The Secret to Getting Your Product on Shelves (and Keeping It There)

Foreign.

Welcome everybody, to another edition of CPG Insiders. I'm your host, Mark Young with my co host, the Robin to my Batman, Justin Gerard. How's it going, Robin? I don't see the tights on today.

I got it under here. You know, it's ready to go when I have to jump into action.

So you wear it under your regular clothes. Superman did that too, I think, didn't he?

Exactly.

Okay, that, that makes, that makes sense then. That tracks. So we're gonna, we're gonna have a, we're gonna have a conversation with one of my dear friends who's been on the podcast many times. For those of you who listened to us before, David Berenbaum. Now, David. Best way I can introduce David is to tell people David has forgotten more about the CPG industry than most people know about the CPG industry. So I'm not even going to get into how many years he's been in it, but I'm going to tell you it's many decades.

I lost count anyway.

Many decades working for some of the biggest brands in the world and working for some of the startup brands in the world. And we're going to talk a little bit about ecrm. Now, Justin, you and I have this experience, so I wanted to lay this out and we'll let David comment on it. You and I run into brands all the time. That a couple things happen. One, they've either got a booth set, they got a room at ECRM and they're going to present. And we talk to them and say, okay, these people are going to want to see the marketing plan. Well, we don't, you know, we're gonna do some social media. We're going to, we're gonna, we're gonna do a viral video. Because it's so easy to do a viral video, isn't it? You just get out of your house, get your phone out, shoot video, and it becomes, you know, millions of people watch it.

Yeah. Or it's. It's.

Yeah, it's something they're gonna think about afterwards.

Right.

They don't have to worry about that right now. They'll figure that out.

Yeah.

And you and I try explaining to people something. And that is one. When you spend 20 minutes with a buyer, about 15 minutes of it's going to be. The buyer is going to want to spend 15 minutes finding out how you're going to drive people into his store to buy this thing. The second thing is there's 148,000 different SKUs in a Walmart supercenter So if your plan is that I'm going to be the one over 148,000 that everyone stops and reads the package on, you're not dealing with reality.

No.

The third thing is. And I'm. I'm. I'm interested. Get David to weigh in on this. You've got about 60 to 90 days to hit a Mendoza Line, or you're already being looked at as a place to cut. So.

And again, remember, for our audience, Bendoza line means a sales goal. For all of you guys that don't have not heard that term for Mark before, that's the minimum sales goal. So you got to hit that thing out the gate or you're ready for some really tough conversations.

And Mendoza Line comes from the world of baseball, where it was determined there was a certain player by the name of Mendoza, and they determined he had the exact minimum batting average of what it took to stay on the team. So in baseball, it's what's the batting average you have to have to not get kicked off the team. In retail, the Mendoza Line is what's the weekly units per week per store that you need to have to not be kicked off the team? It's the same thing. Anyways, David, welcome to CPG Insiders. Great to have you back, buddy.

It's a pleasure to be with you guys, as always.

So what do you think of what we were just talking about?

Yeah. Well, let me start by saying that you and I, your team and. And I have had so many success stories in retail that go back too many years that I've even lost count. But I know this. I walked around one day. I think it was a Walgreens store. Maybe it was a CVS. I walked around the store and literally counted about 200 SKUs that you and I have had something to do with, you know, going all the way back to the beginning. Either you or I. Or you and I.

They're on every shelf.

They're on every shelf. And my goodness, you know, in all different kinds of categories. So what you said, you know, is a great start. I want to say, first of all that, you know, ECRM provides the very, very best opportunity and the best platform by far of any of the trade organizations to give a new product, a new company, an entrepreneur, even an established company who has new products.

We're big supporters of ecrm. And, folks, you may also know ECRM from their other name, which is rangemate.

Yeah.

Because that's the same operation.

Yeah. It's now the best technology available in the consumer products Industry and more and more retailers are relying on it. I, you know, hear that every day.

So Kroger requires you to be in rangeme in Kroger.

Yeah. And if you're a retailer, you could really understand why that's such a valuable tool. It makes life a lot easier for you as a retailer because everything is right there, including, by the way, your marketing plan if you're a product. So ECRM provides really a. Just a tremendous forum and opportunity. And I've lost count of how many I've been to, but whenever I go, they put the number of ECRMs you've been to on your badge. And I don't know, I think I'm up almost over a hundred.

I was going to say yours looks more like a Social Security number at this point.

Well, this, you know, just a trivial thing. I was at the very first one when Charlie Bolas first started the concept. Charlie was actually a. He was the founder, by the way. He was actually a buyer at a company called Boston Distributors in Cleveland. And he was a buyer that I called on and that I did business with. And I remember, you know, I was one of probably 100 people. He probably ran this idea buy when he was starting to put together ecrm. And, you know, I thought it was one of those things. It's too good to be true. You know, you're going to give all these new companies in new products, 20 minutes with buyers when the hardest thing for these companies is to even get an initial appointment with major retailers. But now, you know, you're gonna. You're gonna pay a fee and you're gonna go and you're gonna talk to about 40 of these companies in the course of four days at a beautiful resort somewhere. And Charlie's ECRM is gonna give you. They're gonna tear down, or they're gonna kind of rip apart a hotel room for you. It won't have a bed in it. All the furniture will be gone, and it's gonna be your room to present. And what could be better than that? I mean, that's so much better than a booth at a trade show where you're one of like 2,000 of them and you've got 10ft to cram everything in, including your samples and your displays and your products. And I really love the format of Meet the Market at nacds and gmdc. That's probably the second best format where you go table to table and you make your presentation maybe in 12 minutes. And at least you get to see a lot of different retailers. But the best by far is having this hotel room, because hotel rooms are bigger than you think when everything is out of there. And you can really, for the most part, choreography, or you can design the whole room to be your presentation for your products and your company. So you could put, you know, poster boards all over the place. You could put product displays, you know, everywhere. You can very methodically walk through the room yourself as though you're a buyer and put everything in a very logical order that you want them to see and in the right places. And of course, you're going to have a presentation, you know, on a PC or a bigger screen.

Yeah. And it's so much more intimate, too, because you're not in the middle of a big room with a thousand people walking around. You're trying to hold a conversation well.

And they have such a good staff. I've made so many friends over the years with people that worked at ECRM over the years, and I've gone to weddings and bar mitzvahs and all kinds of things of people that work there. And some of the young people that were there when I first started, you know, they're almost my age, so it's really a great organization. And they've got a great.

David, do you remember when we were the young startup guys?

Yeah, yeah. That's starting to become a long time ago. But they've got a great CEO in. Greg Farr, who had a Nielsen background, which is, you know, terrific. They've got really great people with unbelievable backgrounds. Wayne Bennett, who used to be the publisher or the editor of Drugstore News. Lisa Colliro, who's been there since the very, very beginning. Tony. And, you know, they've got Joe, who does videos with the participants. They've just got from top to bottom. They've got great people and all the way to, you know, the. The young people who sit in the hallway and come knock on your door until you've got three minutes left and make sure that your. That your systems are working, your technology is working. They've just thought of it all and, you know, whereas Charlie really invented all this and deserves credit for putting it together, Greg and his team have just done a phenomenal job of adding technology. They go through great pain, starting weeks and weeks before your event, and they have a staff that helps you as a. As a company, as a supplier to learn how to use their system, their technology range, me and everything else. And they tell you what, you know, their perception of what the retailers are looking for and how to put your time together. All that said, there's one thing that they really can't. They're not really in a position to tell the participants. Whereas Mark, you are in a tremendous position to educate people that are going to ECRM and mostly people that are already there is that you have, if you're a supplier, you have a product, you're a new company. Along with all the other essentials that you need to present, you really need to be able to lay out a basic marketing plan and the reason for that. Think of yourself as a retailer attending this event. You know, you're going to see 50 or 60 different new companies while you're there. You're going to see some established companies where they're, you're going to be doing category reviews, but you're going to see, you're going to see so many companies, so many products. Now you're going to see most of the products you're going to see you've never seen before. Some of the innovations you're going to see are tremendous. You know, wow, that's a really cool product. But I'm a retailer, I'm risk avoidant. I'll lose my job as a buyer if I put something on the shelf that doesn't sell. And heaven forbid I can't get my money back, you know, after it dies or doesn't sell, that's how I lose my job.

And let me add something to that for a minute, David.

Yeah.

I want to remind people of something of the Harvard study that we've discussed here before. And that study shows that there's about 45,000 new SKUs introduced into the market every year. Of that 45,000, only 15% of them are still on the shelf 24 months later. And of the 15%, nearly 90% of those belong to an existing brand that, you know, it's like tied as a new unit or even somebody with five SKUs goes to six SKUs. So when we're looking at one single SKU, first time entrepreneurial consumer packaged goods, the odds of staying on the shelf is, I'd have to do the math, but it's like 150 over 45,000. So when you're the buyer, understand the buyer knows that mathematically the odds are in his favor or her favor that you will fail. So it is so much easier and safer to say no than it is to say yes.

And buyers, of course they, and you know, entrepreneurs ask me a lot of really the same questions all the time. And one of the things they will always want to discuss is they'll Say, how come the retailers, whether it's cvs, Walgreens, Walmart or whoever, why do they always load up their shelves with items from Procter and Gamble and Colgate, Johnson and Johnson, you know, depending on the category, l', Oreal, whatever. Why do they do that? Well, the answer is really easy. They do that because they're low risk, because they know that those type of consumer product companies already have a systemic plan to move product off the shelf. So it's very low risk.

And they know even if the product fails, those companies are big enough to swap it out and give their money back or give them more of another product.

Yeah, so I'm never going to get fired as a buyer for putting in another skew or another flavor or another color or another size of a PNG item. It's just like almost no risk at all.

Well, sure. Look how everybody went, went both feet into Coke. What was it? New Coke. It was a flaming failure. But everybody had it because it's Coke.

It's Coke and they didn't get stuck with it. You know, Coke took care of it at the end and replaced it all with.

Because they're big enough to make good on it if it fails.

Yeah. So very few clients that you or I have will ever have, you know, the budget, you know, that a PNG has on advertising. However, retailers aren't necessarily looking for a match in the spend. They're looking for a plan. And like I always train my clients to say is that, you know, because retailers always ask you, what's your spend? How much money are you going to be spending on your ad plan? Well, you shouldn't be punished for buying value, you know, so you might get.

Punished for not spending the right percentage.

That's exactly right. And so there's two different general kinds of marketing and advertising, number one, and these are real general. But number one is the external advertising and marketing that you do, what you do to bring consumers to the shelf. The other part of it is you need to participate in the retailer's own advertising programs. And, you know, it's so important before you go to ecrm, you know, get somebody that really knows the industry and the retailers to advise you and, you know, sit down with them over a very long cup of coffee and find out what you need to know about each specific retailer. Because no two are really the same. They all have slightly different business models, believe it or not. They have different end result, objectives and goals. They go about their business all in different ways. And one of the turnoffs that any retailer has, whether it's CCRM or nacds or GMDC or whatever is when the new company sits down and says, tell me about your retail chain. Like, you gotta be kidding. We get 20 minutes and you don't know anything about my business? Well, we don't have any in the city that I live in. Okay. You know, this is when they start looking at their watch. You need to know all that. Or you could have somebody with you that knows all those things and that's fine too. But know not just how many stores and where their headquarters is. And you know, you need to know, you need to know how do they promote their own retail chain, how do they advertise and how do they advertise the products that are on the shelf? Which of course is called co op advertising. But in addition, that's the, that's a give me. But in addition to that, you need to lay out the rest of the plan. Now, advertising and marketing today is complicated because it's chopped up and divided into so many different types of marketing and advertising. In the old days, you know, it was television almost period, it was tv, was radio, print advertising. And those things are still around and they're still extremely important. But you know, digital marketing and advertising now is a big piece of it. But that too, you need somebody like yourself, Mark Young, to sit down with you at an ECRM or in the lobby and advise you what kind of marketing and advertising to put on your tentative plan. Because really, you know, for some types of brands, digital advertising is really what you need. And maybe all that you need, maybe, maybe your game plan is to build your business up digitally for 18 months and then take that consumer base to the retailer. Maybe it's to start with retailer. You know, we know that digital advertising is mostly geared for click, you know, click now and buy it. So it sends a lot of business to Amazon or to your own e commerce site. It's a little bit more difficult, although you guys know how to make it happen. But it's a little bit more difficult to digitally advertise and get people to go into the car, turn on the motor and go drive to CVS and buy the product when the consumer really wants to buy it right now, if you get them interested. But that works for some brands in some categories. In some situations, if your main business is going to be brick and mortar, which really most brands still are, they need to talk to somebody with like your experience and your background as to what, what do you imagine that would be? You know, will I be doing some Ads on terrestrial TV or will I be doing some advertising on streaming cable news? You know, there's so many different avenues and possibilities. You know, radio, there's Sirius radio, there's, there's am, there's fm, there's, there's podcasts, which are so incredibly prominent right now. So the list goes on and on of all the different possibilities. And I would say in the first five minutes to anybody that's preparing to go to ECRM is that you need to sit down with somebody like Mark Young, who's an author, has written books, has given so many lectures and has had countless numbers of success stories with new brands on. How do I lay that out? Because the truth is, you really, you know, you're the new client, you've got new products, you really don't know how to do it. There's no way you can know how to do it, you know, unless you've done it many, many times before. And most people who attend ECRM have never done it, or they've tried and failed, or they have great products, but they really don't know how to sit down and tell a retailer how they're going to move it off the shelf. Now, retailers aren't going to sit down and tell you how to do it. They haven't put all the diligence into thinking about how to market your brand or your product.

They can't have time to brands the deal.

They don't want to, they don't have to. They just want to avoid the risk. And so that's what you need to have laid out. And I will tell you, I've been to so many ECR meetings with so many clients. Now, of course, if they're my client, they're going to have all that ready. But I've sat in a lot of meetings where they're not necessarily my client. And, you know, entrepreneurs know all about their product. They know the features, they know the benefits, they know the science. And they could talk about those things forever much better than I can, much better than a retailer will ever understand or want to know. You know, they know their cost, their pricing and all those type of parameters. You know, they know their case packs, they know, they know the specifications and all those types of things. What they don't know is how they're going to move the product off the shelf. The typical presentation of a new company and how they're going to move product off the shelf is usually something like, well, there's no other product like this, or it doesn't have a lot of Competition or, you know, this is so innovative. Yeah, right. But again, there's Thousands of different SKUs in any given store, even in an aisle, even in the category.

So I always go back to a meeting I had with a buyer where the client and the broker were pitching how well the product worked and the buyer looked over her glasses and looked at him, says, do you think people come in here and tell me their product doesn't work? I assume the product does what it says. How are you going to get people to buy it?

And you know what, Mark and Justin, I'll be as candid, as transparent about this as I can possibly be. There's a lot of mediocre products in the store, on the shelves that are doing well because they're marketed well. I'm not going to say Procter and Gamble's products are mediocre. They're not. They're good. But Procter and Gamble is an example of a company that rarely innovates new items. They usually buy established items from entrepreneurial companies who reached a certain peak and.

Then they become a new item for Procter and Gamble is, you know, tides now in a drip free bottle. Yeah, that's innovation for them.

It is. And you know, so you know, the point is, is that some of the most innovative and most fabulous products that I've ever seen never make it to the shelf. And if they do make it to the shelf, they're not there for long because there weren't enough consumers that shop there that knew about it before they got there. And guess what? They didn't notice it when they were there. Yep. So that's where, you know, I'm going to reach. I'm going to reach some of the people I know at ECRM and I'm really going to make a recommendation. Mark, I don't mean to put you on a spot, but I'm actually going to make a recommendation that somehow, some way, they should really involve you in the process. Because there is no body in the consumer products industry. I don't care how big the ad agencies are. In fact, the bigger the worse, really. There's no company, there's no person who has successfully launched the kind of items that come to ECRM more than you have for as many years and with the success that you have, and even if these people never become your clients and you know, you know, and I know most of them won't, but they need to sit down with you or sit down and listen to you speak or to have you join their meeting so that you could Guide them into having that marketing, advertising, general plan ready to present. Because if you do that successfully as a new company, your chances of getting a chance of getting distribution, of getting on the shelf, I'm not exaggerating. Are a thousand times greater than if you don't have that when you're in the business.

It's very kind of you to say that, David. And here's the reality. Justin and I are happy to talk to people whether they become a client or not.

I know you are.

Just like you, we love the industry, we want to help people, but people pay the price for not knowing what they don't know. Unless you've been at this for a long time. And, David, I'm going to tell you another thing that we see, and I know you've seen this now, you're kind of a unique individual because you've been with P and G and you've been with these big companies, but you've launched startups a lot of times. We will see companies got a new product, new company, new product, and they go recruit somebody who was, you know, on the B string or the C string at a major brand. So they get somebody who was, you know, assistant brand champion for Campbell Soup, and they make them the head of marketing.

Right.

And it fails miserably. And the reason it fails, in my mind, is when you're Campbell's Soup, you're a category captain. You control, what, six feet of shelf, eight feet of shelf.

Yes.

You have no experience going in and begging for 3 inches of shelf space. Yep. Your experience is, I'm Campbell's freaking Soup. I can put whatever I want on the shelf. And now all of a sudden you've got a buyer saying, well, I don't care what you have. You're not Campbell's Soup today.

Right.

So what's been your experience?

Do those people, you know, personal example, you know, I grew up in the Gillette company in Procter and Gamble. And, you know, I worked for Smith, Klein Beecham, and people were really nice to me all the time when we'd exchange business cards and, oh, you're, you know, you've got this title or that title with Gillette, you know, and, oh, my goodness, it was easy to get them out to dinner, and we were just instant friends. They don't want to pick my brain. And, you know, it's just a wonderful situation when I left the big corporate world and started my own business and started working with entrepreneurial brands. And it just said David Bierbaum on my card back then. And it didn't have the Gillette logo or it didn't have the P and G logo. My feelings were hurt.

Yeah, because so many people forgot who you were.

So that's the real world. And you know those companies are real popular with retailers for a really good reason and that is that, you know, those are can't lose propositions when you put those products on the shelf. We were talking before though about how some of the very best items that I've ever seen, you know, they didn't have you, they didn't have me, they didn't get on the shelf. And if they did get on the shelf, like you said earlier, they were only there for a year or even less because there was no movement. So it is just, I can't emphasize enough. Not only do you need to have that, but you need to have it. You need, it needs to make sense to the retailer and it needs to look professional. Even if it's informal, it needs to look professional, it lead, it needs to look like you and somebody on your team or somebody that you're sourcing or outsourcing knows what the hell they're doing. Because this industry is too easy to fail in.

And for New Brain, it's a great place. Place where fortunes are made too.

Fortunes are made all the time in this industry and that's really under stated and underestimated. I mean, think about it. You know, if you're listening to this, walk through any store, walk through a Walmart, you know, or CVS or a Walgreens or Target and just look at some of the most successful items in the store. Behind every one of those items, some people have made millions and billions.

Well, you look at one of our old clients, Cremo Shave Cream.

Yes.

Came to us when they were a single SKU. One SKU. They were in fact one SKU that was in risk of being delisted. Five years later, Edgewell bought the company for $300 million.

Absolutely. And I promise you that had they not started out with Jekyll and Hyde, I would say are a similar agency. Except for in, in my mind, you know, there really aren't any. But had they not done that, they'd be a memory today.

They were, remember. Correct. They were close to being delisted when they became a client.

And there's an example of they've got great products, really, really good products. I use them all the time. I love them.

Yeah, it is a good product. There's nothing wrong with the product. But I will tell you, nobody knew why to buy it. Plus it was a premium product, so why should I spend this extra money?

That's exactly right. And that's true of so many ECRM vendors that come to the event. You know what, if you could sit down in every one of these ECRM appointment meetings, you would probably go home and say, you know What? I probably 90% of them were good enough products to be on retail shelves.

They all had a decent reason to be there.

They all do.

You brought up a really good point too, David, and that is you need to know, you need to decide. One, you need to decide who you want to present to. Not present to anybody that will show up.

That's right.

Because you need to figure out where does my product belong and what's the order in which it should. It should show up in these retailers.

That's right.

And then you need to know everything you can about that retailer and that buyer. Because as you said, everybody's different. I'm going to go to Kroger for a minute.

Kroger.

How's Kroger marketing? Well, they're marketing at Food is medicine and how do you know and how do they reduce the use of pharmaceuticals and improve people making healthier choices? So that's important for them. So how does your product talk to their goal, to, to their message?

They're all different and that's so important. And you know, preparation. It goes without saying the companies that do the best at ECRM are the ones that are the best prepared. Because like we've said, almost everybody at ECRM has a, you know, has pretty good product, at least good enough, you know, to probably be on retail shelves.

But it's not. Here's our pitch deck and we're going to replace the logo.

Yeah, yeah. And you know, companies need to be open minded enough to listen to experts and be open minded to making the changes or the tweaks that the experts know will make the product sell. I don't mean to be unkind to people, but, you know, I see package designs that I already know the minute I see them, that regardless of what's inside the product, this thing's not going to sell on the shelf or it's not going to get the right kind of attention. And you find out, you know, somebody's husband or wife designed it or a cousin or, you know, my favorite is they put this on the Internet where people can design something for you and it's like a contest.

Yeah, $99 design. I've seen packages, Dave. I'll give you some examples. I had one guy Bring me a package. The package was a red font on green background.

Christmas.

Not only Christmas, but a colorblind test for, for 1 out of 10 males.

Yeah, yeah.

So for 1 out of 10 males, they can't see the printing. I had another one who brought us a product and I've seen this more than once. They had the, the printing done in foil. Now it looked really nice, looked really nice until we explained it in your hand. But we explained to them, let's go visit a Walmart where they have fluorescent lighting and watch how you can no longer read your box now because under the fluorescent lighting it just blows up.

Yeah. And there's so many situations like that. You know, let's face it, a lot of new products, new companies, they're looking for inexpensive ways to do everything. So they're using the, they're using the art you can buy on, on a, you know, from a Mac computer or something. I can't think of it. Yeah.

You know, and what I always think is interesting is the biggest brands in the world, the brands that have the money to actually build an in house marketing department and an in house ad agency and to hire talent. None of those brands run an inside ad agency. They all use outside agencies.

They sure do.

But the small brands, they think, well, we can do this internally. I've got my nephew and he knows how to make a website. And my niece, my niece does graphic design so she can do a package and it's like, so why does, why does the small brand think that they are capable of doing something that P and G's already determined doesn't work.

That's exactly right. Exactly. And you know, small brands would be surprised if they knew what gets outsourced with the big successful brands. That would shock them, really. Because the idea is that you're putting your best foot forward and in order to do that and have the best chance for success, you're using experts, you're buying experience, you're buying the trial and error that's already occurred. Why would I say, well, I'm going to try this. If it doesn't work, I'll try something else. If that doesn't work, I'll try something else. When I can outsource somebody that already knows what's going to work and what isn't going to work.

And in brick and mortar there may not be a, I'll try something else.

Yeah, no, there isn't. So I really, like I said, I'm going to actually talk to Greg or some of the people at ECRM this is really a void. And it's not ECRM's fault that it's avoided. It's an industry thing. There's, there's got to be better performance in the ECR meetings by the participants in laying out a plan. Now, typically a new company will say, well, I, you know, I can't commit to that kind of budget right now. Well, you're not committing to anything. You're laying out a plan that, that you know in your mind that if you get, if it looks like you're going to get the distribution, you're going to turn on the plan. If for any reason you strike out and nobody's going to put your product in, you're obviously not going to buy a big advertising program. And a real good ad agency understands that and relates to that.

The flip side is though, if you go tell that buyer, you're going to throw the switch and you don't, which happens all the time. Oh yeah, you now have no credibility with that buyer whatsoever.

No, you can't wait. You can't wait until it's been on the shelf for six weeks to push the buttons. First of all, sales performance begins the very second your product hits the shelf. Everything today is moving averages and market share and you know, Iri Nielsen pos. All those things matter the first second you're on the shelf. So the first second you're on the shelf is just as important as what the product does a year from now, in some ways even more important. So you have to have all this ready to go and ready to begin the minute it hits the shelf on a major retail account. If you don't, you can start counting the days that you haven't had enough sales already. It's already averaging in to your performance. So I can't emphasize enough how important it is to get like a company like yours involved before you start making presentations rather than wait until afterwards. There's really, you know, there's always the cliche that no one size fits all. And that's really true. But I can tell you one thing that does fit all. If you're not 90% prepared before you sit down at your first meeting with a plan, your odds of getting distribution are very small. But if you're lucky enough to get distribution in, you know, 62 stores in an 8,000 store chain or something and get tested, that's going nowhere either. Today. There's all kinds of new challenges that, I mean, I, I've been doing this for, I don't know, 40 something years now. I lose count. But Everything changes all the time, but nothing has. Not as many things have ever changed as much as they did during and after the pandemic in terms of doing business with retailers. And you talk about all of them being different now. Some of the retailers don't even do appointments inside anymore. It's all on Zoom. So you talk about having to have things laid out. You better be able to do that. In fact, some of the ECRMs are on Zoom or something similar to Zoom. Some of them are in person now in the hotels, and some of them are still virtual.

I prefer in person.

Yeah. You know, I certainly, I'm old school.

But I. I like sharing space with someone and being able to build that relationship.

There's no question about it. But if you want to get into a major retail chain and they don't do it that way and they do it all online, there's another whole approach to how to do that the right way. Do it successfully. But even more than ever, your plan not only has to, you know, it's not just putting on the table a plan. You have to be able to show the plan on Zoom in a way that's just as persuasive as when you're there in person. And there's so much. We could talk about that on a whole different podcast for hours. You know, about.

You got to meet that buyer on their turf.

You have to meet them on their turf. But that gets into, you know, showing even some motion about how your plan is going to work. You know, how they can view it as if it's already in place. What's it going to look like, really? Would be the way that I would phrase that. Yeah.

Because buyers are still humans.

They really are. And even though AI might replace them eventually, I hope not. Buyers, if you're listening to me, I was just kidding. Bad joke. It'll replace me before it replaces you. But this is just such an important add on that. I wish I could think of the words to not overstate this. If you don't go to ECRM with a plan on how you're going to move product off the shelf from day one, minute one, and then also how you're going to work with the retailer on their own programs. And by the way, if you're not going to work with their programs, they're not interested in you either. Because truth be known, a lot of their revenue that they count on for making any item profitable is by selling you their programs. Is that ideal? No. Is that necessarily the most profitable part? Part of profitable part of Your business? No. Are their programs overpriced? Yes. Do you need to negotiate those programs with them? Yes, yes and yes. But you need to do it because that's something they know for sure that the big companies will do with them and for them. So you need to have that on your plan as well. But you, you know, you can't just say, you know, you go back 10 years ago, the question the retailer would ask you is, what's your spend? That was just kind of a trick question where they really wanted to know if you even thought about it. You know, how you're going to do this.

Absolutely.

But now you've got to be more specific than that because what you're going to spend really isn't necessarily relevant. I mean, all different things cost different, different amounts of money.

Right. But you still need to be spending an industry standard percentage of your budget.

Yeah. And you know, I get asked all the time, what is that percentage? And I have in my mind, you know what that is and how we.

Always tell people, on average, according to Nielsen, on average standing in place, so maintaining a brand is about 15% of.

Wholesale and I would say 15% plus maybe another 5% for the retail programs.

And then growing the brand is 20, 30% if you're in growth mode.

And you know, this is a different topic. But before you establish your pricing, already know going in that you're going to have to budget these things. So don't, don't try to be the cheapest product. One of my pet peeves, honestly, is when I talk to somebody I've never spoken to before, an entrepreneur, and their greatest selling point is that their item is going to cost less than the leading brand.

Yeah.

They don't want that either. They don't want to trade.

I've had a conversation with, okay, so the purpose behind your brand is you're going to lower a $20 ring for Walmart to a $15 ring for Walmart.

Yeah. Now why would Walmart want to do that?

That's what makes you different, David. You've got a number of places where people can follow you and learn more from you. How do they do that?

Well, I have a really, really informative website, much more than almost any I've ever seen other than Jekyll and Hydes. And so my website is simply my name dot com. It's Biernbaum B I E R N B a u m.com or if you can't remember how to spell that, we'll.

Have links in the show notes for it. So just Just go to the Show Notes folks and David will be there.

The easier one is consult David B.

And you have, you have some big social groups too though.

Yeah, sure. So on LinkedIn we have a group that they call them on LinkedIn for consumer products, retailers and vendors and third, you know, service providers, a little bit of everybody. And it's real global and it's on LinkedIn and is called Consumer Goods and Retail Professionals and that'll be on there too. To look at. We've got about 103,000 consumer product professional members with about 50% of them being in the US and the other 50% being very, very globally.

So that's a huge group.

It really is. And a lot of members really benefit from exchanging ideas and getting referrals. And one of the things that happens more often than I even thought would have been the case is if you are clever enough to talk about your item on there without it looking like you're selling it, just talking about an interesting news about it, you're going to get, you're going to get responses from buyers at retailers. It happens a lot. One of my favorite experiences was I've been contacted twice by CEOs at Walmart and they're on there. They're members. They don't write on there very often, although Doug McMillan does. He's the current CEO, which I think is amazing. He writes on there all the time. But most CEOs don't write directly on it, but they're reading it. And then another source that I'm on is retailwire.com there's about a hundred other brain trust members is what we're called on there, besides me. Maybe that's an exaggeration, maybe there's 50 more, I don't know. But they're all good. And you know, I've been in the industry for 40 something years. And so as most of the rest of the brain trust members on there, and I learned more from them than I learned practically from anyone anywhere else because they all have different areas of expertise. So every day there's three retail topics that are posted by the Retail Wire people. And most of us will respond or comment about all three of those topics or one or two of them. I actually do all three or both if they only have two almost every single day. And they're all on my website too. I have somebody that posts them every day. So that's another great source. Retailwire.com consultdavidb.com and on LinkedIn, consumer goods and retail professionals and my website and Jekyll and Hyde's website. Don't underestimate that. I look on it all the time. Justin and Mark and his crew, they put a lot of really good information on there that you should follow as often as you can.

Appreciate that, David. Thanks for being with us today.

Folks.

Go to the Show Notes and we'll have links for everything that David just talked about. So don't worry about trying to write it all down while you're listening to it. But if you enjoyed today's show, please go wherever you get your podcast.

If you're going to ecrm, contact, contact Mark or one of his very able people like Justin at Jekyll and Hyde. And if you want, I'll put you in contact with him.

We're always happy to help. Yep, always happy to help. Folks. That's it for today. David, thanks for being with us, buddy. And folks, if you enjoyed today's show, leave us a five star review and 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 guaranteed result. Just go to jekyllheidagency.com or feel free to give us a call at 800-542 10.