CPG Reality Check – Ep. 49

Foreign welcome everybody to another edition of CPG Insiders. I'm your host Mark Young with my co host Justin Gerard. And Justin, today we're going to I liken this show to be what I'm going to call the CPG Reality check.

I agree with that. I agree with that.

And that's what we're going to do today folks. Going to have a little bit of a reality check. And what we mean by that is we're going to talk about just how much of a brand can some products become? You know, so we start off talking about ad agencies and ad agencies in general always try to tell everybody how they're brand builders and they message to the clients and, and they have their secret formula and everything is about intent to buy and top of mind awareness and all of these things that you hear from ad agencies. The reality is some brands are made to be brands and some brands are made to be things.

Absolutely. The best way that I think that to frame the conversation as you talked about, there are some brands, there are very few of them but there are some brands that are truly built to be brands that have the dollar value, that have the proper category. All these things to be. Here's a brand, right? But for most products, the best, the most effective way to approach your brand is to think of your brand and your branding items, your packaging and your logo and things of that nature. These are just ways to help build distinction from other products. So you want to look at it as, this is an added bonus when I'm on shelf to say hey, here's some elements that we can communicate to consumers so that it's easier to remember me. But having the expectation that again, like Mark, you're saying that you're going to build this massive brand and all these consumers are going to have these strong associations and emotional connections to who you are and all these things. It's not only unrealistic for a lot of products, it's not even effective most of the time. Helping brands reach the goals that they have set for themselves, right?

So you can think of a brand as big as let's say Tide detergent but you don't see people walk around wearing their Tide T shirt or having a Tide tattoo. They'll do that for Harley, they'll do that. Maybe for Apple people they will Nike, they'll wear Gucci shoes or Gucci shirt. But when people are, when people are really becoming dedicated to brands, they're becoming dedicated to the brands because they feel the brand tells the world something about me. I don't need to tell the world I bought Clearasil.

Exactly. It's, it's how it becomes an identifier for consumers if you're at that level. Right. I am.

I drive this.

Yeah, exactly.

I have an Apple phone, I drive a Corvette, I ride a Harley Davidson. I can afford a Gucci handbag.

Right. I am at. Right. That's, that's what those brands have been able to do. But like you said, in so many functional consumer products categories, it doesn't matter. Consumers aren't going to do that there.

Now that doesn't mean that a brand can't be known for.

For. Exactly. Agree, agree.

So that doesn't mean that consumers can't believe that Clearasil will, will help clear up acne. It doesn't mean that the brand can't be known for that. But that's being known for is different than brand ethos and brand loyalty.

Exactly. Because I mean, if you think about it this way, and it's all in the language. Right, Mark. It changes from I am a Mac user, I am a Harley Davidson driver, to I use Clear Cell, I use Kleenex because. X. Right. Because of the outcome, because of deliverable. That is still a, that is an absolutely strong association for consumers. It's an important association for consumers, but is a different relationship.

Let's go through our seven truths on this. The first one is CPG products are not typically built with brand building strategies. And what we mean by that is that a lot of people will talk about, as we're just saying right now that real branding requires consumer relationship. It's developing an ethos. And an ethos is really where the consumer says, I like this brand, I like these people. They get me, I get them. We share values. We're similar, we're part of the same tribe. If my problem is acne, I don't care what tribe you're from. I don't care what your social stance is. I don't care, you know, who works there. I just need to know that you've got a tube of goo that I can put on this bump and make it go away today.

Yep. But, but let's talk about this, Mark, so really quickly. And I want people to understand this factor because I think this is a, this is, this is a really important piece for, for a lot of brands today because I think this concept of branding has been just for lack of a program. Yeah.

Been oversold.

I still go back to my days in college in my marketing classes. Right. This is the stuff that's taught so it has just become, you know, this belief that we need to break. So the goal of this, the end goal, is all about building rapport with the consumer. And that is still very important because you cannot communicate to a consumer and build a relationship unless you build rapport. That is the foundation of communication is rapport. Right. But here's my but. Right. That most brands do not need to establish, again, the type of rapport, the level of rapport to give that brand ethos that you're discussing to sell their product.

Correct.

The rapport they need to establish is, I understand you and your problem, and here's exactly how I can fix it. So I get where you're at in your life in this issue, whatever this indication is. And so then the consumer goes, okay, I'm listening. Because you're right, that is me. I am going through that. And here's how we can solve it better than anybody else. But that's all.

So I go back to. I'm going to use Harley for an example. When we look at Harley Davidson, Harley Davidson does not solve a problem now because can a motorcycle be used as transportation? Yes. Is it convenient transportation? Not always. Are there many other motorcycles for half or less money that will do the same thing and in many cases better than the Harley will? Absolutely. So what Harley does is Harley's built this ethos. When you walk into a Harley store, everyone in the store looks like a biker. They're in black, they've got leather vests on. They might have tattoos. They're wearing boots. They've got a Harley chain hanging off their belt. They've so well crafted the environment to be this is my tribe look. I'm dressed just like Harley salesman. Even the woman, the young woman working in accessories looks like she just got off the back of a bike because they're creating this ethos that this is my tribe, these are my people. And now what happens, I go there and hang out. In fact, Harley's done this amazing job that when. And I own a Harley. When Harley riders travel the country on their motorcycles, it's common to stop at Harley dealerships along your ride across the country. And you stop and you hang out and you talk to the people who work there and you pick up a poker chip that you were there. And guess what? You probably buy an accessory because the pretty girl that's dressed in Harley clothes just told you you should try this T shirt. And they literally have made it where it's a destination. I'm not going to go hang out with Clearasil. It's a functional product. And that gets us to the second truth. And that second truth is, in the world of CPG and OTC products, consumers are buying outcomes, not buying the brand name. Now, that does not mean that your brand name isn't well known and isn't known for solving this problem. But the name isn't, because you guys are so cool that I want to have you tattooed on my arm. It's, you've done a good job letting me know that you can solve this issue. One of the examples that we've used is like, Head and Shoulders, and that is people don't buy Head and Shoulders because I have such a dedication to it. It's so cool. You know, I've got a Head and Shoulders jacket and a Head and Shoulders T shirt. In fact, you probably reluctantly buy Head and Shoulders because I have a problem. Now, Head and Shoulders has done a great job of getting people to look at their shoulders.

Brilliant name, right?

So they've done this great job of saying, look at these white flakes on your black shirt. It's very similar to how Whisk years ago did ring around the collar. Look at this issue. I have. I didn't know I had this issue. So they've done a great job of making sure that, you know you have a problem and that they're the solution for this problem, this visible problem that you can see.

On it this way. Again, if you're. If you're an active listener of the show, you've heard Mark and I talk about this a million times, the purchase process happens in your unconscious mind. It is a pattern that has been developed. So it's not an intellectual process, for lack of a better term. And so how do we get your brand into that pattern? Part of the brain that this is just what we do every single time. One of the main keys is developing an anchor in the mind to developing a heuristic and essentially a cheat code for the brain that says, okay, this is my problem. Now, your brand is already associated with the solution, and there is no thinking involved. They go. They pick it up, right?

White flakes on my shoulders. Oh, I need Head and Shoulders.

Exactly. So this is where your branding is still your brand, your logo, all these messages. So very, very important because it's going to help strengthen that anchor. And this is where your advertising comes into play, because the more frequency of that message and they see those things, the stronger the anger and actual attachment to your brand will happen. So your brand's important, but this is why it's important because they associate it with solving that issue.

Truth number three, category giants are not the obvious choice challenger brands. Rejoice. Tell us about that.

Oh, gosh. So I know that this may come as a little bit of a shock, but the concept of loyalty, consumer loyalty, we're always trying to get. How can we keep retention, how can we build a stronger loyalty from our consumers to our brand? What is the key? Right? Here's the reality of that, okay? It's all about communicating to your consumers. What have you done for me lately? Okay? Consumers need to know that you are talking to them, that you are fixing their problem. Consumers will not remember you, even if they purchased a product and had a good experience, unless you continue that conversation to remind them. So the reason why all these category giants, when you look at these loyalty studies and brand loyalty studies, that it's like, wow, they have so much loyalty. It is not a product performance conversation most of the time, it's an advertising conversation, is they have continued to talk to the consumer over and over again and frequently so that the consumer feels a stronger relationship to them simply because they simply got a phone call. They have a better relationship because they talk every day. And that's something that brands need to understand.

There's an old, I'm going to say this is, this is a very old paradigm that many advertisers still stick to. And that is there's always been a belief in the, in the marketing world that you need to reach people in the 1834 category, because that's when they haven't made all of their brand choices and brand decisions yet. And by time they're 35 years old, they've made their brand choices, they're set for life. It's going to be too hard to claw them back. There is no truth in that paradigm anymore. Consumers that are 80 years old will abandon you just as fast as an 18 year old will today if somebody comes up with a shinier widget that promises a better outcome.

Michael. So when you, when you look at, and this is really where the truth kind of hurts a little bit, is when consumer, when brands are looking at some of their customer loyalty numbers, they have to understand that it is not necessarily a reflection of the product performance. It's because your competitors, those category giants, are having a larger conversation, more frequent conversation with consumers than you. And they're taking them because of that, not because of what your product may have done or not done them. So you have to compete in that arena if you're going to try to have stronger retention Numbers, and that's really the goal.

So truth number four, consumers are loyal only to themselves. And I find this to be fascinating, Justin, we look at these numbers that we have. This is Nielsen data. This is Nielsen data for annual purchase rates. How many items of the same brand did a family purchase? So we're not even talking one person. We're talking about a household Head and shoulders. Average purchases per year is 2 suave 2, Pantene, 1.9, Alberto, VO5, 1.6, Dove 1.5. Now, by the way, head and shoulders being a 2 probably makes a little more sense than the other ones because it has a medicinal purpose. So it's. While the other ones are solving the problem of washing your hair, head and shoulders is solving the problem of washing your hair and relieving the dandruff. So when we look at this, what we have to keep mind, folks, this is household. Now, what's the odds that the average household uses one and a half to two bottles of shampoo annually? I mean, how often do you go through a bottle of shampoo in your house?

For me, personally, I would say I probably go through four to five bottles a year. Me, personally, and I'm in the household, it's much more with my wife because she's got more hair. So.

So your household probably goes through, what, 10 bottles of shampoo a year?

10 to 12 at least.

And out of those 12, how many of those 12 were all the same brand?

Oh, very rarely, honestly. I mean, when I look back, because.

I said, oh, look at this one. This one's for thickened hair, this one's for curly hair. You know, maybe I'll try this. So again, what are you doing? You're going to the store. You bought a brand that performed perfectly well for you. So it's not like the shampoo you had last month didn't perform. But you go to the store, and as you're deciding what to buy, what gets your attention? Either some great advertising that told you about a new feature in which your mind was already unconsciously made up before you got to the shelf, or you're looking at the shelf, trying to see is there any kind of new indication that might appeal to me better?

Right. Well, and I think you bring up a great point there, Mark, is that a lot of the times, I think as marketers and advertisers, we forget the fact that people change, consumers change, their lives change, their issues change. So what worked for me yesterday might not be the right thing for me today, because there have been changes in my Life. So that's what happened.

I will sometimes ask my wife why she stopped using a certain brand of something. And you know what her answer usually is? I don't know. I just quit doing it.

I don't know.

I just. I don't know why I stopped buying it. It worked pretty well. I just stopped buying it. Right, because that brand didn't reach out to her and remind her of the good experience.

Exactly.

Because when we're shampooing our hair, we buy the bottle, we pour it in our hand, we scrub it in our hair, we have an expected outcome. As long as we got the expected outcome, we're not overwhelmed with what we got. It's the equivalent of what happens to your brain when you open a door. So when you walk up to a door and you see a door handle, your brain expects you to be able to turn this knob, push on this knob, and the door is going to open. As long as it does that, you don't say to yourself, what a remarkable device that door handle was. Because that's what a door handle does. Well, that's what shampoo does. That's what a bar of soap does. That's what my dishwasher detergent does. When I'm really going to notice my dishwashing machine detergent is when it doesn't work like I expect. When I pull the dishes out and they have food on them now, I'm going to notice it. So I'm going to notice it when it doesn't work, but I'm really not going to notice it when it does work. So I have to keep that relationship going. And the other thing that I want to. In fact, I'll hold my next thought until we get to these last ones. Let's go to truth number five. Market share is key. Tell us about that one.

So when we're taking a look and we're having this conversation again of brands and brand loyalty and brand building and growth, we need to understand the power of market share. And it's just like we talked about. We've been hinting at this conversation a little bit here. So the market share of a brand is going to greatly determine the loyalty factors that appear to be happening for the brand. The loyalty numbers are going to look bigger now, as a percentage, the consumers are making the same trade of that business as they are for you. But the big thing is they have so much more business than you, so it hits them differently. So if you have to make the math simple, you have a 10 million brand and a 1 million brand there could be a hundred consumers that are trading from the $1 million brand and the $10 million brand. It's the same number, the same number of consumers are shifting and trading and making these decisions you talked about. Right. It just hits that mark, that 10 million dollar brand differently because they have more market share. And more market share will seem to be stronger loyalty because they have more advertising happening that is keeping more consumers coming back and holding on to that market share. That's really the conversation that we're talking about here. And so the whole, the whole concept that your, I guess that your, your advertising or that, that the, the brands themselves have stronger loyalties and more repeat buyers, it's a lie. It's a complete lie. They don't, it seems that way because of the size of the brand and the equity and the market share they hold. Currently they have, they have a different hill than you do.

So what this really tells you, the other message that you need to get from this is the low hanging fruit is finding new consumers more than getting consumers to buy one more of your item a year. That's where you put your effort. Because when you're trying to get the consumers to increase the number of items they're going to buy per year, you're trying to do so. You're trying to force them into an unnatural behavior. But to get consumers to try your brand over another brand is a natural behavior, provided you can give me a reason to try it. And again, folks, when we're talking about this, we're talking about commoditized categories. So this does not mean that someone doesn't, that there aren't certain brands that have great loyalty. You know, some food items have fabulous loyalty because people love the taste of that item or people want to be seen with an Evian bottle at the gym. But when you look at those brands, we're getting back into not just what the brand does for me, it's what the brand says about me. So you have to decide what kind of brand you are. The next truth, brand awareness does not equal sales. And the example that I always use on this is Kmart. Because that is who hasn't heard of Kmart now who shops at Kmart? And even before Kmart shut down, who do you know who would admit going to Kmart even if they went there?

Not really. Ever since especially when Target emerged.

But you will always tell people you were going to Target. You don't mind telling people you went to Target. Now I can tell you from our position that the merchandising Kmart and the merchandising target was probably 85% the same merchandise because we had lots of clients who sold to both counts. And the only difference between what was in Kmart and what was Target was mostly for the most part the fake indoor, the fake inside home decor and fashion brands that the retailers themselves created. So Kmart had Jacqueline Smith and Target had Mossimo. But that's the only difference. So what did Target do that Kmart didn't do? Target crafted a brand that we will refer to as Cheap Chic. Which meant it was okay to go to Target and find a deal on some clever new dishes for the patio or to find some new clothing that happened to look pretty trendy and pretty cool. Kmart had the same stuff, but they couldn't pull it off. And again, I'll give you an example. If you went to the appliance division, the appliance section in Kmart, all the same coffee makers that Target had were sitting there on the shelf at Kmart. Exact same products.

No different. No, it's absolutely not. I mean, and shifted over from a retailer to a product like you mentioned here, who hasn't heard of RC Cola, right? But who's, who buys it?

Absolutely same thing. You know, Sears brand awareness isn't enough. So don't fall into the trap of having your so called ad experts tell you that all we have to do is get out there and keep telling people your name and they'll buy your product. No, they won't buy your product if I tell them your name. Otherwise Kmart and Sears would be doing wonderfully. They will get out there and buy your product if you tell the consumer what's in it for them. And what's in it for them is not your brand name. This is one of the things that I always find, Justin. A client will send me, they'll send me an ad that they created in internally and say we take a look at our ad. And I can't. This has happened to me hundreds of times. And let's say it's a magazine ad or a digital ad. And the first thing in the ad, the first thing at the top of the page is the name of their company, Brand X. And I will look at them and I'm like, so the top of your ad is called the headline. Because this is no different than a news article. Tell me why the name of your company is newsworthy other than you like to see your name. Because it isn't newsworthy. Okay, so what's newsworthy? What's newsworthy Is this product now solves X or now you can get rid of dandruff or whatever it is your product does. That's the newsworthy part.

Yes, 100%. Your name. No. It's the old adage, right? From just basic human communication. I don't care who you are until I know that you care about me. Right. What can you do for me? And then I will start to pay attention to who you are. But that's the key.

Yeah, it's just. I mean, you've seen the same ads where somebody has sent us a banner ad and it's got their name in big letters across the top a hundred times. Why do I care? I don't care about your brand.

Your video commercials, where you've got the first five seconds, they're just branding and it's going, what? Why? Why would I stick around for the rest of this? I have no idea why I'm here.

Or some of my ever. My other favorite commercials are for, like, colognes and perfume.

Oh, yeah. All the models doing. I mean, the rain on the beach.

And playing guitar and jumping on somebody's back.

Right.

You have 25 seconds of you do not know what this product does or what it could possibly do for you.

No clue.

So you're watching this commercial. You're saying, is this an ad for vacation? Is this an ad for a bathing suit? Is this an ad for a dating site? Because your mind is literally just going, I don't know why I'm seeing this. Then at the end of the ad, last three to five seconds, they show you a bottle of perfume, Chanel by Chanel. It's like, so if I buy Chanel, a man will run up to a woman on a beach. Is that what happens if you buy Chanel?

Yeah. That's not unrealistic.

Now, by the way, I see in the case of cologne, I see some of their challenges. Some of their challenges is how do you tell someone what something smells like over tv? But there are better ways to do it than just showing people frolicking in the surf. Because, I don't know, the frolicking in the surf tells me what your cologne is going to smell like either. Let's go to our seventh and final challenge. Challenge. Your brands must also challenge their thinking.

This is a huge truth. I mean, this is. If nothing else, and I will tell you, this is the foundation of our philosophy here at the agency. Whenever we approach a client, we have to challenge our thinking. We have to challenge the way that we are approaching problems, identifying problems. We have to do it differently, period. Because if you're a challenger brand, your growth and your ability to compete in a category depends on innovation, period. If you look at these brands as we talk about, you do not have the market share. And we've already discussed the challenge that creates for you as a brand, right? Which means you don't have the brand. So the equity that may have happened in your category with other brands in the connection, you do not have. You do not have their media budget. So you cannot spend at the same level and try to just have a larger megaphone. It's not possible. So then what do you do? And a lot of the times also, Mark, which you didn't mention here, depending on where you're at in your maturation as a brand, you don't have the distribution that they have. So therefore, people can't even find you as easily. Right. So you've got all these things that you're going up against. The only way for a challenger brand to be successful is to innovate is to do something different, to take the chances that those market leaders are too afraid to take or simply are not putting resources toward because they don't need to. Right. Well, yeah.

Let me give you a couple of hints and I'm really talking to our entrepreneurial listeners. If you've never worked at any of the big CPG brands, big ships turn really slow. And when you're in the marketing department at P& G, one of your key jobs is just keeping the guy above you happy and not getting fired. You don't not get fired. You don't reduce your risk of being fired by coming up with innovative ideas and taking risks. You keep your job because you keep your head down and you don't take risks and you agree with everyone else. But what do we know about science? Let's talk about the scientific method for a moment. Science itself is built, it's always built on the premise of one or some very small group of people dissenting from the common thinking, dissenting from the accepted belief. So one person. And again, it could be a small group people decide as an example, no, we probably shouldn't be bloodletting. Maybe this isn't a good idea. Which doctors did for thousands of years. And as we pointed out, George Washington himself was probably bled to death when he died because they kept bloodletting him. And doctors even commented, well, we took out most of his blood, but it might have been better if we'd have taken out more and just completely pulled all his blood up. The same thing happened the same thing happened with the idea of washing your hands before surgery. That was considered to be ridiculous. It all happens with somebody willing to challenge the status quo and say, hey, wait a minute, stop for a minute. Maybe there's something better out there than this. Let's go try to do this. The term that drives me insane is best practices. And you'll hear this from larger advertisers. We want to make sure that our marketing department is following the best practices of the industry for our category. So your goal is you want to copy whoever is doing it the least wrong today. That's how your company defines success. Let's find whoever has the fewest mistakes and let's just try to copy them. Let's not try to be better than them. Let's not try to look for breakthroughs. Let's not try to look for ways around them. Let's not look to try to surpass them. Let's just see if we can copy the fewest mistakes that they currently are making. That's when you challenge your brand. That is never going to work.

It's never going to work. Right. And I even just want to get, when we talk about it, let's get practical, right? So let's really bring it down to earth and what we're talking about here, very simple example, right? So let's take Mark, your example of Tide. So if what your approach was is I'm going to do exactly what Tide does, which is 90% of just people looking very happy and then at the end it's tied, you're welcome. If that's going to be your approach, your creative approach, because this is how it's done, then great. You also need to spend as much as them. Oh, wait, you can't.

I was about to say, you also, you also need a 60 million dollar ad budget.

Exactly. Oh, no, wait, you can't. But nonetheless, that's how creatively it's done, then all right, how are you going to break through? How are they going to know that it's you? Because they could. They would. The consumer is probably going to assume that it's just another Tide commercial because you're doing exactly what they're doing and Tide spending more money than you. So it can't work. You have to think and approach it differently, period.

It's kind of the key to it, folks. I mean, if you're an entrepreneurial brand, you took a risk the day you decided to become an entrepreneur, the day you decided, I'm going to take my face cream or I'm Going to take my new pain product or whatever thing is. The day you decided, I'm going to go sell this to the public, you decided to walk out on one of those big, long, expansive rope bridges between a giant gully and you set the rope on fire right at the beginning. And now you're running out on the bridge and the goal is you've got to run all the way to the other side of the bridge and get back on land before the rope burns through. So knowing that you already stepped out in faith and stepped out taking a risk and stepped out doing things that were you treading where others wouldn't go, why would you change that behavior now? Why would you all of a sudden say, I've risked my fortune, I've risked my relatives fortune, I've quit my job, I'm running this company, I'm building this product and now you're going to say, but we better just do what everybody else does and play it safe here. That ship sailed a long time ago when you started your company.

100%. And the simplest way I think when we're in, specifically when we're talking about even creative or we talk to entrepreneurs, is we simply ask them, when you're meeting someone new and you're excited about your products, your business, how do you explain it to them? Do you ever start with your brand first? No, you start with here's what it does, here's what it can do for you. And that's how you have to do the messaging. And then you have to, if you talk about, take other risks, do things differently, target a different consumer than maybe everybody else does because no one's talking to them. And this is the people that can be passionate about your product right now. Use a different medium from a media standpoint because no one else is there. So that audience could completely own for shared voice concept because no one's talking to them there. So you will be the brand that they associate. Recognize you can win there. These are the little things that we have to do. We have to be innovative and we do it every day. This is what we do every single day. And for any of our listeners, if you are currently working with partners, if you leave here with nothing, we want you to challenge their thinking and challenge and tell them, I want you to be innovative, think big differently, tell me something new and different because that's the way you're going to win. And I mean in every aspect of your business. We're talking about it from an advertising perspective, of course, for this conversation, but it should Be in every aspect of your business.

Formula, the packaging, the distribution model, how you're going to tell people about the product. You know, going back to your point, when you meet somebody, you don't tell them I'm the president of X. You tell them I run a company that makes topical pain pills or topical pain products. There are, you know, again, go back to Harley. If your name is Willie Davidson and you're the president of Harley Davidson, well in that case you can probably say I'm Willie Davidson with Harley Davidson. Okay, got it. You don't need to tell me anything more about who you are or what your company does because I get it. But in reality folks, statistically there are probably only 50 brands like that in the world that have that kind of dedication. And they are brands like Apple, Harley, Google. I mean we're talking about mass, Coca Cola, massive brands and massive brands that are such category killers in their business that whoever's next to them isn't a competitor, isn't a side by side competitor.

Exactly. So like we talked about with everything going on here, I think one of the overall messages right now is when it comes to your brand it is still important. The logo that you choose, the colors you choose, what you're saying. These are still important items but the goal of them is to help create a distinction in consumers minds from competitors. It should not be in our opinion of course for success to try to establish yourself and build the ethos like a Harley Davidson. It's just how can we put things that give us that little edge to create a stronger connection in consumers minds for this problem or in this category. That's the goal.

I'm going to give you a really good example that's happening right now. So Google has about 86% of the share of the search market. So think about that folks. One brand with 86% of the volume. Now you have an upstart company called DuckDuckGo. DuckDuckGo is doing a great job. And the reason they're doing a great job is because they're not competing. Saying we have better algorithms and can deliver you better search, we can get you better results. Because the reality is they do not have the battery, the army of mathematicians that Google has. So their entry into the market, if you haven't heard of them, is simply we'll never sell your data and we won't track you across the Internet. So their whole pitch is if you want to go on the Internet and not be followed around, not be recorded, not have somebody looking over your shoulder to See what you're searching for. Come here. That will not appeal to everyone. Some people feel, I don't care if anybody's looking at what I'm doing, so what? But there is a certain group of the population that is going to say, yeah, I don't want Google and the government knowing what I look for every day. I'm going to go use DuckDuckGo. And it's a great winning strategy for them because they're defining a different deliverable. So when we're saying think different using them as an example, if everybody was saying, well what's the best practices for search? They'd all be arguing over who can give the most relevant search results when I type in this term. In this case they went after a totally different indication. Let's not even fight Google on these grounds. We can't compete with them there. What is it that Google does that people might dislike that we can not do? So they really changed the thinking and said, okay, let's do this. Let's tell people we won't trail them now by the way, that puts DuckDuckGo at a economic disadvantage because they have less data to sell. So they have set themselves up with an area of a business model that doesn't make as much money per user as Google will. But they found an entrance and they found an on ramp into a category where the major player has almost all the volume and they can carve themselves out a niche. And I think they're going to do okay. Be honest with you. I think they're going to make it and I think they'll be around for a while.

Absolutely. I mean when you talk about success of a strategy like that, Mark, we always say this right. There are ballpark 356 million, let's say that your business, that you can get 5% of those people to buy your product, pretty good business.

And I want to remind people, several years ago Microsoft decided they were going to take on Google. And Microsoft spent a fortune rebuilding Bing.

Yep.

And TV ads for Bing. I mean they spent a fortune trying to get people to switch to Bing and they couldn't do it. Why? Because they tried to. All they did was tell people we're just like Google, but we're called Bing, so go to us. And people kept asking the question why? I don't know, why would I do that? Why would I switch? Because you haven't told me anything that you do better or anything that you do different. You just told me we're just like them, but we have a shorter name.

So the only reason that Bing, I think has really survived is because Bing is the default search engine for any Microsoft computer that is purchased today. So people are just too late. Some consumers, generally older, just don't feel the need to change it. So it's just there. Why change it to Google? Ask them. It's working.

Yeah, the same kind of goes for Yahoo, which is still around, but that's where Bing made the mistake. So the issue here, the other thing I want to compare is Microsoft is enormous. So even a giant Fortune 500 company couldn't make it happen on sheer will and spend because they didn't do something to make themselves different. Anyways, folks, that's it for today. If you like today's show, pass it on. And if you would go to wherever you get your podcast and we'd really appreciate you going and leaving us a five star review. Those are really important to us and we're very grateful to people to do and I want to tell you we're very grateful to all the people who listen to the show because there's a surprisingly large number of people that listen and we take that very seriously that your time is valuable and when you give us that time, we greatly appreciate it and respect that. As always, if you have any questions for Justin or for myself, you can always contact us. You can go to cpginsiders.com or you can go to jekyllhide labs.com and you can reach out to us through either one of those areas. And other than that, we will see you on the next episode 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 gift guaranteed result. Just go to Jekyll Hyde agency.com or feel free to give us a call at 800-500-4210.