Margaritaville: How a Song Became a Brand | John Cohlan, Chief Executive Officer of Margaritaville Holdings | November 21, 2024“We use the lyrics everywhere. So if you get out of the elevator of one of our hotels and you look to the left, you'll see a lyric, and those lyrics really are very helpful in preserving the culture.”John Cohlan, Co-Founder and CEO of Margaritaville Holdings explains the creation and enduring value of singer Jimmy Buffet’s successful multi-billion-dollar brand, before a November 21, 2024 meeting of The Economic Club of Florida. Show notesDr. Jeff Sharkey of The Capitol Alliance Group introduced Mr. Cohlan but first had the club members put their hands on top of their heads in the iconic “Fins Up” salute. Mr. Cohlan showed a video featuring Jimmy Buffett and people talking about the lifestyle they experienced at his Margaritaville franchise locations. He then explained how Buffett, whose hit songs include the iconic “Margaritaville,” expanded his recording career into what has become that franchise. The beginning was very humble – Buffett began seeing T-shirts sold in Key West with his name spelled wrong. “It really all began because Jimmy was so annoyed that his name was being spelled wrong, which is pretty crazy,” said Mr. Cohlan. “So Jimmy was an entrepreneurial guy. And there he was in Key West, and he was just getting going, and all of a sudden, he noticed that there were people in Key West selling T- shirts with his name on them with one T instead of two T’s. And he basically said to himself, you know, I should rip myself off, because other people are ripping me off.” Buffett built a T-shirt shop, then a bar and a restaurant. That’s all that existed in 1997 when Universal Studios in Orlando called and wanted to build a 25,000-square foot Margaritaville restaurant at the entrance to its theme park. Buffett didn’t want to just license the name, he wanted to build a company and brand, so he called John Cohlan to come down from New York. They did market research and found that the word Margaritaville had a 50-60% recognition. Mr. Cohlan said people would answer “’Oh, it's a great song. It's that guy, Jimmy Buffett. It's the place I want to be. It's a hammock.’” No one said, ‘Oh, it's that restaurant in Key West.’ So Margaritaville had a product. It had a product and the product was an emotion.” “And the lesson of a lot of what's happened here is that an emotion can travel to many more places than a product,” Mr. Cohlan added. “The reason we can be the number one coconut shrimp in America, in your Publix store, and also the leading Active Living brand where you want to go and spend the back nine of your life at a Latitude Margaritaville destination is because Margaritaville stands for an emotion, and that emotion is something that is based on the fact that he was such a unique person, and through his music and really the way he lived his life, everyone said ‘I want to live that life.’” Universal built a model of the proposed restaurant and invited Buffett and Cohlan to look at it. They arrived and met the executives, who were dressed in suits, while Buffett was dressed in shorts. “Jimmy Buffett is looking at this big, $12 million restaurant model, and everyone's holding their breath, and he looks at it, and they say, ‘What do you think?’ And there's silence in the room. And Jimmy says, ‘Well, it's great. It's just that I have one suggestion.’ For those who've been to the Universal theme park, you know there's a bridge that goes over and leads into the theme park. And Jimmy looks at it, he says, ‘Is there any way you guys can tilt the bridge so the people will fall into the restaurant?’ It's God's honest truth. They thought he was serious for a second and they all looked at each other and they said, ‘Well, maybe,’ and he said he was just kidding, but that's what it was like,” said Cohlan. Buffett laughed and cracked jokes until Margaritaville now brands more different things than any company in the history of commerce, including:
Branded system-wide sales are about $2.3-billion. Mr. Cohlan said Jimmy Buffett had a very strong work ethic and understood that people needed to escape from their own hard work. “The brand of escapism that he represented and that we extended, you know, to escape, you have to escape from something. And what Jimmy stood for was the idea of escaping from a job. And in order to escape from a job, what do you have to have? Gotta have a job, right? And so, what's really so interesting about him is his reverence for the sanctity of work, right? Work was very important,” said Cohlan. Jimmy Buffett died last year of skin cancer, but Mr. Cohlan said the brand will live on and his name will live on, too. The Florida Legislature renamed coastal highway A1A, The Jimmy Buffett Highway, and it authorized the sale of Margaritaville license plates. (You can also view the entire Club meeting on YouTube.) Links and Resources Mentioned in this Episode
Date of recording November 21, 2024 |