Is Dave Insane? Inside a Brand Makeover
The branding experts said he desperately needed help with his image. But were they right?
Timothy Archibald
HEATED DEBATE: Dave Hirschkop's best customers buy his signature product, the ferociously hot Insanity Sauce, once every three years. Now he's examining his loyalty to Insanity.
Anthony Verde
THE ORIGINAL HOTTEST SAUCE IN THE UNIVERSE
Dave's Gourmet, Insanity Sauce, rebranding, hot sauce
A SIMPLE MATTER OF CHANGING EVERYTHING: Scenes from the sessions at Desky. To the left, Tony Neary goes over the key ideas embodied in Dave's Gourmet. On the wall are the work sheets Desky calls onions. Above, the presentation of new bran
I. The Brandnapping
The hostage note and the first of a barrage of increasingly grisly photos arrived at Dave Hirschkop's office in the fall of 2005. The note, assembled from letters cut from magazines, asked: Do You KnoW wHERE YouR BranD iS? The accompanying Polaroid displayed the October 4 front page of USA Today and a gloved hand around the neck of his first-born. The next day another envelope arrived. More photos, each more shocking than the one before, and this threat: WE WARNED YOU! scrawled on the bottom white border of one of the Polaroids. One photo showed Dave's progeny handcuffed to a water pipe in an ominous-looking basement. Another showed the blade of a table saw threatening to send a torrent of red skyward. Dave smiled.
And then there was this: one more shot of Dave's eponymously named, five-ounce bottle of hot sauce, this time vice-gripped by headphones--headphones connected to a boom box presumed to be loaded with the CD from the adjacent jewel box: David Hasselhoff's Greatest Hits. Dave laughed.
In the 13 years since he had created his ferociously hot Insanity Sauce (spiciness in food is measured in scoville units; Insanity Sauce has a rating of 180,000, compared with 5,000 for Tabasco), donned a straitjacket at trade shows, and professionally jettisoned his last name to stake a more indelible claim in the minds of his loyal customers, Dave had received some wild fan mail but never a hostage note. This practical joke, or whatever it was, intrigued and energized him. No surprise there--the 39-year-old Hirschkop is the kind of free spirit who actually cried "cool" when he got carjacked. ("Hey, something interesting happened," he explained to his wife.) Now he shared these latest brandnapping photos with his nine employees at his San Francisco-based specialty food company, all the while eyeing a phone number on one of the photos: 513-721-6800. A Cincinnati phone number. That much he knew….
Meanwhile, three time zones to the east, a couple of floors up from a dingy basement where only days earlier a handcuff had hung from a water pipe, employees at a company called Deskey were gathering more photos, even a videotape, for more mailings to Dave's Gourmet, pushing the envelope on a most unusual direct mail campaign. Unusual not just because of its approach but in its very conception, for it envisioned no direct return on what could result in long hours of work for Deskey's employees, who normally toil on branding and design work and new packaging concepts for the likes of Procter & Gamble and Starbucks, big corporations with deep pockets.
So why was Deskey expending creative time and energy on a small fry like Dave's Gourmet, whose annual revenue fell short of the ad budgets for many of the projects Deskey typically worked on? Two reasons. Because Ben Stallard, the company's marketing services director, thought Deskey would benefit from what he terms a "passion project." And because while he was looking for such a creative catalyst he happened into the office of one of the company's design directors, Tony Neary, where his gaze fell on a battalion of small bottles with colorful labels. Yeahhhhhhhhh. Stallard experienced a hot-sauce rush without ingesting a single scoville unit.
Designing a hot sauce label would be fun, he felt--just what Deskey needed, a companywide creative sprint that would stretch everybody in ways not always possible when serving Fortune 500 companies. One of a handful of remaining independent branding agencies, Deskey prides itself on being small (55 employees, including those in a satellite office in Philadelphia) and nimble and, in Stallard's words, "kind of a maverick." But Stallard, who had joined Deskey a year earlier, sensed a growing toll of too many tamer projects, lucrative ones that paid everyone's salaries but didn't necessarily light a fire under anyone.
"I noticed the ebb and flow of morale and felt we needed a good, fun project," says Stallard. "When you work for a big consumer products company they often have five years of studies they're going to drop on your desk and say, 'Here's the consumer insight.' You can design between this point and this point, which might be between blue 185 and blue 186. It's very rigid. Lots of rules and barriers. And man cannot live by toothpaste and toilet paper alone. Sometimes you need something that's fun. Sometimes you need a hot sauce."
Bit by bit, a project code-named Scoville Protocol started taking shape.
With no idea whom he was calling, Dave picked up the phone and dialed that Cincinnati phone number. Between rings he created a name for himself. "This is Agent Johnson from the FBI," he began. "I'm investigating this brand kidnapping…" Game on, thought Stallard, sensing a kindred spirit, as the "FBI agent" was being transferred to his line. It looked like Neary, who knew and enjoyed the contents and pedigree of most of his hot sauce bottles, had recommended the right man, a CEO who'd be open to Deskey's unconventional pitch.
Stallard arranged for a get-acquainted meeting in December at Dave's corporate digs in an industrial section of San Francisco. There, Stallard and Neary introduced themselves and Deskey to Dave, and Dave told them more about his company, its strengths, its struggles, and his dream of taking it well beyond its current $2.5 million in annual sales. A few weeks later, Stallard dangled Deskey's services, offering a day of branding brainstorming, to be followed by specific recommendations and design concepts--a marketing makeover, at no cost, from brand experts Dave's Gourmet could otherwise never afford. Convinced of Deskey's talents, though still puzzled how this quite made sense for his benefactors, Dave gladly accepted. Like Cinderella, he was bound for the ball.
II. Day One at Deskey:
Intervention and the Seeds of Invention
