#233 - Ask-Me-Anything: Marketing with Janice Greenwald

22:28Just depending on how big the company is. What do you think? Yeah. So I'm not a founder. I can't give that perspective, but I've seen enough P &Ls to know approximately how much people are giving to the marketing line item, not counting trade spend. So trade being a separate, promotions being separate from marketing. And it's often around 10 % net revenue. I think a steady stage brand, steady state could go as low as like 3%, 4%, 5%, but that's like maybe when you're a lot bigger. But you could also be spending a lot more than 10 % because when you're a startup, I mean, you probably have a lot more of these early costs like packaging design, website design, like these things might be 100 % of your net revenue.

23:09And so a lot of it's going to come to how much money you're willing to invest versus your steady state P &L. So maybe year two, year three, you get into 10%, 12%. Maybe if you have a lot of cash, you want to go up to 20%, but you have to see how it's going to affect your overall margins for the long-term health of your brand. The other thing is the question was asking about like, do you only do social media? Which kind of goes back to my comment before. When I look at budgeting, the number one thing I'm thinking about is what are my objectives with marketing? So it depends on the brand, right?

23:43Like I mentioned the brand where PR was like the main objective. So that's, you're going to have a higher percentage of your budget toward PR in that circumstance. But a lot of the brands that we talk to in the startup CPG world are focused on velocity. So if you're focused on velocity and you say, again, I'm going to use an easy number, I have$100 ,000, then you better think that 60, 70 % of your budget is going to go toward velocity. And very often I see those numbers reversed. People have spent a lot of money on influencer marketing, a lot of money on social, and then they forgot or didn't know that like shopper marketing and demos and all those other things like exist and that you should be doing them and that they're expensive.

24:22And so I always look at my Vine items and I quite literally have a pie chart that like I'm aiming for a rough percentage. And until I get that right, according to what the strategy is, I'm going to keep like rejuring the numbers, if that makes sense. So I break it down by like trial driving, brand building, which might be like content creation, things like that. social media awareness, which might be media buying, PR, things like that. Maybe sales support, like trade events, things like trade shows might hit the marketing budget sometimes, maybe agency fees, things like that. So I kind of break it up depending on the client.

24:58But again, like most of my clients are velocity focused. So I'm looking for 60, 70 % to be toward Instacart, Inmar, all of those things we've talked about in the podcast. I like it. We'll be right back. Are you going to crush it on Amazon this year? It's such an important channel, but it's so hard to do alone, and most agencies are a total ripoff. We can't afford$5 ,000 a month and a commission on our sales. They just don't get it. That's why I love our partners at Daybreak. They are full service, meaning they do the creative work, the listings, the logistics, and, of course, all the ads, all with the most reasonable retainer out there.

25:33I work with them personally. I'm so grateful we have such a good partner to recommend out to you, our community. They do evaluate your product first to see if it might be a fit. So if you want them to have a look, email them startupcpg at daybreak.agency and they'll do a free audit for you. Good luck, everyone.

25:52And before I go to the next question, I just want to pay you a compliment and just call it out for everyone. We're like, do you guys hear how Janice talks about all of these things? And you just like there are a lot of people who will give you advice very confidently who I think are often have like an angle to it or it's really about like the thing that they were selling or they don't really know so much about it, but they'll still tell you really confidently what you should do. The way Janice talks about it, you can just hear how much experience she has doing this in the weeds with brands. I hope for everybody that like they have that filter or lens on when they're talking to people and getting advice, especially at the early stage where you just don't know as much how to like filter advice you get from different people.

26:35this is why i love having janice on the podcast because she just has done this with so many brands and like locked arms with them and like gone through the pnls and actually gone and executed the marketing with them and you can tell when you talk to somebody about it and they can just rattle off so many different things and the benefits the pros the cons the things to watch out for is just like you know when you're talking to somebody who like really has been in the streets with the brand so thank you very much yeah for boosting my ego appreciate yes absolutely all All right. So now let's test you on another hardball question.

27:07Great. Not a hardball, but I do love this question. So this is about packaging. So Destiny in the Slack channel asked, I'm currently developing packaging for my cookie brand. I've started talking to some suppliers. Some of them have asked me for custom box dimensions, which makes me a little confused. Like I thought I would just go get a dye line and then have it printed. Like, what's the process here? Should I be looking in stores, seeing what's out there? How do you guys all do this? I loved this question when I saw it because we spent a lot of time talking about packaging design, which I'm obviously passionate about as a marketer.

27:38But packaging structure is equally, if not more, it can vary, but even be more important than packaging artwork. Right. So structure is wildly important. I will start with saying that the product constraints is really important, like making sure that your shelf life is going to work, making sure your product isn't going to get crushed, like all of these basic things. if you need something that's resealable, like for example, like making sure all those basic things that you need for your product are handled is like number one above everything. But however, I do think that there's other things to consider for sure.

28:09And I have seen so many mistakes and been a part of so many mistakes that I have, like, I'm excited to share some of those with you. But I will say definitely look at the competitive set for two reasons. One is like, you want to see if there's a standard. Two, you want to see if there's a way that you can disrupt and differentiate without completely like angering the retailer, which we will get to because you can anger the retailer because maybe it's not going to work on shelf. Another thing is you have to look at the dimensions of the shelf set. You have to, have to, have to measure things like take a tape measure with you and measure the shelves of multiple retailers where you might appear.

28:44You want to maximize your shelf space, right? But you also need to leave slack. You have to look at how the lighting is going to hit your product, like everything about it. I have just seen so many instances where a product could have done better if they had maximized their space differently or knew how they were going to be merchandised. Like if you're in the freezer, you're going to be in the door or you're going to be in the well. Like there's these different things and you have to know how you're going to show up in order to know how to maximize your product. Another example is like I worked in beverage where we had a six pack of cans and the designer was always showing us the long side of the six pack and it would drive me crazy.

29:20And I told them like, I only want to see artwork on the side that shows the two cans because that's the way of being merchandised. And it was the ugly side because the dial line had like one of those flaps. So you were like designing over a flap and I was like, I don't care. Like this is how it's going to be merchandised. So this is how I want to see the artwork because that's going to be the most important facing for us. So you have to have like a really strong understanding of your actual shelf set and then try to maximize it. And talk and listen to your sales team. Please talk to them because they're going to have input.

29:50They might want to stay conservative and you're the marketer or maybe the owner or founder and you want to push the envelopes. I think it's okay to have a healthy debate here, but they also are going to have insights for you. So I have a couple of examples that I've come into, which I want to share. So a hundred years ago when I was at Sabra, we bought a salsa company and Sabra was breakthrough with the hummus container. You guys know if you look top down, it's clear. And it was the whole concept is that you wanted it to be like table ready and you want to be proud of what you're putting on the table as opposed to like my mom who only will scoop it out and put it into a nicer bowl.

30:28Like she is like horrified if I put a container of hummus on the table. But our like internal thinking was that we wanted everything to be nice enough to put on the table. And so for salsa, it was like really important that we create something totally new and breakthrough because the packaging had been like totally new and breakthrough for hummus. So we created this, like, we worked with like Gen Pack or whoever, I don't remember who at the time, but we created this like very unique and beautiful bowl. And that kind of had like these different curves and flares to it. It wasn't a traditional round container.

31:00Like you see boring, the boring fresh salsa set where every single container is round or square and square would have been a little bit more unique too i think we went down that way at the end but we created this thing and it didn't merchandise well and the sales team totally warned us about it and like we pushed back no no this is great this is breakthrough consumers are going to love it but what happened was it always got merchandise on its side because like it didn't fit the shelf space that was allocated for it so and like the people stocking the shelf don't care if your label is facing forward so failure one costs a ton of money all these like custom dyes and plates and blah blah blah molds sorry mold that's the word I'm looking for it was a total failure another example was when I worked in fresh produce so it's these fresh companies and that was and like we they worked with a super super super expensive agency to create something breakthrough and they wanted their lettuce container to be different than everybody else's lettuce container and you know what like when I started there I noticed immediately is that it didn't pack out a case on the shelf.

31:59And I was like, we need to make this a little bit more shallow and wide so that we could pack out a full case. Otherwise, like every time you guys understand. So there's just like some basic things that your sales team would understand. Like they would recognize right away if you didn't have enough to pack out, if the product didn't fit the shelf right. So anyway, I wanted to show those examples because like I make mistakes and I learn from them. And that's, I think, part of the thing about doing this for so long is that I've seen a lot of errors. Another one I see commonly actually is chips is like no, like there's these chip bags on shelf, y 'all, they have a lot of error in them.

32:34And you don't want to be the brand that has a full chip bag, but it's a tiny chip bag because you're competing against the big brands, the big bags. You want to look at what everybody has and be parody to them on shelf. Does that make sense? It does make sense to me. And I hope everyone does that exercise of actually like once you even get close to final stuff before you print just to go and like print out using your home printer what your label might look like and go and tape it on some product that will resemble the one that you have and actually just go and put it on the shelf and think about it even i've talked to brands who for buyer meetings would just go buy a competitive product that looked like the tube or whatever that their product was going to go in and then just bring crappy print out of what their branding looked like to save them from having to print up expensive mock stuff, but also just get to see what it really looks like on shelf.

33:27Thinking of mocks, FYI, because this comes up a lot in the channel, there are some really good places to get mock packaging. So you don't need to do like a packaging run. It's expensive, but if you want to have a high quality product to take to a buyer, it's not so much a leave behind because it's about$100 per unit, 50 to 100. There's a lot of companies, but I will just shout out like virtual packaging is a really popular one that people use. I think they're out of Texas. I've been using them for like 10 years or so. Really great for product comps. Super high end. Great for trade shows. Like if you're launching something ahead of being able to produce it and you want to showcase it at Expo, you need a final mechanical.

34:04But you could even have like a FPO for your nutrition facts or something like that. But they'll print you like the bag, the pouch, the container, whatever it is. You said FPO? Oh, FPO means for position only. Like if you're putting like a fake nutrition panel on, oftentimes designers write FPO on it. Oh, that's cool. Yeah. So that people don't print it and think it's final. But the company's called Virtual Packaging and they make beautiful stuff. That's a good shout out. All right. Next one I want to get into with you. So we talked about it a little bit when we were talking about PR and social media agencies, but just generally people are always asking for recommendations in the Slack, whether it's like, hey, did anyone know a good PR agency or social agency or someone who's good at this or X, Y, and Z, how do you think people should go about vetting them, seeing if they're actually getting the right person or maybe it was just the first one mentioned or maybe it is the buddy of another service provider?

34:57Like, how can you know if this person really is gonna be a good match for your brand? Recommendations are always good. I will say that like recommendations from people you trust is gonna be a great start for you. I mean, knowing your objectives, this always goes back to like, take a step back, take a breath. Don't just say, I need a designer. Like know what your objectives are and what you're trying to achieve so that you can find the right partner. I will say, depending on what you're looking at, it's helpful if you're posting something in the Startup CPJ channel to consider putting a budget.

35:25Because something like I need help with packaging, you will get inundated with like 40 responses from freelancers who are going to charge you$300 to agencies that will charge you$100 ,000. So you need to have like a little bit of a range. Plus the really good agencies don't have to do that as much biz dev potentially. So they have to be found by you through word of mouth and things like that. I agree with you. But if you're an early brand, you're like, well, I don't know how much this kind of stuff costs. So I don't want to just, what's your budget? Maybe talk to other founders and say, what was your process for going through finding an agency or finding a freelancer?

36:01Because it is hard. I don't want to say it's like a needle in a haystack, but to get truly breakthrough. I mean, there's plenty of freelance designers who can make perfectly good sell sheets, perfectly good coupons, like perfectly good, whatever, like smaller assets. But to get breakthrough and interesting packaging that isn't kind of like more of the same, like you do need to find these needles in a haystack, which can be really, really hard. So you have to know what you're looking for. And if you're looking at packaging, it's like, look at the style of the work that they've done in the past.

36:32So budget's a big one. Like know what you kind of want to spend, what you're willing to spend, things like that. Because that's going to help you. Like if someone comes in too cheap, too good to be true, it probably is too good to be true. I mean, oftentimes, not always, not always, but oftentimes, right? But ask them questions. Like understand their breadth of experience in CPG. Like ask them for lots of examples. See if they've maybe worked in your category before. Like that's even better if they have category experience. Ask them for references. I mean, you could do some back channeling as well.

37:00Like if they show you a brand that they claim that they designed, sometimes they didn't design the first iteration. Sometimes they just designed a line extension. And a line extension is a lot easier to design than the original brand. So you could always like reach out to founders and founders who've had good experiences, I'm sure are more than willing to recommend people. Or if you have a brand that you love, reach out to them and say, who did your packaging? Like, I love your packaging. I would love to talk with your designer. There's probably ways you can bucket it where it's like, because yeah, I mean, here's the reality is for anybody who's like been on the service provider side of this is like, yeah, I'm looking for somebody and I guess my budget is 20K.

37:36You're not going to pitch them something that's 6K. You're going to go and pitch them something that's 20K. That's their budget. But I think what you can try to understand is that there will be different tiers of agencies that are open. So if we talk about branding and design, for example, and it will depend on what exactly you're asking them for, like, do you have a logo or they have to do the logo and they have to do the design for three different SKUs and different lines, you know, all that stuff. But I think generally you could say that there are groupings where, okay, you can find some true indie freelancer type people who might be able to knock out one particular SKU or a couple for, let's say 5K, but it's a certain level of quality you're going to get and expect at that level as well.

38:17Then there's probably another tier that's sort of like up to 15 to 20, something like that. You know, then they're like, you get some good quality stuff in that range. Hopefully you find the right person. Maybe they work. It's an agency, a smaller one that's worked on a brand that you love, that kind of stuff. And then there's another tier that's like 50 to 100 probably where it's going to be a bigger scope of work. And they probably have a couple wins in their bag that they can talk to you about. And it'll be a thoughtful process. And then there are some. And there's more designers on it. So one thing that I'm pretty passionate about is having more than one designer working on the project so that like you're getting multiple perspectives.

38:55So when you go to an agency, like there might be a lead designer, sure, but like there's a creative director. There's a lot of people providing input into it besides just one person's kind of point of view. So one thing I've done, I haven't been like super successful with it, I will say, but I think it's a really good concept if you can hire the right people. is I've done a few times where I've hired three freelancers and paid them to do the initial concept for something. And I've been super transparent. Like I'm gonna have you guys do the concept and then I'm gonna pick one of you to take the project to the finish line based on the concepts you come up with.

39:28So at least you have a breadth of different approaches to a design. So maybe you're willing upfront to say, I'm gonna invest 8K in the beginning to get the right concept. And then I'm gonna just like spend the next 10 on the kind of execution side of it. So that's one thing I've done is pieced it together. It is hard work. I mean, this is like, this is not easy stuff and it's finding those three designers that you think are excellent and all of that. But there's different ways to kind of do it. I think when the last time I hired a branding agency, they understood the scope of the project. I think when they actually did their pitch and we were interviewing a couple of different ones, it was so clear in their pitch that they really understood the brand and culturally aligned to it and had done similar work and had the right inspiration around it, that it was just clear they were the ones we wanted to do.

40:16For agencies, yeah. I mean, it's just so different. Like freelance designers versus an agency. It's just really different. Like people who live and breathe CBG packaging all day, every day, versus just like a graphic designer. Like it's just a totally different world. Cool. All right. Well, I think that is definitely all the right advice. And it's very interesting. So maybe just to end on one more question, which I know obviously as a fractional person, you will have a specific point of view about this. But how do you think about when you're building your team as an early brand, having full-time people is a luxury and it's, you know, expensive.

40:51But how do you think about like how many marketing agencies should you be looking at versus freelancers versus when you figure out you should be hiring full-time? How do you think brands should think about this as they grow? As you said, I'm probably very biased on this, But having done this fractional work now for a while, I'm getting more and more and more passionate about the model kind of working, whether it's a fractional CMO, not necessarily that, but like having specialists, right? Let's say you hire one generalist. You hire a director of marketing. A director of marketing for a startup is probably a promote up from somebody more junior.

41:26Maybe you're paying 80 or 100K. I don't know. I'm throwing that out there, right? But like that person has a lot of learning to do. Maybe they have four or five years of work experience. I mean, when you can hire like specialists for each of the different functions, it actually you're going to get much more senior people doing the work for you at a fraction of the price. Maybe all together in the end, it's going to cost your 100K employee. But you don't have any benefits, nothing like that either to contend with. So for me, I have found that this concept of having a generalist, like a fractional head of marketing, and then hiring all the specialists for your needs, whether they are social or PR or whatever it might be, even shopper marketing, having different areas of expertise covered by people who live and breathe it makes the most sense to me.

42:14I think bringing in full-time help is really, really helpful when it just becomes like too much on somebody's plate. But again, it's like, well, what level are you bringing in and who are you getting rid of? So sometimes it's what I've seen work is like there might be a full-time marketing manager, but they might still have a fractional CMO to report to so that the strategy is still being overseen. But there's somebody to do like a lot more of the hours of the busy work that's coming. So I think it's really helpful to have specialists. So just to turn this back on to you then, if somebody is interviewing you, what would they be really smart to ask you as a fractional marketer?

42:52To ask you and other fractional marketers like, okay, is this really the person who's going to be the best for my brand? Yeah, I think it really depends on like the size of your business and what you're looking for. Because, for example, if you have a$20 million business, which there are people in Startup CPG who do, it might be more about your leadership skills and can you manage a team of people. There might be three junior marketers on the team and already five agencies in place. Right. So like that's more about management, about strategy and management. But for a smaller brand, like I work with a lot of these like very small startups.

43:21A lot of it, like people are always asking me, like, can you execute? Like, will you execute? Right. So for me, it's a combination of both like showing off my strategic chops and showing them that I'm going to be a team member and add strategy, but also the fact that I'm willing to do execution work as well. And I know how to make a coupon and I can probably make it faster than any marketing manager out there. let's have a contest i don't have layers of approval the number of people in startup cpg that i've sent the same email like a cut and paste of like the process to make a coupon of like because i've done it a hundred times now i wouldn't even hire out for it because i'm so fast that it doesn't matter i have the brief written for a designer like i know exactly what i'm doing when i make my coupons at this point but that's the other thing is like i just don't have like layers of approval so everything that i do is just like super fast when i execute which is helpful.

44:09But again, so it goes, it's really varied in terms of like what your company needs, I would say are. If you're hiring like a very first marketer, then you're going to need it to execute. I do see people make the mistake of hiring people who are not, who just want to do strategy. And the fractional CMO is run the gamut. Some of us, I know a lot of us, some of us are like mirror images of me and I have plenty of people I can recommend to folks. And some are not excited to do execution and don't want to do shopper marketing and they just want to do brand strategy, which is a different thing. And so it's important to kind of suss that out.

44:39I love it. And we're going to add the make a coupon into our CPG Olympics when we run them, which will also include events like assemble a shipper. Okay. I'm not going to win on assemble a shipper because I'm like not very handy at things, but like all the elements of a coupon, like the barcode, the design, sourcing the printer, like I got you. I got you. We'll have some good events. It'll be send out a sample, who can sell the most during a demo, There are a lot of good things. That's a good one. That's a good one. I like that. All right. Well, Janice, you never disappoint. You always drop the good stuff.

45:13I really appreciate it. And I encourage everybody to connect with Janice on the Slack or maybe on LinkedIn, something like that. And I am going to sing us back out here, Janice. Oh, am I dweeting again for this one? Let's do it again. What am I supposed to say? Okay, I got it. I got it. Everyone ready? Here we go. All right. Got a problem. I'll help. In a pickle, let me know if you're stuck. We're here. Don't you know? Don't you know? Don't you know? Don't you know? Don't you know you can ask us anything. All right. Good job. Only a little ridiculous, but yes. That's how we do it. Bye, everybody.

45:53Bye.

45:57Well, my friends, we've now arrived together at the end of another episode of the Startup CPG podcast, the top globally ranked podcast in CPG. As you may know, we're not just a podcast, we're a community of brands and experts, and you should join. You can sign up at startupcpg.com. You'll then get an invite to our online Slack community. You're gonna hear about amazing events near you, all of our special opportunities to get you in front of buyers, investors, brands, and more. It's a free community, so what are you waiting for? I will see you there or on our next episode. Bye-bye. Thank you.