Chris McKee ’92 helps Fortune 500 companies gain customer loyalty with gratis goodies

Story and photos by Marc Glass  (PDF of magazine layout)

Chris McKee ’92, vice president of corporate programs for Maine-based promotional-products giant Geiger, is in the business of giving it away.

Ask him—as more than 130 high-end clients like Delta Air Lines and TD Banknorth do—how Geiger can enhance corporate visibility, and he’ll explain how putting a company logo on soft-shell jackets, t-shirts, hats, notebooks, travel mugs, mouse pads and USB flash-memory drives creates “durable brand resonance.” And once a business gives those Geiger-produced, brand-consistent promotional products away, customer loyalty soars.

Which brings McKee to a summative point in explaining how he helps companies improve their market share: “Everybody loves free stuff,” he says. And McKee is no exception.



Last year, he explains, he flew more than 200,000 miles with Delta during 44 weeks of travel to negotiate multimillion-dollar contracts with an array of blue-chip companies—all seeking ways to dominate market share. In return for the year’s patronage (a hefty tab for Geiger, he estimates), Delta gave him two Geiger-procured tokens of appreciation: a 1/100 scale replica of a Boeing 767 and a platinum luggage tag. McKee, pointing out the model airplane that now adorns a window sill in his Lewiston office, is still tickled about the gifts.

“The whole experience proved to me that the way a company acknowledges you, the way they say ‘thank you’ doesn’t have to be a big deal. Almost anything that helps a person form a positive relationship works,” he says. “I’ll definitely keep flying Delta.”

Yes, McKee understands customers (and their affinity for gratis goodies), but his success is also due in no small part to his appetite for challenge. Take, for instance, his first major task with Geiger: turning the trailing Miami, Ft. Lauderdale and San Juan, Puerto Rico, offices to profitability back in 1997. To better communicate with—and motivate—the San Juan sales team, he enrolled in a full-immersion Spanish program at the Univ. of Miami. He also personally pursued and eventually hired the best sales talent he could find. In a year’s time, McKee’s trio of offices led the company in profits by posting double-digit sales gains—a trend that continued during his five years in Miami.

Despite his success at work, Florida’s heat and social climate had McKee pining for home. (“Going out for drinks in South Beach gets old in a hurry,” he explains.) So, he decided to tackle a few Mainer-in-exile projects in his spare time. Like the quixotic task of building a cedar-strip canoe in his seventh-floor beachfront condo.

“I had to reengineer the plans because the service elevator wouldn’t accommodate the length of lumber needed. Acquiring the materials wasn’t easy in a land of concrete construction, either,” he says. “No one complained, so I guess my neighbors didn’t hear the table saw running in the middle of the night.”

After seeing his achievements in Florida and Puerto Rico, Geiger promoted McKee to vice-president of its Lewiston-based corporate programs division in 2001. For the first six months, he shuttled between Miami and Maine while his wife, Kim, was pregnant with the first of their two sons. Though inconvenient, the transition stint was, he says, worth the chance to raise his sons not far from the organic farm where he grew up in Wayne.

And, as he did in Miami, McKee—who majored in business economics at UMF—promptly put Geiger’s corporate programs in the black with year-over-year double-digit growth.

Beyond managing contract negotiations with product vendors and corporate entities, he now oversees an on-site call center and development of client Web solutions like custom online merchandising stores for “large relationships” like Discover Card (whose sales force can rapidly procure logoed goods for customers and courted clients alike). He also oversees Geiger’s employee-recognition program, which—just like a helpful corporate concierge—handles employee years-of-service awards with everything from notifying the corporate client of an upcoming anniversary to procuring the gift. (Perhaps a logo-emblazoned BPA-free water bottle or, for the really lucky, an iPod engraved with a note of gratitude.)



Asked if overseeing 130 high-end clients and Geiger’s myriad business services causes a few sleepless nights (especially in a bearish business climate) McKee says, “You sleep better at night with diversification.” Plus, he explains, “I really work in order to do other the other things.”

McKee may excel in the rarified air of America’s corporate board rooms (looking every bit at home among the wing-tip set), but listen to him describe his extracurricular passions and you realize he breathes easier above 4,000 meters.

You see, in addition to building that canoe, McKee spent some quality time clomping around his Miami condo (and a few beachfront sidewalks), breaking in a pair of hard-shell mountaineering boots in preparation for his ascents of Mount Rainier, several Colorado 14,000-footers and, most recently, Mount Kilimanjaro. (Winter ascents of Mount Washington, arguably home of world’s worst weather, are but minor day trips for McKee.) He’s now contemplating the possibility of tackling Everest, but McKee—a Scuba-certified diver and a single-engine Beechcraft pilot—claims he’s not a “risk-taking daredevil,” just someone who, “enjoys learning new things and new challenges.”

“Sometimes, when I’m standing in an executive washroom of some Fortune 500 company, I look in the mirror and think to myself, ‘I shouldn’t be here,’” explains McKee, who says that although his wife insisted he climb Kilimanjaro when the opportunity arose, he’s not sure she’ll green light two months in Nepal. “I like having a mission and getting outside. My wife knows I get crabby if I don’t.”