The world domination of Pumpkin Funland
During summers in college, Dolly and Lynn Rasmussen hired me to sell produce on their farm. They were very trusting –asking me to close up the shop and count the money alone on my very first day on the job. This, of course, made me feel immediately loyal. They also let me come up with a few headlines for the ads in the local papers. My favourite was “Summer Berries, Some are Cherries!” Yes, my first and last pun headline.
But my favourite job on the farm was the preparation of Pumpkin Funland. Each October, the Rasmussens take one of their giant greenhouses and section it off into hundreds of scenes acted out by pumpkins dressed up in clothes. School groups and bus tours stop by to wander the isles and take in the sites of Sleeping Beauty, Little Red Riding Hood and Gourdilocks & the Three Bears.
The first year we were asked to put it together, my friend Chris and I launched in with great zeal. This would be the best PFL ever! We expanded beyond storybooks into the Olympic Games, current movies, and a giant replica of Mount Hood as the center piece.
Great, they said, but we had to build it all from old boxes, straw bales and equipment we could find on the farm. Only on the farm? But that will look so small time. We knew a place where we could get materials at cheap prices and for a small amount of money we could the raise the quality of the entire exhibit. Couldn’t they see the potential? Where was their vision?
It wasn’t about the money, they told us. This is just the way we do it.
That was it. They didn’t point to a mission statement or pull out a brand pyramid; this was before the idea of a brand was commonly understood. They simply told us ‘this is how it’s done.’
They said the same thing when we tried to update the pencil sketches in their holiday catalogue or when I suggested we print the prices on the produce bins instead of hand-writing them.
It took me several years to see the brilliance of their strategy. They have consciously maintained a real farm experience, not a slick, overly-marketed version of a farm. They’ve had fun with it and have added things along the way (a haunted house, a corn maze, and this year, pumpkin bowling!) but they’ve kept the same tone and approach.
This is a much more mature version of brand than I was originally proposing for them. Not a uniform design or a guidelines manual for the logo (“must sit 3.5mm from edge of page”) but a genuine personality that is expressed fluidly and clearly across all media be they posters or pumpkins.