163 - Unleashing the Power of Emotional Marketing in Building Customer Connections with Brand Castle Growth Partners' Bryan Alston

Welcome to Listening with Leaders. I'm Doug Noll, lawyer turned peacemaker. I teach executive leaders how to listen to emotions rather than words so that they can become the leaders everyone wants to follow. And I teach those same leaders how to be authentically present, available, and connected to their families despite being insanely busy. I have learned that we are 98% emotional and only 2% rational. Learning how to listen to emotions is, in my experience, the foundational skill of life. Stick around to the end of the show and I'll reveal how you can be on our next guest in 15 to 20 minutes. So let's get started.

Brian Austin, welcome to Listening with Leaders. You are the co-founder and managing partner of a company called Brandcastle Growth Partners. Which can be found at Brandcastle.co. Welcome to the show.

Yeah, thank you so much, Doug, for having me.

I'm excited. We learned just before we started the show that we have two things in common. One, we're both Dartmouth graduates. I quite much earlier than you, but we both rode for Dartmouth. I only made it one year.

Hard sport, but 4 years is impressive nonetheless.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yep. I was heavy 8s and I think you were coxswain for lights, right?

If I recall, I was a coxswain for the heavies for 3 and a half years and I actually switched to the lightweights at the very end of senior year and that's really where I had, you know, all of my success. But the heavies were my home. Okay, all that time.

Got it. Good. Well, tell us a little bit about your backstory.

Sure.

So Just rewinding from before Dartmouth, I grew up in San Francisco, a fourth— yeah, fourth-generation San Franciscan. Spent my whole life there for the most part. And since I've spent my whole career in startups, it's interesting that my high school was technically a startup. Like my very first day of 9th grade was the first day that my high school opened. It was this small experimental charter school where the thesis was, you know, have small classes, have these kids on a college campus and then see what happens. So it was a very interesting experiment to be able to be part of the group who gets to name your school and start the student council and be the leaders and really build the school into something, you know, from a lump of clay. So yeah, that was sort of my first startup experience.

Wow.

And then had the opposite experience when I went to Dartmouth. You know, it's a very established institution, as you know. Tons of traditions, tons of existing organizations. And one that I just happened to find myself on was the crew team. I was technically approached by a bunch of giants during my freshman orientation to be a coxswain. And for people who don't know what a coxswain is on the podcast, it's the small person who screams at people and is sort of—

Back of the boat, steering the boat.

Yeah, like you steer the boat. You're the coach sort of in the race. And you're sort of PA's on for the coach. It's a very interesting leadership role that I'm sure we can talk more about as the podcast goes on because it's definitely had a massive impact on pretty much everything I know about leadership, people management, on like dealing with a lot of different personalities, aligning people towards a common goal, winning. So yeah, I would say like my major was psychology and sociology, but my real major was rowing. That's where I learned the life skills that took me into corporate. And then just to sort of wrap that up, after college, went to work for the Gap at their headquarters in San Francisco on their e-commerce team. Back when e-commerce was still sort of in its infancy, it was only like 3% of total sales in the retail industry. And a lot of people at the time told me that my decision to go into e-commerce was a mistake. They felt that it's a fad and who's going to buy stuff online? You know, sure, Amazon's a thing, but who's going to buy clothes on the internet? And I was like, no, I think that there's a lot of opportunity to listen to the data to inform your growth decisions for retail. And the best place to do that was e-commerce. That's where they have all of the data about the customer, about their desires, what they do and don't like. Et cetera. So yeah, that's where I started my career in e-commerce. Ended up in LA where I was a, like, essentially a fractional CMO, helping to launch and scale a bunch of e-commerce startups for many years. Some of those include Magic Spoon, the cereal brand, who I got to work with from about 4 months pre-launch through their first 12 months. Same thing for the cookware brand Our Place. Clove, which is a huge shoe for doctors and nurses, which you can imagine blew up over the past few years. And most recently was at Greater Than, which was a company just going back to the, the customer listening piece that started as a sports drink primarily aimed at men who do CrossFit. That was what they were in business in for about 8 years. And, you know, as you can imagine, If you're trying to compete against Gatorade, it's a pretty hard battle to win, especially when Gatorade sells for a dollar a bottle. And just with that price anchoring, it's very difficult for a premium product to really exist in that sports drink space. So what I had to do from a marketing standpoint was zoom out and think, what is this product really? Is it a sports drink or is it a really high quality electrolyte drink? And if it's the, the second, that's a much broader audience to go after. And we targeted our ads towards what we thought was our core audience, which would be soccer moms. So parents who have athletic children and they don't want to give them sugar or chemicals or any of that, but they can drink this drink themselves. So it would really be sort of a family hydration drink. And what ended up happening was we began to get this organic following of pregnant and breastfeeding moms using this product for their own dehydration issues. That leads to cramps, fatigue, headaches, low milk supply, you name it. And for whatever reason, again, going back to the listening piece, there had never been any hydration brand at all that we know of who had ever focused on this audience, who had ever focused on the massive dehydration issues that pregnant and breastfeeding moms face, especially when they're breastfeeding. And We were like, okay, well, we're getting this organic traction amongst this audience. They're telling all their friends, we're going viral in these communities and they are really loving this product and championing the product. So we basically pivoted the whole brand towards that audience that we listened to, really built this business with them in mind, like a ton of customer feedback, fan mail, you know, their hopes and complaints and all of that. All went into crafting what Greater Than became, which hit the Inc. 5000 2 years in a row, was the fastest growing hydration brand in the US, and more importantly, really helped to impact the lives and families of 100,000 or a few hundred thousand people. So overall, that was sort of the cliff notes of my career up until the past few months and started Brandcastle with my co-founder, who was the former chief sales officer for Quest Nutrition, really focused on helping brands succeed in retail, not just online and not just on shelf, but really being the value-add retail brokers that can get really high-quality brands in store, on shelf, expanding their door counts, and actually delivers the marketing and demand generation to sell the products when they're on shelf and online. So truly building an omnichannel experience and business for the clients we work with. Wow. That's my life story, I guess.

Pretty cool.

You know, I, you, you mentioned that when you first started out in e-commerce, a lot of people poo-pooed you and you saw that no, no, e-commerce is gonna give us some incredible data. And that's exactly what Jeff Bezos saw.

Yes.

And that's why Amazon is not a company that sells things. It's, it's a data management company more than anything else. And in fact, it makes all its money off of AWS, not, it doesn't make any money off its e-commerce site. And, and being able to gather that data, analyze it, figure it out, see what it means, project into the future what the trends are, is, is huge. And obviously you tapped into that at the very, very early period when this stuff was still, people were still shaking their head and saying what? And we didn't have these things, right? That we can, it was before the iPhone or any of that stuff. So what is it that gets you really excited in the morning to get out of bed today?

So for me, because I spent my whole career in e-commerce, it's actually been really interesting working with Yemini, my co-founder, on understanding what happened after e-commerce. Because I mean, sure, e-commerce has grown dramatically over the past few years, as you can imagine, with COVID and all of that. But it's still only 20% of total retail sales. And what I've encountered in my career is I can get brands into orbit, but at the end of the day, they're going to hit a ceiling with e-commerce. And for them to really go all the way, they need to be in stores and not just stores, but the right stores. And they need to have the right marketing and brand awareness to be able to drive the unit velocities of their product when they're on shelf at Target and Whole Foods and whatever it is. And that last piece is often overlooked. Hmm. What keeps me up at night is thinking through all of the brands I've worked with in the past who had excellent products, really passionate teams, had pretty much everything going for them, but for whatever reason, they either didn't listen to their customer and they sort of were positioned in the wrong way, or they put all their poker chips on going big into store and they didn't really sell when they were in store because they didn't have the marketing and branding needed in order for them to actually move the units that were required. So for me, what gets me up at night is thinking about the rest of the, like, retail growth funnel, not just e-commerce and digital marketing, but everything. And how we can have the biggest impact on the brands we work with and hopefully the industry.

So, so you're like a one-stop shop where people come if they're in the e-commerce business and they're in retail, they're gonna come to you because you guys can do it all.

Correct.

Wow. And what am I— you're obviously very excited about this stuff. What is, what is it that gets you really excited and pumped up about this?

So, I mean, just looking back at the last 100 years, usually during recessions or financial downturns or whatever you want to call this era that we're in, that's really where iconic consumer brands not only launch but also are able to seize a bunch of market share. This goes all the way back to Coca-Cola, you know, like during the Great Depression, because hardly any of their other competitors were able to advertise. And they already had, you know, a decent amount of traction going into the Depression. They were really, really able to strategically and intelligently put their foot on the gas, like during that, and pretty much permanently establish themselves as a huge market leader. The same thing has happened for Post Cereal. The same thing has happened for like pretty much every iconic consumer good, food, beverage, whatever it is, you'll notice most of them had a really huge like leap forward during financial downturns. And I think that from a marketing standpoint, we're also going into this very interesting era where a lot of businesses over the past decade treated marketing like a tech play. Like we're just gonna ignore all that branding stuff and the customer stuff and all the blah. And we're just going to focus on optimizing, you know, things towards certain metrics. And I was guilty of this myself, and I used to be one of those people who was like, I think branding is BS. Let's just have the best performance marketing funnel. And what I've noticed is both are required. And if anything, what really keeps your business in people's homes and keeps people coming back is not some performance marketing funnel. Which can get you in the door. But for people to fall in love with your product and to choose you over the all the other things competing for her attention or his share of wallet or whatever it is that you're looking at, you really need to have customers fall in love with your product. You need to build this very emotional connection with them. And to me, I feel like that's sort of this interesting era that we're going into where there's access to tons of data. And there's access to tons of tools that streamline all of those tactics. But from a strategic standpoint and from a branding standpoint, it really does go back to the customer piece and understanding them intimately, like knowing, you know, how you can best serve them and ultimately just, just like tying those things together.

You know, you, you touch on something that I teach. I teach at Pepperdine University at the School of Law there, and I teach a course called Decision Making Under Uncertainty. And what I teach my graduate students is all decision-making is emotional. There is no such thing as an unemotional decision. There's no such thing as rationality, quite frankly. And rational choice theory is great for economists, but it doesn't begin to describe the actual human process of deciding what to do or to spend money or whatever, whatever else. And the second thought that I had was that once you start recognizing The power of emotions. We really don't, we, AIs are really going to become, I mean, they're going to be useful tools, but no AI will ever be emotional. They might mimic emotion, but they'll never be emotional themselves. They'll never, and so they will never have the decision-making capacity of a human being because the emotions are so biologically driven. And what you're talking about in what you're doing is saying, okay, when we're looking at a product, We've gotta be looking at the buyer's experience, the customer's experience, emotional experience. What emotional decisions are they gonna make? And that means we have to gather data that isn't necessarily gonna be driven by AI processes. It's gotta be driven by human eyeballs that understand what emotions are. Yes. And then can make recommendations, develop plans, that sort of thing. Do I have that right?

100% correct. Yeah, but that's exactly it. It's like that was what was missing. And that's what you've heard of all of these consumer brands over the past decade who again were able to hit a certain point but weren't able to go past that because their brand and how they communicated with their customer in the community that they did or did not build around their product didn't hit what you just said. And I feel like that's the thing.

And here's the thing that probably a lot of these startups were, had some very smart MBAs that are running them and, but they don't teach this stuff in business school. No, the word emotion does not exist in business school. And, you know, I teach people how to listen, but what I'm really teaching them is how to listen to emotions.

How do you listen to emotions and what does that tell you?

And then what do you do with it? And in my work as a lawyer turned peacemaker, we listen to emotions to validate people. I call it listening other people into existence. That immediately calms them down. So if you gotta de-escalate an angry person, you can do it in 90 seconds or less. And I, I teach people, my promise to my clients is that learn these skills and you'll never have a fight or argument again in your life. And, and, and you're telling your clients, learn how to read the emotions of your customer.

Yes.

Get yourself, put yourself in the position to exploit those emotions to make this emotionally attractive. And you'll have more business than you know what to do with.

Yeah, totally. And again, it's about respecting your customer and actually listening to them. Like, there's so many times where we've had customers and again, like the Greater Than example, these were pregnant and breastfeeding moms. You know, they're stressed, to put it mildly. So there were times where, you know, they would call customer service and just not be in a great mood. And again, like just listening to them, What ended up happening is they would spend 30 minutes just telling us everything, not just about their experience with the product, but about their life. We would learn about their children. We would learn about what's happening in their life so that way we can figure out how can Greater Than make her life just a little bit easier, or is there anything specific that we can do to address like some of these things? And like one of the things that, you know, we did not only for them, but for a bunch of the other clients I've had success with, is really focused on the community building piece. You know, like for Greater Than specifically, a huge problem that a lot of moms face, especially after they give birth, is a sense of isolation. They feel like they're different people and they feel like no one really understands exactly what they're going through in that exact moment. And unfortunately, what we would hear from a lot of these moms is like when they would go to a lot of other mom forums, to talk to other moms to get advice, it would be a very judgmental and like kind of negative environment. So we're like, well, we have all these customers who are forming their own communities in the comments section of our posts and all of that. Like, why don't we just create a private Facebook group? Why don't we sort of use our power as a brand to build a community that can not only help these moms, you know, facilitate their own connections, but also gives them, you know, the advice and the guidance that they need. So a vast majority of the content that we would post, for example, on our Instagram had nothing to do with our product. It was all like, you know, here's like some mom hacks, here's like some funny skits from families, here's like all these other things that are providing value and insight and education to her sponsored by a product.

That'd be huge.

Yes. So again, like, and again, I've seen this work with other brands. Like, there's this one brand on TikTok, they sell— it's basically aphrodisiac chocolate. And they were the ones who sort of like pioneered this kind of thing where, you know, they have a ton of influencers and content creators they pay to not talk about the aphrodisiac chocolate. They're paid to talk about stuff that's related to sexual wellness or intimacy problems with couples or whatever it is. Things that are adjacent so that way they can produce a bunch of that content and build audiences and credibility within that lane so that when they do post their little commercial essentially for the Sexual Chocolate, it sells like hotcakes. So again, like that just goes back to what you were saying where if you really listen to your customer and just let them tell you, you know, about their life and what's going on, and sort of aggregate that, you can get a really, really solid understanding of how you can provide value to them, not just through your product, but also through your brand. And e-commerce is a great platform to do that. And our thesis at Brandcastle is that if you have that community and if you have that canon, if you will, from a marketing standpoint, when you're already on shelf in store, you're gonna be far more likely to actually succeed when you're there because you already have this groundswell of a community that you can target down to the zip code level to drive traffic in store or who's gonna share word of mouth or whatever it is. So yeah, lots of opportunities there.

Wow.

Amazing. Huh? And here's a really good application of, of how, why listening is so important. And what you're listening for and opening up, opening up the, the, the ureers and all your pipelines for information to, to get as much information about your people as possible. Yes. And, and, and set it up so they're willing to tell you because they feel like they feel safe, they feel connected, and they're, and they're receiving value.

Yeah, they trust your brand. You're a friend.

I trust.

Yes. They're usually, they're home.

That's the thing. That's the thing about listening. When you, when you listen properly, you immediately build instant trust and loyalty.

Totally. I mean, I would say if you're a CEO, like, one of the highest ROI marketing activities that you can do is just calling customers on the phone.

Right.

I mean, it sounds really basic, but you would be shocked by how much qualitative insights you will get that won't show up in any report. That's right. Or any data, but they will tell you something. You're just like, Oh my God.

Like, and the problem is that you're gonna have a CEO do that, but unless a CEO knows how to listen and is motivated to listen in the right way, they're not gonna do it.

Yeah.

That's where I come in. That's why I teach people how to do that. So maybe, maybe we can find a way to work together.

Yeah. Sounds like a match. It's that Dartmouth connection.

Absolutely.

Arts degree.

Okay. One more question. I'll let you go. This has been a fascinating conversation, by the way. What's one thing about yourself, Ryan, that we wouldn't know about unless you revealed it to us?

I'm not sure if anyone would notice, but I actually grew up with a speech impediment. I stuttered pretty badly for many years. I was in speech therapy for 8 years, probably from, I would say, 3rd grade until 11th grade, and really had to learn how to speak, essentially. And being a coxswain, which is a very verbal role—

it is—

it was a very interesting challenge that I signed up for, you know, but it's one that I think— yeah, it's one that I think has really helped me in an odd way.

Overcoming that disability.

That, but also some of the skills you learn as a stutterer. For example, you know, as a stutterer, you are constantly listening to the other person to try to predict where the conversation is going. Because there are certain words I still can't say and I just know I'm going to have a block. So I have to replace the word with something else, like on the fly. So you have to pay very, very close attention to the conversations you're having to sort of see, okay, like, where is this going? Like, how can I sort of not stutter? And that came in handy as a coxin, where it's kind of How do you have this very chaotic situation and like actually organize it to win? It came in very handy, you know, when I was a consultant. There are so many times where, just like you're saying about listening, like I've had angry clients where they're like, hey, I'm like, we have this goal, but we have to shift priorities and we need to throw out everything you did or whatever it is. And I have to listen to that instead of me sort of being combative or like whatever it is, I'm like, I'm just not going to say anything.

I'm—

or I'll ask you questions to get more information so that way I can figure out, okay, like, what is it that you really are looking for? So that way we can craft a strategy to get that. And what I found is very often sometimes people who— the stuff that they say and what they really want are different. And I think that that's something that, you know, as a stutterer, Yeah, just really helped me to sort of like figure out how to like, just like navigate that. So yeah, I would say that that's probably the most shocking thing for people.

That is amazing. This has been an amazing conversation. Thank you so much, Brian. Been really nice chatting with you.

Yeah, thank you so much for your time and for the platform.

Doug Noll here. Thank you so much for listening to Listening with Leaders. If you are a successful executive leader who would like to be on this program, please visit podcast.dougnull.com/podcast. If you got something out of this interview, would you please share this episode on social media? Just do a quick screenshot with your phone and text it to a friend or post it on the socials. If you know someone that would be a great guest, tag them on the social media, to let them know about the show and include the hashtag #ListeningWithLeaders. I love seeing your posts and guest suggestions. We are regularly putting out new episodes and content. To make sure you don't miss any episodes, go ahead and subscribe. Your thumbs up, ratings, and reviews go a long way to help promote the show and mean a lot to me and my team. Want to know more? Go to my website, DougNoll.com, or follow me on LinkedIn, Facebook, Facebook and Instagram. That's @DouglasEnoll. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you on the next show.