Imagine a finance guy having his break at marketing doing brand activation for Coca Cola in the middle of the Olympics. By some combination of luck, hard work and genius, Pete Canalichio pulled it off during the 1998 Nagano Olympics and it launched his fruitful career in brand activation and expansion. Many Olympic stints later, Pete has become a global authority on brand expansion, a licensing expert, TEDx speaker and award-winning author of the bestselling book, Expand, Grow, Thrive. At BrandAlive, Pete uses his global branding experience to help emerging brands reach their full potential. Listen in to his conversation with Ben Baker and get a glimpse of the ins and outs of such a massive undertaking in marketing that few other people will ever get to experience.
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Brand Activation On An Olympic Scale With Pete Canalichio
Thank you, my wonderful audience, for joining me yet for another week. I love that you guys share, I love the fact that you guys subscribe. Thank you all for everything that you do. I have Pete Canalichio. We’re going to be talking about brand activation on an Olympic scale. Pete, welcome to the show,
It’s great to be here. I’m so excited to talk about this with you and to have some fun along the way.
We are going to have a blast. You and I always have a good time when we talk off air. I want to have a little bit of a history by you because you’re an retired Navy pilot, you’ve got the Olympics, you’ve got Coca-Cola. There’s a whole bunch of things we could talk about. I’m going to let you tell a bit of a story. How did you get to the point now with BrandAlive?
It’s been a fun ride. I was telling you off air that I’ve been renovating my basement. In one room, I’ve got all my Navy memorabilia and the other side, I’ve got all this Coca-Cola and other Olympic memorabilia. It started out with my Navy career, I was on the West Coast down in the San Francisco Bay Area, and then ultimately instructed in Jacksonville, Florida, and then got my MBA and got hired at Chapel Hill, North Carolina, UNC, and got hired to the Coca-Cola company. That was the launching pin for everything that’s happened since then. I started out in finance because I was good with math, but then after about five years, I transitioned into marketing roles and learned about licensing and brand expansion and got to work on my Olympic programs, including everything from Nagano to Salt Lake, to Athens, to Vancouver and Sochi.
Several years ago, I had been working for the Newell Rubbermaid company running Rubbermaid’s Global Licensing Business, and then got promoted out of that to run a business called CardScan. In 2009, I found myself with a lot of other folks on the outside looking in going, “What’s next?” That actually looked like a curse at the time which turned out to be one of the greatest blessings, because then I could launch my own company and help others understand how to help their brands come alive in the hearts of those that experienced them. I’ve had a heck of a lot of fun working with folks over those years, doing just that in small companies, big companies. I like to look for folks that are overcomers, that aren’t afraid of an obstacle and want to find a way, and don’t get upset when things go difficult and accept no as a route to yes in success.
It’s fun because there’s always a way over, under through something. It’s just a matter of figuring out what it is. I love that mentality. I’ve got an attitude that I say, “The glass isn’t either half-full or half-empty. It’s refillable.” I think you’re one of me.
Definitely, that’s my mindset. I tell this to my two daughters that are in college. I say, “If everything was easy, we would have nothing to talk about. Let’s hope for those challenging times because they actually develop us and show us where our limits are. Then give us a story later to talk about.”
Let’s talk about the transition from the Navy to Coca-Cola, but from finance to marketing, that’s the one that really makes most people’s head shake is to sit there going, “How do you go from being in the Finance Department at Coca-Cola, which is numbers crunched, button-down with suit and tie, very rigid type mentality, to the creativity of branding?” I want to take back history because that needs a little bit of exploring because I think that will probably launch us into your whole Coca-Cola career and talk about that brand activation because that’s really where we want to go.
I’m looking forward to sharing some with you. When I was at business school, I did an emphasis in finance because I was good at math, and I actually studied Physics as an undergrad. I thought, “This would be an easier route for me.” Thankfully at Chapel Hill, there was a general management program. While I had the emphasis in finance, I got exposed to these other subjects. I get hired into Coca-Cola in their Finance Department, and I’m having fun in working with the European group in engaging with different nationalities. I love that part of my flying days in the Navy. I’m seeing all of these things that are going on in my amazing organization. Most of the people that are having fun are the marketers, so I am missing out on something. It’s funny because the finance folks around me, a lot of them didn’t act like I did. I was more outgoing, gregarious and wanting to get involved in stuff. I was looking for a route to do that.
After a couple of years, I got invited to go into the Treasury Department where I first managed Coca-Cola’s long-term debt. We actually borrowed money for a hundred years, $150 million worth of debentures. I did a commercial paper where I sold basically borrowed money at a very short timeframe for about a year. Then I got into London and I worked on the International Cash operations. When that was over, there was a transition point that was offered up to me.
The Olympic Games will start whether you’re ready or not. Nobody’s going to wait for promotional marketers to be ready with their stuff. Share on XI knew at Coke, if you wanted to leave a function that was really challenging because they expected you go all the way up that function. I had a conversation with the treasurer of the company and I said, “I want to be a general manager. I think the best route for me to be a general manager is to get some cross-functional experience. Can I get your permission to look for opportunities in marketing?” Unbeknownst to me, there was someone that was in his organization a couple of years back who had moved into a more senior role, but overseeing the business affairs of how the company invested in sponsorship. I met that person, her name was Melody Justice. We had a good conversation and she said, “I need somebody from my team. Why don’t you come join me?”
All of a sudden, I find myself negotiating sponsorship contracts for Major League Baseball and the National Hockey League and the Olympic Games. I was looking at the business side of these sponsorships and it was interesting to see how those were done. This was back in the middle of 1990s. In 1996, we were celebrating the Atlanta Olympic Games and doing that in a big way. I got involved in a thing called Coca-Cola Olympic City. Coca-Cola company spent about $30 million creating a theme park that lasted 100 days. They built it, it lived and then it was gone. Through that, I met a woman named Laurie Ann Goldman. Laurie Ann was running Worldwide Licensing. She called me up a couple of months after the games were over and said, “I want you to come talk to me.” I’m like, “Okay.”
I go over there and she’s like, “I’m running Worldwide Licensing. I want to create a group called Event Merchandising, which is basically create merchandise to help memorialize our activation of the Olympics. I want you to head that group.” I was like, “It’s got to do with the Olympics, I’m in. I don’t know what the rest of it is you’re talking about, but I love the Olympics.” I remember being fascinated in front of my TV at a very young age, watching every hour of every game until the wee hours of the night.” For me, it was like, “Let’s do it.” It turned out it was this thing called event licensing or dual brand licensing or multi-branded licensing. My first event was the Nagano Olympic Games. That’s how it came to be.
You would have been the ideal client for me. Back then, I was involved in custom branded promotional marketing but at a global scale, looking at the stuff at, “Let’s take it all the way from the 3D printer to the manufacturing trips to China, to be able to sit there and create something.” That was totally unique for a particular customer. I get where you’re coming from. There are not very many people out there that understand the intricacies of what you were trying to create because the number of vendors that you would have to manage, to be able to make sure that the brand is consistent across a variety of different mediums, across different substrates, and be able to make sure everything is there on time and on budget. Let’s face it, when the Olympics are done, they’re done, nobody cares about Nagano stuff six months after Nagano. There might be a couple of collectors that you might be able to sell a few things to, but it’s basically done.
I always say, “The Olympic games are going to start whether we’re ready or not, so we better be ready.” Nobody is going to wait for us. It was always insanely crazy. The truth of the matter is, in most of these instances, I was starting way later than I wanted to. When I joined that group, it was in 1997 and the games were a year off. To do this thing right, I should have been starting in 1996 or even late 1995. We were racing to the finish line, doing lots of things in parallel that should have been done in series. We were trying to get our merchandise there on time for the games. In some categories, we were a month ahead and most of them, we were literally getting them done the week before the game started.
The Nagano games, we had merchandise all along the Olympic Torch Relay routes. I’ll say routes because Japan had to do it differently. They actually had three Torch Relay Routes going at the same time, which had never been done before. We had merchandise along there. We had merchandise in and around the Nagano prefecture. Then we had our core pin trading center, which was basically a retail store where we unveiled all of our Olympic pins and including a Pin of the Day set that formed a puzzle piece, which ultimately formed a Coca-Cola bottle. It was fun, chaos and we didn’t know whether we were going to sell any pins. By the time it was done, there was nothing on the shelves. In fact, we had to have single branded Coca-Cola non-Olympic pins shipped in from Atlanta just to fill the shelves because it was crazy how big the pin craze became, which was amazing to be part of. I still can’t believe that to this day.
There are many different directions we can go here. Let’s talk about pins because for a pin collector, I was part of the 2010 Vancouver Olympic experience. I worked for the City of Richmond on the Protocol Team, and everybody had pins. You had pins that you kept you and you had pins that you traded, you had pins that you shared, but it was all about the experience of the conversation that went along with the pin. How do you create that whole activation? We’re not talking about one pin, we’re talking about 500 pins, 1,000 pins, different pins for different days, different VIP pins that are bespoken ill and only certain people get. Then there are certain pins that everybody can have. How do you go about even thinking about where to start out a program like that because it’s got to be monumental?
You touched on a really good point, the idea around the experience. Truth be told, one of the greatest reasons why Coca-Cola is the longest standing continuous sponsor of the Olympic Games, 1928 is when they started. They’re coming up on 100 years of continuous sponsorship at the top level or the Olympic partners. They realized that a lot of the attributes of their brand were the same as the attributes of the Olympics, bringing the world together, sharing experiences, authenticity, things like this. For them, it made so much sense. In 1988, they became the official pin trading sponsor and they can create the official pin trading center now with the games in Calgary, which is another Canadian city for that matter.
What we would do is we would say, “What are the different ways that we can engage with our fans, enthusiasts, consumers?” We looked at across all of the different opportunities and we said, “Let’s create pins that represent the pictograms.” These are all the different images of all the different sports. All of them had our co-branded logo. This was something that was created for the games themselves, Coca-Cola and the Olympic, not the five rings, the five rings were there but the actual event itself. It would be Coca-Cola and the Vancouver Olympic logo created as a single logo. They brought the two logos together and create a composite logo.
Every one of these would have those pictograms and the biathlon. There would be ones for all of the flags representing all of the countries that were participating, so you can see how many different Stock Keeping Units we have. Then there were pins associated with all of maybe the venues, so there could be another fifteen there. Then there might be pins associated with all the things that are naturally Coca-Cola, so vending machines or Coca-Cola trucks and things like that. Then there was that 17 days of the Olympic games, so there was a 17-day pin set that formed the Coca-Cola bottle. As you can see, you create all of these different pin sets and you’re looking for opportunities for people to buy pins and then trade them to create an experience. The pin was there to help them more memorialize that experience.
When you held the pin up, you could say, “I remember when I was there, I met this incredibly funny lady from Switzerland and she had this unique pin from back the Innsbruck Games. I had this pin from Nagano and I traded my pin with her.” You have this incredible experience and it’s all because Coca-Cola was there creating that pin for you to be able to have that exchange. It was magical what happened and it’s something I’m so glad I got to be part of.
Let’s talk about it from a logistic point of view because it’s not Coca-Cola making the pins. There is an official pin supplier for the Olympics, and they’re not just making Coca-Cola’s pins, they’re making the Olympic pins, they’re making pins for the different organizations. It’s not just your 800 pins, they’re probably making 1,000, 2,000 or 5,000 different pins. We’re not talking ten pins of each, we’re talking tens of thousands of pins of each particular one. This is just one promotional item. There are hats, mugs, t-shirts, lunch bags, there are a million different things that you’re dealing with. First of all, curate what vendor programs you’re going to be part of, what vendor programs you’re not going to be part of and decide. I’m assuming this is almost 250 days for production schedule, let alone design and contract building and licensing agreements and everything that go along with that. Where do you start when you’re having those conversations?
For clarity’s sake for the audience, there are two important components here. There’s all the promotional merchandise that’s bought by the sponsors to give to their guests, their customers, all of those. That’s a big program that Coca-Cola had and every other sponsor had. What I was working on were these licensed pins.
Those are what those people came for.
They were separate and distinct. Usually what happened was senior executives came to us and said, “I want a special pin out of that licensing set for my own go-to pin.” You were alluding to that earlier and that was important for us to take into consideration in the pin sets. The Pin of the Day set, they may buy 150 of those to give to our best customers. Those were sales that we were selling internally from my department to another executive department, but it was all good and that was part of my charge to get that done. The first thing is the sponsorship agreement said that we were officially allowed to create licensed merchandise and to be the official pin trading center. Once we had that, then we went to the licensing group within the Olympic committee and said, “We want to create a co-branded Olympic program. We will work with you in concert to create these products.” In the case of Vancouver, for example, not only did we have pins, we had plush, cups or mugs, lanyards. We had seven different categories of merchandise, pins were being important but of course all the apparel too, so t-shirts and even some vests, caps and hats.
Once we had that program agreement with the Olympic committee, then we had permission to go into the categories that we agreed were going to be those co-branded categories, and then go find licensees. The first place we had to look because of the arrangements already made, and the commitments made by these licensees to the Olympic committee was to look to them first. They were already official and we wanted to work with them if we could, and where we couldn’t like they were not interested in this co-branded program or they couldn’t meet our price points or our timelines, then we were authorized to go outside.
In the case of the Vancouver Games, for example, the company that we worked with was Aminco. They were already officially sanctioned, so it was easy to work with them. They had all the pressure on them to get all this done. Fortunately, we’d been working with them for several Olympic Games, so they weren’t starting from scratch. They knew what we needed and they knew all the different categories. We gave them a style guide and we told them what we were trying to do. We quickly signed them as a co-branded licensee, and then we went off to the races and said, “This is a year out, maybe 9 or 10 months out. Here are the categories. Start to get back to us as quickly as you can with all of these two two-dimensional designs of these pins, you know how it works.”
For the most part, they did perfectly. We weren’t asking them to make any changes of any kind because they had already done this for several games. Then it was a question of getting those approved, getting the prototypes approved, getting those pins tested, because we don’t want any lead-based paint in these pins and things like that. Once that was all done, then going, “You’ve got to figure out what’s our official retailer, how many pins you’re going to sell there and how many pins you’re going to sell to the other brick and mortar retailers.”
Aminco, who’s your pin partner, they’re responsible for the sell-through.
They are and that was the beauty of it. This was the big difference between the Atlanta Games and starting with the Nagano Games and going forward. When I worked for the Atlanta Games, I didn’t work in licensing. I was with this business affairs group and the sponsorship group. I worked on Coca-Cola Olympic City, so I saw a little bit what was going on. Coca-Cola for those games was asked by ACOG, the Atlantic Olympic Group, to be a licensee, which was weird because we didn’t make the pins, we didn’t make any of this stuff, so we had to contract with these manufacturers and then pay a royalty to the Olympic Committee as if we were the ones that were the licensee. Then whatever inventory was left, we were left holding the bag for it. We extricated ourselves from that process and said, “You guys are much smarter about this than we are. We will be the co-licensor along with the Olympic Committee, and you will have to figure out along with your retailer how many pins or other merchandise to manufacture. Once you sell all that, we’ll co-share royalty that is a percentage for the sales that you make.” It was much more effective and truthfully the right way to do it.
Does this make it almost near impossible for a new vendor to break into being a licensee? Based on the fact that they don’t know what they don’t know, because as you said, when the Olympics are done, they’re done. You could be stuck with 10,000, 100,000, 1 million pieces if you guess wrong, and it could bankrupt so many companies. As Coca-Cola, do you guys have an advisory or a set of parameters that you say, “This is how we work with our licensees, this was the run rate we’ve had for the last three Olympics to give you some ideas,” or you’re basically leaving it to the licensees to basically figure it out on their own?
We’re definitely not leaving it to them, but it is an interesting balance between the two. Fortunately, the good thing for this kind of event where we were coming in as a sponsor and getting permission to create an official merchandise program that was co-branded. We could go to the organizing committee and we could say to them, “By the way, we want to support you, Organizing Committee. Who are the licensees you have today?” At least we knew that they already had been vetted by the organizing committee. They already knew how to create merchandise because they were creating a single branded merchandise for the organizing committee and probably had been doing that for several years. Now they were going to be asked to participate in a program where we would be involved, of course they’d love to cook names. Usually, there was a decent amount of interest.
Then it was a question of, “Could they make it happen?” Some couldn’t, so they just didn’t sign up. Others wanted to try and they did, and they had those risks. They’d seen what was going on. They also knew what we were going to do. The holistic topic of this conversation was Olympic activation. We would tell them what we were going to do for the Olympic Games, how we were going to activate. What are all the consumer activities that we’re going to do for the games? What kind of advertising campaign are we going to have for the games? Where are we going to have presence in the greater city that’s being hosted? To use and be able to leverage all of that to shed light on these programs, so that their merchandise wasn’t just showing up on some shelf with nobody knowing about it. That definitely helped them, but at the end of the day, it was still a risk for them. Some did better than others.
I remember after the Vancouver Games, I remember talking to my apparel licensee and he said, “I’m really happy with what we did, but if you had told me a year earlier, I could have done a nationwide program and done ten times as much.” I said, “I know, I wished I had been able to tell you a year earlier. I was not told a year earlier, so consequently you didn’t get told.” That’s the difference in the magnitude of what could have been, had we been able to get out in front of this earlier on to give these licensees the chance to do something significant. A lot of it had to do with not just their ability to execute, but it had to do with the ability for the retailer to buy, because that retailer had already committed their shelves to other products. They didn’t have the capacity even to buy our product if they loved it, because they knew they were going to stock their shelves with something else.
They had already committed to something else, and that’s a challenge. I remember Vancouver had the Official Olympic store. I’m sure there were a lot of Olympic places to buy Olympic merch throughout the Olympics. I remember the Official Olympic Store was in the floor of the Hudson’s Bay. This has got to be 100,000 and 150,000 square feet, somewhere in that neighborhood. I have no idea how big the floor is but it’s huge. It was wall-to-wall merchandise. You had everything there from plush to pins, to coffee mugs, to shirts, to towels, everything. You sit there and say, “The dance has got to be incredible. How much floor space do I take? Do I take too much? Do I take not enough?” Be able to sit there and look at these activations and say, “Two years before, what’s going to sell and what’s not going to sell for 37 days?” You might get 60 days ahead of that and you might get 15 days after that, but really that’s your buying window.
There are seventeen days of the Olympics. You’ve got a little bit of a lead up time, and then you’ve got the Paralympics after that, and then it’s a steep drop-off. There’s a little bit that might be going on. In the case of most of the games, I can tell you with Nagano as an example, we saw sales quadruple from the day before the Olympic games to the day of the games. Then they went up maybe doubled in the next week and stayed there until the very end, then they dropped off 90% very quickly during the Paralympic games. Then by the time the Paralympic Games were over, it was almost zero. It was there and gone in a blip.
You’re going to have different merch for the Paralympics games than you are for the Olympic games.
They have a different logo and different design. Who wants to take a risk on that? In many instances, our licensees didn’t. We were literally selling the same co-branded Olympic merchandise during the Paralympic games. That’s unfortunate for the Paralympians, but it was too much inventory risk and you couldn’t blame the licensees for that.
What was the biggest challenge for doing an Olympic-sized activation? You’ve done a lot of these Olympics. You’ve done five of them or something like that.
Five where I’ve done the official licensed merchandise, and in a couple of instances, I did more than that, but yeah five games for that. That would have been starting with Nagano and then Salt Lake, then I got involved heavily, not so much in licensed merchandise, but on the Olympic Torch Relay for the Athens games. That was a unique special opportunity because it was a global Olympic Torch Relay. Then Vancouver and Sochi. I was there leading up to and through the Olympic games.
Of all the Olympic games that you were part of, what was the biggest challenge that you can talk about? I’m sure there are things that you can’t talk about. I’ve heard stories about Sochi that make your head explode, but that’s a different story altogether.
I like to say in the case of Sochi, but it was truthfully in all of them, maybe Sochi more than others, our program was on cardiac arrest more than two times just because of many challenges. In the case of Sochi, for example, we got started even a little bit later where there was an official retailer that was going to have our Olympic pin trading center in their store. Think about like the Hudson’s Bay and how we were in that store. That retailer was supposed to place an order with our official licensee, and when that ordered did not come, the official licensee told them to me about six months out, “If we don’t get this order in the next week, we are out of this program, we are gone.” I knew if I lost them, there was no way I was going to have a program because they were the only ones that could pull it off. There was no opportunity to switch to some Russian company, and it was never going to work. I basically told them, “Over my dead body are you going to be out. We’ll find a way to get you that purchase order.” They agreed to stay on, and literally two months later, this official retailer said to us, “We’re out.” Not only had they not placed the order, but they were out and we were two months from the games and we were scrambling.
Thankfully the company that created the official Olympic medals was also a jeweler. That jeweler said, “We want the exposure of Coca-Cola Olympics, Sochi Olympic merchandise. We will step in, we will create the pin trading retail center and we will buy the inventory.” They saved the games. There are two examples of literally where we were in cardiac arrest and didn’t know whether we could resuscitate the patient. As I told my client at the time, “Gabriela, we’ve got to picture ourselves in the pin trading center, looking and celebrating this amazing day.” I told her this four months out. There we were sitting in the center and I said, “Here we are just like we pictured.” She was like, which was one of the greatest compliments ever, “Pete, I believed because you believed.” Thankfully, we made it happen and it was pretty special.
Olympic pin sets are more than just promotional merchandise; they help people create and memorialize experiences. Share on XPeople don’t seem to understand 120 days. That’s nothing in terms of production. That’s a blink of an eye. You blink and you’re gone. Even losing a weekend at that point in time could be the difference between making the production and not making the production. God help you if you get caught with Chinese New Year.
That was stuff that was going on too because that was all factored in because the manufacturing facilities were in China, so we had to factor that all into it. Literally for those games, if I recall it correctly, we had probably days 1 through 4 in a shipment that came right before the game started. We had days 5 through 8 in a shipment that came a week into the Olympic Games. It literally was like that piecemeal coming in. I’m just saying, “Dear Lord, let them get done, let them get approved, let them pass through customs and let them get to us transportation and on the shelf.” Especially when you’re talking about a Pin of the Day set, you cannot afford not to have pin day 12 or 14 or 16. That’s all part of the set. If you don’t have them all, you don’t have a set. That was our key promotional item. We unveiled that pin every day at 11:00 AM. I couldn’t imagine how embarrassing it would be if we said, “The pins did not arrive, so there’s no Pin of the Day set today.” It was insanely crazy. As you say, one weekend could make the difference between doing it or not doing it.
You need to multiply this out by fifteen different vendors. It’s not just the pins, it’s a whole logistics train and it’s figuring out shipping, boxes and customs and all of the things that we’ve talked about. Being able to realize that we’re not just talking about 50 pieces, we’re talking about 50,000. When you’re looking at stuff that level, the problem becomes that much more insurmountable.
I wrote a book published in 2018 called Expand, Grow, Thrive. In Chapter One, this was my story with the Nagano Olympic Games. I get into detail about it. For those who are interested, it’s a crazy story and it starts with me literally answering a call on the last day of the games back in Atlanta from my manager in Nagano, Japan. He said, “Don’t worry but the police called me last night.” I was like, “What?” I won’t tell any more the story, but to say that it was crazy and chaotic what went down. We had to have all of those SKUs from all those different vendors. All of the backup part of it is the approvals and the process, but we also had business objectives. We needed them to create and sell merchandise. We had to hit certain numbers of different products. We had to hit certain revenue targets. We had to hit certain royalty revenue targets. For us, it was brand building but it was also royalty revenue that we had to deliver. It was way more than just having excellent merchandise in people’s hands.
There’s so much more we can talk about. I want to make sure we’re going to get a way for people to get in touch with you both through BrandAlive. I also want to make sure that we have a way that people could get your book because that’s going to be a phenomenal read. I’ve got to grab a copy of this thing and have a read. I’m going to ask you one question. It’s a question I ask everybody as they walk out the door. When you leave a meeting and you get in your car and you drive away, what’s the one thing you want people to think about you when you’re not in the room?
For me, the question is about the kind of character I am, the kind of person I am. They may never choose to work with me, but I want them to know that if they were to choose to work with me, they could be completely confident that A) I would always bring my best, that I would always act with transparency and integrity, and B) I had the ability to do what I said I was going to be able to do. If that was what I could leave behind, I knew that everything else would take care of itself.
Pete, living a life of integrity is the only way to live it. You like me, we have a little bit of gray hair on the side of our heads, but it’s well-earned, and the stories that came with it make it worth all the while. Thanks for being such an amazing guest.
It’s been so much pleasure, Ben. This has been a lot of fun reminiscing about those crazy days. As I was telling you earlier, if we didn’t ever have any challenges, we would never have anything to talk about. I’m glad for the challenges, I’m glad for the experiences. Hopefully, some of them were interesting to your audience.
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About Pete Canalichio
“Every brand owner and organization has the right to expand, grow and ultimately thrive. That is why I have made it my mission to develop tools, talks and training designed to inspire, educate and empower you to achieve all that is possible.” – PETE CANALICHIO
Pete Canalichio is an award-winning author of the Amazon #1 New Release, “Expand, Grow, Thrive” (2018) and TEDx speaker. He has worked in brand strategy, expansion and licensing for the past 20 years for The Coca-Cola Company, Newell Brands and most recently, BrandAlive, a Service-Disabled Veteran-Owned Small Business that he founded in 2009.
Pete believes people deserve to be delighted with new and innovative products and services from brands they love. He also believes every brand owner and organization has the right to expand, grow and ultimately thrive. That is why he has made it his mission to develop tools, talks and training designed to inspire, educate and empower his clients to write a better story, and from it, to achieve all that is possible.
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