Episode 124: "People Don’t Buy Products, They Buy Better Versions of Themselves"

Welcome to Skucast, the podcast for entrepreneurs in the promotional products industry. Skucast shines a light on our industry's best work, features maverick personalities, and discusses what's really involved in running a modern promotional products business. SkewCast is the official podcast of Common Skew.

Today's episode is a little departure from what we normally do. Hi friends, I'm Bobby LeHew, the Chief Content Officer at Common Skew. A few weeks ago, Mark Graham, Common Skew's co-founder and Chief Platform Officer, saw an article on Medium that really captured his imagination and sent it to our team. We were all stunned by the insights in that article. And thought it was such an important topic for us and for suppliers and distributors that I contacted the author who wrote it, Xander Nethercutt, and asked if I could read it on the SkewCast. Xander was kind enough to say yes. It's only a 5-minute read, but I hope it's as impactful to you as it is to us, because it has huge implications for how we sell, how we market our businesses, and how we inspire our customers. The article is titled People Don't Buy Products, They Buy a Better Version of Themselves. And I'll get to the article in just a minute. Quick note, SKUCon is almost sold out. If you scoop up those last tickets, you'll hear Memo Cohn from Promoshop, Brian Pappe from Mir, Vicki Ostrom, Lucas Greglia, Darryl Griffin, Kate Ivory, Brenda Spears, and many more. You can register at skucon.com. This episode is brought to you by CommonSKU, the platform that powers your connected workflow, enabling you to process more orders and dramatically grow your sales. Begin your free trial now. Commenscue.com. Now here's the brief article by Xander Nethergut, followed by a conversation with Mark Graham and I as we bridge these insights into our industry. Xander, by the way, can be found at xandercut.com. You can find a link to the original article and to Xander's website in the show notes at community.commenscue.com. Now here's the article, People Don't Buy Products, They Buy a Better Version of Themselves. The year was 1957, and Pepsi, like many of the youth at that time, was dealing with an identity crisis. Despite efforts from marketers, Pepsi was being outsold by its biggest competitor and perpetual market leader, Coke, by a factor just shy of 6 to 1, even as it was selling at half of Coke's price. It wasn't the product that was lacking. It was that Pepsi's brand ethos, indecisive and directionless, was a fragmented shell of what it would need to become to take on Coke. At the time, Coke was unrivaled, having succeeded in convincing the American public that they captured everything good and wholesome about American life within the murky confines of a glass bottle.

Bottle.

This clear transcendence of the competition was not unlike Apple's— like devotees react viscerally to a green speech bubble in iMessage. So too was it that to anyone who embraced the deeply American traits of exceptionalism, community-mindedness, and of course Santa Claus, consuming anything other than Coke would have been considered heresy. In 1963, Pepsi hired a young advertising executive named Alan Potash to address the issue. Potash's task was, to put it gently, difficult. He was to reinvigorate a brand competing against one of the most successful of all time, a product that not only outclassed Pepsi in every consumer-driven category but was also chemically nearly identical. And so Potash made a decision that would later become iconic, as he put it, to stop talking about the product and start talking about the user. Here is Tim Wu in his book The Attention Merchants. On the decision. Potash thus conceived of marketing Pepsi without reference to its inherent qualities, focusing instead on an image of the people who bought it or should be buying it. For the first time in history, a brand decided to promote the type of user that purchased a product as opposed to the product itself. Beyond that, Pepsi promoted the idea of an entirely new generation, one free from the manipulative consumerist messages being perpetuated by the mass media. It was, after all, the 1960s. This group would come to be known as the Pepsi Generation. The Pepsi Generation was revolutionary because it was the first time a brand convinced people to purchase their product by focusing on the type of person that doing so made them. No generation before had ever so vocally longed to transcend themselves, to escape the consumerist mindset and achieve truly independent thought. And thus Pepsi's message, drink our product and do exactly that, reached the perfect group at the perfect moment. Here's Wu quoting Potash on the success of the campaign. "For us to name and claim a whole generation after our product was a rather courageous thing," Potash would later remember, "that we weren't sure would take off." But his intuition would prove correct. What you drank said something about who you were. We painted an image of our consumer as active, vital, and young at heart. Over the next decade, Pepsi, as a result of the Pepsi Generation campaign, gained significant market share on Coke.. And while the campaign was revolutionary, the recipe for its success was simple. As Wu points out, desire's most natural endpoint is consumption. In other words, the campaign simply reimagined what people desired. This generation longed to escape consumerism, and the fact that Pepsi convinced them to do so by embracing it— purchasing a Pepsi, after all, is about as consumerist as it gets— is a testament to the genius of the campaign. Those who bought in and became a part of the Pepsi Generation were searching for a new way to feel. Rather than a new beverage to drink. Pepsi's genius was that it found a way to be both. The profundity of the Pepsi Generation campaign is twofold. First, its success reinvigorated a brand on the verge of being knocked out in an early round by one of the greatest competitors of the 20th century, Coke. Second, even decades later, it is nearly impossible to find a brand that has not used the strategy Pepsi pioneered—selling not a product but a better version of ourselves. Consider Apple. To be an Apple user, at least in the era of Jobs, was to think different. Critics might laugh at that characterization of an Apple user now, given the homogeneity and ubiquity of Apple products, especially among the wealthy. But those critics would miss what Apple didn't. People don't buy products because of what those products do. They buy products because of what they can do or what they imagine they can do with them. This idea even permeates Apple's retail strategy. Apple employees will never show you how a product works. Rather, they will let you use it, forcing you to familiarize yourself with the product. Yes, but more importantly, yourself in its presence. A diverse range of product options to choose from, after all, will never be as captivating as a homogeneous product that turns you into a superhero. And Apple has the latter in spades. Samsung learned this the hard way. Dogmatically focusing, as they did for the longest time, on promoting the features of their products as opposed to the person you could be by using them. Now they avoid talking about the speed of their processors, the depth of their blacks in their screens, because 99% of people don't care. What they do care about selfishly is what they will become—makers, directors, creators. In the words of Casey Neistat, if they use a Samsung product, the message: be like us. The solution? Buy a Samsung. Samsung even reworked Pepsi's initial genius, realizing that it is as powerful to portray the person people aspire to be as it is to portray the person they aspire not to be. In Samsung's case, the brainwashed Apple user who never makes the switch. The consumer who finally does is the one Samsung shows in their commercial, Growing Up, the better version of the Apple sheep portrayed leaving behind those who foolishly opt for the iPhone, the clearest among them a scowling man with the iPhone X's trademark notch. Etched in his hairline. The message: don't be him. The solution: buy a Samsung. It is far from just tech companies, though. Adidas and Nike both do it, the former with a similar line of thinking to Samsung's and a similar list of influencers. Starbucks does it by crafting beverages like the Unicorn Frappuccino, a drink that famously and unsurprisingly looks better than it tastes. While a poorly flavored but photogenic drink wouldn't have sold in prior generations, to this generation, our generation, it does. Why? Similar to how Pepsi understood they would never compete with Coke on product alone, Starbucks understands that in 2018, it is less about the drink itself than it is about who the drink makes you on Instagram and thus in real life. And regardless of what you think about us millennials— narcissistic, selfish, vain, outspoken— one thing is abundantly clear. As a result of social media and the internet, our generation is more conscious of how we are perceived. By friends, family, colleges, jobs, hell, even people we've never met than any other generation ever. Social media is well understood to be contributing to identity politics, but I argue it's contributing to something deeper: identity paralysis. This condition is one in which we have a forced awareness of how everything we say and do, even the seemingly inconsequential, like the shoes we wear or the airline we fly, reflects on us. It follows that our generation would also be uniquely drawn to brands that make us feel how we want to feel about ourselves, even as how we want to feel about ourselves is often nothing more than how we want to be perceived externally. Like Starbucks with the Unicorn Frappuccino, we prioritize external perception over just about everything else. The social media market where we live now demands a focus on visible characteristics which are by their very nature external. From designer drinks, yes, but from individuals too. Given all of this, I propose that analysts routinely overlook how people feel in the context of a brand when considering the value of a company. This statistic isn't discussed on earnings calls, and there is no way to measure it on a balance sheet. But perhaps that's because it has only begun to matter. Pepsi, after all, was the first company in history to market itself by promoting the image of consumer that drank it as opposed to the product itself, and that was only 50 years ago. Since then, consumers, aided by social media, have become far more conscious of who they are in the context of the products they use than even Pepsi could have imagined. In this society of ultra-conscious consumers, successful brands will be those that make consumers feel the way they want to feel about themselves. End quote.

Why did this article hit you so hard?

I think in my heart, I have always felt like I am this twisted version of a consumer marketer, even though I've always been in B2B marketing. I've always had this admiration and respect for the consumer marketing discipline. So as a result, I've admired brands that I've had relationships with, like Apple. And then there's a whole list of other consumer brands out there that I just think have done a fantastic job of differentiating themselves. So I suppose whenever I read anything that celebrates some kind of success in the consumer marketing world, I immediately think, like, is there a connection to our world in the promotional products industry? Because I think that we as an industry can certainly learn from some of the best marketers on the planet. And I think oftentimes you see that in the consumer world. So that's what struck me about it.

Where did you find the connection or the connecting point to merch and swag? What part of the business did you find that connection?

So if I, if I reflect back on my experience with Right Sleeve, I think that the kind of promotional campaign that I loved selling the most and building the most were campaigns where the customer had this strong emotional response to the products that we were building and creating. So an example could be when I would drop off the clothing or the hard goods or whatever for this particular client of mine, I always knew that there was some magic when employees would be running out of their cubicles and saying things like, oh, the merch is here, the swag is here. Like, we're so excited. Can we have some of that? And then the person that I had produced, my client, would look like a hero because, you know, they had just ordered this great merchandise from Right Sleeve. And so to me, there was that emotional moment that, that I just always loved. And in reading the article, the way I saw this connection is that you have You have a strong emotional response when someone buys an iPhone or a strong emotional response when someone opens up a can of Pepsi and so on and so forth. And I thought, you know what, the promotional products world is often labeled as lame and trinkety and trashy and having no real impact in the advertising and marketing space. I mean, at its worst, that's what some people will say.. And I've never believed that based on my own experience. And so that was the line that I drew. And I was like, listen, that hooded sweatshirt with Red Bull or Shopify or insert end client user here, the impact that that has on employee stakeholders or their end clients that they're handing out is just as strong. And I think that's really, really meaningful. So there's the line.

Yeah, I think I told you this once before, but we switched the language we were using even when we were doing company stores. We went from being a fulfillment service-oriented logistics type of company and we started using the line, we cultivate brand champions. I love that. And that was a, that was a big leap from, from the factuality of what we did, which can be commoditized and priced and shopped versus the emotional experience of cultivating brand champions. And also the reason why we did that also was because because the corporate buyer did not get it that employees may or may not buy their swag and their merch, and that the whole objective of it was to cultivate these brand champions. But let's back up a little bit and, and think about this from a consumer products— I'm curious what, what you think when people are buying something, they're buying a better version of themselves. What consumer brands came to mind when you read this article other than the obvious Pepsi one?

Um, I'll give you an example of, of a recent purchase that I just made. Um, Everlane. Okay. So, and I'll just think about myself in terms of why it is that I chose to buy the product. So I've admired the brand for some time in terms of their design and their web presence, a great example of engagement commerce there. And the experience of ordering the product, of receiving the product, and how the product was actually packaged was really quite fascinating to the feel and the cut of the garments. They sell merino wool sweaters, they sell t-shirts. I mean, I know where to buy t-shirts. I certainly didn't need to spend $25 on it. I could get a nice t-shirt for much less than that. Jeans, you know, same thing. But as you know, it was this little thought that as I was just interacting with the brand, I was like, oh, you know, I, you know, maybe indirectly I'm now thinking like, well, you know, I'm a better person. I'm buying a sustainable, sustainable sustainably sourced t-shirt and pair of jeans. So as a result, this makes me feel a little bit better about myself. You know, and as I say, in a very, you know, kind of indirect way. And I think that they're smart to play that up in terms of their brand value. So that's, that's one recent example. How about you, Bobby?

I think it's hilarious, by the way, that both of us know we can go get a cool and decent t-shirt for less than $5 if we wanted to go buy a blanket item. But we both recently went and purchased an item 10 or 15 times that price because we love the brand. So in my case, I thought back to a couple of purchases, and this will probably show that I'm a whole lot more vain than you, Mark.

That's not going to be a shock to listeners.

Yeah, no, it's not at all. Buck Mason. I love their brand. I love their— the cuts of their shirts. I love the material. And then Frye Boots, and both of which are just the iconic styles that I like. I was reminded of Ralph Lauren saying once that we're not in the fashion business, we're not in the apparel business, but we're in the storytelling business. And, and all of their images sort of convey this greater version, better version of who you can be or who you want to be. But I do think it's funny that both you and I paid like top dollar retail price for garments when we know what the cost is and we know we can get plenty, probably for free, if we just ask a few friends. You know what also is an interesting purchase that we both make? That exemplifies that we buy a better version of ourselves are the books we buy. Yeah. Oh my gosh.

That particularly applies to me. And you look at my nightstand and I think I'm so educated for having Les Mis, the original version or the unabridged version.

Is that what's on your nightstand right now?

Yeah, it's on my nightstand and it has not been cracked and it's like, what, 1,500 pages? Right. And I feel I need to be lifting weights in order to Lift this thing up. Yeah. And it makes me feel really cool, but I haven't read it, so maybe I'm just a poser.

No, but I mean, this is a really good point. I think it exemplifies the discussion, is that the books we read are just a perfect example that we're buying a better version of ourselves because we're obviously trying to be a better version of ourselves. I do the same thing. I think for every book I finish, I put down 5 or 10 maybe. Um, and I've got my same types of books on, on the nightstand as well, the deep philosophy books or something like that. You know, I, right now I'm reading Susan Sontag's bio and I'm just about to wrap up her second journal. She's this erudite, astounding thinker, this brilliant analyst. Anne Carson is another one, a brilliant Canadian. I'm not that smart, but I aspire to think smarter, swifter. And this, this applies to self-help books for sure. Um, but it's funny how we can make this tie for almost any product you can think of.

I, I'm, I'm going to back up a half step because I actually think you are on to something. I'm— what I'm wondering is whether there is any parallel that we can draw between this concept of solution selling that we talk a lot about in the industry, and there's many people in the industry that do an incredible job of selling solutions. Yeah. Can you draw a line between solution selling and selling to people who are trying to buy a better version of themselves, as well as drawing a line between the transactional sell and the opposite of that, the opposite of buying a better version of themselves? So, and I don't know if there are parallels there, but I kind of feel like this concept of solution selling is like this elevated experience where You're, you're moving the buyer towards a sale through things other than price and product. You're, you're moving them there. You're either inspiring them, you're engaging them, you're telling them a story that excites them. You're, you're presenting a solution that may make their brand look like it's a better version of itself, right? Even if it's not just the person, right? It's like, wow, our, our brand with this particular product, it's going to look amazing if we go and do this. So all that versus if you're not doing that, then is the black and white alternative the, hey, can you get me 100 stress toys? I just saw this online. Can you give me a good price? And that may be the exact opposite.

Is there something to that? I think there is, because I think that in the sense of that latter part of the product, and you're selling the commodity at that point. So let me see if I can answer it this way, Mark. And this is a little bit of a paraphrase. There's no such thing as average. And so to reach down toward this mythical character or the average person, because when people buy stuff, you know, they're trying— what they might do instead of buying swag or merchandise that elevates the person or honors the aspiration within them, So to reach down toward this mythical average person is to deny that each of us is on the way up, that we're all actually ascending. So no one can improve until they discard the notion that people are feeble-minded or basic. Yeah, basic being the emphasis here, because what we choose to buy is often really an act of faith. And when you're selling, you don't question the capacity of your audience nor diminish their competency and capabilities because of the aggregate, the average. There's no such thing as an average person. Instead, if we sell to their highest aspiration as an individual, that's where we're going to find higher margins and more the inspirational sell. The person who questions their audience, dumbs things down, averages them, is actually a bit of a schemer. The person who believes in their audience's individual aspiration ends up helping shape their journey. I know that's kind of more obvious in the solution selling, but here's an example that's from a retail purchase. And remember, it's just simply a shirt. Nike had a commercial series called Greatness in You, and it featured normal people, not super athletes running or playing sports. These, these were— these weren't lithe, svelte, muscular people at the top of their game. These were folks just getting started or struggling, but there was like this tiny seed of hope in them, and that hope was the birth of a better version of themselves. And it— if you can draw that line to a simple shirt, keep in mind that a Nike shirt, for the most part, is no different than a generic shirt. It's just that brand is on it. So to add another connection point to that, we do this with our own education. So any article I write or presentation I make is reaching into the heart and mind of the aspirational person who's listening. If we dumb our content down, we end up inspiring no one. If we challenge people to rise to the level of greatness that is possible within them, we honor their intentions. And in the sense, we actually become a co- creator with them and writing their success story. Right, right.

I think it's such a— it's such an interesting point. I think it's one that could be debated, um, quite a bit. Um, and, and, and so what I take from what you just said there is, and you apply it to a promotional product sale, in the case of a distributor going to an end client, or even a supplier coming to a distributor, sometimes a distributor that goes to an end client and puts in all this work and inspires by producing all these fun and crazy ideas and goes really above and beyond the call of duty, that what happens when that backfires, when the customer just says like, listen, thanks for all your time and effort and all your, all your proactive ideas, but all we really want is this white t-shirt because our budget's $4 a unit. And so I suppose it comes down to When is this idea of reaching high, when does that backfire? When is that not the right thing to do? Because as we know, as an industry, and certainly you and I have had experiences along the way with our time at Robin and Right Sleeve, that for all the inspiring high-minded work that we've been very proud of producing over the years. There's no question that we do get our fair share of orders, people who want 24 white t-shirts and they don't want a lick of creativity. And they just need it by next Wednesday and the price better be good. And boom, we just go and put it in as a transaction. So I've always been interested in that tension between creativity and solution selling and buying a better version of themselves and like, can you just get me these t-shirts?

Don't make it so complicated, buddy. Yeah, I hear that. In that case, I take the order, but I never let it rest inside me that our, that our job and our responsibility is to inspire the customer. Because you can't— you can always come down. If you come in at that commodity level and you come in, I'm the cheapest guy, I'm the, I'm the one that can sell you anything, you're so easily replaced. As opposed to now, now, could your buyer— would your buyer never get there and just say, look, man, finally, Stop trying to sell me this stuff. Sure, they could get there, but again, I'd rather come from that position of strength, that position of respect, that position of purpose, than I would the position of marginalized, commoditized, and average. I mean, it's funny to draw the corollary to literature. This might be too big of a leap, Mark, but Ralph Ellison said that the central theme American theme is search for identity. And everything we talk about with selling merchandise is back to that identity, coming back into that identity. So that may have got us off track, but the bottom line is I would sell to the buyer. I would take that order. I would say thank you, but I would never settle for that in my own heart and mind. You think that's BS? Hmm. Don't get me wrong. I'll take orders like that a lot. I will say this. When you look back, maybe to challenge yourself, when you look back at some of the most complicated and rewarding orders that you ever had in the history of your career, or if I was to talk to a promotional products professional right now and say, I want you to tell me right now in the past 12 months, the project you worked on that was the most challenging, encouraging to you. And it could be the commoditized product that had some problems with it they rescued or something like that. But Probably 8 out of 10 times, maybe 7 out of 10 times, it'll be something that triggered that emotional connection. Yeah, oh, for sure.

I think you're bang on with that. And again, that emotional connection could come out of maybe a very basic product, but some creative way that they solved it. I mean, think of the SKUcast that we did with Ruth and Beth at Paperclip in Austin and their office where the, uh, the jacket order that they were talking about that they rescued from that train, um, I, I'm not entirely sure. Well, they didn't get into a lot of detail about the actual jackets, but in that particular case, I'm not so sure that the jackets themselves were overly creative as much as their approach to solving this huge problem that allowed them to go and either rescue this order and make their customer look good. And I think that that's That I think is in the same family as buying a better version of yourselves. I know it may be a bit of a stretch, but I just think it's this notion of how it is that we as an industry are either creative in producing the product or creative in solving problems or creative in some logistical mess that needs to be solved. I think that's when people remember things with fondness.

Going back to that Pepsi article, I have to keep reminding folks that we're talking about Pepsi. We're talking about sugar water. So if we can— surely we can make the correlation between— yeah, that's true. That's a really good point about sugar water. You know, the, those who bought— there's, here's two lines from that article. Those who bought in and became a part of the Pepsi generation were searching for a new way to feel rather than a new beverage to drink. People don't buy products because of what those products do. They buy products because of what they can do or what they can imagine they can do with them. And so that article highlighted the fact that we need to reimagine what people desire. Let me ask you this, Mark. What implications do you think this has for what we sell if our job is to reimagine what people desire?

I think that the best distributors and suppliers in the promotional industry are the ones that can take their customers on a journey. And so much of that is in reimagining or maybe repositioning reframing how it is the customer views the product or views what they think they need to accomplish a certain business objective. And I think like right now as we are recording this, there are probably thousands of conversations taking place all across the world where an end client has reached out to a distributor with a request. Can you get me this? And I think that in many cases, those that really excel at their craft are the ones that are able to take that customer on a journey, maybe take that request and try to frame it in the context of what it is they're trying to do. And in some cases, that might be reframing it. That might be saying, well, hey, like that, this may not be the best particular product for what it is that you're trying to do. And so I hear that and I think that so much of it is How is it that we in this industry are helping inspire our customers as much as humanly possible by taking them on this journey so they go from what they think they need into something that's truly spectacular?

One of the questions I have for you is you've seen this impact customers who invest in Commenscue. So when you read this article and you read that in light of wearing your Commenscue hat, not your right sleeve hat. How have you seen this impact on our customers and who is it they're aspiring to become?

Like, this is the thing that absolutely jumped out for me when I read the article. It's worth noting that we've spent a lot of the podcast talking about how we as distributors can inspire end clients with promotional products that are magical. Okay? We've talked a lot about that and I think that's a very worthwhile point. But there's also a huge point to be made in how it is that we as distributors suppliers, or in CommonScoop's case, a service provider, how it is that we position our brands like Pepsi has positioned their brand to their consumers. So what I mean by that, and if I give the example of, I'll give two examples, Right Sleeve and CommonScoop, because the ones I know best is that with Right Sleeve, I mean, if you use the sugar water analogy, Right Sleeve is in the sugar water business, commodity business. There's there's, what, 20,000 distributors that are in the promotional products market in North America. It's the ultimate commodity business, just like cola is the ultimate commodity business as well in terms of how cheap it is to manufacture. You can get the same— it's easy to make. You can get the materials from a number of different sources. But it's, it's how, it's how we went about branding the company and the story that we were telling about our brand and the story that we were trying to tell to our target audience that allowed us to become a bit like a Pepsi or just something that was a little bit different than just a company that could sell you promotional products. And so what that, that journey was a long, tough journey allowed us to command better margins, command better loyalty, allowed us to work on projects that were truly creative as opposed to getting stuck in these. I found this on 4imprint. Can you match the price kind of thing like that? Yeah, it doesn't happen all that often. So to me, that, that jumped out way more in the article was how it is that we as a company were trying to be like Pepsi. Um, and then following on with Common Skew, it's a more recent example. Common Skew, if you boil down our product, is also somewhat in the sugared water business. Um, it, it's a product where we could have gone out and said, hey, we've got nifty presentations, or hey, we've got great orders. You can go and submit them. Hey, we're in the cloud. Like at the end of the day, there's lots of other great providers. Providers that do presentations and orders and are in the cloud. Um, and so I never wanted to build a company that was just competing on those features because a much larger competitor would just be able to come in and either copy those features and, and, and kill us. But what a larger competitor could not do as easily is creating a tribe, creating a community, creating this sense that those that were purchasing the product were becoming a better business, a better version of themselves. Uh, it was aspirational. It was a community of people that were helping one another that was all backed by very powerful, beautifully designed software that communicated these 21st century modern values. And that was incredibly intentional. It was incredibly personal and from the heart because those values are ones that I've lived forever. And so I knew that that would come across as authentic. So when I read this article, now you're getting me really fired up. Is how we as an industry, how we as players in this industry owe it to ourselves to take a page from that article. Because going back to our marketing podcast that we did a couple weeks ago, the absolute very best companies in this industry— supplier, service provider, or distributor— are the ones that have invested in their brands, the ones that know marketing really, really well, just like Pepsi.

The bottom line is this comes down to inspirational engagement. That's really what it's about. And we look at— and that leads to another next question, you know, how How do we reposition our marketing and our messages and our brands to incorporate this? And the best already do that. I think the best in the business already do this, where, as you like to say, that best of the brands have a story to tell. Or what is it you said about their clients? Oh, they have a, they have an opinion about their clients. Oh yeah. Yeah. So this all ties into that better, greater version. Their opinion might be you can be a better brand than you are. You can be a bigger brand than you are. That's why you're engaging with us. Because you can be— we can help you realize all that the potential that your brand has wanted to become. And I know that sounds grandiose, but I'm thinking, Mark, of— we had a company in our market that was the biggest— it was a Google-type buyer for our market. And it was— these guys had a $4 to $6 million budget, I kid you not, for promotional gear. The CEO himself for the longest time signed off on the merch himself. He appropriated something like $600 per employee. It was an insane number. I remember we got about a million of it. There were a couple other companies involved. There was about 4 or 5 of us distributors involved, and we got about a million of it. And a couple other distributors had bigger chunks of it. But it was always astonishing to me that you had this billionaire. Yeah. Making a decision over swag and also making sure that he appropriated $600 per employee for this apparel because he actually believed in that greater version of their brand, of themselves. And it was an infinite infinite well of pride that he had.

Yeah, yeah. I love that.

You and I have been in the business long enough to see it work on the inspirational level in a big way.

So we're not just blowing smoke. Yeah, yeah.

Oh, that's, that's such a cool story. Yeah. And you know what, Mark, there's a little example I used to use for customers when I would present to them. I would take it, I would take an ordinary glass and it was, it wasn't crystal, it was just glass. I would ask what the value of this product is. And I would tell them it's glass, not crystal, but it looked gorgeous because I'd shine it right before I showed it, you know. And they would look at it and they go, I don't know, $2, $1.50, $0.99 if you bought a piece of glass. Like it was a wine glass off the shelf at Walmart. And then I moved my hand and it showed the Apple logo. And I reminded them that it was still a dollar piece of glass that you could buy off the shelf. At Walmart. But what Apple had done brilliantly, brilliantly, was they sold to a greater version. And what the other thing I love to do in my, as you know, Mark, in my storytelling session, I love to do is I love to show logos and ask people what they feel. And so for example, I'll show the Apple logo and people will say, they always say the same thing. They say smarter, wiser, faster, and all of that er, er, is a better version of themselves.

Yeah, yeah, that's such a great point. That's really great. It's like you're a magician there, Bobby. You were—

you have a cloak on when you were doing that. Yeah, yeah, I know, I know. And it was— but you and I are passionate about this because we've seen it work, not because we're just here, two talking heads trying to make a podcast happen. We've actually seen it in real life work. And when you see it work with the biggest brands, you are now the professional, and you can go back to your other customers and say, hey, we made this work for this company, and you cross-pollinate this this passion and this inspiration to your other customers.

Yeah, absolutely. You also wanted to talk about social and specifically Instagram and how brands use Instagram in an effective way to really promote this idea of inspiring other people.

Is there not a better explanation for people buying a better version of themselves than Instagram? Yeah.

Yeah, for, for, for all, for all the bad in terms of the posturing and, you know, creating this better, better life about how your lives are so exciting, you know, that can apply to product too.

That everyone edits. Like if you take a picture, if you take 3 pics of yourself, you're going to post one online, you're going to edit. What that means is you're not going to alter the photo. You're going to actually edit out the 2 that are bad and you're going to post the one that's good. And so everyone edits. Otherwise we'd all be walking around practically nude, right? Every morning we edit. We shave, we shower, we put on clothes, put on the best clothes. But all of that is a better version of ourselves, every bit of it. So I think the smartest marketers among us just know that that resides in all of us. But it's funny, we could have just said this whole podcast, Instagram is the best example of people buying a better version.

Yeah, cut out all the middle stuff and throw that in. No, I mean, like, that's, that, that's a That's such a great point. I think the other thing that is also obvious to me that social and specifically Instagram has done wonders for our medium because promotional products photograph really well, or when they're photographed well, they show extremely well. And usually when they're shown in a way that suggests some kind of emotional connection or excitement, that, that's not only great for our industry, but it's great for the brand because it's showing off, it's showing off something that's tangible that they're excited about. And I mean, when's the last time someone took a picture of a business card or, well, actually, you know what, here's what's amazing to me. Business cards up until the time of moo.com were super boring and no one cared about them. And now people are ordering them from a site like that and they're, they're, you know, beautiful designs and quality. And it's amazing they're having their Instagram moment as well. So I mean, that's, that's a side point, but it's just amazing to me how photography has done such wonders for communicating the value of promotional products. And I mean, you don't have to look so— I mean, just look at end clients that go and receive product and they're posting them and they're thanking the brand for it because, yeah, because it means something to them. And the only reason someone's posting it to Instagram is so they can show all their friends how cool and smart they are. So isn't that a better version of themselves right then and there?

Absolutely. Another example is Yeti. Does buying a Yeti cooler make me a better hunter, or do I fish better? Do I hike better? Do I, do I tailgate better? Do I do all of— do I do any of those things better because I bought that cooler?

No, it doesn't make you do it worse. But right, right, right.

But I am buying into a greater version of myself. And when you look at their videos and the commercials they're doing online at YouTube, Google their— some of their aspirational commercials they're doing, they're getting in the heart of it, man. They really sold that product. I mean, you, you ask any supplier in the industry that sells a competing product, they have coolers that can actually keep food and beverages colder, longer, and better than Yeti. But what did Yeti do? Yeti out-inspired everybody.

I know, it's a great example. It's, it's the perfect example in this case, um, because the product costs 2 to 3 times as much, uh, and clients are asking for it, and distributors are frustrated because it's hard to get. Um, and they can say, well, I can move you into this Gold Bond product, or I can move you into this Hit product, or move you into a Logomark product, all of which are great products, but if they don't have that brand name, then the customer rejects it. And, but yeah, it's, it's an exceptional story. And what's really amazing about Yeti, just as a kind of a side point, that in their case, they've been able to transcend all these different demographics because they originally started off selling to the hunting and fishing crowd. And yet now Wall Street bankers, are demanding Yeti products for Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, which, which is amazing to me that they've been able to make that leap and appeal to all different market segments.

Mark, I love this discussion. I actually think this is going to be a continuing discussion because I think this topic is so big for our business and for our industry that we'll be returning to this one again. And what I'd love— I'd love to hear folks' opinion on this. I want to feedback. I actually feel like you and I are sort of, even though we've experienced this and even though for with CommsCue, for example, is definitely the heartbeat, I think, of what we do because we, because we seek to inspire and grow the entrepreneur and recognize the greatness in them. But we also want to hear how other folks have experienced this and what's happened to them in the market if they've had the same kind of thing happen. Any last words?

No last words other than I just love having this conversation, and I think it really represents the very best of our industry. I think in many respects it represents the future of our industry, particularly as we grapple with the Amazonification of the industry where people are expecting self-serve transactional online experiences. Again, nothing wrong with that segment of the industry. I think that's a very interesting segment of the industry. Industry, but you think about what we talked about with marketing, you think what we've talked about with engagement commerce in the past, so much, there's so, so much opportunity for this segment of the market where distributors are inspiring their customers around along the lines of what this article talked about. Yeah, awesome.

Thanks, my friend.

Thank you. Thanks so much for tuning into this episode. Episode of SkewCast. Be sure to keep up with our latest content by subscribing to SkewCast on iTunes or to our blog at community.commskew.com. Until next time, friends, thanks so much for listening.