Robert Hollander’s career has taken lots of twists and turns. Today, he is president of Brand Sense Partners, a Los Angeles-based company that manages licensing products for Thermos, Britney Spears and Dodge, among others. Hollander, who went to Georgia Tech University on a football scholarship, saw his marketing career take off when the Atlanta Olympic Committee chose him to spearhead licensed product development. Next came stints running licensing for Championship Auto Racing Teams and serving as president of WhatsHotNow.com, a Los Angeles company that sold licensed products on the Web.
Question: Describe your company.
Answer:
We really try to unlock and leverage the power of brands and take them into key businesses. The company gets the duel advantage of getting their brand in front of consumers and they also receive royalties from these other companies who do the heavy lifting. We manage those businesses for our clients, everyone from Britney Spears to the Clorox Corp. We take a percentage of all the things we create in terms of the revenue.
Q: You are known for your unconventional approach.
A:
C onventional is just slapping a logo on some product and saying here you go. The unconventional is trying to understand the consumer of that brand, and where they shop and what they do and trying to find a connection. We are doing that with Dodge Hemi power tools. That would not be a conventional brand extension for a lot of companies in the automobile business. But people use their truck as a tool. They could be in the construction business or the cabinet business and they have a truck. They are very familiar with the brand and Hemi means performance.
Q: What other licensing projects are you working on?
A:
Kingsford Charcoal. We have just taken them into the charcoal grill business. We have a company that makes charcoal grills. We license the brand Kingsford, and you will start to see Kingsford grills out in the marketplace, which is the perfect connection. If I happen to own a Kingsford grill, what kind of charcoal am I going to use? Well, Kingsford Charcoal.
Q: How do you avoid diluting the brand?
A:
Whether they are a celebrity or a sport or a corporation, the integrity of the brand is the most important thing. Whatever you do, it has to be at a high level that matches the brand. For us to do things that dilute the brand is counterintuitive to our business.
Q: Los Angeles is loaded with small and middle-market companies. What particular brand challenges do they have?
A:
Probably the biggest challenge is that a lot of these medium and smaller companies don’t have giant advertising and marketing budgets. How do you get national or worldwide recognition without spending lots of money? Fortunately, by being here in Los Angeles, you can capture a lot of celebrities wearing your products, which can be seen in something like People magazine. You have to do things that are really unique and be very, very selective in where the advertising goes.
Q: How did you get involved with Britney Spears?
A:
I had met her manager a couple of years ago. I said, “When you are ready to chat about it, why don’t you take a corporate brand approach rather than the usual trinket trash approach?” The first part of the business plan was to take her into the beauty business. If the perfume business does well, it could be going for 20 years similar to Elizabeth Taylor. Her perfume is probably still a best-selling perfume even though she is not that visible.
Q: Now that she has her first perfume on the market, what comes next?
A:
Elizabeth Arden will be launching Britney’s next perfume. There will be television commercials and print advertising. We are starting to move into a little more of the cosmetic side, with lip gloss and eye shadow.
Q: Do celebrities have problems branding themselves?
A:
Most of the celebrity branding just happens. They are very reactive, opportunistic. Some of it is driven by the fact that the managers and the agents are looking for that dollar. Some of them say, “I have clients that are hot for 20 minutes, and if they are going to be hot for 20 minutes, I have got to get everything I can right now.”
Q: So give us an example of a trashy celebrity product.
A:
If you take the music business, a lot of that was driven by concert souvenirs. They are not representative of the highest quality and fashion that a music celebrity might want.
Q: So what is your approach?
A:
We treat it as we would treat a very long-term corporate brand and build a business plan. We say, “OK, you are the brand, who do you appeal to?” If you appeal to these people, what are they buying? What are they touching? What are they doing? How can we connect with them and keep the integrity of your name, your brand, at the same time?
b>Q: Talk about your Olympic experience.
A:
I took the approach that if we treated the Olympics more as a brand than as an event, we might be able to do more business in the long run, as opposed to the games that come for three weeks. If you look at what the Olympics stand for, what they stand for doesn’t go away after the games. We really started saying, “How can we extend it to different people in different ways?”
Q: For example?
A:
I did a licensing deal with Speedo, and they created all sorts of swimwear with Olympic indicia on it. A lot of Olympic Speedo was sold worldwide. We rent the brand to a third party, and they pay a percentage of everything they sell. If you want to take your sweater and put the Olympic rings on it, we might rent you the rights to do that, and every time you sold a sweater with rings on it, you would pay the Olympic committee a small percentage, maybe 5, 10 percent. When you multiple by that by hundreds of companies and thousands of products, it actually ended up being a very, very significant revenue stream.
Q: How would you approach the London Olympics and do you think the terrorist acts will have any effect?
A:
I don’t think it is going to have a big effect. Any of the cities that were bidding for the games always have the potential to have some kind of incident. I would be sure that the security will be at its highest levels when the games are on in 2012, which is still a long way off.
Q: When did you start learning about the power of brands?
A:
We had a little company over a 12-year period or more that we grew into a fairly nice size company called Rand Industries. I got involved early on with the folks from Ralph Lauren who were trying to figure out how to redistribute some of their product. I would basically contract for excess production of polo shirts that they were making. Then I would resell them to retailers around the country and ship them out. What I started to realize is that the thing that made the things we were doing really attractive was the brand.
Q: What brand do you believe has been particularly successful?
A:
Ralph Lauren. In the early days, before tennis shirts became polo shirts, I knew that the same guy who made the shirts for Sears in the same plant was making the shirts for Ralph Lauren. Quite frankly, the difference was a couple of buttons and a label; that was about it. Ralph Lauren did a phenomenal job. It was always a little more expensive than everything else. It was marketed as being very stylish, very upscale. People want something that is high-end, luxury and shows that they have great taste.
