The garden occupied a third of an acre and answered to the name Dude Ranch. This was outside Minneapolis in 2009, on land supplied by an employee of Haberman, a marketing agency whose clients sold organic milk, natural food and better ideas about agriculture. The setup cost about $5,000. Staff tilled, planted, weeded and harvested. Lettuce arrived at the office once or twice a week. The end-of-season party was called Dudestock, because an agency can resist a bad pun only for so long.
It would be easy to file the garden under perks, somewhere between cold brew and Summer Fridays. Haberman treated it as something stranger and more useful: a live brief. If the agency was going to tell stories about food, its people ought to know the bother of growing some. The plot taught them what no demographic slide could - that values become credible only after they become inconvenient.
An agency born on the long way home
Fred and Sarah Haberman founded the firm in 1994, after a run of experiences that makes the average agency biography feel underfed. They had worked on an American office-products venture in Kazakhstan and guided adventure-travel groups in the Himalayas. Fred had volunteered at the 1991 Special Olympics World Summer Games in Minnesota. Experiential learning, indigenous wisdom and servant leadership are not retrospective decorations in the company history; Haberman names them as ingredients in its origin.
The founders made a pact not to work for just anybody. Their mission became “telling the stories of pioneers making a difference in the world.” It is an elastic phrase, but the client record supplies boundaries. Organic food. Herbal medicine. Sustainable farming. Public health. Credit unions. Special Olympics. These are categories in which the customer must first believe a different account of how the world could work.
Today Haberman is a full-service shop: brand strategy and positioning; creative and design; paid, earned and owned media; PR and executive visibility; influencer work; analytics and measurement. It is privately held and partner-owned, with several team members holding a stake. Public directories put it in the 11-to-50 employee band. Its fees are not published. The useful public budget clue is only adjacent: a recent senior role asked for experience with annual paid-media programs from $2 million to $15 million-plus. That describes client media spend, not what Haberman charges.
The 18-year client
The relationship that best explains Haberman is not a launch but a tenure. For 18 years it handled PR, thought leadership, product visibility, influencer relations and events for Organic Valley. During that span, the farmer-owned cooperative grew from less than $100 million in sales to more than $1 billion. Haberman does not claim it single-handedly caused that tenfold rise - marketing case studies should come with sensible weatherproofing - but it helped turn the people behind organic dairy into national authorities on farming, food and sustainability.
The same logic appears in Traditional Medicinals. Haberman connected herbal expertise to ordinary needs - digestion, sleep, stress - and put the company’s own herbalists forward as voices that advertising could not manufacture. The agency reports three consecutive years of double-digit sales growth within a seven-year run, plus a 13 percent lift in unaided awareness. The story did not abandon the roots. It translated them.
The chart gets the last word
Purpose-led agencies invite a reasonable suspicion: perhaps the mission language is doing work that the results cannot. Haberman becomes more interesting when a campaign misbehaves. Campbell’s moved Pacific Foods away from its large-agency roster and asked a smaller team to show what marketing could actually do for growth. Haberman built a matched-market system, comparing geographic clusters and tracking brand and sales effects.
Some markets produced zero lift. Some creative failed to break through. Those were the first failures, and the measurement made them difficult to sentimentalize. The team shifted money out of flat markets and kept adjusting the mix of brand, influencer and celebrity content. In the better-performing clusters, the agency says incremental sales lift reached 19 percent; exposed audiences showed a 12 percent awareness lift.
Illustrative comparison based on Haberman’s reported range. The practical move was simple: stop funding zero and investigate the lift.
This is the copyable part. Start with a hypothesis, not a monument. Put media people in the room before the creative is finished. Run small tests across audiences or markets. Agree on the measure before anyone sees the answer. Then give the team permission to move the budget. It sounds obvious in retrospect, which is where most obvious things live.
A teenager can hear the adult in the room
For the Minnesota Department of Health, the behavior to change was youth vaping. A finger-wagging public-service announcement would have arrived wearing an adult’s shoes. Haberman worked with real teens on Room to Breathe, a brand that connected nicotine dependence to mental health and well-being. Research uncovered a more productive tension: young people might resist advice about themselves but feel fiercely protective of friends.
That insight produced Hey Norm, a fictional character with a real hotline whom friends could invoke without staging an intervention. It mixed facts with humor, what the agency calls “info-tainment.” Haberman reports more than 71,000 website visits, a 204 percent traffic increase, reach to 90 percent of the state’s addressable youth and an 11th-grade vaping rate that fell from 14 to 8 percent during the campaign period. The work won a National Gold ADDY in 2025. Campaigns do not control every force behind a public-health trend, but those numbers make the approach worth studying.
In 2026, the agency pushed the logic further with a Youth Content Creator Coalition: public-health experts supply facts; Minnesota teens decide how those facts should live on social platforms. The adults surrender polish to gain fluency. That bargain will not suit every organization. It needs leaders who can share authorship, legal teams that can review without sterilizing and a subject whose truth survives a young creator’s format.
Begin with what the organization can honestly claim and what people can recognize.
Name the foe. Without a conflict, a mission statement is office wallpaper.
Use culture, live media and research to learn where the story touches ordinary life.
Make the benefit legible, then measure whether attention became action.
Where Haberman earns its place
A client can buy brand strategy from a consultancy, ads from a creative shop, reach from a media agency and reputation work from a PR firm. Haberman’s proposition is that mission-led organizations lose something in those handoffs. Its alternative is a compact integrated team, especially useful for consumer brands, public agencies and nonprofits whose challenge crosses belief, behavior and distribution.
That does not make it the automatic answer. A company seeking vast international production infrastructure may prefer a global network. A buyer who wants the lowest-cost execution of a settled plan does not need Haberman’s strategic breadth. And a leadership team unwilling to expose creative to live tests will pay for measurement mainly to decorate the postmortem. The method depends on a true story, access to outcome data, enough budget and time to test, and permission to admit that the first answer was wrong.
The agency itself has repeatedly behaved like a client with something at stake. It created a pond-hockey championship, helped launch an urban aquaponics venture in an abandoned brewery and planted the Dude Ranch. The latter was the smallest experiment: $5,000, one-third of an acre, a harvest bag at the office. But it contained the whole philosophy. Get close enough to the subject that the dirt ruins your shoes. Make something people can use. Watch what happens. Change the plan.