It was the maiden voyage for the Mardi Gras, the newly formed Carnival Cruise Lines’ first ship. Just off the port of Miami, the ship promptly ran aground and was stuck for 24 hours.
“It was pilot error,” says Bob Dickinson, Carnival Cruise Lines’ president and CEO. “The first thing we did was open the bar. The drink of the day was ‘Mardi Gras on the Rocks.’”
It was a troubled start for the company that would, less than 15 years later, become the largest cruise line in the world. While running aground may have given competitors fodder for jokes, Dickinson knew Carnival had a much bigger concern — there was a problem with the way the company was presenting itself to the world.
The brand was, ‘The Mardi Gras — The Flagship of the Golden Fleet.’ The problem was, there was only one ship, it wasn’t golden and “Fleet” was a brand of personal care products that included enemas. The ship sailed half empty and lost $8.5 million in the first year.
The brand obviously needed a major overhaul. And it didn’t take great inspiration, or a midnight epiphany to come up with a new brand.
“When I came down (from the parent company), I had the advantage — I was, among other things, the chief marketing officer,” Dickinson says. “I had the advantage of not knowing anything. I let the company run for a while and didn’t get too involved for a week or two and just studied — studied the other lines, the brochures, what else was going on.”
Those observations resulted in one of today’s best-known brand names: Carnival Cruise Lines.
