The
Bastians
sold
kettle corn at local events
and markets but made a
breakthrough
when
they
started selling at Minnesota
Vikings trainings.
“They loved it enough that
the sales and marketing team
came over the next day and
offered as a contract to be the
kettle corn of the Vikings,
with the caveat that it costs a
grand,” Dan Bastian said. “We
were excited that we could
make some inroads, realizing
that if we got connected with
the Vikings that will help
build our outreach to other
potential customers. … We
would pop right outside the
stadium … and have lines of
people. And that’s when things
kind of started to change for
us.”
While moving into retail,
the Bastians found a space for a
popcorn targeting women. The
brand focuses on using clean
ingredients and empowering
female
consumers,
aiming
to encourage them to have
a positive relationship with
food.
“We went in 2004 and we
looked at what was popcorn
called,” Angie Bastian said.
“At the time on grocery store
shelves popcorn was Vick’s,
Orville, Dale and Thomas,
Harry and David, Cracker
Jack. This is my punch line.
I said every time, I said to
Dan, ‘Where are the popcorn-
women on the shelf?’ So, we
named it Angie’s, created a
small label and started out
with just a plain cellophane
bag with a label on it and
started to sell in stores.”
Angie said she felt the
company
truly
disrupted
the popcorn and snacking
industry
when
it
began
working with salespeople and
marketers to target female
consumers.
While
snacks
targeting men were permissive
and those marketed toward
children
and
adolescents
were playful, Angie Bastian
said snacks targeting women
assumed they were on diets
— a marketing technique she
wanted to avoid.
“Our sales team said, ‘Why
don’t we just do it?’ ‘Angie’s
Nearly
Naked’
or
‘Angie’s
Skinny’ or something like
that, because that’s what was
happening in the marketplace
at the time,” Angie Bastian
said. “I’ll just say at that point
there were 72 trademarks for
food with the word ‘skinny.’
And I just said, ‘You know
what? I don’t want to do that,
like, we are not going to do
that.’”
In the wider food industry,
Angie
Bastian
added,
advertising
and
marketing
toward
women
is
either
hypersexualized or focused
on dieting. Her goal was to
remove the barrier between
women and snacking built up
by marketers.
“Women and food were
depicted in a couple of ways,
and one of those ways was a
‘moment of conflict,’” Angie
Bastian said. “If a woman is
going to eat, it’s conflictual
for her, or it’s sexualized for
her, and we are not like this.
This is going to be food for
women every day: normal,
natural.”
Business graduate student
Georgia
Cassady,
one
of
the vice presidents of the
Marketing Symposium, said
her team wanted to focus
on finding a disruptor in the
consumer-packaged
goods
industry. The Business school
emphasizes
the
Consumer
Packaged
Goods
industry
for
marketing
recruiting,
she said, but the industry
is sometimes perceived as
stagnant and slow-moving.
“A lot of people think it’s an
industry that’s just chugging
along,” Cassady said. “Tech is
the big thing these days, but
we wanted to remind people
that
there’s
opportunity
for change and disruption
within CPG and all types of
marketing, regardless of the
industry you’re going into.
… Since we’re all going to be
managers after our MBAs,
how can you continue to
disrupt and challenge the
status quo?”
Cassady said the Bastians
were
able
to
disrupt
a
seemingly stagnant industry
like snacking while providing
an empowering brand for
women.
“Right
when
you
think
that snacking, and especially
popcorn,
that
there’s
not
much more you can do, that
there’s so many people in the
industry, these people came in
with a brand that was entirely
new,” Cassady said. “One of
the big things was that Orville
Redenbacher, SmartPop, they
were all kind of masculine. So,
they came in with this really
feminine brand and that was
really different.”
Dan
Bastian
said
BOOMCHICKAPOP’s
early
success
came
from
long
hours of work and dedication
to the brand, along with
fast adaptation to obstacles
they faced entering the CPG
industry.
“I think so many people
get stuck on needing to nail
it, perfect it,” Dan Bastian
said. “For us, just continuing
to move forward was what
worked for us. Our success
lies oftentimes in the fact that
we move fast. We didn’t take
shortcuts, but we would adjust
on the fly, and if we made
mistakes or had challenges,
we would revisit and fix it and
keep moving forward.”
Michielssen
and
her
team
created
the
project
for
an
entrepreneurial creativity course
taught by University lecturer Eric
Fretz. He said his assignment had
no set guidelines other than it
must be “cool,” take all semester to
complete and must change people’s
lives in some way. In the past, he
has received final products ranging
from a concert at Necto Nightclub to
a robot that takes the trash out.
Fretz said he isn’t surprised the
pact has gone “viral” on campus —
he’s heard other faculty members
discussing the pact, though he is
not surprised it has gone “viral”
on campus. He said he has also
had friends with backgrounds in
computer science reach out with
interest in the project, often offering
insight into the security of the
website.
Fretz said he expected the
questionnaire to either end up
with 200-500 participants or break
5,000, but once it started spreading
around campus, Fretz knew it
wouldn’t stop.
“Once it becomes a thing,
everybody talks about it, and then
everybody wants to do it,” Fretz
said. “That was that hump I knew
they would have to get over, but
I figured it would happen pretty
quickly.”
Michielssen
and
her
group
have watched their creation turn
into the talk of campus over the
last three weeks. Since the results
came out, private Facebook pages
where students post about U-M
campus life, like UMich Memes
for Wolverteens and Overheard at
umich, have been inundated with
content about the pact.
One poster made a poll to see if
people participated and, if they did,
how they felt about their match.
Another created a meme about
being a senior matched with a
freshman.
For Michielssen, logging onto
social media means seeing a barrage
of posts about her team’s creation,
which she said she finds hilarious.
However, not all participants
were excited about their results.
Several heterosexual participants
reported being matched with people
who identify as the same gender, as
well as people being matched with
their siblings or cousins.
LSA sophomore Natalie White,
who found the pact through her
roommates, said she felt swept
up in the excitement of the mass
engagement across. Because all of
her roommates were filling it out,
she decided to as well, but her match
was not what she was expecting.
White identifies as a heterosexual
woman, meaning she would be
interested in matching only with
heterosexual men, yet her match
was also a woman. She reached out
to the email the results were sent
from and was told someone must
have inserted the wrong gender
or sexual orientation, which made
White question if she had completed
the questionnaire incorrectly.
“We all got our matches, and I
went to look, and I was matched to
someone named Rachel, and I was
like, ‘Okay, that’s not usually a guy’s
name,’” White said. “I was pretty
sure it was a girl, so I looked her
up on Instagram and it was a girl.
… I don’t know if I screwed up and
she was actually looking for girls,
because I feel like maybe I deprived
someone of finding their Michigan
lover.”
Michielssen
said
her
team
received emails similar to the
one White sent and immediately
checked the algorithm. She said
they found no errors and concluded
that people either completed the
questionnaire
for
their
friend
and entered the wrong sexual
orientation as a joke, or people could
have simply clicked the wrong
option by mistake.
She noted the algorithm used
MCommunity, an online resource
for finding contact information
for members of the University
community, to verify participants
were undergraduate students. She
said this worked for most cases, but
in some circumstances, they were
unable to verify their grade level.
Additionally,
Michielssen
said approximately 8 percent of
participants were not matched,
the
majority
of
which
were
heterosexual female students.
Public Health junior Renata
Terrazzan was one of the female
students who did not get matched.
When the creators sent out an email
to all participants early on in the
process noting many heterosexual
women might not get a match,
Terrazzan said she had a feeling she
might fall into that category.
“When I first got the email about
700 girls (not being matched), I was
like, ‘Oh, of course it will be me,’”
Terrazzan said. “Then it was, and I
just thought it was kind of tea and a
good story.”
Michielssen
attributed
this
mainly to an imbalance in the
number of heterosexual male and
female participants. She also noted
the purpose of the questionnaire is
to find potential future spouses for
participants, so if a large number
of students of a particular gender
and sexual orientation were not in
the participant pool, it would make
sense for there to be no match.
While she wanted everyone to
find someone through the pact,
Michielssen cautioned participants
not to take the results to heart. She
reminded people the questionnaire
is for a back-up person to marry in
20 years, not to be the participant’s
next significant other.
“I really want to remind people
that this is a marriage pact, and it’s
not meant to be taken too seriously,”
Michielssen said. “In no way, shape
or form are we trying to set people
up right now. Our whole goal of
this was if you’re single in 20 years,
and you’re lonely, well, this is your
person.”
She said her team hopes to do
a similar questionnaire next year,
though they still have to work out
the logistics as two team members
are graduating. For Michielssen,
this has become almost like a part-
time job, with her team putting
in multiple hours each day on the
questionnaire since the beginning
of the semester.
As for the team’s grade on the
project, the jury is still out. The
project lasts until the end of the
semester, so right now Michielssen
and her partners are working on
responding to any issues people
run into, gathering feedback from
participants
and
preparing
a
presentation.
When all is said and done,
Michielssen said she is hoping they
get an A.
“I hope all of campus is crossing
their fingers for us,” Michelssen
said.
“Being
a
journalist,
there’s kind of a pipeline
for work. You have to
contact
the
units,
and
then you have to figure it
out,” Reel said. “You have
to film it, and you have to
write it. You have to, if
you’re doing video editing,
do
basically
everything
yourself. There’s a deadline
because this is journalism,
so I got pretty good at
prioritizing projects and
task management.”
Panelist
and
nursing
student
Warren
DeLong
went
straight
into
the
Navy
after
high
school
and served in a hospital
in
Okinawa,
Japan.
He
said being in a foreign
country without his family
at 19 years old helped him
develop as a person.
“My first duty station was
Naval Hospital in Okinawa,
Japan, and I loved it,”
DeLong said. “When you’re
living in a foreign country,
as a 19-year-old, it’s not
hard to find fun, new,
exciting things. I really
liked the people I worked
with … and they guided me,
they mentored me, and they
got me on the path that I
am today started taking
college classes.”
Engineering
graduate
student Ian Carter attended
the event and told The
Daily that discussing the
different types of military
careers
emphasized
the
diverse opportunities the
military offers.
“My favorite thing is
that they all had different
experiences, and I think
that
is
important
to
highlight when you are
talking about people in the
military,” Carter said. “You
can have a Marine that was
a journalist and you can
have a Navy corpsman that
was working in a hospital.
The variety of stories really
help to highlight to regular
civilians that the military
is really a profession and
that you can accomplish
other things.”
During the discussion,
panelists
also
talked
about
adjusting
to
University
housing
on
campus.
Engineering
student Stefany Escobedo,
panelist and president of
the
University’s
chapter
of
Student
Veterans
of
America, said she had to do
her own research to find out
whether she was eligible
for graduate housing.
“I did not know because
I was so old, that I could
be in graduate housing as
an undergraduate. And it
took — it was the first year
— after the first year, year
and a half maybe, that I
was reading through the
policies and procedures of
housing for some reason,”
Escobedo said. “And that’s
when I saw if you’re out of
high school for six years
or something, then you
can
apply
for
graduate
housing. And I said, ‘Why
did nobody tell me?’ That
was very frustrating for me
because instead of moving
around
from,
like,
this
little room and my summer
storage to this apartment
that cost $1,400 and that
was really far away from
North Campus.”
Business
sophomore
Michael Geraci attended
the event and told The
Daily it was helpful to
hear positive and negative
perspectives of being in the
military.
“I
thought
it
was
interesting to get insight
from enlisted and active
duty people,” Geraci said.
“I’m not contracted with
ROTC (Reserve Officers’
Training
Corps)
yet,
which means I don’t have
a commitment with it. I’m
still kind of considering
that
option,
and
I’m
considering what route I
would want to do. I also
like hearing the negatives,
too. You get the positives
shoved down your throat,
and I wanted to get a whole
perspective.”
Other students, like Public
Policy
senior
Nicholas
Tomaino, urged CSG to ensure
they were surveying all groups
on campus to get an accurate
read of the political dynamics
on campus.
“The University of Michigan
is
a
premier
research
university in the state of
Michigan, and obviously it’s
important to have some sort of
relationship with our elected
representatives,”
Tomino
said. “It’s a respectable thing
to be doing. It’s incumbent on
the CSG president to seek out
the perspectives of various
communities across campus
whenever he/she aspires to
speak on behalf of the entire
student body.”
Tomaino
said
Gerstein’s
statement
should
have
specified whether students on
campus unanimously agreed
that the Higher Education Act
was the best solution to solve
the college affordability crisis.
“While I’m sure that there
is near-unanimous consensus
that college affordability is an
important issue for folks on
campus, I’m largely skeptical
that there is near-unanimous
consensus
on
the
Higher
Education Act being the most
effective method for solving
it,” Tomaino said.
Gernstein
said
in
his
conversations
with
student
stakeholders at the University,
the
dialogue
was
largely
centered on improving campus
affordability. He said there
wasn’t a specific survey on how
the entire student population
felt.
“I would say that among
the 40,000 students we have
on campus, a good majority,
a large amount of students
would say at least the campus
affordability is an issue that
exists here at the University
of Michigan and in higher
education across the country,”
Gernstein. “And so, I didn’t
have specific polling numbers
to show that the entire student
population
thinks
campus
affordability is a large or larger
issue, but just in terms of
campus advocacy, and what the
dialogue has been on campus
around campus affordability
the last couple of years and
institutional barriers to access
for low socioeconomic status
students.”
Communications
director
of the University’s chapter of
College
Democrats
Camille
Mancuso, Public Policy junior,
commended CSG’s support of
the Higher Education Act.
“College
inaccessibility
and unaffordability is a crisis
faced by students all across
the country, and that crisis is
amplified at the University of
Michigan. College Democrats
is excited to see a commitment
to solving this crisis in our
Central Student Government,”
Mancuso wrote. “The Higher
Education Act is a step toward
increasing college access for all
students--specifically for low-
income
and
undocumented
students. It is both important
and necessary that our Central
Student Government President
reflect the interests of students
by advocating for the Higher
Education Act.”
The Daily reached out to
the College Republicans for
comment several times but
received no response.
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
News
Friday, November 15, 2019 — 3A
VETERANS
From Page 1A
BOOK TALK
MONICA BABITS/Daily
Philip Larson, program coordinator for University of Michigan Veteran and Military Services, leads a discussion following a showing of the
movie “Lioness” as part of Veterans Week in the Michigan League Thursday.
CSG
From Page 1A
POPCORN
From Page 1A
PACT
From Page 1A
“For us, just
continuing to
move forward
was what worked
for us. Our success
lies oftentimes in
the fact that we
move fast.”