July 1, 2010

2010 Top OPS Awards: Independent Marketer of the Year: Mitch Robinson

Mitch Robinson, Marketing and Business Ops Manager

Click Cable TV

What does it take to shake up a staid, 100-year-old utility so that it can compete effectively against giants like Comcast? For Mitch Robinson, our Independent Marketer of the Year, part of the answer is purple hair.

Although he admits "I’m not a young guy who looks good in colored hair," Robinson last February had his locks dyed purple — the color that dominates Click’s service trucks, its billboards, its Web site and, well, everything.

Robinson had lived in the Seattle-Tacoma area before joining Click. "I wasn’t sure what Click was," he says. "Was it a power company? A cable company? I figured other people felt the same way." Research proved him correct. Click had an identity crisis. That’s when the purple haze descended on everything Click. "We wanted to stand out and entertain." It’s also when Click Network Tacoma Power gave birth to Click Cable TV and the tag "Your Local Choice." Today Click Cable TV has 110 employees serving 25K subs.

But the purple hair? Robinson did it when certain "lofty" sub and revenue goals, set nearly 4 years ago, were reached. But this was not a ‘hair today, gone tomorrow’ situation. Robinson kept his colorful mane for "a long 3 weeks" and attended a slew of community events and business meetings. "The chairperson would usually say, ‘Before we begin, Mitch, tell us, why is your hair purple?’ And I lost no opportunity to talk up our company in these community forums," he insists.

The significance of Robinson’s purple hair hasn’t, er, receded. Pictures of his coiffure abound on walls in Click’s offices. "He took one for the team...it raised morale, brought us together and reminded us that we reached our goals," says Click’s Government/Community Relations Manager Diane Lachtel. "It was very popular with field employees," she adds, noting service techs initially got plenty of ribbing driving around town in Click’s all-purple trucks.

While hair might make the man, it takes more to make a good marketer. Beyond his hair-raising antics, Robinson "knows how important it is to make a mark in the community when you’re up against a strong competitor like Comcast," says NCTCs SVP Dan Mulvenon. Indeed, "Markting is all about differentiation," Robinson says, "and we’ve layered localism on top of everything we do." So Click’s ads feature local high school musicians. And it picked up WGN because it knew Chicago Cubs’ skipper Lou Piniella is a local hero — Robinson even staged a Piniella-style base-throwing contest to generate buzz. Click sponsors Saturday matinees at a local theater for subs and non-subs alike. And Robinson holds free, quarterly sessions for subs, where he discusses how to get more value from cable. Recently he treated a packed auditorium to free, brand-new remotes. It was an Oprah Moment. Is it coincidence that Oprah starred in the film The Color Purple?

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