[From CBS MarketWatch]
Tough cookies: Businesswomen credit Girl Scout sales with market savvy
By Kristen Gerencher Last Update: 2:54 PM ET March 13, 2002
SAN FRANCISCO (CBS.MW) -- ... Under the direction of 317 local Girl Scout councils, first-grade through high-school girls this year are again getting a taste of business peddling perennial favorites like Thin Mints and Samoas. They join the ranks of 50 million American women who've sold cookies to raise funds for local chapters of the national organization, which celebrates its 90th anniversary this week.
With membership nearing the high of 3.9 million achieved in the 1960s, today's troops are learning skills such as brand awareness, team work, money management and customer service as a result of their "cookie drives."
As with generations before them, girls take valuable lessons from pounding the pavement with product pitches and order forms, an exercise many former scouts say had a great impact on their careers.
Modernizing the playbook
Unlike the old days, girls also are setting up cookie-table clearinghouses outside retail centers and sporting events to capitalize on impulse buying. There's one place where selling is still off-limits: the Internet. Safety concerns prevent Girls Scouts of the USA from endorsing online sales, spokeswoman Sara Au said.
The national group doesn't track or promote sales figures and discourages parents from involving themselves beyond support roles, she said. Rugged individualism is supposed to take a back seat to the idea of funding collective outings and field trips.
"It's not about how many cookies are sold or which girl sells the most," Au said. "It really is about learning to create a 'business plan,' how to sell and how to deliver on a promise."
And what better way for girls to do that than with a brand that sells itself, said Kevin Clark, president of Clark Marketing Group Inc. in Draper, Utah. "They have a good experience because many people will buy from them."
Marketing 101: Selling themselves
Girl Scout cookies have a long history of achieving one of marketing's most profitable goals: Evoking emotion.
"It really does have a good name because of the quality of the product and....the charitable element of helping out the girls and the organization and the social consciousness that goes along with being a good citizen," Clark said.
Though the girls benefit from pitching a product that's marketed exclusively through them and only for a short time, they face other obstacles, said Judy Hopelain, a partner at Prophet, a San Francisco brand-consulting firm.
"Yes, they're cute and wearing their uniforms and people are predisposed to wanting to interact with these kids. But still they have to speak loud enough and not look at their shoes and sell themselves," she said....
Carl
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