Mint Condition

"Scarcity drives collectibles," says Diehl. "But we were becoming the coin-of-the-month club." So he and his crew marched to Capitol Hill to convince Congress to limit its commemorative coin fix to two per year. "We had finally committed to representing the interests of our collectors," says Diehl. "And we demonstrated that we were prepared to defend those interests."

Reducing an oversupply of bad coins simply inspired the next challenge: creating a more robust market for good coins. The fact was, congressional meddling aside, most of the Mint's coins weren't very compelling. The themes weren't interesting. The designs, which almost never changed, weren't engaging. But that hadn't always been the case. Back in the 19th century, coin designs were ambitious, and they did change frequently -- which is why collecting had become so popular. But in the 20th century, once the Mint began putting dead presidents on coins, it became virtually impossible to take them off. Asks Diehl: "Who's going to propose removing George Washington from the quarter?" Still, Diehl and his crew understood that unless they changed how the Mint made its change, their ability to make lasting change at the Mint would be limited.

Enter marketing director David Pickens. Pickens, 53, loves coins. He's been a coin collector, off and on, since he was eight years old. It was this early love of coins that gave Pickens a sense of what the Mint's future might hold. "I realized that the Mint could use its heritage and legacy to make change," says Pickens, whose official title is associate director for numismatics. "There aren't many organizations that can manufacture to the Mint's quality levels. Have you heard the term 'mint condition'? Well, this is the Mint! Yet it has suffered from a lack of strategic imagination and from the stealth marketing that was done.

"The Mint produces a legacy product that people will be collecting through the next several millennia," Pickens continues. "There's a mystique to this type of permanence. A coin has the year on it. It has 'In God We Trust' on it. It's sculpture, art, history. It is a representation of our culture and civilization. Most of our customers buy our coins and never intend to sell them. They pass them on to their children or their children's children."

The more that Diehl and Pickens thought about the Mint's long-term strategy, the more they rethought the nature of the business itself. They realized that the Mint wasn't just in the business of selling collectibles. It was also in the business of creating and fostering exchanges -- exchanges between fathers and sons, between brothers and sisters, between perfect strangers. "Coin collectors have always known that coins have two functions in society," explains Diehl. "Primarily, coins facilitate commerce. But more important, coinage has always been used to tell the story of our nation to its own people, and to itself. Only by understanding how our customers viewed coinage could we rediscover a crucial method of using coins to tell our own story."

Adds Pickens, "We had forgotten the magic in our product. People were bored with coins. We had failed to see what it was that made coining and coin collecting exciting."

Thus began one of the most successful consumer-product launches of the 1990s. The Mint's 50 State Quarters Program, unveiled in December 1998, is a long-term initiative designed to rejuvenate public interest in coins. The program honors each state with its own special quarter. It involves the public (through the governor's office of each state) in the design process. Every 10 weeks for 10 years, a new state quarter gets put into circulation, released in the order in which each state joined the Union -- first Delaware, then Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Georgia, and so on.

Like most of the changes at the Mint, the initial push for the State Quarters Program came from collectors. For years, they'd urged the Mint to reintroduce circulating commemorative pocket change. But Diehl had been skeptical. His early years at the Mint were tough ones. Even as he was making big changes in Washington, the Mint's manufacturing operations were struggling to make enough coins. Diehl had neither the funding flexibility nor the personal desire to stimulate additional demand. Over time, though, as he sensed the enthusiasm coming from collectors, he realized that the idea was too good a business opportunity to pass up.

Of course, even a well-designed product needs a well-defined marketing strategy -- a competency that the Mint had never developed. How would it tell the public -- and especially kids, most of whom were more interested in Pokémon cards than in coins -- about this revolutionary new product? Answer: Kermit the Frog. "We were looking for the right person to introduce the program, and he volunteered," jokes Pickens. In fact, the Jim Henson Co. contacted the Mint after it got wind of the program, and an unprecedented public-private marketing alliance was formed. Kermit, the official Mint spokesfrog, took the agency prime time -- promoting the 50 State Quarters Program in commercial spots during shows like NYPD Blue and Jeopardy, and on such cable-TV channels as Nickelodeon, Lifetime, Discovery, and the History Channel.