TWO

Learning and Implementing Brand Strategy

I was a senior at Foley High School in December 1967 and, of course, knew nothing of the opening of Chick-fil-A in Greenbriar Center. I had just returned from spending a year as an American Field Service exchange student in Christchurch, New Zealand, an amazing experience for a South Alabama teenager.

When I graduated from high school in the spring of 1968, my family couldn’t do much to help financially with college costs. So I enrolled in Faulkner State Junior College (now part of Coastal Alabama Community College) that fall, where the work-study program allowed me to earn money working on a landscape crew. I also worked in general construction during the summers. But as a bonus, I was able to make the Faulkner State baseball team as a walk-on, my last fling participating in team sports.

One night my teammates invited me to join them at a youth rally in Mobile, where David Wilkerson was speaking. Wilkerson was a preacher who had gone to New York City in 1958 to minister to seven gang members on trial for murder. He stayed and ultimately helped thousands of kids on the New York City streets to change their lives, kids who were overcome by poverty, crime, and drugs. He later wrote The Cross and the Switchblade about his experience, and the book sold millions of copies, making a huge impact on teenagers across the country. As it turned out, I would be one of them.

I had grown up in a going-to-church environment that, to me, seemed to be mostly about rules. At least that’s the way I felt as a teenager. Performance—rules for what you do and what you don’t do, who you hang out with and who you don’t hang out with, what you say and what you don’t say, what you drink and what you don’t drink. Don’t get me wrong; this attitude probably served me well and kept me out of trouble. But by the time I was a sophomore in college, I found myself having no hunger or joy in my spiritual walk. I experienced seasons of guilt because I had bad thoughts, said bad things, or behaved poorly, and I couldn’t erase those things from my life or my mind. It was all about my performance. And I was frustrated.

Wilkerson’s way of working with young people in New York, I learned that night in Mobile’s coliseum, was to first deal with their soul, their spirit, and help them understand how to build a life—from the inside out—around the reality of living as a Christian. I listened to his story and the power of the resurrection—not just Christ’s resurrection, but resurrection in the lives of those kids in New York City who were turning their lives over to Christ. He explained that the gospel is about grace, not rules. We don’t earn our salvation; it’s a gift because of the finished work of Christ’s death and resurrection.

What?!

Although I had heard that message of grace before, I’d never fully understood it was for me. And I thought, This is what’s missing from my life. I can’t operate in this constant struggle of trying to deal with my shortcomings and sense of separation from God by myself. I have bad thoughts and behavior that create a relational chasm between me and God. I don’t really KNOW Him. And nothing I seem to do can bridge this separation. It was as if Christ called my name and, as a popular worship song says, “I walked out of the grave.” My grave. I gave my life to Christ that night in Mobile, Alabama. I wanted to be part of His life and the reality of His redemption for me.

Reflecting on that time, I think of a statement by Dr. Charles Swindoll: “Conversion to Christ is the initial downbeat to an entire magnum opus, which God composes of our lives.”⁴ The reality of this only became clear years later, and quite frankly, my recognition of it became louder as I wrote this book.

That experience began my long journey to understand biblical grace. Years later, when Dianne and I were married, we became involved in churches with solid biblical teaching, and my understanding of the gospel of grace grew clearer. I studied the stories of Christ’s interaction with people through the lens of the apostle John’s statement that He came in grace and truth. He always led with grace. He didn’t prejudge the people He interacted with. It didn’t matter if it was the harlot, or the woman with an issue of blood, or Zacchaeus up in the tree, or a tax collector named Matthew. Story after story, He led with grace. He accepted people for who they were and willingly went to their dinner parties. He didn’t want to leave anyone behind. More times than not, He shared truth only as they asked Him questions or after He had developed a relationship with them.

That night in Mobile changed my life, my purpose, and my worldview.

I finished junior college and transferred to Auburn University, where I majored in marketing and worked at a boarding house for my meals. I loved Auburn. Still do. I’ve been buying season football tickets since Bo Jackson was a freshman! My two years there flew by.

Early in my senior year, I stopped by unannounced to see the dean in the College of Business, Dr. George Horton, a transparent and engaging leader. I had started interviewing for jobs, and most of the opportunities were sales jobs. I mean road sales. Road warriors. Pharmaceuticals, power companies, supply companies, tech companies like Xerox. I had been there and done that with my dad, and it wasn’t the career that excited me. I told Dean Horton that I was attracted to the communications and brand-building side of marketing and asked if he had any ideas.

“If I were to consider grad school,” I said, “where should I go?”

Without hesitation, he said, “I can tell you three places you ought to consider. Given what you want to do, you don’t need a traditional MBA. You ought to consider a master’s with an advertising and communications focus.”

“Okay,” I said. “Where?”

“Either Columbia, Stanford, or Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism and Advertising. And I would probably recommend Medill, because virtually all their staff are former practitioners, and every quarter, you’re going to have a practical project with an agency or client.”

He volunteered to call Dean Vernon Fryberger at Medill and learned that the next year’s class was already filled, but Dr. Horton persuaded him to grant me an interview.

The previous spring, a great friend and Auburn FarmHouse fraternity brother, Jerry Batts, had set up a blind date for me with Dianne Keen, whose brother, Bobby, was one of the chapter’s founders. We hit it off, two kids from rural Alabama, me from Foley and her from Billingsley. When I decided to go to graduate school, I didn’t want to go without her, so I proposed. She said yes, and her parents said yes, so Dianne and I drove up to Northwestern with my parents. I met with Dean Fryberger and members of his faculty.

“I can’t make any promises,” he told me as we left, “and the odds are against you, but I’ll let you know.”

A short while later I got a letter from him saying, “You’re in.” Amazing! But now I had another problem: I didn’t have any money. This was before the day of cheap student loans, and I had to have ten thousand dollars for tuition within weeks. (Looking back, what a bargain!) Though my dad had not been able to help pay for most of my undergraduate education, he offered to cosign on a loan, pledging the assets of his business as collateral. And the local bank granted the loan.

Dianne and I graduated from Auburn on June 6, 1972, and were married four days later. Two weeks later we loaded up a U-Haul behind my ’63 Ford Galaxie and headed to Northwestern. There were thirty-six members in my Medill class, and I was number thirty-six. I was the only one from south of the Mason-Dixon Line, and boy, did I hear about my accent. What accent? They were the ones with the accent.

Dianne got a job as a secretary in the behavioral science department of the MBA program, earning enough money to pay for our room and board. We were living in Evanston, north of Chicago, but we didn’t have money to enjoy much of the city. Occasionally, though, we would pack hot dogs and go to a White Sox or Cubs game (we were only eight miles from Wrigley Field).

In class, my classmates and I were studying media strategy, creative strategy development, campaign development, and public relations. Simultaneously, we were working on a campaign project for either an agency or a client directly, immediately applying what we had learned in the classroom—writing campaign strategy, creative briefs, creative development, media strategy, and media plans for a client every quarter.

Because my professors had been practitioners, they brought a reality to the classroom that made the Northwestern experience special—very powerful and marketable. That’s still their philosophy today.

The work was nonstop for four straight quarters. We spent long hours preparing our case studies beyond our normal classroom work, working in small teams with one person leading creative, another doing media, and another drafting strategy. Teams competed with each other in an effort to mimic the real world.

One quarter my team created a campaign for a protein-based shampoo product. Our strategy created a point of difference for the brand by communicating the virtues of milk in the shampoo.

Another project was for the kids’ space in McDonald’s, and that experience led to a job interview with their agency (how ironic).

After a year at Northwestern, I graduated with the tools I needed to think about and document a brand strategy, develop a marketing plan that flows out of that brand strategy—it’s not the other way around—and plan all the communications that flow out of the marketing vision.

They taught me how to think strategically. Undergrad school at Auburn gave me the traditional academic experience of topical silos: studying consumer behavior and research, media, pricing, economics, finance, and accounting. Northwestern put it all together and showed how these silos fit into the broader construct of building a brand, a marketing plan to support the brand, and then the communication strategies within that. Dr. Horton had given me great counsel.

Creating a Wholesome Environment

While I was learning branding strategies from some of the finest marketing minds in the world, Truett was implementing his intuitive, personal vision for growing Chick-fil-A. Three business decisions were particularly instrumental to its success. They set the foundation for the workplace environment in Chick-fil-A stores.

One of those was the decision to close on Sundays: it set the tone for what was important. A day set aside for him and all who were part of Chick-fil-A to rest, be with family, and worship, if they so chose. Sales and profits were not everything.

Another crucial decision was the creation of a unique store-leadership financial model that is still used today and is not likely to be replicated by another fast-food brand despite the obvious positive impacts it brings to the business and the brand.

Truett wanted personally engaged leadership in every Chick-fil-A restaurant, and the only way to guarantee that was to create a financial model in which each franchisee would operate only one restaurant, which meant each restaurant had to generate healthy income through strong sales with long-term growth potential, allowing the Operator to sustain that business year after year. Unlike most other franchise chain leadership, Truett was not looking to create a portfolio of restaurants with great locations that supported lower-caliber sites. Each restaurant had to be a winner. Also, he was not looking for franchise investors; he sought talented restaurant leaders to own and operate restaurants, no matter their finances. Thus, he created the Chick-fil-A franchise agreement, which remains basically unchanged today, around these key components:

        •     No up-front franchise fee. Operators make a five thousand dollar refundable commitment (changed to ten thousand dollars in 2016).

        •     No up-front capital investment by the franchisee (this is all Chick-fil-A’s responsibility)

        •     Only one restaurant per franchisee (exceptions came much later)

Other fast-food brands require their franchisees to invest more than a million dollars to open a restaurant, usually in the form of an up-front brand rights fee, plus capital dollars for site, facility, and equipment. Not Chick-fil-A, which selects the site, builds the restaurant, then purchases and places all the equipment. Once underway, the franchisee pays Chick-fil-A, Inc., 15 percent of its sales for the use of the brand and for all the brand’s support systems. After the Operator pays all the expenses of running the restaurant, profits are split evenly with Chick-fil-A, Inc. Chick-fil-A’s half is categorized as an “additional Operator charge.” The other half is the Operator’s income.

The deal Truett created in 1967 is incredibly generous, and it is a win-win. This ingenious model has never been changed, except to increase the guaranteed base draw. It builds trust with Operators. More than anything else, the franchise agreement motivates the Operator to take care of customers, take care of details, manage profits and losses, attract great people to work in the restaurant, and grow the business. It allowed Truett the opportunity to replicate himself so that every Chick-fil-A Operator has the spirit and drive of an entrepreneur, genuine love for customers and employees, a commitment to develop young people, and the gift of hospitality. Because the restaurant’s employees work for the Operator, it also generates longer store-level employee retention, and thus, more opportunities for personal and professional development for their team members.

In 2018, there were approximately two thousand Chick-fil-A restaurant Operators. The continued success of the brand requires each of them to regularly assess whether their leadership is producing the customer, business, and brand performance specified in their agreement with Chick-fil-A. And for staff, particularly those focused on Operator selection, are they holding future Operator candidates up to the light of Truett’s original intentions for a Chick-fil-A Operator? Because, ultimately, the Chick-fil-A brand rises and falls on the leadership style and values of the restaurant Operators. In the end, do they value what Truett valued? Quality attracts quality, so Operator selection is the most important decision made at Chick-fil-A.

In 2017, the average Chick-fil-A freestanding restaurant had sales 70 percent higher than the average McDonald’s location and four times that of an average KFC location. Approximately 450,000 customers visit the average Chick-fil-A restaurant every year—some 1,700 each day. Operators develop effective leadership teams to manage volumes at that level, with the full intent of keeping those leaders for years. Some of their staff stay a long time because they aspire to be an Operator and they know one of the best ways to achieve that dream is to learn and be around a high-performing Operator.

To be effective, leadership teams must be diverse. Some team members are gifted in hospitality, others have a community outreach relationship or a marketing mind-set, and still others show their talent producing fresh food in the kitchen. Every restaurant needs leaders who are strong in operations and/or accounting to help run the restaurant, keep the books, and manage inventory. They also will have critical shift leaders for morning, midday, and evening. But the crucial, consistent “glue”? The Operator, who is the on-site leader and coach, engaged with the leaders, walking the floor and connecting with customers, and watching the performance of their team. They’re focused on the same things Truett focused on when he walked around the dining room at the Dwarf House. Chick-fil-A is able to do all this because of its financial relationship with the Operator, which is profitable enough for the Operator to afford to invest in great leaders and high-caliber employees.

Customers have a better experience and a more consistent experience at Chick-fil-A restaurants across the country because the company attracts high-caliber Operators who then attract high-caliber leaders and team members. And because their team-member turnover is less than one-third the industry average, Operators can afford to invest in their employees’ training and development. When people learn that I worked at Chick-fil-A, the question they ask most often is, “How do you get such great people to work in the restaurants? The level of attention, caring, and service is amazingly consistent.” The answer goes back to the store leadership model that Truett created with the Operator deal. It worked with the first restaurants he opened, and it has only improved over the decades.

Another key characteristic Truett sought in Operators was a strong drive to always improve. He was never satisfied unless he could say, “I got a sales increase in the Dwarf House this year.” Though money wasn’t his prime motivator, it was a scorecard showing that he and his team were doing the right things to earn support from current and new customers.

Chick-fil-A strives to select Operators with that same drive, utilizing the healthy tension of the motivated, independent businessperson who wants to grow sales and profits every year in partnership with the parent brand, which owns all the assets. The company can set a high bar on performance expectations and quality standards, and if there’s an elongated track record of underperformance, they can make a change; people are standing in line to become an Operator.

The business model of highly compensated, highly motivated Operators who are in business for themselves but not by themselves became a foundation of the chain’s success. Chick-fil-A could not do the things it has done in the restaurants and with the brand if not for the leadership talent in every restaurant. That, quite frankly, is the biggest point that competing chains cannot recreate.

Truett’s motivation was clear: “I’m not interested in your money. I’m interested in your ability.” After decades of observing great Operators, I believe Truett looked for two key traits:

        •     Their ability to attract, develop, and keep great people

        •     Their passion, or their “fire in the belly,” as I like to label it. He looked for Operators who were never content with the status quo, who were always looking to improve food consistency, service, and sales.

Truett’s experience owning the Dwarf House continues as the model for the Chick-fil-A chain. Unlike other franchise operations, Truett limited ownership to a single restaurant per franchisee, except in unusual circumstances. Franchisees would not be overseeing multiple managers at multiple locations. They would be in their own stores—in the dining room, the kitchen, or behind the counter—or out in their community, just as Truett had been for twenty-one years before starting Chick-fil-A.

The third significant decision Truett made (to affect the workplace environment) was to create and implement the Chick-fil-A Team Member Scholarship program in 1973, the same year I was graduating from Northwestern. Truett was drawn to the vigor of young minds and wanted to attract college students to his company, and the scholarship program gave restaurant employees who met certain benchmarks a one thousand dollar scholarship to pay for college expenses. The goal, like the Operator agreement, was to encourage team members to make a longer-term commitment to Chick-fil-A. The program, the first of its kind in the fast-food industry, became a powerful recruiting “extra” to help Operators attract and keep high-achieving teenagers.

Marketing Calculators and Dolphin Shows

With my hard-earned master’s degree in hand, I directed my energies to finding employment back in the South. I pressed hard for opportunities with companies like Coca-Cola, Delta, Six Flags, Texas Instruments, and Frito-Lay. Though I received many rejection letters, some of which Dianne still has, Texas Instruments showed interest because they were gearing up a consumer marketing division to support a new line of handheld calculators. In fact, they were leaders in the space. But they were engineers, not experts in marketing, so they were hiring brand managers and communications people to build a consumer marketing department. They needed some young guns, and I fit the bill.

Texas Instruments (TI) was marketing directly to engineers and architects, mathematicians, students, chemists, and other technical professionals, and they offered me my first job—to help them market their scientific calculators to those targeted audiences. We relied on direct mail and trade journals, a skill set I had not acquired at Northwestern, where we dealt with building and marketing consumer brands with more traditional platforms and channels of distribution. So this continued my education.

I quickly learned how to use segmented media and direct mail, how to build direct mail lists, and how to calculate returns on investment per thousand reached through circulation or delivery. I was tutored on how to develop creative content that would solicit an immediate response. The experience was like another year in graduate school, in a one-to-one platform talking directly to the engineer, the math student, the architect, and others with similar interests.

At the same time, TI was responding to new entries to the market by driving down the cost and prices of their calculators, even though we were selling more product than they could manufacture. As the young brand guy, I thought we should be adding value to the technology and positioning ourselves as the premium-priced brand. After all, we were the early-entry brand, the preemptive technology leader, and we were learning how to crack the niche, high-end tech markets. Unfortunately, we often left bags of mail sitting on the mailroom floor because we had lowered prices despite the demand we were experiencing. It drove me nuts.

After a year of this, I was still an underling by a long shot, but I was engaged in a healthy debate with my supervisor and others over the company’s vision for this segment of the business.

Then the telephone rang. Dan Howell, director of marketing for Six Flags Over Texas (SFOT), was on the line with an opportunity. Six Flags had entered into an agreement with the City of Arlington to manage the Seven Seas theme park next door to Six Flags. They needed a sales and promotions manager. Would I be interested?

Dan quickly explained that the relationship with Arlington and Seven Seas was only guaranteed for the 1974 season. The company did not own the park. They were on a management contract, so he could not promise a commitment beyond 1974. But if I was interested, I could come out on Saturday and spend the day exploring it.

I had high regard for Dan, a Medill grad with previous brand management experience. And his brother, Bob, was a close friend and Northwestern classmate. So, of course, I was interested.

In just a few hours, the Six Flags marketing team showed me a laboratory of marketing work and learning. Theirs was truly a marketing- and brand-driven business. The contrast to the engineering culture at TI could not have been more stark. I would be reporting to the director of marketing for Seven Seas with mentoring support from the Six Flags staff.

At the end of that Saturday visit, Dan offered me a job that would double my income and include a company car but, as he had said, offered no guarantees beyond the first season.

I couldn’t pass up the potential for growth and new challenges. In addition to Dan, Six Flags, Inc., vice president of marketing George Delanoy and SFOT sales and promotions manager Jim Pemberton became friends and great mentors. I brought my TI experience, with its direct marketing to target audiences, and applied it to school, church, and tour groups. We developed a corporate benefits package that companies could offer as perks to their staff: the Six Flags Funseekers Club, which succeeded so well at Seven Seas and SFOT that it was replicated at all the Six Flags parks, as were other direct marketing programs. We filled the park with 375,000 visitors the summer of 1974, and at home, Dianne and I had a new visitor too: our beautiful daughter Jennifer Joy Robinson was born.

The morning of Joy’s arrival, Dianne told me she thought it was time to go to the hospital. Hard-charging as I was, I dressed for work—coat, tie, the whole bit—in case it was a false alarm. When we arrived at Presbyterian Hospital, more than twenty women were in the maternity ward being prepped for deliveries—so many that Dianne had to be prepped in the hallway behind a screen! After the nurses had been watching her for two or three hours, the doctor examined her and said, “Get this woman a room! She’s going to have a baby!” So finally I loosened my tie, and a few hours later, our first child, Joy, came into the world, along with the thrill, excitement, and responsibility of such an incredible gift from God. Of course, I had questions for myself: How am I going to step up to this challenge? This responsibility? You don’t know how you’ll answer those questions until you experience the reality of the birth of a child. God uses children to reveal and shape your character. Children are both a blessing and a test.

Most of the day-to-day responsibility for Joy fell to Dianne. She made the decision from the beginning that she would stay home with our children while I built my career. She allowed me to focus on my work because I knew she was with Joy and she was incredibly supportive of what I was doing.

Seven Seas, on the other hand, was a ninety-minute commute each way. On top of that, we had park hours on weekends, plus special events and concerts into the night. I wasn’t home much, but Dianne never complained.

Then the City of Arlington chose not to make any additional investments in the Seven Seas guest experience, so the management contract began to look like a one-year transactional relationship after all. But the contract stipulated that if our work continued past year one, then the city would be obligated to invest capital to refresh the park and add more attractions. I hoped we might have a two- or three-year gig, and I could continue to learn from the Six Flags organization. I loved the Six Flags experience and the theme-park business—the adrenaline that came with the instant feedback of daily attendance, consumer marketing, and retail marketing, all rolled into one brand. Six Flags marketing and management leaders mentored me, investing time to guide me through strategic and tactical marketing issues as well as higher-level management of the business.

At the end of the season, the City of Arlington announced that it had made a new agreement with the founder of Sea World to manage Seven Seas, ending its relationship with Six Flags. Our general manager called me into his office, graciously laid out a severance package, and said at the end of the week my assignment was over. Just like that, I was out of a job.

I drove home playing out the whole thing in my mind—the decision to leave a stable job at Texas Instruments for a gamble. I knew that it might last for only a year. But now we had a child and a mortgage, and Dianne had paid such a price. We had saved some money, and the severance package would last a couple of months, but we were still sleeping on the pullout sofa.

I walked into the house with the news, and Dianne wasn’t fazed. She hugged me and said, “God will provide.” With her calm, stable influence at a time when we didn’t know what would happen with my job and my career—she was a rock.

I still cried.

Learning to Trust God

Dianne was right. My unanticipated sabbatical did not last long: less than two weeks! Six Flags called with a new opportunity.

The company was opening smaller tourist attractions around the country, including the Movieland Wax Museum near Disneyland in California. More than a million patrons visited Movieland annually, and that success inspired the company to build a similar attraction, Stars Hall of Fame, near Disney World in Orlando. They hired me as sales and promotion manager, and for three years we enjoyed success. Stars Hall of Fame sat right next to Sea World, and with two hundred wax sculptures of stars placed in about a hundred built-out sets of classic movie scenes, we drew movie lovers of all ages.

At home, Dianne provided so much support with her encouragement, patience, and complete commitment to Joy and me, and I sought to support my family by seeking the counsel of other men. I’m a firm believer that iron sharpens iron (Proverbs 27:17). For me, that means engaging with other men who have demonstrated over a long period of time spiritual discernment, discipline, and submission to the Holy Spirit. They have proven their ability to lead, discipline, and develop people, even if it’s not directly through a business. They speak truth, even when it’s hard. Put another way, they are respectful truth-tellers.

Other than my dad, the first men who stepped into my life in this way were strong high school basketball and baseball coaches: Ivan Jones, Denzel Hollis, and Lester Smith. These coaches by their countenance, discipline, and resolve demonstrated they were good men worth following. They were men who lived their talk. They expected their team members to do the same.

When Dianne and I married, we sought churches based principally upon the biblical integrity of the man in the pulpit. It doesn’t take long to gauge a pastor by his teaching, by his ability to empower and influence others, and also by the culture within the church. I wanted a pastor I could have a relationship with—one who would speak truth if I had spiritual questions. We found that in Skokie, Illinois, when I attended Northwestern, then later in Dallas, Orlando, and Atlanta.

Here’s one of many examples: several months after we moved to Orlando, our house back in Texas was still sitting empty, unsold. Though the mortgage wasn’t overwhelming, the burden of a house a thousand miles away weighed heavily. I shared my concern with our Orlando pastor, Bill Sutton, perhaps hoping for some sympathy. He offered an unexpected response.

“That’s not your house,” he said. “You and Dianne were stewards of a home that God gave you for a season. So it’s His to sell, not yours. You should just thank Him in advance for selling it.”

I nodded in agreement, but to be honest, I thought Bill was seriously thinking outside the box. God wasn’t mailing a mortgage check back to the bank every month. We were. Or was He?

Later, however, as I thought about what Bill had said, I realized he had spoken truth. If I was going to trust God in all aspects of my life, then I would trust Him to bring a buyer. I prayed as Bill suggested, thanking God for selling our (His) house, and it made perfect sense. And He did, in fact, bring a buyer less than thirty days after that conversation—on July 4th, Independence Day!

Destination Marketing at Six Flags

The Great American Scream Machine, an iconic roller coaster that influenced American amusement parks for a generation, reenergized the brand as well as sagging attendance at Six Flags Over Georgia. And it almost didn’t happen.

As the 1964 New York World’s Fair took shape, President Lyndon Johnson and Texas Governor John Connally looked to the successful Six Flags Over Texas for help and asked Six Flags founder Angus Wynne to oversee the Texas pavilions. Wynne sent Errol McKoy to oversee the entire Lake Amusement Area, and, while there, McKoy visited Coney Island. He was impressed by the historic and fast wooden roller coaster, the Cyclone.

In 1969, after Wynne had made him general manager of Six Flags Over Georgia (at the age of twenty-six!), McKoy suggested that they build a gigantic wooden roller coaster. Wynne responded, “Young man, if you ever do anything that harkens back to the past, you’ll have a very short career in theme parks.”⁵

After Wynne left the company in 1972, McKoy tried again. This time the reception was much friendlier, and in 1973 the world’s tallest, longest, fastest wooden roller coaster opened in Georgia. That season, attendance increased by 350,000 people, and the Scream Machine started a coaster war of sorts, as amusement parks around the country took notice.

In 1977, while I was still working at Stars Hall of Fame, I got a call from Spurgeon Richardson, director of marketing at Six Flags Over Georgia. He needed a sales and promotions manager. My name had been floated as a candidate by someone in the Six Flags organization. I jumped at the chance to interview and was blessed to join Spurge’s team within weeks.

For two years, my role as sales and promotions manager at Six Flags mirrored my responsibilities at Seven Seas and Stars Hall of Fame. We were preselling tickets for corporate outings and youth groups, scheduling concerts and other special events, and connecting with conventions.

Like the last two Six Flags stops and Texas Instruments before that, we relied on segmented direct mail and direct marketing through trade publications to reach schools and colleges, fraternities and sororities, band directors, and church choir and youth directors. We were preselling groups through direct mail while also creating events that would appeal to unique audiences. And we had a great sales staff calling on southeastern companies about corporate outings and the Funseekers Club. We booked jazz bands, Christian talent, and created a marching band competition. The first Christian concert series, featuring emerging artists like Amy Grant, was at Six Flags Over Georgia, with forty-five thousand Saturday visitors. Amy was in her early twenties—such a great young talent—and her “production support” was her guitar and a stool. But she packed the Crystal Pistol theater. The other parks followed our lead on that one.

We created a two-ticket option where a visitor could come the day of a special event and have a second ticket to come at another time. Geographically, we reached out hundreds of miles, often in the direction of the Six Flags parks in Texas and Missouri. The three parks roughly formed the points of a triangle with Memphis, Tennessee, near the center. We shared a footprint in Mississippi, Louisiana, western Tennessee, and Arkansas, and in those areas we partnered on marketing opportunities, primarily direct mail, promoting common events at the multiple locations.

All three parks were sharing ideas and benchmarking each other. It was another learning lab for me.

Because Six Flags had a great reputation nationally and regionally, its name opened doors to other highly respected corporations. Spurgeon had introduced me to co-branding initiatives, which allowed us to extend our brand beyond what we could have reached alone. For example, we partnered with Coca-Cola to offer special tickets for guests. Coke printed the offer on the side of cans, so the effect was to saturate the region with millions of impressions and to connect the Six Flags name with an enjoyable experience: drinking a Coke.

Various companies like General Motors and Dell sponsored rides and shows. One of the more memorable ones was the Chevy Show, where visitors sat in reclining chairs and watched a film projected onto the inside of a dome. Decades before virtual reality or GoPro was a thing, the Chevy Show took viewers inside Corvettes, race cars, airplanes, and boats for a first-person perspective. If you watched the guests inside the show, you could see them lean into a turn or hop in their seats when they hit a bump—even though the seats never moved. A sign outside the show reminded guests of the possibility of motion sickness. (Ironically, I currently live on a road in Atlanta where a portion of the film was shot.)

We worked with many of those same corporations to create events and ticket offers that they marketed for us as an extension of their in-park activities. They sponsored concerts and special events, which were all considered presold or promotion sales. That combination of sales and presold sales generated roughly six hundred thousand of our attendance in 1977. In 1978, my first full season at Six Flags, the park introduced the Mind Bender, the world’s first triple-loop steel roller coaster. We grew our presold sales to 1 million tickets, which contributed to our hitting a record of 2.8 million visitors. The park had never done more than 2.4 million. “2.8 in ’78!” had been Spurge’s vision cry, and we were blessed to reach it.

That’s when I crossed paths for the first time with the growing leader of chicken sandwiches. The head of our sponsorship group wanted to make a pitch to a small, regional restaurant company called Chick-fil-A. I didn’t know much about the chain other than that they were in malls, served a unique, quality product, and were mostly in six or seven southeastern states. What better place to build a brand and trial than a place with 2.8 million people coming through in a season, primarily from the southeast?

“Go for it,” I said. “But you’ve got to be specific. Pitch a location, a design, and be clear about what’s in it for them.” In turn, Six Flags had to retain a portion of sales for sponsorship rights.

We met with Jimmy Collins, senior vice president; Bureon Ledbetter, who was general counsel; and Don Millard, their chief financial officer, and pitched them on building a park restaurant. Over the course of multiple conversations, we got to a store design, location, and a pro forma.

The pro forma, I believe, is what soured them on the deal. Six Flags would receive forty percent of revenues, which represented the sponsorship fee and covered the expected decline of our normal fried chicken sales. In other words, Chick-fil-A would not make much, but they could potentially break even while they built their brand through trial and the personal connection with customers who were part of the Six Flags experience. Jimmy, to his credit, wanted to make money, so they chose not to do the deal. We shook hands and parted on good terms, thankful to have made the connection.

“Out of Sight, Out of Mind, Out of Business”

After that season, Errol McKoy, who was by then the executive vice president of SFOG, told us he had been called back to Dallas, where he would serve as president of the Texas State Fair. Spurgeon Richardson was named general manager of Six Flags Over Georgia, giving us a marketing veteran running the park. I was twenty-eight years old, yet Spurgeon was gracious to give me the opportunity to replace him as director of marketing.

As part of the transition, Spurge and I wanted to better understand the “walk-up” part of the business—the people who drove in and bought full-priced tickets. What compelled someone to come up and pay full price . . . and feel good about it? This was a significant challenge in the theme park business: full-price ticket sales. (Sound anything like fast food?)

I was in the park almost every day, sometimes seven days a week, observing how people were taking in the experience. For two years my team and I had been helping large groups of people make plans for future trips to Six Flags. We had grown corporate outings, concerts, and events that had invigorated presales. But the most profitable ticket we could sell was a family stepping up to the front gate. For the park to continue growing at a healthy pace, we needed to create compelling reasons for people to come today. If you put an umbrella over everything we were doing in our marketing group, that was the theme. “Why do I need to come to Six Flags today?”

Spurge had a simple phrase he repeated a thousand times: “Out of sight, out of mind, out of business.”

Our marketing group’s job was to create that truth in the inverse: “In sight, in mind, in business.” We needed to create top-of-mind awareness for the park by raising visibility and giving families compelling reasons to remember that Six Flags is relevant to their life and family today.

We believed our main gate sales would respond to this question: “What is the compelling, everyday brand promise?” The answer to that question became our challenge and our ad agency’s challenge. We needed to do more than talk about the new rides, updated shows, and events.

“Give visibility to the park’s features,” I said, “but we have to have a brand promise bigger than rides and shows.”

This was the beginning of my education in using research and listening to customers to build a brand.

With the help of our advertising agency, McCann Erickson–Atlanta, and custom research, we started to understand guests’ emotional engagement with the park. Going to Six Flags was a big family expense, and the research told us people were not buying just the fun-and-functional performance of the Scream Machine or the Mind Bender or the Crystal Pistol shows. Families were attracted for many of the same reasons they were attracted to Disney—the emotional experience and the relational time and engagement with their family, particularly with their children.

That knowledge became a powerful insight for us. With it, we gave McCann new direction. Show the rides and shows, especially the new ones, and the calendar of concerts and special events. But particularly during vacation windows, identify the brand promise for the family—their unique family time at Six Flags.

The gifted Clisby Clarke, a hall-of-fame advertising talent at McCann–Atlanta, took the challenge. Clisby played piano by ear and was a huge Georgia Bulldogs fan (I didn’t hold that against him). In fact, that same year he wrote a new fight song, “Bulldog Bite,” for the Georgia athletic department. He and his team responded to our challenge with a powerful theme: “Hug Your Kids the Six Flags Way.”

It was brilliant. In a single line, they identified the emotional promise, which we could build on with images and in-park experiences. He even wrote music for it. We produced radio and television spots that captured family engagement at Six Flags. They showed the park’s brand assets alongside images depicting the relational reward of being with your children and hugging them the Six Flags way.

The campaign was a huge success. Our research confirmed that people immediately identified with it and liked it. The next year, the campaign migrated to some of the other Six Flags parks. It was my first experience with a campaign genuinely capturing what a brand represented. Rewarding, indeed!

The irony for the Robinson family, however, was that I was spending most of my waking hours bringing families together for a wonderful time instead of having a wonderful time with my own family. Our son, Josh, was born in 1979, when Joy was four and a half. On Joy’s birthday, we had an event at the park, and I absolutely couldn’t get home. Dianne was wonderfully patient; she understood.

We decided she would bring Joy to the park to be with me on her birthday. This will be great, I thought. We had in-park characters, so I planned to invite one of them to the party. I got a cake and had it all ready. Then Dianne showed up with little Joy, and when Joy saw that cartoon character in real life, she was scared to death. Dad’s best-laid plans . . .

I missed special events like birthdays, but I also missed too many Sundays. I couldn’t worship with my family. I couldn’t eat dinner with them. Too many nights I came home late. The theme park business is relentless, particularly if your department is responsible for major events.

While I was focused on getting other families into Six Flags based on our brand promise, Spurgeon Richardson was focused on how we delivered on that promise. Spurge insisted the brand promise was much more than just rides and operations and safety. It was also about the interaction and the guest experience. We needed to ramp up the quality of talent we were hiring in the park and improve hospitality training. Thanks to Spurge’s influence and our park’s leadership team, we succeeded. The result: walk-up attendance went up significantly the first year of the campaign.

Then three and a half years into this ride (pun intended), my phone rang.