Episode 171: What Creates an Extraordinary Product Experience?

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. Skucast is the official podcast of Common Skew.

2020 put promotional products in the spotlight. Suddenly, distributors everywhere were working on substantial campaigns, shipping to homes, connecting disconnected audiences in ways that we've never done before. Promotional products were the one thing that connected us, created a bond and a unity. But we have a challenge now. How do we not let this new opportunity slip into commoditization? How do we not make these new kits, these products we're shipping into homes, the new brand fill? And most importantly, how do we impact our teams and our clients with the enthusiasm we have to take a functional experience and transform it into an aesthetic, emotional experience? Hi friends, I'm Bobby LeHew, CommsCue's Chief Content Officer, and today I'm joined by Mark Graham, Comiskey's President and Chief Brand Officer. I want to say a quick thank you to all 1,100 of you who signed up for SKUCon and for the near 1,000 people who didn't just attend, but stayed throughout the entire duration of the several-hour event. A special thank you to the speakers who didn't just show up to talk, but showed up to ignite our minds and encourage our hearts and mostly launch us into 2021. If you didn't attend, keep an eye out at community.commonsq.com as we'll be releasing one at a time select videos from the event. This episode is brought to you by CommonsQ, the work from anywhere platform that powers your connected workflow and enables you to dramatically grow your sales. You can learn more at commonsq.com. Now here's my conversation with Mark. Marc, how do we take a functional experience and elevate it to an emotional experience as opposed to just checking boxes and creating campaigns? We both have experience as distributors, so we could, we could call on any number of campaigns that we've built for clients in the past that we loved and enjoyed and that were received well and that achieved their objective and their intent. But let's start with the freshest campaign that we've both worked on, particularly you, and Kate and Ali, only because it's fresh in our minds, not because we're trying to promote the SKUCon merchandise. But I want to know and get inside your head about what you go through when you're trying to take a functional experience like getting swag to people, which is just at its base element what we were doing, and elevating that to an emotional experience.

I think everything starts with community. If you have an engaged community that has an emotional connection with your brand or your company or the product or service that you're creating, and they also have an affinity for one another in the community. So, if there's a, let's say, a shared interest or some like-mindedness or a shared philosophy, I feel like if you have that, no matter how big or small it is, then building a promotional products merchandise campaign that springboards off of that community or serves that community, that to me is where everything starts. Without that, it's so hard to find your North Star when producing merchandise. So that's my quick answer, but I think you've got a question there.

Yeah, some people might say, okay, my client's contacting me for a campaign, and I don't know that that tribalism exists with the market. Is our job then to explore it until we find it, or to find that affinity?

I think it's two things. When I, when I talk about community and I talk about this emotional connection, And you're right, not every brand has that, but what they do have is a target customer. They do have a target customer with hopes, dreams, objectives that need to be satisfied.

Aspirations is a big part of this.

Aspirations, absolutely. So, I feel like community is almost like the higher calling or a more evolved version of that. But at its most basic element, if we're talking about, let's say, a functional brand, a functional company that provides a transaction to its customers that may not have that, say, tribal following, that target customer still has aspirations and still has interests that need to be satisfied. That person, that particular personality and that profile of that end client needs to be put up on a pedestal, and that's where the promotional merchandise campaign, needs to be designed with that person in mind. Right.

You know the old adage, people buy from people they know, like, and trust? That's no longer a perfect trifecta. Like, the like part falls short in this, in where we're at now and in the future. It's part of a bygone era. I think it's part of the old, the old school methodology for sales. Because when Anne Henley spoke at SKUCon and she used the word affinity, I just, my mind sort of erupted because affinity is a perfect word for what we're describing here. It's different than likability. I can still like you as a person and keep my distance. With affinity, literally the meaning is there's a bonding and a connection. There's something that connects that audience to each other. And let me give you one example. Speaking of Ann, when you said about this, this, Mark, we had a conference we were doing for Ann Marketing Profs, the largest B2B conference in the world, the largest, largest community of B2B marketers in the world. And what we did for their merch one year is instead of just slapping a logo on the product, what we did was we created some really clever copy that, that bound that audience together. For example, at the time, marketing departments were getting dumped on with all kinds of projects. They're known for that in a lot of large businesses. And so we actually played on this aspect. So when people showed up at the event and they read the tagline copy, they laughed and said, these people get me. Yeah, we found that affinity, I guess, is one thing I'm saying. So I'm making two points there. That is, as a brand ourselves, we have to build that affinity, but also through these campaigns, I think that's something we can look for is where is the affinity, right?

And does the merchandise advance or cement that affinity even more, right? And I think that's another really critical question, regardless if it's a community that you're trying to service, or if you're just trying to service, let's say, a target customer in building out their profile. What does this promotional merchandise actually do? How does it move them in a way to get them to do what you want them to do? Right? Does it— and these are very simple questions, right? Does it compel them to book a demo with you? Does it compel them to purchase your product? Does it compel them to feel appreciated? Does it compel them to feel like, as Anne Hanley was saying in her opening remarks, is it a celebration for them as they open merchandise, getting prepared for a virtual conference? There's all sorts of different objectives. But I think that the successful distributors, not only do they have that target customer, that community in mind, but they also have a very clear understanding as to what the promotional merchandise is going to compel that customer to do. If the customer— this is the worst end of the continuum— opens up their kit at home and says, "Oh great, the shirt didn't fit me," or "This product is falling apart," or "This product, it's fine, but I'm never going to use it," and it immediately hits the the garbage bin, then that's a total fail. Much like back in our in-person event days, if you showed up at a conference center and you receive a tote bag at registration and it's filled with things that don't speak to you, then that, of course, is also a fail. And I think that by really pausing and understanding the objective and the target audience, those are two critical questions that distributors can think about in absolutely every interaction they have with a customer who's coming to them looking for a promotional experience.

Right, right. And speaking of that, affinity, there's something in project management called an affinity diagram. And that's when you take random ideas from a brainstorming session and you sort of collect them together by affinity groups or by their natural relationships. Distributors do this for clients when they gather the universe of products in the industry that are available, whatever that quantity is now. There's like a million, a million plus, like the world is just full of, of product opportunities inside and outside the industry. But they gather these into small clusters for the client to consider. That moment right there, you could call this our industry's decisive moment.

Yep.

That moment right there, that gathering, that collection consists of a few things happening in the synapses of the distributors. This is not dumping the newest ideas from suppliers into a presentation. It's passing a creative firewall in the mind of the savvy distributor. Number one, they are intuitively gathering what makes sense for the brand and processing it through their brand buyer filter. And then number 2, together with the client, they form an agreeable direction for creative merchandise that fuses the client's opinion with the distributor's. And there's an affinity moment. There's like affinity moments happening all the way through this exchange. That's where affinity happens, when a client distributor fuses in harmony to create magic. And affinity is happening through the whole buying spectrum from the first time you reach out to a supplier, from the client, from the prospect, from when they see your website, the front door of your business. The first person they meet is your website., to distributors connecting with suppliers and product that they're trying to find, to everyday transactions. But I guess why I'm stressing all this is because with our teams, as we head into this new era, we can't make trade show merchandise that we used to sell at trade show events become the new tchotchke, right? We can't let that become the new brand fill. We have to be more cognizant and aware of what we're doing for our clients.

Yeah, absolutely. There was one word that popped in my mind when you were just mentioning that, Bobby, and it's curation. Curation is also at the heart of what you just said there. And another thing that really jumps out at me, and you and I have chatted offline about this many, many times, is that in that process the distributor is having or the journey they're going on with their end client, it's also rooted in a firm position and a firm opinion that the distributor has about their client brand. I know this is a theme we've mentioned on a couple of SkewCasts in the past, but you take that curated approach coupled with this strong opinion that the distributor has about their client's brand, their client marketing objective, their client's client, and the best, the very best campaigns are the ones where the design of the products are done with that very end client in mind. And the best distributors are the ones that think like that. Wasn't it Mitra Khayyam in her Q&A at SKUCon was quite simply talking about making merchandise that she liked herself because she in fact was the target customer and immersed herself in the world of her music clients' fans. So simple, yet something that so many people just overlook in this rush to get off a quick presentation because they're up against the gun.

Right. And we have to retrain and retool our sales teams moving forward. We talked about this in the Future of Work series, that in order to form an opinion and have an opinion, two things have to happen. Number one, they have to be cultivating a creative lifestyle that feeds on ideas.

Yes.

So outside the business, inside the business. I would say it has to be at least 50/50, if not more so outside the industry than inside the industry, because we are obsessive about feeding our minds with inside the industry product and ideas. But most of the creative inspirational people feed their minds with things outside the business. Number one. Number two, they have to immerse and take their time to immerse themselves into the culture of their clients. And that's what you're pointing out that Mitra did. She, she developed not one but two successful retail t-shirt shared merchandise companies, and they both serve different audiences. But she had strong opinions about design and trends because she immersed herself in that. She trained herself to constantly be looking for ideas, and then she immersed herself in her audience world. She read, listened to their music, read about their heroes. In a sense, she could— you could say she entered their world as a participant and not an observer.

So I don't want this podcast to be about hiring salespeople and account people in the industry, but I'm going to make one quick little comment about this and then we can get back to the task at hand. In my experience, in 20 or so years in the promotional products industry, I think about my past distributor life and I think about my current experience in the software business catering to the promotional products professional. That the best salespeople, the best account people, according to me and based on the experience I had, were not from stealing a salesperson from another distributor because what you're getting at that point is just simply a salesperson that's got a list. And generally speaking, they're just selling product to that list. And to me, I was never interested in that. Whereas if I could hire someone without industry experience that had the right cultural attitude, the right cultural fit, but then more importantly had a curiosity about their client, about the world around them, about maybe a vertical that they were passionate about, then I knew 9 times out of 10, if they had the right work ethic, they could come in, they could learn the business. I mean, the business is actually not that hard to learn. But what's hard to learn is sitting across from a customer and saying, "No, Mr. or Mrs. Customer, this is the hooded sweatshirt you need because of X, Y, and Z, because of my opinion," as opposed to just reading out of some product chart that says, "Well, this is a 15-ounce versus a 17-ounce," right? It doesn't, that doesn't matter. And I just think so, I think fondly, an any merchandise program that I had the privilege of working on with my colleagues at Common Skew and certainly back in their old right sleeve days, it was never about the particular supplier. It was always about how this particular merchandise would move the client if they purchased it. And that was so exciting.

Yeah. And this is a recurring refrain, by the way, among the best in the business. When I was interviewing Tracy from Genuine Mark, this was also the very thing we talked about is curating collections and having a strong opinion. You know, the broken part of our system and where our industry fails is not in the execution of the delivery or the mechanics of sourcing and printing and getting the item there. We actually have an astounding success rate. I know people that are aggravated by maybe some challenges with production might not feel that way today, but when you look at the— when you step back and you look at how many projects go right in this business, it's an amazing business. So logistically, Functionally, it's wonderful. It's in our heads that's where the difference occurs and how we think about this business. Meaning we get, we get the functional logistical parts— finding an item, navigating imprint options, meeting deadlines— but where we often fail is in our heads. And this is what you're talking about by hiring the right type of people outside the business. Mark, you remember the phrase knowledge worker and how that was going to be the future? Yep. Um, that was a big deal when it, when it first hit, and we all were like, what's a knowledge worker? Well, we're in it, and the most basic definition is one who thinks for a living. And Thinking is our most important job, not sourcing, not finding, not searching. It's thinking about those kinds of objectives. And to put a finer point on that, it's being intentional, as Jamie likes to say, with everything that we're doing.

I think this is certainly a point that has been made well before me. But look at the internet, look at the big internet retailers in the promotional industry. They are masters of the product and the price and being able to get something to an end client efficiently. And that model is certainly growing and continuing to thrive. But what I find so interesting is that years ago, people were predicting the death of the non- e-commerce distributor and how it was going to be an Amazon discount mug for the world. And what's interesting to me is that while foreimprint certainly continues to grow, I don't know that it's necessarily at the expense of the traditional distributor. And that's not to give the traditional distributor a hall pass that they can't embrace technology. They need to embrace technology or else they're done. But it's this whole concept of the thinking, as you say, Bobby, the sort of knowledge distributor that combines great technology but with great thinking, because that's what the truly picky marketers with big-ass problems, they're not going and purchasing a product on a website like an Amazon. They're going to a distributor partner that's got great tech but great knowledge, great creativity, and great opinions. Like, there's that word again, the great opinions that come together in a strategic way.

Right. Some might argue, Mark, that certain brands aren't exciting or important or tribal. And, but can functional brands elevate to experience? In other words, can we create experiential moments for even just what we might call functional brands?

Absolutely, absolutely. I don't think that a transactional brand can get away or have the hall pass as I was saying before when it comes to producing crappy promotional items. I think that if they understand their customer, getting back to what I was talking about, understand the customer's aspirations, their hopes and dreams, so to speak, and also understand what's going to move that customer to act in a certain way. If they ask those two questions, or I should say the distributor should really be asking those questions. It's the distributor's job to guide the client. Then great merchandise will result. Now, I was talking offline with you, Bobby, about the relationship that I have with my air conditioning company, my furnace company. Right now, it's a different relationship than I have, say, with a brand like Apple, which may be a little bit more emotional just by virtue of how it is that I use those products. Right. And also by virtue of maybe Apple's aspirational advertising. Now, I could get a product from Apple, promotional items from Apple that I would cherish and that I would use and that I might cement my part of being in the Apple tribe. But I do believe the air conditioning company, the furnace company, and I'm just kind of pulling this out of my hat right now because I actually don't have a good example of them giving me a promotional product, but it was just one that I was thinking of the other day that I'm not sure that I'm ever going to be a tribal rabid follower of my furnace company. It's just different. Now, that's not a bad thing, but if they could gift me something that would either thank me for my business in a way that felt very targeted and meaningful to me, or it was something super basic like a fridge magnet— I know that is a very, very basic example— but had a phone number as well as an hour guarantee that they would be at my door if the furnace broke down 24 7, 365 days a year. And I'm just using, I'm just, as they say, I'm pulling that out of my hat, but something like that is incredibly functional. It's going to be right in front of me and it's going to be reminding me of this particular company and it's compelling me to act in a particular way. That's a very successful functional thing that is not going to land in the garbage. A Nike polo shirt with their big logo on the left chest, I'll probably never ever wear because I just don't care about the brand in that way.

Yeah. I think a question we can ask every time we do a project is where is the opportunity for us to create either or all an aesthetic experience, an ecstatic experience, something that makes people exclaim and feel that, or an emotional experience that elevates the moment. Let me just pause for a minute and address the skeptic in the room who's like, here's Bobby and Mark on their high horse again. Do you guys know how busy I am? We both agree that you may not have the bandwidth to do this for every project that comes across your desk. No. But the best in the business do this in a very fast moment, intuitively in their head, for one thing. And number two, yes, you can take a transactional order and do that for a client and fulfill what it is they need you to do. But if you consist of nothing but transactional moments with you and your client throughout the year and you do not take special campaigns, for example, when the CEO steps in and says, I want to recognize all our salespeople because despite the pandemic, we had a 20% increase in sales. That moment had better be an aesthetic, ecstatic, and emotional moment, and you'd better step up your game. So transactional experiences happen all the time in this business. But what we're saying and what we're seeing is the future of the business are those that do this intuitively, which is why we need to train our teams to do this, and also that know that moment when it occurs and that opportunity when it occurs and how we need to address it when it happens.

Absolutely, my friend.

In summation, what I want to encourage folks to do— most people listening to this are believers, right? They're already there with us. They're nodding their head in agreement probably the whole time. The new challenge for us is not for those of us listening to do this as much as it is for us to create this type of passion within our teams. Because a lot of folks listening are leaders in the business, or if you are listening and maybe you're either a solo entrepreneur or perhaps you're a salesperson on a team, it's to spread this type, this type of framework for working as we go forward amongst your own tribe.

So Bobby, that's, that's a great point about this concept of creating a framework around how to deliver great merch experiences to your customer. We talked about Understanding the customer's customer. We talked about understanding what's going to compel them to act in a specific way. And I think the other part of it is quite simply emotional. And I reflect back on the experiences that I had at Right Sleeve with the segment of my customers where I was doing work that I was really proud of. I, it was like I was designing merchandise for me to, to, to kind of quote Mitra. And even though I wasn't gonna be receiving the product, I felt so excited for the client to give out the merchandise to their end client. And, and, and I would see the responses on social because I would be following all of my customers on social. And I would see sometimes when we had produced merchandise for them, at a trade show or a conference, or it could be a delivery program at home, I would see the customer's customer posting online and talking about how much they loved it and how much it meant to them with no mention of Right Sleeve because, of course, we were the brand behind the end client. But to me, I was like, "Yes, we did it." And if I translate that, now that I'm outside of the distributor business, I think about the most recent experience at SKUCon, that we're taking a page from that same book in that, you know, Bobby, you and I have always talked about how we design these events as the kind of events that we would want to attend as attendees. So based on that, that's informing the content, but it's also informing the merchandise. So that makes it a lot easier when designing merchandise and picking through things Literally, often the bar is, "Oh, I would love this," or, "You know who would love this would be Renya. She would love it," or, "Winston would love it," or, "John Vo would love it," or, "Dominique at Whitestone would love it." And these are just people that we know who are ones that we receive in it. So, we create these almost like a profile map and whiteboard it out and say, does Does this meet this bar? And if it doesn't, then we just move on. And at the end of the day, it's not about keeping the supplier happy. It's not about keeping really anyone happy other than the recipient. And we can nail that and surprise and delight them. It's a Bobby term. Then that's the emotional thing that I'm talking about. That is the trump card in in all of this. And that doesn't happen with every program you're doing. People are listening to this, maybe rolling their eyes going, hey dude, do you know that I just got an order or a request for 100 koozies that need to be delivered by tomorrow morning? And I could care less what the objective is. I could care less who the end client is. Fair enough. I understand that. That happens. However, that's not the kind of merchandise program we're talking about.

Let me close this with the CTA. If you, as you were listening to this, thought, I've got the perfect campaign these guys are talking about, I did this for a client, we did this for so-and-so, email me bobby@commonsq.com. We'd love to highlight that, share that story, share your story about that journey. We need more stories like that amongst our community because as we each grow and, and rise to the level of aspiration within us, that just makes our businesses better, makes each of us better. So, Mark, thanks for the chat, my friend.

You bet. Always a pleasure.

Thanks so much for tuning in to this episode of SKU Cast. Be sure to keep up with our latest content by subscribing to SKU Cast on iTunes or to our blog at community.commsku.com. Until next time, friends, thanks so much for listening.

Mm-hmm.