"There's a little bit of quirkiness in everyone," says Sheryl Adkins-Green, SVP Marketing of Snapple Beverage Group. "We are that permission to have fun with those quirks."

Well, Sheryl, it takes one to know one, right? :-)

Before she joined Snapple, Sheryl was head of national sales and marketing for Citigroup. One would not necessarily expect a financial services company to be a hotbed of even mild eccentricities, but Sheryl's own special kind of quirkiness at that time was just about legendary.

"My colleagues at Citibank could tell if I had arrived at my desk because the Snapple bottle would be there," she laughs. "That's how people tracked me down." So when the call came from Snapple, she couldn't resist the chance to take a peek behind that curtain.

What excited her, she says (other than the 24/7 supply of her beverage of choice) was the entrepreneurial spirit of the company. She also was drawn by that certain element of fashion that infiltrates each and every brand in the Snapple Beverage Group portfolio -- from the flagship brand to Yoo-Hoo, Mistic, Nantucket Nectars, Orangina and Stewart's root beer.

As it happens, Sheryl's career began with fashion retailing, which is what she studied at the University of Wisconsin, where she also gained some exposure to business and marketing. Ultimately, it was brand management that captured her imagination, she says, because "by being a brand manager, you were really running a little business within the company."

That appealed to Sheryl's entrepreneurial spirit. While earning her MBA at Harvard Business School, she did a summer internship at General Mills in the Big G division. After graduating, she joined what was then General Foods, now Kraft Foods, where she moved between different assignments and categories.

Sheryl says she liked it at Kraft but one day received a call about an opportunity from Citicorp, which was looking for people with classic packaged-goods backgrounds to help them become a more consumer-oriented brand. They wanted the retail banking experience to be more consumer-friendly, and were looking for people with those classic marketing skills.

"The challenge of taking my packaged-goods background and applying it in a whole new industry was appealing to me," says Sheryl, who joined the company as a regional president of retail banking in the New York area. Then she got a little bit of dot-com fever and moved into an assignment at Salomon Smith Barney, where she developed an online investment business. After that it was a turn as national head of marketing and sales in Citigroup's second mortgage business.

When the call came from Snapple, Sheryl says she wasn't necessarily looking for, or expecting, it. An executive recruiter had met her a few years earlier and remembered some of the marketing work that she had done on the Altoids brand, which has somewhat of an idiosyncratic personality.

So, the people at Snapple thought that would be excellent experience. Sheryl thought joining Snapple would be a great way to draw on all of her past experiences all at once.

And -- wouldn't you know it -- the first thing Sheryl (the dedicated follower of fashion) worked on when she got to Snapple was the personified bottle campaign. The campaign was already developed, but she got there just in time to help pick out the wardrobe for the next commercial.



You went from Kraft to Citibank to Snapple Beverage Group -- is culture shock a way of life for you?

I tend to be a very adaptable person, so I can't say that it's been culture shock (laughs). Maybe it's my mindset, but you can take an entrepreneurial -- or "intrapreneurial" -- approach even within large companies.

Many of my experiences either involved new products or turnaround situations. At Citibank, that meant starting up an Internet business. From that standpoint, it wasn't a hard transition to join Snapple.

How do you reconcile the big corporate culture of a Cadbury Schweppes with the renegade image for which Snapple is known and loved?

Cadbury Schweppes believes in the power of brand and recognizes that different brands have different forces of energy driving them. They respect and appreciate that, and give each brand the room to be what it is. So -- yes -- Snapple is different in the way we might put together a meeting or presentation. But that's one of the reasons Cadbury Schweppes values the Snapple brand.

While we're on the subject of corporate culture, what is it like to be an African-American woman in corporate America today?

That's a big question. Having always been a woman of color in business, I can't compare it to anything different. Speaking for myself, as a woman of color, being sensitive and astute to cultural differences has always been a part of my life.

Certainly, in the corporate world, between different companies and obviously a wide range of people, one of the things that I needed to do to be successful was to be astute at understanding a wide variety of people, and working with them.

It's a similar skill to consumer marketing, where you're thinking about people, understanding what motivates them, understanding how their perceptions affect how they relate to you. So, a lot of those skills and instincts that I use in consumer marketing I've deployed in my career.

How have you deployed your fashion instincts to your role as a marketer?

My interest in fashion gives me certain insights into people and how they feel. Certainly, the clothes you wear have a lot to do with how you feel -- it's your personal environment. Having that interest -- and an eye for how colors, fabrics, textures and images can shape how a person is feeling -- is a creative perspective that I've been able to apply throughout my career

Even in banking, an eye for fashion helped me think about the environment for the banking conversation, and how people feel when they first walk into a bank. What are some of the physical cues that help them feel welcome? What helps them feel relaxed and valued? That kind of sensitivity to the purchasing environment is very much connected to my background in fashion.

Fashion also is really about change, and understanding what people are going to want next. You need to make sure that you keep enough of it familiar so that you're building loyalty and equity, but also scratching the itch that people always have for something a little bit new and different.

You manage a portfolio of brands that in some ways compete with each other. How do you keep them all on strategy?

That's a large opportunity that I focus on every day. Some of the brands might share ingredients. So, yes, you might say we have multiple juice drinks. But we keep them differentiated by getting really close to the consumers who are part of each franchise. We get past some of the obvious things each brand has in common and carve out distinct brand personalities for each.

We help each brand really connect to different "need states" that consumers have. We talk to each of our different targets in a unique voice through individual campaigns. Each brand truly does have a distinct core following.

Stewart's seems like an apple among oranges in SBG. How did it end up in the Snapple portfolio?

It was a brand that was acquired by the Snapple Beverage Group and even though it seems a little bit different, there are some similarities in terms of the whole gourmet-soda segment.

It's very different from your Coke or your Pepsi in that people are really drawn to it because they're looking for a change of pace. A brand like Stewart's, which has such a wonderful heritage, is almost eighty years old, creates a feeling of nostalgia.

People are starting to gravitate to more of those classic things. Whether it's the TV shows, fashion -- things like that -- people like to kind of go back and feel good. I mean, what could be better than a Stewart's root beer float?

Mistic is one of the brands in your group that doesn't seem to have quite as much profile as some of your other brands. Why is that?

We use a lot more local marketing, as opposed to broad-reach advertising, with Mistic. It has a core following, typically more around major cities. It does have a distinct audience versus Snapple. The flavor profiles are bolder and the colors might be brighter and more intense. That's something that the Mistic consumer enjoys about the product.

Yoo-Hoo, meanwhile, is getting more buzz than ever.

The buzz is really coming out of the way that we interact with consumers through our promotional activity. A lot of what we do starts off as grass roots -- concerts, and tours, events and fun radio promotions. It's a brand that's stayed very true to its unique roots. It's a unique product. And we celebrate that -- we celebrate the people who enjoy it.

One of the reasons people are excited about Yoo-Hoo is that's it's not afraid to be outrageous. For example, last year we had the Big Stinkin' Tour, featuring a garbage truck. I mean, who would walk around sampling their product out of a garbage truck? But it was really about the fun, and a little bit of a rebellious way to interact with our core target. They had a lot of fun with it and it did pick up buzz because it was different. And it was also something that felt very real.

More recently, you did a Yoo-Hoo promotion with Jesse James, the Monster Garage guy. What was that all about?

That was part of our Gumball Rally participation, and this year's summer promotion is called Burnt Rubber Summer. So, it's all about cars and wheels. We know that one of the things teenage boys care about is how they are going to get around.

So, as we were thinking about that promotion and how to really bring it to life, the Gumball Rally looked like a great opportunity. And, of course we said, if we're going to participate, we want to do it in a very unique way.

It turns out that Jesse James likes Yoo-Hoo. He loved the idea to customize a car for us. And as he got involved in the project, it caught a lot of attention. We're actually going to be auctioning off the vehicle he customized for charity at the end of summer.

It seems like Coke is really on your trail these days. They've recently announced a milk-based line of drinks (like Yoo-Hoo) and a new emphasis on lemonade (like Snapple). What do you make of that?

Certainly all of our competitors are looking for new ways to grow their businesses. In the milk -- or what we call the dairy -- category, there hasn't been as much activity until recently.

One of the things we did this summer was launch our Double-Fudge product, which is off to a very big start. We know that our competition is really looking at all of the beverage cooler doors and looking for ways to increase their presence there. Until recently, the dairy door has been a little bit more quiet, but that obviously isn't going to last much longer.

Coke, meanwhile, has had some success in licensing its brand name to other product categories. Do you think Snapple has similar potential?

It's certainly an area that we're looking at. But more important to us is if licensing helps us engage with our consumer in a fun way. That's what's most important to us -- less so the commercial benefits of licensing.

Snapple has put plasma TV ads in MTA subway tunnels and print ads above urinals. What makes that kind of media attractive to you?

Not necessarily the ads over the urinals! It's really about engaging with consumers in unexpected ways, which again is part of Snapple's unique personality.

We don't always do things in an expected way and we always are looking for distinctive opportunities where our brand can appear. It's that little bit of element of surprise. You'll see us on pizza boxes. You might see us in a fortune cookie. Those are just some of the ways that we connect with our consumers.

What do you find most exciting about your work?

The thing that I love about this business is the a chance to stay close to our consumers -- whether it's talking with them on the phone or interacting with them live.

That, for me personally, makes this business exciting. It's really a source of energy and ideas and one of the things that makes all of our brands unique and why people are so passionate about the brands that I have in the portfolio.

That's probably a difference, versus Kraft. You tell someone you work on Jell-O, and maybe they talk about their favorite flavor. But when you tell people -- hey, I work with Nantucket Nectars, or Snapple, or Yoo-Hoo -- and their faces light up. People will say -- I love that brand. It is such a wonderful opportunity to work on brands that people truly love.