Great Marketing Won’t Save a Bad Product (Business & Marketing Chat)

0:00One of the great mistakes that small businesses make is they may be so good at marketing, they have that salesmanship, but their product sucks. You know, and I think, you know, all that good marketing does against a bad product is speeding up everyone knowing that your product sucks. This is the Gary Vee Audio Experience. When you hear the phrase, branding that bites, what does that mean to you? When I hear that, it sounds like someone wanted to use the word bites to mean, you know, works or hits or whatever word you want to put in there. but at the end of the day, what I think, you know, Allison so masterfully did and other companies that have done it, there's so many people in the business world that are so obsessed with understanding how every single penny returns a dollar, right?

0:56Or a nickel or a dime. And for me, when I hear that sentence, before you go to the podcast, I've got a big announcement. I know several years ago, a lot of you bought 12 books of 12 and a half to get the NFT, the book games NFT. I also know that a lot of people have dropped off on their journey with VFriends, which is a massive mistake because what we're doing on Burn Island and what we're doing on base with book games is remarkable. So you need to go to VEEFriends, VFriends.com slash old books. Go to VFriends.com slash old books with an S. You will go to that landing page and we will help you explain if you are trying to figure out where where your NFTs are, how to bring them over to the website, and how to start activating them so that you can start using them for all the incredible exchanges and draws and raffles and experiences that we're doing for people that actually own the book games.

1:52So please go to vfriends.com slash old books where you can start your journey on reactivating your book games journey. I'm so passionate about branding and marketing because I know it's more effective than sales. And sales is so important. So many of you, I myself am a proud salesman. I love selling things. In fact, probably the thing I'm most passionate about right now is live social shit selling, right? The QVCification of social media with whatnot and TikTok shop. But when I hear that, it sounds to be like someone understood the assignment. You know, at the end of the day, we all want people to come to us and buy what we want to sell.

2:39We don't want to go to them and knock on the door and ask them to buy it. And I think that sales and marketing slash branding are the two functions. And I think that the marketing branding is harder because it's gray. It's art. You don't see it show up right away. There's a level of trust that has to come along with it. And look, I'm sure all three of us can attest to this. There's, to the credit of people that struggle with loving branding and marketing, they sit on validity. You know, I spend a lot of my time in Madison Avenue, and 95 % of marketing campaigns are very expensive failures. And that's a very, and by the way, I'm being kind this morning.

3:27You know, I truly believe that 95 % is being kind. And so there's a reason people struggle with it. As private equity starts to buy up a lot of things, you know, those are finance guys and gals. They struggle with it. They view it as a cost, you know, not a value prop. But for me, you know, branding that bites excites me. Awesome, awesome. And Allison, you started your brand literally in your kitchen sink. And now you have national distribution and you have billions of dollars. Yes. Yes. When did you first realize that Poppy's brand was just as important as the product itself? So we're lucky that we were Mother Beverage before.

4:18Because let me just tell you, that brand was shit, you guys. And I know that. I can say that our shark told us that but we did have a great product so it does start with the product but you have to have both you have to have product and brand and I'm so blessed that we realized that really early on so after getting a deal on Shark Tank we took nine months off and did a brand exercise and yes I said nine months because a lot of people think building a brand is just something that you're like, OK, I know my mission. I know my values. I know my consumer. Let's go. There's so much more that goes into that, from brand guidelines to understanding where you show up, how you show up.

5:01I mean, we have a brand book that's like 180 pages long. It's kind of crazy. So for us, we went through a big exercise of what is poppy? We're soda for the next generation. What do we do? We give people the freedom to love soda again at its best. I love saying, as an adult, I've given you the freedom to enjoy grape soda, right? And that's just really powerful. It's nostalgic. So you want to move really the thinking of what a brand is. You move it from the head to the heart. You want to emotionally connect with your consumer. And so a lot of the work that we did is we want to call yourself a soda.

5:38So it's obvious we're in a 12-ounce can, not a bottle, right? Where Mother Beverage was in a bottle before. we want to scream soda soda tastes good at the end of the day people drink soda because it tastes good what looks juicier than colorful bright cans with like glistening um in ice right that's juicy that's like soda not a white can with clean girl aesthetic um you want to let like we knew all this going into it so when we launched poppy in march in 2020 literally the first week of covid we knew we were soda now nobody else believed we were soda right that was a big thing in the retailers they didn't know where to put us they thought we were sparkly water a sister to kombucha they didn't have anywhere that they knew kind of where to put us so but we knew and i feel like if you kind of stick core to your values right think of nike just do it they don't talk about their sneakers it's an emotional way that they connect with the consumer and so we just led with the brand first take the time, invest in it, build the brand, but you also have to have a fantastic product as well.

6:42Amazing. That's amazing. I'm sorry to interrupt, but it's such an important point. Probably my favorite thing to do at VaynerMedia, our marketing branding agency, is when we actually tell clients that we would like to not work with them, which is very unusual in the agency landscape. And it always comes from a good place of really talking about product. I think, you know, we're very proud of what we do, if you're in this audience right now and you feel good about your marketing skills, I think one of the great mistakes that small businesses make is they may be so good at marketing, they have that salesmanship, they have that marketing, but their product sucks.

7:23You know, and I think, you know, all that good marketing does against a bad product is speeding up everyone knowing that your product sucks.

7:34awesome it's so true yeah don't fire me hey everybody uh hope you're enjoying the podcast right now make sure you follow the podcast that's why i'm interrupting let's keep going on this show but follow the podcast it'll make my mom super happy branding is one piece of the equation and marketing is the other piece and i remember you may not remember about a year ago, was it a year ago you sent me your new book? We were, all the marketers were on our way to Cannes, the Creativity Festival, and I read it on the plane front to back, and when I got back home, I asked my entire team to have that as a part of their book club reading, because marketing has changed so much over the last 10 years, five years, one year.

8:24And you often talk about attention being the number one currency. 100%. How do small business owners decide when to show up and how do they break through the noise, break through that noise in order to really plant the seed of attention? I think, you know, when to show up is as often as you possibly can afford. Like, why would you not? Right? I think where to show up is what I think a lot about. You know, to me, that book was called Day Trading Attention. And it was important that I called it Day Trading Attention, because I had finally understood what I'd been doing for my whole career. You know, to remind some of you, or if you don't know, really, I learned my craft working in my dad's liquor store.

9:18It was a local one-store liquor store in Springfield, New Jersey. And I built that business from a 3.8 million to a$60 million business in a very short window, which is nice and a nice number and a big accomplishment. But as I've gotten older, it's even more profound to me because I did that without raising any capital. And my father was so immigrant, we didn't even have a credit line. And the business did 3.8 million on 10 % gross profit. $380 ,000 before expenses. And in a six, seven year window, I built that business so quickly and I was able to ask myself, what from that point in 1998 to today was I doing?

10:05And I was day trading attention. At the time, there's a lot of youngsters in here. Having a website for a liquor store was like, what are you talking about? It'd be like if I showed up on stage right now with an AI robot and we were just chilling up here. It was very advanced. And then email marketing was advanced. And then the big one at the time was Google. I bought Google AdWords when nobody else was doing that. And then it was YouTube and then it was social media. And right now it's live shopping or it's working content to show up on LLMs to be the first results when you're in chat GPT for what wine should I buy or who's a good entrepreneur or whatever it might be.

10:44Everybody here needs to do underpriced things. I learned how to market with no money, which is the greatest way to learn, right? As we know, big budgets, you know, you didn't have as many dollars, things were scrappier. Now in a PepsiCo world, they'll spend more money on a production day, you know, to promote this than you did in your whole year. So for everyone here, this is why I'm completely obsessed. How many people here know my content or follow me a little bit? Just give me your hands. Thank you. So the people that raised their hands, you know I'm screaming on a daily basis in a hundred different ways saying the same shit, which is make unlimited social media content organic.

11:33It's free. It's free. The fact that every person in this room is literally one post away from things being different. Now, one post away sounds nice on paper. It's hard. How do you break through? That's why I wrote a 300 page book on it. It's details. Today, the second, the thumbnail, the first three seconds, how you keep people's attention at the 10 second mark on a 40 second video, the copy you support it with, do you do a reel or a carousel? Are you on Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, Spotlight, because no one's going there, YouTube Shorts, Facebook, Twitter. it's a complicated framework, but for every face that I'm looking at right now, it is worth the 25 hours of deep education to get good at it, because it is the lowest cost, highest upside to build your business.

12:31Amazing, amazing. Allison,

12:39you started on Shark Tank as someone seeking funding, and then you came back as a shark. And through that journey, you've seen a lot of brands. People, I'm sure, come to you for mentorship and advice every single day. What's the single biggest mistake you see entrepreneurs making in their branding that you want this room to avoid? Yeah, I think, just to comment on you, I was one post away from going viral and I did go viral and it changed my life. So that video now has 250 million views and I have 3 billion views on my face on TikTok. So don't give up. That is such good advice and I really feel like it was such an important part of our journey.

13:31When it comes to brands making mistakes, that's almost like a loaded question because you You don't know what you don't know, and if you don't take risks, you don't know what's next. So for us, yes, we knew what we were and who we were in our consumer, kind of like I was saying earlier. But what I love what we did at Poppy is we had like the 80-20 rule. 80 % of our budgets, our AOP calendars were planned to cultural moments or big moments in retail. They were very structured, organized. We had, you know, months of planning, years of planning ahead of time, projections. And then we left 20 % for cultural relevant moments.

14:14So for example, Love Island was going really viral this summer. We did an Amaya papaya meme and we were like, let's make this flavor. It got picked up by people. It went viral. It got hundreds of thousands of views and likes. So much so we had a DM waiting for her when she got out. and we were able to do that within three months. And we're a huge company now. There's so many instances that we did that back in the day. So we took risks. We spent money not knowing the ROI or the KPI or anything behind that because it was culturally a moment that we needed to be a part of. And another example that I love is we're the official soda of the Lakers.

14:56We actually can't sell there because of contracts. I think it's a Coke stadium. But the Lakers are part of culture, right? Celebrities go there. We have our logo with Kim Kardashian sitting on the sidelines. That's a cultural moment. It wasn't like, oh my gosh, we can't sell there, we can't do it. So I think a really big mistake that brands do is not taking enough risk and not testing enough things and not doing things that make VCs and probably the money very uncomfortable. And if that's one thing, I would say it's like take way more risk, at least 20 % more. Yeah, and so, you know, as we think about entrepreneurial brands and the big guys that do the same exact thing, the playbook is exactly the same.

15:40You have a budget playing a certain amount against things that you know will happen that are static, that hit retail windows. The other 20 % opportunistic to really take advantage of what's happening in culture. And so, Gary, as you have seen so many brands, big brands and little brands, and you work with all different types with your agency, what do you think the big brands are doing wrong? Everything. Okay. Okay. All right. Tell us. Big brands are still running marketing departments based on a book that was written in 1991 called How Brands Grow. That book was written in 1991. Now, a lot of CMOs and big brands don't realize they're running it.

16:31They just have bought into the philosophy. Ironically, or maybe not ironically, the philosophy is incredibly sound, right? The problem is it was written in 1991 and couldn't factor in the fragmentation of the media landscape. It was written based on the principles of having television be the disproportionate most important medium. and still living in a world where television commercials could penetrate culture. We're now in a world where the only television commercials that have a prayer of being ROI positive are Super Bowl commercials. The problem there is it's such a financial risk. It's incredibly high risk, high reward, but still worth it.

17:20All of us, when I said that, everyone's like, I mean, we literally watch for the commercials, not even the games sometimes, depending on your fandom. I definitely don't watch the game anymore. I'm a Jets fan. I'm super pissed this morning.

17:36So big brands also make a very critical mistake right now that I think entrepreneurs, we rely on common sense a lot more because we have to. So for example, in big brand land, one of the things that they're obsessed with is reach and frequency. We've got to reach you all a lot of times. The problem is they assume the reach was garnered. So they will run banner ads on websites, television commercials, billboards, in places where everyone's on their phone, and they'll say, we reached this many people. The reality is you could potentially reach this many people and you reached none of them. So I think the disease that's destroying Fortune 5000 land is potential reach versus actualized reach.

18:30It's why I'm so obsessed with social. And let me be very clear here with a lot of you. I could give a shit about social media. I care about attention and attention happens to be at scale in social right now. But when Zucks is done with his master plan with the glasses and the phone that this gentleman just dropped and I watched him pick it up. That is our remote, this is the remote control of our lives right now. We all know it. We're all trying to figure out how to be on it less. It's that powerful. This is about to go away. This, you know, for the OGs in the room, this is about to be the beeper.

19:10Like you're gonna buy this thing in 20 years on eBay as like a nostalgic reminder. And for the parents in the room that are so scared about their kids being on the iPad or the phone too much. This is gonna be child's play to the world we're about to go into. AI, AR, VR, robots. Like, what do you think, technology just stops because you're living right now? So I think the big mistake we're making is not taking advantage of where the attention actually is. And then finally, and I'm sure you went through this, and I'm sure this is something that you spend a lot of time thinking about, This is her.

19:50Now there's gonna be custodians of this brand and they're gonna make subjective calls on what's on brand. And they're going to be subjective calls of one or two or three people. The other biggest issue in Fortune 500 land is subjective opinions make trillion dollar decisions. There's an incredible lack of humility in big brand marketing. It is based on politics and audacity and subjective opinions. It is wild. And then we guess and spend all our money amplifying it from the top. When we have this new world where you can do social at scale, do you know how many different ideas all of us have of what this brand could talk about?

20:36Now that's tough because to Allison's point earlier, when you want to be on brand, when you're trying to do relevant things for everybody in the audience, there's a lot of different people here. You could start to be off brand by people's opinions. My issue is that I'd rather be relevant to as many different people as possible because relevance leads to consideration and consideration leads to buying stuff. So I'd rather in this room if I was selling this really know you one by one and get you to buy this based on what you fuck with. Which is gonna be different for everybody in this room. And so I think they're losing on relevance at scale, and I think they're getting destroyed on potential reach versus actualized reach, and that's where our work has been in trying to change that playbook.

21:25That's amazing. So Allison.

21:31In a very crowded category that you compete in, how do you get the balance right of reaching and scaling to new audiences and staying true to who people have known this brand to be and maintaining the core of your relevance? How do you get that balance right? How do you think about that as you are now entering a whole new frontier of growth? You know, to this point, Poppy is me. And going into the Pepsi system, to your point, they're like, can you just write everything down? And we'll follow a book, to your point. It is a little bit hard, but, you know, I did sell my company, so I do have to do that.

22:15And, you know, good luck. But I will say, for me, it's interesting with just the way that you kind of look at that. But look, I struggle with men in gaming and sports with Poppy. We are a female company. It's core to who our audience is. We do know that once you get to a scale, you do have to open your audience and get more people in the fold. It's the only way that you can scale a business and be successful. So that was a topic of conversation that we had for almost three years. Poppy girlies, right? The college girlies, the moms, the genzennials is what we call it, was just the core of our community.

22:58So we're like, okay, how do we get men into the fold? So we did the Lakers partnership. We did Inner Miami. We started working with Fortnite streamers. But what we did really well is we did all that, but probably you guys maybe know about the Lakers and Inter-Miami, but we don't put any of those things on our social feed. So we are working with gamers, we're working with YouTubers, we are working with sports athletes, we're doing all these things, but they actually never come into our social ecosystem. Because then the people that are our core community, they still know us as the poppy girlies and the core to it, and it's so fun, and all the trend and the cultural things, but we are talking to the men, right?

23:37And so I think a lot of people get confused, and it's almost very jarring to all of a sudden see men just showing up on our feed. And I think that, I know I'd be curious to think what you think about that, but it's something that's just worked really well for us. We also know that within the Pepsi portfolio, they have 20 brands that are for men, and Poppy's really the only one for women. And that's okay, too, right? To capture the, women do all the shopping for the household. The amount of times I have someone come up to me and be like, my daughter introduced me to it. That's a man. So that is an avenue to gain new men into the fold.

24:15One of my favorite stories was we were trying to get into Publix. It's a grocery store in Florida. And the buyer kept telling us no. And then finally he called us one day and he's like, you have a full rollout. And I'm like, what happened? He's like, my 17-year-old daughter came home and said, Dad, why do you not have poppy? and so like so I think people you just kind of have to like think of it differently you can expand your audience as you do it but you don't have to do it necessarily in the traditional way of like all of a sudden changing the core of who you are to build on that what's happening is we're living in a fractioned media landscape let me just go very deep we are probably within the next two or three years where the content you put out on social the algorithm is going to find the audience that is interested in the content itself, right?

25:03So I'm sure everyone is aware of this. The social media I grew up with was more like email marketing. You had to get as many followers as you could and then every time you posted, a certain percentage of those followers would see every post. I would actually argue we are past the social media era and I think we're in something I call the interest media era. So I think we're seeing the things we're interested in, not the content from people that we follow. And so what would happen in that sense, Alison, is that you would have a lot of control of what people can see. To your point, the way you broke that down, you're talking about people coming to your Instagram and seeing that grid.

25:45That's less than 3 % of the consumption of Instagram content, because everyone's consuming in feed. You'd still be able to control that. In fact, if you look carefully, the platforms are always addressing what people want on both the company side and people side. They're rolling out on Instagram the ability for you to control the grid completely. Not just the top three pins, but the whole grid. Because they know so many brands care about that. At the same token, I think at the end of the day, you want to get as many people to be interested in what you do. And so there's platform strategy. Like if we were jamming four years ago when you're like, what do I do with this?

26:25I would say, where are you at with YouTube Shorts? Where are you at with Snapchat? Where are you at with Instagram reels only posting? So you'd be able to post reels only so it doesn't show up in the grid, but it can still hit that male audience. So this is why it gets into the details. Like once you really know, this is why the point I made earlier, if I can just get all of you into that 25 to 50 hours just on social, just on the six platforms and how they work, you can start getting into your optionality, which helps you execute your strategy. Amazing. So, Gary, I asked you earlier, what are the big guys doing wrong?

27:06Now I'm going to flip the question. Is there anything the big guys are doing that's right that this audience should adapt?

27:20Not really. and I'll tell you what I mean by that like the things they do well come along with scale what do they do well? they got fucking money that's good for y 'all like you should do that but the execution we all in here zero to a hundred looks nothing like the big guys looks nothing like it you can't afford to be that stupid You know, it's just different. And by the way, this is important because of the way I'm talking, so many of the people in these big companies are smart. They're stuck by the system. You know, they're checking, like I'm in me, that was the most shocking to me when I got into that game.