Increase Your Sales Conversion with Marketing Lessons from our U.S Presidents with Jason Voiovich - Ep. 48

Foreign. Welcome, everybody to this edition of CPG Insiders. I'm your host, Mark Younger. Dr. Doc.

Remember you're a doctor now.

I am, yeah. So you can trust me and my co host, Justin Gerard.

You are welcome.

And Justin. I wasn't. You just did. You did something for ecrm. What was it you did?

Yeah, that was the global market event I did out there. So we put together, we put up some content up there that, that we'll be doing a show on here soon for every one of our listeners and had a great time, had met a lot of new upcoming brands.

So did you do. Is it a video or was it a zoom meeting?

Mostly meetings. Yep, mostly meetings after they've engaged in the content about what to do once you've gotten your first retail account.

Got it, Got it. Well, you were highly complimented on doing that while. While I was off out wasting time.

You're just driving real fast.

I was out. Yes. Going around in circles on a racetrack. Although actually, folks, when I race cars, I don't go in a circle.

No, no, no, no.

I race circuit tracks.

Right.

So our tracks. Track I was on last week is the Corvette National Corvette Museum track. So it's 3.2 miles and 23 turns.

It's a lot of turns.

It's a lot of turns. I'm dizzy already.

And you know, and I got to. Auto racing is a great. It's a great metaphor for sales, for advertising.

It's true.

It is.

You want.

Because what you need to be a great marketer is what you need to.

Be a good race car driver, which.

Is you need to never stop. You need to always. You need to focus on winning.

Yeah.

You need to adapt fast. You need to be able to change direction quickly.

Agreed.

When things happen, you need to be able to pivot and change direction.

Yep.

You need to be able to recover from mistakes. You need to be able to recover from unforeseen accidents. And you need to understand that as my spiritual guru, Ricky Bobby says, if you ain't first, you're last.

So very impressive.

We've got to focus on what Ricky Bobby says and we follow Ricky Bobby. So anyway, religiously. Religiously. So it's time, Jason, let's. Jason. What am I calling you Jason now?

I'm Jason, that's Justin.

So now it is time, Justin, for us to let's shake and bake and move on with the episode. And on today's show we actually have Jason, who is Jason Vojovic. Now Jason is another long time recovering ad guy like ourselves.

I Don't think I'm recovering. I don't think I've recovered. I'll let you know when that happens.

Admittedly, we are not recovering mad men, and there's something to be said about that. There is a certain personality that is what I refer to as a madman or an ad man. And there are very few of us, to be honest with you. Even in most ad agencies, when you go to most ad agencies, not everybody there is a ad man. They are executives. They are technicians. They're not real mad men. So it's a very unique set of skills. It's a very unique personality. So, Jason, very quickly, tell us a little bit about your madman journey.

Yeah, no, that's. I identify with that. My dad was a madman as well. A real one. He was in the business in the 60s and 70s when that was a thing, kind of that Don Draper era. He worked at all the ad agencies in Chicago and Minneapolis. And when I was a little kid, he would take me along to photo shoots during the whole summer when I was just going to get in trouble at home, because that's the kind of kid I was kind of kidding.

Leo Burnett and Gray and those places.

Yeah, he either worked directly or was contract. He was an art director. So he'd bring him in for. He worked on Magnum PI he worked on Procter and Gamble, a lot of General Mills stuff, because General Mills is headquartered in Minneapolis, where I'm from and where I grew up. And, yeah, during the summer, I would go on photo shoots. We'd go on creative. I'd sit in creative meetings. I added. I played with Legos in the corner for the most part. But, you know, for my entire growing up, it was advertising was what we talked about in the car, and, you know, what we. You know, what we thought about at the dinner table. It was. I don't know. I grew up. I went to college, and I thought, well, this is the life everybody had, you know? And then I discovered that some moms were accountants. I'm like, oh, yeah. I can't imagine what that dinner conversation was like. But it wasn't as fun as, like, what are we going to do to promote the next Magnum PI Season? That's cool.

Yeah.

My poor daughter, who grew up with the madman father and my wife, who has an accounting background.

Yeah, I get it. My mom and her whole family were immigrated from Cuba in the 1960s. So if it wasn't advertising, it was Cuban politics, and it was Cuban food, and it was this real gumbo kind of mix. And I just Think for me, I think what. I'd be curious, Mark and Justin, what you think, but I think what makes a real madman kind of an advertising person to kind of gender neutral. Neutral. Ify that is to say they're just naturally curious people.

Yes.

You know, they just, they just have to. They just there if there's something new, they want to know about it. And you just can't fake that. I found that you just can't get interested in a client's thing if you're not honestly interested in a client's thing, whatever it is, you know, I mean, you guys have done work for what, butt cream? There's butt balm. Yeah, it was butt balm and recticare and come on, you gotta. I'm not saying you gotta be that interested in it. It gets weird. But what do you guys think? I just think that the best people are just. They're curious and they just won't be constrained by that. What would you say?

I couldn't agree more. And this is something, Jason, that we have probably pride ourselves on. And it comes to the way we approach our business. As we've talked in the CPG space, we have gotten. We have become so curious and scientific in the way that we approach our business that we understood that it takes more than a good ad to sell product. So we went so farther and we have to understand their business, their consumers. Okay, some people say that.

Right.

But for us, we understand the full, the full view of success for the client. We understand that, hey, we can create the best piece of creative in the world and we can have the best media plan in the world. Right. But if that product is not in enough retail doors, well, then it's not going to sell enough to make a profit. So how do we solve that problem now? And we figured out how to solve that problem for our clients too. Right.

More than just advertising. The other thing for us, Jason, in advertising is we have a different approach. And as you know, growing up in this business, ad agencies all pride themselves on being brand ambassadors and brand builders and brand developers and brand champions and all the other superlatives that you can tie to the word brand. And we consider ourselves to be match.com the dating service. And our whole approach is our job is to get your product as many new first dates every day as we can. But only great products and great service can get engaged and get a second date and get engaged and get married. And we can't fix that.

Yeah, but it's, you know, it's the Mr. Ink Ball, the glorious Mr. Ink Ball. You can't fix stupid, you know, and, you know, I look at it there. Or is that Ron White? I can't remember which one of those gentlemen on the blue Collar comedy tour. I get their catchphrases wrong sometimes, but I love how you guys put that. That in advertising. And my dad talked about it the same way. He said, ultimately, if you're advertising out there and you're not selling product, you're not moving the needle for the client. They can have all the other goals they want, that they want to create awareness, they want to educate the market. They can have all the other goals they want. But ultimately, no other goal is sustainable other than revenue. That's the only goal that's sustainable.

And it drives me nuts. Because we will hear about some of these big agencies and we're talking about. We're going to. In the next 13 to 26 weeks, we're going to. We're going to measure intent to buy, and we're going to measure your brand awareness in the marketplace. And our whole approach is, how do you deposit intent to buy into your checking account? Because you can't write a check against my intent to have somebody buy my product. So we're very much here, very down at the ground level about if the client is spending money this week, we need to justify that. We return that revenue next week. That money came back. And it's just not the way a lot of the industry works. But it is the way now. Now you have a. You have written a book.

That's right.

And the book is Marketer in Chief. And I see the picture there on the back and looks like.

I know, right? It's Presidential seal. I thought, I got this thing and it's a great banner. And I thought, oh, gosh, I'm writing a book and writing the book in 2019, early part of 2020. And you think, okay, well, you're going to go and you're going to be at book signings. You're going to go to Barnes and Noble or something. I didn't really know. I was just curious about it. And I thought, well, I'm going to need this little banner to put up behind me so that when I'm. When I'm there, people can see me. And maybe they'll see the book because I'm not going to trust the retailer to do anything. Well, we all know that. We're all in our house now. So this has become my zoom background because I'm going to use it for something. Damn sure. I spent Money. I'm going to get a return on this investment. The whole point about the book is I just love history. I didn't write it because I wanted to use this as a step by step guide for brands to be able to follow these steps that the president's followed and you will be successful launching your next consumer brand. I was just a curious person and I love history. I know, Mark, you do too. And I wanted to tell these stories and what I found is when I would talk with clients about, hey, this is a story, this reminds me of Cicero. This reminds me of something Ben Franklin said. This reminds me of something from the Gupta dynasty in India. And they'd look at me like I'd grown another head and they just couldn't. It would take me a long time to relate that story to the issue they were facing. And ultimately though, in the end the client would say, oh, holy crap. I see precisely how that connects to what, to what we're trying to solve here. For me, that's just natural. I'm curious and I want to figure out, I figure every client problem I face, someone has faced some version of that before. So the whole point behind the book is every chapter covers one president from a advertising marketing person's perspective. And my job is to relate some aspect of what happened during their presidency to a common set of problems I see clients face on a day to day basis today to make it history relevant and fun and interesting. And it swears a lot. And it swears a lot. So do be careful. I do want your listeners to understand that if they are offended by certain.

Words, skip the chapter on LBJ is what you're saying.

You know, it's funny. Have you listened to those recordings? Oh, they're hysterical.

No, he was foul.

You know, the most foul mouthed president. This is gonna surprise you if you don't know it already. And Mark, you might know, so don't say anything. The most foul mouth president Justin, who do you think it would be most foul mouthed?

Oh, wow. I mean, well, recent history might. People might say Trump.

Trump's a good guess, but not even close. Like, you think Donald Trump is like, ah, he's got a foul mouth, right? Would not hold a candle to Abraham Lincoln. Not even close.

Really?

Oh, yeah. If you read his, there are all kinds of stories written about him from contemporaries who wrote down the kind of stories that they heard out of Abraham Lincoln's mouth. And they censored those stories and they're still full of profanity, you know, things.

That, that, that Adams and Jefferson used to call each other.

Oh yeah, they were horrible. If anyone thinks that today, like, oh, our politics, like when people tell me that, oh, the political environment today is so, it's so hostile and it's so mean. Like you just haven't read your history.

Not even Jefferson accused Adams of, of being a woman. Adams told in his publications, if you elect Jefferson, your wives and daughters will be raped in the streets because that was their advertising.

Wow.

That was literally in the advertising that Jefferson supports raping your daughters and wives in the streets.

Yeah. So here's the thing. When people, when brands get, because you guys have talked about this on the podcast as well, how do brands navigate of this political environment? And I would just tell you that's not new. We've been working on this for a long time, so we've kind of had a little break here and there from having to take sides on political issues. But that's happened throughout our entire history. Politics and commerce and religion are in kind of a three way battle royal. We'll figure it out. That's why, it's part of why I wrote the book. I just wanted to show people how these things aren't new. We'll get through them. There are solutions out there. We can do this. So that's the aspect of Lincoln's personality and his ability to convey with humor that I cover in the book. Like how to be funny.

Lincoln, I believe was hysterical. One of the comments Lincoln made that I loved was one day someone accused Lincoln of being too faced. And Lincoln's response was, you think if I had two faces I would be using this one? I mean it's self deprecating humor. But he was as you know, he was fast. He was quick.

Yeah, oh yeah, he was so quick he, he could command a room. You know, the Daniel Day Lewis in the 2012 movie Lincoln told the Ethan Allen story. It's a really serious movie. It's a great movie. I love it. Really goes through kind of the tail end of the Civil War and the fight for the new anti slavery amendments and the civil rights amendments. Really stunning commentary with Thaddeus Stevens. The actor escapes me, but just spot on performances. But he told the Ethan Allen story. And the whole thing about the Ethan Allen story is they're at the end of the war, everyone is just fried. And he wanted to kind of help, kind of liven the spirits in the war department. And basically the story was about how Ethan Allen was invited after the Revolutionary War to a British noble house to kind of have dinner and they were Having dinner and they're kind of having drinks and he had to kind of use the bathroom. So he excused himself. They showed him where it was. He goes into the privy and right there, right on the toilet, like right above the toilet is a photo, a painting of George Washington. And not a photo, of course, you know, and have photos, but painting of George Washington. He comes back out, he sits down, back at the table. Presumably he washed his hands or whatever he did. He sits back down and they said, yeah, you know, well, what did you think of the, what did you think of the bathroom? You know, what do you think about, you know, the placement of the portrait? Ethan Allen said, you know, and Lincoln's telling the story. He said, yeah, I think it's a great place to put that painting. And the British lord's like, oh, what? What do you mean it's a great place? He said, yep, it's going to do the most good because nothing's going to make an Englishman shit quicker than the sight of George Washington. But it's just those kind of that ability he had, you know, people think that his ability was kind of these speeches that we carve into monuments and I'd been to National Mall, I've seen these photos of them and just, it's really inspirational to be there and to kind of stand in that presence, you know. But the contemporaries of Lincoln understood that what made him relatable was his sense of humor. And that's the lesson for CPG brands is just relating to people on a really emotional level. That people want that, you know, they want that connection, they want. You got to find out what that emotion is that's driving people. And often it's not the kind of high minded, four score rhetoric, it's oh, I can relate to, I can relate. That's why influencer marketing works, right? Like, oh, I can relate to that person. And it's not the Kylie Jenner I can relate to, it's the Dr. Young that I can relate to. That's the idea.

We try to get our clients to understand that in many cases and sometimes your product just solves a problem.

Right?

So we'll use rectacare as an example. Rectacare is an amazing product.

It is great by the way.

Yeah, it's an amazing product.

It is a great product.

And if you have a hemorrhoid, that stuff is going to numb that roid as soon as it hits it and you're happy. And you don't really care what Recticare's political views are or how they what they. How they handle the environment, or if they're out supporting any particular cause because your butt hurts, you just want your butt to stop hurting.

That's right. I don't want to have to go into Walgreens and tell them I'm a Democrat or Republican to get my RECT account. I just want that right.

But there are other brands where the options are different. And now it matters. It matters that I have an ethos with this company. So if we were to look at a brand like Red Bull as an example.

That's right.

Red Bull sells. Red Bull sells sugar water with caffeine.

That's right.

This is not brain surgery. These are not chemical breakthroughs in science. But I. I want to. But I have an ethos with Red Bull because Red Bull sponsors racing and Red Bull does the cool, you know, air races and they have extreme athletes. And I get these people and they're cool and I like what they're about.

Right. They're selling energy. Right.

Because I could go buy monster energy instead of buying Red Bull energy. So now we're building an ethos with that customer base. So it does matter. It matters with what you're selling and who you're trying to communicate to. Now, I do think that we have moved into a time right now where there are some brands who can benefit from deciding which side of the political aisle they want to be on. And if we look at brands like Black Rifle Coffee as an example, they've done a great job of. We're ex military, we're pro military, we're pro conservative views, we like to blow crap up. We do videos where we shoot everything in sight. They've been smart enough to figure out, and they're terrific people, by the way, but they've been smart enough to figure out we just need to be who we are and let the people who are like us follow us. Because we don't need the whole world to love us. We're perfectly fine if this group of people is passionately in love with us.

That's the key word.

Yeah, Justin, I think you're absolutely right there.

That.

Passion is it. What's that old rule of thumb that 2% of your audience are going to be brand zealots? And there'll be another chunk of your audience that are occasional users. And then the big chunk might be just, you know, just one and done. One and done. Speaking in and out. The in and out is another example of that, you know, where they're focused on a passionate group of people because it's Just, it's just burgers and buns. You know, this is not. This is not really new. But they're. They're really focused on, you know, delivering that kind of food experience, you know, fresh food. They will not expand beyond their supply chain. They are, you know, they do have kind of like Chick Fil A, have a series of, you know, their. Their founders. They're privately owned companies. So they have, you know, they have a certain set of views that they are passionate about in the same way that a Patagonia has its views, the same way a Ben and Jerry's has its views. I think the key thing, Justin, that you're right with is that passion, because you can't fake it. If Patagonia goes out there and all of a sudden you discover that Patagonia has been dumping plastic into Puget Sound for the past 20 years, well, that's not living it. But they live it. They talk with people about. They set up a store where you can buy old clothes because they want to actually use less of them. Okay, great. That's a thing where you've got to. It's just as much kind of picking the political side. It's kind of living and kind of going deep. Black Rifle coffee, they're hiring veterans, all of those things to really make sure that, hey, we're going to. This isn't just kind of marketing spin for us. We live this.

Right.

So let me give you a little insight on Black Rifle. So I'm a part of a Christian outreach program called World Mission, and we've been working to pull people out of Afghanistan. So we've been trying to get Christians, Americans and allies that have been left behind out.

Right.

The Black Rifle people have been right next to us through this whole thing. And I mean, with effort, with intelligence, with money, even to a point where one of their own executives flew over to meet with our contacts in Pakistan to try to bring people out. They are the real deal. So, I mean, it's genuine, it's authentic.

And it has to be. And I think that's exactly what Jason's talking about is. And let's blend the two examples because we've gone from a. We talked about recticare, which is if there is no other definition of first aid than hemorrhoids. Right? So you've got. This is a problem, and I am passionate about solving said problem. And then we're shifting over. When you talk about Black Rifle coffee. Now we're talking about a category that, for lack of better term, is commoditized in A lot of. Lot of consumers.

And coffee is. Coffee is an experience.

It will. It now. It has. Well, the palette has changed in the United States. And so then you've. You've got different segments within the category. Right. So. But Black Rifle Coffee didn't say, hey, we're going to be able to make better coffee than anybody else. No, because guess what that actually costs. Your margins will not be there. You're going to go out of business. Okay, fine. How else can we do this? We're going to create an ethos.

We're going to create a passion.

We're going to make coffee for patriots.

And they have been able to develop a passionate group of followers.

A.

And it doesn't matter that if it's only 10 or 15% of the country. Again, do the math. 15% of 350 million people buy your stuff regularly. Yeah. You've got a really good.

Now, who was the chain who just refused to shut down in California? Was that In N Out that actually closed down or was that Whataburger?

I can't remember. I don't think Whataburger is based out of. I think they're based out of Texas, aren't they?

Yeah, yeah, Whataburger.

I think they are. But it must be in and out. I think it was In n Out in California last week. Refused to reject people who didn't have a vaccine passport. They said that we are not going to make our customers have a vaccine passport. And they actually shut their stores down because the health Department San Francisco shut their stores down. And they actually said, you know what? Shut our stores down. Go ahead. Shut our stores down. We're going to stand for what we believe. Now, I thought was funny because somebody just sent me a picture of one of their soda cups that they just came out with, and if you flip the soda cup upside down, it says, let's go, Brandon.

Oh, that's.

Come on.

Oh, boy.

It's printed. It's not. Somebody didn't write it on there. It's printed.

They printed it on the cup.

And just in the little tiny rim of the cup.

Wow.

It says, let's go, Brandon.

Wow.

But you know what? If that's your brand.

Well, exactly. And that's. And that's what we're talking about here. And we. And you know, it's very interesting because we have to. I know here. And Jason, I'm sure you, you, you've. You've had this conversation many times with, with clients that you've worked with. We almost have to every time we, we speak to a new client, do a re education because we don't want them to lose the concept that we're discussing here. That passion is very important in that consumers do make their decisions based on emotion for the most part. Right?

That's right.

I think what brands don't understand, a lot of marketers today don't understand is the pathway to that emotion. They get confused there to your point. They earlier, they get lost in the, the high brow, almost unattainable thoughts and beliefs and it's like, no, no, someone is allowed to be passionate about hemorrhoids. That's okay too. You're still going to get there. It's what is the right line, what is the right journey that you'll be able to create that passion for consumers to connect to your product. And there's many different ways and different categories to do it.

I think that's the key thing. We talk about ethos, we talk about emotion. And that's why the title of the book that I wrote is how each President Sold the American Idea, not How It Sold the American Product. Because the specifics about what America is have changed over the past 220 years markedly in lots of places. Anyone who doesn't know that, hasn't read about was a very, very different place in many different eras of totally fine. Like any innovation, it evolves, but it's that idea that has carried it through rather than the specifics of it. And I think what I hope people will get out of that is how do I get at what the idea was underneath? Because once you understand the idea and the pathway, just as you said, Justin, you can draw that same line between your brand and the idea that people are buying into, sometimes with a very clear problem solution brand like Recticare. Butt Balm. It's okay, the baby's crying, butt's on fire. This is a problem solution, fit sort of thing. Very easy. So it's a short path to that doesn't mean it's not an intense emotion, but it's a shorter path. The path to a Ford F150, best selling car in the United States. Again, it has sold. I checked on this. 534,831 vehicles so far, even after a chip shortage has cut that number by 9%. So what are people buying? It's pretty clear. Mark, you've talked with this on previous podcasts. You said if transportation was really the problem that people were solving, everyone would be in a two seater smart car, right? And maybe there'd be A four seater version if you had kids, but that everyone would be in there. So why on earth would people buy an F150? Well, what's the idea of the F150? It's ruggedness, it's power, resourcefulness, masculinity, in some ways, in some ways femininity.

And we know the vision of this. And we know that the boxes in the back of the F1 in over 90% of the F150s are empty.

Oh, they're pristine, too. I got a bunch of buddies who drive them and they do the bedliners so that they can clean them and they take the Clorox wipes to them so that they're. So that they're nice. I get it. Like, hey, personally, I drive a Prius. Not because of the idea of the. I didn't. But this is something I know you guys have talked about in previous podcasts. I'm sure you talk about with clients as well. There's that buyer who kind of buys into the ethos of the Prius, the whole ecosystem of that. And then there are other buyers who are like, hey, wait a second, this is the cheapest car to own that I can possibly own, that the brakes never need to be replaced. Then it gets 60 miles to the gallon. I'm a little worried about price shocks and fuel. That thing has more cubic storage space than most small SUVs. And the thing's 22,000 bucks. I'll buy one of those just to tool around where I live here. No big deal. I mean, I wouldn't take it on a long trip. It's not comfortable, I can promise you that. So there's that buyer too, who's going to be on the periphery of that. And that's really the balance is how do you attract that buyer with the idea to make them passionate, keep the people in that second orbit. That can be really profitable for you. And what do you do with the rest? Is it okay to say? Because Toyota, I've had an opportunity to chat with a few people who could do the US Positioning for Prius and they do the same thing on their side. Like, hey, we know that an F150 buyer isn't going to buy one of these and we're going to repel that person and that's okay.

With the F150, buyer can have one as a backup. They can put the Prius in the back of the.

Yeah, put it in the back.

So when we look at, you know, when we look at politics and corporate advertising, business advertising There is crossover. Because if you think about it, not only does it affect your advertising, but at some point, you as a marketer might need to be a politician. You may need to go do some political things, whether it's dealing with the fda, the ftc, dealing with zoning commission, whatever the case is. It's hard to separate yourself totally from the world of politics.

I think it's foolish for brands to believe that, that they can act in apolitical bubble where, you know what, if you're based in Minneapolis, Minnesota, San Francisco, Austin, Texas, Dallas, Texas, wherever you're based, whatever state you're in, you are going to be impacted by local laws and regulations of all types. And large brands, large CPG brands, we're not talking about the challenger brands. I think there's an area of opportunity for challenger brands, but large CPG brands absolutely do not ignore the political sphere. There are organizations here in town, in Minneapolis, where I live, but this is the same for every major Fortune 500 organization. They lobby extensively for favorable terms, for all manner of different products, for different hours that they can operate, different products they can sell or can't sell. And part of it is for they are trying to create the most favorable business operating environment they can, using the levers of government and regulation to do that. Now, the tricky part, of course, is, hey, if you were to just kind of go out and just say, hey, we want to not allow Walmart within 20, you know, within 2 miles of any target, and we want you to write that into a law, well, you can expect Walmart to have something to say about that. But there are all kinds of places where that line is fuzzy, right? Like, is it okay that a hairdresser needs to be licensed in one state and not licensed in another? It's that sort of thing happens all the time. Now, if you run the board for hairstylists or you run a major training program for beauticians, you might want to make sure that they have to be licensed and they have to take a certain amount of number of courses in order to do that. And you could justify that any way you wanted. You could say, well, you know, you want people to be safe and, you know, protecting people. I'm not sure for me, your listeners can't see me, but I am not concerned about my hair. But the point is that big brands and large organizations absolutely are advocating for themselves at the government to create a frame of competition that is best for them. And I really think Challenger brands have an opportunity to do that. I think one of the best examples of Them doing that is supplements and vitamins kind of getting around the. A lot of people say, like, well, the supplements of vitamins aren't regulated by the fda. Well, if you've ever worked with the fda, which I have, you know that. Yeah, in many ways, a great organization helps protect the public from dangerous drugs. Got it. But it is prohibitively expensive for many smaller brands to go through the approval process, even if they are safe, even if they are effective. So many supplements and vitamin brands purposely go around that. Otherwise there's no way they could make it to market.

And even here in Michigan, let me give you an example how it affects a big company. So here in Michigan, we're the Motor City. So automobiles have big power here, always have. So we have very strong franchise laws.

Right.

So our franchise laws, one, prohibit a dealership from being within six miles of a competing dealership. So you can't have a Chevy store more than six miles away. It's in the law. You can't have it.

Right.

But what's even further is you cannot sell a car in Michigan unless you are an independent dealer. A manufacturer cannot sell a car direct to consumer in the state of Michigan. Enter Tesla.

That's right.

Now, Tesla has a business model that will not function in Michigan because they can't sell cars directly to consumers here. And to your point, Tesla actually sued the state of Michigan. They still haven't changed the laws, but I think they've come up with a workaround for Tesla to sell the cars through a third party or something. That happens when we bought our Tesla. At the time we bought it, we had to go to Ohio and buy it.

You see all kinds of examples of that. Indeed. The frustrating part is that when you take a look at the impact of that, there's a professor I quote in the book from the University of Minnesota, Dr. Morris, who's done quite a bit of work in the term for all of this is called rent seeking. So you're essentially seeking rent in the government to create your business model. And what he says is, listen, it decreases mobility for people to move across state lines because the rules are often different. It tends to raise prices for consumers. And the worst part is that it actually doesn't really help the average worker, the average person trying to make a decision. It doesn't really help them. What it does is it protects. It creates a walled garden around an industry that can protect itself. And the problem is, it's Tesla's exposing that walled garden of traditional automakers is when they come in, they are the epitome of a challenger brand. They're going to come in with a disruptive business model in the same way Uber and Lyft destroy the medallion market in New York City.

Oh, can you imagine? Those medallions were worth what, a million?

A million dollars? Million dollars.

Now I understand you can't sell one for 80,000.

Yeah, that price has not bitcoined. We'll just say that.

Yeah, yeah. Are they still at the 80 number or are they even going down further?

Do you know the last number? I have the same last number that you had there. But I'm not sure what's happened kind of during the pandemic. But here's the thing. When you think about an Uber or a Lyft and they've been all over the news for advocating for that kind of open market in California, in New York, all kinds of different places. And what's interesting about the business model from my perspective is I remember right as the pandemic was getting going early part of 2020, just looking at Uber and Lyft and I've got a client who does, all they do is competitive intelligence and you're looking at Uber and Lyft and kind of that ride sharing business model like they're done. Not a chance. That's a dead business model right there. Kind of environmental circumstance. Well, what did they do? They pivoted. And yeah, it's not like it didn't hurt them, but it hurt. Uber eats. They found a way, they found a way to contract with Amazon to deliver packages. They found ways to make this thing work. And that's what walled garden markets are really bad at doing. And that's really the benefit for Challenger CPG brands. I know a lot of your listeners are those brands and trying to find a way. How do I, you know, how do I compete against this kind of walled garden that this, the major competitor has set up? And really the, the answer is disruption. Go around them. You know, you can lobby, you can be, you can work it, you know, work, you know, work to get into the government a little bit. Once you get that capital, to be able to afford the legal side of it and the lobbying side of it, but better strategy disrupt around make their walled garden irrelevant.

So who would you say was the first president that was actually packaged? Oh, it's sold like a packaged good.

You know, I'm going to pick on Justin again here just because I know Mark, I know you know Justin.

Wow.

If you were to look at kind of back at presidents, who would you feel is like, where did we Hit that inflection point of, okay, the President is now a mass market commodity.

I mean, and I'm going to show my age here. I'm going to show my age here. To me it feels like Reagan, but I could be. He might not be the first one, but he was definitely a product.

He absolutely was. The playbook he followed was Calvin Coolidge's playbook.

Ah, Silent Cal.

Silent Cal, the hero of Chuck Woolery, by the way. Calvin Coolidge. I, you know, when I was researching the book, there were a number of presidents that I didn't know a lot about. I was interested to learn and great, awesome. There were a number of presidents, especially those in the 20s, that I just, I just had, I did not have the right. I just didn't understand that era. People think about today, the information age as this era of massive disruption. But if you go Back to the 1920s, you think, well, what change happened in the 1920s? The entire consumer culture was built in the 20s. The Sears catalog, the dishwasher, the microwave oven, the radio, electric razor, or dozens of the airplane electromagnetic magnetic spectrum, everything was invented. Quantum theory was invented in the 1920s. So when you start to think about the amount of change done in that time and you think, okay, there's this entire consumer package culture because there's so much more engineering, there's so many more products than you could ever, than people could ever hope to buy. We needed to create an entire new industry to figure out how to package these products and get them to people. So that was the whole idea behind the Sears catalog. It was the whole idea behind Bruce Barton, the original bbdo, the B in bbdo. It was Bruce Barton and what he figured out. The genius of Bruce Barton and why I talk about Bruce Barton is his genius was figuring out that there is no difference between a product and an idea and a person like a political candidate. And he packaged Calvin Coolidge and all of the innovation that comes around like, oh gosh, well, how did Ronald Reagan package himself that he used one on one speaking versus instead of the American people and you citizens, he would talk like he was talking to you. You felt like you knew him. Bruce Barton coached Calvin Coolidge to do that. People think it was FDR who did the fireside chats like he was the first person. Nope, that was Calvin Coolidge and taught him how to be good on radio. He was the first person to target market things we take for granted in advertising right now. He was the first person to say, well, I need a different message for women who are just Becoming voters and they're not going to vote the same way as men. Got to think of them differently. He was the first person to reach out to African Americans with different messaging. First person to reach out to rural people with different messaging. First person to use astroturfing to build the illusion of grassroots support. First person to use images like how did you see Calvin Coolidge in the magazine? All of those techniques and tactics were advertising techniques and tactics and created this image of Silent Cal that he was Calvin Coolidge and that he was cool.

Because he changed his wardrobe.

Yeah, he changed really subtle things like he was Calvin Coolidge at the time. People wore these really formal top hat kind of suits. So Calvin Coolidge wore a business suit because he was going to get down to business. And the country was growing and it was expanding quick and you wanted a cool headed business person. Especially when Warren Harding, the end of his presidency, flamed out and he was embroiled in all kinds of scandals. And you wanted someone with a calm, cool hand on the wheel. That was the origin of cool came from that right there.

The Harding presidency. That's the one that had the biggest controversy until Nixon.

That's right. The Teapot don't. Yeah, the Teapot Dome scandal.

Yes. And the person who gave the money to Steward in the Teapot zone was my uncle's father. Yes.

So it's in the family.

Yes, that's a whole other story.

So.

Yeah, so it's like we brought down a presidency in my family. But at any rate, I'll give you an example here. So I'll give you an example. If you took a human being who died in 1950 and you brought them back to life today, and let's say you took a person who died in 1900 and put them into 1950. A person who died in 1950, if you brought them back today, they would be surprised by everything. But they could function.

Right.

So television still work? You got a remote? Cars. Cars are cars. You still drive them the same way. And the appliances, you know, kind of been modernized, but they still work. The computer's kind of a new thing. But I know what a typewriter works and I know how to. I knew how to use a typewriter. So now I can. I'm going to transfer those skills now. Take that person from the 1900s and move them in the 1950. What's a car? What's a television, What's a radio? So you can see that big time. Z, that big dramatic time where technology changed. We think of us being the big technological Change. But you're right, that big change came between 1900 and 1950.

That's right.

That's where the change happened.

I just think about what my grandmother lived through. You know, she lived into her 90s, you know, and she would. She would talk with me about that. She talked with me about, you know, what it was like to live before vaccines, what it was like to live before cars and before refrigerators.

You know, my father used a. Used to use a buckboard, a. A wagon and a horse to. He was a young kid. When he was a kid, he rode, took horses to go pick up milk and stuff for the family.

Yes. I just think about that level of change, and I think now, and I get it, that's kind of a recency bias, right? That we all believe we are living in the most challenging and transformational times. And in reality, I'm not sure I see a lot of evidence for that. I see evidence for the 1920s being transformational. I listened to a talk from David McCullough, the historian. He's written a number of books. John Adams, he's written them on Harry Truman, 1776. Excellent, excellent scholarship. I listened to him give a talk in Minneapolis, and It was in 2008, and it was right before the election, and people were asking about, this is just this transformational time. It feels so uncertain and we feel so much anxiety. And his message, kind of a gravelly voiced older guy, he said, listen, I got to help explain something to you. This is nothing compared to 1777. And when Washington's on the run, we have no idea what's going on. The level of uncertainty at that time, it's not even close. It didn't really settle down to the point where Americans felt secure until the latter part of the 19th century, 1880s, 1890s, where that first time when Americans finally started to feel like, okay, nothing, we might be kind of safe here. Like, we're on the path here. It's kind of that Teddy Roosevelt kind of era that really kind of captured that. Before then there was a lot of anxiety. Think of the Civil War. Think of living through that versus living through. Well, now we have iPhones.

Come on.

Let'S be okay here.

So I'll tell you a quick story, and we may bring this up when you're on the other podcast. Jonathan Winters. Jonathan Winters. As a child, his father took him to meet Orville Wright because his father knew the Wright brothers. Fifty, 60 years later, Jonathan Winters is on stage doing a presentation with Neil Armstrong. And it occurs to him that in the span of his own 50 year life, 60 year life. @ that point he actually shook hands with the first person to fly. And technology changed so much that he shook hands with the first person to land on the moon.

Think about how lifespan. Yeah. Think about how surreal that was. And we're not even talking about the, the dawn of the nuclear age. We're not talking about, you know, you know, all of that kind of, you know, that kind of disruption during that period of history. So I think when, when, when I talk with clients, most of my kind of day to day work is helping launch new products. Kind of I'm product innovation, kind of creating the new things. I do work in advertising as well, but primarily it's kind of getting new products and services off the ground. And what I try to remind folks in the kind of my purpose in writing the book was to help show people that, yeah, there are some kind of fundamental truths that are not changing, that people buy into ideas. The product is a wrapper. The idea comes in. So how do you get people to buy the idea? Mark to your point about the Tesla, the Tesla is as much a car as it is an idea of getting off of. I'm never going to the gas station again. I'm going to electrify. I'm going in that direction. I want to be on the front end of that. I want to be that type of person or I identify with the type of person Elon Musk is. I just identify with that push to push us forward to go to space, to go to Mars. I want to be. That's the idea I'm buying into A Model S is the wrapper. That idea comes in. And yeah, it's great that it also gets you from place to place and with. On ludicrous speed. I know it might not. It's kind of an old movie, but man, Spaceballs was funny. I really do. I do. Mel Brooks, there's a podcast and people should go check this out too. But Mike Rose book, he wrote a book on kind of as I heard it or something like that. And he told the story. I think the first story is about Mel Brooks in World War II and how Mel Brooks kind of got up there and put speakers facing the German lines. He risked his life to put speakers up there so he could play jokes, kind of criticizing Hitler over the loudspeaker to the German soldiers. And that's the kind of humor is risky and kind of getting out there. I mean, we talk about kind of humor being risky today. Like, well, the worst thing that you could do is you get booted off of Netflix.

Right?

You get canceled, you don't get shot.

Yeah, Mel Brooks could have been shot and people thought he was just nuts. But that's the sort of, that sort of passion. And that's kind of the theme of this, right? Is just what's that ethos? What's that idea? What's that kind of emotion that's driving people? And how do you make sure that the product can pay off on that in the right way? And I think the more that brands can focus on doing that and making this, the better you can make that connection, the quicker the path to revenue you're going to have. Everyone wants to buy that. People want to have that emotional need satisfied as quickly as possible. The quicker you can make that. I just look, I look at In N Out Burger. I've been to it several times. I don't live in the area, but I'm always at an In N Out Burger when I'm in the Southwest. And I have never been there and walked right up to the counter. There's always been a line either in the drive through or in there. It's always busy. Any time of the day or night that says something.

It's Chick Fil A here.

I see Chick Fil A building. I got a Chick Fil A out my window. I see it there. It's my wife and I sold our house, we lived in. We're living in an apartment because we want to, we want to move different places. So we're in here. I'm looking at Chick FIL A. It's 4:30 in the afternoon, Central Standard Time here. And okay, it's. This isn't dinner time, guys.

Right.

You know, line. There are 50 car. There are more than 50 cars in that drive through in two lines.

Yeah, absolutely.

There's just something about it. There's something about that kind of passion that when you stand for something, people will line up for it. I mean, why do people pay $200 for a reasonably average Patagonia vest?

Right.

That Columbia one is a fourth the price. Why isn't everyone buying a Columbia? Why isn't everyone driving a two seater Smart car connecting to that passion? And Mark, I think you're right. I think brands that feel like they can ignore all of that and they can kind of somehow live outside of the environment they're in and not kind of pivot quickly. When you see the wall coming up on that track, you need to be turning in advance. Once you see the wall, it's probably a little too late. Yep.

Well, Jason, we really appreciate you being here. Jason Vojovic, folks, the name of the book is Marketer in Chief. Go to the show Notes at CPG Insiders and we'll have a link for Jason of his. You have social media links, too?

Yeah, I sure do.

We'll have those in the end with a link to get to the book. And Jason, we appreciate you being with us here. Folks, that's it for today. If you enjoy the show, make sure that you send links to other people in the industry, obviously. And give us a five star review wherever you get your podcast because that helps. List us up. Oh, listen, a bell just went off. That means an angel got his wings. I believe that's it for this week, folks. We'll see you on the next edition 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.