Jeffrey Weiss stands in a darkened room looking up at a picture of a cartoon character on a screen. A group of 20 or so designers sits in a semi-circle around a table where the cartoon’s creator slowly reads the back story of his creation to his peers.
Weiss, president and COO of American Greetings, a $1.9 billion company best known for its greeting cards, listens for a few minutes, then heads back out into the hallway at the company’s sprawling headquarters building near the intersection of Tiedeman and Memphis roads in Cleveland. Outside the room are displays of more familiar characters: Holly Hobbie, Strawberry Shortcake and Care Bears.
Maybe the character he saw on the screen will go on to rival the success of those classics, or maybe it will die on the drawing board. Either way, Weiss is happy. His employees are exhibiting the types of behaviors he needs to make the cultural transformation at American Greetings a success, which, in turn, will help the company reach its strategic goals.
While the company has always been focused on creativity, about five years ago, the management team knew the company needed to change to reflect new realities in the marketplace, and the culture needed to change with it.
“For better or worse, the company five years ago was heavily a sales and distribution company,” says Weiss. “The strategy we had developed in the ’70s worked very well through the mid ’90s.”
But then the market started to change. Retail was growing rapidly, but it was at the expense of small, independent stores. In their place were the large mass market retailers who could dominate a category and did so much volume they could dictate prices and terms.
Consumers were changing, too. No longer was the interest of American Greetings’ primarily female customer base limited to just a few styles promoted by network television. Instead of one mass culture, there were now many niche cultures with different demands for styles of everything from clothing to greeting cards. And if American Greetings couldn’t change to meet the demands of those niche styles, it would risk losing its appeal to its customer.
“In the ’70s, we all watched the same three channels of television,” says Weiss. “In American culture, we all related to and had an affinity for a large mass culture that was influenced by large mass media. Today, the number of television channels is up to a few hundred. I’m still watching predominantly three to five channels, and you’re still watching three to five channels, but the three to five I’m watching are probably different than the three to five you’re watching and the three to five someone else is watching.
“The influences for creative development were starting to fragment. As an industry, we were focused on creative and development models that were aligned to large mass markets or large media markets. The consumer wasn’t there anymore.”
American Greetings had to change its strategy, and the culture needed to change to support it. The company was going to shift toward being focused on content creation centered on social expression products that help people express themselves. And regardless of whether it was in the form of a greeting card, gift wrap or a new cartoon character to be licensed to someone else, it was going to take the whole company to make the strategy work.
“The culture we had was representative of that model from the ’70s ,’80s and ’90s, so we started on a path of cultural change,” says Weiss.
By clearly articulating what the goals of the company are, creating behaviors to drive the results and holding people accountable to them, American Greetings has transformed its culture to better match the company’s strategy and a rapidly changing marketplace.
