Starting the voyage
Dickinson could have hired high-paid consultants or a prestigious marketing firm to come up with the new brand, but it wasn’t necessary. Instead, he just asked himself a simple question.
“What do people like on vacation? They all want fun,” Dickinson says. “They may define it differently, but they all want fun. That was the creation of Fun Ship. We started to brand that as early as January 1974. We kept developing the brand.”
Changing the branding of the cruise line wasn’t complicated because the old Golden Fleet brand had poor recognition among consumers.
“The good thing about that brand is nobody really knew it,” says Dickinson. “When we changed to the Fun Ship, there wasn’t a lot of retraining to be done. It wasn’t like Esso becoming Exxon, because everybody knew Esso.”
Dickinson never would have come up with the simple brand name had he allowed himself to get overburdened by the day-to-day drudgery of his job.
“When you are a CEO or a brand manager or a CMO, you need to spend a certain amount of time away from all the little things that the job entails,” he says. “You need contemplative time. I see a lot of people in the business. They have phone calls to return, they have e-mails, they have meetings. At the end of the day, at the end of the week, at the end of the month, even at the end of the year, a lot of their job gets trivialized, and the inmates run the asylum. Others are setting their schedules.
“Frequently what happens is that necessary planning and strategizing, that big-picture, looking-at-it-from-30,000-feet positioning, doesn’t take place because time is eroded by all the minutia.”
Removing yourself from the business is important to gain a clear perspective.
“There is a level of detachment that a CEO or a CMO should have from the day-to-day of the company,” says Dickinson. “Obviously, they can’t be detached all the time. It’s very, very important that they have unstructured time where they can think and they can meditate and they can manage by walking around.”
It’s not an easy change for some executives to make. It takes discipline and dedication.
“They have to start with a little bit of time management,” Dickinson says. “They have to carve out time to do this. Whatever the project, if you don’t create time for it, it never gets done.
“I liken my job as CEO to being the conductor of an orchestra. The conductor does not play an instrument when he is performing. He lets everybody else play the instruments. Whether it’s the winds or the percussions or the strings or the brass, they’re all working together. They’re all in harmony. That’s the job of the conductor. It’s also the job of the conductor to decide what’s going to be played. Where are we going to be?”
Dickinson recognizes that it can be difficult to make the change to that mindset because there is a stigma attached to a CEO who doesn’t spend most of his or her waking hours on the job.
“There are other executives I know in different businesses that kind of laugh at my work hours — I take time off, I take vacation,” Dickinson says. “I may not leave for work until a quarter to nine. I rarely stay past five. I want to get that jump on the road home, but we get the job done, and it’s not a question of working long hours. It’s a question of working smarter, not harder, and getting the right team around you.”
