Business and Politics - Episode 32

Welcome, everybody, to this edition of CPG Insiders. I'm your host. I have to get this right. Dr. Mark Young.

Doctor, yes.

And what was your name again? Justin Ferrat. Yes.

God, he's so funny.

I know. I've got it. Well, you don't do anything. You just sit around and wait for these shows.

Pretty much.

So, Justin, we're gonna, you know, we're gonna talk about today. Yeah, we're gonna talk about. We're gonna. We're gonna do something we should never do. It's gonna mix politics and business.

Here we go.

But we're not taking a political side. No, what we're gonna talk about is the politics of business. And a lot of people are. A lot of companies are becoming very concerned now because it is so easy to get drug into a political conversation.

Well, because right now in our world, everything's political, right.

Everything's being viewed through this lens.

Yeah.

So you could have an officer, your company, who donates money to a political candidate, and all of a sudden it gets blown up into company A supports this candidate.

Right. Well, I mean, just think of the conversation we had this morning about a piece of creative for one of our clients where we're not even gonna have a true talent. We're just talking about maybe having hands. And we have to have this discussion on, well, they're women's hands. Is that sexist versus men's? Do we have to have multiple hands with multiple races? Are we gonna be taking sides? These are all things that we have to consider right now in this climate because everything is being looked through that lens.

I think it'd be funny if we had female's hand and one black male hand and they actually worked like it was one person. Everything covered here. But anyway, it's just funny. Come on. I'll give you an example. There's a brand called Goya.

Yes.

And Goya, their president was given some kind of award or something by the president. And because of that, people who were anti president started, wanted to boycott Goya foods.

Right.

And the award was, in fact, what the award was, was for creating jobs for Mexican Americans, which you would think is a good thing, everybody would appreciate. Now, it turned out okay for Goya because the other side launched into buying more Goya products.

Right.

The issue is many brands want to remain, you know, anonymous, want to remain outside of the political spectrum. But you really need to examine everything about your company. Look at what your people are doing. What are your people doing in social media? What are you doing politically? You know, political Activism after work, you have to examine all this stuff. Now, there's another thing that's going on too, though, and that is we're soon and we are approaching a point where there are going to be political brands.

I mean, I mean, I think what you just said about Goya is a pretty strong example of being. Eventually they're gonna turn into one.

Right. A good example of this is Nike with Colin Kaepernick. So Nike took some big risks and supported Kaepernick and then, you know, BLM and the Neely, and it worked okay.

Yeah. There are recent Rainbow campaign too, with some of their shoes and things like that. That seems to be working out for them. But they're clearly taking a political position.

Now. Nike made a decision that they were going to let some of their customer base go away in exchange for some of their other customer base maybe increasing the loyalty.

Yep.

And it appears to be working out.

Right.

Another company that's a really good example is called Black Rifle Coffee. Now, this company literally was founded to be a conservative company where Nike went with the liberal Democrats side. This company went conservative. So they started from day one. We are pro Second Amendment, we're pro freedom. We're all, all of our employees are veterans. And everything about the brand is conservatism. And by the way, it's working incredibly well for them.

Sure.

Because when we look at a business like coffee where there's massive competition, this is actually a way for them to define themselves from the other coffee companies because we're the coffee company. For people of this political stripe, it.

Is a clear point of differentiation in a category that for most of consumers is a commodity.

Right now, Ben and Jerry's, they're on the other side. Ben and Jerry's has come out pretty strong for being on liberal and Democrat side, and they've given up some of the Republican or conservative business.

Yep.

But what I think is interesting is I think we're soon going to find that we're going to have more and more left and right brands. And this is not always a bad thing.

No.

And it's not. Because here's the thing. Let's use Black Rifle Coffee as an example. If Black Rifle Coffee just launched as Black Rifle Coffee with no message, they would be one of another hundred thousand local coffee companies trying to sell products in mail order.

Yes.

So they made a decision. We're going to deliberately alienate and if not, insult half of the nation.

Yes, they did. They did.

Absolutely. And they're blatantly insulting to half of the nation. They go out of their way to.

Insult half of the nation in some of their advertising. Yes, it is. But that is who their brand is. That is the brand essence, the. The reason why it works for them as. As you're saying, they took a stand immediately. They have a clear understanding of what their identity is. Not just the identity of the brand they want to be as in their Persona, but who those people are. Those people, every person that works for Black Rifle Coffee, from the CEO all the way down to someone who works in shipping, they are all aligned under the same belief system. They're all in everything they do. Their communication, their actions, their accountability, everything. And that's what consumers expect. They expect. Okay, fine. If you're going to say this, you need to live in it. But they are, and that's what they've been from the beginning.

And it works because it is better to be passionately loved by a part of the country than to be ignored or just not relevant to the entire country.

Well, we've had these discussions many times with clients in the past. So right now, I think what the United States population is what, 350 million right around there. Okay, so let's say that you have 3%. You own 3% of the United States population of those consumers. They're passionate. They only buy from you. It's pretty good business for most people.

Absolutely. So what we're really saying here in this episode is if you want to take your brand and align it to a political group or to a cause, your cause could be transgender, your cause could be lgbt, your cause could be cancer, your cause could be anything, whatever. It's not necessarily a bad thing to do, provided that the group that you're attaching to is highly passionate, highly loyal, large enough to fund you, and likely to buy from you because of this ethos that you developed with them.

Right. But you also have to understand, especially now. Again, I come back to my last statement. Consumers expect transparency, accountability, and action. That's what they expect. So if you're going to say you stand for whatever this cause is, you need to really live and breathe and stand for that cause. It's not just a portion of our sales go donated to X anymore. That's not enough. You really have to live and breathe it.

Yeah. And I said Black Rifle is a good example. Nike's a good example.

Absolutely.

Even Ben and Jerry's is an example because they donate lots of money to all kinds of Democrat and liberal causes. And they do. They walk the walk.

Yeah.

But as you're saying, if you're going. It's. It can't be a gimmick. It needs to be a commitment. It does and needs to be not only a commitment to this belief structure, but you need to be comfortable with walking away from a large portion of the country in order to be passionately desired by the remaining portion of the country.

And also understand that there is going to be that backlash no matter what your cause is or stand or what side of the political spectrum. Now, because as we started this conversation, you might think it's just a cause, but especially in today's world, everything is viewed for a political lens. So it doesn't matter how genuine your beliefs and actions are, someone is going to view it through that lens and take offense.

Now, the last thing I want to leave people with is I want people to also not get so panicked about some of this stuff. And let me take a moment with this.

Yep.

Let's say that. And we've had this happen. Let's say your ad appeared on the Tucker Carlson show on Fox News. You bought Fox News AP to midnight. It appears on Tucker Carlson. Tucker Carlson has a group of people who are out trying to drive him off the air. All of a sudden, your email, your website starts getting 20, 30 emails saying, how dare you appear on Tucker Carlson. We're going to boycott your product. Yada, yada, yada. You're horrible people. Sometimes advertisers panic when they see these emails. I want to warn our clients and listeners of this. Examine the emails closely.

Mm.

You will find that the language in the email is surprisingly exact where the body of the email is just about cut and paste.

Yeah.

And this is for two reasons. One, you have these organizations that have a few passionate people who, they will send out a broadcast email saying, please send the following email to this company. So it's really not a bunch of passionate people. It's a few people that are just forwarding an email.

Right.

The other thing that happens is some of these activist groups have, I'll use the word, kind of professional agitator, so to speak, where they'll have 20, 30 emails to a person. Sometimes 100. And many times you might get 30 emails that really came from one person who just kept repeating over and over, how dare you, you know, advertise on, as my example, Tucker Carlson. By the way, it could be, how dare you advertise on Rachel Maddow. Yeah, I had, I gotta tell you, folks, I had a client who got an angry email because their ad appeared on the E. Channel during a show called behind the Scenes. And so E had this series where they showed behind. I remember very well on this behind the scenes show, the episode was about a playmate who was murdered. So that was the story.

Right.

Now, the story wasn't glorifying Playboy. It was talking about how she was playmate and this and that. And then she got involved with his husband and he was suspected of killing her. Our client got an email saying, so do you normally glorify objectifying women in pornography? Because if you're a pornographic company, we want to boycott you. So some of this stuff is just ludicrous.

Yeah.

Now, first off, the client was buying run a schedule, didn't even know what show was on.

Right.

And certainly do we really get down to the point of, okay, we might appear behind the scene. We need you guys to send us the script on every one of these shows so we can read it to see if there's anything in it. It might be offensive to people. I will tell you what we usually do. We usually send these people back a blank email or form email. And the email says, you know, thanks for reaching out to us and contacting us regarding our advertising. What we usually say is if, let's say it's the Tucker Carlson thing, our response is usually our goal is to buy the most efficient advertising we can buy to tell as many people in America as possible about our wonderful products. Fox News does provide us a large audience at a reasonable price that allows us to tell that story. But please keep in mind that we also advertise on other networks like CNN and msnbc because our message, we feel that our product and our message is important for people on both sides of the aisle. That's usually how we deal with it. If it's a real complaint, you never hear back from them. If it's just some put a blank crackpot who's being paid to do this, then they'll want to argue with you. But the reality is, don't get panicky about it. It's a minimal amount of people and I assure you they're not out buying your product.

Yeah, yeah. Traditionally not. And as we were talking about here right now, our world is obviously changing by the minute. And I mean, I agree with Mark that there's going to come a time here, sooner rather than later, where it's going to be near impossible for brands to be apolitical anymore.

As I say, I got one of these emails once and it said, I recently saw your. And in parentheses it said product name here on Fox News.

Yeah.

And I showed that the client I'm like, it's a form email that a group of people send out to people and ask them to fill out. And this particular person didn't even take the time to read the body of the email. They just cut and pasted.

Right. But even again, as you were mentioning earlier that what brands I think really need to do right now moving forward is get a true sense of their identity, understand who they are, and with this kind of new age approaching, really understand that and see where do they align, whether it's a cause, a political side, whatever the case may be, but get an understanding of what that is and who they are so that when that time comes and they can no longer stay again in the middle and they've got to take a side that it's organic, that it's who they are, they live and breathe it and be okay with losing some consumers. Because what you're going to do is create such a passionate core group of consumers now that align with you and your ideals that your business will continue to grow and thrive.

Cleared the shelves, right?

Right. And we've always said this outside of this conversation, Mark. What we've always said to clients is what you need to do is understand what your product is, what it does, and understand now who are the people that are going to be passionate about what you do and what your product offers. Who are those people? Now let's go find them, because that's how you build and grow your business.

By the way, taking a politically charged view is sometimes a great way for a product or a brand that really has no point of view difference.

To have one.

To have one.

Right.

When you think of coffee is such a commodity.

Right.

I haven't had black rifle coffee. I'm not, I haven't bought it, I haven't tried it. I'm struggling in my mind to think that it is infinitely better than other million coffee brands out there. There may be the occasional person who likes the way they roasted it better than someone else.

Sure.

But regardless, it's the point of difference.

Yeah. And it is. And you know, we've mentioned this before too. I've said this before as I, you know, own. I own pair of Tom shoes. Right. But I own them because they're comfortable shoes. The fact that they donated a pair of shoes as a cause, it's not that I don't approve of that, but I didn't have a passion about charity, that that was the reason I bought them. I bought them because they're comfortable shoes. So there's going to be consumers like myself, depending on the category that are going to be product focused. And you'll still be able to win some of those here and there. But again, those that passionate core, that is what's keeping companies like Tom's moving.

Well, that's it for CPG Insiders. As always, if you ever have any questions or need any help with anything, you can always get a hold of Justin, myself, or anybody here. Just go to. You can either go to cpg insiders.com or jekyllhydelabs.com if you want to find us, and we'll be back with more episodes and more, more interesting ideas in the future. 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 jekyllhideagency.com or feel free to give us a call at 800-504.