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Chairman Ron Lays It All Out for You
Pilot Pen honcho (and author-to-be) Shaw mixes wisdom and yucks at BRBC confab
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Business New Haven
8/6/2001
By: Michael C. Bingham
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Keynote speaker Ronald G. Shaw, president and CEO of the Trumbull-based Pilot Pen Corp. of America, was slated to discuss “How Being a Good Corporate Neighbor Is Smart Business” at the 127th annual meeting of the Bridgeport Regional Business Council (BRBC).
Shaw never really got around to that topic, exactly, at the July 10 confab, attended by about 300, at the Trumbull Marriott.
Instead, the standup comedian-turned-CEO shared a few tips from his recently finished book, Pilot Your Life (with Richard Krevolin, Prentice Hall, 224 pps., $22 cloth), which is slated for an October release.
“You don't need permission from anyone to fulfill your dreams,” Shaw told the business group. “If there is a theme to my life, it is aggressiveness.”
That aggressiveness manifested itself more than half a century ago when the ten-year-old Shaw (he is now 62) convinced a newspaper distributor he was 12 in order to secure a paper route that paid $12 a week. Likewise, shortly, thereafter, when he strode into a bicycle shop and convinced the owner to let him leave the shop with an $86 Schwinn for a $6 down payment and promise to pay $5 a week - no parents or paperwork involved (he kept his end of the bargain, he says).
A dozen years later, when Shaw decided that show business was too insecure a calling for a just-married family man, the then-22-year-old convinced a Bic pen sales manager he was two years older to land his first adult job as a salesman.
He stayed with Bic for 14 years, being forced out when it came time for the boss' son to take Shaw's sales-management job as part of the son's grooming on the way to the eventual top job. So Shaw signed on with a then-unknown - at least in the U.S. - pen-maker, Pilot.
The subsequent 26 years, he says, have been “a rocket-like ride” for Pilot Pen on its way to becoming the third-largest pen-maker in the U.S.
Shaw described the principal milestones on the road to growing the company. First, he said, “We built a lot of close relationships” through tactics such as taking potential clients and their spouses on cruises where the prospects would be captive audiences for days at a time.
Next Shaw described his company's experience trying to build a major brand through advertising. (“Never try to do it unless you have your distribution in place,” he cautioned.) Readers above a certain age will recall the full-page print ads showing a woman staring pensively at a Pilot under the headline, “Is It Sick To Love a Pen?” The company ran this successful campaign first in regional editions of Time, Newsweek and U.S. News & World Report, later graduating to national editions.
Next came radio campaigns “to create recalls and retention” of the brand name in the mind of potential consumers. “Of, say, 100 people who will buy a Pilot Pen today, 95 didn't wake up this morning intending to buy one,” Shaw said. Two years on network radio, said Shaw, drove sales up by about $15 million.
Next, Pilot Pen graduated to television ads - first featuring comedian Alan King, then featuring the comedian-turned CEO himself.
Shaw called “well-orchestrated” public relations “One of the best-kept secrets in business.” A fortuitous opportunity arose in 1994 when Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Palestinian leaders Yasser Arafat signed their (ill-fated) peace treaty - by happenstance, with a Pilot Precise pen. Within 24 hours, Pilot's agency had put together an ad with a photo of the historic moment under the headline, “There's a Fine Line Between War and Peace. This One Was Written with a Pilot Pen.” The agency ran the full-page ad in the 25 largest U.S. newspapers.
That's advertising, of course. The PR part kicked in when an AP reporter wrote a news story about the ad that ran in news outlets across the globe.
If there's one thing Shaw has been able to teach his conservative Japanese bosses, he said, it is the value of sports marketing. Pilot Pen, of course, has been title sponsor of the annual week-long August women's tourney at the Connecticut Tennis Center in New Haven (“We're about to extend out contract there,” he revealed).
The value? “This tournament will keep our company's name in the newspapers for a minimum of eight days,” said Shaw. “It's a marvelous vehicle.”
As for parting thoughts on the meaning of it all, Shaw offered, “Don't ever go to bed angry.” Then the jokester in him got in the last word: “My wife and I last went to bed in March.”
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