A Corporate Suck-up Like No Other

My sister Susan has inspired this one, by telling of her recent experiences with her local Red Lobster restaurant.

Personally, I haven't eaten there in a long time. Like without exaggeration, it's easily been over five years... I read Susan's story, entertained by the inconsistency of the big-box dining experience.. And then at the end, she posted the picture you see above, the Red Lobster Logo.

Seeing that logo brought back a memory so ridiculous it made me chuckle to myself. Why would a cartoony lobster have that impact on me? Read on, dear reader. Read on.

I mentioned a while back that I spent the bulk of the '90s working for AEI Music Network, programming music for businesses. One of our larger customers was Darden Restaurants, primarily known for their Red Lobster and Olive Garden brands. At the time, there were over 1000 Red Lobster locations alone, and Olive Gardens were popping up all over the country. Definitely an important customer to our company. I personally didn't handle music for either brand, which was a relief because somewhere in the mid-'90s they left us for a competitor. Pretty sure they headed over to Muzak...

In the cutthroat world of business music in the 1990s, Muzak was always trying to steal away AEI's biggest customers with promises of more personalized attention, better service, and in the case of Red Lobster, a special speaker system that would "turn their entire dining room into one big speaker". Well, the guy who was in charge of "visual merchandising" at the Lobster was a sucker for that line, so he packed up their business and headed off into the abyss.

I don't remember the EXACT timeline, but I think less than a year went by before the rumours started popping up that they were less than thrilled with their new business partner, and that we had a chance to snag them back. Time went on, and the rumours were confirmed as fact. Our equipment department went crazy setting up demos of all the different speaker setups we could offer, we put together countless music demos aimed at making every song, Red Lobster's target customer's favorite song.

Finally, the day of "The Big Meeting" came. The entire company was aware that up in the conference room, our sales team and company executive officers were waging the Battle for the Lobster, and we weren't planning on coming out empty handed. There was a combined feeling of desperation and confidence that seemed somewhat surreal. And when the doors were shut and the meeting began, the marketing department unveiled their top-secret weapon.

Various helper-monkeys from the marketing team went department to department through both of our buildings, handing out special T-Shirts. Everyone was REQUIRED to put their shirts on, and keep them on until all Red Lobster people had left the building, and were on their plane back to Florida. These T-Shirts were going to be the final, guaranteed WIN for the deal.

These T-Shirts were the single largest, most pathetic corporate suck-up I've ever witnessed in my life.

They were white. The front had the very familiar, and at the time, very stylish AEI logo printed on it. But this was a special AEI logo. It had a cartoony, red, lobster perched atop the letters. That, I have to admit, actually looked pretty good, even clever.

But they also printed the back of the shirt.

The back of the shirt was the full Red Lobster logo you see at the top of the page, along with big, bold letters saying "WE WANT YOU BACK!"

We had a good 300+ people at our headquarters, and when the meeting was adjourned, the doors opened up, and every one of them - under penalty of "disciplinary action" - was wearing this T-Shirt, shamelessly begging for the chance to provide safe adult-contemporary music to these very high-maintenance restaurants.

I have no idea if the deal was already done in the meeting, or if the shirts actually had anything to do with it, but we did get them back. And like most things that you have to try that hard to win back, it was really annoying. They felt so empowered by our epic brown nosing, that they felt THEY owned US from that point on. Installing the new custom sound systems cost us a fortune, and they were perpetually displeased with the music being played. Not because there was an actual problem, but because we had established ourselves as their serving wench, existing only to please them.

Their return did impact me personally too. By the late '90s, I was doing less music programming, and more specialty programming. This included things like overhead messages, music and messaging that plays when people are on hold with their phone systems, etc. For the Darden Restaurants group, I wound up doing their music and messaging on hold. To keep their "important" customers from being bored while waiting to talk to a live person, they put together a formula for their on-hold music. 30 seconds of music from a current Red Lobster program, followed by 30 seconds of music from Olive Garden, 30 seconds from Bahama Breeze, and then over again. Interspersed was the token "Your call is very important to us" along with various "we are so great!" messages. The total loop had to be 20 minutes or so, and I really hope nobody ever stayed on hold through the entire thing. Worst of all, each month all three restaurants got new music, so naturally their on hold loop had to be updated. On my list of "Things I produced at AEI that I am still proud of to this day" the Darden music on hold loop doesn't even place. It was a total vanity project, that they were getting for free because they were self-established as our most important customer. There are many things on that list, but I'd forgotten all about this one until my dear sister used that logo yesterday. Thanks, Sue!!

If anybody's still reading, thanks... And know this: All of the shenanigans listed above are true. As bad as it sounds, they pale in comparison to the self-important nit-picking of the large retail clients, specifically the Limited Group (Limited, Limited Too, Victoria's Secret, Abercrombie & Fitch and more) and the number one pain-in-the-butt company for the entire 9.5 years I worked at AEI, The Gap group, particularly, Old Navy. Even today, when I hear a song playing in Old Navy, I know how much effort, and how many revisions it took to get approval for it to be played there. And I shudder... And life as a boring I.T. guy seems a little better.

Oh yeah, one more thing... I kept my shirt, and LOVED to wear it any time I went to Red Lobster to eat. It finally hit the end of its lifespan a few years ago, which is maybe why I never eat at Red Lobster anymore - I just don't know what I would wear!