12 Steps to a successful Ad Campaign "The Infinite Growth Path" - Ep. 40

Foreign.

Welcome everybody to this episode of CPG Insiders. I'm your host Mark Young with my co host Justin Gerard.

Gosh, was the smooth jazz voice you.

Got going on, wasn't it? Yes, I'm going smooth jazz. And you get really close to the microphone and you talk like this. Multi talent.

Oh gosh.

Folks, we are going to do the proverbial letting people put their head under the hood. And what I mean by that is we often get asked, you know, what is, what is it that makes you guys different than other people? Because you guys, as Jekyll and I, you hit a lot of home runs. How do you keep hitting these home runs over and over? And we want people to be able to do that for themselves. And we're going to explain how that happens. Now understand, we're going to go through a program. It's a 12 point program. I'm not going to call it 12 step because then it sounds like AA.

Like we're in a different kind of meeting.

Right. It's not a 12 step program. It's a 12 point program. And internally here we call it the infinite growth path.

Yep.

There's a reason we call the infinite growth path is because once you go through all 12 points or 12 steps, you start over. So there's no such thing as oh look, we hit a winner, we're done, let's go away. Unless we happen to be doing something like selling a shamwow where it's a gimmick and it's going to be burned out in two years and walk away.

Right, right. But, but, but as you know, Mark, in advertising, but I think specifically in consumer packaged goods, it's constantly evolving because humans are constantly evolving, people are evolving, their needs are evolving. So we have to.

Yeah. And most CPG clients aren't looking for a one hit wonder. They want to have a product that's.

Successful for years or an entire line.

So when the, with these 12 points, here's what it is. Every ad campaign that anyone produces involves risk. Because no matter what anyone tells you, no one can guarantee you this is a home run. This is shooting fish in a barrel. This is going to be so easy. No, it's not like that. There's always risk involved. And it's important, by the way, for you to allow for risk. Because if you tell your advertising agency or your internal marketing people, whatever you have, if you tell them you have total intolerance to risk, then I assure you, you're never going to have any great breakthrough advertising.

There's never going to be an innovation.

Right. Because they're going to have to just take the proven path. Let's go copy what someone else is doing.

The best practices method.

Let's do what we did last year. Let's try to keep it safe. The term best practices, as I've said before, is a term that I just detest the term because to me, the term best practices mean well. Let's copy the person who has at least wrong. Let's not make it better. Let's go imitate the person who is at least doing it better than everybody else. Now, is that a terrible thing? No. But it's not where heroes are built. It's not where people tell stories about, wow, you should see what happened with this product. It's not a place where a $3 million CPG product becomes a $23 million CPG product in 24 months. That doesn't happen there. That happens through innovation. It happens through hard work. It happens through following a very scientific proven methodology and taking some risk. Now, the 12 step, or 12 points, we're going to walk you through. They're the way to mitigate the loss or mitigate the risk. They're the way to stack the deck. It's not a guarantee, but what I can guarantee you is the more of these points you fail to do, the more I can guarantee your campaign will fail.

Or you're going to have to rely on pure luck, which lightning doesn't strike that much.

Right. It's almost one of those things of somebody sick and they don't want to go to the doctor because they don't want to know what's wrong.

Right.

And you can tell them, well, I can't guarantee you're dying, but I can guarantee you're not getting better.

Exactly. Right, Right. And that's the entire mean, the entire first. You know, almost half of this process starts with evaluation.

So let's start with the first step. First step, here's. This is the 12 steps of how we build a winning ad campaign. The first step is called business model review. And this is where we identify the client's desired outcomes and goals. Perform a deep dos of on the business model. And I'll let you go a little deeper into that.

Yeah, absolutely. So when you say dos. So dos is. It's similar to a SWOT analysis. It's when we're going to analyze what are the dangers, opportunities, and strengths of the entire business. So this is where we really dig deep. And again, this is not just about looking at the product itself. We're Looking at the entire business, we have to understand how are you built, what is the team? So what kind of infrastructure do you have from a team perspective? Do you have the right people in place to run this business to support an ad campaign or support growth that you're projecting?

Right. And when we say dangers, opportunities, strengths, dangers could be, do you have a patent that protects it? Is the FDA making some rulings about one of your ingredients coming up, do you have a competitor that's coming out with the same product at half the price?

Right.

Those are the dangers.

Absolutely. Absolutely.

The opportunities are, what is your current footprint? Is there more distribution available? Are there new uses for your product? Are there new demographics that don't even know you exist that we can go talk to?

Is there new technology coming out here shortly in the future that will completely change your particular product or business model the way it can be distributed that no one else can take advantage of or hasn't seen yet? Right? Yep.

Then we look at what are the strengths?

Right.

Well, a strength could be distribution. We have, we're everywhere. That's a strength. A strength could be we have an exclusive formula that no one else has. A strength could be you and your team's just absolute hell bent desire to succeed.

Right.

And to make this product work and to be successful at it. So we need to know all of these things. And then of course, as I said, we need to understand what are you trying to do.

Yes.

Because it doesn't make any sense to design an ad campaign to grow a product by 50 million a year in sales if your goal is to grow the grow sales by 2 million.

Oh, absolutely. And to get an understanding is what is the long term goal? Are you just trying to build a brand to sell it as soon as you can? Are you trying to build something long term because you want to have a legacy to give to your children one day? Right.

Are you planning on having multiple SKUs? Are you one SKU? So that's step one. Step two is called product analysis. This is analyzing the product category and competitor practices.

So this is when we're really going to. The first step, as Mark's talking about is we want to take a, what we'll call a macro and Microsoft look at the product. So from a macro perspective, we want to take a look and understand what is going on in the category is when we take a look at iri. Is the category up? So do we know that there's a really high and growing consumer demand or is it down? Are people just not buying this stuff and is that something that's a seasonality issue? Is that something that is really a consumer preference? And we have to say, guys are riding down the wall and you don't have a long term left in this business.

Are you selling razor blades during a period of time where everyone's wearing a beard?

Exactly.

I mean, there are certain things that you can't overcome.

Right.

You look at the product. I'm gonna give you an example. The product Ben Gay. Ben Gay was an enormous topical analgesic.

Huge.

Now if you look at that product, they spend zero money on advertising and they're just allowing it to fade out and be profitable. Why? Because in today's society, no one under 60 is going to buy a product called Ben Gay.

Nope, it's not going to happen.

So it's being sold to seniors and they understand the customer base is going to die off eventually.

Right, Right.

And that's fine.

Right? That's okay.

Let's ride it out.

And it's interesting you talk about that category specifically. So something else that we could take a look at when we take a look at the category. So let's talk about topical pain analgesics. Right. We can take a look at the category and going based on the performance of this category, you know, and I'm looking at the product offering. It's dying for some innovation that could come back to some of your strengths and opportunities. We could say, hey, guys, you have a unique tech in this category. These consumers, they're dying for it. They cannot wait to have something new come out. And as soon as we just give you a little bit of voice, this thing is going to blow up a lot faster than we even could imagine. But that's where we're starting. Let's take a look at the category itself to see how it performs. And then we're going to shift down to, all right, so then what is. Let's look at your technology specifically. What do you have? What are the ingredients? What is the ip? What are the particular deliverables that you have for consumers? Because as we all know, especially when it comes to cpg, consumers buy based on indication. What is it going to do for me? And so there's many times, and we've experienced it a lot here, where we could take a look at the particular formula and understand, huh, there's a hidden indication here that you haven't been messaging at at all.

And we also need to look at what the competitor's doing.

Right.

Because as an example, how much are the competitors spending?

Great point.

If I'M in a quiet category where no one is spending. I don't need to spend a lot of money to have 100% share of voice and really grow.

Which right.

If I'm in a category, if I'm selling shampoo and conditioners and in a category that spends a couple of hundred million dollars, all of a sudden I know, well, geez, to have 10% share of voice, my client needs to spend $20 million.

It's huge.

So maybe I can't do that. So maybe I need to find somewhere else to compete.

Absolutely. And we'll get into it later when we talk about another one of our steps. But also understanding what is the traditional ACV look like in this category? Is it a retail product or is it an E commerce product? Or possibly it's a blend of both. Who knows? But we need to understand that as well.

And our conditions changing. So when we look at the nutritional category, right now, the nutritional category is very much shifting away from a brick and mortar model to a digital model. Oh yeah, because people are realizing I just have to hit reorder.

That's it. Right.

I take 10 vitamins and I can go to Amazon and I can just click the reorder button and I'm done.

Or just get my subscription going there.

Or get a subscription and I save money.

Exactly.

So the next step is what we call historical analysis. This is where we use past experience to mitigate risk and uncover routes to increase sales. Now let me explain to you what that means. This is where the labs in Jekyll and Hyde Labs comes into play. This is why the agency is called Jekyll and Hyde Labs. We deal with dozens and dozens of brands of consumer products. As we spoke at the beginning, you need to allow your ad agency to take on risk. If we don't try something innovative, we're never going to come up with something breakthrough for us. Because we have all these different brands, we get to spread the risk across them all. So we're able to say, let's try this new digital strategy for client X and let's try this print strategy for client Y. Now let's say that they both worked. All of a sudden we can take what client X just did and we can now go to client Y and say, hey, look, we can do this for you and you now don't have any risk to absorb. You took the risk on item Y, but you don't need to take the risk on item X because our other client took that risk and now you both get to share each other's data. Now, this does not mean we to go give your sales figures on your product to another brand. Remember, we don't deal with competitors. But what it does do is give an example. We have several products that appeal to seniors. As we learn different techniques that work selling to seniors, the majority of those techniques, those media choices, those channels reapply to the same people who are selling products to seniors. Same thing too. We're selling products to people who are into appearance, that are in the makeup, that are dieters, that are health enthusiasts, that are runners. Whatever the case is, we can start swapping those lessons around. That's the point where we do that. Because now what we're looking at is how do we do something innovative for the client but take the risk out of it.

Absolutely.

Because it's not untried. We've already done it.

Right.

And there's one last flip side to that, and that is what have we tried that failed so that we don't go and tag more clients with what sounds like a good idea but doesn't work, Right?

Absolutely.

We've been down this path, We've already.

Done that, we've tried it and it didn't work. I mean, the other piece of this too, of course is something when you think about historical analysis is we're going to analyze everything that's been done before for your brand that we haven't done. So we're going to take a look at every ad campaign you ran, we're going to take a look at the sales performance, we're going to take a look at the mediums, the messaging, and then we can say, okay, great, here's where you have been. Now, I can understand why you didn't.

Get the results right, but maybe you did some stuff right.

Right.

So let's not throw that away.

Why would. Yeah, right, exactly. Why? If there's already clay on this wheel and it's starting to work, then let's just keep doing that. There's no reason to do extra work.

Okay, Point number four, point of purchase review.

This is so important. This is unbelievably important. And you know what? For a lot of entrepreneurs that we're talking to that are really starting to get into the cpg, this is really a point that seems to get missed a lot. Understanding the importance of it. So when we talk about what makes an ad campaign work and what helps build a brand, there are two major concepts. Right. It's all about availability. It's mental and physical. Right?

Right. And understand mental availability means I know your Brand, Right. I know what you stand for, I know what you do. I know how you fit into my life.

Right. As soon as I'm going to make the purchase of a product in this category, you're what I know you're what comes to mind first. That's what mental availability is. And that's a lot of what we do as advertisers. Right? That is our job is to make sure that happens and that's crafting the right message, putting in the right media, all those different things. But the physical availability is really where the return happens. Without this piece, an ad campaign will never get the results that you want. Right.

Because I know about your product and I love what you do. And I have no idea how to buy it.

Right. Or I can't buy it. So what has really happened, you know, as we've seen over the past year, was the growth of E commerce, is that this concept of physical availability has definitely changed for a lot of categories. Like you just mentioned, when it comes to otc. Right. And health and beauty, a lot of the nutritional products were. That was a drug business. So you needed to get into cvs, you needed to get into Walgreens if you were going to do anything like that was your business. That business model has now changed. Where if I'm not in Walgreens or CVS and I have a product like that, am I missing opportunity? Absolutely. Because the amount of people that still go into Walgreens and CVS is something that you can't match. But now you have Amazon filling in a lot of that gap for you. So your go to market strategy could effectively be E commerce to begin with or in the past that might not have been possible.

Or how about the clients that we meet who have retail distribution and they don't even bother with Amazon.

With Amazon, right. It's. And I mean again, at the foundation, just think of it this way. You've convinced someone to buy your product, now they can't. Why would you do that? So this is the point of our model where we take a look and we understand, okay, great. Based on that category analysis that we just did, we understand where these products are purchased, how they're purchased. So then we're going to take a look and get an understanding of, okay, great. Where are the points of what we'll call distribution? Does your product need to be, where is it at now? Then we can start to calculate, okay, so what type of ad campaign and what return is possible and also what steps do we need to take to get you the Return that you really.

Need to maximize that for every percent that you are not physically available is another percent that your ad campaign isn't monetizing.

Right. And we constantly say for, especially for those categories that are truly dependent on brick and mortar, you need to have that 70% ACV before you really start to feel the full impact of that.

And you need 100. But you got to cross that 70 line to really get your money.

You got to get that cross that 70 line. You have to.

So you want to be available as much as you can. Now, there are exceptions to it. If you're selling Brioni suits or Ferraris, then part of your appeal is limited availability.

Right.

But that's not the case in most consumer packaged goods. If you're selling something to help people with a headache or dry eyes or toenail fungus, I just need to buy it and I need to buy it quickly and as easily as I can. And you need to meet me where I am, not expect me to go find you.

Right, Exactly. Exactly. Part of what we do here because of the skills that we have and the network that we have is to, depending on the results of this analysis, we can adapt our go to market strategy for you and understand. Are there retail brokers that you don't know right now that you need to know? Okay, then that's part of our strategy for you to take this level.

Number five, consumer insights, research consumers, measure campaign results and messaging. So this is really about getting a deep dive on who are we trying to sell this product to in a much deeper dive than. Well, it's everybody above 25. Because I've had that. Well, any adult wants to buy my product. No, any adult doesn't want to buy your product. Or women 21 plus. No, it's not just women 21 plus. How do we start to define this? The reason you want to define this is because it is a far greater path to success to have a couple of million people in America that just can't live without you than to have 340 million people who are familiar with you. But you mean nothing to them.

Right. I mean, so what you're talking about there, Mark, is so above all else, another one of the cornerstones of helping grow a brand is going to be your reach. So you've got to reach as many people that are in the category looking to purchase your product or, or are potential category consumers that aren't there yet that you can convert into category consumers. Right. But you can build, you can build a very strong business on those passionate Few that are described as a free zone. Do you want to describe what the free zone is?

Yeah. The free zone is really where's the space that you can live where you really don't have competition. And let me give you an example of this. And we did this for a client recently, and we had a client who had a product who only sold in the summer, and everyone in the industry accepted the notion that it only sells in the summer. So we rethought this, reimagined it, and we created, I'm going to say, a new indication for winter.

And.

And we built an ad campaign under this new indication. So when I say new indication, we told the public they now had a problem they didn't realize they had. And once we told them that they had a product or had a problem, we now showed them the solution for the problem, which was our client's product that normally sells in the summer. We launched this product in January. So in January, a product that in the summer is nowhere near, was nowhere at the moment, near being the number one in the category. They immediately became the number one product.

In the category at that time.

Now, the reason was, one, no one else was advertising 100% share of voice. Two, we were able to expand the circle of people who would buy their product because in the summer, this group of people bought it, but the winter group of people was a bigger circle of people. So now all of a sudden, people who were never in their universe entered their universe.

Yep. And we have to do that in order to be able to pull off a campaign like that. It's getting to understand the consumer. It's getting to understand, as Mark, you know, you have the foundational pieces, the demographic pieces that everyone goes into, what is their age, what is their gender and income, all that kind of chats. Right. But that's not going to get you sales. That's not really going to get a consumer to buy your product. You need to understand who they are. You need to understand contextually what is their world like. I need to be, as an advertiser, as much as I can paint the picture for them, and they can look into whatever that ad piece is, whether it's a TV commercial or it's a video on Facebook that looks like me, that room looks like a room I'm in, or my room or whatever the case may be. Right. As much as we can contextually put the framework in there that they relate to, that immediately builds rapport with the consumer to say that this brand gets me. I'm listening now.

Right. I ride a motorcycle, like that guy.

Right.

Or a bicycle. Or I lift weights like that guy.

Exactly.

They're talking to me. Now, this goes right into the next point, which we call hypnotizing principles.

Yes.

Now, when I say hypnotizing, I'm really saying hypno dash tizing. T I S I N G. So this is built on a book that I've written, which will be out soon. Probably by time this podcast goes out, it'll be four weeks out. Four weeks or so. And this is simply what it is. As Justin was saying, everybody looks at the basic demographics. Okay, so how much money do they make? How many kids do they have? Are they married? Are they single? Are they employed? Are they not employed? Think of an iceberg. And when you see that iceberg, the amount of iceberg that you see poking out of the water is about 20% of the amount of iceberg that's below the surface. But the majority of that iceberg is under the water. Now, I want you to think of how consumers buy products. Consumers don't buy products consciously. They buy them unconsciously. Let me give you an example. When you think about how a human brain works, I want you to envision for a minute a grape sitting on top of a beach ball. In between the grape and the beach ball is a dime sitting flat. The grape represents conscious mind, conscious awareness, which can process seven bits of information plus or minus two per second. This is why we have phone numbers with seven digits. And in France, by the way, they actually tried to do an experiment of going to eight digits for a while, and it just turned the whole freaking country upside down because people couldn't figure out how to remember the number. And folks, this is the part that, as you've heard me say, I'm a PhD or a doctor. This is where that doctorate is. This is that space I live in. What we do is we start to look at and go back to my analogy. The beach ball that the grape is sitting on, that beach ball represents the unconscious mind. The unconscious mind can process thousands of bits of information per second. This is how you drive down the freeway. Someone swerves into your lane. You immediately glance in both mirrors, grab the wheel, swing the wheel out of the way, miss getting hit. And you've done all this in a. In a split second. Then your conscious mind goes, geez, what was that fool thinking, right? But what happened was your unconscious mind, that can process all the data and recognizes patterns, took action, made the decision for you. If your conscious mind had to avoid the crash Remember, seven bits of information. Your conscious mind would say, what is this person doing? This person appears to be swinging into my lane. Why are they doing that? What should I do? Maybe I should look in my side view mirror. Should I turn the wheel right now? I wonder if I should apply the brake pedal. By the time your conscious brain had all those conversations, you've already had an accident. This is how people buy products. They don't buy products based on that seven bits of information. They buy it on the thousand bits of information. If people bought products based on conscious awareness, every person here would be driving, every person in the world would be driving something like a Chevy Spark or a Smart car. Because a little $15,000 three cylinder, cramped up little car will take you to work every day. Sure, it will do the job. It will do the exact same job as a Corvette. It will do the exact same job as a Cadillac. It'll do the exact same job as a Rolls Royce. When it comes to moving you from point A to point B. Now, how you feel when you're being moved from point A to point B is completely different.

Completely different. And you're talking about the emotional side of things. But also, just consider through the metaphor that you're walking through. If that part of your brain was part of your buying decision for every product, you'd be exhausted by 9am because there's way too much data coming in. If you're sitting at a Walmart shelf, right, and you see all these thousands of products, there's. And your brain had to constantly analyze every single one of them and decide which one they're going to buy. There's no way you get through a shopping trip.

So what we lean into is we lean into how does the human brain work. And what it does is the human mind is actually made to be efficient, to burn the fewest calories possible, to put forth the least amount of effort possible, how do we leverage you into that spot? As an example, one of the things we look at is what's called availability bias. Now, as we were talking about earlier, we were talking about maximizing availability. Availability bias is the information that I've heard most frequently is the quickest route for my unconscious brain to make a decision on. That's the one I'm going to buy.

Mm.

So people walk into a restaurant and do they order a cola or do they order a Coke?

Right, Right.

They order a Coke.

Right.

Because their brain defaults to the information that is most available.

Well, now you're leading into heuristics here, right?

Do they do. They ask someone, excuse me, do you have a facial tissue?

No, they say Kleenex.

Right? Do you have a Kleenex?

Exactly.

Kleenex is not a product, it is a brand. But we lean into the availability. That's just one example of how we can do this.

One example.

The other things we look at is how do we use neuro, linguistics, programming, hypnotic language patterns and neuroscience to be able to create the best message. I'll give you an example. Here's one quick example. This is called a because statement. Because statements have been proven to work and they work phenomenally well. A researcher, a great researcher, Dr. Ellen Langer, ran lots of examples of this and she wanted to find out, do humans crave a reason? What was discovered was people craved a reason and it didn't matter what the reason was. She sent actors out to college campuses back in the day when people would be lined up at the copy machine to make copies for school. She started by asking people, do you mind if I cut in line? And about 25, 28% of people would let them cut in line. Now the same actors went, do you mind if I cut in line because I'm going to be late for class. Now about 75 to 78% of people let people cut in line because I said, do you mind if I cut in line? Because then she started changing it to do you mind if I cut in line because I'm in a hurry. And she kept making it more ridiculous. Eventually they got down to do you mind if I cut in line? Because I don't want to stand in a long line.

Well, who does, right?

Guess what happened? The same 75 to 78% of people still allowed people to cut in line. Here's the reason. When a human mind gets a request and the request is followed by because, our conscious brain zips forward to here's the other shoe dropping. And the first part of the statement goes directly into the unconscious brain is fact, because it's a three card Monty. I played a shell game with you and I'm playing a shell game with your brain. So as an example, one very famous one is Winston tastes good like a cigarette should. So when I tell you you should buy this product because, you immediately focus on the because and you accept you should buy the product. As a truism, an example, you can try this. If you have small kids, you can try this with your kids. The kids don't want to clean their bedroom. Go in them and say, you need to clean your bedroom tonight because. And give them any Ridiculous example. You want. I proved this with my own daughter. When she was younger, her room was always a mess. Went to her and said, you need to clean your room because we're going to go to dinner tomorrow. We're going out to dinner. We always go out to dinner, but we're going to go out to dinner. You need to clean your room tonight because we're going to go out to dinner tomorrow. And then guess what? She cleaned your room because she had a reason.

Right?

It didn't even matter what the reason is. So this is a quick example. Now we go through hundreds of these. We go through things like feel, felt, found models we go through X, then Y models we go through. Because models, we go through all these different models and then we start to focus on the language. Are we speaking in a passive voice? Are we speaking in an active voice? What are the trigger words that can generate a negative emotion? What's the trigger words that will generate a positive emotion? We had a client come into us and they sold a product in the oral care product. And the client came in with an idea. And the client's idea was, I want to use a dentist and I want to have the dentist with a patient in the chair and the dentist looking all professional, recommending my product. And we immediately said no. And the client said, why would you say no? It's very simple. The dental chair is not an experience that any human enjoys. It's a negative experience. Unconsciously, it raises my heart rate, it raises adrenaline. It's a bad experience, it's a bad feeling. And you're about to take your product and neuro associate it with something that I dislike, at best, hate as a possibility.

Yep.

So no, we can't do that.

But it's.

But by the way, I have a dentist who's my spokesperson. On the surface you would think, well, my dentist's spokesperson putting them probably next to a dental chair. Makes sense. Makes sense because now I'll know they're a dentist.

Right.

Okay, I get it. That may, that establishes them as a dentist.

Right.

But you're not looking at the, at the unconscious damage that you're doing to that brand. So these are where that step goes. So once we get through that, that whole group is what we call insights. Now we're ready to start talking about a campaign. We haven't even gotten to a campaign yet.

This is just all the exploration beforehand. This is our analysis. Before we even start jumping into, here's what you should do.

So now we go into the next six steps and I'LL move through these as quickly as we can. The next step is called refine goals. This is where we talk to the client to define what is a win. We hone in on those goals accordingly. What is your win? Tell me how we know we succeeded. Is it POS went up a certain percentage? Is it you got chain wide distribution at Walmart where right now you have 500 stores. What's the goal? What's the win? And there could be more than one win, by the way.

Absolutely. Absolutely. And I want to make sure. And the way we have this phrase shocking to after what you just heard, it's on purpose. We're using the term refine on purpose because when we have clients come in and we're going through our insights phase, just like any consumer buying a product, you come to us with a problem and you have a goal in mind which you've expressed. After we've done this analysis, now we have a better understanding of your business, of your product, of your category, of your. Of your current ACV or distribution. Now we can say, okay, great, you came in here and your goals were 1, 2, 3. Now we want to reassess them again to make sure, are these the right goals? Are these goals realistic?

Right. What was true when you walked in the door?

Right.

What is true today now that we know a lot more?

Exactly, exactly.

So what you thought was the right answer, which may have been the right answer at that moment, may be different now because we've provided you with a.

Lot of data and not even just you, us as well, we might have initially said, here's where we think this should go, here's where we think your goal should be. But now after we've done this analysis, you say, okay, with this in mind, now this is where you should go. Here's what makes sense. Here's the type of growth path that makes sense for you considering all of these pieces.

And this is a point where we may come back and say, the growth that you laid out for us with the budget you laid out is an impossibility.

Right.

We may also come back and say, guess what we can actually hit? We think we can hit the goal you want and you can probably lower the budget because there's not a lot of competition.

Exactly, exactly.

So it's a moment of truth.

Absolutely. That's exactly what it is.

Now the next step is what we call pre launch. Pre launch is pretty simple. This is go make ads.

Yeah.

Go shoot a TV spot, Go make a banner ad. Go make a print ad, Go do whatever it is. You need to do right to go get this ready to go and review with the client, make sure everything's approved, and make sure they're happy with what they got. The next step is the launch. That's real easy. Throw the switch, right? Turn the campaign on, put it on tv, put it on the Internet, have a skywriter, you know, writing your brand over the beach if that's what it's going to take. Or chalk on a sidewalk. Whatever it is we're doing, go start doing it.

So make it happen.

Okay, the next step is analyze. Analyze is measure the results, define what we know now that we did not know at the outset. What have we learned as this campaign went live?

Another one of those truth points did.

We just find out, wow, this product just explodes on tv, but it's not that big a hit on digital. Maybe we need to back off on digital. Maybe. We ran five different pieces of digital creative, and we learned that three of those creatives tank, and one of them's doing okay, and one of them is just a home run.

Right?

Okay, let's look at that. Which takes us to the next step, which is optimize, which is really that step where we're really going through it and we're saying, okay, how can we paint this airplane in the air now?

Right?

It's live, we're selling. How do we make it better? What kind of tactical adjustments can we do? Are we noticing that we started off with eight television networks? What we're really learning, the three of those TV networks, is where all the action is. Do we need to start migrating our money away from the eight networks and moving them to the three networks? Do we find out, you know, what, Facebook is killing it here. But Instagram doesn't work with this crowd so much, Right? Maybe this is an older audience, where older audience works better in a Facebook. Or it's a younger audience, where they're more about Insta than they are about Facebook.

Or like you said, it could be that through our analysis, we found that, hey, there is an audience that we didn't anticipate that this is really being successful with. So we need to shift some of this, bend over to a new audience.

And then the last step comes in, which is called future casting. Future casting is. Is very simple, and I wrote a book on this years ago. And when you're predicting the future, you do things. You do four models, and your four models are possible, probable, preferable, which are called the three Ps and wildcard. Okay. Possible is, wow, this could explode and how are we prepared for it?

Right.

Possible is also something horrible could happen and Covid comes in and we're not selling. Probable. This is probably what likely will happen. Preferable. This is what we want to happen in the future. We've now grown the business 5 million. We want to grow another 5 million this year. The last one is wildcard. And wildcards, they follow the model of Nassem Talib's book, which was called the Black Swan. And basically in 16th century London, no one believed there was any such thing as a black swan because no one saw one until one day, one landed on the Thames River. And then everybody realized, wow, they do exist. The point of the Black Swan is just because you haven't seen it doesn't mean it doesn't exist. And eventually it will land on your pond.

Right.

So a wild card. A good thing on a wild card is Dr. Oz just showed up with your product on his TV show and waved at everybody and said, everybody, go buy this. The reason that's called a wildcard, because, believe it or not, that's a problem.

Well, yeah, because now you have to support all of that because all of.

A sudden the shelves went empty and you're not prepared for it.

And if you're in a retail product, the algorithms that the shelves use to refill that order, it's not caught up.

Correct. Cause it's looking at 1 over 52.

Right. So it's going. I know what you're talking about.

The next thing on the flip side of a wild card is you came to work this morning and you found a crew from 60 Minutes in your lobby because the FDA just said an ingredient in your product causes cancer.

Right.

That's a wildcard too. And that's going to crush your business. I'm going to give you an example of this was Guthy Renker. Greg Rinker had a product out years and years ago. It was called the Ab Roller. And it was this big metal frame with cushions on it. And you sat in this thing and you did sit ups. Now what the purpose of it was, it made sit ups easy, which is actually the opposite of the reason you should do a sit up. This is so much easier.

That's doing a good job.

But it made you feel good about doing sit ups because you could crank out a hundred sit ups in Ab Roll. It's like, man, I do 100 sit ups every morning. Damn, you're a machine.

Yep.

I do it and I'm smoking a cigarette and eating a chocolate donut while.

I knock them out, you animal.

So what happened was Greg was, I mean, selling millions of them. He was crushing it with the ab roller. And then The News Magazine 2020 did a expose on the ab Roller. And they had a bunch of experts and physiologists and they all showed, no, this is doing less than nothing.

You're better off sitting on the couch.

Right. So they pointed out you could spend $100 for an ab roller and do 100 sit ups, or you could do 10 sit ups with your foot under a chair and you're going to get much more for it. Greg literally said, and this was in the days when you sold stuff by phone. His phones went so dead that he was calling his own numbers to see if they still work. Now, this was from a place where you're selling millions the day before. That's a wild card, and you need to be prepared for it. Now, don't think for a minute that we're telling everybody we think you guys are selling fake products to do phony pushups. That's not the case.

No.

But guess what? These black swans happen.

They absolutely do.

And can you be prepared for them? You can't be prepared for all of them, but you can think through as many as you can. You know, Covid was a black swan for many of our clients. For some of our clients, it was a black swan that blew their sales up.

Right.

Because they were selling comfort food.

Right.

For other clients, it pulled the plug on sales because we're selling makeup and I'm not going to the office, right. So I'm not using as much makeup because I'm doing phone calls and I'm not at work. So, I mean, how do you get prepared for that stuff? We talked to some people recently, you and I did, who sold products to the airlines.

Oh, yeah.

And all of a sudden, no one was on an airplane. So no one was eating food on an airplane. No one needed their product.

And those airlines did not care about those contracts anymore.

Almost put those people out of business because they had an inventory that they built up to provide the airline with sufficient quantity of product every week. Now all of a sudden, there's no flights, Right? So nobody needs the product. They're not buying it. And you're still sitting with a warehouse full of product and no place to ship it. So you can't guess them all, but you can plan for what you can. But the other part of that future casting is we just had a successful campaign. We just grew the product 20%, 30%. Where are we going next? And When I say, where are we going next? Let me give you an example. I spoke earlier about the client where we created a new winter condition. This is not the first time we've done this. We've done this similar trick for many people. Getting back to the lab.

Right.

Hey, you guys are in trouble. We know a trick we can do. We're going to create a new indication and move you into a new season. Hit a home run. Guess what? Next year, I guarantee you at least three of their competitors are going to come up with the same winter disease.

Oh, yeah. They're going to do the exact same thing.

Because one, why we follow best practices and these guys became number one in the winter.

Yep.

So what is best practices? Let's go copy whoever's doing it the best this year.

Absolutely.

Which happens to be us.

Right.

So we know we're going to get copied.

Absolutely. And we also know for most of our clients here that when they get copied, they're going to get copied by someone who can spend a lot more money to do it.

Right. So now that we've come up with this new winter disease and we had a great run.

Great run.

Now let's predict what's going to happen next year. So when we look at possible, probable, preferable. Preferable tells us everybody ignored us, that we were number one. Possible could tell us, well, maybe everybody will ignore us. Or maybe everybody did pay attention. Probable tells us we got some big players who we just ate their freaking lunch for an entire winter season and somebody's got egg on their face back at a big company to say, how come this smaller brand just crushed us in iri? And they're looking for revenge and they follow best practices. So they're going to go copy what we just did.

Yeah.

And they're probably going to steal our creative and they're probably going to steal our new disease and they're going to run out and they're going to figure out, okay, let's go do that. So now what's your plan? Because that bullet's shot.

Right. And again, they're going to spend a lot more money than you. So if you try to shoot the same bullet, no one's going to see it.

So now we need to re innovate. We need to be a step ahead of the competitors every time. That's why we need to future gas.

Yeah.

Now that we've done this, now that it works, now that we've shown everybody else how to do it, how are we going to now change it up so that while they're copying our last year idea. We're kicking their ass this year on a new idea.

Right. And that brings us back to step one of this entire process. Infinite Growth path. We're back to step one because now we have to analyze again. We're future casting what is possible, probable, preferable. Right. So we have to go back to the business analysis. Do you have the infrastructure to handle what we think is preferred?

Right. And when we go back to the business analysis now we go back and we have a different business to analyze.

Exactly.

Because in this particular case. Oh, wait a minute, this is a two season company now.

Right.

They were a one season company. They're not the same company they were when we started.

Nope. You were a $5 million brand. We started all of a sudden, oh my goodness. Now you're 10, you're $15 million.

And it is for your case, you were a three month business. Now you're a seven month business. Different company.

Completely. Completely different company.

So that's why the process starts all over again.

It has to.

It never quits.

No.

Well, that's it. That's, that's how the program works. If you have questions about it, you can reach out to us. We're actually going to have a entire graphic and layout of the Infinite Growth path on our website. I don't know if it's there yet, but it will be there. But if it's not there and you want to get a copy of it, you can reach out to us. We'll send you one. Do you have to go through all 12 steps to to have a home run campaign? No. Each step you miss will decrease your odds of having a home run campaign. So this is about stacking the deck in your favor. Miss the steps, they don't do it. Now by the way, there are other simple steps. There are basically six simple steps that it takes to get somebody to buy a product when you're creating a piece of copy. And if you don't follow those particular steps, the odds on that ad working aren't as good. I hate to get back to sports. I'm going to use sports as an analogy and it could be golf, it could be football, it can be auto racing. For you and I, it's golf and auto racing. It doesn't make sense to learn how to do some new fabulous trick in the race car if first you haven't perfected all the basics.

Exactly.

Same thing with football. If you don't do all the basic block and tackle, then all of the special team stuff isn't going to matter because you're not going through the basic steps of success. These are the steps you have to go through to make sure you're always on a strong foundation. Just like you need to go through the steps of creating Copy, which follows the steps of how humans behave.

Absolutely. And the biggest thing why we take these steps and we repeat these steps every single time is simply this. All of this relies on data. Yes, we have some intuition and we have some of the lab reports we've done in the past that have worked. Right. But it takes our ego out of it. It doesn't matter what we think. It matters what we can prove and what we can show. That's what's important. I don't care if I have the greatest idea in the room if it cannot. If we cannot put it through this pressure test and it works and it wasn't a good idea.

The truth is the truth. The science is the science.

Exactly. Exactly.

And if you don't follow these 12 steps, then you end up in another 12 step program because now you have a drinking problem because your ads keep failing.

It could be one way to answer those problems.

So I'm going to end with this. You can either follow our 12 steps or you can end up in their 12 steps.

How inspiring.

It is, isn't it? I like that. Folks, as always, that's it for today. If you have any questions, you always feel free to reach out to us again. We love hearing from marketers and entrepreneurs, and you can always have conversations with us that you don't actually even have to write a check for. We, we're always willing to have conversations. Love learning, and sometimes it's an opportunity for us to learn from you, sometimes an opportunity for you to learn from us. And sometimes having a conversation just helps you not do something you were. You were thinking about going and doing.

Right.

Because we can tell you, you know what, we've already tried that a couple times, and here's why it doesn't work. It looks good on the surface, but kind of like going back to, you know, let's put the dentist next to a dental chair. Makes sense. Makes sense when you hear it. Until you think of the unconscious effort, which is, oh, wow, that is a horrible experience for most people. Why would I want to relate my product to a bad experience?

Exactly.

So that's it. And we'll be back on future episodes of CPG Insiders. If you're looking to greatly increase sales on your CPG product, don't hesitate to contact us at Jekyll and Hyde Advertising and Marketing. By the way, the only advertising agency with a guaranteed result. Just go to jekyllheidagency.com or feel free to give us a call at 800542.