At some point our creative folks just can't handle the throughput. And then retail advertising has also come into the corporate advertising group. So, yes, [the goal] was to consolidate a lot of pieces into one spot so we can get one look and feel, so we can educate one agency and say, "Here's what we're looking for, here's where we want to go."

What was the first step in finding a new agency?

What we did this time was use a small firm out of Boston called Pile & Co. We're in Freeport ˆ— I don't know what's going on in New York or Chicago. I know what ads I like and what ads I don't like. So I need somebody who can say, "Okay, here's what the trends are. Here's what agencies are doing and here are the things you should be aware of."

There's also some level of a process manager in here. We had a total of just under 100 agencies who were either interested in having the Bean business or we were interested in talking to about the Bean business. The day that it came out that Martin/Williams was leaving, I thought my phone was broken because it just kept ringing and ringing and ringing. And you just need someone in here to help you manage the process.

How did you establish the field of contenders?

What would happen is, you'd get a number of agencies that would call and say, "Look, I can do this." You [also] had some agencies whose work we liked or Pile liked. Or Pile would say, "They think like you guys do."

So you'd end up with this pool ˆ— I think there were 92 agencies in this pool. Fairly or unfairly, we'd then go through this process with Pile and say, "Okay, just not big enoughˆ… No experience in televisionˆ…"

If you're one of the agencies you could say that's somewhat unfair, but we do the best job we can and it's just a winnowing down. We've got stakeholder responsibilities and sales responsibilities. And I'm not like Nike, where I can go out and shoot 12 spots and only run one or two. Every dollar we have is like our last dollar, and I just can't afford to have someone learning television on Bean's dime.

So we try to do it thoroughly and we try to do it fairly, but at that point we take the 92 to about 26 or 28, give or take. Each of the agencies then sends into Pile a "capability assignment." Basically, we say to the 28 remaining, "Send us a video of your team and give us your early thoughts on L.L. Bean. Tell us who your clients are and send us examples of your work."

We then took that information and sat down one day in Boston and went through all 28 of those. Pile was invaluable in helping us say, "These folks are very good at this but you may have challenges in this part."

At that point, did they send in anything close to actual campaign ideas, or did you just ask them to tell you a little bit about the firm before taking the next step?

These are all very smart people, and they know that the worst thing they can do is send in a creative pitch that they have no context for. So occasionally we'll see someone do that, but it's usually a swing for the fences thing.

What were some of the capabilities you were looking for?

We wanted an agency with significant consumer branding experience, supported by a direct marketing sensibility. That's a big thing for us. You have some agencies come in and say, "We have consumer branding over here and direct marketing over there, and they are two separate things." And we don't think so. We actually think that a direct [marketing] sensibility is how Bean thinks, and how our consumers expect us to think. In our case, I think a direct sensibility means talking about a product's benefits. You're talking about what role it will serve in the consumer's life.

So even though you want to balance out your various sales channels, you don't want to bury your traditional catalog identity. I guess that means you're not looking for a campaign that goes too far into high-concept branding.

That direct marketing sensibility is part of the Bean brand. Whenever someone tries to separate it, we end up with [something that doesn't work]. In a funny way, that's not us. So that's one of the things we look for in an agency.

How did you get from the 28 semi-finalists to the final three?

We first narrowed it down to eight. Then we invited the eight up to Bean to do a presentation of their capabilities. We asked them to use two of their clients as examples and talk about what the objectives were, how they fulfilled them and what the results were, so we can see if they talk about results in the way we talk about results.

At that point, we narrowed the eight to three. Then we did two things: We sent them a final pitch assignment that said, "Here is a challenge we want you to solve for us." And the other thing that we did ˆ— for the first time that I'm aware of ˆ— is invite each agency up for a field day. We spent all day with each of these teams to see what they were like and what kind of questions they ask, and see how they responded to the "Bean thing."

Did you give the finalists any guidance before you sent them off to work on their creative pitch, or did you intentionally say nothing to see what they'd come up with on their own?

It's more of the latter. We give them a pitch assignment along with a big stack of recent research, and we give them some general guidelines like a brand personality statement. We really don't try to give them a lot more that that.

One of the mistakes you can make in this pitching process is to be too influenced by the creative you see that day. The important thing is seeing how the agency got from what they were given to what they presented ˆ— do you like what they presented, sure, but it's more to evaluate the people you'll be working with. Can they show you how they got from the assignment to how they presented the final creative?

So any creative pitch you see that day doesn't stand much chance of becoming the final campaign?

I can't speak for Pile & Co., but the number of times someone comes out of a pitch and says, "Okay, that's the creative we'll buy and will use going forward," is pretty slim. It doesn't happen that often.

How many people from Bean were involved with the judging? I think you'd want enough people to get a diversity of opinions, but you have to be careful not to have so many people weighing in that it becomes chaotic.

That's exactly it. We do our own creative and our own catalogs here, so we know that more people working on a catalog can make it better, but at some point it becomes diminishing returns. And it's the same thing with advertising. We limited that room to about a half dozen people, ranging from the chief merchant [Fran Philip] to the CEO [Chris McCormick]. It's also a message to the agency, too. Agencies don't want to work with an organization in which 100 different people check off on an ad.

I'm fortunate that the CEO here said, "Here's my opinion, but ultimately, Steve, it's your call. You're the one who has to work with them. If they don't deliver, you're the one who has to get rid of them. So you decide."

Now that you've picked a new agency, when might we see the results of this process in magazines, on TV or the Web?

There won't be a definitive answer to that. You will see for the most part the balance of the Martin/Williams work now through the holidays, especially on the national level. There may be a couple of exceptions to that, especially in the fast media ˆ— Web ads, as we start getting really close to Christmas, and radio. If we start doing more radio this fall I can almost guarantee that some of it will be from the new agency.

For the bigger, national scope stuff, next summer will be the first executions from the new agency.

How will you move forward from here with the new agency to develop a campaign?

It's Bean 101 and Bean 201 and Bean 301 and 401. They will literally come here for a couple of weeks. We'll go through old advertising and strategy documents. All the questions that they were trying to figure out themselves, we'll give our perspective on that. It almost goes back to your first question on why we consolidated. If you've got one agency doing your e-marketing work, another doing your retail work and another doing your national work, that's a lot of groups that you've got to keep up to speed on what's going on at Bean, and it gets to be a challenge.

Are there any broad economic or retail trends, or things that agencies brought up in the pitching process, that you think will shape the campaign?

One of the things that came through the pitches a little bit is the idea that consumers are looking for people they trust, and how often can they find it? If there's one thing that Bean has, it's trust. You may see some piece of that come through our work.

The other piece you may see more of is that, in many cases, the customer is a lot more articulate about Bean than we can be. One of the pieces that came through a lot is letting the consumers talk for Bean. We got a letter from a soldier in Afghanistan who says, "I can't say where I am for obvious reasons, but I spend all day hiking through the mountains and when I was home on my last leave I bought a pair of your hiking boots. I just want to tell you they're the best hiking boots that money can buy." Wow. We can't say anything like that [ourselves], but that's how Bean stuff is used. We talked a lot about this with all the agencies in the process.

We expect everything to hang together within a message. Messages change from year to year based on what perceptions are and what strategies you're taking. You may have noticed that Bean for the last couple years has been talking a lot more about price. We had a lot of research showing that customers were starting to say we were getting too expensive, and we were trying to reeducate Bean's customers on the value that Bean provided. For three years we've been bringing down the average unit price of our products and wanted to make sure our customers saw that, and it's been pretty effective.

So it sounds like there will be broader branding messages that won't change much, but underneath that umbrella you can create different spots to address specific trends or customer concerns.

Yes. For example ˆ— hypothetically ˆ— research could come back saying that customers still love you and get the value piece again, but now they're saying that everything is blue and green. There's got to be something other than blue and green. So you may decide to push color during a season.

Bean is an interesting place ˆ— and this came through in all our agency pitches ˆ— in that customers know we have great customer service. And you'd be really hard pressed to find people with an unfavorable opinion of Bean, but we occasionally have to remind them why they have a favorable impression of us ˆ— it's these products that we have. Occasionally we have to remind customers of that.