Branding vs. Sales – Episode 1

This is CPG Insiders, the podcast that helps consumer packaged goods companies survive and thrive in business. Now your hosts, Mark Young and Rob Taylor. Welcome everyone to CPG Insiders. My name is Mark Young and my co host and partner in Compadre and all those other various names, Rob Taylor is right next to me.

Hello everyone.

Let's give people a little bit of an idea of what we're going to do here.

We are going to do a bunch of shows and we're going to try and answer common questions we receive from clients or prospective clients about their CPG business, CPG advertising, how to get into retail, a ton of topics. We're going to try and answer some of those questions here so we can direct people to the podcast. Hopefully answer questions before people even reach out to us so they know what we're about. Just give them a good lay of the land about getting into retail and being successful at retail, building successful advertising campaigns for retail, et cetera.

So these are a lot of the conversations that we have on a daily basis. Now, in addition to that, Rob and I are both with an advertising agency named Jekyll and Hyde Advertising and we specialize in CPG clients. We have a lot of friends and colleagues in the CPG industry. So we're going to be bringing a lot of guests to the show. We're going to be bringing in reps, master brokers, buyers from some of the big accounts. So we're going to cover a lot of information about cpg, not just how do you make an ad campaign for cpg, but we're going to be covering everything to do with moving your product, getting your product into retail, getting the buyers to say yes, getting your product off the shelf once you've gotten it on there, how do we get people to come and buy it? There's just so much ground to cover. So today, on the first episode, I think what we're going to talk about today is we're going to talk about the difference between branding and sales. I believe that's where we were going to go. Right?

Yeah. Essentially one thing we face and we run into it with bigger clients, but we run into it with a lot of little clients or mid sized clients who have a lot of times they'll hire a marketing director from Campbell's Soup or somewhere big and their focus is on brand awareness or intent to buy, or you probably hear those terms a lot. And our goal, typically when clients come to us, is to focus on sales first. Brand follows. Not that we don't build brands, but we aren't looking at brand awareness as the top line item.

So Rob, when a big agency is talking with a client and they're talking about we're going to build top of mind awareness, we're going to build intent to buy, what do they mean by that?

So there are a couple of things. There's unaided awareness, aided awareness. I think there are a couple of different classifications. Outside of that, it's about if you were to survey the public, does a large number of people or what percentage of people recognize your brand? So Coca Cola obviously has huge unaided brand awareness. So if you show somebody the Coke bottle without the logo, you still know that it's Coke.

It's almost, almost unanimously people know.

So it's, you know, they would probably have, you know, 99% unaided brand awareness. And that's how that agency measures success, is making sure that that brand awareness figure is protected. They look at other stuff too, like market penetration and how much of the market or cola market do they own? But brand awareness is one of those key items that they're looking at. And you see it outside of Coke too. So it's just. And they'll, they'll survey, you know, a random sampling of people. They'll show them some ads or show them some, some piece of creative and say, all right, who is this? And you know, you say it's Coke. That's essentially what they're talking about.

So let's say I have, I've got a consumer package goods product and I'm starting to get into retail and I made a three million dollar brand. Okay? So in reality, if I will, if I go find a hundred people, chances are no one in a hundred people will know me. I probably have to go find 10,000 people to find someone who will recognize me. Why don't I want to focus on increasing my name awareness? Because if I focus on increasing my name awareness, doesn't that mean I'm going to sell more product?

In some cases it will if the product is desirable, but it is not a guarantee. I mean, we talk about. Kmart is a good example of a brand that has probably unanimous brand awareness for the last decade plus and they've been in decline for that or more.

Same with Sears. Everybody's heard of Sears, but nobody wants to go there.

Service merchandise. If you're old enough, you know who these brands are, you recognize them, you recognize their logo. If they were missing some letters from the logo, you'd still be able to put it together what it is, but you're still not shopping there. So it doesn't equate, it's not a one to one, you know, if you know the brand, it doesn't mean you're going to go out and buy it. Even Coca Cola faces that you may be a Pepsi drinker and other examples.

I mean, think about the car industry. I mean, where's Plymouth, Oldsmobile, Pontiac? These were all brands that we all grew up with that are gone now. And you can't say that they didn't have brand awareness.

You can't. And honestly there are very few brands I think that can say brand awareness equates to strong sales. Coke, you know, Budweiser. A lot of the consumer packaged goods are those types of products. But if you get into automotive, it's a good example where it's, you still need to focus on sales, sales figures, etc.

So what, what should that small to medium sized company be looking at? What's, what should be their metric? Sales is the metric. So when you're looking at an ad campaign, so when you're creating an ad campaign, you're the chief creative officer, your job is to make these campaigns. When you're looking at an ad campaign for a company that's relatively small in comparison to P and G or something, what's your goals? What are you looking to do?

The first thing we're always looking at doing is increasing sales week over week. So if you're going to spend $10,000 or you're going to spend a million dollars a week, whatever the figure is, we want to get that money back and then some obviously to pay for product, the ad campaign, etc. So we want to make sure that we're monetizing any dollar you spend. And monetizing does not mean or measure with brand awareness or intent to buy. Intent to buy is a really nice fluffy term that some marketing genius came up with at some big ad agency.

That it's a way to not be measured.

Yeah, I mean it means shit, you know, it means nothing.

So a lot of clients will talk to you and they'll say, well Rob, we want to work on, we do want to focus on selling more product, but we want to focus on building our brand too. So what do you say to the people that are calling and saying, well, we really want to focus on building our brand.

Companies like that tend to be a little savvier and they tend to have a brand worth building.

I'm talking about the new company.

Always the case. Yeah, the new company. We tend to look at whether or not the Product is good first, because if it's not, you're never going to have a brand. A brand isn't defined by the campaign. Almost never is it defined by the campaign. A brand is developed by the user. So Nike, as much as people want to think Nike is a brand that built itself, Nike was built by the users, it was built by the runners. And that's what shaped the meaning of that brand. And that's what still shapes the meaning of that brand. It's shaped by the user. So for a company to come to us and say, we want you to build our brand, it's an impossible task for an agency to say, yeah, we'll build your brand. I mean, what builds the brand is sales first, getting a product into the hands of the consumer and then how the consumer perceives or experiences that product or service or I don't want to say it, but that brand, you know, that's what will ultimately shape it. And if the product is a piece of crap, you're not going to have a brand ever.

All the wonderful advertising in the world will not keep a bad product alive.

I mean, again, Kmart, you know, not to knock Kmart again. It's just, it's if the experience is bad, if the product isn't great, it's people will only buy it once. And if you buy a product once, it will never be a brand in those people's eyes or they'll view it as a bad brand that they don't want to repeat. So it's just, it's a difficult thing. So our approach is always sales first. Try to sell it to as many people as possible because no matter how many people you sell it to, a percentage of them will not enjoy it and will move on. And our focus is trying to get as many of those people so we have a larger percentage of people who come back and buy it again and come back it because their experience is good.

You know, when you, a lot of agencies, when you look at a lot of ad agency websites, you see all this stuff all over. We're brand developers, we're brand builders, we're brand ambassadors, we're brand stewards, we're guardians of the brand. And what I tell clients is, that's nonsense. An agency can help you craft your brand, they can help the image of your brand. But you, the client, you have to make the brand. So I'll give you an example. Let's use Harley Davidson. Harley Davidson is an amazing brand. And if you think about it, how many products do. Can you think of off the top of your head where people tattoo the company logo. I mean, that's amazing, isn't it?

It's pretty impressive.

And people are walking billboards for it. And the brand is actually a lifestyle for many people. They actually live a Harley Davidson lifestyle. And you can get everything with the Harley logo on it. So the people are experiencing the brand. They're advertising the brand. No TV commercial, no radio commercial ever built that because it was built by the experience. What our job is, our job is more like a dating service. So if you go to, let's say that you wanted to be dating and you go to match.com and you build your profile, well, the job of match.com is to show your profile to as many prospective people as possible who could be a possible date or a possible match. That's what you pay match.com to do. And match.com finds you 50 different people that might be interested. It is not match.com's job to get you a second date. It is not their job to get you engaged. It is not their job to help you get married. It is their job to introduce you. That's really what an ad campaign does. Our job is to introduce you to the public and get that first lunch. We're going to get that, that first coffee, that first lunch. I'm going to give you a few, few dollars of my money. I'm going to take your product off the shelf, I'm going to take it home, and from there on out, it's on you. What is the experience that client is going, that customer is going to have with your product? And everything goes into that experience. The packaging, the use of the product, the experience. Was it easy to open? Did I have a hard time getting it out of the tube?

And now with social media continuing that conversation or expanding that universe. So if there is a problem or a question or whatever comes up, some positive experience or negative experience, social media does a good job of helping guide that, shape that brand, correct some of the errors, answer some questions that people wouldn't have asked 10 or 15 years ago. So your opportunity to, quote, build a brand is better now. But there's so many different touch points and you're right from the second it shows up at your door. And unfairly. Amazon, if you order from Amazon, plays a part in the brand experience. And you can read reviews of products on Amazon saying it shipped in six days instead of two. And I'm really unhappy. One star for the product.

Don't you love that?

But that's part of the overall experience. And people associate that purchase of product X with the entire thing from the moment they click Buy now to the moment they're opening up, opening it up and using it. That entire thing is the brand experience. But most of that obviously falls on the product.

So, bottom line, and this can be for big companies. I mean, first off, I'll say this and see if Rob agrees with me. There are only probably 50 real brands in this whole country, if not in the whole planet. And when I say brands, brands, where I can show you an image, I can show you a silhouette of a logo, I can mention a slogan, and you will know the product.

Yeah, I think there are more than that, but I think there are far less than people actually think. I think you're right on there.

There's not many.

No.

And this is one of the things I'll add to this. Oftentimes, clients will get wrapped up in we need a slogan, we need a tagline. And you have to keep in mind, unless you're probably in the top 50 spenders on advertising, which means you're spending 75 to 100 million plus, that would get you into the biggest bottom of the group. Unless your ad campaign is in those realms, then the taglines, the slogans, all that stuff, it means nothing.

I think it does. It plays a part in shaping the feeling that people get when they see a commercial or hear a commercial. But as far as overall taglines, you know, just do it still has hung on, but now it's tough. You know, tagline does not sell a product. It will never sell a product.

Right. But to have something where when I say things go better and you know the answer is Coke, that takes hundreds of millions of dollars to have that kind of recognition.

It does and it does. And it takes hundreds of millions of dollars and years and years and years of just pounding into people's brains. And if that's where your focus is as a company, expect failure unless you have money to burn, which some of those companies do, good for them. But if you're coming at this from a perspective of I want to build my company and sell more product, that's how you build a company. You need to be focused on benefits to the user. You need to be focused on experience for the user. You need to be focused on those key items first and foremost. Brand, brand will follow. If you have a good product and we can get it into the hands of people, or your agency can help you get it into the hands of people, your brand will build itself naturally. As long as your product doesn't suck.

Yeah. And the other thing too that I'll add to this, Rob, and that is you can do really bad advertising and sell product in the short term so you can have commercials that look like, you know, the shamwow guy.

Yeah.

Head on and head on and you can pedal a bunch of product. But guess what? Where's Headon right now and where ShamWow right now? Jail. Exactly. So those are short term moves. But if you have a good product and your advertising is done correctly, the advertising will build brand. But the focus, and this is what I want people to keep in mind, the focus for you needs to be on how many pieces of that product can I get to cross that cash register this week And I'll build the brand second because I need the sales if I'm going to be in business next week to build some more brand, I have to move product.

Yeah. I mean philosophically that's I think not to talk about our agency here, but philosophically I think that is where we have always been. For as long as I've been here, that has been first and foremost. And part of that has grown out of our direct response roots where we were trying to do the shamwow thing, where we were selling product. We knew that to be on next week we had to sell product this week. And now that we've matured a little bit more, we understand that to build brands you need to sell product and sell product and sell product and it just grows. It nurtures itself as you sell more.

Product and do it in a fashion where it is organic to the brand, where people like the brand.

Forcing it. That's what people are doing when they're trying to talk through creative executions or media plans or trying to go viral. I love that term. It's forcing an unnatural rapid growth that isn't necessarily sustainable. And brands are sustainable things. Brands are these larger, breathing, living concepts and you don't get that out of those forced.

Well, I'm going to say if you need, you know, if you ever want to talk to Rob, myself or any of the people here at Jekyll and Hyde, you can go to Jekyll and Hyde agency.com the show is at cpginsiders.com and we are always happy. We love entrepreneurs, so we're always happy to talk to people. Even if you're not a big account. We're always happy to talk to people and see what kind of advice we can give them. And that's why we're doing the show, so that we can give people a lot of information that they don't have. And again, as I said earlier, these are the conversations that people just call and ask us for all the time. So that's it for today. And we'll be back with more episodes.