Marketing Is Not a Line Item - Bill Harper

0:00Hey, welcome to the CMO Whisper Show. I'm your host, Steve Olensky. Part marketing practitioner, part ad agency veteran, part journalist. I was a writer for Forbes for 10 years. I've had so many insightful conversations over the years with business leaders, to athletes, to celebrities, to, of course, CMOs. The only difference now is instead of sharing those insights through written form, I'm doing it this way. My guest this week is Bill Harper, a guy who's been building brands longer than most people have been talking about branding. He's the CEO. By the way, it doesn't mean you're old, Bill. He's a CEO and chief career officer of Brand Boss HQ, his fifth five agency, where he helps businesses find a story that actually scales.

0:49Now, Bill's worked with more than 300 brands, helped drive over$2.5 billion, that's with a B, in new revenue, and built a playbook that small and mid-sized companies can use to punch way above their weight, the same way Fortune 1000 do. he's got the receipts the results and the reps and today he's dropping the kind of brand wisdom you don't google you earn bill harper my friend this is way overdue thank you for being on the cmo whisperer show i appreciate the invitation i'm looking forward to the conversation thank you for having me absolutely big big fan of your tiktoks well thank you big big fan you're who i want to be when i grow up well i don't want to grow up that's you know that's the problem for most of us i don't want to grow up either no no no no and i certainly don't want to mature but anyway so we are recording this on what the hell day is august 25th august 25th a day that will live in obscurity but it's also the day as you and i were just talking off air that yet another brand and i love that you use the phrase a confused rebrand yeah you might want to trademark that one by the way um but on this day and date it's the cracker barrel it is just the latest and you and i both know they will not be the last nope but let's talk cracker barrel as it's hot right now i almost want to do word association bill harper cracker barrel go just off a cliff the cracker barrel reminds me of the thing mom used to say if all your friends jumped off the top of a bridge would you do it too because it's just about as dumb for those not familiar and what rocky have you been living under i guess but especially by the time this comes out cracker barrel changed their logo how would you describe their old now old logo i was like folksy right oh yeah folksy it was dare i say timeless in the sense that it was a very traditional like old-timey logo and you know it was what it was it had the little guy in the rocking chair sitting next to the barrel and it had the word cracker in it which was only funny because i was just served up a spot just before coming on that almost had me in tears it was a picture of the cracker jacks logo and it says we're the only cracker left and we have to protect us and the dog right because it's it's the kid and the dog so it's just i mean this thing has taken on wing in a way that you know i thought jaguar had it bad but cracker barrel i mean even even american eagle outfitters in the sydney sweeney thing didn't get it as bad as cracker barrel is getting it.

3:42Cracker barrel is like the, the Sydney Sweeney was the windup. And then the release was cracker barrel. And everybody was just like, I got to say something about it. I got to have an opinion about it. Lines are being drawn. Camps are being made. I mean, this is well past ridiculous at this point. Okay. Of the million questions I have, and I'm going to ask for my audience as well. And you know, my audience is your audience, the marketers or whatever. There's help but like i almost want to go put me in that conference room where this was decided and i just okay so here's how i think this happens okay okay and i'm not i'm gonna take woke out of it okay i'm gonna take out of it because i don't think i think woke is the label people like to slap on it but i don't think that's actually where it started now jaguar was a different thing jaguar jaguar was the distillation of woke broke nation.

4:37Like it just, it was absolutely like, I don't know who in the hell approved that, but nonetheless for Cracker Barrel, here's what I think happened. They took a look at what was an aging population. They were looking at younger people with far greater restriction on what they eat, what they'll put in their body, whatever. And they were like, look, We have been riding this cash cow for a long time and he's getting long in the tooth. What are we going to do? People don't look like this guy anymore. They don't look of the store appeals to an older audience. This older audience is aging out. The people that are coming up behind them don't look, don't sound, don't talk like them.

5:19Like, what are we going to do? And so they go and hire somebody. I mean, 700 million, 700 million dollars on this rebrand. I can't even begin to imagine the approval process that must have been required for this ridiculousness to get moved forward. But nonetheless, so they go out and they find somebody and they say, we don't know who we should become. We know who we were and we believe that that's in jeopardy. Where should we go? And that's what leadership is doing. because internally, my guess, again, I don't actually have knowledge, but this would be my strong guess, is that they all got together around a table, tried to suss it out themselves.

5:59And we're like, we're so firmly rooted in who and what we are. We really don't see a path forward. Let's get outside opinion. So they go and they find somebody who is a CMO with vision or whatever. And that person with vision comes in the door and tells them a story. And the internal top brass falls in love with this story and decides we're going to get behind it and we're going to put shoulders into it. And for whatever reason, the story that they decided to tell was let's make it as franchise boring as humanly possible. I mean, they literally stripped every bit of visual interest out of the brand identity and then not to be outdone with what they did to jack up the logo.

6:44They then went into the store and stripped virtually everything out of it. I saw a post yesterday that cracked me up. It said it was a side by side of how it used to look in today. And granted, the old one was cluttered. But the quote on this post was, it looks like they gave design to Dolores Umbridge, which just absolutely cracked me up. They were like, all that's missing are the cat plates. And I think that's kind of what happened is they came in and they said, well, you know, the thing is, is that this is cluttered. So let's get rid of that. And you know, what's what's would let a lot of people sit down and eat here is if we just went back to laminate table.

7:21So let's go do that. And that was a price choice. And then, you know, if we're going to have clutter, why don't we have it in a in a clean, concise way? So somebody make a clutter grid, and we'll hang it on the walls, which represents the clutter that used to be there, but isn't there. And then we're going to streamline the clutter, because there are only these elements that really sell during the year. And it really should be more like this to appeal to this audience. And it was a radical shift for the people that walk in the door that were old Cracker Barrel customers. I have to imagine that it was total abject confusion.

7:56Yeah. It's a walk in and look around and be like, I have no idea where I am. I'm suddenly at a Cadova. Like there There was no, it's not that far, but it kind of is, you know, like you've stripped everything that it was out of it. And then out of left field comes the race card. Then there's a bunch of uproar. Like even I was watching a couple of comedians that were cracking me up that were saying like, put the cracker back in the barrel. Like it was fine how it was. What are you doing? So, I mean, there's like, it's just the battle lines are everywhere. And for whatever reason, this brand over all the rest of them since Jaguar, Jaguar was the one that had it last.

8:38They just got just crucified on this thing. But correct me if I'm wrong. Like, is it was it broken? Like, did the consumers say? I you know, I don't think it was certainly not enough to warrant this kind of slide. I mean, this is we're getting into Bud Light slide territory, right? Like we're getting into walk away from the brand movement in the negative as far as their stock is concerned. But no, I don't think I think what happened is, is that their growth had kind of plateaued and they just weren't doing great. They weren't doing I don't think they were doing poorly. I think, you know, I'm going to look that up.

9:17That's a really good question. What was Cracker Barrel stock? Yeah, because I don't remember when I heard about the new logo and the in-store changes. Well, it was I didn't hear anything like you talked. We listened. You know how brands say that. Right. Surveys. I don't unless I missed it. I don't remember anybody going on a mountaintop screaming. You've got to change your logo. You've got to change your in-store experience. All right. Well, going back and taking a look, they sort of peaked. If you look at the last five years, they peaked in April of 2021. Their stock price in April of 2021 was at one hundred and seventy five dollars.

9:56OK. OK, now today it's at fifty three ninety four. Good Lord. And it has been falling over the last five years in a fairly predictable decline. So these guys were reacting to a fall off. And really, if you take a look over the last, I guess they started recording in the late 80s or early 90s. it really seemed to start growing as a concept between 08 and it hit sort of like a big peak in 15. So it sort of hit its plateau, skipped around a couple of years, dropped off like everybody else in 2020, rebounded back, and then has been dropping precipitously since then. So this was a, you know, the company is not doing well.

10:44Let's figure out what we need to do to be ready for the next generation kind of a pivot it just look we could literally spend this entire episode breaking this whole nonsense and i'm being i don't think it could be called much else right like but that number oh my you're in an agent agency world i've had it i've i've done the agency dance that's what really it pisses me off it makes me 700 million dollars 700 million okay i'm sorry 700 million dollars i just but my favorite is you know she goes on uh their new ceo goes online i mean i did a video of it with me just laughing because honestly i couldn't i couldn't come up with anything to say that was as appropriate as my just abject laughter at her being on a whatever the talk show was and they're like you know this is not looking good for you and she goes no no no overwhelmingly people say that they like the change and my response was like what are you smoking?

11:43Like what, what possible rock have you decided to camp under that you're missing out on the clearly, I mean, you, this is how profound this is. It's on LinkedIn. Okay. Most of the time, this kind of rant stuff stays off to Instagram, Tik TOK, you know, that kind of thing. Yeah. This is the first five posts of LinkedIn today, yesterday, and tomorrow on LinkedIn. in. Let's do a quick, not quick. I want to do an exercise with you if you don't mind. Nah, go right ahead. Cracker Barrel comes to you before this, not after, before this. Bill, our stock, look at this. We're hemorrhaging. We need help.

12:22What's the first thing you do? Research. First thing. You go out and you talk to people who are abject loyalists, and then you go to people who used to go there, but don't anymore. And then you go and talk to people who've never even heard of it or considered it. And you get a 360 degree view of how the brand is perceived in the world today. And then you sit down with that information and you say, what thing could be done that would make us relevant again? Not what flat out abject change could we make to just show people, hey, look, it's new and it's different. But what relevance does this have?

13:02And if it is, if it is, you know, stepping back in time, if it is, you know, bringing back together the feeling of the family dinner, if it's like, what is the core? And then once you understand what the core is, then you build a new modern story around that core. But thou shalt not, you know, stray from thy purpose. And this is exactly what Bud Light did. Bud Light turn their back on their base yep and when that happened the base was like we're so pissed that you ignored us that we'll go drink your competitor like life and and like bud light and miller light people really are not the same people but no but bud light pissed them off so badly that they were like i'm gonna buy blue from now on screw red i'm buying blue and they did it like it wasn't just that they claimed they were going to do it, which is what brands dealt with a lot.

14:00You know, PR prior to social media was people are outraged, but they don't really have a voice. So, you know, the outrage lasts as long as the people's memory and then everything goes back to normal, which is usually about a cycle. But now that's not the case. Now people realize the power that they have. And now that they have the ability to group together on social media and reinforce and legitimize the things that they think and feel, they are now able to carry that through to the bottom line. And they do. And they enjoy the fact that they can do it. I mean, this is like kids, you know, finally getting a driver's license, right?

14:42Like the freedom is overwhelmingly exciting to them. And there you go. it's the just because you can do something just because you can do this doesn't mean it's a good idea to do it yeah it's just to me like i said i didn't read anywhere that said you know we we asked 5 000 consumers and former i didn't see any of that i didn't either nor did i hear her say that what i and that was the problem is she took the politician's answer right she tried to sugarcoat it. Oh, everybody loves it. And if I say it enough, it'll become real. Honestly, in my video, I said I give her 24 months, but I'm not sure she'll make it that long.

15:26I don't know if she's actually going to make it two years from this, unless they have some second act that nobody can see coming. But I've been in this business a long time and I have a pretty good ability to see around some corners and I can't even begin to see around this one. So if they've got some, I can't see it. You and I both have done this long enough to go, okay, I'm as open-minded as the next guy. And if you want to surprise me, go for it, but I don't see it. But anyway, all right, I want to pivot. Marketing. I believe you said marketing. You're a big fan of marketing should be the growth engine, not the call center.

16:06Correct? Yeah, for sure. So why do so many companies still treat it like a line item then? Oh, because of Harvard. Because of what? Harvard. Elaborate. Harvard, as Harvard goes, so do MBA programs everywhere. Harvard thinks of marketing as a joke, or at least their syllabus suggests that. And as MBA mentality, you know, we want to focus on the important things. We want to focus on finance. We need to focus on operations. We need to focus on people, the people who buy from us completely secondary. And it's the exact same way that VCs, private equity groups, angel investors. I mean, the whole like 10 percent, we're going to we are going to invest a shit ton of money in 10 companies and fully expect that nine of them are going to fail.

16:55Only an MBA would come up with this like under no other circumstances in business anywhere in business. Would you would you make that kind of a bet? It's foolish to do so. So like I, you know, and I don't have a beef with Harvard. I actually have a lot of respect for Harvard, but marketing is considered the redheaded stepchild. It has always been the lowercase C in the C-suite. And that is completely foolish because if you can't tell a story that is relevant to your buying audience, then you aren't relevant. And so the whole idea that companies come out with is, I'm going to make something that's better.

17:35This notion of the better mousetrap is so firmly rooted in the belief structure of success. But take a look around you. People don't buy the best products. They buy the products they like the best. They buy the products they are most familiar with. The average person who goes into a small town community and sees two options for lunch, I can either go to Bob's Belly Buster and in the front window of this one or two person shop is trophies everywhere and a picture of this hamburger that looks idyllic. It looks like something out of Mount Zeus, right? It's perfect. It's amazing. It's won all these awards.

18:19It's been written up everywhere. 70 % of people, and this study has been done over and over again, will go to McDonald's and buy a crap burger because they're familiar with the brand. That's profound. And for people who are business owners not to pay attention to that is ridiculous. And let me go a step further. If you want to watch this happening in real time at a success level that most companies would kill or die to have. Look at liquid death. Liquid death is the least innovative product ever made. It is flavored water in a can. Cans are not new. Flavored water is not new. Carbonated flavored water is not new.

18:58They have thousands of competitors and yet they just reached a 1.4 billion dollar B billion dollar valuation because of the story they tell. That's it. how much competition is there? Liquid death is the greatest case study we will probably see in our lifetime of what is possible with story at the forefront. When you go into the market with a product that you can get on any shelf already from brands you already know, and you can kick the living shit out of them up and down the block because your story was better. When they start teaching this, businesses will stop having those meetings where they sit around and point fingers at each other going, this is another bad quarter.

19:45It's sales fault. You're not saying something that gives sales the opportunity to be able to sell through because no one can see your value. And thus the salespeople who don't know any better, not because there's anything wrong with salespeople. I'm a salesperson. I know a lot of great salespeople, but those people don't have the vocabulary to come back and say, our purpose isn't coming through. Our value isn't coming through. So what they do is they say, I need a new promotion. I need innovation. I need a pricing advantage. Give me something I can sell. And that puts those businesses in a race to the bottom because now all of a sudden you're racing on things that you can't win.

20:24You can't be the cheapest. You can't be the fastest because somebody will always undercut you. And so the model is so jacked up doing great advertising is easy talking businesses off the ledge of the momentum and the repetition and the rest of it that they have become so hopelessly dependent on it's it is the opioid like epidemic of our industry and they just they just do it over and over again it's like did you see these glasses look at the hinge man i've got a patent on that hinge nobody else has that hinge. No one gives a shit. No one cares. No one. And so it's everywhere. It is absolutely everywhere.

21:08I spend 90 % of my career not doing great strategy, not doing great creative. Those things are the easy thing. I spend 90 % of my career educating, holding hands, trying to walk somebody off the ledge, keeping them patient enough to actually work through the development of a brand. All the things that they express they want, they think they can get with a pill overnight. And I keep telling them, it's like going to the gym. I don't care how hard you work out that first month. I don't care if you're in that gym 24 hours a day. You are not going to look like Arnold at the end of 30 days. It's not going to happen.

21:47But everything about what they're being told on social media, these 24-year-old kids that are like, dude, I'm drop shipping and I'm making$50 million a week and it's bitching and you should get in on it. And they listen to this nonsense or they come out of MBA and they're like, I've got a SWOT analysis under one arm and I've got innovation under the other and hot diggity whoopty. I'm going to own the world. And I'm like, no chance. There's no chance. It is so not surprising to me that 90 % of businesses fail in the first five years. Isn't it more exacerbated now in the world of AI? Oh, yeah. And the thing about AI is it is a phenomenal tool for efficiency.

22:29What was that four-letter word to use? Tool. Yes. Tool. It's a tool. Can everybody hear that? Please. T-O-O-L. Go look it up, as in screwdriver. It's a phenomenal tool as long as you remember the cardinal rule. Garbage in, garbage out. If I don't know how to use a saw, it's not the saw's fault when the thing I cut isn't cut right. And this is it. So they're like, hey, I'll tell you what, Bobby, look how much money we can save by firing everybody and bringing the AI agent in. I love that the reports are coming out now and are like, OK, so that was a failed experiment. Let's don't do that again.

23:11But people, they just they they see what they want to see. and you know it's so there you go so and it's the quick you know we all know our attention spans are negative numbers anymore forget about short they're just negative yeah and ai comes along with the automation and going no no we can fix everything i i posted something on linkedin i've defined it and sent it to you but it was a study of somebody survey web developers said three of the 10 30 said we can do all marketing we don't need marketers yeah we can we can do it i'm like really? Hmm. Okay. Did you watch Adobe's summit presentation from last year?

23:50I did not. Okay. So I was watching in abject terror at what I saw. Okay. You remember the fever of the iPhone when Steve jobs did the presentation, right? Oh yeah. A famous presentation. Very famous. Yep. Okay. So there's the frenzy level, right? Like everybody's in the thing and you could just watch their chairs vibrating and they're like, like, bring it on, bring it on. And so these guys come on and they say, we're going to use Pepsi to show you what the future looks like. So they walk out and they say, okay, on this side is a database that's filled with pre-approved product images. On this side is a database filled with pre-approved brand elements, logos, colors, that kind of thing.

24:34And on this side is a prompt that has been pre-approved to talk about product. Watch this. and then they hit a button and like 500 elements were spat out of the back end of this thing lighting wasn't right headlines didn't make any sense shit was all over the place and the room erupted they're like you're never gonna have to do another banner ad you're never gonna have to do another social post you're never gonna have to do anything and these folks fell down like it was the second coming. Like they were like, give it to me. Give me, give me, give me, give me, whatever it costs. The most ridiculous, like flat out obsessive, like put it in the, put it in my vein as fast as you can push the plunger.

25:21Gotta have it, gotta have it, gotta have it. And I'm looking at this stuff and I'm like, we're going to eat these guys for lunch because they're all racing to the common denominator bottom level. Everything is going to look the same. Everything is going to sound the same. Everything is going to be the same. The only thing that's going to matter is strategy and creativity. That's all that's left. So if the world's crayon box just went from 64 colors to 64 million colors, which is in essence what AI has just done, you can do anything, produce anything, make anything. Fantastic. And what's left? Something that is relevant, something that has continuity, something that will last the test of time, a story worth listening to.

26:03It isn't about the thing. It's about the story. The thing allows you to bring to life. And that's the lesson that everybody is going to learn the hard way. And they're already starting to learn it. So, you know, there are going to be businesses everywhere that are like, just hit play, man, just hit play and shovel that shit out as fast as we can get it out there. And if you thought it was bad before AI, there's going to be 84 billion new blog posts a day that all sound like the robot out of the Jetsons because nobody's checking it. And the number of businesses that aren't even fact checking the stuff that's coming out of this is alarming.

26:43The lead gen companies, the repetition in the lead gen companies, the mistakes in the lead gen companies like these groups that are early adopters to this tech, it's terrifying. By the way, it's not just I know you know this and you'll definitely resonate with this being in the agency world so about a year ago and this is even you know ai was starting but it wasn't like it is now and a cmo of a fortune 100 company i can't tell you who but she was lamenting she had rfp out for creative and she's like steve i started going through them i got five total i got to the third one then the fourth and i go wait a minute everything's sounding the same sure enough all five agencies who went right to chat dropped in you know right in rp didn't change a fucking word and she went you're all out i'm done right and that's i think that's just starting exactly that's just starting i mean i can't tell you the number of people in the last year who have said when we have discovery calls when we sit down and talk about it i get the same response 75 of the time yeah you guys don't sound like anybody else you're like you guys are doing like what you're doing makes sense.

27:50Like this is, it's not just a stack of tactics, but everybody else feels like a stack of Legos. It's like, well, we're going to get a blue one and a red one and a green one and a yellow one and shit. They'll like something on that list. And that's not how we do it at all. I sit down with them. I'm like, look, you have to start here at research. You have to understand what your audience thinks and feels or you're not going anywhere. And they're like research. Really? I was like, yeah, yeah, really. Like you're making broad assumptions, lots of them, like money sucking, soul sucking assumptions that are ruining your ability to grow.

28:24And they're like, wow, you know, no, we have no idea what our awareness numbers are. No, we have no idea what, I mean, we did some customer surveys asking the wrong questions. It's like, they don't even like it. It's not even, it's not even a part of their vocabulary to think about this. How in the world are you supposed to develop something that has any meaning if you don't have any understanding of what the people who are supposed to be buying from you value about you. Now, let me let me do a little pushback. Yeah. Okay. Because I know, you know, this stat, whatever the case may be, that the CMO perennially annually always has the shortest average C-suite tenure, right?

29:04We all know this. Is it because and it's probably getting worse because of AI and the CEOs who are clueless going, what used to be six months, you can do 30 days now, right? Oh, sure. I can do that. So everything from under brand now gets tossed aside for performance and that whole argument. And if they don't deliver in 18 months now, instead of 36 months, you see where I'm going? So that's part of it. We actually did a study that we conducted for ourselves on this because I wanted to know if that was really what it was. And it wasn't. I was surprised. That was the assumption that we had also.

29:42Yeah. Was that people are hired. They're hired to quote unquote, get results. The results don't happen fast enough. And in 12 to 18 months, they're out to try again. What I found though, was really interesting. So Rochelle and her team went out and did like a whole research thing on this. And what she came back with that was so amazing was CMOs are no longer being hired for brand. They're being hired to fix a problem in the organization. They're being hired as, hey, that person knows social and we have a social problem. You've got 18 months to put our social thing on the right path. And then they move to the next tactic and they say, we have a data problem.

30:26Our, I don't know, our conversion, our acquisition numbers are too high or whatever. So they'll hire a data person. The data person comes in and says, oh, well, you're hemorrhaging money at having too many products and you've got this. They're almost acting like a consultant. And then they'll do it again. And again, we have a packaging problem. We have a story problem. We have this or that. No one is actually looking at the brand comprehensively. This is why it's all eroding the way that it is. And when you have the data person in play, the data person is only looking at numbers. They don't come from brands.