Chocolate Marketing masterclass

Okay, so let's, let's get the show on the road.

Cool.

Okay, so I'm obviously I'm recording this for everybody, but if, if we stay with just Chocolove, we'll make it Chocolove specific, but we will cover obviously the the subject as well, so I'll talk a bit more generically. The reason that I've put this out as an opportunity to watch is that I feel that coming into the UK is a challenge for lots of reasons, but one of the main ones is actually once you've done all the work, you've developed the products, you've got the packaging, you've found someone to do the distribution, you've found someone to ship it for you, the challenge actually is around the marketing. Can you see my screen, Stephanie?

Yes, I can see it.

Yeah, that's okay, it just says screen sharing is paused. So I think what we What I'm going to try and do today is to give you some pointers and to give you some examples also of some of what I kind of think good looks like. So some of this we've kind of done before, probably more in the realms of trade marketing when I did the course on trade marketing, but I want to dig in again into who is your— who's your target market in terms of who's the target customer, and we can also think about who's the target retailer as well. And then thinking about, well, what am I bringing to the party? What is my brand? What are my products doing for this customer? And one of the other things that I sort of had quite a lot of reflection on is there are— I think there's 22 companies in total in this cohort, although I've only worked with 11 and people kind of drop in and out. You're all making chocolate and you're all very different, but what we need to make sure is that when you're marketing, you are marketing points of difference so that you're not going up against each other. And if I actually sat and thought about it, I could probably identify for each of you different niches, which I think is really important because the whole point of this is to to get the overall export of Ghanaian chocolate into the UK, not having you guys compete because that's kind of counterproductive. So what I'm going to do is we'll talk about the target market, what are the key messages, so we can start thinking about honing that. Some of this I've done with some of you and some of you not. And Can we— sorry, we've got to— that's it, thanks Stephanie. And then I'm going to have a little look at packaging because it's something I know I've talked with some of you about, but I just wanted to go through having a look again at packaging, what makes it impactful, and then looking at how we put together that consumer. And I've put trade in there as a kind of maybe piece as well. So is it trade or is it is it consumer? Again, the principles are the same in terms of we need to get a message across, but obviously the publications might be quite different. So that's the plan. We've got 2 hours in the diary, so as people come in, that's good. And as I say, I'm recording all of this and we will share— I will share the slides with you as well so that you've got all the information that you need. So if we start with target market, I've read quite a lot of information actually about how building a customer avatar is maybe not the best thing to do in the world, but I think you have to envisage the person that you're selling to. And I haven't put it on this slide, but Somebody shared with me this really good example of how it doesn't work. So they took Prince Charles— sorry, now King Charles, but was Prince Charles when this was written— and Ozzy Osbourne. Now, they are both the same age, they're both wealthy, they're both British, they both have an interest in dogs apparently. But they are incredibly different people. So when we're doing geographic and demographic, so things like where do these people live? What are they, where are they buying? What's the age set? You know, whenever I say to somebody, well, who's your target audience? People go, oh, millennials or age 35. Females of a high income. That is such a broad brush. So what you have to do is to go on to the right-hand side of the list and really think about who's going to buy your product. And there's, there's kind of 2 dividers that you can look at. There's psychographic, and psychographic is all around lifestyle, interests, values. What's that person really interested in? So if we use the analogy of King Charles and Ozzy Osbourne, 2 very, very different people. I've just read actually Ozzy Osbourne's been diagnosed with Parkinson's disease, so he's going to have some very different needs and interests maybe to King Charles, who's just become King of England. So you can see same on the left, although actually on yours, when I think lives in Los Angeles, not in the UK. But on the right, you've got very different psychographics. And then the key bit really is the behavioral piece, and that is around what are they interested in, how are they buying, where are they buying, what benefit are they getting from buying, because That's the bit that you need to be tapping into. And I'm certainly not a social— hi, Stephanie.

Yeah, the slides are not moving. I'm still on the who are you.

Okay, let me just— it does say it's paused. That's why I kind of checked. You see it now?

Yes, I do. Thank you.

No worries. So I'm not a social media expert, and I, in some ways, a marketing masterclass needs to have a look at social media. But what I've done is I've had a little look at some Instagram examples. But one of the things that, and, you know, I'm suggesting you if it's an area you want to work on, I would suggest you find somebody to help support you doing that in the UK, because I think I was talking to somebody yesterday from Eswatini, and she's got a social media team because she says it's just changing so quickly and so thoroughly. But one of the things that's gonna be key if you're briefing a team or even thinking about doing it yourself is who are you trying to find? And one of the great things about people like Facebook and Insta and TikTok is you can start to become granular in terms of what is your customer really looking for. And also you can go the other way, so that's the targeting way, but you can also say, okay, Who's buying my products? So you can go in and you can analyze who's buying the products. Now, obviously the challenge is when you first start entering a new market, you don't know who your customers necessarily are going to be. So we need to be starting to form a wishlist and think about what— if you remember when we did the training the 2-day training, we talked a lot about what's your unique selling point, and this is where we need to dig into. So what is unique about your brand and what is unique about your products? So my first kind of working question, and we've only got Stephanie here, so Stephanie, we're gonna do some work together if that's all right with you because I was hoping to do a little bit of work, but we can do it with Chocolove. So I know you and I have talked about this to some extent, but who would you say is your target customer in the UK? Or it doesn't have to be UK, actually.

Okay, so now I have to rephrase it and not make it as generic as you put it earlier. There you go. I'm thinking of how to be as specific as possible, like you mentioned, not like—

Those ones on the left.

Oh my goodness, okay.

You can use the ones on the left, it's not, you know, they are there for a reason, but what I was— what I'm trying to show you is the fact that it's If you just say it's, I don't know, travelers, for example, which could be quite relevant to you, we need to get more granular. Does that make sense?

Yes, it is.

So start with the ones we're comfy with. Do the demographic first.

Okay, demographic. Okay, so I'm looking at people who are looking for For the UK market, people who are looking for variety and something new in terms of origin.

Yep.

So they are most likely to buy our products. I'm also looking at people who value and appreciate artisanal chocolate.

Someone who wants to like— I'm sorry.

And the people who appreciate artisanal, the value of artisanal chocolate.

Yeah.

Um, and what goes into making them, and are willing to pay a bit of a premium to buy. Um, we are looking at institutions that want to make custom-made chocolates.

Yeah.

And branded chocolates. From Ghana. Yeah. Um, what else? Lifestyle. Um, institutions. Okay, people who want to offer something unique and different in terms of origin. I already mentioned it. So yeah, we are selling to like hotels or people who will want something unique here.

Yeah.

Okay, so So I think that's it, maybe.

Have you got therefore 2 customer avatars? So have you got someone who's going to buy your products as a consumer? So somebody like, you know, me who wants something new, likes the artisan chocolate, willing to pay a premium. So that's one. Is there therefore a separate one which is the institutions, which is the corporates, the hotels who are looking, as you say, for custom-made chocolates that have that unique location and manufacturer?

Yeah.

Okay, so because you've made a really good point which I hadn't mentioned, you don't have to have one avatar. You can have, you can have 2 target customers, and you often, you do often get that actually. So if you take me as an example, my key target is food and drink companies who are trying to grow their businesses through gaining retailer listings. But my secondary market would be people probably, or corporations or groups like the ITC or Mission Kitchen. I did a talk at Mission Kitchen last week. So people who are looking to provide value for their customers or their clients. So I do have 2 target audiences to some extent. So in terms of, well, what does that mean? The marketing that you would do for the consumer, so the first one, is going to be different to the marketing you do for the second one.

Yeah, that's true.

Because, and also if we come, let's come on to to look at marketing messages. Now, I was in Bali over the summer and there's a lot of chocolatiers over there and I went to Kao Chocolates to have a look at their factory and really to understand how they are marketing because they're in a similar similar structure, I suppose, to you guys to some extent.

Yeah.

They are— they're based in Bali, they're growing in Bali. They obviously want— they want to get that kind of virtual— sorry, vertical production. They do the growing as well. They don't have the cocoa board like we do in Ghana. And they are doing a little bit of export, but the majority of their business— and I did take some photos actually at the airport, and I'll show you them at the end because for you, Stephanie, it'd be quite Interesting to see how Dumbansar's airport is laid out.

Okay.

A lot of chocolate. But just taking cow, what you know their marketing messages, which I thought were quite relevant to to all of you. So pardon me, cow chocolate is made from scratch here. The organic chocolate factory was formed to produce to bring you high quality organic affordable cacao baking. based baking ingredients. They do make chocolate for eating, but they do couverture, and they also do drinking chocolate. So they've got a range. They also actually have a really lovely cafe where they make the most amazing hot chocolate. My goodness, it's good, which you wouldn't think you'd want actually in Bali because Bali's quite warm, but it's really good.

Okay.

So I've taken this, this off of their website. So, you know, it's, it's, they are using, you know, some keywords that kind of spring out to me are organic, affordable. So they're not saying, you know, we're crazy expensive. Cacao-based baking ingredients, not quite sure whether that's their target. sustainable farming practices and producers who can enjoy the benefits of cacao for years to come. So they're talking about that sustainability message, but in quite a good way.

Mm-hmm.

So I think one of the things that you guys need to think about, and not just Chocolab, but obviously everybody else who might be watching this back, is what is the— what are your key marketing messages? And that kind of goes back to, um, to the USPs. But I think also if you think about other, um, other brands and the bigger brands, um, and I, I always use the example of Cadbury's actually, because when I grew up with Cadbury's, they used to be on the TV and they used to say a glass and a half of full cream milk in every bar. Now I can still tell you that after 30 years, probably. No, probably longer.

It's probably another glass and a half in every week.

Yeah, have you ever seen the ad?

No, but you see that on their chocolate, they have a glass of milk Yeah, like being poured out on this side, like a logo like that.

And they used to have an ad, you know, we are going back probably to the late mid-'70s, but they used to have this, somebody pouring the glass and a half of full cream milk, and it's still there. And Dairy Milk is very clear, and we'll come on and we'll have a look at some packaging icons, but Okay. That's the single marketing message. Now, you know, they spend millions on honing these marketing messages, and as I said at the beginning, I'm not a marketer. I understand marketing and I know we need marketing messages, but I think it's about that creativity of saying, how do I get a message and a strapline and the thing that's going to make people want to buy from me?

Okay.

And I think that's something that you hone over time. And, you know, as a team, what I would recommend is you spend some time you know, bouncing it around. So if you start to say, well, what are the things that I think my customer is looking for? So we said in your case, Stephanie, something new that appreciates artisan, that's premium.

Mm-hmm.

So Is there something around how do you communicate that, you know, the— if we go back to Kao, this is quite long. They're emphasizing with their logo the cocoa beans.

Cocoa beans.

But they're putting it in there, but What is it that sort of— and I'm not suggesting, I don't want to put you on the spot to sort of say, well, you know, you need to do it now, but what is it that really says— I mean, the brand name Chocolove, I love that. I think that's a good start in terms of Chocolove, you know. It says love chocolate, so you're already kind of getting that that piece across, and maybe we need to be reinforcing the artisan piece, the premium piece, and maybe the innovation.

Yeah.

So what I think might be useful is if you have a think about that for over the next couple of weeks, and maybe we pick up on a one-to-one session. And for those of you who are on catch-up, the same principles apply. We've got sessions either booked in the diary or need to be booked in the diary before the end of November, and we can start to think about, you know, who's your competition? That's the other one. So, you know, if you are If you want to stand out against the other people, what's the message? How are you going to give something that's a little bit different? And Choco Love is a good example of a completely different brand name, and you could build on the love piece. There's quite a lot we could do with that. So we will pick up with that. later on a one-to-one basis. But the point of today's class is to really give you some ideas to think about and some examples so that you can go away and have a look and also go and have a look at what your competitors are doing. Have a look at the marketplace that you want to go into and then again have a look, so if you want to go into into corporate, then that's a slightly different ball game because as a corporate, what am I looking for? So a point of difference, the quality is going to be really key, giving something back might be quite key. So what I would be wanting to do is to go and have a look at some of the values that these— if we focus on hotels, the hotels are saying, what is it that they are, you know, where you will fit in with their offer? So if it's around the service that they offer, the luxuriousness of the surroundings, the way we take care of you as a guest, you know, how can you then go, you know, we help you take care of your guests because we provide you chocolate love or we provide you what have you. So does that make sense?

Yeah, it does.

Cool. Okay, so that's, that's a very brief overview of what can be a whole degree to study of thinking about who's your target market, who's your target customer. and your marketing messages. So what I wanted to talk about next is packaging, because packaging, you know, if you've ever studied, there's a guy called Kotler who wrote The Definitive Marketing Guide, and he had the 4 Ps of marketing. Oh, I love Kotler. And product is one of those 4 Ps. And product is obviously partly the recipe, but it's also the packaging. And I think there's a couple of you who I've talked to about packaging, and I just wanted to go through some of the ideas around what you do or what makes good packaging. So The purpose of packaging primarily is to protect the product, and I just wanted to get to that because especially if you're shipping product from Ghana to other countries or even within the country, protecting it and keeping it safe is really key. We had some Côte d'Or— I'm not sure who makes Côte d'Or actually, this week which was completely bloomed. It had been temperature abused quite horrendously actually, it was virtually unedible, inedible. And I'm not saying actually packaging is going to help you with blooming because of temperature control, but the purpose of it to start with is to protect the product and to stop it getting damaged. through every step of the process. So from when it leaves your factory and goes into a box, then it goes on it onto distribution. If you're shipping it, if you're flying it, if it's then sitting on the shelf, all of those times it needs to prevent the damage. And I've put Dairy Milk here because this product, and it's a while ago now, there used to be an award for packaging, for bad packaging, and this one won an award or was nominated because it was not recyclable. And I think that was a few years ago, but now more and more so, people are looking for recyclable packaging, whether that's making sure that you, you know, it's in cardboard or it's recyclable plastic or it's reusable or something that's making sure that it's sustainable.

Okay.

The other thing about packaging is making sure it's communicating the brand message, and we'll talk about some design as we go further forward, but also thinking— and I'm going to show you some examples of making sure it stands out on shelf. So the packaging design can be really critical. So you might think, I mean, this is a flow wrap. A lot of artisan chocolate comes wrapped and then put into a cardboard sleeve or a cardboard box. If you're gifting, cardboard with plastic inners can sometimes be used, and that's not necessarily good for recycling. There's been a huge backlash against Easter eggs. So Easter eggs traditionally come in a nice plastic clamshell and then a big piece of cardboard water all over it, and my goodness, it's, it's, uh, yeah, it's packaging nightmare in terms of waste. So there is a real focus now, and, and one of the challenges I think for, for chocolate, um, if you're in the gifting, is how do you balance out the need to be recyclable, uh, light on packaging, but actually still have that gifting? element. And that I think is—

and then I think cost is also another factor when it comes to gifting chocolates, because sometimes you realize that the packaging alone, like, takes— sometimes can be more than the cost of the chocolate itself.

Yeah, no, you're absolutely right. And I haven't actually put cost on there, but I think cost is a really critical part. And Again, there's— when you start to look at the cost of like a display tray, for example, I've done quite a lot of work with retailers where they've wanted a display outer, and those are really expensive because you've got to have an insert that pulls out and the outer's got to be in 4 different colours, and that can add cost the product. And also getting the size of the outer right is important because if it's too small, you might only have maybe 4 boxes in the outer box, but you maybe could get 8 on shelf. Therefore, you've used 2 boxes and that's more expensive as well. So designing packaging for cost is really quite interesting because also you've got the— a lot of you guys hand-pack, and that's a challenge because ideally you want, you know, that chocolate that's photographed there is in a flow wrap and that's going to run down their line bang, bang, bang, hundreds, hundreds per minute, thousands probably per minute. Now, if you've got that automation, then that's really great. But if you are doing gifting, and I used to work in sushi, and I mentioned sushi because you're kind of like, wow, it's nothing to do with chocolate. We actually use the same company to produce all of our packaging that make the packaging for Hotel Chocolat.

Wow.

Because they I mean, I think we're going back a few years, but they used to make the individual plastic inserts that you would put the chocolates in, and they are perfect for sushi. We used to have it all tooled and made for our specific sushi products, but that's expensive as well. So yeah, the first thing about packaging, as we say, is is getting the purpose. The second one is about keeping the costs down. And then the third is making it look good. And I suppose the fourth one actually is making sure it's legal. And maybe the fifth one is getting the customer to buy. So packaging is just so, so critical. And, you know, there are— as there are experts in marketing, there are experts in packaging design. And sometimes I think it's, it's worth, if you're going to any expos, there's quite a few packaging expos, and if you're actually going to something like IFE, I think there is a packaging expo that sits next to it. There's certainly a manufacturing one next year. It's worth having a look at.

Thank you.

So I sort of So we've done the practical side of packaging, now we'll do the pretty bits, the nice bits.

So Karen, please, before we go on, move on, how do you balance the functionality of packaging with cost and pricing?

I think you have to start with the customer in mind. So if you say to yourself, right, I am working with a corporate, let's use the corporate as an example because they'll be more cost orientated. So you say, I want to be able to produce a gift for my corporate customer. So what are the things that they're going to be wanting? So for example, you might produce them a bar with the, with their logo on it, or you might do them a a small box of chocolates. So then you've got to say, well, actually, what are they going to pay for it? What do I think, you know, and if you can get the budget beforehand, great. But if you say, okay, they're going to pay £2, let's go, or $2, it doesn't really matter. It's all the same at the moment.

So £2.

And you know, and you say, okay, so it's 4 chocolates, I want to make, you know, 50%. They're gonna, they're gonna want a bit of markup for it, or they might not actually if it's a gift, they might just be buying it from you. But say they, you know, say they want to buy it from you for £2, you want to make some margin, so say you want to make £60 pence for each one sold, so now we're down to £1.40. You've got £1.40 to play with. They're like, well, we'd like 4 chocolates in it, so you go, well, the chocolates cost us this, there's— and there's the distribution and there's the labour, and now that's the little bit that we've got left for packaging. And you can then say, okay, that's how much money we've got and start to look at the packaging alternatives. Now the other way you can do it is obviously go from the other end and say, right, I've got a really nice box that we know we can pack, that we know is relatively easy, and it costs 25p to buy, or 30, or 40, or 50, and so therefore we can build that into the cost. But I think you can go from one end or you go from the other end, and it's— there isn't a one-size-fits-all. It really does depend on who your customer is. So if you are— if you're selling bars into the UK and it's to someone who's looking for artisanal chocolate, it's probably something that looks nice but it's not overpackaged. I think there is very much a pushback now about overpackaging as well. So I often think with a lot of the artisanal bars that I see, they are quite heavily packaged, especially— in fact, we bought quite a few when we were in Bali just to have a look at them and you know, you do get the inner flow wrap and then, or a foil wrap, and then you get a cardboard on top. So yeah, it depends. And I think the other thing to say that innovative packaging can sometimes be a game changer. So how you present your products. can make a real difference. I'm just trying to think if we've got any photos. I mean, I picked this one. Most of my photos actually are of chocolate, but I thought this was quite interesting because most of the carbonates are in cans. And most cans are this shape of 330ml. So Coca-Cola now have some 250s, and obviously you've got juices down here that are bottles. But if you look at it, everybody's the same. So it's kind of like, well, what makes it stand out?

Yeah.

And By virtue, I think, of the fact that Coca-Cola is so well known, I can tell you from looking at this, and I'm trying to remember where I took it actually.

It looks like this is in Ghana, one of, because I see a lot of Ghanaian products.

It might well have been in Ghana, which is why I don't recognize all the other products.

Yes, I see these guys, I see All the other Ghanaian juices. So, okay.

Okay, so good.

Taking it from God.

I took it off my, off my phone. I was looking at all the photographs and seeing which one, and I thought, oh, that one looks— that's going to make the point that I want to make. So if we look at it, we go, right, there's Coca-Cola. I know that's Pepsi. I know that's 7-Up. I know that's Fanta. Yeah, I know that's Sprite. I think that's Lipton.

Yeah, that's Lipton. Yeah.

No idea what that is. That may well be a local brand.

No, I don't know that brand either.

These I suspect are local brands.

Arizona is not local. I think it's from the US or so.

Okay. Yeah, I can't read these juices.

Um, I know there's Boosta and there's some Ice Tea on the next shelf. It's a local brand of iced tea.

Okay, and this one stands out because it's a bit squat and different.

Yeah.

But the point is, well, it's twofold really. One, I've seen these on shelf internationally for so long and I've— and they've marketed them for so long, I know what they are. I can go down and I can tell you what they are, but also I can see what they are. That's Sprite, that's Fanta.

Okay, I got it.

I can't actually see what that— I know it's Pepsi, but yeah, but you see how we're going. That's Pepsi, that's Fanta, that's Sprite. Down here I'm like, what is that? So, and also the other thing to say, and this isn't too bad an example, but if you look here, there is a shelf lip. So one of the mistakes that people make is when they're designing their packaging, you look at the design on a board. So your designer will send it to you, or not necessarily on a physical board anymore, but on a PDF, and you'll go, oh, that looks nice, and And it's all— there's all my information. In a lot of stores, you will get some kind of shelf lip. Not always, but sometimes. So if all your key messages are down here in the bottom, it's lost.

Yeah, that's true.

Now if you look at Coca-Cola, where's their message?

At the top.

At the top. Sprite, right across the middle. Coca-Cola at the top, Fanta, okay. Now what the other thing to say, and this isn't really relevant to chocolate, is round things move round. So what you have to remember is the fact that it's not, you know, this is a very unusual display because actually everything is front forward. But if you had that, I don't know when your peak selling day is, on a Saturday afternoon and everyone had been in shopping it, it wouldn't look like that. It would be a mess and the products would have been moved and turned around. So if you are, and I don't think you'll ever make anything round, but if you ever make anything round, it's important to see, as you can see here, whichever way this Fanta is, you can see still see it's Fanta.

Fanta, yeah.

So making sure you get the brand is really key, and I've got some more examples, which is a little bit— we'll go, I'll go down each of them.

Okay.

Some of them are UK, some of them— so this is Australia. So I was in Australia I think I have shared this. I was just struck by this because it was just such a beautiful display, and I've forgotten the name of this now, but it's, it's a bit like Hotel Chocolat in the UK. They have a number of chocolate stores across Australia. Each of these designs is a different flavour.

Wow.

It's absolutely stunning. Because they're merchandised within their own store, they don't have to have the branding as strongly, so it doesn't have to knock you over and go, right, okay, I know what that is. But it's just beautiful and it's a beautiful design and it's eye-catching.

Yeah, it's artistic.

It's artistic, yeah. So when you're thinking about product design, You might well want to be thinking about, well, how can I make it really pop on shelf so it stands out? Do you know who this is? Can you see it? I can't make it out.

This is Nish.

That is Nish.

This is Nish from Ghana.

Yeah, Nish from Ghana. And that struck me, and I can't remember which store it was in, But I went, wow.

I think it's at the mall, Shoprite.

Yeah, it's one of the shopping malls. And what struck me was the fact that they've got so much space, which is great, but also look at that single block colour. And it's hard to see on this screen, but actually when you get the PowerPoint, you can blow it up and have a look at it. And it's so clear. This one's coconut. One of them I think is orange. I can't remember what that one is, but—

Pineapple, I think.

Yeah, it's absolutely crystal clear what those products are. And because they're using the bold colors and also, you know, I can see the niche logo from here and it's, you know, it's a tiny— on my screen it's tiny. And there at the bottom is Kinder.

Yeah.

Which doesn't look quite half as good, to be honest. So that's that. These are in the UK, so this is slightly different. And the reason I wanted to— this is Whole Foods. We went to Whole Foods. And Whole Foods has a range of products. You know, you guys would fit in Whole Foods in terms of your target audience. But I think what I wanted to say, it looks better when you see it on shelf, but even so, it's a bit of a mishmash. It's very hard to see what they're doing. Um, I quite like this one. This is Quite a nice design, but again, I couldn't tell you what the brand is. I can't really see any of the brands.

Yeah.

So, and here they've got straight-on trays. So, you know, I was talking about having— one of the things that's really key for especially bars is to have them sitting upwards. So we did a piece of work with sushi actually, which again is not chocolate, but, and we demonstrated that we had— so the sushi trays used to lay flat and we put them in plastic display outers and our sales went up phenomenally. And I've seen the same results with ham as well. So, you know, when ham's in a thin pack. and it lies flat, people don't buy it as much as when people can actually see what it is. So with the chocolate bars, and this has been done here, these stand up. I don't know what's holding them up actually, it's probably lots more chocolate bars. But you wouldn't get that in the UK, you wouldn't get that amount of shelf fill. So these are in little display outers, but they're not really screaming the brand. However, over here, if we come over to the last one, this is very bold. They're very bold. You know, I can see this, I think was a Gonzalén also in Whole Foods. So okay, it's slightly bigger, but it's not that much bigger in terms of the physicality of what's on the screen. But I can see it's Gatto, it's Keto. Hi, Cliff. You can see what they are pulsing. That's what you want to be getting to because, you know, it's all very well having loveliness, you know, artisan and tastes great, etc. But actually what you want is someone to be able to come in and go, ah, I want Chocolove, or I want that one, and they can pick them out. And it's much, much stronger. And again, if you look at— if we go back to Coca-Cola, look at the bold colors. Now, generally artisanal products don't come in big, bold, brash colors.

Yeah.

But, you know, These are big and bold, these are big and bold, these are artisanal, a bit recessive. So my sort of key point really is start to think about how do you stand out on a shelf and make sure that you're you're eye-catching, that you're, you're not getting lost in all of this sort of melee of lots and lots of other chocolate bars, because that is the problem. And I can share with you other photographs that I've taken when we did the tour around Selfridges, for example, same problem. So what's happened there? Okay, so Let's have a look at some. So we talked about how it sits on the shelf and how it stands out, but then the question is what's on the front of the pack? And I've just picked 4 to start to pull out some of the thought processes. So they are mainly, well, bigger companies. a big company. Green and Blacks is owned by Mondelez, which is a very big company, and Divine and Willy's are probably slightly smaller. So if we start with Green and Black, if you, if you looked at the display, all of these would line up. The colours, they have different colours for different types of chocolate, so milk, plain, blah. Here's the logo. What I notice about big brands is their logo is usually about a third of the pack. There's always— there are exceptions to the rule, but you know, I do love an exception to the rule, but generally it's, it's a big chunk. You know, look at Willy's Cacao. If you've come across Willy's Cacao or you've followed them in it, he's quite— I wouldn't say he's egotistical, but he's certainly— he is his brand, so hence his brand is like almost half of his packaging. But this is probably my favorite because if you saw it on a shelf and you saw them all lined up, it's pretty stunning. There's the different colors, they're not super bold, so they're not brash like Coca-Cola, but they are definitely showing the difference between the products. This one's butterscotch, and then this intensity is really key. So people seem to be within chocolate buying into percentages. So if you look at all 4 of these, they've got the percentage in different ways. So Lindt is all about, you know, this one is 77%, 70%. So, and actually all of their bars of the Excellence range have it stamped right in the middle. So if you look at that, that's almost the same size as the Lindt logo.

Okay.

Theirs is less so, but they've got this intensity marker, so they're taking some of the cues from cocoa— sorry, Coffee. So if you look at coffee, coffee tends to be on a spectrum, so they're kind of using that. Divine has, for me, too much information, it's too small. So I feel this has been designed for you to have a look at in your hand, but it's really not. So I can't actually read all what this says. It's about looking after farmers.

Every bar directly improves the lives of farmers. I think they're big on their sustainability.

Yeah, and that is what Divine's all about. So they co-own the cocoa farmers. There's the fair trade stuff at the bottom. Made with Musum dust, the finest quality cocoa from, it's where they actually buy it from, they only buy it from one particular area. So they are reinforcing their sustainability. Again, the use of colour means that they will have different colour for different brand, sorry, different products. I quite like the cocoa, nobody really uses the cocoa picture, a little bit like the cow guys do. In terms of on-shelf standout, is it that good? Would you recognize it?

No, it took you to mention it for me to actually see it was cocoa. Yeah, even though I just read, I didn't pay attention to it. It's subtle.

It's subtle, and sometimes that's not a bad thing. So, you know, you—

it's—

is it implying the overall quality of product and therefore it's subliminal, or actually does it mean there's too much there? I don't know. I'm not a packaging expert either, which is why we get packaging designers in because that's what they do. And then Willy's Cacao is interesting because he is all about beans. So down here, once you've got over— we've got over his ego. Milk of the Gods.

Yes, that stood out to me. Yeah, I mean, I'm like, oh yeah, what is that?

Then he's got It's Venezuelan and Rio Caribe, and then at the bottom it's Creamy Milk Chocolate, Nutty Coffee Notes. And 50 grams, and then he's got this 44, which I'm assuming is 44% cocoa, but we don't know that. Interesting. Does it stand out on shelf?

Yeah, yes, it does.

It will with its brothers and sisters, that will stand out, and actually when you look at a display, it does. I don't think— let's see what's— no, I don't think it's in Whole Foods, so we haven't got it to stand out on there. So if we go through what we've already talked about, the hierarchy. So we know who our target customer is, we know what we're trying to communicate. So if we go from left to right, Green and Blacks always used to be about organic, and they have, they have got a diffusion range now which isn't organic, but it's basically, it is chocolate, it's good quality chocolate that's organic. That's it really. Lint, it's all about the brands. They talk so much about lint and excellence. It's about smooth. If, if I was going to look at Lyn, it's about smooth, you know, Lindors, they're very smooth. It's smooth. And then, you know, at the bottom there's lots of gold.

Yeah, kind of luxury.

Yeah, it's, it's, it is, it is luxury, but in terms of price Which one do you think is the most expensive of those 4?

Okay, can I? I think, okay, I'll be a bit biased because of industry. So looking at the 4, and I think Divine would be more expensive.

Yeah, I think Divine is more expensive than 2 on the left. I think they actually are in order of price, not deliberately. Willy's Cacao is more expensive because he uses— he does bean-to-bar and he uses small batches and estate-specific. So that's why he's more expensive. But Lindt is all about, you know, treating yourself. And I'll be honest, and I've said this before, Until I started working with the Ghanaians and before I did my— I did do the Institute of Chocolate exam, I thought Lindt was great. And then I realized that every— not obviously the 70% cocoa, but the majority of the Lindt I'm eating is well over 50% sugar. And that was just such a revelation for me. And now I don't really like any of the Lindt chocolate because the cocoa is too bitter when we go up 70% but actually I don't want to have 50% sugar.

Wow.

But it is actually interestingly more entry-level. So when you're looking at the design, what you've got to think, is it going to stand out? Is it reinforcing and talking to my customer? And then what are the messages? What's the hierarchy of message? Because I think we get sometimes too preoccupied with, well, I want to have a fair trade logo on it, and I want to say it's organic, and I want to say it's artisanal, and I want to say it's from Ghana, and I'd like a picture of a Ghanaian person on it. Actually, what were we eating the other day? Nestlé has a picture of a Ghanaian person on the back, so they're obviously sourcing all their cocoa from Ghana.

Would you think it's because of the demands of the market. So sometimes you want people who want sustainability is key to them. They want single origin, and you want to sell at a premium. So you want to put all out there that, you know what, I do, I produce this with sustainable products. It's organic. It is bean to bar, because that is also a premium. It's from Ghana because people know Ghana has good quality cocoa. So it's like, um, a way of putting out your best foot. You know what, if you want this, I have it. If you want organic, it's organic. If it's sustainable, so I have it all. Choose me, basically. So I, I think we get tempted to put all that because, you know, and getting those certifications are not cheap and not easy.

Right.

So you don't want to get them and hide them, you want to show them off basically.

Yeah, I think you're right and I think what you've got to decide on is what's the underpinning message. So Green and Black was always organic and my mum was a great fan of Green and Black, she loved Green and Black so I used to buy it for her as a present and moved from some other chocolates like Thornton's that were UK-based. But it doesn't tell me where it's from.

Yeah.

It's not actually assuming much intel— not intel— well, it's not assuming much chocolate intelligence. Lindt isn't either. It's going, look, We got you. We've done all that. We've done all that stuff. You know, you don't need to worry about is it organic, is it fair trade. You know it's Linn, it's gonna be good. You know, look, you can look up our credentials on the website. It doesn't really matter because at the end of the day what we're giving you is this lovely, smooth, intense, dark, luxurious experience. Divine are saying, look, you know, we know you care about people. And we are looking after those people and we're looking after the farmers and we are fair trade and we're doing good, you know, we're a good company. It's nice chocolate, seriously smooth, but we're really good people. And then Willy is going, look, I tell you what, I know I can pick the beans for you. I know you're a bit of a specialist. I know you want to have some Something a bit different. You know, you you want beans to buy. You know Willy's Cacao is beans to buy. You've seen the TV program. You know about me. This is milk of the gods. You know, I've picked something from Venezuela. It's Rio Caribe. I don't even know if that's part of Venezuela, but if if it is, it's a specific part. You don't you know you don't know that that is, but I know because I've picked the area for you. And I know you're really interested and you're a bit of a specialist. So we're saying it's creamy, but it's got those nutty coffee notes. So I'm kind of tapping into the fact that you probably have a bit of a coffee aficionado and you're probably a wine aficionado as well. So you see what I was saying, if you go right back to the beginning of lifestyle and what are people looking for, that's what he's talking to. He's talking to the chocolate snob. He's not talking to the chocolate snob that's the crazy chocolate snob that's maybe buying from chocolate trading company who are really looking for you know, single estate, very specific dark chocolate that they can taste the independent notes. So having used those 4, we need to be kind of going, right, what is the, the essence of what you want to communicate?

Right.

And that's from the words To the pretty pictures, and then the other bit, which is the not sexy bit, is this is what you actually legally need to put on the pack. So I've I've put a link there that you can go to and and see what the legislation is for labeling. But basically, what you need is the legal name of the food.

Now.

Generally, I would suggest all of these have got their legal information on the back. So your legal information has to be in one field of vision. So legal name, ingredients, so whatever is in there, including quiddings. So if you're claiming that something, say, got milk in it, you need to show the percentage Percentage of milk. Obviously, you've got to show the percentage of cocoa butter, allergen information, a net weight, storage, your your address, country of origin, nutritional information, minimum font. That's quite key, actually, because I have to say I've noticed in Bali and also in Ghana because I'm a little bit old, I can't. Read a lot of fonts, and there is a legal requirement for fonts. And I used to, all those years ago, make or sell vitamins for Boots, and we used to have to have dry peel labels to get all the information on, especially on a pack that's— or a product that's got lots and lots of vitamins and supplements in it.

Barcode.

You do need a barcode. Have you got barcodes, Stephanie?

No, not for the bus. I think we have for the buses but not the bus.

Okay, and do you get them from GS1?

I'm not quite sure where.

I will add a link in the presentation So in the UK, barcodes come from a company called GS1. GS1 are a global business, and it is worth— they're not super expensive, but it is worth making sure you get them from GS1 because you can buy secondhand barcodes, and if they're not set up properly, they will not scan as your product. They will scan as something something else. And I was in a situation a few years ago, and it wasn't our fault actually, where we were selling— it was an own-label product and it was Asda, and Asda had given us Young's barcodes, so it was scanning as a Young's fish product rather than our fish product, and we had to relabel them and over-sticker all the barcodes. It was an absolute nightmare. So don't have dodgy barcodes. It's not the sexy stuff and it's not the marketing stuff, but it's quite important. And then obviously batch code and best before date or whatever your traceability is, because traceability is really key. But yeah, it's not super sexy stuff and it can go on the back. But that's, that's the other thing to say, I suppose, about the packaging purpose, because if you have a tiny bar, so say you've got a 30-gram bar and you've got to get all that information on, that's quite difficult. So sometimes I think you end up with a bar that's too big because you just need to get all the legal information on and get the wording font size. Okay, any thoughts, questions, challenges for you guys on packaging? Hang on, you're on mute, you're on mute, unmute yourself.

Sorry, I was like, for us not much. Maybe the only thing is what you mentioned at the Again, and packaging to make sure that when you go out there into the supermarkets or wherever, the products still maintain a certain level of quality. And that has been, let's say, our challenge basically, and the fear that we might end up with bloomed chocolates. And, you know, but, um, see how it goes. I would think we'll do our best to overcome that.

Yeah, and also, you know, it might need protecting if it's traveling overseas, so making sure that— I don't think bars are probably too thick to break actually, but if you are sending boxes of chocolates, are they going to stay in— also when you open the box, are they all in the right place? Because we've all received something and it's like been shaken up and squidged, and it's making sure that the packaging can hold the chocolates in the right place. And certainly whenever I've done work in the past, we've done travel tests to make sure that it actually arrives in the condition it should do, because my goodness, I've seen some stuff that's left a factory and then it gets to the retailer and you're like, my What's happened to it? How has it ended up in that mess? So yeah, so that's something that I would certainly recommend you do, is travel testing. Okay, so that's packaging. So the final part that I wanted to go through is is thinking about marketing. So we've talked about packaging, which is part of marketing. So if you have the 4 Ps, it's place, price, promotion, and product. So this is about promotion, and I'm going to kind of— I'm going to whiz through some of these, but I want to talk about little bit about website, social media, PR, in-store promotions, which I'm not really going to talk about in detail, and sampling, and then email marketing. So I wanted to show you a couple of what I think good looks like, so I'm just going to take that out for a second. And show you some, just a couple of good websites, and it's easier to show live than it is Okay, so this is Willy's Cacao. So here I am. Oh, there I am again. This is Willy, for those of you who don't know. So there's the branding in the middle, luxury chocolate gifts. Okay, and it's interesting actually because if you asked me about him, I would've said he's more about Beans Bar and he's more about the type of chocolate. I wouldn't say necessarily I would think of him as being around signature truffles or luxury chocolate gifts. But if you start to scroll down, here's his story already. He had a cocoa farm in Venezuela. Okay, now we've got the popup. And I do, I have put a screenshot of this in the presentation later on because one of the things that's really key is getting, is building an email list. And I'm going to talk about that in a little bit more detail, but as you can see, we've been on his website for what, 10 seconds?

Yeah.

And he's got a pop-up and grab. Again, I've read 2 schools of thought on this. Some people say, yeah, it's really good, and others go, oh, it's just Irritating, and also you know why would you give 10% off? You're already devaluing the products. But you know, I I think you do need something on your website that grabs people and says sign up. But anyway, that's not why we're here. So what do we got? I you know is it part is it a great one? I don't know. So. This is his little story, what he does. It takes him 3 days— sorry, 3 weeks to make the chocolate. And then here's what he's got. So he's got truffles, he's got bars, he's got gifting, he's got cooking, he's got letterbox gifts. You know what I was saying about the standout? Look at the standout of this design.

It really stands out.

It does really stand out. He's got vegan. And then as we drop down, oh, there's a bit more about me. And then there's the links, and the links all work, people. And I've had a gripe with a couple of the gone in. team that they don't all work. I don't even know what that one is actually. There we go, that doesn't work. That's quite interesting. Anyway, I'm sure that was— So that's, that's Willy's cacao. Let's do another one because there's a couple of others. I wanted to show you the barley one because I think that's quite relevant in the same kind of structure in terms of Being a what I call a local business. Okay, so there's a video. Yeah, so they've got an online shop. This is this is their product designs again. There's the brand. There's interesting. This is reinforcing barley, and the product is quite clear. They're talking about made from scratch, and yes, you're absolutely right, there's the video. It does go on a bit, but let's have a quick look. So they've got— they're encouraging people to look at the Make it. This is our factory. Okay, then we've got certifications. So you know they haven't got any funky ones. So they've they've got the basic local certifications. Then they've got the products. So they sell. Beans, butter, and couverture. They also have drinking chocolate, cacao powder, and a vegan series. And then this is the availability. So these are all local Indonesian. Alibaba obviously is Far East version of Amazon. And then here's some distributors if you want to get it. And then there's Another video down here. So it's not perfect and it's quite different from, from Willy's, but it gives you an idea, I think, of how you could lay out a website in a different way.

Mm-hmm.

They are very much into education. When we were there, there was a school there and they take schools in quite regularly. And I know, Stephanie, ultimately you guys want have a farm for visiting, and they do it really nicely. The food is lovely, genuinely really lovely. They get kids, they take the kids in, and they do a day. I think they do some drawing, they make some chocolate, I think they go and visit a paddy field as well. It's a nice kids' day out. And they show you around the cocoa plantation, etc. So that's, that's their tour, that's their shop, this is if they want to export, and then who knows what's in press release. But yeah, and, and note most of it's in English, which is not my first language. So that's— I just wanted to show you a couple of websites because I know, Stephanie, you're here, but we've quite a few people we've we've been going through the websites and going they could do with a bit of updating. And I have to be honest, I can't remember where we've got to with yours, but they probably all need a bit. And go and have a look at Green and Blacks and have a look at Hotel Chocolat as well because they're all different. Hotel Chocolat I found is. A little bit catalogy. There's lots of products, but they do have an awful lot of products. So they're not so much selling about the brand; they're more selling the products itself. So key things, I suppose takeouts for me about your website is what's its function? So are you trying to get people to buy stuff, which is what they're doing on Hotel Chocolat? Are you, and to some extent Willy's Cacao, are you trying to emphasize your brand, which is, and your credibility and your sustainability, which I think a lot of you guys will be looking for, which is more like the cacao product? Or are you, you know, just fun and offering a point of difference? And I'll show you some of the Instagram feeds from some other people. People in a second where some of the big brands like Kit Kats and Cadburys, they're not interested. And to be fair, that's not their brand values. It's not about sustainability. It's about, right, buy some Cadbury's, you know, chocolate or Kit Kat. So we'll have a look at that. So that's websites. So I wanted to Compare and contrast for Instagram feeds. The first, I, and as I say, I'm not a social media expert, so everything that I'm talking about today is to try and get you to be thinking about what's the message and how are you going to put it across. The other thing which I was debating with one of you guys was about do you have one social media or do you have a country-specific? And it's quite interesting to see the way the different brands work. I mean, someone like Green Blacks and Willys are only UK-based. Sorry, yeah, they are, they are UK-based, but it's global. KitKat's global, they've got over a million followers. I think Cadbury's is a UK one, So they've got one specific for country. I think the more you have, the more difficult it gets. On the other hand, your marketing in Ghana might be quite different to your marketing in the UK, in which case you might want to have 2. So if we start with these 2 to have a look at them, the other thing to say which has changed so much in the last year is video. Video is king. If you take one thing away, is make sure you've got videos, not photographs, because videos just seem to be working so well. So Willy's Cacao is all about artisan, look at how artisan it is, they have got some competitions. This was a strange interview with Willy and some products that he'd found. Green and Blacks I found quite disturbing actually. So they're all videos of nature, well these ones were all videos of nature, of animals and where they grow the cocoa.

Mm-hmm.

It didn't do it for me, it didn't make me think, oh, I must go and buy some some cocoa, some chocolate from Green and Blacks, even though I would buy Green and Blacks, but I wouldn't buy it because of this. And then obviously you have got the Soil Association. But yeah, it's a little bit strange. Having said that, they've got reasonable engagement. I wouldn't say it's brilliant engagement. If we go to the big boys or girls, it's a slightly different ball game. So Cadbury's, I don't really understand Cadbury's. So Cadbury's have done a tie-up with the British Sign Language Association. I'm not quite sure why. I'm quite, I am a massive fan of charity. I think getting involved with charities is a great way of marketing your brand, but I think the charity needs to resonate with your brand, and I'm not quite sure why sign language does. Anyway, this is teaching you sign language videos, so do feel free to go and have a look at that. This is the mystery bar, so something that Cadbury's do a lot of is competitions, so that's quite interesting. And then we've got— so this is about— this is the mystery bar and these are all the clues. And then this one again is, is a bit weird. So this is a video of a guy in their development kitchen making a headdress, which I think RuPaul would wear in some TV program, which I've never heard of. So clearly I am not their target audience because I do not get a lot of this stuff. Other things to say is there is that consistency of the famous Cadbury's color.

Colors, yeah.

And then over this side, this is a bit more random. So KitKat is take a break, have a KitKat, share your breaks with us, have a break. So they— oops, come back— they have very much got that hashtag and I think if you've ever seen any KitKat advertising, you will have take a break in there. But the range of things is interesting. So this is Butterboard. So I don't know whether Butterboards have made it to Ghana, but this is about the 5th time I've seen Butterboard. boards this week, so it's obviously quite key. So basically you, you, you've got some flavoured butter and then you lob on some accoutrements, and this one's obviously a sweet one, so I suspect those are small bits of KitKat, and then you spoon it up and you share it. So it's like a sharing plate with a butter base, which is just— I don't know, I don't really understand it. And then There's some different themes. So this is a new product. So this is the caramel— well, it's not that new— caramel KitKat. This is just a, isn't KitKat gorgeous? I can't remember what that one's about. This is vegan. So vegan's quite key. And then they also— if you remember, this is a tie-up with sign language. This is a tie-up with Prime Video. So they are doing a collaboration and they're promoting it. So Yeah, quite a random set of themes.

Yeah.

To choose from, I suppose. A couple of things that kind of, I guess, are interesting is the use of hashtags, but the use of hashtags that are smaller. So I think if you use a hashtag like #chocolate, it's kind of a bit of a tough one. A lot of, you know, if you— I don't know how many million it is, but it's a lot. Whereas what these guys are doing, I mean, you know, Sign With Fingers is obviously a whole campaign that the Cadbury's Fingers is doing. And the Butterboard, so, you know, I went and had a look at the hashtag Butterboard, which is what they use in that, and it's got 5,000 posts, so it's a decent number. If you were looking for butter board, you'd go, oh look, there's— and you would probably end up having a look at the KitKat one. Competitions, I think, are really key. They really do help increase engagement, and, you know, go and have a look at the competitions that the big guys are running, and there's a lot of Tagging other people, getting people to share, you know, all about increasing the engagement, increasing the number of followers. And then collaboration. So I picked up the last one is Montezuma's, not such a great big brand. I think they've got about 28,000 followers, so they've got a decent number of followers. And there they have obviously product, but oops, come back, lots of competitions. So they're doing a cross-promotion with Jude's, which is an ice cream brand, which didn't get— actually, that one got quite a lot of engagement. This one didn't get so much engagement. This is you win a hamper of other stuff which didn't feel that resonant with chocolates. I think if you're collaborating, again, we go back to who's your target audience and what would they be buying alongside your products. I think that's quite important to think about. So don't collaborate, you know, with something that doesn't work. So I don't know, an artisan chocolate with Coca-Cola just doesn't really sit, even though they've got super, super loads of followers. So that's how Montezumas are doing, and if you go and have a look at them, they're a smaller chocolate brand in the UK. Okay, so before we move on, as I say, I'm not an expert in the, in I have put a recommendation of a course which I think is really good. There's a lady called Kate McCrory who I have heard really great things about, and I do have her course, although I haven't had the time to do it. I think there's so much in social media in terms of advertising, building relationships, And the other thing that I haven't put in here at all because we did cover it previously is LinkedIn. Never forget the power of LinkedIn. I know it is more of a trade social media than it is consumer, but you know, it's got a lot of people there, so don't forget it when you're pulling things together. And also, obviously, the other thing that we're trying to do at the moment is get listings, and And so if trade, social media is just as good. So any thoughts, questions, Stephanie?

At this point, no. Social media, yes, I think.

It's a challenge.

Yeah.

And as I say, I think, I think if, if it's something you When you get to that point of getting into the UK or other export, I think it's worth seeing if you can get some funding for getting an expert to help you put together the plan, because what I'm giving you is some of the questions and some of the thoughts, but I think there is a— you need some help with putting that plan together. And we can work on the themes, but the insider knowledge of what Well, how do I do it and how do I get more engagement, I think comes from, from a media expert, not least because it's changing all the time.

Yeah, um, the trends, the new trends almost every week.

There are new trends and, you know, Instagram's replaced by TikTok, TikTok's being replaced by YouTube Shorts apparently, someone told me yesterday. So anyway. I'm not going to worry about that. Get someone else to worry about it for you, that's my advice. Okay, so PR. There's 2 kinds of PR generally, there's proactive and reactive. So I have talked about trope PR before, but I'm going to put it out there again for you, and I've picked 3 magazines that I think are relevant to the UK for trade, but the principles are the same whether you're doing trade PR or consumer PR. At the end of the day, you need to have a story that is interesting and newsworthy because this is about giving press, whether that's magazines, radio, TV, news, and some content for them to talk about. So we've got Fine Food Digest, Specialty, and the Chocolate Magazine, and I've just picked 3 chocolate trade press and the emails for each of those so you can take those and you can— they are more likely to print what you send them. So obviously, if— and I'll show you a structure of a press release so you can have that in case you want to use it. But it still needs to be, you know, you can't just go, I've got some lovely chocolate. That's not news. I've got some lovely chocolate that's newly available in the UK. I've got this great new flavor. I've got this new range of gifts. We've got— I don't know, you could maybe talk about a collaboration, maybe a tie-up with a charity. There's lots of different things that you could be— could kind of dig into. But that's trade. Consumer is the same principle. There's loads and loads of consumer magazines, from women's magazines, lifestyle— I'm not probably allowed to say women's magazines anymore. Anyway, lifestyle magazines, food magazines. So there's Olive, Delicious. Good Food magazine, there's hundreds. So what you need to be thinking about is, what do I want to get coverage from? And again, who's my target audience? And what are they reading? So if, for example, like Stephanie, you are aiming at hotels, then Fine Food Digest and Speciality is not the one for you, you might want I don't know, Hotel Weekly or Travel or whatever. I don't know what the magazine is, but there will be a magazine of hospitality. There's, I'm sure there's a couple of hospitality ones. So think about who your target audience is, what they might be reading, and then go find them. And be, when you're being proactive, you want to be targeting relevant magazines so that, your press release is relevant to them and their readers, because otherwise they won't publish it and it's a waste of time. The other thing to say about press and publicity in general is it doesn't have the same impact on sales as maybe doing a Facebook ad would. It's more brand building and it's slower generally than than other forms like trade promotions in a store, for example. So I have taken an example here of simple press release. A lot of people that I've worked with tend to overwrite too long a press release. The trade tend to publish press releases in full. You won't see that so much in some of the food press. They tend to take it and go, okay, okay, and they might even get in contact with you. So simple, simple press release. What is it? Who's your press contact? So if it's you, what's your phone number? What's the date? Here's the title. And basically the first paragraph needs to summarize the rest of the press release. So what's the point? You know, the title needs to catch the attention. What's the news? You summarize what the news is. It's got to be catchy and interesting. And then you maybe have 3 paragraphs of further information that back up the first paragraph. And then it's always good to have somebody quote. So either our CEO says, or if it's consumer press, it might be, you know, you might say, I don't know, Nigella Lawson always uses our chocolate, and there's a quote from Nigella Lawson. That would be a wonderful thing to have. And then at the bottom, for further information, here's the contact details. You end the press release and then underneath it's notes to editors. So, notes to editors should be things like, I don't know, what your retail prices are, what your availability is, maybe your website. I know it says the website in the end of the actual copy, but it's worth maybe putting that into the notes to editors. Maybe where the range is currently available, what your range of products is. So the notes to editors is sort of information. If you're sending it out by email, which people tend to do these days, I would certainly put at least the first paragraph in the email, if not all of it, and then attach it as a file. Always have on hand, just in case somebody contacts you and decent photograph, range shot, and a basic press release about your brand just in case anybody ever contacts you. It's worth having one of those on file so that you're ready to go in case somebody says, yeah, we're really interested, and then you're scrabbling around for pictures and details. And then we have reactive PR. Um, and I've picked Ella, um, out because I've been working with Ella on and off for 3, 4 years and following her as well. And she is very, very good at reactive PR, although I've noticed more recently she's actually going to more proactive PR. So reactive PR is about— it's clues in the title— where you are reacting to something or somebody reaching out to you. So, um, this is some examples. She was on 5 Live. I can't remember what she was talking about. Um, BBC News did a piece on her. Um, and she was actually in Forbes as well, which is very prestigious. Um, and I can't remember what the article was about. Was it Starbucks? But anyway, it wasn't really relevant, but she had— she got quite a decent-sized piece because she'd commented. And I think the point is, what had she commented on? So if we look on the right-hand side of this, there is something called Journo Request. And if you go— this is— I took from Twitter over the last couple of days. If you put hashtag journo request into Twitter, you will get back these here. And a lot of them will not be, we would like some samples of chocolate so that we can try them for our magazine. A lot of them are looking for people to come on to shows, looking— so this one is Good Housekeeping, which is a really high readership magazine. Looking for women who've made a big change in 22 for a feature. So you know they're looking for somebody. So it might be you, it might be the founder, it might be somebody within your business. This guy is looking for consumer affairs. This one's looking for a CBT therapist. So it's probably not relevant. But what people like Ella do is they scan every day and. See what's— what people are asking for, um, and basically just respond. And that is how she got, um, onto Radio Live, 5 Live, and also the news, um, because they were looking for people who could comment. It was actually commenting on the news, which takes me to the second part, which is called newsjacking. So normally we might put a plan together and we say, right, we're going to have a marketing plan and we're going to publicize artisan chocolate from Ghana. And, um, I don't know, we'll be launching some Christmas ranges. So we start promoting the Christmas ranges maybe in September or something like that. And we'll put some PR out. That's proactive PR. Reactive PR is like these 2. So this one, um, I don't know if you remember, I can't remember how long ago it was, a couple of years ago, Cristiano Ronaldo, um, Ronaldo, must have been the last World Cup actually, um, was being interviewed and there was Coca-Cola on the desk and he moves Coca-Cola out of the way and he says, you should just drink water. IKEA, a lot of people picked it up and, and did spoofs on it. And IKEA actually came out and they said, drink sustainably, Cristiano. There we go. It's 2020. Uh, even the fact it was the Euros, not the World Cup. Um, and they created the Cristiano recyclable bottle for water, which is quite clever. It's not really PR as such, but it's reacting to news and creating content from that, and they got really good coverage. Domino's Pizza got picked up by a lot of press for this one. So this is more recent, this is last month. It was about— and I'm I don't know whether you saw any of this in Ghana, but basically Holly and Phil have the program This Morning on ITV. So it's a main morning program, lifestyle magazine program. And Holly and Phil happened to, in theory, jump the queue. Whether they did or not is not the point, but there was huge backlash. They were seen as jumping the queue to go and see the body of Queen Elizabeth. And Domino's went, apologies to anyone waiting on their pizza, we've just had an order from Holly and Phil, which obviously is referring to the fact that they jump queues. Look at that, 186,000 likes, and it got picked up by loads and loads of media as well. So that is newsjacking. But it doesn't have to be about that. You can be picking up I don't know, the budget. You could pick up the fact that the UK's gone into recession, which it hasn't yet, but it will do shortly. You could pick up, I don't know, we need happy news, not sad news. Pick up, I can't even think of an example at the moment, what's going on in the world. It's all bad, horrible stuff. But yeah, or, or You can pick up hashtags. So it was World Mental Health Day yesterday. It was also World Homeless Day yesterday. So again, that's probably not reactive because you would be proactive. But if it was something that you saw everyone was jumping on the bandwagon, it might be something that you want to have a look at. But one of the challenges for this for me is the fact that if you are coming into, for example, the UK, then you want to be aware of what's going on in the UK. And this kind of thing would probably need somebody on the ground to say, actually, I'll tell you what, this is really relevant to chocolate this week, or artisan, or what have you. But it's just another way. But the journey request is quite interesting. Okay, so email marketing.

Yeah, that looks familiar.

That looks familiar, doesn't it? Uh, so yeah, I did a screen grab of that earlier on today. Um, if you— again, just be aware when you go on 21's website, when people have pop-ups or, can we help you, or, do you want 10%, or— what they are doing is they are grabbing your email because as you As you drop on, yes, if you've if you've got Facebook and you've got cookies and you can monitor who's visiting your website, you can repurpose and you can get back to advertising them. But actually, what we really want because Facebook, Insta, TikTok, Twitter can all ban you, and and and I know I've got examples of clients who've been banned from all. In fact, I was cloned on Insta. Instagram and was suspended. I've even just— I was suspended earlier this year from LinkedIn, which did frighten me a bit because I was really scared I was going to lose my LinkedIn. But anyway, I got back fairly quickly. But it's all about people cloning you, unfortunately. If you've got an email list though, it's yours. They're your customers, they're your people. And so long as you don't spam them and you use a a mail list manager, it's, it's really worth, and I can't stress enough here, I've got a lot of business from my list. Um, I have a list of about 1,500 mostly food founders, um, and I grab them from, um, from the website. I get them to, they sign up to watch my webinars, um, they sign up for my newsletter. So it's adding, giving them value. So this is a good example how Willy Cacao does it. You sign up for the newsletter, you get 10% off the products and exclusive offers. And that's great.

It's easy.

Just sign me up. There's my name, there's my email. And then you've got those people and you can put them into something like Mailchimp or ActiveCampaign or I use HubSpot, but it's a little bit more expensive. But I'm not using it because it is expensive. It's just had some functionality that's worked really well for me. And then you can start building a relationship. And if you remember the training I did, and we haven't mentioned it today, and you have to touch someone 7 times before they buy from you, this is a great way of talking to customers. So for example, You might want to say, you know, we're coming to the UK, you know, the chocolate, our chocolate brand's coming to the UK in September. And you can do, if you capture and you can build your email list, you can start personalizing and telling people you're coming. You can use it, obviously, if people are buying from you, you can use it to prompt them to buy from you. You can tag people to segment. So if people say, for example, you've been doing some sampling in stores and you say, well, let me take your email and I'll send you some details, you can then say, oh, we saw you a couple of weeks ago, it'd be really nice, and really work that list. It's probably one of the most underutilized pieces of marketing That brands have. It's a huge opportunity. I mean, I'm on Hotel Chocolat's list. They write probably a little bit. In fact, I might have taken myself off it because they do write out quite regularly, but they'll write and they'll say, oh, it's— in fact, they've just sent me one because it's my birthday on Saturday, and they've actually sent me one saying, it's your birthday, here's a £5 voucher. Happy days. So, you know, That's more sophisticated. So at some point they captured my, my date of birth. I tend to send advent calendars to my 2 kids from Hotel Chocolat. You can bet your bottom dollar I'm going to get an email going, do you want to send some advent calendars in a couple of weeks' time? Or whenever advent calendars go out. So again, it's a fairly specialized area. It does take some doing. But if, if you're selling from your website, then please really think about email marketing in more detail because there's such a lot of opportunity to get value from it. And then I did promise a few little bits and bobs about getting help. Doing Instagram, social media is hard work, so you can schedule your posts. So I've put Hootsuite in there as a Human resources, getting people to help you. So if you're coming into the UK or you're going to America or you're going to Nigeria, wherever you want to export, you probably want somebody from country who understands the way that country works. Fiverr and Freelancer are great ways of finding people to help you. I certainly used both of them for helping me with tasks that maybe I don't have the expertise, or if you want somebody to just do a PR campaign for you. I mentioned Kat Kuroi, who is the Instagram expert. She's got loads of great stuff on her website. She's just really— she's got some really good marketing ideas as well. And then Jono Requests, rather than just going on to Twitter and looking for them every day, which is a little bit difficult, you can sign up to something called journalink.com. I'm not sure how much they charge, but you will get an email every day, um, and there's a couple of them like that which will just send you emails where journalists are looking for information. It can be overwhelming because I have signed up to it a couple of times and you get loads and loads of emails, but, um, if you can get a person to help you manage it, it might be something that's worth having a look at. Okay, so lots and lots of information, lots of things to think about, lots of lists really of things to say, right, well, have a think about this, have a think about that. They all vary in effectiveness. If you are trying to touch somebody 7 times to get them to buy your products, a combination of some of those different elements. You know, website is a kind of no-brainer, some social media, PR if you want to do it maybe at certain times, email marketing again if you've got an online shop to boost your sales, again no-brainer. So think about what are you going to focus on for the end of this year. You know, you're coming into the biggest selling season as As I'm well aware, for Christmas, which then obviously runs through into Valentine's as well, which I know are big for a lot of you. Just think about what you need to do from a marketing point of view, and also don't sweat it, don't get overwhelmed, because I think that's the other problem. We just look at it and we go, my goodness, there's just too much to do, and then nothing happens. If you want to talk to me specifically about marketing, then please Do email me, and we have coaching sessions. If we have coaching sessions booked in, we can talk about marketing specifically. And if you want to talk to me about getting your marketing messages and thinking about your target audience, we can have another think about that as well. And that is about it for today, and we are pretty much almost perfectly on time, which is quite quite scary how that happens. Stephanie, thank you for being there for me, so I've not been talking entirely to myself for 2 hours. Any, any questions you've got before we finish for today?

I think I've asked all the questions I've had to ask today, and the resources you gave would also help Especially for social media. So yeah.

It's just finding the time, isn't it? When you've got everything else to do, it's just like, how do I find the time to do that as well as everything else?

Exactly. And then when you're overwhelmed, you don't really prioritize. You're like, you can do this later.

Yeah, because that's not the thing that's shouting. And one of the problems is we do the things that are shouting. So if a customer's going, look, I want an order for— I need a my order for next Thursday, you go, right, I'm gonna do your order. And what's important, I think, is scheduling time for marketing because it will pay back and it does pay back. And I know, you know, over the last year I've done quite a lot of free webinars and speaking gigs and I get people come in and I'm still reaping the benefits of that, but I've actually stop doing any active marketing at the moment because I'm quite busy, but I know that in 6 months' time I'm going to suffer from that because my pipeline won't be there. So it is just finding the time and the resources and thinking, well, actually, can I give it to someone else to do?

Yeah.

But yeah, it's tough. I know it's tough. I do get that. But Have we got another session booked in? I can't remember if we have. I'm just going to stop this now.