Q&A with INTEGRATE Speaker Joe Cohen

Joe Cohen is the Senior vice president of communications for KIND Healthy Snacks. He was kind enough to answer a few questions for the student blog, you can also read more about Joe here.

Q1. Last year #kindawesome set out to engage customers in acts of kindness, tell us how this program came to be?

 

At KIND, we’re always seeking new and creative ways to make kindness a state of mind. It’s been that way since 2004 when our founder Daniel Lubetzky launched KIND and the company immediately became a pioneer in both the healthy snacking and purpose-driven brand categories.

In 2013, we first introduced #kindawesome as a program to empower our team to spot and celebrate acts of kindness happening around them. When a team member witnesses a kind act, big or small, we give the person a #kindawesome card that they can redeem online for KIND Snacks as a “thank you” for being kind along with a #kindawesome card to pay it forward.

Last year, timed to World Kindness Day on November 12, we scaled up the #kindawesome program by creating digital versions of the cards to empower our fans to help in spotting and celebrating kindness. Simultaneously on World Kindness Day, our team brought to life KIND acts all over the country through regional activities like spreading the importance of kindness in preschools and delivering care packages to the elderly.  The campaign became the most expansive grassroots activation in KIND’s history and a great moment in our ongoing effort to recognize and celebrate kindness.  

Q2. Does KIND use influencers, if so please tell us a little bit about that?

KIND has an incredibly passionate base of fans and this includes influencers ranging from actors and athletes to health and wellness experts to social media stars.  When it comes to formal influencer partnerships and programs, we only work with individuals who we know to be fans and supporters of KIND – it’s very important to us that every influencer relationship begins with an authentic passion for our brand.

Q3. Recently the FDA has been looking at the definition of healthy snacks, would you tell us about KIND’s involvement in the conversation surrounding this topic?

To begin, we commend the FDA for its decision to reevaluate the regulatory definition of healthy which was introduced with the best intentions more than twenty years ago but has since become outdated.

The announcement that the FDA will reevaluate healthy generated a great deal of conversation in the media, as well as the health and nutrition communities, as did the agency’s affirmation that KIND can use healthy on our wrappers again – just as we had it before – in connection with our corporate philosophy but not as a nutrient content claim.

KIND’s involvement in this conversation began more than 13 months ago when we received a warning letter from the FDA asking for us to remove the term healthy from the back wrapper of four KIND bars, and that also pointed to a number of items that have since been corrected.   We quickly brought our packaging to compliance while at the same time studying the regulatory definition of healthy.  We learned that the current standard was introduced when the benefits of consuming “good fats,” like those in nuts (a key ingredient in many KIND Snacks), were not fully understood.  Under the regulation, foods like fat-free chocolate pudding and children’s sugary cereal can bear a healthy nutrient claim but foods like nuts and avocados can’t.

None of this made much sense to us, so last December we filed a Citizen Petition with top health and nutrition experts respectfully calling for FDA to update its guidance.  Since KIND filed the Petition, momentum has been building. From leading nutrition experts to Senators and members of the House of Representatives, there is a rising call to update the regulatory definition of healthy.

Our team continues to maintain an open and collaborative dialogue with the FDA and, while we know it will take time, we are optimistic that the regulation will be updated to better align with current science and existing dietary guidance.

Q4. You’ve been at KIND for almost two years, prior to that you spent 15 years at a PR agency. What differences did you see between agency PR and in-house PR? Were there any surprises?

Whether you are in-house or at an agency, the core tenets of communications remains the same.

There are, of course, differences.  One of the aspects that I loved about agency life was the creativity and adrenaline rush that came with managing multiple accounts and teams, and the thrill of the competition when pitching new business.  Additionally a big part of the reason why I stayed in the agency game for so long was the great culture and team in place at MWW.

Working on the in-house side is also very deeply rewarding, particularly at a company like KIND where I am helping to promote an incredible product and advance a social mission that resonates very deeply with me.  Additionally, part of what I like about working on the corporate side is that you’re able to go much deeper and understand the nuances and intricacies of the business at a level that just isn’t possible when working within an agency.

Regarding surprises, I had heard that the pace of working in-house versus at an agency is much slower and more methodical.  This isn’t necessarily the case at KIND which has a fast-paced and highly creative environment.  The day also happens to go by quickly when you love the work and the people, and at KIND I’m fortunate to have both.

 

Q5. Earlier this year you received the Philip Dorf Award, which honors individuals who lead, guide and selflessly counsel and stimulate the careers of PR professionals. Congratulations. What advice do you bestow on young PR practitioners or those just graduating?

I’ve been privileged to have had incredible mentors like MWW CEO Michael Kempner, ConAgra CCO Jon Harris and KIND CEO Daniel Lubetzky, who have had a profound impact on my growth as a person and as a professional.  My advice to young professionals is to actively seek, adopt and embrace mentorship experiences.  Identify individuals who you find to be impressive and admirable and make a proactive effort to get to know and learn from them.  Also, look for ways to extend your network. Get involved in groups like PRSA where you can meet and learn from new people, expand your skill sets and broaden your perspective of your industry.

 

Q6. What changes do you see within the PR practice in the next five years?

The profession itself will become increasingly competitive as more enter the field.  Communications pros will be challenged to continually refresh and enhance their skill sets and knowledge base or risk being left behind as the media and business landscape continues to remain in a near-constant state of evolution.

Additionally, the lines will continue to blur between the disciplines and there will be less traditional PR firms and more integrated marketing shops – this will also extend to the way PR is housed within corporations.  Continuing education will be essential and communications professionals who today are deepening their expertise in brand marketing, integrated marketing and data and analytics, will be better positioned for success.

Q7. Please share a favorite quote or person who inspires you?

 

“A master in the art of living draws no sharp distinction between his work and his play; his labor and his leisure; his mind and his body; his education and his recreation. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence through whatever he is doing, and leaves others to determine whether he is working or playing. To himself, he always appears to be doing both.” – L.P. Jacks, an English educator, philosopher and Unitarian minister

Start With The End Game In Mind

Retrieved from http://imc.wvu.edu/curriculum/curriculum-map

As Capstone drew near, one of the things I focused on was how can I leverage my other classes to help me deliver the best capstone project?

For Crisis Communication, I developed a plan for the CDC and in Audience Insights I tried to look at why people were or weren’t vaccinating. Both of these built on the campaign I had developed for PR Concepts & Strategy.

All of this pre-work really helped me get a head start on my campaign; don’t get me wrong, there was still a ton of heavy lifting and questions to answer. Having spent time researching vaccines and the CDC, I was acutely aware of new articles and research and filed them away into my capstone folder.

So what does this mean to you? As you lay out your course schedule, try to be conscious of the end game, developing an integrated marketing campaign. If you know your company already, which classes will help you get there? How can that company be represented in those classes? For example, in Brand Equity I selected Taco Bell, perhaps I should have picked the CDC or the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services (my campaign was focused in Michigan). Will your campaign require a big internal communication plan, then take that class? The bottom line, don’t take your schedule lightly, take the time to plan it out.

Here are few tips:

• Decide when you will take 636 Campaigns. Campaigns is only offered in late fall, late spring and summer. Plan your schedule to hit one of those. Personally, I do not recommend taking a semester off before Capstone, I would have lost all motivation.
• Check your electives first. Unlike the core courses, every elective isn’t offered every semester. If you want to take Global Brand Communication, you will have to plan for it.
• Which teachers? Deciding if there are teachers you want to take is also important. Talk to other students. WVU IMC also awards the Alexis Vanides teaching award, you can see past winners here http://imc.wvu.edu/about/teaching_award
• Put it on paper. Lay out your schedule (use this http://imc.wvu.edu/advising/course_schedule) with your wish list and your back-ups. Prior to registration, find the course numbers and copy them there. That way when registration opens, you’re just copying and pasting the numbers into the system, not searching.

Here’s to #owningit!

 

Why Do We Go To School?

Why do we go to school? There are many answers to this question…. We go to better ourselves, to stay connected to trends, to make more money or to teach. Ultimately the answer should be… “we go to school to learn.” In the era of trophies for everyone, it seems we have lost sight of learning. Learning means you will not have a perfect score; you may not get an “A” and you will most definitely have to work hard, otherwise you are not really learning.

I must admit, in the throes of school there were moments when I was extremely frustrated when I did not receive a perfect score. There were a few classes where I racked my brain until I wanted to dump my laptop on its head and throw my books out the window. But the one thing that kept me going was the fact that I was growing. I was challenging myself to learn and do something different, something that did not always come easily.

Capstone was no different. In our weekly discussions, I completely missed the media objectives and did general objectives. I reviewed previous work and the objectives I had done were not focused on media, they were campaign or PR objectives. I was pretty hard on myself. It was the end of the program, how could I possibly get that wrong, after all I have learned? Then my professor said something, “I wish students weren’t so focused on the grades, but on the learning process.” I was suddenly reminded that even after two years, I am still learning.

Cheers to all of us for making this huge investment and a reminder that we all should strive to be learners even when we have reached the finish.

Have you considered INTEGRATE 2016 and IMC 621?

Spoiler Alert…. This is my hard sell (I am not a spectacular sales person, so pun intended) for INTEGRATE 2016 and IMC 621 (the professor and curriculum are updated for 2016). I understand there are a lot of electives and we are in a digital program, however sometimes real-life connections and a class that was not on your agenda are worth the risk.

As many of you know, WVU is hosting INTEGRATE conferences in multiple locations. However, the flagship event is hosted in Morgantown and IMC 621 ‘Current Topics in IMC’ is centered around INTEGRATE 2016. Check out WVU’s 31 reasons to #attendINTEGRATE.

My journey to INTEGRATE started at DTW, continued through PIT and on to Morgantown:

The conference is well organized, moves quickly and provides you with information that you will be able to draw upon in future classes. Personally speaking while attending, I was able to use information that Scott Cuppari shared regarding Coca-Cola’s age limit for advertising in IMC 619.The collaboration and participation across faculty, administration and students was amazing; #integrate15 even trended locally and shows the impact this group has in the social space.

Beyond just the conference agenda, for those of you curious around the expectations of Capstone, I highly recommend the overview that kicks off INTEGRATE. Those in 621 followed the Capstone prep with a class meeting. So why am I making a hard sell of INTEGRATE and IMC 621? INTEGRATE has a plethora of content that I would never have discovered before IMC 621; what grad student has time to watch that, unless it is part of your class?

Social and digital media are excellent, but real life connections still matter. Having the WVU IMC program online is probably the only way I would be able to complete my Master’s degree. But the ability to make real world connections with classmates, faculty and teachers was tremendously helpful.

 Retrieved from https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10204180806352286&set=t.659592071&type=3&theater

Talking and spending time with people can dramatically change your impression of them, particularly if the only other interactions you have had are through their written words. What’s not to love about attending a great conference, as part of a class where you learn and discover excellent integrated marketing messages from analytics, to direct marketing and everything in between?

Understanding their backgrounds, jobs and families outside of what you have seen or read online is an important component to interpersonal connections. In addition, most of my relationships with the Professors did not extend beyond our classes, so being able to spend time learning about their careers and the classes they teach is very impactful. Had I not been so far into the program, I probably would have changed some of my electives based on those discussions.

Real world connections are not just good for our brains, they are good for our health too. “When you share a smile or laugh with someone face to face, a discernible synchrony emerges between you, as your gestures and biochemistries, even your respective neural firings, come to mirror each other. It’s micro-moments like these, in which a wave of good feeling rolls through two brains and bodies at once, that build your capacity to empathize as well as to improve your health” (Matter, 2013).

Reference

Matter, G. (2013, March 23). Your Phone vs. Your Heart. The New York Times. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/24/opinion/sunday/your-phone-vs-your-heart.html?_r=1.

What is your Grad school routine?

Whenever I tell people I am in graduate school, the most common question I hear is “how do you do it?” They ask this because in addition to graduate school, where I doubled up twice: I oversee a team of 30, travel every two weeks or so, am married and have twin four year olds. I must admit, during the last two years, there are times when I have not done any of those things well and I definitely could not have done it without a supportive husband. So how did I do it? Get into a routine and stick to it; that routine might mean your normal routine is no longer normal.

I always order my book(s) before the semester begins, which allows me to read the first two chapters of the main book ahead of time. Have I had a teacher start in the middle of the book? Yes, but either way the chapters I have read usually help me get into the mindset of the class and I can typically use them for citations.

The next thing I do is create a folder on my desktop for the current class so that I can work on it no matter where I am (I back the folder up on Google Drive). I also create a new bookmark folder for the current class (I then move each class to a school master bookmark folder). You could use Pinterest, One Note or any other bookmarking tool to do this. I highly recommend doing this as I have used these bookmarks in multiple classes and I usually remember which class I wrote about the topic, making it easier to find. From there, it is time to create a couple of Word documents; one for the weekly discussion board posts and one for the weekly writing assignments. On the discussion board posts, I copy the weekly assignments onto the document and write below it. This helps me ensure that I am hitting all the points of the discussion and that I have the question for reference if something similar comes up in another class. I also put each week’s new question at the top. I do this so it is documented and doesn’t take me scrolling down, but also because I find that I use a lot of references more than once and I can copy and paste within the document. For the Word document, I create a template of sorts, with my title page, header/footer to the appropriate class. I also set the overall section heads and a few reference examples so I do not forget the format.

Once the class is on blackboard, I download all of the extra readings and put them in weekly folders within my class folder. I review the first week’s assignment before the lesson. I do this because it gives me an idea of what we are going to be writing about. I will copy the weekly discussion post into my document as well as the weekly writing assignment. When I am reading the lesson, I can pull quotes from the materials that I may want to cite. This also allows me, when I am able to multitask, to look for relevant articles online and bookmark them.

Aside from the first week, I typically try to do all of the reading between Sunday and Monday. I try to have my weekly discussion board posts written and up on Tuesday. I respond to four of my classmates on Thursday morning, I wake up at 430 am most days so I can get this out of the way before my real job starts. Over the course of the last few semesters, I have actually modified this slightly but by Thursday night, my minimum of four is typically done. On Friday during the day and evening I reply to anyone who has responded to my post.

As far as my papers during the week, as I mentioned I am trying to find relevant articles and figure out my approach or topic. On Friday, depending on how many replies, I will begin the writing process. Saturday evening I will usually finish writing my paper and I post it on Sunday after I have read it one more time. When I doubled up I had to do more writing throughout the week and even during the day on the weekends. Finishing the papers Sunday allowed me to start the next week’s work.

Between traveling and work events, I never know when I will have time to do school work. In addition, there is usually one night a week that I fall asleep by 9 pm; call it a combination of physical and mental exhaustion but I just have to roll with it. Having my homework done ahead of time allowed me not to panic in any of these situations.

The hardest semester for me was summer. You see in Michigan it is really hard to stay inside ;). Don’t get me wrong, there have been huge sacrifices, virtually no exercising, not spending enough time with my family and way too much caffeine. But overall it has been totally worth it!

Why Grad School is Like Learning How to Drive a Stick Shift

I have always loved cars, which is really convenient given my line of work! When I was 15, I could not wait to learn how to drive a stick shift on my own. See, my mom had hurt her wrist and I was already helping shift gears with my left hand.

I am not sure how much courage my Dad had to muster up, but off we went to the parking lot of the community college. I will never forget how he made me turn everything off; no a/c, no radio and we had to have the windows down. You have to listen and feel the car in order to know how to shift. But Dad!!!!!!! No radio?!?!?

We started out slow, learning how to start in first gear, knowing when you needed gas. I did that over and over again and from there we moved onto knowing when you needed to shift, not because of what the RPM’s said but because of the sounds the engine was making. Finally, there was a little hill where I had to keep the car from stalling without the brakes or the gas, just using the clutch.

A week later we did it again, but in a different car. See how the clutch is slightly different and how it sounds different when it’s time to shift?

I know, I know there are probably a lot of ‘car people’ out there saying “you’ll burn out the clutch or the RPMs are the only thing that matter and the future is all about paddle shifters.”

So how does this relate to grad school?

Each class and professor are similar to driving a stick shift and learning a new clutch. You are not sure what their expectations are and you have to feel your way through. One professor may want you to comment throughout the week and another might be okay if you finish them all at once. Do not get flustered.

Knowing which classes require more work and being ready to commit to that amount of work is similar to being on the hill and knowing you are going to stall. Everyone talks about the amount of work you have to put into PR but they also talk about how much you get out of it.

Listening to the car is similar to listing to your classmates. Do not do your discussion board posts in a vacuum; read what others have written and leverage that in your comments.

You never forget how to drive a stick shift. If you have to take a semester off, you might need a minute to get comfortable in your seat, but you will pick back up where you left off.

Finally, there is nothing like pulling away from a light and leaving that other car in your dust. That’s exactly what you are doing to your competition by being enrolled in the IMC program.

Here’s my post grad school stick shift dream, what’s yours?

The 650-hp, 2016 Chevrolet Corvette Z06 is one of the most capable vehicles on the market, capable of accelerating from 0 to 60 mph in only 2.95 seconds, achieving 1.2 g in cornering acceleration, and braking from 60-0 mph in just 99.6 feet.

The 650-hp, 2016 Chevrolet Corvette Z06 is one of the most capable vehicles on the market, capable of accelerating from 0 to 60 mph in only 2.95 seconds, achieving 1.2 g in cornering acceleration, and braking from 60-0 mph in just 99.6 feet.

Images courtesy of General Motors

It is never too late…

Greetings fellow IMCers, my name is Whitney. I work at General Motors in their social Center of Expertise (think governing body) as well as managing the US social care team. Here is a look at our social media command center:

 

Throughout my career, I have had the opportunity to work with great brands such as P&G, 3M, T-Mobile, Children’s Place, Budweiser and Ford.

I live in ‘Pure Michigan.’ I’m married to an engineer and car lover and we have 4-year-old twins.

 

There is no denying how much work you must put into grad school. As I near the finish line with Capstone starting in March, I thought I would share my top five tips:

1. Plan Ahead, Don’t Wait. If it is due on Monday, plan to finish it on Sunday. If it is due on Wednesday, finish it on Tuesday. There are so many things that come up including work, family, even the opportunity to go to a concert. If you aren’t ahead, you are behind. Why Buy: there were nights where I just fell asleep from exhaustion. I’ve traveled to China, Brazil, Mexico, Germany, India and Dubai during this program; you can do it.

 

2. Ask Questions. Whether it is an assignment, an interesting article or a fellow student’s career, ask the professors and your fellow students’ questions. Why Buy: there were two assignments in this program where I was docked points for information that was actually contained in my papers. Once I asked, the teachers reviewed and revised my grades. Everyone is human.

 

3. Own your schedule. Know what classes you want to take and when they are offered. Understand when the Capstone is offered and how that impacts your schedule. Research professors. Have the section number and a back-up ready when it is time to register. Log-on as soon as the schedule is open regardless of what time zone you are in. Why Buy: I enrolled for one semester while sitting at an outdoor restaurant in Singapore. I am graduating exactly two years after I started.

 

4. Don’t expect As, Earn them. Grad school is hard work and should be a competitive environment. Why Buy: in most companies, they have their own rating system for performance reviews.

 

5. Talk about the WVU IMC program. From your colleagues, friends and family, talk about what you are learning. You never know where the conversation will take you. Why Buy: having pride in the program helps balance the times when you would rather have been doing anything but homework.

 

Whether you are at the beginning of your IMC journey or the end, what tips would you share?