Girl Scouts Spend $100,000 To Hire Image Consultant
The Girl Scouts, best known for selling cookies, are spending about $100,000 to find out why they are best known for selling cookies.
The $100,000 is going to hire a New York image consulting firm to “help build a brand identification program,” the scouts announced.
For years, said Executive Director Marsha Johnson Evans, the public has assumed that Girl Scouts “are about cookies and camping.
“There’s so much more to today’s scouting.”
So earlier this month, the scouts decided to spend the equivalent of 33,000 boxes of Thin Mints to hire the firm of Siegel and Gale, which calls itself an “international strategic marketing and communications firm.”
Head consultant Alan Siegel said Wednesday that his mission would be to help the scouts figure out why they are “considered a fuddy-duddy, white-shoes-only organization that has … fallen off the radar screen.”
After four months, Siegel said, the scouts will be able to “communicate clearly and be understood by the various audiences they deal with.”
At that point, the firm will likely urge the scouts to spend additional money to buy advertisements promoting their image.
Along with cookies, Evans said, programs include sports, computers, literacy, career mentoring and math and science workshops.
“The cookie program plays such an important part in enabling us to provide this wealth of opportunities,” said Evans, apparently already forgetting her resolve not to stress the cookies.
Siegel, who will direct six consultants on the scout project, said he did not know that a box costs $3 or that the individual troop retains only 40 cents on each box or that this year’s flavors are Thin Mint, Striped Chocolate Chip, Lemon Chalet Creme, Samoas, Do-Si-Dos, Tagalongs, Trefoils and Snaps. He added that he has yet to buy a box of cookies.
“We have to prioritize their programs,” he said. “We have to help them synthesize their programs into coherence and relevance.”
Siegel and Gale bills itself as a “pioneer in the plain English movement for business.”
As for spending $100,000 of the girls’ money, local scouts were more sour on the idea than the lemon in a Lemon Chalet Creme.
“Wow, what can I say, it’s shocking,” said the leader of Troop 801 in Mill Valley, Calif. “My girls work hard for every dollar they get. To spend that much money - I just can’t believe it.”
Girl Scout Christina Kellogg, 10, said she thought the consultant would “just tell us what we already know.” Besides, she said, everyone knows the scouts do more than sell cookies.
“We sell nuts, too,” she said. “And we take hikes and go to Great America and make cards for the homeless shelter and a lot of stuff.”