Marketing the Steppenwolf Brand
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Hawkanson, a consultant to Steppenwolf before joining the company and managing director of Minneapolis’s Guthrie Theater prior to that, says they took a look at their strengths and weaknesses and realized they needed someone with serious marketing chops. They settled on Bradford Matson, who knows all about databases, focus groups, and conjoint analysis but had been using them to sell silk shirts and sofas to the working woman. Matson has no theater or nonprofit experience, but in 22 years at catalog giant Spiegel, he worked his way up the ladder from copywriter to senior vice president for advertising and brand communications.
The job at Steppenwolf, where he’d been a subscriber for years, was, he says, a chance to “market something I believe in, something important,” but would entail a huge pay cut–something on the order of 50 percent or more. While Matson was debating the wisdom of this, someone gave him the name of Tom Yorton, president and managing director at Second City Communications, who’d also left corporate marketing for the theater. Says Matson, “I called him, we discussed the pros and cons, and he said, ‘It sounds like you want to do it. Why don’t you just go ahead?’” Now Matson, who will start at Steppenwolf January 5, sees himself as part of a boomer midlife trend: trading a generous income for more meaningful work.
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