Haulin’ Buns: Marketing from Behind the Wheel of a Wienermobile
November 26, 2024
- Author
- Mark Johnson
The century-old brick and columns of Davidson College’s Chambers Building provide a stately backdrop for concerts, formal photographs and tented dinners.
On a sunny morning last fall, the less decorous Oscar Mayer Wienermobile rolled on to the brick plaza in front with Emily Schmitt ’23 at the wheel. The cloaked statues on top seemed to frown in disapproval.
If someone had surveyed Davidson’s seniors the previous year and asked which classmate was likely to pull off such a stunt, Schmitt likely would have topped the list.
Months earlier, she had set out on a quest that led her down an equally logical and unconventional path to her first job—a role that combined unbridled fun with underestimated depth: a “hotdogger.”
Can they ketch up?
During her senior year, Schmitt lined up events for the Union Board, adding creative flair to the role. In one case, she convinced Candace Mulherin, assistant director of student activities, to try to orchestrate a race between the Wienermobile and the Planters Nut Mobile on Davidson’s campus. The LL Bean Bootmobile didn’t, as Schmitt said, cut the mustard.
Comedy threaded through much of her Davidson experience. She majored in English and minored in digital studies, tackling Shakespeare and Javascript. Outside of class, she led the Oops! improv group and hosted trivia night at Summit Outpost. So, her attempt to wrangle two vehicles that promote iconic brands into a processed protein drag race wasn’t entirely surprising.
The effort proved unsuccessful but fortuitous. While submitting an invitation to the Weinermobile through the Oscar Mayer website, Mulherin noticed a banner recruiting applicants for the team who drive the distinctive wagons and alerted Schmitt.
Schmitt wanted to do something creative after graduation but wasn’t sure what she truly wanted to be.
“If I don’t apply,” she said, “I won’t get it.”
She launched her application.
Early doggedness
During a second-grade school chorus performance, one of Schmitt’s classmates fainted. She later asked her parents what happened, and they said the classmate may have been nervous.
“Emily asked, ‘Why did she get nervous?’,” says Wendy Schmitt, Emily’s mother. “She didn’t understand why you would be anxious. At a very young age she was comfortable in front of audiences.”
At Davidson, Schmitt’s wry wit came through, says her advisor, English Professor Suzanne Churchill. What was intriguing, Churchill says, is Schmitt demonstrated the capacity to command the room but “she didn’t seek to be the center of attention.” And she didn’t try always to be the funniest person in the room.
For her senior thesis, she set out to write sketch comedy. Instead, Churchill says, she developed short stories with quirky, sometimes dark, humor. The themes ranged from girlhood and womanhood to “relationships with our past and past selves,” Schmitt says. Her thesis advisor, English Professor Alan Michael Parker, said Schmitt surprised herself.
“She ended up with content derived from thinking hard on what fiction can achieve,” Parker says, “from recognizing that there are different ways to think about meaning in the world.”
After applying to Oscar Mayer and during a break from thesis work, Schmitt emceed a trivia night filled with clever team names and Division I-level competitiveness. An email popped onto her screen as she sat on stage.
She remembers seeing the subject line: “Hotdogger.”
She got the interview and, later, the job.
Relishing the opportunity
Less than six months after graduation, Schmitt’s territory included a swath of the South, allowing the side trip to Davidson. Parker came out to say hello. President Doug Hicks took a photo with Schmitt. Students gathered around the frankfurter-shaped vehicle, a custom fiberglass chassis with a Chevy engine and mustard-and-ketchup colored interior, for a selfie bonanza. And the questions got ready responses:
How many people fit in it? – “Six seats for 12 buns.”
Do you sleep in it? – “No. It’s not a Wienebago.”
Who sits up front? – “The driver and a teammate who rides shotbun.”
Oscar Mayer, now a subsidiary of Kraft Heinz, rolled out the first Wienermobile in 1936, designed by Carl Mayer, Oscar’s nephew. The 1952 iteration sits on display at the Henry Ford Museum. The company now fields six of them, each with two team members, that travel across the country in any given week. They stop at county fairs, parades, grocery stores and the occasional birthday party ride. At a stop in Nebraska, Schmitt met a college student who was graduating the next day.
“I asked her ‘What time?’” Schmitt says, “and we dropped her off at commencement.”
Drew Barrymore took a surprise birthday ride in one during her TV show in February. Humor writer Dave Barry borrowed one back in 1994 to pick up his then-13-year-old son from school, despite his son’s horrified “NO” ed at breakfast.
“So right away,” Barry wrote, “I knew it was a good idea.”
The meat of the job
At first, even second, glance, a hotdogger’s work looks fun, cheery and, to some, “a little silly,” Schmitt concedes. All true, and also missing that it’s a serious marketing gig.
“One of the most important roles of marketing is creating top-of-mind awareness, cultural relevance among both current and potential consumers,” says Steve Shames, a 1996 Davidson graduate and New York President and Chief Growth Officer at the French firm Publicis, the second largest communications and marketing agency in the world. “We know that creating these emotional connections, eliciting a laugh, a smile and an experience, greatly improves the probability that a consumer will remember, and select your brand when it comes time to make a purchase. Oscar Mayer knows this better than almost anyone else. For nearly 90 years, the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile is a testament to the brand's dedication to create those connections, build community and maintain relevance with the next generation of consumers."
Hotdoggers do not sell anything when they make a stop. There is no sales quota.
“You don’t have to buy anything,” Schmitt says, “to enjoy the Wienermobile.”
Schmitt spent four years at Davidson, where a strong community cultivates relationships that help students pursue their aspirations. The college’s mission statement pledges to foster humane instincts and creative, disciplined minds. These capacities equip graduates to navigate the ambiguity of the world outside of campus. Even in Schmitt’s seemingly lighthearted role, those skills carried the day.
“It’s about connection and trust. People are so much more likely to purchase things or buy things that they have a personal connection to,” she says. “In those moments when you’re standing outside, the Wienermobile does that. I always thought about … how do I bring this person in front of me into the history, make them as much a part of this brand as I am?”
That task isn’t always easy. At Davidson, Churchill conducted a mock interview with Schmitt, preparing her for the job, and asked how she would handle an aggressive male making inappropriate comments about the Wienermobile. Schmitt never had to use the de-escalation strategy that impressed Churchill, but there were a few folks wanting to offer a complaint about Oscar Mayer or who were just having a bad day.
“Sometimes people take it out on hotdoggers,” Schmitt says. “You have to meet people where they are, such as the shy kid. How do you adapt to what they need in that moment? You’re helping them find the bright spot in the everyday. That’s not something many of us pause to do. Hopefully they’re pulled into that magic, even for five minutes.”
In Oklahoma, a woman checking out the Wienermobile said her mother, who loved the unmistakable vehicle, had recently passed away. After a brief chat, the woman asked for Schmitt’s name.
“Emily,” she said. The woman’s face brightened. That was her mother’s name.
(Almost) top dog
As Schmitt’s year on the road wound down, she learned that the coordinator position for the teams was open. That’s the Chicago-based shift boss who plots the course for all six Wienermobiles, a calendar of more than 1,200 events a year.
The promotion was offered, and she grabbed it. Now, she is organizing visits and planning the routes for the new teams that started over the summer. She has multiple computer monitors running in her office with six calendars and constant google mapping.
Schmitt knows firsthand the challenges for hotdoggers, booking their own hotels and living out of them, managing time and a budget while always being an “on” personality. Her mother recalled family weddings and visits with friends that Schmitt missed.
That experience now helps her guide and counsel the new hotdoggers. She visited with them in their first weeks, and she’s a cell phone lifeline on all sorts of questions.
“I know what they’re going through,” she says.
She learned some of that mentoring at Davidson, where professors did more than teach — from Churchill’s interview prep to Parker’s guidance in expanding her ideas to a collective shaping of her studies around ensuring an array of viewpoints in a community. She was ready for that first county fair or grumpy grocery store customer and, now, for helping steer the next class who will take the wheel of the Wienermobile.
“When I think about what prepared me, the amazing activities and the people at Davidson who supported me were integral,” she says. “I’m the lucky dog.”
This article was originally published in the Fall/Winter 2024 print issue of the Davidson Journal Magazine; for more, please see the Davidson Journal section of our website.
