You know, I've walked into brands that are hemorrhaging. They're losing employees, they're losing business. And they have certain expectations. I walked into brands that are doing well, but their expectations are like 300% growth, but they only want to invest in like 10% of their time and money and energy. And like, wow, that's like talking to your CPA telling them you make 50,000 a year and expecting to retire on an island that cost 5 million.
Welcome to Making it to Market the podcast where we discuss everything about taking your product or service idea through to commercialization. I'm your host Dahlia Kelada. Well, we're back again with Jonathan Fisher, Chairman of BrandExtract. Last time, we talked about marketing touchpoints, attempting to sell an ugly baby, rebranding and buyer personas. Today, we're back again to talk about brand erosion, how marketing support sales and some insight into investing into your brand's advertising and marketing program. Let's get into it. Welcome back, Jonathan. Happy to have you on.
Thank you for having me.
Before we get started, I've been meaning to ask you, what are some of the nonprofits that you're involved in?
I've worked with a number of nonprofits over the years, I sort of subscribe by the philosophy, if you teach someone to fish, you know, rather than give them a fish, they can feed the village and their family and themselves. So I'm attracted to nonprofits that have sort of geometric returns involved with them. It can be you know, literacy and education, because you can break the life cycles of you know, somebody's ability to get a job or not get a job to travel to communicate, earn a living, you know, so that one act has a very large compounding act around it. I've worked with over the last, I guess, you know, last decade to help start a nonprofit called the Houston Community ToolBank. They're an affiliate from tilbake, USA. And essentially what it is, is this is a giant warehouse full of tools, hammers, saws, ladders, you name it, anything that you would use to perform a project. And the philosophy is simply that rather than the 1000s of nonprofits in the city, try to maintain their own little tools for their own jobs. They can come to this one place, if you're volunteering, and get all the tools that we ever need. It's like It's like walking into Home Depot. And, and you need 1000 shovels, we got 1000 shovels, why should you buy 1000 shuffles? Once? Hmm. And waste your money? And then how are you going to store them? How are you going to maintain American and repair them? How are you getting insurance? How do you know if you got the right shovel? Right? So the whole concept behind the use of community ToolBank is that nonprofits shouldn't have to stock this inventory, and waste their money and their resources on it, they can do the thing that they do best. And when they need a pump, a ladder, you name it, lawnmowers, chainsaws power drills for themselves or for their volunteers. They can come and it's a lending library, check it out, check it out,
it is so interesting.
Well, and so essentially, you know, rather than everybody buy 1000, hammers once for themselves, 1000 hammers they use 1000 times to whoever 1000 companies want to use it, whether 1000 volunteers Oh my gosh. So we literally have a warehouse with like, I lost count, I want to say it's over 50,000 items in it, that you can come and borrow. If you're a volunteer and doing community good for nonprofits, and a nonprofit, we'll check it out. And so any nonprofits that are out there any corporations that are doing this as a service, so interesting, big deal, they want to be part of it. And they want to come and get involved with a tool bank. I helped found it with a lot of other dedicated individuals in this town and a lot of businesses that raised money to stock the inventory and buy the inventory and be part of the the franchise was such a good cause. And they service pretty much, you know, disasters to work with the first responders that are out there that people that go in after hurricanes.
Wow, John, and that is so wonderful. I love hearing you getting out into the community and helping out like that. Well, thanks for being back on the show again. Let's get started. So let's talk about how do brands become eroded?
Well over promising and under delivering obviously, I think it's one of the first places people make a mistake there will be confident you know better to under promise and over deliver. Everybody's delighted and surprised they got more for their dollar than they expected or more service or more delivery than expected. To the degree you can do it within reason and not put yourself out of business. It's a good strategy. But if you're giving away 200%, and your margins are negative, you're in trouble for that. So, you know, ways that that people will often make mistake is not looking at the entire process, they try to cut corners, they will take a complicated process that worked in one market, except it works in the other market. And it doesn't. And, and so we use the analogy of selling cakes versus cupcakes. You know, sometimes the buyer just wants a cupcake. But you're you're trying to sell them a cake or processes, nine layers, and they just need a bite. So be be cautious of that I've see companies that take something that works well in one place and try to replicate it another place, but then they don't realize the differences. Cultural differences, political differences, geographical differences, you know, in the south, for example, it's really not a unionized construction space. But in the north it is. And so the value propositions are different. If you're, if you're, say, a builder or developer, industrial, commercial, residential, whatever it might be sometimes, and you go into those union markets, it's a whole nother world. So if you go in with the exact set of messages, the exact set of processes and thinking, you're probably not going to be as successful,
I appreciate you saying that, especially from the cultural thing. I worked at Halliburton for a little bit. And I, you know, my background is in marketing and advertising, but they wouldn't allow me in that position to produce any materials because they wanted to control the message at the corporate level, the marketing team did. And we were putting out an ad was for drilling and completion fluids. So we were putting on an ad and the Middle East. And the AD team came back with a person that the persona that didn't match the Middle East, first of all, and the message that they used on there was something I you know, we love something. And I can tell you being Middle East or myself, you don't say those words, you don't say love you don't, that's a very American westernized language. So I just when you're saying that, it reminds me of that experience I had.
Yeah. So you know, concepts, the concepts of reliability in the US mean, one thing very different than, say, Asian, certain Asian countries, where they might be associated more with counterfeit, you know, green are environmentally friendly, in one part of the world might be associated, you know, as a positive protection, all that good stuff we think of, but in another part of the world, it might be associated with red tape, it might be associated with price hassles. So this goes back to getting those personas, right, understanding the cultural differences. It's not just about translation, it's about adaptation. And the best marketers and companies that are out there, understand that and they will adapt accordingly, into those markets appropriately for what they're doing. If you just literally translate something, you often run into trouble
well, and it's insulting to be can be very insulting, especially if you don't got the right, you choosing a different ethnicity and saying it's Middle Eastern, completely different. And then your, it's just like, there's no, it to me, it's a disrespectful thing, to put out something that doesn't match the persona. Or if you're trying to tell me that this person is Middle Eastern, when I know they're not, you know, like, how do I trust that brand? If they don't figure out who I am, they don't try to..
They're not being authentic, right? They're not being authentic to who they are, and to you and the customer, from your perspective, their reality versus your reality. Back to that perspective, and understanding, you know, what matters to that, that market, that buyer, that geography, whatever it might be, you know, you know, I can talk about all i, everything I know, in Texas, and pretend like I do exactly the same thing in DC, or Tennessee or wherever it might be. But the reality is the temperatures different. The environments different. Yeah, the raw material that's required to build in those markets is different, the applications are different. So if I take the exact same thing that I was preaching in one place, and try to preach it in another place, where it doesn't have the same relevance, what's going to happen, right, they're not going to believe me, or they'll buy it and it will fail. And again, it goes back to that brand is a promise, and you have to live up to that promise. So this is why you start at the at the core and you run those slots, you do the three legged stool approach. You look for those positioning pieces within the Venn diagram and you build off of that. And so there is a there's a scaffolding to this process that that you work off of. You know,
I'm interested in the go to market plan because it kind of ties back into this Long story. So what is the go to market plan and who needs it?
Well, if we're going to talk about go to market plans, essentially goes back to the definition of marketing that we started with. Think of, you know, the four P's, the the product, the price, the placement promotion. And a plan is essentially those definitions put into paper with a strategy and, and sometimes the tactics for it. So it can be the budgets, it can be the timelines, it can be all that defines the channels, it can define the messaging that you're going to go to market with. So when you're talking about building a go to market plan, you're essentially agreeing and aligning the internal stakeholders that are part of the process. Through that plan, you know, sales is going to do this marketing is going to do that finance is going to do this purchasing is going to do that CEO is going to give us the budget, or CFO, whatever it might be. And you are focusing the team. So if you're going to market without a plan, how do you know where everybody's headed? Are the salespeople just picking whoever they want to sell to any industries, they just choose the appropriate how to you know where to advertise your dollars, which trade shows to go to which magazines to market in which key terms to focus on how much money to spend on one channel versus another channel. So the plan defines that and helps define that and align people, I just had a conversation with a company and you know, there was a half a dozen people in the room, and they couldn't agree on what was their audience and which audience was a priority? Which one should they sell the most of first? So, you know, and I asked questions like, Where do you have the most history? Where do you have case studies? What is the net new market for you versus an existing market that you can cross sell, or upsell, which market is likely to have a shorter sales cycle, the plan defines those things and says, Okay, given this, we should go here first and spend this or expect this in terms of the ROI. It helps define, and break down everything so that when you go to create the ad, or the websites, or the tradeshow booths, or whatever those things are going to be implementing. And along the customer journey, you are working in alignment with your organization and your team, and your agency or your freelancers or consultants or whoever you're doing. So that's essentially what a go to market plan is, it really is the unification of effort, if you will, for a process that you plan on executing.
And it takes away the siloed approach for just your branding, just being a marketing, it shows all levels of responsibility in this whole process, I think, yeah,
I'v eseen massive organizations have huge sales forces, and big internal marketing teams. And the two don't even talk to each other, or they're adversarial to each other. It's terrible. It's awful, you know, and, and yet, they're there, you know that they're expected to each achieve their own goals, but they might be pulling in the opposite directions. You know, I've seen salespeople in an organization literally stopped selling, because they hit their sales quotas. I've also seen them sell the cheapest, easiest product with the lowest margin. But the product they didn't sell sat on the shelf, and the longer it sat on the shelf, the lower the value it was. And when they eventually did sell it, they had to sell it at a 20 to 30% loss what they originally could have sold it for. So imagine the sales compensation structure is vastly misaligned. With the marketing initiatives. The marketing was told push the high product stuff, push the stuff with the most margin push the thing before it ages out, whatever it might be, you know. And the sales force is doing almost the exact opposite. Because their quota, their quota was met. So they just shut down at three o'clock in the afternoon. So it's the strangest thing I've ever witnessed. Wow, I was like, What is going on here? There was no, there was no unification, there was no alignment, there was no plan, and that organization and so whatever it might be, it's important to get to build those endorsements, not consensus. You're not asking for consensus. You're asking for endorsement.
And this process,how do you get that what's your what's your advice? For for better collaboration amongst sales and marketing?
Well, I think understand first off, don't if you work on a customer journey map you will realize that it is not usually a binary process it's not lead the horse to water and then serve up the drink. There's often a conversation or many touch points along the way. And you want marketing to support sales and when they understand each other are working together for the same the same goal and they realize how each other benefit along that customer journey helping each other than then they generally get in line because you're like, oh, wait, you can you can help me close the deal faster. Oh, you can help me defend my price point. Oh, you can bring me better qualified leads, you can bring me more leads. Okay, what happens if the guy makes the call and he doesn't bite? Or or the lady, as you know, does the pitch and they don't they don't don't close, right? That's where marketing can come in, they can nurture the process, they can continue to add touch points, what if they bought but they didn't buy that much the sales have a responsibility who owns that continuation of the loyalty in that lifecycle? This is a complicated process, it's generally not one and done. You know, it's a culture. Yeah. So you have to have the right culture you again, you have to have the right plan, you have to help people understand the journey and the roles they play and the act and the actions they take. And when you do all that, you can open their eyes to the opportunities and they get excited, because people generally want to succeed. And if you give them a method and an approach and philosophy and a process and whatever it might be, they they get on board. And if the ones that don't eventually leave, you know, they aren't, they aren't as successful. I've seen sales organizations, you know, cherry pick the best salespeople, and they use them to train others right there, they want to coach them in that process too. So those others can, can be the rising tide can lift all boats, so they want them to come along. And so if you sit down and talk with really good salespeople that they'll understand and talk about the importance of branding and positioning and marketing, it makes their job easier. And vice versa. marketing's job is going to be made easier too. I just had a conversation with a new client, and they are very disconnected in that process. And when I told him, we wanted to go in and look at the sales processes and the sales methodology, they just kind of said, Yeah, we do too. I was like, well, we're not allowed over the fence. Oh, wow. You know, it's just such a lost opportunity. And they get it, but their hands are tied. And so I said, Well, I kind of don't accept that I'm going to do everything I can to get you over the fence. My job is gonna be to help you.
Have you ever done that, where you've been asked to go in and kind of pitch the idea of marketing.
We're often brought in to be quote, the bad cop, if you will. You know, and Well, the thing is, is that they've said it a couple of times, but nobody listened to him. Okay, but when the hired expert comes in and says it, and then they bring in all the data, and they bring in the customers perspectives, and they bring in a competitive differentiation arguments, you suddenly instead of one voice, you have many voices now saying, hey, you need to listen to us. You know, and we hear a lot. It's unfortunate, but it's as they say, it's very hard to be a prophet in your own land. So some just something about human nature, if if, literally, if I call on somebody in my town, and I call on somebody in another town, I'm suddenly like five times the expert. In the other doubt, because I'm new, I'm different, I must know something that they don't know already. And so I think I think the lack of respect is sometimes attributed to just being there. These people are brilliant. They've been saying when we walk in and reinforce them with but because we said it, it suddenly carries more cachet in the process. But it's you know, but on top of that, we really do put the science behind it, we put the homework behind it, we put the customer perspectives behind it, we go back to that three legged stool over and over again, with clients to help drive this in the right direction. We often use a technique or we talk about subbing the word, like for what works. Yep. People often internally to say, well, I like this, or I don't like that, to which I respond. That's great. I don't really care what you like, I care what works, right. You know, and I mean that in the nicest way that sounds a little blood, a little blood right now. But but the reality is, is you can like pink, but if the customer doesn't want pink, the customer wants orange or blue. We can push pink out there all day long. And it won't be successful, you know, in that process. So we have to look at what's works. And that goes back to managing and testing and constantly working to improve what works. So what worked last year may not work this year, we had a client that drove originally 2,000% of their opportunities through LinkedIn. But over the last 12 years, we've worked with this client over time, other channels have superseded that and that channel has diminished. And so as much as I Love. LinkedIn isn't working. And I needed to shift. As the market was shifting the locations were shifting for where we were to reach these people, their behaviors were shifting. And so it's it's a really good philosophy to say, you can have an opinion. And you can talk about what you like. But it's better to talk about what works in this process.
And how do you know what I need to find works, what works?
Go back to what's appropriate, go back to what's authentic, go back to that Venn diagram, go back to what the data tells you. Do your testing, you know, you know, I think it was Harry Beckwith in selling him this, will I get this right? Again, you're gonna have to check me. But he said, I think he said that all experts are wrong 17.5% of the time.
Yeah, we just, we just convinced you that we know what we're talking about.
Only reverse the math on that. So it only you know, 17.5% of what I'm telling you today will be wrong. No need for me to fact check. But it goes back to this, you know, don't, you know, you gotta you gotta do like, every good every good person does and test it and prove it and repeat it. And make sure that it's working and continues to work, because what worked yesterday may not work tomorrow. And that's true with anything, and requires a constant tending and evergreen approach to this process. And that's the thing that we try to preach to these clients is it truly isn't set it and forget it. Because things can run their course that you can, the competitors can come in with something new, bigger, better mousetrap, you know, the climate. And by that I mean, the environment, the world, the perspectives. war breaks out, you know, price points change. Okay, this was an appropriate price point once now it's not. Yeah, no Ramat supply chain disruptions. Okay, how do we get around this? Now? How do we reposition? I was selling chairs to offices now. But nobody's going to the office. Otherwise, they're just consumers for their home office. Okay, what was working for the corporate office doesn't necessarily work for the home office, things changed. If I didn't pivot, I was in trouble in this process,
to innovate, innovate your business in order to survive.
Yeah, some companies that did pivot during the last two years, did better than those that didn't. I had clients that literally called and said, shut everything down for six months, call us back, we'll see if we're closing the plant. Nobody's going to be doing this.
Right. Like the whole hand sanitizer industry where alcohol companies were, you know, innovating and taking advantage of that, taking advantage of the market need.
Yeah, I know, I know, people that you know, suddenly discovered new core competencies at different applications. And it's almost sad, that it took something like a pandemic, or now maybe a war for some people or supply chain disruptions, that it took that It's sad that these companies, it took those catastrophic type of events for them to force them to evaluate their true strengths. Okay, if you manufacture something, you tend to associate your skill with that end product. And the skill may be in the doing, not the thing. You know, if you make something that's incredibly small, and can go into many things, and your skill needs to be looking at how you manufacture small things, and can sell them to, you know, make them for other companies that also need small things, not necessarily the widget you make that is small, and that process. And so companies that had fabrication techniques, I know tradeshow houses that suddenly started making, you know, acrylic, you know, face shields, and divider systems, because they're used to working with acrylic, for environment displays, you know, building desks for new stations and tradeshow booths and whatnot, the skills they had had other applications, or the product, the raw material, they had had other applications in the Marketplace. And companies, many times overlook that, because they're so busy focused on just perfecting the thing they have, not realizing that they have other strengths and opportunities within the organization. But if you think about it from that swap perspective, if you think about it from the user perspective, when we think about it from the market opportunity, perspective and differentiation, you can suddenly sometimes create new opportunities that you never, you never thought existed and the process or find new revenue channels, right, you know, many hours worked for a number of manufacturers and manufacturers would often give away the engineering to get the production, you know, to win the production process. Well, the engineering is highly valuable sometimes and companies will pay for it and can be a whole separate revenue stream. Really helping companies think about you know how they're going to design a product before you make it. So, something that may be a loss leader a value add company on integrating a revenue stream or even a competitive differentiation
I'm with Jonathan Fisher of brand extracts Hey guys check out brand extracts podcast called solving for be stick around till after the break you don't want to miss Jonathan explain the difference between soup and cake
I have experienced of my customers giving me ideas for business
customers cuz we interview cuz we've interviewed 1000s of customers and and they are a wealth of opportunity, you will learn so much by talking to customers. It's just I will tell a company this, I will go to my grave saying it. If you do not talk to your customers, you're giving up an opportunity, I guarantee you'll learn something. I don't know how I don't care how much you think, you know, you will learn something. And sometimes that the thing you will learn is will change your rock and change your world. Oh, absolutely. in ways you never imagined. And so when we talk to customers, we understand their vocabulary. We understand their mindsets, we understand their decision processes, their likes and dislikes their works and doesn't works, right. We understand their why buys, why not buys? What what is the pain of switching versus not switching? What what product? Do they understand or not understand. I'm doing interviews right now for a company asking them? Do you even know what our brands are that we sell? Do you care about the brand? Are you just care about what it does? You know, I'm asking them? What are their trends? What are they doing? What are they forecast for the next year, because my client wants to know what inventory to buy more of. I'm asking them how they're different in the marketplace, I've already been given several ideas of things that they don't offer from a service standpoint that they could do that could help differentiate them or they could even charge for we've understand we've got it, we've gotten a glimpse into some operational deficiencies that are eroding the brand as it's being delivered against that my job to fix operations. But it is my job to point out when something operationally doesn't support the promises I'm making in that process. So, you know, I'm not an operations consultant. But I will tell you, this thing is causing a problem. Yes, if you tell me you're fast, and your delivery drivers use paper tickets, and you have to wait for hours for them to return in order to tell the customer when they call up asking the status of the delivery where it's at. Because you aren't using technology, I have a hard time promising You're fast. When there's you know, I can track my pizza being made. You're and you're a half a billion dollar company now, are you still using paper tickets? Yeah, these are stories that come from a place of, of experience. So I want to be, you know, you want to be authentic to the process. And you want to understand that SWOT and be true to how you get and deliver in on, on the whole, the whole experience. So
I know that BrandExtract, you guys have posted online, a guide to brand strategy, I'm going to put that link in the show notes. If you're listening, and you want more information about how to get going, that's a great resource for you to look at. What's the biggest or most common mistake you come across with your clients?
I think the biggest or most common mistake is assuming they know what they know. I hear it a lot. We know our customer. Our our product is perfect, or we don't have any competition. You know, I think it's it's it's it's it's not it's not wanting to take the time to do a proper assessment to do a proper discovery to do a proper competitive analysis. They have done it before or did it internally and they think it's good. But they often didn't do it the way we did it or from their perspective we have and so they'll unload material on me saying here, you don't need to do this. Again, you can skip this step I have it. But then I started looking into it. And I started asking them questions. They're like, Oh, we didn't ask that question. Or we didn't put it in this context, or we lead the witness, you know, by asking it this way. Or they didn't do enough of it, or whatever it might be. It's dated. It's just really not. I think no matter who they work with, whether it's us or some other agency, if you're going to bring an expert in, bring the expert in and let them run their process. Don't try to circumvent what they're doing. Amen. Because you're trying to shave some corners. Yeah, you can ask them is there a way to condense this timeframe? Is there a asking is there a way to make this more efficient? And there's usually a few tricks they can put or, but there becomes a point where you just, you're not you don't do the steps, you just don't have it. I liken it to the difference between a soup recipe and a cake recipe. And this is an analogy I'll use a lot with clients, they'll say, what is the difference between a soup recipe and a cake recipe? Any idea?
