The Strategy to ESCAPE Competition and Build Creative Monopoly for Challenger Food and Drink brands - Alex Smith

42:06What would that look like? And so the point here is that there was a vast litany of very bold, practical actions that they took as a consequence of that strategy. So number one, they got rid of business class. Okay. So they were the only airline, as far as I'm aware they didn't have business class at that time. Number two, they got rid of lounges because of course you don't need a lounge at that. Number three, they started flying out of less convenient, crappy airports that were obviously a lot cheaper for them to fly out of because obviously they didn't need to offer that high level of sort of convenience that a business traveler has.

42:47Number four, they simplified their fleet. So it was only one type of planes, all of their planes. I forget which time of plane it was, but they only used one type of plane. Number five, they were flying on sort of like shorter, you know, sort of shorter, less, less good sort of options of routes. Like I forget exactly all of the stuff, but the point is you can see how like they had this understanding of the value that they were going to go for. And then most importantly, that cascaded into a bunch of decisions, which their competitors would never ever make, which their competitors could never make.

43:20so you also need to ask in your own category like okay so we think we have this strategy we think that our unique value is x you should then also ask the question of all right well that being the case what is a decision that you've made which your other competitors who are offering different values would never ever make if you don't have an answer to that question then i would question whether the strategy exists because that's the kind of the proof in the pudding yeah i mean it's yeah i mean so so i know you're a big fan of rory sutherland so he's been on this podcast yeah yeah he's been on this podcast oh yeah yeah oh i took that out um one of his whole things is the opposite of a good idea is a good idea yeah yeah opposite of uh for business class airlines right fuck it what is the opposite of that um let's go for a uh yeah let's go for the low cost he came up with a great idea of the opposite of coffee he's talking about this in the podcast is so the issue with coffee right now as you go into a starbucks people are already a venting by the time you've done the queue it's like 10 15 minutes right so it's quite a lethargic process now ironically when it was meant to be slow so he was saying we should create a a coffee shop in a in a train station called flat whites will fuck off one product no like no no options but you can move a speed with the opposite of a good idea is a good idea same with southwestern airlines and i think a lot of brands can actually to escape i want to talk about your newsletter but i've wrote a piece on i've just launched a newsletter actually called um fried hungry feast and i wrote a piece about called escaping the middle and the way to escape the middle which is basically the middle of the the commoditization it's where it's crowded is to ask yourself the questions like okay what is the opposite of a good idea like what is the opposite of what the category is doing um also i think the best brands actually define themselves by not what they are but by but by what they're not so if you say okay with uh i always use dairy that the kind of the old milk categories is so easy to use so a brand like mine and figures would say we are not um we are not going after the consumer who's like the the milk consumer so So we're not going to act and think like that.

45:35We're going to act our way. So we're not like that brand. We're not like that brand. And by doing that, guess what? You've got minor figures. And I think in that category, it's so crowded now with every brand. You know, they've got like a blue and a yellow, blue and a green. So they're trying to look like milk. So many brands. And the ones that are probably doing the best and of other notary, I suppose that's a bit of an outlier, but are probably minor figures in rude health and trying to add some allusion to your um not allusion to add some color to you let's add some color to your strategy uh to your point is it's like get to the top of the source ask yourself the hard questions and and and actually where i want to go now is this confidence and strategy because founders start with a lot of naivety and confidence and i actually think confidence and naivety are two actually cousins i think they're much closer than you think yeah um and you're so not i mean like i was telling you about this like if i knew how this was going to be i would have stopped but but because i had so much naivety going into it i was like right i can just keep taking each day but you come to this point where they get bigger they need to have confidence in the strategy and i've seen this first half in businesses and people i've spoken to corporate people come in because the investors want corporate people to come in the corporate people the issue is is the corporate people have worked at these fucking brands are all in the middle they're all commodified brands i mean people who work for mars no i don't mean to be disparaging but selling a mars bar is one of the easiest things so you've got all this thinking which isn't challenger thinking the founders up shit creek without a paddle because they're like uh do i get this person in i want to sell the business or do i do that or do i stick with my gut or what do i do and i've i mean ben branson said this happened three times and ben branson's founder of seed lip you know yeah yeah it is this happens with every brand it's it's people some pericord of the doom loop how do you founders have conviction and confidence in their strategy and it's almost like the strategy's up the roots and you're getting the wins from the corporates and the wins from the supermarkets and the wins from the the market like how do they remain steadfast and resolute do you know what i mean yeah yeah do you want to check that i will check that because i've got i'm getting quite into that bit uh right yeah so that is a really good one and it's today i'll thought uh uh i'm uh i'll answer just one sec but just before what you said about the um uh about the uh or how do you put it?

48:19The opposite of a good idea and all that. The way that I think about that, I think it's a really good sort of hack, strategy hack, if you like, for founders is something that I talk a lot about, this idea of contrarian value. And contrarian value is basically like you've got building your brand on having a fundamental disagreement with the other brands in your category. So what do you fundamentally disagree with all of them about? That can be quite a good way of teasing it out because that's kind of like a method of kind of undercutting their position and doing things that they, by definition, wouldn't do because you're kind of going against their sacred cows.

49:04Anyway, leaving that aside, answering your question about the confidence. So my experience is that because of the growth path that we were talking about, where you put out that initial idea that you think is going to be like X, and then obviously it doesn't really go the way that you expect it to go. This then pushes all founders into a position of uncertainty and hesitancy, because obviously they've seen that they aren't kind of psychic and yet maybe it's been going really well for them but it's still they're still kind of get put typically into this situation of oh well should we do this or should we do that kind of kind of thing and then what happens and this is just a normal way that most businesses are run so it's not like you know a pathology it's just normal for a non-strategic business is that they start they basically answer questions one by one so questions come up in the business should we do x or should we go do y should we go left or should we go right and they answer each one of these questions sort of independently of each other and they try and make the best possible decision based on the information at hand about that question the problem is that when you start answering questions independently like that is that that is basically a recipe for commodification because these are the same questions that all the other brands are having to answer and the right answer, absent of a bigger strategy to tell you what to do, is always going to be the same as everyone else's right answer.

50:33And this is how you start to just sort of like get softer and softer and more and more squidgy and commodified, and you drift towards the middle. Now, a confident founder is obviously a founder who has a very, very firm idea of what the strategy is and therefore what they need to do. And so when they're answering these questions that come up, the way that they answer them, eight times out of 10 anyway, is what does the strategy tell us that we should do? It's not even really the founder's decision. The decision is a fait accompli because they know what business they're trying to make. And so therefore, they just answer it.

51:13They just say, okay, well, we'll do whatever it is that's going to push us in that direction. And by answering all the questions like this, sort of like based on using the strategy to answer them, the business burrows deeper and deeper and deeper and deeper into its own space and progressively makes more and more and more different decisions than what other brands are making. and the reason i think one of the main reasons i think about confidence a lot is that sometimes i look at the the ultimate greatest brands out there the ones that everyone sort of loves you know the global sort of like sexy titans and you can any old idiot can see what their strategic game is and what they're trying to do because like you know that is the ultimate litmus test of a strategic brand is can you read it from the outside is it written all over them right and uh which is the case with you know all of your patagonias or whatever but the interesting thing is that most of the time they're the actual sort of intellectual content of their strategy is nothing clever it's not anything that anyone couldn't have come up with but the reason that they're so incredible is because of the unbelievable lengths that they go to in execution like they over deliver.

52:29They go like, you know, 11 out of 10 in the direction that they're trying to go. And the more and more extreme you are in your delivery, I mean, liquid death, obviously, everyone talks about, you know, they're another sort of example of an extreme execution brand, the more people are going to be attracted to and love what you do. But that kind of extremeness of execution, which 99 % of brands are miles off. They're very, very timid in execution compared to these brands. That extremeness of execution is simply a symptom of utter conviction and confidence and knowing what exactly it is that you're all about.

53:09So I often kind of say that people focus a lot on, they want to have the right strategy and they want to have a clever strategy and of course you should want to do all of that but there's an argument to say that it doesn't even really need to be it doesn't need to be very clever if you're prepared to go really really far in your delivery of it so you know there's this is kind of two elements to kind of like the strategic leverage one element is yes is it a clever strategy which is actually opening up white space for you but the other element is simply um does it enable you to execute in a way that makes people think fucking hell what a cool brand and to be perfectly honest you could at a pinch actually have a completely non-unique strategy a strategy that's kind of just like another brand in your category but because you were going so mental in the execution of that strategy naturally people will start to think it's yours and you own it even though at a kind of technical level you don't back to minor figures mate at the air colby festival they in so oh my god there's a quote by david ogilvy which i love which is if you're going to do it go the full hole or something like that yeah yeah again back back to looking where no one else is looking and i think or or if every brand or founder absorbs the same information as other founders you end up back back to this thing it all leads back to the middle or leads back to this place we don't want to be so you've got to escape that and that is um i jump around a lot sorry but that the david ogvey learned his opening book to confessions of an advertising man he pays homage to his time as a chef in hotel majestic and he said i learned all my leadership lessons from Hotel Majestic.

55:02And he literally says, you learn them in a kitchen. And I've interviewed loads of chefs for this podcast as well. And in terms about escaping the middle or like not reading the textbooks, which everyone else is reading, they're some of the best conversations I've ever had on leadership have come from chefs. And it's all about getting different inputs is the first kind of point on that. But going back to this quote about going the full hog and you don't have to be maybe that different. You just have to be unique in what you're saying to give unique value but it doesn't have to be a tesla it doesn't have to be an apple it doesn't have to be a well one of those two because most people aren't going to do that minor figures don't have that much differentiation from your root health from your um oatly from your but what you're saying is right can you go the full fucking hog with execution and make people fall so deeply in love with your brand that there is you're in a blue ocean tony's minor figures liquid death these are essentially like uh um full hog brands i don't from the outside i don't see anything particularly like there's no sort of clever judo move behind any of those brands but what that is is just an unbelievable conviction in execution and people are attracted to that they love it yeah so so i completely agree so there's outliers there's minor figures there's your tonies um but really and truly a lot of people listening to this maybe having it's hard to have confidence without having evidence is what i'm trying to get at so how how do you get to that stage yeah i mean so obviously you know the lack of i mean the boring point obviously is the lack of confidence is a symptom of not knowing what you're doing so therefore you need to figure out your strategy and then you'll have confidence.

56:58Of course, there is then your sort of like nested question within that is how can you actually have confidence in the direction itself? And that is quite an interesting one because it's going to be a really unsatisfying answer, but it's true and it's always true. A good strategy, it will kind of be its own evidence when you've got it you won't be asking what's the evidence to this do we need to test this should we do some research see if this is right like if you're thinking that then it's wrong because um going back to the whole dolly parton thing and this being an exercise in kind of identifying what's already going on when you see it it's just there and there isn't any question about it.

57:51And my feeling is that, and this is the case with every project I've ever done, basically, is that when you've answered the question, the answer will be simultaneously embarrassingly obvious. Like so obvious that like, you know, if I was to sort of like give you the case, if I was to tell you about that project and the case study on that brand and the conclusion we came to, you'd be like uh yeah well obviously but it's obvious but no one it just so happened no one had ever said it before right it's amazing how the obvious things uh slip um and how obvious something can be without you without you realizing it and uh so that's why you won't really need evidence when you get it right because your reaction is just going to be yeah of course and i think back to this unique value piece some of the brands that really do it are the brands are the other an extension of the founder's personality so and i think you need a steadfast founder who's like well no this is how we're doing things and i don't give a fuck and so i you do juliet barrett from grenades no yes and she was like she i mean that they are uh they're a proper case study proper case study because she literally says two things she said is one the brand was an extension of ourselves of her and al um and they're both just i can i mean i've never heard i like to swear a lot but she's where absolutely the brand just yeah but just but she says she goes it was at stakes with me and al and actually in terms of this unique value is people can't copy you i can't copy you you can't copy me every single human being walking out of southwark station right now is wildly different so i'm trying to think for what families can do if you can put your personality into a brand there's fuck loads of protein bars but their personality was in that brand and and well just yeah where i'm going is is so that was the first thing she said and then she said we set our stall early we knew exactly what we were going to do and we were going to knew there was going to be some ways to go before they found the way here to reference your newsletter but they set their stall early and then if i think to minor figures stew for the founder of minor figures like you meet him i've been for business with him a couple of times over once right and that brand is an extension of him so i think for early stage founders and as an example of my friend amelia at bold bean who's letting her personality ooze into that brand very very suddenly and i think that's a way to create this unique value because you're unique um and look beans have been around for fucking years she took see look she's not the first oat milk so i think there's something in that in terms of how you know the early stage founders listening to this to create almost uh i think as they say brand is a moat that starves off competition is allow your your your personality to be that wall that makes sense that's a very interesting point and makes you think of two things immediately so the first one is that yeah there are definitely lots of cases of that happening and a lot of cases you know some of them obviously a lot of the real big success stories they're ultimately coming back to another way of saying the same thing as what you're saying is that the founder's natural instincts for whatever reason are just right.

1:01:22And the founder, they might not actually even know, in some cases, what strategy they're following. They just sort of do what they feel like. And the sum of that is something great, which to my understanding, that, for example, was the case with Innocent, you know, and Richard Reid and all that, like, you know, like, it was just like, he just like, he just got it. But then what happens with some of those brands is that they have a problem when the founder leaves it wasn't codified so uh so essentially there was a strategy it was kind of an invisible strategy because it only existed in the founder's head and actually if you sat them down and you asked them to and you asked them to explain it possibly they can't even do it i know you know i know for a fact that that was a problem that innocent had after they were brought out that of course it wasn't really a huge problem for them because they've sort of moved on to being a different type of brand in their sort of coca-cola era so you know that they're fine right but they they couldn't continue the magic if you like that was sort of inherent in the original founder-led version of the brand because there wasn't a clear codification so i think that founders like that they have a responsibility one way or another to codify the magic that they're bringing naturally to the party definitely you know definitely if they want to well not just if they want to sell the brand also after a certain point of growth i don't know what the number is but perhaps you can only be truly dictatorial as a founder let's say i don't know in a business of 10 12 people if you've got a business of 50 people then you it starts to sort of like dilute that potentially if you haven't code of mind because you you want to trust other decision makers to be able to make the similar decisions that you did so uh so yeah that is uh that's one thing that happens i think i think um like imagine a tree right isn't a tree so the way you do the founders values uh sorry the founders magic needs to be decoded into values which are the roots yes right and an organization is like a tree if you were to look at the organization chart and flip it upside down it's like a tree literally so it's like a tree and so you've got the founders roots there and it goes up up up up up and then you've got the employees and then at the end say the leaves or the flowers on the tree are the consumers and you want them to blossom and be happy but ultimately that starts with the roots every tree grows from the roots i think where founders get fucked or businesses get fucked when that isn't decoded um lucky saint luke interviewed him he he was spent was so fastidious with the with the decoding the values of that brand like i was like mate like that's crazy that the amount of work they put into those values yeah yeah i think that's how you do it is it's it's that again that's the tree analogy if you've got the roots the tree ain't gonna ain't gonna sway despite the market conditions do you know what i mean um mate yeah but so you're an extremely curious person i'd love to sort of go maybe back where does this um kind of insatiable like insatiable appetite for curiosity and learning come from?

1:04:31Like, I'd love to kind of go into that. God, no, that's a good question.

1:04:40you know there's a kind of similar answer to to your founder point as well which is i think that one reason that founders would struggle to put themselves effectively into their brands and it's a reason and it's something that i would empathize with as well is that most people sort of fact of life they don't really know themselves so they don't really know so you say okay put yourself into the brand but then that begs the question well who am i and of course where you then get tripped up is that we all we copy other people and we sort of you know we get swayed by you know visions of like oh that guy's cool i'd like to be like him so actually you think that yourself is like that but it isn't you're just sort of like you're just sort of mimetically drifting towards whatever you think other people think is cool well so what does mimetic mean uh copying oh okay uh so uh so you know you like ironically you know if you're a founder who doesn't have a really strong sense of self then trying to put yourself into the brand is actually going to make the brand more similar to other brands rather than less because you just end up subconsciously just copying whatever you think is cool which is probably some other brand in the category so in my case you know um you know i would say also i had this thing of not really knowing myself very well and making sort of like career decisions or whatever based on you know kind of what other people were doing or what other sort of things kind of seem cool and it takes a long time sorry so you word i was doing that yeah and a lot of the my sort of looking back on it you know a lot of the parts that i went on you know were just like you know they weren't necessarily really very sort of like me it was like oh i saw it in a movie and that like good kind of thing you know and ultimately what i've done with basic arts in a way is to try and build a business which is centered around my natural personality if you like and what i'm just sort of like into and what i just do without thinking about it so in a sense you're almost kind of like monetizing your personality in a way, which is kind of, I guess, I think what you're doing as well, you know, with this podcast and stuff, you're like, well, when I strip away all of the other stuff and all the other pretensions and all the other things that, you know, I, I imagine that I could be, or might be quite cool to do in another life kind of thing.

1:07:20When I get down to the core of like, you know, who am I and what do I like to do? And, you know, what is the unique value that I can bring uh and then you say okay now and then can I can I make a living out of that can I make a business out of that you know in my case I think that's what I've done because fundamentally I just and not there's no there's no reason I just I'm just basically just a person who's just like good at kind of like one thing and that one thing is seeing wood for the trees, pattern recognition, right? It's just something that I just do as a personality quirk, as a hobby. You know, it's not about businesses, you know, it could be about absolutely anything in the world, movies, relationships, politics, I don't know.

1:08:10It's always, you know, you can always have the same kind of like zoom out, what's really going on here, conversation with everything. And this isn't something I've cultivated, it's just something i do so then the question is okay well if that's just something that i do like can i be paid for doing that and can i be paid for getting into my flow state let's say and that and that's and that's what this business is it's just me trying to get paid for doing something i would be doing anyway but that's why i said right beginning with kinder spirits because for me you know i'm a good bad and ugly i've got a very addictive personality which is spilled over to bad things um you know you'll put put a pint and a pack of cigarettes in front of me and i'm away right but then it spills into very good things in terms of like i'm addicted to reading like i love reading i would i could read i can't really watch a film but i can read all day every day if i'm left alone to it it's my playtime right on the weekend i'll read i love talking to people i love conversing with people i love understanding people's stories so i'd do this shit anyway like this is what i wanted to do but it took me from the age of you know and this isn't my first I was trying to put, I wrote my first piece ever on LinkedIn about being a white man van driver in 2015.

1:09:25So it's taken one, two, like a lot of years to actually get to here. I'm actually making money out of it. But it took all that sort of trial and error to go into yourself to find yourself. Yeah. But no, I love that. And I think as you going back to like, if founders don't know who they are, then how can you put the personality into the brand? Because the personality then just comes fucking wishy-washy. how did you you know you said you followed everyone else and you were taking those points your career what was the change in alex's sort of mindset or head or was it was there an event that thought right you know what i'm going to swim the other way swim upstream and do what i want to do god that's a good question um and what when what year was this by the way just to get some context what do you mean like when you when you did go full-time with basic or cast out basic arts i mean i went full-time with basic arts six or seven years ago something like that right okay so uh so so quite a long time but i would say that like the types of realizations i'm talking to now are more like in the last couple of years right and i suppose that like i think that i guess a big part of it was maybe having having uh our daughter christina because obviously it makes having a kid makes your life sort of more complicated and more and more sort of like sort of logistically difficult if you yeah yeah so you know when you're just a kind of single person bumming about London in that kind of, you know, that sort of more sort of adolescent mindset, you can get away with a lot of crap.

1:11:12You can get away with being a pretty dysfunctional person because there isn't really anything shining a light on your own kind of internal contradictions, right? Because like, you know, your life is just easy and you've got no responsibilities. So, you know, it doesn't really matter how much of a basket case you are, like you'll be able to get away with it, right? When you've, of course, it doesn't have to just be having a kid. It could be many, many things that anything that's sort of like putting responsibilities on your life and is forcing you to kind of grow up, let's say, like that is then going to shine a light on the fact that, oh, you're actually not the awesome person that you thought you were.

1:11:52It turns out, you know, maybe you're not actually right about everything, You start to get little points of friction in your life. You get little points of difficulty that are starting to show up by being put under pressure. And then that forces you to then start to question, okay, well, are some of the things that I thought were true about the world true about myself, are they actually true? And so in that scenario, you know, you've either got to face up to the lies that you were telling yourself or equally likely, maybe more likely, just hit the wall and crash and burn and like have like, you know, the kind of like personal malfunctions and crises happen that obviously do happen to people, you know.

1:12:39And I think that obviously a lot of those personal crises, they happen because people have a misunderstanding about themselves and a misunderstanding about how things are. So obviously, like anybody, I've been through various sort of challenges. And so I think that in a way, it's just a process of responding to those challenges. And you start to see what kind of idiot you were. and I don't mean I'm 38 so I mean I would assume that like anyone else who's 38 for sake of argument listening to this podcast would presumably agree that when they were 28 now that they look back on it they were like oh god I was so clueless so clueless I was so like wrong about so many things so many things that I thought were true are just not true right so give you some examples of this because one of my questions I love asking is like what's one belief I think it's uh yeah yeah what's one belief you you had that was you know that is now wrong because i'm 29 it's just interesting

1:13:48yeah what's so either like what was the lies you were telling yourself is either one question or two what is like one belief you had at 29 which is now completely wrong so one of the things that's change is that before I was very sort of output focused on like, you know, what I do for my job or how I spend my time. There needs to be like the thing that's being produced, the end result needs to be something really cool and impressive, right? So you see this, this is a very common feeling like, so people would like, people they want to work for brands that they think are really cool so people think oh i uh oh i really uh you know i really care about the environment i really think that patagonia is super cool so i'd give anything to be able to work patagonia kind of thing and then wouldn't i be a great person and wouldn't it all be great uh and so it's a very uh sort of um output kind of almost like appearances focused way of thinking about what's going to give you satisfaction.

1:14:55And in that regard, I actually really didn't particularly like what I was doing for work because at the end of the day, this is, it's all kind of like trivial, like, you know, like what I do, you know, like essentially helping businesses sell more stuff is obviously a kind of a trivial thing. And actually let's be real, like, you know, all the sort of brands are kind of trivial too. Like it's all trivial if you, if you want to get really sort of philosophical about it. And so I was like, oh, couldn't I be doing something? You know, this is like, this is kind of lame. Couldn't I be doing something like so much kind of better or cooler or whatever?

1:15:30Because I was basically thinking about the output of what I'm producing, you know, is not, you know, I'm not going to go down in the history books or whatever. But then I sort of thought that I kind of realized that actually you can get sort of meaning and purpose from not, it's not for most people, I would actually say, it's not about the thing that you're producing. It's not about the end result. It's not about the business that you're working for or whatever it might be, or their product or whatever. The thing that is going to give you satisfaction often is actually just the process of doing what you do, right?

1:16:13So I would suggest, and I mean, I see this with like friends and stuff like that, and it's something where I think people are really, it's a personal view, really, really wrong. People would rather do a kind of, people would rather do a shit process for a brand they think is cool than a process that really just the actual doing of the doing gives them satisfaction for some cardboard box company. And I think people have got that all wrong. I think some of my mates, and I don't like kind of extrapolating out of fmcg but the obvious example of this is finance right where and i've got loads of mates who are brokers who make fucking loads of money but they're they externally they've got it all and they keep searching that external barrier sorry external sort of area of like this will give me some sort of feeling this will give me some sort of thing yeah and ironically loads of food and drink fans i met a bloke at the coffee festival last week i would and charlie and rich from moju x finance and x you know uh city boys these are many of the days they realize that this internal the external thing doesn't give you the satisfaction and actually let's let's find the internal thing and if we win there then the rest will fall into place and this is i've done a lot of work on this i think warren buffett's got a thing of this internal versus external scorecard right yeah so with me with this podcast is and i I want to actually, you teed me up perfect, Helix, I want to talk about your creative process.

1:17:40But I've won, every day I've won, because I get up super early, get fuck loads of coffee on me. I get, I read for 25 minutes, headphones on, like thumping Ibiza techno, and I just write. And I'm just, and I'm in, I'm in my flow state. I'm in seventh heaven. Yes. Yeah, I just feel like, I feel, I mean, in this sort of fucking weird, almost panacea, is what I would say. and then i do that and then i start the day but i've won so the pro i've already run by the process so however well this podcast goes on that podcast goes all the downloads like yes of course i've got an ego like i do look at those things like i'm a human being yeah but i've won and i think there's something really in that for for people listening to this is are you are you like what is the part of in the business you can you can do where you're so in love with the process that you feel like winning.

1:18:33Do you know what I mean? Versus I want to sell a food and drink brand because I want to put it on LinkedIn and I want to be good. Yeah, you really articulated it well. And people often ask me, oh, well, you know, like, why have you ever thought about starting your own brand? Because now, you know, you've seen all these like other brands and you'd like, you know, you can sort of pick out, you know, the opportunities in the market or whatever, you know, isn't that an obvious thing for you to do? And of course, I would, yeah, just sort of visualizing it i would love to have some cool brand out there that i created on shelf and you know a emoji or minor figures whatever and like and all of that like sort of the extrinsic basis it sounds amazing there's only one problem though that i know that i would not enjoy creating and running an fmcg brand that i would not enjoy the actual doing of the doing this is what a lot of people said to me is i'm mate you're going to create up a create a brand and i you know i talked about the the interplay and dance between naivety and confidence when you're naive you're actually really confident yeah sure like i've got no idea what's going on i was spending six years in a brand and i was just like i was like i know how god smackingly hard it is i was like i've got too much experience to be confident i'm like i just know how hard it is and i think there's something really in believing in naivety and confidence because they are i think there's a symbiotic symbiotic relationship between the two um which is fascinating but but you write in a newsletter called the way which is really really good and i actually think every founder and everyone in life should have a writing process because it gives you an unfair advantage on problem solving so i write in the morning but there's been so sometimes i've had to go through negotiations with people and i've actually written down where i think they're going to push me back where i can go and it's complete unfair advantage in everything writing the most people don't want to do it but i'd love to get into your process like what is your kind of reading slash writing slash creative process that's unique to you so i mean i i definitely agree with the writing thing and as you say obviously like most people don't want to do it and you're sort of privileged if you're someone for whom it feels natural or who quite likes doing it but i do funnily enough it's one of my pieces of advice that I often give to clients and whatever is you pretty much boil it down to less PowerPoint, more Word, right?

1:20:57You can hide bad thinking in slides, but if you actually write something as prose, as a mini essay, it will show up all of the bollocks, right? You can't hide bollocks in prose. So even like when I'm doing like a strategy project, the end strategy, the actual thing, people say, well, what does it look like? What does the actual sort of deliverable look like and the answer is it's basically a essentially a mini essay like a one page of prose and that is how you actually lay out the strategy and that's how you do it in a clear way in a way that you can share in a way that shows up the bollocks in there if there is any so yeah definitely so sorry oh yeah just on that because i think that's such a fucking good point because uh it's so ernest hemingway's got a quote which is which is the first draft of everything is shit and in terms of cleaning out the bollocks i think you know you do when you when you actually write your sales pitch down or whatever it is you literally write that down in pro yes yes the the the flags of like okay i'm waffling there yep yep um and i suppose one of the values doing this podcast is getting me 10 times better at sales because i'm listening to myself back do you know what i mean but i'm gonna be like okay there's a bit of bollocks there so i think founders doing pitches just to retailers write it out before you make the slides because when you writes it in prose you've got way better storytelling yeah um but yeah sorry so sorry i was just stuck that i don't know that's cool but i'm not just just around the off and the funny thing is about like whether people like writing or feel that they're good at writing well everyone writes emails everyone's good at writing emails i've never seen anyone who's like who like you know who sends emails and then you read the email and you're like oh what what what are they talking about here everyone can write the clear email right uh because you write your email just like you're talking and everyone well give or take can can talk so you just you just need and maybe people they put themselves into like oh i'm writing now so i need to like put on this weird voice or something but no it's just like whatever you do in an email just do that you could even actually i mean i i write lots of stuff in emails write an email to myself that's nice to think if that if that's gonna make it easier for you then just do it you don't need to use word maybe that's too intimidating just do it in your email and then it'll be better yeah anyway um yeah the the process uh obviously a daily thing is uh how do you do so you're talking about do you want to so let's be more about the the content stuff like the newsletter or like the the the either the consulting work i think they're i think the newsletter because i think they're two are in each of to be intertwined ultimately yeah um but i think the the let's maybe pick an article so say you know what i'll talk to you about this in a set so product is nothing how to see things the way customers do really i thought it was a really good article by the way um so what's the process for that so basically uh i think the bottom line of it is the main thing that people struggle about with creativity is that like creativity your personal i know exactly sorry i don't know but i mean it's my it is my personal view but i also do think that it's quite general as well but of course like uh others could disagree is that you just you can't like sit down and say right okay now i'm gonna come up with something because you probably won't you got to do it the reverse which is just like shit is going to come up and you just got to get into a practice of capturing it when it comes up so essentially all i have is just like a very sort of um now no now it's just instinctive note-taking system where like someone will say something in a conversation whatever and then immediately i'll be like or i'll just be thinking of something while i'm walking down the street and about oh that'd be a good article and then i just i obviously don't write the whole article then and there but i then just make some notes on the phone so i've got like a folder in i use a microsoft to do the the to-do list app um and i've just got like a sort of like a list on there which is just blogs and i just put them on there so at any given time i've got like 15 or 20 blogs and then when it when i actually have time to sit down and write i just like okay which one of these do i which one of these am i feeling right now and then and then and then you can just they can just bash it out because you've uh but it all just comes down to capturing the stuff when it comes up so really good point so when uh about capturing and being almost a conduit for things coming into right and then express them outwards so back so right at the beginning we were talking about that early stage when you're a brand you've got that serendipity piece right and you're just it could be brands doing sampling sessions and in that moment you've got to find your unique value right you've got to think okay when and it's back to dolly parsons which was uh find out who you are do it on purpose so in those sampling session days when you're a brand you're driving the trial as a founder not a field sales rep as a founder you have got the beauty of doing sampling sessions is you have literally got who you are or who you think you are and the market telling you what you think and i remember when i was at manly life food i'd do sampling sessions all the time and I would literally, if I could say something like it's almost listen to what the consumer was saying back to us, put it on my notes on my phone, I can show you on my Evernote, there's thousands of notes about what people were saying and I think there's something in that for founders who are starting out with being listening to what that market is telling you and then if you can get that to synergize with your unique value, then you're off for the races.

1:26:45So I think tying it back to your point. Yeah. Yeah. And it's a part of that is you, you've got you, and it's certainly something that is very central for me is that you've got to have faith in your intuition. You've got to trust your own intuition. And I don't think that people do. People are too obsessed with sort of like kind of like robust evidence and like rigor but ultimately like you're the pattern recognition of your brain that is going to come through in sort of half-baked opinions and stuff like that that is much much much much much more sophisticated reading of reality than something that you've worked out by sort of careful careful methodical process so when you're in the sort of scenario that you're that you're talking about you know we all know that feeling you know you'll just get you'll have that sort of like little sort of like aha moment or something will just spark something for you and you aren't quite sure why but that's you've got to learn to like listen to and trust those signals and not second guess yourself like if you know this is you know it's like one of the reasons why like the first i you've all been in those sort of brainstorms where it's like the first idea is the best idea kind of situation like you know there's that's not like that's not random there's there's there's reason for that and even when i'm doing like the consultancy projects this is actually my next newsletter is specifically about this so it's top of mind is that people believe and it's not just about a consultant this is true of like um scientists doctors academics whatever this is this is the way it really works and you've read stuff about this yourself.

1:28:28It's like people think that like the way that a kind of an expert thinker arrives at the solution is that they go and they gather the data and they look at the data and they do their sort of calculations and then they object and ah yes this is what the data says and therefore that is the answer. Like that is the kind of the myth that we're sold about how the thinking process works. But in the real world definitely in my case and I know for a fact in a lot of other cases as well, including things like medicine and stuff like that, even though it's not the way people would sort of openly talk about it, is that what really happens is that the person, the me or whatever, they take a cursory glance at the situation.

1:29:12I go into a brand, I take a cursory glance at the company. Obviously, you need to sort of like see the situation to an extent. you've got to have something to go on, then you basically just come up with an idea, a random sort of half-jokey hypothesis. Oh, yeah, well, what if you just did this kind of thing, you know, without giving, you know, nothing very sort of like informed necessarily. And then you actually ask, well, yeah, actually, what if we did do that? And then you start to see how much that fits. how well does that theory fit with the data so it isn't like the data spits out the theory it's like you have the theory and then you see to the extent that it fits with the data and you see sort of how true it is and maybe you actually find something that kills it and you're like oh yeah well you know actually no that doesn't really make sense because of x or weirdly more often than not you actually start to be like you know what i was i was sort of like half joking when i said that but actually now that i think about it there's really that's really that's really a thing and then you go deeper and deeper into it and then you find out that that's and that and that's like the answer so you've you've got to you've got to really respect these these punts and i don't think that people do respect it because i think that people have been sort of well frankly i think brainwashed to think that the methodical um sort of deliberate uh rational process is the way that you get to truth.

1:30:40And that's bollocks. I mean, Taleb writes about this in one of his books. This won't be quite right, but you'll get my gist, and you can look it up if you're interested. Something incredible, like in medicine, almost, I think there's only one drug, like ever, which was designed for the purpose that it was useful. almost all medicine and drugs are kind of repurposing of things that people have sort of post-rationalized and found later on right so you know like viagra obviously wasn't designed to be viagra it was a heart medication or something like oh actually but it could also be viagra all right so that's happening in bloody like you know in bloody pharmaceuticals so i think damn well happened in your own creative process right oh for sure and i think i think uh it goes back to the issues with i've been reading james dice's book called invention which is fucking sick and he is basically he basically says he basically says the issue is is the way we're taught in schools is knowledge retention so the kid who gets the merit and gets into the best universities the one who's basically got the best brain and can remember something and then regurgitate an exam which is fine but actually in the in the real world with solving problems we need to teach kids about failure iteration failure iteration because that's how things happen so uh viagra was created here for us back to what you said about the start x it could be y right yeah that's true yeah yes viagra just created for your headache gives you a raging bone quite crudely but it's it's we what we're not taught is how society merits knowledge retention and regurgitation as a as a thing and i think going the other way it takes something almost like a flight of imagination to rethink about how how are we actually approaching these issues or these problems that brands face or founders face and it's actually this there's something in this developing this fail forward mindset and back to what you said about to led and this is a quote that i just i mean i'd love i put it in my recent newsletter actually which i'll put in the comments i suppose much of what other people know isn't worth knowing instinct that the treasure what one needs to know for a profession is necessarily what lies outside the corpus as far away from the center as possible and i think there's something he's just a fucking legend i'd love to know well oh he's the best yeah but it's funny how these uh it's funny how these things yeah everything sort of like uh connects because it was exactly um uh the subject of my last newsletter weirdly was the thesis of it was basically interesting people make interesting brands, boring people make boring brands.

1:33:24And the reason for that, obviously, is that if you have this very weird, quirky, diverse set of inputs, that is going to affect your decision-making downstream in ways that you can't even predict. So the classic example of that is that when Steve Jobs was in university, he took a calligraphy course. So a very weird thing to do. most people just wouldn't do that and people made fun of him and were like what the hell are you going to do with a bloody calligraphy calligraphy course but you know he was just an interesting curious guy and he did it because he fancied it anyway fast forward 10 years or whatever it was that calligraphy course was the reason why he insisted on having different fonts on the computer which is the sort of you know now it doesn't even occur to us that once upon a time that was a very weird decision to make but at the time it was like a completely weird decision to make and he only made that decision as he himself said because of the calligraphy course that he did in college so you see how like the being that type of person in an unpredictable downstream way then leads to incredible business idea back to the source then and we look at david ogilvy he he he he was a chef in Paris.

1:34:40He was a door-to-door salesman selling agers. He basically had the most weird myriad of inputs that created him as probably one of the best, well, kind of the pioneer of advertising, right? And I completely agree with that. Sorry, just to pick up on that, because it's one of my passion subjects. This is a huge issue, huge issue that we have today, more than ever, that one of the sort of effects of sort of modernity and sort of algorithmic driven internet is that what's happening every passing year is that the experiences that people have and the inputs that people have are becoming more and more homogenous and more and more the same.

1:35:18People now, if you follow my logic, are much, much more similar to each other than people were 50 years ago. And then people 50 years ago are much more similar to each other than people were 50 years before that. And so we're all being sort of like, we're all being sort of like experience, sort of experience set. So we are all just very, very similar to each other. And we all know the same things and we all like the same things and we all study the same things. And so we're all creating in the challenge brand world, we're all creating the same brands. So that is a big, big challenge for founders that they got to consciously break themselves out of that and become more and more weird.

1:36:02And I'm sure you've heard about the blanding phenomenon. I don't know of something you've discussed in your podcast before it's basically this sort of like propensity that brands are starting to look more and more alike and there's been lots of interesting stuff written about it and people should just look up blanding and you'll find some really interesting articles the blanding phenomenon is a direct consequence of the fact that the founders are basically all give or take they're all the same people like every brand is every brand is different but they're all the kind of like the same because every founder is different and they're all kind of the same they've all been to the same universities they've all been to the same schools they've all studied the same things they're all watching the same show on netflix they're all reading the same books so of course they're all going to create the same grants and doing cold showers and oh yeah i mean i actually do that so it'd be one of those i try i try i just can't do it thank you no no but man i i one thousand gazillion percent uh agree completely wholeheartedly and i think that's why when i interview a chef who's completely different industry or coming from different industry i interviewed tommy banks who was a professional cricketer he had old caritas so basically when he was 17 i mean he's this i don't know you i don't know if you like food but i love my food but this guy's youngest mitchellan star chef he's got two mitchellan stars up in york and up in leeds he's got a he's got his own brands he's got banks brothers wine can wine um he's on great bridge menu all the time he's fucking smashed it but he's come from he came to chef to cooking from a cricket background and he took the lessons from cricket and and he became and because of that lessons from cricket he wasn't he didn't he was never professionally trained like all the other chefs he would didn't do them um the i think whatever it's called or the sort of the the the chef degree that every chef does i don't know um didn't do that came at it from a different input from a cricket background and he's assailed faster than any other chef at 24 years old he got he's now 34 but i'm in a mix of stuff and back to what we were saying about founders is if every founders can say consuming the same stuff they're going to produce the same stuff and i think i don't know i suppose what i'm going to ask you now is like how do we or how do people listen to this can not even consume because it's like i mean the other or the obvious answer is just get off instagram and go for a fucking walk i mean that would be our point.

1:38:23How do you consume different inputs to produce wildly different outputs? Yeah, and I did think about this before. What was the conclusion that I came to, if any? I think...

1:38:41So one element of it is to not consume uh exclusively recent things books movies whatever it's quite i think it's quite an error to sort of like be only consuming things that are current um number one obviously for the basic reason that they're what everyone else is doing at the time so it's all the very sort of top of mind stuff um but also but also number two because obviously this is a tallow the lindy effect and all that like the the old stuff the stuff that stood a test of time that is essentially a signal that there's a lot of value in that thing just as book there's 100 years old um that that is still like a thing then um because yeah it will be famous like you know like bloody war and peace is famous but like most people haven't read it right so just because something's famous it doesn't mean that it doesn't mean they've watched far severe as fucking 2000s yeah right so so like so uh so you know my point is that you don't have to be like necessarily mining for gold a lot of the interesting stuff is hiding is hiding in plain sight so i do think that you know consuming sort of older canonical classic stuff is quite an easy way of doing it and ironically it's something about education that in the past the literal purpose of education was which which now we're very far from but i think personally it's something we should be going back to purpose of education was essentially like to expose people to the wisdom of the ages right okay in the last 2000 years people have been thinking about shit and here is the best stuff that they've realized or produced and so now i'm condensing it and handing it on to you so like you know shakespeare is shakespeare for a reason and aristotle's aristotle for a reason whatever so people would consume that stuff in order to basically cultivate to sort of like become the most full and complete person that we could possibly be and now that isn't the logic now of course education is more like that basic level how do you get a good job or something like that so it isn't about sort of cultivating um a person based on the accumulated wisdom of the ages so personally i think that's a really sort of like easy so what's what are some of what are some of your favorite books then because obviously with black swan by taleb is i love i mean all the taleb stuff is definitely sort of future classics i mean i would i would definitely tell someone to read every single taleb book they are that they're required reading and actually i know that i'm going to contradict myself here but there isn't the irony that well we've both read it so we've both got the same inputs now well it's obviously not the best example because it's very recent um and so you know those taleb books are interesting because they straddle the line of being sort of somehow kind of timeless but they're also kind of quite recent bestsellers so you're right they aren't uh they aren't the um uh they aren't the best uh they aren't the best examples but you know like i mean i think that you can be i'm not saying that this is going to solve all your business problems or anything like that but sorry just go back to the book and i will buy the books but what are some of the books you've read that maybe the weird ones are like so um not just like my favorite books ever but the books that sort of like pertain quite well to this subject um there's a book and this is a real hospital pass because it's like 2 000 pages long so like no one's going to read it but it is absolutely phenomenal for this type of thing and it really is a book that it breaks your brain and it basically makes you realize what an idiot you are and those are the best books the ones where you realize like oh god i was just so wrong you know um is called the matter with things by ian mcgill chris you might know ian mcgillchrist he's a um he wrote his big hit book which i haven't read was called the master and his emissary and actually i can give you somebody if you want to just a sort of more a quick version a guy wrote a book about advertising which was basically just ripping off this ear mcgillchrist work and putting it into an advertising book which is definitely worth checking out this it's called it's called lemon by a guy called orlando wood it's actually published by the ipa so yeah you can sort of like it's a much shorter way of like getting jc yeah i'm not that's i'd love that yeah but he's uh his whole thesis um is so he's a he's a sort of a neurologist um uh brain guy this whole stuff is about right brain left brain and his thesis is that basically the world has been kind of taken over by a sort of left brain bias thinking, whereas the right brain is actually a much, much more effective way of thinking.

1:43:41And so it makes a very, very compelling case for this and spelling out a lot of sort of pathologies and delusions that exist in the world at large essentially as a result of kind of over dominance of the left brain um and you can drill this all the way down to basic business stuff as that guy did with the with the advertising book uh and yeah it's an extremely um important and interesting thing and once you've read it it's one of those books where you can then just go out there into the world and you can just look around and you can just see the the the fingerprints of it everywhere so you know it's like you're suddenly seeing behind the curtain so i'm just reading it now because i haven't finished it yet because it's so bloody long but you know you you can you can get the gist if you ever i also think in terms of different inputs so don't look at the business but business oh yeah fiction my best ideas not saying i mean i haven't made it or anything at all but like for me i think that reading fiction is a real value i read um bonfire vanities by tom wolf i love has one of my favorites where i found really but the way that guy writes is basically he's a huge inspiration of money tom wolf but that book taught me to be able to understand ego and understand my ego understand other people's ego back to what we're talking about this are we doing this for external validation or are we doing this because we want it because is it sherman or who's the guy's the protagonist who wants to be the master of the universe yeah yeah every fucker wants to be the master of the universe no two ways about it right all my mates who are probably going to see later for beers all of the city wanting to be the master of the universe so it's what he told me that book was one of the best sales books i've ever read because it made me realize when i'm speaking to anyone when i'm saying to is that it has to be some sort of ego involved so i'm sort of diminishing my ego and helping that person it's not necessarily ego maybe that's a reductionist way of putting it but it's like helping them get what they want and that book really that's the same yeah and you read his other one what's the other one man in full unreal yeah yeah his line style was just delicious it's so good that is a really it's something that i do do and it's a really interesting way of picking books um albeit it's quite hard in terms of research but obviously you're attracted to books that imprint like novels that are about a subject that you think oh that sounds interesting right um but another way of approaching it which there's much greater fruit but like i say it's difficult is to basically look for the best written books ever because essentially which are for you oh god i mean no the two that stand head and shoulders above everything else are anything by truman capote or is it capote capote and he hasn't he hasn't written much so his only two real books that were sort of like big hits are in cold blood and breakfast at tiffany's which you know um in cold blood is quite sort of interesting superficially because it's sort of true crime but breakfast at tiffany's is just sort of about nothing kind of thing so it's not a book that i would have ever chosen to read if i hadn't been thinking about it in i just want to read the best written book ever and i do think the breakfast tiffany's is the best written book ever and the other one is um lolita by by him oh no no no no uh it's that's by navokov i think which is particularly interesting because that's also considered to be one of the best written books ever but it was like the guy's russian so it's english as a second language um and yeah it's um and what you find with these the books that never mind forget the plot forget what it's about obviously uh lolita's about pretty dodgy uh plot uh uh uh plot topic what's the plot so big oh it's i mean i mean it's about i mean it's basically like the protagonist is essentially a pedophile uh but you know you're sort of like he's presented in a kind of sympathetic way if you can imagine that like uh so yeah i know that's an absolutely terrible sales pitch for the book but obviously you know it's one of the great seminal greatest novels ever and that's for a reason but the point is breakfast tiffany's and um uh and lolita is that like what they're about is obviously not what they're about.

1:47:55And because they're so extraordinarily well-written, what that basically means is that there are, to your point, there are insights in every bloody sentence. Like, they're writing a story, which is whatever the plot of the book is, but as you're going through the story, that's just a framework on which to hang unbelievable insights into, well, I guess, the human condition if you want to put it that way by the writer and that's why these are like considered to be so well written the so with it autobiography which i think are brilliant is it allows the person the business person to present themselves in the best way possible right or i mean i read the guy from disney and i was like that's a vomming like i was like jesus christ how much do you want to celebrate yourself son but with fiction is the author allow is allowed to create characters which has allowed to create the truisms of life oh yeah do you know what i mean do you know what i mean so it's like yeah you can hadn't thought about that yeah because it's not real it allows you to actually explore people's pains and worries and so there's actually a study on this where reading fiction builds empathy um i don't have to get i don't know what it is but yeah when i read fiction i can see the world like with x-ray vision whereas when i read uh sort of autobiographies of famous business people i feel inspired which is great but i don't like a lot of it is it just it whistles through the success stories without like it's a different kind of landscape almost yeah the exception to that that i i mean i don't read too many of them but i mean i it's it's too much of a cliche to mention but the ward but the walter isaacson steve jobs uh biography not autobiography obviously um that i got a huge amount from that really yeah i need to read that i need to read that because i tried to read his one uh Benjamin Franklin yeah and the one with DaVinci DaVinci yeah i mean i i mean i got about 20 pages in i'm conscious of time but i'm up man i'm gonna have to do a round two mate because i'm up to loving this but what what i want to finish on is product is nothing how to see things the way your consumers do now i'd love to explore this because one of my beliefs is product is everything in brands actually is is the amount of businesses that are insane at creating hype insane at creating evangelists online and i went for dinner with one of my mates who owns a whole study of the week and he was like oh there's this one brand i won't say it is but a couple of brands have got all this fucking hype on instagram linkedin they're not selling the cases so i almost think it's like almost this is a bit of a crude analogy but it's almost like meeting someone at a bar is almost your branding and you think they're gorgeous so then you go home they're bad at the sack you don't that's probably the most crude way of putting it so i think you need both brand for food and drink but you also need um product but i'd love to explore like where you were thinking with that article like why you think product is nothing so i love testing and teaking where I could be wrong.

1:50:59It's just interesting. I think that as with all disagreements, we don't actually I completely agree with you. It's more just like approaching the problem from a different angle. So the idea with that is to try and make people realize that a given product can be interpreted in many different ways. In other ways, a given product can deliver a great many different potential values. So going back to the idea of you delivering unique value, right? The thing is that this is why the founder's got to get out of a product-centric mindset. And most founders in the FMCG world are in a product-centric mindset where they think their business is their product.

1:51:46That's not actually, I mean, it is true until until for like, you know, it is true, but it shouldn't be true. In fact, the business is in the, their company is in the business of delivering whatever the value is. And the product is merely a tool by which they deliver that value, right? So if you're product centric, you know, you think like, okay, well, we make cucumber water or something. And that is what this business does. as it makes cucumber water. But you haven't answered the question, okay, well, why is that a good thing to do? What is the value of cucumber water? Which again, is one step above.

1:52:28Cucumber water, your product, is always merely a tool by which you deliver value to the consumer. So we can talk about Mojo in this instance, right? Because they had this absolutely fabulous product, the juice shots, um, which had a certain degree of traction. Um, you know, when it, when it first came onto the market and sort of like got a certain amount of the way kind of organically, like we talked earlier on, but it was unclear. Okay, well, this is a great product, but why is this a great product? What actually is this giving to people? Now, the fact is, is that you could of answer that question in many different ways.

1:53:05Okay. So is, you know, uh, is the, uh, is the value of a juice shot? Is it all about like giving people, um, easy access to certain plants in a kind of concentrated form is the value of a juice shot just make, you know, like being healthy is the value of a juice shot. Like it's a smaller juice or something like it's one product, but you could like in principle interpret it in many, many different ways. So in that respect, it isn't actually that helpful to have a really good product because ultimately, if you don't know what the value of that product is, if you don't know why it's a good product, if you don't know why, what people get from it, then you're still going to be floundering and you're not going to be able to repeat the trick.

1:53:54So you have to answer the question. you have to answer the question of, okay, of the many different possible interpretations of this product, and there will always be many, which one is the right one? And if you are a, if you're a product centric founder, you, where you think that like the end, the beginning and end of your business is this product, you won't have answered that question. So you think I make cucumber water and it's brilliant and people are buying it so they love it but you have no idea why cucumber water is actually a good product you get you you you might have a personal idea of it but you don't actually know because you could frame cucumber water in 10 different ways and nine of those ways that business would fail and one of those ways that business would be huge and it's the same product okay i so what i'm doing what working with one brand called islands chocolate who have they literally i mean it is category in the nicest chocolate i've tried they're like the uh if you ever buy gales if you're going back to under bridge um get hot chocolate mate really good yeah but basically we were having this issue is it's like hey we've got bagging product we've got we're one of the only brands with full traceability on the supply chain like they've They've basically got farmland over there.

1:55:17cool that's product banging cool how the hell do you communicate that and back to this sort of serendipity throwing stuff at the wall like they ended up working with chefs otolenghi gordon ramsay's restaurant all the nicholas restaurant chefs so we looked at the category of chocolate and i said well let's not go to confectionery because that is so crowded that's the middle let's go to home baking that's blue oceans that's where no one's playing and let's position this as chef's chocolate and chef's chocolate automatically in terms of like how you position yourself and we've we've put underneath like through the the packaging is like mission style quality bakes do you know what i mean so it goes back i kind of now completely get where you're coming from it's like you have the best product in the world but if you don't communicate that in a way that hits the levels bang and then you know back to what we're saying earlier about listening to signals i would literally just fix when i was talking to people is i would say stuff like uh it's quite obvious but like social proof but it's like you'd say we've got chocolate from the Caribbean.

1:56:24Cool. That's option one. Option two, this is used by Otolenghi. This is used by Sat Baines. This is used as Gale's hot chocolate. Eyes look like that. You notice that. You use that and you pitch. So it goes back to kind of that listening. And there's, sorry, just to pick up on that, and there's a huge fallacy in there, which is very important for founders to be aware of because it's one of the main strategic errors that they get made is that founders are obsessed with being the best x oh we make the best this the best that okay firstly this is the obvious point of like we're best on what metric nothing is you can't say that anything is the best anything because it all depends on what people are what that what the punter is looking for and what they value right so that's very much in the eye of the beholder so it's essentially an empty phrase to say that something is the best but let's say that it wasn't an empty phrase let's just say that everyone agreed on the metric of like what constitutes the best chocolate or what's the best tasting chocolate let's say the market doesn't reward best right the market only rewards different so if i came if i somehow made the best oat milk now which is just categorically like if you sat everyone down blind taste test they would say this is the best oat milk it's better than every other oat milk thing would be a complete and utter a failure because that question has already been answered.

1:57:44And even if it is better, the market interprets better as the same. All you're saying, if you say that your product is the best, is that's another way of saying, oh, our product is exactly like everyone else's, but a little bit more. You'll have to take our word on that, right? That has no traction, right? That has no traction. best is a synonym for the same so of course if you're making a chocolate you do want to put in your ultimate effort to make it the best possible chocolate because that's what's going to get people coming back for more but it will not get you market traction the only thing that will get you market traction is as you say opening up that different concept in punters minds which that's a good example like you know like i've never heard anyone talk about sort of chef chocolate so already like yes you and i might both know that at the end of the day this is still just chocolate it doesn't seem like that it doesn't read like that to the market it reads like this new idea this new thing this new cool thing so that's the thing that gives them traction and then yeah the fact that it tastes good is just the kind of like the under the hood stuff yeah well it's going but yeah exactly mate we could go on whatever we're going to do a round two because i've fucking love that mate um but yeah felicia's i'd employ you to subscribe to alex newsletter the way we'll put a link in the show notes um but yeah thank you so much i've loved that yeah absolutely and it's quite bad timing in regards to the newsletter because i'm literally about to rebrand that so i don't know when this is going to come out is this be for three weeks yeah no so it'll probably be different by then and it's actually going to be called the hidden path but either way the link will be the same so you'll figure it out nice little brother thank you so so much for listening to the podcast i really really do appreciate it if you like that episode only if you liked it please do give it five stars subscribe tell all your friends families foes next door but one cat dog whatever please tell everyone about this podcast it means the world to me and i really want to understand what your pain points are as the new wave of challenger food and drink brands please do hit me up on LinkedIn, search Dan Pope, and hopefully we can together create a more meaningful and powerful podcast for the next wave of challenger food and drink brands.

2:00:05Thank you so much.