This is Not Your Grandma’s Girl Scouts: The Centennial Re-branding of Girl Scouts of USA

It’s that time of year again – piles of brightly colored boxes are beginning to appear stacked high on tables outside storefronts all over the world. This is not a special holiday or shoe sale, but the annual Girl Scouts’ cookie sale, a rite of passage into spring for almost 100 years and a $700 million business led by girls who now are selling upwards of 400 boxes of cookies an hour!

Before you read any further, set aside your stale childhood juice box impression of the Girl Scouts associated with camping and crafts you may have been familiar with growing up, whether you were a Girl Scout or not. Founded in 1912, the Girl Scouts now have 3.3 million girl and adult members in 90 countries worldwide with 1 in every 10 girls participating. But, today’s Girl Scouts is not your grandmother’s, your mother’s, or even your older sister’s variation of Scouting. With 2012 marking the centennial celebration of the Girl Scouts of the USA, leaders have looked for ways to freshen up the Girl Scouts’ brand to make it as hip as ever and in tune with the Justin Bieber crowd and beyond.

The solution? A makeover, the first of its kind in 30 years!

According to a July 7, 2010 press release, which made the effort public, Chief Marketing Officer, Laurel Ritchie, told ABC news, “We heard our logo looked a little, tired, weathered, worn and discolored, like it had been out on a picnic table all winter”. Additionally, she said the goal is to reposition the Girl Scouts so that it is relevant to girls since research revealed awareness of the Girl Scout brand but not a full understanding of its direct benefits. Ritchie’s statement supports the re-branding vision of Kathy Cloniger, CEO of Girl Scouts of the USA, to “revitalize and energize”.

The January 19, 2010 video clip, “What Can a Cookie Do” uploaded by GirlScout Videos laid the message of the power of an individual girl through the use of a cookie as a mechanism for personal growth and change. Whether intended or not, the overall feel including font, colors, movement, and themes directly mirror in a splendid application “The Girl Effect” (May 2008) video clip, sponsored by Nike.

“The Girl Effect” movement is too powerful not to be mentioned here but any further detail would require a separate entry to do it justice. Simply put, if you empower a girl with basic skills applied to cookie sales or cow farming she could become successful and in turn influence her direct community and later change the world. So, the heart of the Girl Scouts’ re-branding message is effectively placing additional emphasis on and playing off the new brand of the modern girl being independent and powerful by herself alone.

In a truly integrated fashion, the Girl Scouts’ have managed to combine online, traditional media, and place based marketing in a multichannel strategy. Most of which has been carefully planned and executed but some of which has been much like a game of hide-and-seek with new initiatives popping up around the map. Overarching the entire campaign at its foundation is the revised color palette and trefoil logo created by Original Champion of Design, which moves toward a more vibrant green and away from its old logo, originally designed by Saul Bass in the 1970s. These decisions to change were drawn from focus group sessions that revealed modern hairstyles, longer/thinner necks, and lowercase letters would all make the Girl Scouts more approachable and casual to the target audience of young and teenage girls.

The traditional outlets such as news ads highlight themes of girls participating in sports, featuring Serena Williams, career ambitions with females in space, and community involvement. This general campaign hopes for $30 million in pro-bono placements for traditional broadcast and print journalism to airports and online messaging.

Online, the Girl Scouts have it covered. With a stand-alone website, YouTube Channel, Flickr Group, Facebook page, and Twitter account its daily reach grows exponentially through the application of technology making Girl Scouts social media gurus. The “Cookie Club”, a password protected website, enables Girl Scouts to even send e-cards with a link to an order form online asking for pledges.

Jud Hoffman, the Global Policy Manager at Facebook, told coworkers one day his daughter was selling Girl Scouts cookies and he had created a Facebook event for people to purchase. Many responded with dismay as they typically only had credit cards and could not make a purchase with cash. He quickly huddled with James McKelvey and Jack Dorsey, cofounders of Square, a dynamic duo of a downloadable app and 2.5cm dongle that scans credit cards, and implemented this technology to assist his daughter in selling 400 boxes of cookies in an hour! It probably helped that Facebook’s Randi Zuckerberg tweeted simultaneously, “Some very smart, enterprising Girl Scouts are at Facebook HQ w/boxes of cookies & @square devices. Making SERIOUS bank.”

This is of course a story of extremes but there are many examples of e-payment options being used. E-payment options are a trend and are increasingly popular on mobile technology. Girl Scouts in northeastern Ohio were selected to use the GoPayment app and credit card reader by Intuit, a small business processing payment company, who is also offering use of these free and reduced costs services to Girl Scouts nation-wide in the U.S.

One of the best uses of technology so far, unbiased of course, is the “Cookie Locator” App which can be downloaded to the iPhone, itouch, and iPad.  Chicago’s southside West Chesterfield Girl Scouts troop were the first to implement. This handy app enables cookie-craved consumers to find a cookie booth location between February 18 and March 13.

So, with this year’s re-branding effort of the Girl Scouts it is quite likely that you’ll receive emails, tweets, and reminders via a Facebook friend, in case, heaven forbid you’ve somehow missed the cookie sale in person and need to be reminded. It’s also a matter of convenience too-for those who only carry plastic. Never fear, chances are you’ll be able to pay after you find a cookie sales booth using your handy mobile phone app and then swipe with Square or another form of GoPayment. Girl Scouts are evolving to be not only business savvy but technologically as well. Wouldn’t your Grandmother be happy you’ve successfully brought forth an age old tradition of cookie sales into the convergence of technology?