One Brave Choice Changed EVERYTHING // The Happiness Blueprint e021

Rob, from Promotions & Unicorns, Too, shares how he’s built an engaged community, what wisdom he has for choosing a life path, and what lessons he’s learned about happiness!

0:00 Rob from Promotions & Unicorns, Too
2:06 Building an Engaged Community
9:17 Choosing a Life Path
16:24 Lessons About Happiness
19:50 What Makes Rob Happy?

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A special thank you to Vibe Arcs for sponsoring today's episode. To get started on tracking your personal, team or project happiness metrics, visit https://vibearcs.com/ 

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The Happiness Blueprint
// Powered by GBM6
// The podcast where we uncover how people build happier lives.

GBM6 
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Think Like a Pilot
// Bobby Dutton, founder & director of GBM6, is a professional speaker, entrepreneur, and philanthropist. He's also a licensed commercial pilot and flight instructor -- for fun. 
// To connect with Bobby or learn more about his keynotes, visit https://thinklikeapilot.com/

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

This is the Happiness Blueprint. The podcast where we uncover how people build happier lives. Awesome. Welcome back to the Happiness Blueprint Podcast, friends. I'm here with Rob from Unicorn Productions. Am I getting the company name right? Perfect.

SPEAKER_01 0:12

Alright, try Promotions and Unicorns 2.

SPEAKER_00 0:15

Promotions and Unicorns 2. Where does this come from here? What is the origin of Promotions and Unicorns 2?

SPEAKER_01 0:21

Well, that's actually much easier than you think. Actually, um, my last name is the German word for unicorn. Awesome. Okay. And when I started this business in 1991, I wanted something that would be pretty memorable and that you can just understand that it works. Yep. Have I considered changing the name many, many times over the decades, but I'm not changing it. I just, when people say, you know, when I introduce myself, I usually drop the word two. But promotions in unicorns, every pretty much anyone in this market has at least can accept it. Most of them have heard it.

SPEAKER_00 0:58

Yes, yes. The unicorn part certainly stuck with me the second I saw it come in. And I think that's the key to marketing here. It's just we want it to be recognized, we want it to people to remember it and know that it exists. And that's half the battle of it all, right? They can't retire you if they don't know you exist in the first place.

SPEAKER_01 1:11

And while today the term unicorn has that secondary meaning other than a mythological creature, it actually works to my advantage, I believe, because a lot of the time when I'm suggesting ideas to the con to college students for promotional products, I make it very clear. We can go for the basic, or we can move up to the second and third and even higher level by just tweaking the ideas. And it doesn't always cost the schools more. Yep. That's just we can have a lot more fun by more success on the high at the university and the college, because I'll be able to suggest new ideas to them that they hadn't necessarily anticipated.

SPEAKER_00 1:56

Which is the goal always is to be able to help them come to the idea where they're going to come to you with a goal they have in mind, but they don't know the road to that goal here, right? And you're by being the expert in this chair, by seeing so many other students come through the similar questions, you're able to bring them the information they didn't know they needed, the answers they didn't know existed, possibly.

SPEAKER_01 2:11

Uh and that goes for all of us at any given time of our lives. We're all looking for the next thing. Yep. The happiness, I mean, that's why your program exists, is to encourage find the little moments in the lives to heighten everything. And we want that good moments, that good juju, whatever phrasing you want to use. We all want that. And any opportunity that we, especially in this associate level for NACA and other uh higher ed associations that we all deal with, we want these college students to feel that connection to the school. Yes. Um, something that I had heard many years ago from at another conference was an engaged student is a retained student. So I took that and I love that phrase, but I also explained to students that they need to look at, student leaders specifically, need to look at what they do on campus in a way that's similar to a corporate shareholder of a business. Every year they have they by law, they have to have their election, the new boards, just like in higher ed the student programming boards do. But these students and their advisors, they are truly mask leading the future for that campus. Since the pre-COVID, one or two, usually small, independent, often liberal arts private schools would go out of business. Post-pandemic, it's two to three and even occasionally more. And some schools don't even give adequate notice. There was a school in Philadelphia that literally announced it two weeks before graduation a couple of years ago. Oh my goodness. And doing that, all of these students have their whether it's one year or four years or more if they, depending upon their actual time on campus, whether they were a part-time or a full-time student or graduate time. They invest so much of their lives in that school as student leaders. And just the idea of them finding that their school won't exist after May is debilitating to so many of them. Finding a new can school, the school, oh yeah, we've already made connections so that you can we're gonna automatically accept you at any of these four or five other schools. I didn't choose to go to that school. I chose to go here. And so what the students do at conferences like this one that we're at right now, is just to help keep that school more viable and to make that life. And then hopefully, for when they after they graduate, when they have that, these students these days are so focused on the career and post-care their college career and then their professional career, that the schools then are hoping that just like my school did, I certainly do donate money back to the school. And again, that's adding to that connection, that longevity.

SPEAKER_00 5:20

I think you're right. I think it highlights an interesting fragility to these campus communities, where uh I think ultimately, yeah, we're talking about campuses, but I think this is true of any community, but most communities have a greater resilience because they're not tied to a physical location. So many communities are tied to uh yeah, mutual shared interests or something. But you're right, if the campus itself dissolves, it's hard for the students to stay in touch because they're all gonna go back to their different homes and different states and different places. And that, yeah, that fragility is an interesting thing that I think uh it's on us to bolster and try and make as resilient as possible. And you're right, that we all are as vendors trying to do our part in making these campuses resilient and strong and durable for these tough times that uh are inevitable, right? There's gonna be an ebb and flow eternally to the collegiate life. Um, I'm curious, uh, we started talking before the show a little about how you got to this point in your life. So I'd love to understand uh yes, how this first started for you. Uh, you mentioned this kind of a crossroads here that I think resonates, probably with a lot of people attending this conference, right? A lot of students in college now are kind of going, where do I want to go? What do I want to do? What do I hope this life has for me? It sounds like you face a similar crossroads, and we've had a beautiful, beautiful run ever since then. So I'd love to kind of go back to that here.

SPEAKER_01 6:22

I was one of these undergraduate students 37 years ago, and I fell in love with coming to this con to this conference. Obviously, not this location, and not that I there's anything wrong with it. Gee, I sounded like say uh TV show just there. Um, but I fell in love with the idea of what NACA was doing. I was already enjoying being a student lead student programmer on campus, but to see what was being offered at this conference, and you've walked around it for a while, you know about it, you know it from previous. And there's just so much engagement here that I fell in love with it and I felt flash forward till 1991, spring semester. I'm getting ready to graduate, and I'm being interviewed by from both, you know, looking at my future. And I was being interviewed by a number of associate agents to work as an agent. I was interning with MTV at the time, so I certainly had an opportunity. I was also being considered for a job there. And there were also graduate schools who were interviewing me as a potential graduate assistant. I was actually made it to a second round at a school in the Northern Plains. Um, and they I made it to the second round of a job for an associate director, which would allow me to be go to grad school there and earn my my postgraduate degree, but to relocate my life for only 10 months in 1991 to 1992 for $11,000. Yes, they were giving room and board, I would have lived there. I didn't think that that was the right thing. My parents offered me an opportunity to start my own business. They were an entrepreneurs, and I said, sure, five, seven years, then I'll go back to grad school or get a job with one of the other agencies. Well, as I said, it was 1991, it's 2026, and I'm loving what I do.

SPEAKER_00 8:36

That's beautiful. Yeah, I think I had a similar thing when I got into the camera stuff. I was like, this is gonna be a fun two, three-year detour, and that'll be that. I'll have my fun, it'll be great, and then I'll go back and fall back on my have a degree in psychology that was like always the safety now. I was like, okay, this is gonna be where I end up in life, and I'll take a fun little detour and explore and get to travel and see the world. And sure enough, now I'm going my 10th year, and it is still, yeah, growing, continuing to be as fun as it's ever been. Uh so I relate to you where I think there's something uh important in starting a journey being like, I don't know where this journey is gonna take me. I don't know what it has in store for me. Your job is just to be brave and take that first step into the journey. And I think it's something we see of so many people, again, and specifically college students, but people in general, right? I think this is true of people at any age, and it's most commonly at this yeah, young adult age. But I assume there's plenty of other adults at their job going, is this my forever path? Is this the path that's gonna fulfill me forever? And I think it's yeah, a kind of brave thing to go, no, this is not it. And then what is that path? And it sounds like you did a good job exploring that.

SPEAKER_01 9:32

Well, I'm you know, I'm a father of a 24-year-old graduate college graduate. She got her first career job, and she's getting ready for her anniversary, her one-year anniversary is coming up this week. So, yeah, I'm able to see that's the one thing I've always found that was beneficial for me with this market. I had nieces, nephews, and an IK, and of course a daughter who was always in college in most of those years. There was somebody who was. So if I had a new idea, I could basically test market it on a family member. And if they responded to it, then I would present it to something, and it would usually be something a little outside or an application that the college students wouldn't normally see.

SPEAKER_00 10:21

What are some of the most successful of these products? And I guess uh part two of that is why do you think they've been successful? So uh what are people latching on to, and why do you think that has been the case?

SPEAKER_01 10:30

One of our one of the things that we had sold for decades was a pen that looks like that has an outline of something. For us, of course, we use it as a unicorn bust, the bust of the unicorn. And that became a standard operating procedure over 20 years ago. And the schools love it because most of the time they have a mascot that's evocative of it and or they can build it into a theme. Yes, in 2026, less students are actually writing their notes with pen and paper, but it's still something special. And people buy these similar ones at at we're at Disney, where it's just the Mickey head. So it's still viable regardless. And then post-COVID, one of the things that we pivoted to because you come to this conference and everything is experiential. There is so much more of this. What we're doing, what you do right now, and all the Groove of the other programs like Groove Boston, GDM6 has been doing, that's experiential. Look at the marketplace, it's all rides and games. We actually developed with another company games that we are now branding for the schools, whether it's a a version of Jenga or a version of Connect 4 or Shuffleboard, even, or knock hockey. There are so many of these games because when the students are coming to their club fairs and welcome weeks and all, the school they're talking at the students. They're not having the conversation that's organic the way you and I are. They're just preaching, they're speaking about, they're not engaging enough. But by playing a game, there's the engagement, there's the fun, because these these programs are all about fun, happiness, the connection, and the wanting to stay. So by bringing in gamifying those moments, it builds up that connection that they have early on at the school. And most of the time it's only one, maybe two. There have been some schools that have ordered dozens. I was at an event, not for students, it was for professionals. And a school we never worked with before, saw it as we were setting up, thought it was great. It was the end of the fall, it was the be it was the end of the spring semester. She had a couple thousand dollars and said, Here's fifteen hundred dollars. I'm gonna get you the money, just send me however many you can that you can send me for that. I didn't get the artwork for months, but I invoiced it that day. It literally was ordered from there in early June and then mid-August, right before two weeks before the students were gonna arrive, that's when they sent me what they wanted on them. But they knew what it meant and what it could lead to for their students, for their game room, for the student offices. And that's one of my favorites. Another one that we do is um playing cards. And everybody knows where the thing about playing cards, when you're at home, and I'm sure Peter, you understand this, you know if you're gonna play cards, whether it's solitaire or poker or whatever, you know where those cards are in your home in your home. What drawer they're always in or a shelf, whatever. Playing cards are one of those things that people don't necessarily think about, but they know it brings them that happiness, that moment of whether it's a quiet moment of happiness or a rambunctious one. So we came up with having each card printed on not just the back of it, but the face, where it's we did it with uh school uh Western Connecticut State University, the deck of clubs. So each organization has their own card. Very cool in the 52, and then they would do some other QR codes. We've also done it where it would be campus offices, and you'd use the QR code, and you could actually track their it would hook up to the campus map, and they could actually figure out directly where that office would be. Interesting. And that's just to make it easier for the new students to see what's out there and where they need to go when they need something special.

SPEAKER_00 14:54

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SPEAKER_01 16:47

I think through social media, more than anything else, and I mean, obviously, this is social media, has people were afraid of social media, and they still are, and there's justifiable reasons. But what the students, and this correlates to what I had said earlier about ownership and the investment. When the students are public publicizing their events, they're all they're tagging the school, they're tagging the programming board, they're tagging if they're co-op doing something cooperatively with another organization or office on campus. What they're missing is tagging their high school, their friends' high schools, their cousins, because when they add that, it's just adding to the fun. It brings more to the future of the school, and it shows those students who are younger and looking up towards their, whether they're looking up to that student who's on the campus in a uh looking up to you, you know, uh as a mentor, or when they look at the colleges, suddenly they're gonna see that Endicott, for example, you did a session with those students, does such great programming. Now I need to take a second, a first or even a second look. And then the students who are looking at those colleges, like my daughter did, she needed to find the right niche for place for her. And that's all the that's what makes it happy. My daughter was known as they didn't necessarily moved to the town that we're in when she started eighth grade. So she did not know many people. There were three middle schools feeding into her high school, as well as private schools and everything else. So she wasn't very well known outside of her circles, but she fell in love with the school, which she wound up going to in her junior year. Sid a uh as she was a rising junior, I'm sorry, sophomore year, as she was a rising junior, she actually did a summer program at that school. So she was wearing their clothes every day. She was um so she was like she knew where she wanted to go at such at an early age. And she was known as the girl who's going to American University. They didn't know her first name. They knew very little about her because she was very quiet. She still is pretty quiet, but that was her, and that was her identity. It wasn't the identity she necessarily wanted, but that was the identity that she presented. And what we all want, we want the identity that we present to be part of who we are, but we also want our own identity beyond just what people see. And so it that part was hard for her, but she knew who she was and she knew who her friends were. And that's what matters more than anything else.

SPEAKER_00 19:49

That's beautiful. That's beautiful. Uh, my last question for you here is something that makes you happy outside of this. We talked a lot about making other people happy in the way that your work and your career has facilitated other people's happiness here. I'm curious what makes you happy outside of this. So is there a hobby, is there an activity, uh a place you like to go? What's something that brings you joy?

SPEAKER_01 20:07

I enjoy exploring traveling. First of all, traveling is uh one that my parents taught me to as a pat to have a passion for traveling at an early age. They traveled the world um multiple times. I like to travel, been to a good number of countries, not them as many as many of my friends, but say la ve. Um, but I also like to, when I'm in a city, explore the alcohol. No, I'm not an alcoholic, and I know a lot of people here who are going to be listening to this are underage, but and I'm frequently my wife and I, because she loves it as a hobby, and she actually says going to breweries, distilleries, and wineries is her hobby. I am invariably the designated driver, so I'll have a sip, I'll have a taste, but I'm always, always in control. But that has become the hobby for my wife and I, admittedly, when she was younger, my daughter, there was no way we could do that. But once she was in high school, we were able to say, okay, you know what? Let's go to, and we'd find we'd look at a map of wherever, say, all right, we're from New Jersey, we're from the Jersey Shore. There's a place that we wanted to check out. It's an hour and a half away. It's in Pennsylvania or New York or all the way down in Cape May, New Jersey, wherever. And we'll just either do it as a day trip or spend the night or a weekend. And it's fun because we're able to find the history. We've learned about the manufacturing process of how beer, wine, spirits are made. I actually have recently helped out my local brewery in making a beer that's actually being debuted next weekend. Very exciting. And that was a treat for me because I'd never actually had my hands on the on the equipment.

SPEAKER_00 21:57

That's exciting. It's cool to find something to. Immerse yourself in. And I think it's a universal piece that you can uh really get to know each city with where each uh I think each bar, each brewery has so much culture, has so much to learn about it, and it's such a um a way to experience how the city identifies itself and how it wants to be identified. And I think it's uh yeah, pretty a culturally rich part of the city that exists universally, so you can kind of compare each city to it rather than trying to compare the Eiffel Tower to the whatever other Right.

SPEAKER_01 22:23

But also you're you're learning about the history of the product itself. I mean, when most of us were in of a certain age, we're in high school or middle school, you might have heard about the Canterbury Tales, for example, or ancient Egypt, and they talked about mead, which is a honey wine. Most adult, most of our of my generation and even younger generations have never even touched something like this. And there's a place not far from my home that makes many meads. You think honey, it's going to be super sweet, and others are just unbelievably spicy, have such earthy notes that you would not anticipate. And that's what we're learning about that, because we like food. And it's the same thing. You can hear about something, you can make something that you can put a lot of honey in, but you might the the whole hot mic's hot honey. Look how iconic that's come in such a short period of time. And people are putting it on really spicy, on mild food, and then you get the heat and the sweet, and it's a flavor profile that most people would not have thought about 15 years ago to that degree. And it's become an icon in such a period of time. Everybody dr everybody uses it, and they they marketed it so well that restaurants actually specifically say Mike's hot honey, or maybe a different brand, a regional brand. And that is part of the whole thing about why branding and the branding that the college students are doing for their identity for their for their student organizations. That's their identity. That's going to be what lasts. It's going to last in the students' hearts who are the student leaders, and hopefully it'll last in the hearts and memories of the students that they're serving.

SPEAKER_00 24:15

Yeah, that's a beautiful note to end on there. Thank you, Ralph. I appreciate you sharing your wisdom with us and taking the time to chat with us here today. Uh, this has been the Happiness Blueprint Podcast, friends. We'll talk very soon. Thank you. Thanks for listening to the Happiness Blueprint, powered by GBM6. It's about making people happy.