How to find inspiration with Kory Marchisotto

0:00Kory Marchisotto:Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Uncensored Renegades. This is the 20-minute podcast where Kory Marchisotto and myself tackle one big question every week. I hope you enjoy this. Now, if you are enjoying it, I've got one request to make. We're putting this out on the current Uncensored feed for a limited time only. So if you're enjoying it, go over to Uncensored Renegades, hit subscribe and never miss an episode. Anyway, without further ado, let's get into it. okay boss we're back what's up what's up okay so i am sitting in front of the chief

0:34Jon:choco caster oh yes so so clearly this was put down for me to react to because i can't imagine anything on this table wasn't put here specifically to cause a reaction and this is uncensored chocoloney and i'd like i'd like to learn a little bit more you want to know what's going

0:53Kory Marchisotto:on with this i want to know what's going on well look my second favorite brand in the world obviously after elf wait since you said that yeah little plug here commercial just apply my

1:06Jon:melting lip balm shall i while i think i think you should yeah yeah so i am a massive fan of

1:13Kory Marchisotto:tony's chocolate only i i mean look if you were to sort of like if i had to pick one thing to do in the world it would be like inventing brands i just love and i particularly love challenger brands that take on the establishment and just turn it on and say like you've exactly like you've done with elf right and i just think and i love chocolate as well right so if i were to pick like a category to disrupt but there are so many lessons from it because like what they've done i mean the funny thing about the origin of this brand is it's a bit of an accident because it was three journalists that were looking at the supply chain and and they discovered that there's huge amounts of child slavery in the cocoa supply chain right i didn't know this right and so these three Dutch guys did a whole documentary about the supply chain and the amount of you know child labor working below the you know below the poverty line and the kind of slavery that exists in the supply chain and they kind of exposed this in um in Holland and they decided as part of the documentary to mock up what an ethical chocolate would look like and I think one of the guys that did it was called Tony so they kind of named it after Tony and they they basically produced an ethical chocolate i just thought what an absolutely brilliant story and um what they've managed to do as that brand is is they've taken that idea and carried it through everything right so if you were to open this up actually yeah yeah feel free to open this up because um they've even made the bits of chocolate uneven so when you so you know normally most chocolate is you break it and it's in squares it's all very uniform what they've done with this is they've made made every piece of it a different shape basically to communicate how the supply chain itself is unevenly distributed

2:52Jon:well i even love this share our chocolate so this is the first time i'm ever opening a tony's chocoloney and i love this so they have the story on the inside and they are serious crazy about chocolate and serious about people yeah now who doesn't love just listen to the sound of the oh isn't that just the best

3:15Kory Marchisotto:and foil as well something about foil that when when chocolate brands take the foil away i always think it's a bit of a shame because the foil is part of it now apparently when they first launched this right it caused arguments in households because of course like the parent would give the kids the chocolate they'd break it and of course they'd get different different shapes and sizes so yeah it caused all this thing and um a wonderful example actually of um because in the uk i don't think this exists in the same way in the us but we have this uh idea of an advent calendar in the run-ups christmas so in the in the number in the 25 days before christmas day you open the calendar and you get usually a present each day right yeah tony's came and traditionally it's chocolate as well all the advent calendars are little chocolate bars in tony's came up with a uh tony's advent calendar except that on day i think it was day nine they left it empty and they made a point by leaving it empty to say that this symbolizes the people that don't get paid a fair wage in the supply chain wow it caused outrage it was the number two trending topic in the uk on the bbc news website wow of the christmas this is like three years ago like literally kids were like they're devastated they're crying upset they weren't getting the chocolate now obviously he's made the point really well right if we're worried about not getting one tiny little bit of chocolate yeah think about the kids in the supply chain so they made their point absolutely brilliantly but i think as a brand what i love about them is how they deeply care about their mission but how they use marketing in terms of the packaging the way they communicate the way they display in store the website everything they do links back to the purpose in a very clear way.

5:00Kory Marchisotto:So a very long answer to your question, but I just think as a brand, it is one of the ultimate challenge brands that have taken on a huge industry. And the other thing that's admirable about them as well, they are a supplier to their competitors.

5:15Jon:So they care more that the supply chain is fixed

5:18Kory Marchisotto:than that the Tony's brand is successful. So their mission is first to fix the supply chain and second, if they happen to sell Tony's off the back of that, then that's good. But what they care more about is that everybody is buying ethically, which I think is incredible.

5:31Jon:I can see why you're very inspired by that. So that's top of the list of things that inspires you.

5:36Kory Marchisotto:So it inspires me. So when I went to, bless them, when I went to interview them last year, they made up a whole ton of, well, okay, the reason this is called Chief Choco Caster is that whenever you work, whenever you join Tony's, they have this guy whose only job it is to write copy. They have like an in-house copy guru who does the copy for everything. Every person he joins gets their own job title. So you might be the Countess of Chocolates or something, or, you know, do you know what I mean? So everyone has a very bespoke name that's personal to them that links back to the mission. And so they gave me the honour of being the official ChocoCaster.

6:14Jon:So how does that work? Did the chief copywriter sit down and interview you and then grant you this name? Or did you come up?

6:23Kory Marchisotto:It's like royalty. You have to get granted it, right? You know, you can't apply. You just have to be granted the title, you see. So in anticipation of the interview, I was kind of, you know, just pitching and dropping a few hints across. Wouldn't it be nice? I don't think anyone's taken the ChocoCaster title yet, have they? So maybe I could, you know, claim it. But, you know, they happily bestowed me with the title.

6:45Jon:I love that.

6:46Kory Marchisotto:But it's a great bit. I mean, you know, where we get our inspiration from, I think, is an important thing as marketers. because I know I found in my career that most of the inspiration I have in any job comes from outside the organization, rarely inside. Because I think inside the organization, there's a way of doing things that's always existed. And I often find looking outside can be the best place to look for inspiration.

7:08Jon:Well, I think in order for an organization to grow, for a brand to grow, the people need to grow. And how do the people grow? It's by exposing themselves to different stimuli. And when I think about myself as being a beauty executive for almost 30 years now, whenever anybody asks me what inspiration I take from within our industry, I actually say none. I spend almost all of my time looking outside of our industry. So similar to you and how you're very inspired by Tony's Chocoloni, and I will now spend time with it as well because it's a pretty incredible story and I'm very inspired by stories.

7:47Jon:I take inspiration from so many other brands. You and I have talked about our love of liquid death. This one for me is absolutely exceptional, but not only in the fact that a challenger brand disrupted an industry, but even the way they deal with hate, creating an album called greatest hates and in essence, tasing their haters and anything that happens, they flip it on its head and actually do the opposite. And I think it's just such a brilliant approach to marketing, copywriting, consistency in being very disruptive in how they approach everything. So brands like Liquid Death, as a challenger, you want to study challenger brands.

8:32Jon:That's how you make sure you continue to sharpen your sword. But honestly, the first place that my inspiration comes from is nature. and I love to ski. And one of the places I find the greatest inspiration is snowy mountaintops. And when it is snowing and the snow is weighing down the trees and sometimes it's, you know, multiple feet of snow and it's a winter white wonderland and you're skiing down a mountain in this fresh, beautiful mountain air, there is something that happens to you as a human that you reset and you almost recalibrate your own operating system. And then the other thing I find specifically as it relates to all of the answers one can find in nature when you get grounded and you really spend time with it and you allow yourself to be present in the moment is the beauty of skiing is when you get down to the bottom of the mountain, you have absolutely no choice but to pause and reflect because you've got to get on the lift and it's going to take a

9:34Kory Marchisotto:certain amount of time to get up to the top again.

9:37Jon:And when you're on that lift, you're thinking about your last run and how you can get better for your next run. And this is really almost a leadership lesson. Pause and reflect. Ask yourself, what incremental changes can you make to get better for your next run? And if you are in a constant state of incremental changes that day on the slope, you will find yourself a better skier at the end of the day than when you started. So it's consistency, practice, iterating in a beautiful environment and scenery where you're getting fresh air and you have great focus. So I actually find my time in nature clears my mind, recalibrates my operating system, and usually gives me some of the greatest business and leadership lessons that I could ever ask for.

10:25Jon:And they're all right there in nature.

10:27Kory Marchisotto:100 % the equivalent for me would be cycling on my bike actually is does exactly what you just said because you're concentrating on staying on the road not falling off you know and and that being in in the zone I think as you describe isn't it is like that somehow it releases your mind to be able to join the dots and think about things and process and so I get so much inspiration when I'm not doing work which I think is the key but the other the other thought that occurred to me as you spoke was um the importance of changing your context as well something years ago i mean my um rather very randomly my degree at university was actually in stock markets and um so i studied basically um how stock markets grow and whether or not you could predict the returns from stock and the theory without going into it in too much detail is that stock markets are so efficient that unless you have inside information there's no way you could predict the movement of a stock And my theory was that depends on perfect information flows.

11:25Kory Marchisotto:So if you go to another market, so emerging markets where there's less information flow, there's different languages, exchange rates, there's more variability, you could outperform the market based on having superior knowledge. Anyway, this was my entire degree. So I actually pretended to invest in six dollar markets around the world and I managed to outperform them as part of my dissertation. Okay. But anyway, the reason to tell you all that big story was there's a theory in trading called arbitrage, which is where you take the knowledge created in one market and you apply that knowledge to a different market with less than perfect environments.

12:01Kory Marchisotto:Okay. And you can get unfair advantages from that. So I then started applying this and went to work by walking around the supermarket. Now you think, why is he walking around the supermarket? So I'd be like a weird guy going up and down the aisles. But what I'd be looking for is, so ask her the question, what would a juice brand do if it was operating in the shaving category? You know, what would a diaper brand, you know, use the American equivalent, what would the diaper brand do if it was selling snacks? You know, and what you do is you take one category problem and you solve it with another category's answer.

12:33Jon:That's brilliant.

12:34Kory Marchisotto:And I just, I love that. I get, I mean, it sounds weird, but I get so fascinated walking around the supermarket trying to go, oh, well, if they apply that to this. You know, I mean, ice cream, for example. How do you sell the idea of a low-fat ice cream? I mean, that's contradictory, right? Ice cream's fat. How would you, you know, answering those kind of questions? I also find the colors, organization,

12:57Jon:the entire journey in a supermarket is wildly inspiring. The smells, the sounds. I have to touch everything. I don't know about you, but like I have to touch everything. So I want to crinkle the paper like I was just doing with the foil here on the table. And I find when you think about how hard a package has to work on a supermarket shelf, how inspiring that is when you think about, well, how do I tell a story utilizing my package to say everything to a shopper who's passing me by looking at 3 ,000 other things? This is really hard work and hard problem solving for packaging designers, brand designers, product marketers, all of these things to be able to use a two square inch of space or however big it is to tell an entire brand story.

13:47Jon:And there are so many aisles that I just think are absolutely fascinating. Of course, the ones that have a lot of color, I think bring a lot. So sometimes that can be your dessert aisles and things of that nature. And I think the whole experience of letting yourself be free without a shopping list and seeing what you gravitate toward and why, And what about this specific thing made me gravitate to this section? And what about this packaging is speaking to me in a meaningful way that actually makes me want to take it off the shelf and buy it at the expense of every other offer? The other thing I always do when I visit any country is go to the supermarket, because I actually think you learn a lot about a people and a culture by wandering around the supermarket.

14:31Jon:So when I'm in other countries, two of the things that I do to get inspiration are go to a supermarket and also ride the metro and understand the rhythm of everyday life. And I get so inspired in the metro. People think that's crazy. A lot of people are like, well, I love it. You get to see real people going through real life. What newspaper are they carrying? What bags do they have? How are they dressed? How do they look similar or not? And following the rhythm of how the life moves in a particular city, I find incredibly inspiring.

15:10Kory Marchisotto:I did this once. After the first time I got fired, I know we talked about this on a previous episode.

15:17Jon:So many firings, so little time. Exactly.

15:22Kory Marchisotto:I think it deserves a little series. But I found myself with extra time, obviously, as you do. And I remember I'd never been to New York. This is only seven or eight years ago. I've been loads of times now. But then I'd never been to New York. So I bought a plane ticket and took a week off. And the only thing I did for a week is walk around supermarkets in downtown Manhattan, right? I did a lot of steps. But all I was doing is just thinking about this arbitrage idea. What exists here and fulfills a demand that I don't see in the UK? and I set myself the challenge in five days of coming back with five new brand concepts and I wrote them up on the plane on the way home and it was surprisingly easy I mean things that I know you'll be familiar with but like the idea seltzers right yeah seltzers don't exist here uh cold coffee this is a few years ago but cold coffee in cans I like you know obvious right it serves a need so obvious yes that's such an obvious thing that didn't exist here really so I mean things like that and kombucha I mean kombucha was a bit of a fad it kind of came and went but there was there were so many even in i was just looking at drinks right just in drinks there were tons of things that exist to fulfill the same need that you'd have in new york but doesn't exist in london then i looked at snacks as well saying you know like you have um like thin uh thins or barks or whatever they're called like these really interesting kind of shareable shareable chocolate right in these big beautiful packets you don't have shareable chocolate like that here.

16:49Kory Marchisotto:You know, again, it's again, things like that. It was, I found it amazing just by going to New York for one week, I could come up with multiple ideas for new brands.

16:58Jon:Well, I think that goes back to the idea of being open to be inspired. First of all, you have to be humble enough to be inspired. And then when you think about this idea that you have to be curious, right, you have to be curious enough to walk those aisles and be looking for something that is going to fulfill something that you're unaware of. Issey Miyake used to say, spend time with things you don't know. So whether it's New York or anywhere in the world, spend time with things you don't know, which is what you were doing. And speaking of New York, I think you saw a couple of weeks ago, we were back at the New York Stock Exchange and there's something called Experience Square, which is right outside the exchange.

17:37Jon:And it was a moment where we had to utilize the space to tell the story of six brands. That's not easy to do. We want to tell the story of our entire portfolio. And I was in Paris, let's say six weeks before that. And there was a balloon museum at the Grand Palais. And this is someplace that I get inspiration all the time, not particularly in Paris, but at museums. And there was this incredible section where they were essentially colored boxes where balloons were bringing some idea to life in these boxes. So one was a butterfly and the wings were made out of small balloons done in different colors.

18:17Jon:One was flowers. You can imagine how this goes. And I took a picture of it at the time, not knowing what I was going to use it for, but I was so inspired how they were able to unfold this story in these distinct vignettes, yet somehow it all fit together to tell one bigger picture was about all this things that you could do with something as simple as balloons. So I took that picture and I gave it to our chief brand officer. And that was the inspiration that was used for how we unfolded our story. Now we didn't use balloons, but it was the idea of these vignettes and how you tell a story over the course of six brands.

18:53Jon:So museums are an incredible place of inspiration. All different types of exhibits can fuel how you think about bringing activations to life, immersive experiences, even drawing and design, you can get great ideas from museums. So I like to spend a lot of time in museums when, especially when I'm traveling. And one other thing that sticks out for me and a brand that I probably put on the biggest pedestal that I used to work for is Hermes. And not only was Hermes brilliant about putting their craftsmen on a pedestal, So even when you go to their office, the craftsmen work behind glass so that you can see who's really responsible for the incredible work that they do.

19:39You can see them hand crafting everything with unbelievable attention to detail.

19:45Jon:And one of the things that they do, especially in the beauty space. So one of their perfumers at the time when I was working there, his name is Jean-Claude Alana. And Jean-Claude Alana lived in the south of France in this beautiful place that was up on a hill. So inspiring landscape, right? Because he's a creator. He's an artist. Making a perfume is like writing music. There's notes and accords. And what they would do is make sure that there was a steady rhythm of exposing Jean-Claude to other artists. So they would send, for example, a famous saxophonist. and for three days they would stay in the Hermes house and they would speak artist to artist.