Espresso: Giles Brook: How To Kill Your Brand OverNight DANGER AVOID!!!!

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0:24Say you were to try and commit brand aside and kill off a brand in grocery. What are some of the things you do? And I think this will really help listeners to avoid them. So I think the first one would obviously be to let's drop the gross margin to say 10%. So how would we succeed as a brand by obviously being more successful than others, right? Yeah, yeah. How would you kind of kill off a brand? A competitor brand you want to about? No, no, your brand. Ah, sorry, yeah. Because that... I thought we were going to dangerous territory. Yeah, yeah, no, no, no, no, no. It's a really good reframe because it basically says if you just avoid these things, then you'll be successful.

1:00You know, my model is... Because some people invest an insane amount of money because they want to be the next listed business or the next unicorn billion dollar business, right? I'm a middle road sort of person. I want to invest and grow businesses from 5, 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 million, but I'm always going to, I want to do it where there's a business, there's a validation each time. So we will always check before we put big sums of money down, we'll always test something or check something's right. So just bear in mind, I'm that middle level of risk in terms of building a business, right? But within that way of thinking, the things that I will say, look, if you want to kill a brand off, here are the things to do.

1:35So launch or else agree a listing with a customer at a ridiculously low gross margin. If you're below 20 % gross margin, because sometimes people will justify it and say, well, look, actually, look, there's a marketing angle for this. It's amazing visibility. Let's do it. Now, there may always be the odd exception of that. but generally I would say look have your pricing parameters give your sales team the pricing corridors that they can work within but don't drop below that because once you drop below that you just end up burning through too much cash and you're not making enough money and it becomes unfortunately a little bit of a a kind of downward spiral from there so I think that's the first thing I'd say I think the second thing I'd say as well is don't buy the listings either because quite often you'll see that people not just having to invest in a case price to buy it but they also have to put big lump sums down particularly like saying oh you need a you know there's a listing fee of 10 10 000 or 20 000 pounds that's that's quite common in the travel environment by the way so if you go into those customers you know like the wh smith's travel of this world and stuff like that if you you have to kind of pay for space in those sort of places because it's it's a bid who wants the space in there and some of those are great brand building sites but you've got to make sure that you've got the commercial parameters right because if you haven't suddenly you start hemorrhaging cash because if the rate of sale is not strong enough you go down pretty quickly because you suddenly invested too much too much in there right so i think be very careful about the support package and investment you put against certain customers you know i always do it on what i call a percentage basis rather than the cash basis to say look actually we'll give you three or five percent of uh revenue back in marketing that's fine because you're only exposed to three or 5 % whatever revenue you generate.

3:12But if you'd said, I'm going to put 10, 20, 30, 50 ,000 pounds down, the revenue's next to nothing. You're knackered because suddenly that 10, 15, 20 million as a percentage of the revenue becomes a huge amount, right? There's a few which people will say, well, I'm being controversial here or not. I don't know. I think overtly criticizing competitors and going on a marketing campaign where all you do is just diss your competitive set, I think is a very dangerous thing to do. I've seen a number of challenger brands kind of take long established brands in the category and do consumer campaigns that talks about how crap they are, how rubbish they are, and sometimes taking a swipe at them.

3:47And we've all seen some backlash in the media about that as well, in terms of inappropriate, and also people being asked to take ads down. Talk about your own brand and its own merits rather than dissing direct customers. I don't have an issue if you talk about in the category in general. So if you're doing something differently that's healthier or better than everybody else, so let's just take soft drinks. For example, let me take Dolson's, for example, which is one of mine. we absolutely are right to talk about the fact that we are sparkling water and we are fruit and nothing else versus the fact that all those other soft drinks have got stuff like aspartame and stuff like them which is a time bomb waiting i mean that's the next ultra processed foods we've seen already but that soft drinks world is going to change in the next three three to five years because it's going to be regulation because those ingredients are all going to get found out and i think you can you could absolutely at category level talk about that but what i don't want the guys at Dalton's to do is start calling out that orange brand or that lemonade brand or that brand and start dissing them because I think it's a really dangerous thing because you lose a lot of credibility as a brand both with consumer and with people in the industry if you do that overspending on general marketing before you've got the brand established and I've seen this the whole time which are ATL campaigns yeah I've seen it like I've seen people running like tube campaigns when they're in less than 300 stores.

5:04And you're like, why are you investing in consumer awareness when people can't even know where to, or can hardly buy you anywhere? Your best thing there is just, you know, take a fraction of that spend, or even if you want to take the same spend, invest in proximity to purchase, right? Go and invest in the store. So if you're in Whole Foods or in Sainsbury's, go and speak to those guys and say, right, how do we bring the brand to life in store and market there? Because you've got a much better chance about educating a consumer who can then convert to purchase. and then importantly knows where to buy it as well.

5:32I just see too many people spending too early on generic consumer marketing before they've even built out the distribution. That's a glorious kind of linking this to Julian's barbell of simplicity and complexity. As you say, a brand, and I've seen there's loads around London, it's like a brand's gone into 200 waitress stores and they've got a fucking ATL campaign. I'm thinking this is crazy. It's like that is so easy to get complex on that. So easy to go and spend loads on influencer campaigns. So easy to go and spend loads on doing an event and a launch party. so easy to go and spend loads on as you say atl campaigns it's like proximity of purchase that is that's the golden golden mean a la aristotle i don't know why it's getting philosophical but it is really interesting thank you so much for listening to that espresso i hope you enjoyed your morning coffee and are ready for the day let's be having your boy and please do subscribe follow the podcast share this espresso on whatsapp if you liked it and also there's a link to our newsletter in the show description.

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