How the Snapple Brand Won Our Hearts in the 90s, Then Lost Them

Jane is a former Madison Avenue marketer who previously drove strategic planning as an executive vice president at McCann Erickson, one of the world's largest ad agencies.

So Jane Cavalier, thank you for joining us here on the Lead Balloon podcast.

Oh, thanks, Dusty.

I'm so happy to be here.

So Jane, can you tell me briefly about your background? You have had a very rich and storied career in the field of advertising.

What path has that career taken, and what are some of the brands that you've had a hand in shaping?

Well, you know, it's interesting, Dusty.

I think I probably started at the end of the Mad Men era on Madison Avenue.

I started at a, at that time, was a great creative agency called Doyle Dane Bernbach, which really had transformed Madison Avenue by pairing the copywriter with the art director and creating that team for the first time.

So I worked in large agencies, and then I went, uh, with two partners from a place called ChiatDay.

We formed a creative boutique, which in its first year won more creative awards in advertising than any other agency in its history.

And then I returned back to a large agency, as you mentioned, at McCann Erickson, where I was EVP of strategic planning.

And I fell in love with branding and brand strategy there, and I opened up the first brand strategy boutique for McCann, and then left with, uh, ExxonMobil as a founding partner client worldwide, and had my own brand consulting company with ex-chairman of McCann, Peter Kim.

It was called BrightSun, and then from there I moved into my own brand consulting company called Brightmark.

You know, I've been doing that for the last 20 years.

One of the things that I love about talking to Jane for this episode is that she brings a perspective of having worked with all of these huge brands in both the big agency world and the boutique agency world.

But of course, the brand that we're discussing today is Snapple.

The company was founded 50 years ago on Long Island by a trio of blue collar fellas whose approach to juice making was as unsophisticated as their approach to marketing.

And I'm not talking down here.

I'm just saying that the brand was originally launched under the moniker Unadulterated Food Products, which doesn't exactly make me wanna run out and crack open a bottle.

You know, and the three owners, Lenny, Hymie, and Arnie.

Lenny and Hymie were brother-in-laws.

Arnie is the one who owned the natural health food store.

The other two were in the window washing business.

So, um, I would say that like a lot of entrepreneurs, they intuitively think they know branding or they know marketing, and then as they get into it, it's not as easy as they thought.