BRAND SECRETS AND STRATEGIES

PODCAST #199

Hello and thank you for joining us today. This is the Brand Secrets and Strategies Podcast #199

Welcome to the Brand Secrets and Strategies podcast where the focus is on empowering brands and raising the bar.

I’m your host Dan Lohman. This weekly show is dedicated to getting your brand on the shelf and keeping it there.

Get ready to learn actionable insights and strategic solutions to grow your brand and save you valuable time and money.

LETS ROLL UP OUR SLEEVES AND GET STARTED!

Dan: Have you ever asked yourself, how do you keep your brand today, alive, and tomorrow? And then what comes next life after pandemic? I want to assure you that the sun's going to rise tomorrow. It's going to continue to rise inside. Tomorrow's a new day, the best defense against any viruses, a healthy diet, and that begins with your brand. Learn what you need to do to ensure that you have a healthy foundation to grow and scale your brand on these are the strategies that will help you gain competitive advantage and help you accelerate yourselves in the new normal. This is critically important that you have to take the time to lean in, take the time to lean in, and help identify who your target customer is. Once you understand who that customer is, how do you speak to them? How can you more effectively communicate the value you have your product to that customer, right?

Dan: Then how do you help the retailer understand and appreciate why that consumer's different, why they can tumors better than other shoppers and how you can help leverage that consumer to drive traffic in their store. This is how you future proof your brand. And this is how you survive after a pandemic. This is the actual recording of the webinar. The free webinar that I put together with Andrew, please help me raise the bar in the industry and make this available to any brand and wanting to grow sustainable sales. Check out the events page on my website and check out the link on my YouTube page so that you'll be able to see what Roy webinars are coming up so that you can attend them. These are the insights that you're going to get from industry thought leaders. In addition, a lot of the brands that are partnering with me so that we can help you raise the bar in the industry and help you compete more effectively. Thank you for being here. This is about you and it's for you. I hope you enjoy this. Reach out to me. If you got some specific topics or bottling max that you'd like me to cover in the webinar series or on the podcast, how can we help we're all in this together? We arise by helping each other. Thank you again, if you want to see the presentation so you can see what we're talking about.

Andrew: Events page on my website, or go to brand secrets and strategies.com forward slash what's next. Thank you everyone for being here. I really appreciate it. This is about you and it's for you. And the reason we started doing this is to help you grow and scale your brand during these uncertain times. And the best part about this is that as you can see on the slide here, a lot of other people have wanted to partner with me on this mission, this mission of helping you. And so, as you can see here, ECRN range me, big orange, whole foods magazine and C-suite radio. And I've got other people that are looking to come in and support us and be part of this community to help you get your product or more source shelves and into the hands of more shoppers. And I'm especially thrilled today because today Andrew's here from big words, productions, and Andrew has a wealth of knowledge about not only the industry but about what it takes to get your product in front of a customer. How do you maximize each and every opportunity that you work with a customer? And so, anyhow, let's get started. So, Andrew, do you want to please introduce yourself?

Andrew: Yeah. Thanks, Dan. Really appreciate, uh, you have me on today. Um, you know, a little bit of my background. I started out, um, in the promotional world in college, um, where I was actually out in the field representing brands like Verizon and did tours, uh, in the college space. So it gave me short of a, in the field look as to what was going on. Um, I had a tech background, so I went into a sort of the tech world for nine years and, uh, kept in touch with some of the people that we're in sort of my marketing and promotions, which ended up being the general manager of big orange production. So one day she was calling me up and said, Hey, you know, what do you think? Uh, we're looking for a director of sales. Do you know anybody? And I said I know that really good salesman.

Andrew: He's really handsome, she was like, great. Who are you talking about? I said to me. She said, well buy, you said good salesman and really handsome. That's grown up. So, uh, met with the owner, met with Samantha. Who's been, you know, a big orange now for 10 or 11. I think it's 11 years now. Um, and really talked about what the goals were, what we wanted to accomplish. And from 2012 to now we've grown the business close to 550% over 550%. So, um, as it relates to that, we've also, you know, expanded out because historically speaking, we were very 10 99 based and sort of help with that sort of transition from a workflow standpoint and employment standpoint, uh, to transition over to W2, which is a hard and tedious task, but, uh, definitely something that was worth it. And a good thing. We did it from a preplanning standpoint because now that we've sort of hit the pandemic, it's made it easier for us to be able to stay alive and stay afloat, uh, because of the relationships that we've been able to build with our customers because of that transition. So we can dig into it more, um, as we go through the presentation, but you know, definitely, it's about planning and relationships. And how are you nurturing that? Not just saying, Hey, what can you do for me? But what can you do for other people as well? I know that guy over there, Dan is all about reciprocation and taking care of people and, you know, doing it even with the expectation that he might not get anything in return. So, um, that's why I'm here. And I appreciate you having me on

Andrew: Thank you and the checks in the mail. I know I really appreciate it, and we've had a great relationship and a great friendship for several years, and I want to recommend highly recommend that anyone and everyone listening to this, go in and listen to the two different podcast episodes that featured Andrew. The first one, I called salesmanship four Oh one. He does a phenomenal job of spelling out what needs to happen because remember he's got the unique opportunity to, our vantage point to be able to talk to a lot of different brands to see what works and what doesn't work. And so he shares that advice with you. And on the bottom of the screen, the lower left-hand side, you can see another one of the mini-courses that we did together. And that's all about how to maximize your in-store demo marketing program.

Andrew: And even though we're not doing things today, the way we did a couple of weeks ago, a couple of months ago, the strategies in this are critically important and you need to leverage those wherever your customer's shop including online. So thank you Andrew for being here. So let's get started. So a little bit about me as Andrew said, and thank you again for doing that. My mission is to make our healthy way of life more accessible by helping you get your products are more source shelves and into the hands of more shoppers, including online, please help me raise the bar by, as Andrew said, sharing these resources with any brand wanting to grow sustainable sales. So we want to know what keeps you up at night. We want to know what are the things that are bothering you. And if you can let me know, reach out to me, my email addresses at the end, uh, reach out to me and let me know.

Andrew: And I'll build content around that, whether it be on the podcast, a YouTube channel, or perhaps even in the webinar. And in addition to that, I've got a lot of other resources. And I know a lot of other people that I can bring into the conversation to get you the answers that you need so that you can, you know, solving your problems and growing scale, just realize that you're not alone. There's a wealth of information out there. And I've got a lot of great resources, a lot of great friends that I could tap into to try to help support you. So the reason we're here is that 80% of natural brands failed in the first year. I'm committed to change that as you're going to hear in a moment and throughout this entire presentation, retail is a marathon. It's not a sprint. We want to help you plan for sustainable long-term growth.

Andrew: And that's the focus of everything that we do. So a little bit about me, if you don't know who I am, I've had the privilege of working with brands from, um, emerging brands. Pre-revenue all the way up to multibillion-dollar brands. In addition to that, I've also had the opportunity to mentor brands and work with them and help them. And, and, and then in addition to that, excuse me, I'm also the first person certified at the highest level category management proficiency. The reason I share this is not to impress you, but to impress upon you, that strategies, these skills that we're sharing are vetted. These are the strategies that the big brands are. You learn. What I do is I take those strategies and I put them into our world. So I'm not trying to turn you into a big brand. I'm trying to teach you what the big brands do so that you can level the playing field between them and yourself.

Andrew: As we talked about a minute ago, there's a wealth of information here. My website is dedicated to being a resource to help you grow and scale your brand. Use it on an addition to that have also got a podcast and the podcast is Andrew was on twice a month. I just published episode a hundred, 186. And as you can see, I'm getting some great feedback from industry experts. In fact, I've got another one I've got to put on there from, uh, from Seth, from Tofurky. So putting out, I've got a lot of great getting a lot of great feedback. And on this podcast, I share information and get this validated by CEO's and other thought leaders in the industry, including Andrew. So this is not just me talking. This is about other people sharing their advice with you to help you grow and scale.

Andrew: And then also check out my new YouTube channel on the YouTube channel. You're going to find a lot of interviews with industry experts, plus a lot of shorter videos that contain information that solves your most pressing bottleneck. In addition to that, I've got the course, got school. There's a wealth of information here. And the best part about it is that a lot of the courses on the school platform are free, including the one that he did with Andrew. And one of the things that are really cool about this is, as you can see, I've partnered with other industry experts, Andrew Bob Burke, Michael J L Donald, um, temp forest, et cetera, to talk about the different things that you need to be doing to be thinking about as you're growing your scale, your brand, for example, retail execution, or how do you develop the best digital strategy and more now this weekly webinar series, I started this when expo West was counseled.

Andrew: And what I wanted to do is I wanted to lean in and try to find strategies of ways to help you. And so, again, I'm thrilled to be able to tell you that next week, the free webinar is going to be with ease CRM and range. Me East CRM is a great platform that allows you to connect with retailers online. And they've got a new digital version of that. So that's really cool. The other cool thing is that, uh, East CRM, if you want to get your product, for example, at whole foods, the market, then you've got to get on there and CRM on the range we platform. So this is really, this is going to be very timely. And you want to make sure that you attend that because that's going to help you a lot in terms of how do you go forward today, not knowing whether or not we're going to trade shows tomorrow.

Andrew: And so on. In addition to that, the week after I want to talk about how do you identify, or how do you calculate the true ROI from our promotion? This is critically important to the success of every brand, every promotion that you have, first of all, promotions trade-marketing is everything required to get your brand in the hand of another shopper in the hand of your idea shopper. And so how do you maximize each and every one of those opportunities? And as you're going to see as we go through this, everything is related to your trade-marketing. And I've got a really cool tool that I hope to be able to demo that I'm planning our demoing. That's going to allow you to calculate the, how much your promotion actually brings in the true ROI of your promotion. So, anyhow, that'll be really, really cool. So, sorry, just invited a few people, sorry.

Andrew: I'm just looking at them anyhow. Thanks for commenting. Just took a quick break to look at that. So thanks. Okay. So let's start out by saying the world is changing. So the first thing that we all need to do is we need to breathe. Decisions made in haste lead to regrets. I've heard a lot of brands and I've watched a lot of brands talk about what they're doing on LinkedIn and other platforms. And a lot of people are scared in these uncertain times. You need to breathe. You need to realize that you're not alone. That's why we're doing this today. That's why Andrew's here. So you need to be thinking about, um, how do you need to calm yourself and, and find that center so that you can think about strategically, how you move forward. And the only way you can do that is if you take a minute to step back, pause and reflect Andrew, any thoughts?

Andrew: Yeah, I totally agree. I mean, when it comes to the people that I'm seeing, having the most success at retail right now are the ones that are sort of taking a breath, looking at it from everybody else's perspective, sort of getting inside your customer's head, figure out like, okay, what's changed based off of our current plan. What did we have a plan for the rest of the year? Don't throw the whole thing out, but pretty much revisit it with the perspective of the shopper in mind, because that's how your buyers are going to be thinking. That's how your broker teams are going to be thinking and short of work your way back as it relates to that and figure out what part of the marketing mix that you have planned for the rest of the year needs to potentially be tweaked or changed completely, or, you know, what certain things might be able to stay the same.

Andrew: Great. Thank you. And so with that said, reassess your situation and think about this, solve your problem, put your problem in solvable terms. In other words, as Andrew was saying, how do you solve for what you're trying to address? How do you think about what are the strategies you need to put in place? So that you're thinking about, how do you make it easy for customers to buy and ship your products? You want to begin with a customer and your mission, how do they align and how can you help them? And what I'm getting at here is why did you start this business? There's Andrews, who's been saying, why did you start this business? Go back to that, go back to roots, and think about how your product solves a unique problem and how you can solve your customer's problem. The best defense against any virus is a healthy lifestyle. Andrew, your thoughts.

Andrew: Yep. And so, as it relates to that, think about, think about reaching out and prioritizing what your top 10 accounts are, right? Or maybe it's your top five, depending on where you are sort of in the, in the process, right? And figuring out who gives you the most revenue and who sucks up most of your time and see if those two things sort of match each other. And if they don't make a prioritization of, to sit there and say, I only have so much time in the day, um, things have changed not only at work but also at home, how am I taking care of a home and keeping the balance, you know, good, uh, because if you're not taking care of yourself and you're not taking care of your family, everything else is going to suffer, right? So you get your top 10 customers and you focus on those top 10 customers, not to say that you completely neglect everybody else, but it gives you the opportunity to prioritize.

Andrew: And then I think it's reaching out to the stakeholders that are involved inside that account to sit there and say, what do you need? So if you're talking to a buyer, um, you know, they're incentivized in different ways. Let's figure out how they're incentivized because maybe they're having trouble filling the bucket for the weekly circular that goes out. That might be 5% of their total income for the year. And they're really worried that they're going to be throwing that out the window because they don't have enough people supporting it. If you help them, you have your you're earning the right to be able to ask for help in the future, not to say that it's all this quid pro quo type scenario, but it's more about genuinely caring about what matters to these people that can help you in the future and help them get there.

Andrew: And it's, it's almost like the, um, um, BNIs, right? It's all about givers game. You give, you, give, you give there's a certain point where you're probably not even going to have to ask. And you're just gonna, you're gonna see sort of that boomerang come back around. I mean, that's honestly what w how I even got started in this business. I didn't, I knew what it was like on the field, but I didn't, I didn't know sort of how everything got put together. I had to learn that from scratch. I actually see Rhonda pals on as an attendee, right. For, for this today. He's, he's watching me well, if it wasn't for Ron, I wouldn't even be here, which is kind of the funny part, right? Because I got off a plane and Scottsdale Arizona for the NARMS conference. And he was one of the first people that I met and he practically taught me and took me under his wing, even though he does the same thing that I do. So, uh, I just learned, listen, listen, listen. And, you know, at some point, Ron, I promise something's going to come back your way. Sorry. It hasn't yet.

Andrew: No, no, I'm sure. Well, it has, I mean, look what we're doing here now. So the law of reciprocation, thank you for sharing that. That's been my secret sauce. And as Andrew said, one of the things that I've been able to do is push around big brands, all my career. And the way I've been able to do that is by providing so much value to the retailer. What I talk about as a category leader, not a category captain, but a category leader, any brand willing and able step up and help their retail partner grow and thrive by using the strength, that unique customer that your brand drives into the store. So doing that, I've had retailers call me up and say, Hey, I've got an incremental promotion. If you want it at yours, I'm not going to charge you for it. Or have them reach out to me and say, I need help with a category, totally unrelated to you.

Andrew: Can you help me out? And the point is if you can give and give and give and develop those kinds of relationships, imagine being in a position where you don't pay slotting, imagine being in a position where you don't pay menu fees and all the other fees, and you're getting incremental opportunities. I talk a lot about this on the podcast, but this is, wow, this works. This is the beginning of it. And by the way, this isn't something that happens overnight. As Andrew said, this is something that you do overtime that you build over time. Remember marathon, our retail is a marathon, not a sprint. Thank you for sharing that. So lean and make a difference. That's kind of what we're talking about here. In other words, instead of curling up in a ball and waiting for the world to open again, lean in and think about how you can make a difference in the lives of your customers and the retailers, how you can make it easy for your retail partners to say yes to everything that you offer.

Andrew: And on that note, step back, learn and grow. Take this time to invest in yourself. As Andrew said, the best advice you've ever you'll ever hear, make yourself a priority during this time, step back and focus on what do you need to do to yourself in a position where you can get back in the game at a hundred percent, and that you can make sure that you're there for your team. So invest in yourself, invest in these programs. There are free webinars. Again, they're free to invest in looking, checking out the other webinars. So you've got all the right skills so that when you're ready when the opportunity presents itself, you can take advantage of it. Andrew, your thoughts,

Andrew: I would just say like the best one for you to be able to watch is the one with you and Dustin from, uh, pop ancient, ingrained, um, you know, yeah. Thank you, everybody, obviously for attending this and we'll make sure that we bring you some value in the time that you're sharing us today. But I would say, uh, from, from a free course, the one that you did with Dustin Fenkell was probably lights out as it relates to managing trade spend and all of that. And then separate. And aside from that, um, you know, the effective broker management courses, like I know people who've been in the business for like a really long time, right. That could absolutely learn a ton from just being able to go through managing your brokers effectively. I mean, there are great brokers out there, but let's say you're a small brand and you're trying to, you know, break out.

Andrew: Right. And, you know, Hey, I need brokers, right? Just like you, there's only so much time in the day for your brokers. There's only so much time in the day. How do you manage that effectively? How do you incentivize those people properly? If you're struggling with those questions, effective broker management courses through Dan, I mean, it's not a shameless plug, you know, a conference that we're doing here. It's, it's really, how are you going to help move the needle? How are you going to sorta break out? How are you going to stand out right now? And it's really figuring out different strategies. And really a lot of it comes down to preparation. That's the part I get frustrated with most. And I'm seeing it on the demo site. People are reactionary. I need demos. I needed it in two weeks. Well, why do you need it in two weeks?

Andrew: Well, my, my, um, my, my buyer asked, or my broker told me, this is what we have to do. And it's two weeks away. Why didn't we plan out what that whole year looks like? And I guarantee if you come in with what you're planning on spending for ads and caps, demos, you know, all of the different cycles within your marketing mix, even if it has to be tweaked a little bit here or there to make it where the buyer wants, certain things spent in certain areas, they're going to appreciate so much that you even took the time to put the skeleton out in front. And that's gonna, that's gonna be a big difference because you just made their life easier. You made it easy for them to do business with you.

Andrew: Thank you for sharing that. And so to go one step further, the whole idea behind this, and by the way, you're not the only one that's going to be thinking about. How do you manage your broker more effectively? I gave a presentation, a free webinar to the category management association. So we're talking about big brands. Every brand struggles with this, every brand is trying to figure out how do they maximize their results with their broker? And the reality is that brokers love them or hate them. They use cookie-cutter strategies because that makes them efficient, but they don't know your brand and they don't know your customer. So this is why you need to think about what are the things that you can do to help raise the bar and work with your broker more effectively. How do you keep your hand on the wheel of your own ship? And then how do you guide them to drive sales with the strengths that you know about your customer, about your brand by your category, et cetera. So thank you.

Andrew: One, one thing to add to that, right. Please do one thing. Like a lot of times people point the finger at the broker to say, Hey, you don't know anything about my brand. I challenge everybody. Who's on the call to sit there and answer a couple of questions about their brand. Because if you can't answer the question, the nice efficient manner that you could roll out to somebody, at, at a bar when they opened back up, um, you know, what's the story of the brand? Why does your brand exist? Um, what are the three main selling points of your product in the scope of compared to other brands in the same category? What makes you different? What's your selling point? And then what are the common objections? And the way I can best explain it is we had a customer, they had Palm oil, um, as an ingredient inside their, their product.

Andrew: And they, you know, customers were constantly telling us in demos, Oh, it has Palm oil in it. Thank you. And sorta moved on. They didn't realize that it was a fair trade because it wasn't on the package, right? So that was a common objection. One, we had to change the packaging, but two, we had to make part of our talk track when somebody brought up on oil and it was fair trade Palm oil. And it actually got to the point where a brand changed the ingredient from Palm oil to sunflower oil, right? Because they were listening to their customer. But the point of this is understanding the story of the brand three main selling and the common objections and misconceptions that either buyers or customers are going to have and get back to the basics, use this time to get back to the basics. So you can thrive and sort of use this sort of planning time that nobody's ever had before as a runway. So as things open back up, boom, you're taken off you're on the stratosphere,

Andrew: Well said. And on that note, she almost plugged my free turnkey sales story strategies course is designed for exactly that everything we just talked about, take it again. It's free. It is the foundation that every brand should be built on. And it has also the Achilles heel of the other brands because they're not doing this stuff. So take the course again, it's Turkey, Salesforce strategies. You can get it off of my website in the courses tab. So thank you for sharing that. And then, more importantly, focus on the customer journey, which is what we're talking about. If you know who your customer is, and you understand how your customer shops, your product, other categories, et cetera, then that's critically important. And so where I'm going here is we've been taught as an industry, or we try to teach people as an industry that you need to focus on the margin from a single item. That's not smart. The reality is that your customer buys a lot of other products throughout the store. And it's that customer journey you need to understand. So if you're an organic customer or Palm or whatever, your customer is going to buy premium products throughout other categories in the store, therefore your customer's more valuable to the retailer. And this is where all the stuff begins to make sense. This is where you leverage these strategies to gain a significant and sustainable category, competitive advantage. And this is how you become a category leader. Your thoughts, Andrew,

Andrew: The best example of that is like the Costco rotisserie chicken, right? $5 chickens, right? Costco doesn't care. I mean the care, what they pay for it don't get me wrong. But Costco is perfectly fine with losing one, two, probably two 50 a chicken, because it's kind of like having hand sanitizer in your store right now, put a sign out front, hand sanitizer in stock, you know, you could lose two, three, $4 on a hand sanitizer bottle right now. They're trying to keep it priced at the same as what it was, but it's sort of that loss leader, right? Where do you fit? Are you, uh, are you potentially something people can't live without yet? Or is that something you're working towards while? How do you do that? You need to start thinking about those types of scenarios, um, and then do marketing, do it, do a product mix. Try. And, um, what was we were talking last week? What was your, um, example with, uh, once upon a farm?

Andrew: Oh yeah. Great idea. Thank you. So yeah, if you think about your co-promoting a product, a lot of people when they think about Coke promoting its, um, mustard and ketchup or peanut butter and jelly. So my suggestion was to let's get creative, especially during this time. And so what I said and thank you for bringing it up, that if you're once upon a farm and you're selling organic baby food, and when you partner with food stores, which sells a baking mix, think about the family dynamic, think about your customer. So you've got a family, what's a new baby. And a lot of times those families will have a child to have an infant child while that infant child feels neglected and left out. So use that opportunity when the baby's sleeping for the mom and the child to develop a relationship or make a memory.

Andrew: And so if you think about how your customer shops and creative ways that you can bring your customer into the conversation and, and make it easier for your customers to think about, Oh, wait a minute, here's an opportunity for us to make a memory that's going to help you stand out as a solution provider, as a value-added brand, et cetera. So, and on top of that, the best part is if you co-promote, then you get a higher lift because you're tapping into both, uh, both brands, customers. In addition to that, you're reducing the, spent the amount of money you're spending. So this is excellent. I, you know, thanks for bringing that up, Andrew, this is exactly the kind of strategies that we want you to start thinking about. So thank you. And again, it's all about

Andrew: Linked that back in with social media, create a video to tell the story that you're trying to tell people, meet people, learn better when they listen to the story, figure out how you can make that brand story into a nice, clear, concise message. That's going to show up in somebody's Facebook feed. It doesn't cost you really that much. You don't have to do a Superbowl ad to be able to connect with the masses.

Andrew: Well, and if you do it well back to the turnkey Salesforce strategies, then your customers, your loyal shoppers are going to evangelize it. It's going to go viral on its own and you don't have to spend a dime. That's the best part. So thank you. So, as we're talking about thoughtfully, make a plan and you've heard the expression measure twice. Cut once. That's exactly what we're talking about. Think about strategies like the one we just shared. Thank you, Andrew, for bringing it up, that differentiates you from other brands on the shelf that differentiate you from other brands that the retailer works with. How are you standing out? How are you helping the retailers solve their prompts? You remember retailers want three things. They want a reasonable profit in the category. They want a competitive advantage in the market and they want more customers in their store.

Andrew: And if you can help them solve their, their needs, you know, accomplish that, they're going to bend over backward. Savvy retailers were well to help you drive sales, gang, incremental distribution, et cetera, and then flawless execution. This is what Andrew's been talking about. You've got a plan. Your plan is only as good as your execution. If you don't execute flawlessly, then you run the risk of throwing a lot of money away from upsetting customers out of stocks. Horrible thing to have, I mean, in a horrible situation to be in, because you're telling customers that you don't care enough about them. That's kind of the way they might view it to make sure that they, you got enough product on the shelf for them to buy your product. When you promote it, think about that. It's got your brand on it. Andrew, your thoughts

Andrew: Execution is kind of my thing, right? There are different types of execution too. At retail. You've got to talk about merchandising. You got to talk about, um, you know, something that I think is probably the basic thing that gets missed is you spend all this time and money to get it authorized within a store. Um, you get a launch date and everything's going to ship from you. And if I send somebody out to the store to actually make sure that it got cut in, and when you sell through it in hopefully a really fast turnaround time, do you have somebody their sort of checking and asking for the reorder? Um, if you're going to do all spend all the other money and you're gonna spend all the time and resources don't look at when you get that first PO as a finished line, look at it as a starting line. So I know it's easier said than done, cause we've got a million things going on, but make it a priority. And that sort of follow-through, you know, to sort of push through the goal line. Um, that's gonna make a difference cause I'm a firm believer in how you start is more important than anything else because you know, you get off on the right foot and you get out of the blocks, right. You know, everybody's going to go, Oh, that was a good experience. And they're going to invest back in there.

Andrew: Absolutely. And by the way, we're going to have a Q and an afterward, but Ron asked a very pertinent question. So thank you, Ron, for doing that. So the answer to the question I would recommend is that you work it out with the brand. So you have two brands approach the retailer and say, here's what we're going to do. In other words, don't wait for someone else to creatively, come up with a way to sell your product. Too many brands go hate this. I'm a brand. And I need you to do this for me. Cause I'm important because I'm a brand because, because this is about me, wrong solve the retailer's problems. Be creative, reach out to other brands in the space, other people in this space, and to go one step further with what Andrew was saying, these incremental improvements are going to compound over time.

Andrew: And this is where you start seeing the big wins come. So I hope that answered your question. So now look for opportunities to always improve. Every time you do something, take a step back, breathe for a minute. Think about are ways you can improve it. Did it work? Did it achieve its objectives, uses a scorecard. There's a scorecard module in a couple of the courses that I've built that broker management course and also the trade marketing course that I'm working on, but figure out a way to assess what you did, whether or not it reached the objective and what you could do better each and every time. So Andrew.

Andrew: Yeah. So this kind of goes to Ron's question, but it piggybacks on what you're talking about. Um, I'll give you two examples. One example is we had a customer, he has a great Quito beverage and he's super successful in the club store space. And um, he could have crawled up in a ball because his co-packer got taken over by FEMA. Right. And Larry knows this well, cause she helped me out a lot with this. Right? So all of a sudden he cannot make his Quito beverage because his co-packer pretty much said, sorry, tough luck. FEMA took me over. I can only make a hand sanitizer. So instead of him curling up into a ball, he, he went out, talked to a couple of people within the industry and said, Hey, there an interest in hand sanitizer during a global pandemic. Yeah. FEMA allowed the co-packer to also sell whatever they were able to make that FEMA wasn't gonna take.

Andrew: So this guy, yeah, he was doing a keto beverage and he was sick. He was super successful, but he had to change gears because he went out to the retailers to say, Hey, if I do this, will you buy it? You know, if I build this, will you come? And everybody said, yes. So that was one scenario. You know the other is sort of how we had to change. Big orange productions does in-store marketing with people face to face. That's not happening right now. We had to pivot and look for opportunities. We went to, we went to a big retailer nationwide retailer that everybody's heard about and said, um, where are your gaps? What are looking for? And they came back to us and said, I want kitchen equipment. And I want a home fitness because those are two gaps that we have. And the third thing was, um, hair dye.

Andrew: If you can find any of those three things, um, we want to help the first to make a lot of sense, right? Everybody's cooking at home. So they're looking for different ways to be able to cook. So we were asking the retailer what they wanted. We went out and helped them find it home fitness equipment. Nobody's going to the gym. You can see I've grown another chin in the past four weeks. Okay. Thing, actually, it was there before, but kind of a joke. Um, you know, but the third one was the hair dye. It was amazing. People can't go and get their roots done. You practically can't find just for men or whatever hair dyed out there right now. So we're trying to help find different waves if all of a sudden your brand, maybe temporarily relevant that's okay. Figure out what you can do to build value. How many times have we heard, Kroger's go out to people and say, I really liked the way that you do business. We want, we want to help you build the brand. Kroger's great about doing that, telling people, this is what I want. If you go out and do it will be your first customer. Those are the types of opportunities during the time like this people should really be, be looking for,

Andrew: Thank you for saying that. Yeah, exactly. You want to stand out and this is how you become relevant. This is how you do that and okay. Maybe I need to get some hair color, so, okay. To build on those wins, celebrate them, and then repeat them, take what you've learned, and repeated it. Keep using these strategies and growing and getting better and better and better and leverage these strategies so that you can grow your brand and make sure that everyone across your entire sales funnels is in step. And they're leveraging these strategies along with you. That's another Achilles heel of big brands. There's a lot of silo thinking. If you can do things as a team, as a single unit, that's going to help you succeed. Andrew,

Andrew: I just want to kind of go back a little bit too, to Ron's question as well, because part of his followup was what is the plus or minus about offering store brand? Um, I think what's important. There is you don't want to pillage your own brand. So I think about like the cheese space, right? So Cabot cheese does its own brand and right next to it is the store brand. And literally, it's got the same packaging. It just has a different label on cause if it's Cabot cheese, right? I think what people need to understand about private label is the expectation of private label has changed over time. I'll use the pup tart example, pop tarts used to be nice and full of all, whatever that yummy sugary whatever's inside there, right? And the knockoff brand, the store brand was always the one that had like half the film.

Andrew: That's not the way anymore. Look at incredible foods. That is, you know, the sort of natural version of what the pop tarts are. If you were to get, if they were to go private label, the expectation is the quality has to be just as good. If not better, it's just, there needs to be a value on it because of the marketing cost is going to be less. So the plus or minus is really if you do store brand, you almost have to either have a crystal ball or have a good relationship with those buyers to say, what are you looking for? Let me go find it, or let me make it for you or have such a great product that you're willing to do it. But you have to be careful that it's not going to suddenly eat away at sort of the profitable side of the products that you're selling.

Andrew: And it may be a way for you to get in the plus is it may be a way for you to get in through private label and then have your brand sort of trail along behind it. The minus is if you're already in the store and they're asking for a private label version of it, it can sort of detracting from the overall sales of your brand, which might over time, get you taken off as your brand and only there as private label. And we see that a lot and with the whole food space because you know, they're trying to push that whole three 65. So hopefully that answers your question, Ron, if not reach out to me and I'd be happy to, you know, talk it through with you.

Andrew: Yeah. And I do talk about private label on the, uh, the podcast as well. And, and on that note, you know, I've all, I'm a firm believer that you need to establish your brand, as Andrew was saying, and you don't want to do anything to undermine it. And there are a lot of creative strategies that you could leverage, but your brand has your name on it. Your brand has got some, your brand is something you can take to any retailer. If you had a private label brand and one of the retailers, it just went under, guess what? You've lost all of that, that, that share of mind. So we could get into that later. So reach out if, if, if again, to Andrew and let us know, and we can help. As I mentioned, the shopper journey changed shoppers have unlimited choices as to where they buy their products as to where they shop again, be thinking about how the product solves that problem. And then you want to help your retailer remain relevant, relevant, meaning how do you help your retailer compete against their competitors within their market online? And that's what this is all about. Leveraging these strategies to give your retail partner a competitive advantage. Andrew, your thoughts

Andrew: You've covered it, man

Andrew: Nickel, and this all begins with the customer's consistent brand messaging. As we talked about, as Andrew was talking about earlier, and the turnkey sales story strategies course understanding your customer, how do they shop when they shop? What else did they buy? What unique about your customer? Be able to provide insights, actionable insights to the retailer that no one else is providing. And this is what this is all about. In other words, you've got creative strategies we've shared a minute ago. You know, something about your customer that, that they're not learning from anyone else can top-line reports do not. And can top line, can strategies do not differentiate your brand from your competition. This is how you stand out. And then, more importantly, make sure that everyone across your entire sales funnels communicates with the same enthusiasm, passion, and energy across your, to everyone you talk to, including your customers. So why does it go ahead?

Andrew: One thing there is like, um, chopper behaviors is changing a little bit, uh, maybe accelerating a little bit of the online shopping and everybody's probably sitting there going, yeah, great, Andrew, you have, you have labor. So it's easy for you to pivot, you know, and go and do store cleanings instead of demos kind of thing. I have a brand, how am I really going to pivot? Think, omnichannel think about like in New York, New Jersey Kings and Balducci's has sort of changed over and they're doing curbside pick up if they didn't do before, um, that takes some money and infrastructure to be able to build out. Um, if you were to sit there and say, Hey, King's, you're, you're a critical part of my, you know, my business, how can we help you with the buildout? And, you know, sort of a, maybe it's a sample size giveaway that goes with every order, just to be able to gain exposure and maybe throw some sponsorship hours behind it, or maybe your sponsor and the flyer that goes in there.

Andrew: Think about different ways that you can do that or food kits. One thing that, um, that fairway is doing really good at, even though they're in bankruptcy, you know, sort of making that, making that transition and trying to stay alive through this process, they're doing a really good job putting a meal together. We all go to conferences. We all go to expo West. We all go to expo East. We all go to fancy food. Well, not this year, but we all have friends in the industry. And some of these brands are complimentary ketchup and mustard. Some are, some are a little bit further apart, but to your point, we think creatively, we can help do the cross-pollination within the store. That's really going to not only drive sales but drive everybody's awareness about who we are.

Andrew: Thank you for sharing that. And it brings us to our next, does this slide here? And because in, in, in, in, in the interest of time, I went ahead and put in all the bills. So why does this matter? Look at where you're at on this chart. Think about this. Every brand 25% of our brands, gross sales are tied. You're trademarking. Remember everything we're talking about here? How do you get it from the customer? How do you promote, how do you market? How do you do in-store demos? Everything right? So 25% of your gross sales are tied to your trade-marketing. And yet 70 to 90% of those dollars are wasted or ineffective. In other words, they're not doing anything to move the needle. They're not doing anything to drive sales. And what I mean by that is that if you have a promotion, just for the sake of having a promotion at the end of the promotion, if the customer doesn't continue to buy your product in the, after the promotion is over at the same rate or at an increased rate, then that promotion is ineffective.

Andrew: So we want to think about how do we add value so quickly look at this chart, by the way, you can see this on the trademarking Central's course webpage. If you want to spend some time studying it, but the point is this, if you could figure out a way to improve, for example, a 10% improvement on a million dollars is $17,500 a year. And that's going to compound over time. What could you do with that money? Could you invest in more demos? Could you invest in more innovation? What if your brand was a better value to potential investors, to retailers, et cetera, and then

Andrew: Chargebacks on you NFI, right?

Andrew: Yeah. That's a huge one. Yeah, definitely. Thank you for bringing that up. Yeah. I'm going to be talking a lot about that in that course. So trade-marketing can add rocket fuel to your brand. According to Nielsen targeting the right offer to the right person could more than 13 X year ROI. This is why this matters. We want to help you drive sustainable sales by leveraging the strengths of all these strategies we're talking about. So you want to gain a competitive advantage, as Andrew said, and thank you. Most brands are reactive and not proactive. Think about what you want to do going forward. Not just tomorrow, but six months down the road. What are your goals? What are your objectives? How do you want to prepare for before the future? Know the difference in why matters? In other words, what, what strategy is going to get you, where do you want to be?

Andrew: What can you do to tweak that strategy to help you stay on course? How can you align that strategy with your end goal? And then the benefits of being proactive is that you're not in a reactionary mode. In other words, you've got the right amount of product in the pipeline to be able to support the promotion in Andrew's business. If you've got an out of stock during, as an in-store demo, big mistake, it's the brand's fault the brand should have thought about should brand. And I believe should have come to the retailer and said, this is how much incremental project product you need to have in the store to some more, to support the promotion based upon this fact-based information based upon historical, et cetera. And then don't take for granted the promotional strategy, get to know this, don't farm it out. As I said, I'm kind of going a little bit fast and make sure we have some time for additional questions.

Andrew: Brands need to own their own strategy and house too many too often. People farm this out to your broker, to your distributor, someone else, huge mistake, you know, your brand better than anyone else. You need to leverage these strategies to drive sales. Don't let anyone, but you manage your go-to-market strategy. And here's the sad reality that people don't understand. If you allow a retailer or anyone else to manage your brand, then guarantee that your competitor's going to be deciding how in when often, how often, and when your brand's promoted or where your product ends up on the shelf. You don't want that commit to be a trade-marketing expert. Again, this is everything we're talking about. Commit to the execution, commit to leveraging these strategies, make this a priority and revisit it often, and leverage your partners to gain a competitive advantage. As I said, maximize your sales and profits, make your go-to-market strategy, a top priority, own it. Put your brand to work on your behalf. Andrew, your thoughts.

Andrew: Nope. I think we'll save time just in case people have questions. Um, you know, people want to sort of dig in more. They can reach out to the two of us,

Andrew: For sure. Thank you. Perfect. Yeah. And this, so this is, this is the, um, the first webinar that I did and you can free webinar. You can get there on my YouTube channel by going to brand secrets and strategies.com forward slash video dash 64. Trade-marketing strategies that grow sales and profits. Do you want to check it out? As I said, it's one of the first free webinar and I put it on that page so that you could, so anyone could get to it. But the point is I frame a lot of this conversation. It's the foundational piece that you need to have going forward. And then, more importantly, leverage your trade management and partner with your retailers. That's what the course trade-marketing Central's. If you want more to know more about it, reach out to me. You can find out more information in the courses tab. So why does this matter?

Andrew: Increased distribution, preferential merchandising, efficient trade spending, maximize each and every opportunity, urgent ever, promotional opportunity, category leadership, higher sales, and profits. Remember you want the brand, the retailer to come to you as the value-added resource and then happy law shoppers. This is the ultimate. You want customers to evangelize your product to go out of the way to ask for your brand when they go into the store and then the Q and a thank you. I know our winter, the last part of it really fast, but I think we had a great discussion. So what questions do you have? And by the way, again, thank you to my partners. Here's how you can reach out to Andrew, andrew@bigorangeproductions.com and he's got a free download and you can see it right there. Big orange productions.com forward slash big orange boredom Buster dot PDF. So you can get that. And then of course leverage all the resources on my website. Reach out to me. I'm offering a three 30 minute call if you if I can help solve some of your most pressing bottlenecks. And again, thank you so much for being here. So what questions could we answer?

Andrew: We got one from Larry that says in the light of the lack of demos, where do you feel the best spend is for those funds, uh, as it relates to the demo budget. So I think short term, outside of having the conversation with your buyer to ask them sort of what they want in your critical,, uh, you know, top five customers, I would say from an Omnichannel standpoint, really looking at the curbside, um, pick up, trying to figure out creative ways that you could sponsor there, um, doing the ads and digital in the short term, um, and potentially doing things that help the general public. So people, I mean, today's a rainy day in New England. I'm willing to bet that if I go into Walmart and stand right now, right. But that being said Sunday, it's supposed to be nice. Walmart is going to be packed on Sunday.

Andrew: How can you sponsor the sanitizer bin that they have at the front of the store? How can, how can you do the, do a, you know, clean sanitizer at whole foods or at whatever your local market is? That's, that's a good customer of yours. Um, think about different ways of sort of going to be a visual merchandising, um, because these stores are a mess right now, and it's not the store's fault. They're doing the best that they can to keep up with what they have, but trying to keep people inside the stores. Um, talk to your, talk to your, um, stakeholders at the retailers to figure out, Hey, would it be okay if we can find some people to send people in a third shift to, um, do some merchandising, uh, hang some visual merchandising, just to be able to sort of spruce up the place a little bit, um, and attract, you know, as people are sort of, you know, trying to do social distancing and everything else as they go through, how does your new brand sort of catch people's eye, especially this is critical for the brands that are fairly new to the store anyway, and people aren't sure that they're there.

Andrew: Um, you know, that's where I'd be sort of looking to spend my money. Um, and Larry, we can talk offline or for anybody, we can talk offline about how to figure out the best places to spend that money.

Andrew: Absolutely. When we're coming to the top of the hour. So if you don't get your question answered, please reach out to us. Thank you. I appreciate you guys coming on. So another question is, Oh, what's the best way to schedule time with Dan. Okay. Is there a link? Yes. Thank you. Brandsecretsandstrategies.com/30min. And then you automatically see my calendar. So thank you for asking that question before that Ron asked about incorporating. Okay. So look back to the turnkey sales story strategies course. The whole idea is you become an expert in your customer, not female of household, 2.3 kids, but get to know how do they buy, how do they use your product, et cetera, leverage each. And every opportunity that you get in front of a retailer to help educate them about your customer, take those key learnings and make them available, help educate your customers online, or wherever they're looking at your product. Remember customers, don't go to the store, pick up a package, and just buy it necessarily. They look at it, they go online, they do research about it. Be available wherever your customers are and educate them about that unique attribute. That's going to help them within your selling process within your, within your website. It's our hope that helps Andrew your thoughts. Yep.

Andrew: And kind of looking at it on a more granular standpoint, when demoing and presenting, how do we help buyers and customers understand the pro, how the product fits into their life old school coupons. They work don't get me wrong, but let's make that into a three by five card and have the coupon perforated and be able to have a nice, clear, concise, aesthetically pleasing, not bullet points, but, you know, present it in a nice way to be able to, if they get nothing else, they take that card away. Even if they didn't listen to a thing that the person said, they're going to have something there that says how, how it incorporates into the life of, of that person, how it's gonna, how it's gonna solve a problem for them outside of that, don't we take a lot of things for granted because it's our business and we live it and that's all we do.

Andrew: So we expect that people should just sort of know what we're talking about sometimes, especially because they're a category manager and they're in charge of our category. So they must know everything about it. Don't take it for granted. Don't come across in a condescending way, but don't take it for granted, figure out ways that you can sit there and say, you know, um, I'll use the hand sanitizer, for example, pre-COVID-19 62% alcohol content was a great and accessible, uh, amount of alcohol content post-COVID-19, 75 to 80% alcohol content is the expected minimum going forward. And the only reason being is things changed. We need to do our job to educate people and do it in a clear and concise manner. That's easy for people to digest. So, yeah.

Andrew: Well, and on that note, and thank you for bringing it up returns, you guys hear me say this a lot. Retailers cannot possibly be an expert on every product they sell, every category they sell and more importantly, arm your customer. This goes back to the turnkey sales store strategies. Course. This goes back to everything we've been talking about. You're the expert, you know, your customer, you made a product designed specifically to address their needs, leverage that and educate the retailer like, like Andrew was saying, educate the retailer about what the trends are, help be their eyes and ears what's going on in the marketplace. What are the things that they need to be paying attention to? So we're at the top of the hour. Thank you again, everyone, for being here, please reach out to either Andrew or me. You've got our email addresses here, and if we can help any other white, please let us know. Please patronize these partners that were, that are helping us with us. And then at the same time, and then, more importantly, excuse me, in addition to that, not more broadly, but in addition to that, make certain that you attend the rest of the webinars. They're free. I'm doing this to help support you during these uncertain times, leverage these strategies. And again, please reach out to us. We're here for you. You're not alone.

Andrew: Last thoughts. Well, thank you, Dan.

Andrew: Appreciate it. Um, you know, the ACRM, uh, portion, the rest of the series that you have coming out, I'll certainly be in attendance. I appreciate you for having me be a part of this. So thank you very much.

Dan: Thanks, everyone. I appreciate it. And we look forward to talking to you next week. I want to thank Andrew for coming on today and for sharing his insights and his wisdom. I'll be certain to put a link to big orange productions on the website and on the podcast webpage, this week's free download is a trade-marketing optimization checklist. You can get that insulin by going to the webpage. These are the things that you need to be thinking about or things that you need to have in place as you build a successful trade-marketing strategy. These are the things that needed to be thinking about so that you can survive today, tomorrow, and beyond. You can get it by going to brandsecretsandstrategies.com/session199. Thank you for listening. And I look forward to seeing you in the next episode,

Thanks again for joining us today. Make sure to stop over at brandsecretsandstrategies.com for the show notes along with more great brand building articles and resources. Check out my free course Turnkey Sales Story Strategies, your roadmap to success. You can find that on my website or at TurnkeySalesStoryStrategies.com/growsales. Please subscribe to the podcast, leave a review, and recommend it to your friends and colleagues.

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