Marketing Happy Hour - Marketing That Makes Your Brand Unforgettable | Katelynn Ludwig of DUDE Wipes

Episode Date: March 13, 2025

What does it take to build a bold, culturally relevant brand that people actually want to engage with? Katelynn Ludwig, Director of Brand Strategy at DUDE Wipes, joins me to share a peek behind the brands strategies across social media and content strategy, influencer marketing, PR, and brand activations. In this episode, Katelynn shares how DUDE Wipes keeps its audience hooked, maximizes influencer partnerships, and strategically invests in events and PR moments that drive brand awareness and sales. Plus, her best advice for marketers who want to build disruptive brands that stand out.Key Takeaways:// How paying attention to what consumers are saying can drive engagement, product innovation, and brand loyalty (social listening)// DUDE Wipes’ approach to influencer marketing—why it works and how they measure ROI// How hyper-focusing on customer needs and requests can spark product innovation and better brand communication// The power of PR and events—how strategic partnerships can drive massive brand awareness// How to build a disruptive brand that stands out in a crowded marketConnect with Katelynn: LinkedInLearn more about DUDE Wipes: WebsiteFollow DUDE Wipes.: Instagram | Tik Tok | LinkedIn#AD Explore Popular Pays____Say hi! DM me on Instagram and let us know what content you want to hear on the show - I can't wait to hear from you! Please also consider rating the show and leaving a review, as that helps us tremendously as we move forward in this Marketing Happy Hour journey and create more content for all of you. ⁠Join our FREE Open Jobs group on LinkedIn: ⁠Join now⁠Get the latest from MHH, straight to your inbox: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Join our email list!⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Follow MHH on Social: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Instagram⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ | ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠LinkedIn⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ |⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠TikTok⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ | ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Facebook⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

Get consumer insights, pull consumer data. It's really community driven. Talk to the community like they're our friends, they're our buddies. There's a lot of ways that we're just trying to always touch the consumer. And then when they're at Target, Walmart, wherever they see us, they're like, oh yeah, I'm finally here. I'm just going to grab it real quick. Welcome to Marketing Happy Hour. I'm Cassie, consultant, podcaster, and your host. Every Thursday, you'll hear episodes packed with insights from brand leaders on an array of topics, from crafting effective marketing strategies and hitting career goals, to building leadership

skills and launching your own business. Inspired by those unfiltered happy hour combos with peers, this show is all about practical, empowering chats to support your professional journey. So grab your favorite drink and let's get to the episode. I'm so excited to have Caitlin Ludwig of Dude Wipes here with me today. We're going to talk all things just bold, culture-driven brands, talk about influencer marketing and how it drives ROI for them, and just overall marketing trends and of course some career tips here and there. Super stoked to have you, Caitlin. Welcome to the show. Thank you. Thanks, Cassie, for having me on the show. Super excited to dive in. Love what you're doing over here at MHH and

just excited to be part of it. Oh my gosh. Thank you so much. Yeah, I was telling you off record, Dude Wipes is such a fun brand and so just curious to dive into what you guys have been up to lately. And of course, your personal story as well. We'll talk more about that. But first, I have to ask you in true marketing happy hour form, is there anything fun that's been in your glass or cup lately? Everything NA. Just really trying to cleanse the system, get out there.

So I've tried basically every canned NA out there. So if anyone that's with an NA company is hearing this, I've probably tried your brand. I probably like it, or I have some feedback for you. Oh, I love it. Yeah. Besides that water, I'm a water girl through and through. So you'll see me sipping on my, my big old water. I love just overall that industry and this resurgence, not resurgence per se, but like just new wave of the way we consume and, and celebrate and everything. So, um, no, I totally respect that. That's amazing. So tell us about your story. How did you get to where you are today and kind of what's your day to day looking like right now? Yeah. So I think I have a kind of

unique story or at least I think so. I actually started my career while I was still in college. I am a certified sign language interpreter in the state of Illinois. That's what I studied in college. So I did not study a single hour of marketing in college. I've learned everything in the trade. So while in college, I started working for a couple of different brands under the Coca-Cola, Glasso umbrella. So vitamin water, smart water, NOS energy, popped over to Vitacoco, some good old Vitacoco days and had a mentor take me under his wing and really taught me so much while I was still in college. After I graduated, he offered me a full-time role and my passion was

there for marketing and I felt it and I craved more and more and I craved to learn more. So I took the leap of faith, still was certified in interpreting just in case I needed that in my back pocket, but really just dove in headfirst and learned everything, like I said, in the trade. So started in field marketing, experiential marketing, all the way up to some trade marketing. And now we're in brand strategy and overseeing brand strategy for Dude Wipes, but also worked for so many other great brands like RX Bar, Juneshine Hard Kombucha, Next Century Spirit. So it's been a fun journey to get here. Oh, I love that so much. Can you clarify too, you know, we have a lot of younger professionals, just professionals

looking to break into the industries and get their feet wet and learn more about the different roles and opportunities out there within the brand strategy role, just kind of in a quick nutshell, like what is your typical role entail or your day-to-day or some of the functions that you're kind of leading with that role specifically? Yeah, a lot of the work happens at the end of the previous year. So we start the brand strategy plan out ideally in that August timeframe. So really getting ahead of the end of the year planning and just understanding the consumer. So the brand is great and really just pushing the strategy is great, but understanding the consumer, what makes them tick? What's in their shopping

cart? What are they watching on TV? What are they doing with their friends on the weekends? How many times are they eating Taco Bell and Chipotle? And really just understanding this consumer to their core and finding that secondary consumer, but then hyper-focusing on this first consumer. From there, we can build the strategy out. Whether it's we want to launch a new program, like this year we're doing LifeQuakes. I'm sure you've heard Ryan Megan talk about it. It's kind of new and emerging, but we're really pushing this into the market. So LifeQuakes is how many different places in a person's life can we show up?

How can we come in a unique spot? So think about toddlers when they're learning to potty train. They're going from being baby wiped to dry TP. Well, that's not really going to cut it. So introducing dude wipes into that space is key for that first lifequake moment. So we're talking to the moms and the dads and really making sure that we're getting in front of them in that lifequake moment. Then you move on to puberty. So we all know puberty, not the greatest time for all of us, but we have dude wipes now. You know, we have our

odor destroyer, which is essentially a deodorant wipe. So the solution has a deodorizing solution in it. So it really is just like helping benefit. Like my nephew uses it after gym class, loving it. So, you know, I get, I have his dad on board. Next step in life is, is going off to college. So talking to college kids is one thing, but let's talk to their parents who have that disposable income that are going and making those Sam's Club runs, that are going and making those Amazon purchases and shipping to the dorm and really pump their heads and get them to understand like no one wants a stinky kid on campus, right? So it's really just like playing into these lifequakes and that's how how we built the strategy for this year.

Hyper focusing on these lifequakes and making sure that all of our marketing ladders up to these lifequakes. So we really push it hard. Yeah. I was going to ask you your question because I feel like breaking into this industry and brand strategy is you have to understand your brand at the core, right? Understand everything about it, the ins, outs, and all of the different pieces of the organization. And then that second part, like I kind of honed in, is that consumer. Really get to know that consumer. Get consumer insights. Pull consumer data.

We work with numerator. Like, work with these resources that have all of this data at your fingertips and understand the consumer. You'll be able to talk to them a lot quicker, spend less dollars in marketing, and get them to turn and buy at the shelf. Yeah. Brand strategy really is a foundational element of just messaging and everything you're doing out there, consumer-facing. consumer facing and it's a really important piece and something if you are very curious about data and you find yourself kind of learning about consumers and asking questions about why they buy what they buy and their behavior and stuff chances are it's a it's a really good space to maybe get curious about and tap into so thank you for sharing that no No, super PR. So

you built this plan the end of last year. Now you're going out to execute it on digital channels. Kind of what is that, that looking like for you guys? Yeah, it's, it's really community driven. Push our community to this next stage. Talk to the community. Like there, there are friends, there are buddies, like we're texting them on, you know, Twitter. So that's been a huge strategy piece for Dude Wipes way before I was on the team. Our community management team is just incredible. It's actually one person. It's not a full team. It feels like a full team sometimes.

But, I mean, he's replying to hundreds of people a day. He's messaging and tweeting at hundreds of people a day. He's messaging and tweeting at hundreds of people a day. If someone's talking about pooping or they talk about that they just crushed eight burritos at Taco Bell, he is in those tweets. He's in those Instagrams. And he's saying, where can we send the wipes? Just really getting our community just stronger and stronger. It doesn't matter if you have a million followers or if you have 15 followers, he's still going to tweet at you. Um, there is

no discrimination on how many people are following you. We're all, we're all, you know, we all poop at the end of the day and we're just trying to talk to everyone that's pooping and get, get dude wipes in, in top of mine. So, um, yeah, I think, I think like that's one big piece that overlaps with, with a lot of our strategies, I think like that's one big piece that overlaps with, with a lot of our strategies, building this community and continuously talking to them in different avenues. So like I mentioned, we have community management where we're talking to them on Twitter, Instagram. Um, but we also have linear media. So we have a pretty big, um, budget for linear this year, which is really exciting exciting so you'll see our commercials running through the rest of the year starting March 3rd we were working on new creative spots so last year we had two spots this year we are

running those two spots until our new creative is ready so excited for that to come I can't give any spoilers quite yet but yeah overall is just talking to consumers in all these different places that they are living. So they're going to see us on TV. They're going to see their best influencer that they love to follow. They're going to see them posting about us. They're going to see our TikTok live streams. They're going to then go and get a tweet from us because they mentioned pooping on Twitter. So there's a lot of ways that we're just trying to always touch the consumer, talk to the consumer. And then when they're at Target, Walmart, wherever they see us, they're

like, Oh yeah, I'm finally here. I'm just going to grab it real quick. Absolutely. And that goes back to that recognition piece. And that starts to happen when you're showing up in literally every touch point of a consumer's life. So I want to dive into social a little bit further too. So a lot of brands struggle to keep their community or followers just engaged long-term. So how are you guys kind of diving deeper into what you just mentioned, maintaining that consistency and engagement and what, what metrics or how does that kind of point back to the bottom line of the business? And how are you guys seeing that social engagement and interaction, for example, tie into just the business goals overall?

Yeah. So big piece is just always having content ready. We always say internally, we never have enough content. We do. We have a ton of content, but it's, it's keeping this content relevant. Um, and also not taking ourselves too serious. So we're this irreverent brand where if you're scrolling through Instagram, you're seeing political stuff, you're seeing, you know, the, the normal news stuff.

Um, we're not that brand. We're not talking about it. We're not putting any opinions out there. We're literally just trying to have fun, trying to make you laugh, and cracking jokes along the way. So that's kind of how we built this community the entire time. Working with influencers that also have that same mentality of just being irreverent, having fun with life, not taking everything too seriously. That's how we're able to get this huge master wheelhouse of content where we're always pumping out new content every day. The way that we kind

of look at content is like we just kind of chatted about is getting in front of our consumers many, many times through a week or a month. And the way that we're able to do it is this influencer program we have is just insane. Garrett Payne, he's our director of influencers here. He has built an awesome program where we have partners on the program where they're creating content every single month for us. And their content goes viral. And they will create content until it does go viral for us, which is unlike any other influencer campaigns I've ever seen before. It's typically, all right, I'm going to create a video. I'm going to get my check cut and I'm moving on to the next brand. These, these consumers, these, you know, family,

friends really recalling them at this point. They love the brand so much that they're part of our brand. They're part of our team. Um, and they feel that way too. So we really have that trickle into every facet of the business. Like even our brokers and buyers, they feel the same way. They're part of the team. They're part of this overall goal of really just selling more wipes, wiping more butts, as Sean likes to say. And that's kind of like, that's the mantra. Wipe more butts, sell sell more wipes and have fun doing it. Life is just, it's too fast and, you know, we can have fun. We can have fun doing the work we do. Yeah.

And I think that goes back to one of the ways that you guys are just standing out on social. Consumers see all of these different messages all the time. And so even outside of that bold, fun nature, are there any things that you guys are considering or thinking about when it comes to content to ensure you're standing out? So the reason I'm asking is if there's someone from a brand listening who maybe doesn't have as crazy and fun and bold of a personality as you guys, are there other kind of elements you're considering when it comes to creating content to ensure, hey, this is going to stand out in the feed, it's going to connect with the consumer, etc? Yeah, that's a great question. So yeah, not every brand can just be talking about

poop and bathroom humor, right? So I think a great way to look at it is have fun with your influencers. Make sure that your influencers fit within your brand culture. Would you bring them on board and mentor them? Would you have them as your right-hand woman or man? And think about it like that. Do they fit within your brand? From there, it should be pretty easy and turnkey to have them create content because they're one of you. They're part of your team. So I think it's, you know, get a little bit deeper than just this

surface level. This influencer has 50,000 followers and their engagement rate is 6%. Let's look past those numbers for a second. Those numbers are great. And I think there are some, you know, CMOs that love those those metrics I would say most CMOs at this point are probably past those metrics and we want this great content that resonates with consumers so yeah let's let's take a pause from all of that just think about numbers numbers numbers let's make sure these are good people that fit within the brand and I'm trying to kind of put myself in in a position where a brand might not be able to have as much irreverent fund that we can. And yeah, I would say, I would say the same thing. Just

try and find that right brand fit for you, for your team and then for your campaign. Always make sure everything loops right back to your campaign that you're running. Yeah, absolutely. So kind of on the topic of influencer too, and I want to tap back into social to talk about TikTok here in a second as well. But with influencer specifically, I think even still, it's surprising to see how many brands are still kind of hesitant to dive headfirst into influencer marketing. So again, going back to this discussion of ROI, and you mentioned just making sure influencers are the right brand fit and everything. But how just overall, when you're building out a campaign, you're tapping into influencer as a strategy.

How are you ensuring that that leg of your campaign is successful? And how are you measuring success just overall with influencer partnerships? So we measure success with influencers in a unique way. Viewership is wonderful and we love those big numbers, right? We love to say 900 million views on all of our content from last year because that's what happened with our organic content. But really, it's how many of these unique eyeballs are seeing our content every single month. That's that's what we're the bread and butter lies for us. And we don't we don't really put an ROI on influencer marketing. I think it's really hard to measure a success rate on influencers because we don't know how the end consumer is seeing that content, taking that content in and following up with that content.

So it's really just this little piece of the puzzle that needs to be there. So we're talking to them at the right time when they're winding down after work and they're watching their Instagram feed or going through the Discover page. We want to be there at the right time talking about the right things that resonate with them. And that will happen when you bring on those influencers that fit within the brand, fit within your campaign. It'll just happen. Like I said, it's part of that puzzle piece that I think just needs to be there, gets these wheels turning and helps get to the end result, buying more wives. Yeah, great, great feedback there. So I want to tap back into social specifically and talk about TikTok. TikTok, of course, has given us quite a bit of

whiplash in 2025 so far. We're happy that it's back for now. What are you guys just kind of doing on the platform overall? You mentioned offline. TikTok shop has been huge for y'all, which I'm excited to continue to see that with live shopping and everything integrate into 2025. But yeah, what's kind of the approach there on that platform and how successful has it been for you guys so far? Yeah. Test, test, test, test, test. I cannot say that enough. There are so many new things popping up with this live shopping where you need to test everything that comes up, obviously within budget. But there has been several different campaigns that we launched last year where it was a new agency popping up. Hey, we have a thousand creators that are going to talk about your product.

Okay, great. We'll sign this deal. Tested it. It worked well. Another one pops up. Hey, we're going to have 20 creators go live on your behalf. Great. Sign up for it. Wow. That really took off. Let's bring on these two top creators that were bringing in a quarter million GMV a month. Um, yes, some creators are bringing in a quarter million dollars for our business. Um, and they're seeing that 15% commission rates, they're seeing higher commission rates, but really launching into this space and diving diving head first and trusting the process and anyone that's that's listening right now they know tick tock shop has not been an easy process to learn and adapt to because it's constantly changing um so really just understanding every

single test we do analyzing that test and then going full force to it or tapping back and trying to go other avenues. Right now, we're actually doing a test with an agency partner where we hired someone to go on live four hours a day on Dude Wife's TikTok page. And he's just selling, selling, selling, selling for four hours straight. We don't have the bandwidth internally to do that, right? So how can we get there without us all having to work, you know, 80 hours a week just to be on TikTok live? Let's bring in other people. It's okay to spend a little bit of money to see if something works. It's really that test and learn. So we're seeing that this is ramping up again. So TikTok shop is, I believe here to stay. I know we had that 14 hour freeze and everyone was afraid, but, um, we're, we're holding solid over here at Deep Wipes and

we knew it was going to come back. Um, but yeah, I guess come coming back like full circle tests and learn, and then just adapt to what's working. Make sure your profit margins are there. That's something that I'm constantly preaching to some of my friends in other industries is that profit margin is important because everything is fulfilled through TikTok. So make sure you have that profit margin. But at the end of the day, test and learn. See what works. And go full force.

If that's something that's part of your plan for 2025, selling on TikTok shop, try it. If it's not part of your plan, maybe it could be a plus up for you guys. And you never know until you try. Yeah. Such a good reminder too. I think sometimes we as marketers get so stuck in this hamster wheel and the same things and strategies that we've been doing. So just that encouragement of trying new things that are a little bit different. Do you have any tips or encouragement for whether it's the young professionals doing the functions, the marketers themselves, or just brands overall to not be afraid to step out of that comfort zone? It may just be as simple as just do it and go

forward and you have to kind of build up to that. But anything you would say, because I still feel like a lot of brands today are very hesitant to new and different things that they haven't tried before. Yeah. It's scary. It's also, it's, it's challenging to get buy-in. So, um, I'm fortunate where I report straight to the CMO. So it's, it's pretty easy to get the buy-in where we have a run same wavelength, if you will. Um, but I, but I do understand I've been in that place before it's, it's getting the buy-in. So create a case study. Hey, I want to build this test run through TikTok shop. It's going to cost us $10,000 to run it. This is my expected outcome. And if it doesn't hit this expected outcome and GMV, this is what we're going to learn. And this is how we're going to adapt. But don't be afraid.

And a lot of leaders want you to take that leap of faith. They want you to test. They want you to learn. They want the best for you. And I know it's sometimes scary to be like, hey, I need an extra $10,000 to do this test. But overall, you're growing yourself. And just take that leap of faith in yourself. Do the research. Do your DD. And try. Just try. Put yourself out there.

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and book your demo. Trust me, this will free up your time and protect your brand's vibe. Cheers to that. So I want to pivot again into PR and events. We're kind of hitting these different touch points within marketing, which has been so fun to hear your insights. So specifically on this, you all are known for just unique and fun. I feel like that's kind of the key to this episode, unique, fun, bold brand activation. So what's been one of the most game-changing PR moments or event sponsorships or whatever you want to share just for the brand, since you've been a part of it so far? Yeah, there have been so many stunty things we've done. I think the one I've had the most fun with has been the mini pooper. So you'll pop over to my LinkedIn and check out our mini pooper.

But it's literally a mini cooper wrapped with dude wipes and has a giant poop on top. So it's been fun. We had our friends over at Out Cold. They're a Chicago-based creative agency. Um, so it's been fun. We had, um, our, our friends over at Out Cold, their Chicago based creative agency, they built our, um, they built our mini pooper for us and they did a full college tour for us. So we, we did a college tour through the Midwest, five different campuses over two weeks. Um, but now we own the car, we bought it outright and it's, you know, here in Chicago. So we take it places. We we do funny stunty stuff like

photoshopping us into the uber app everyone thought that was real it's it's not real you can't get a mini pooper uber but like getting funny plates and like getting reactions on on social from from the plate choices but that's been one that's been really funny and stunty. Um, we actually had hard knocks, um, like just an organic mention about dude wipes. So the, the, the dudes were in the locker room, the bears were in the locker room and they were talking about getting flushable wipes. And someone said, Hey, did you get the dude wipes? And the guy has like a bottle of Clorox wipes. We're like, dude, we can't use that for like, we need dude wipes. So it was organic. We didn't even know until like we were getting texts from friends and family members. So what we did was like

immediately send a pallet of dude wipes to their training facility. But we had TMZ draft up this huge like article about the mini pooper delivering a pallet of product, which didn't really happen, but it was a great PR moment. We did send the product. It was there. But this beautiful PR moment came from this, from just an organic mention on hard knocks to the mini pooper popping up on TMZ. So millions of eyeballs, millions and millions of eyeballs just for one little mention. Oh my gosh, incredible.

And that's why like social listening is so important and just literally paying attention to everywhere your brand is being talked about online because to your point, that just creates a new opportunity that maybe you all probably did not expect hours or days before that. So kudos to you guys on that not expect, you know, hours or days before that. So kudos to you guys on that. Yeah, quick thinking. We're always on our toes for sure. Marketing doesn't turn off.

That is 100% the truth. Marketing never turns off. It does not. Not at all. So with that, like talking specifically about events, or even if you want to tap into more of these brand moments or activations, how do you all decide like which moments, events, whatever to invest in and what makes that activation a strong brand fit for you? Yeah, that's a great question. So we do have a healthy sponsorship budget and we have for a couple of years now. But really when we're analyzing these sponsorships is how many eyeballs are going to see us and how does it relate to the brand. So the Browns, the Cleveland Browns, we're one of their sponsors, their main sponsors. And it's obviously the perfect fit. Browns, poop, you know, it's just, it's a natural fit.

So working with them, but also ensuring that when we're the presenting sponsor for that game, how are we showing up on site? Do we have samples? Do we have plenty of samples? Are we on the LED screens? Are we going to be in the email blasts? Can we do some type of giveaways or sweepstakes? We're really trying to make this program, this partnership more 360 than just we're the partner of the Browns. No, we are the partner of the Browns, but we're also doing a full entire activation around it, that 360, including social media. So I think that's one

important piece that we're really good at here is making sure that, yes, we have a great sponsorship. Yes, we put this budget behind it, but how are we plussing it up in natural ways that don't take much lift, don't take much budget, but really pushing the envelope of how many more eyeballs are going to see us, who's hearing about us, and what other social media shares, mention, tweets can we get from this partnership. And do you feel, too, just this idea of being a part of multiple touch points? Is it because you feel a consumer needs to see the product multiple times for that resonation? Like what's kind of the thought process behind that too? Because I feel like that's always a decision making process that brands go through is like, should we just put our

logo on a banner somewhere? Should we do more? And kind of what's the reasoning for that, you would say? Yeah. In my experience, it's the clutter. So just have a banner in the Browns Stadium. There's so much clutter that's going on. Also, everyone's there for the game. They don't, not everyone's a marketeer where they're looking at every single brand that's sponsoring.

I know everyone listening to this right now is like yes I've been to a baseball game or a soccer game and I know all the sponsors um not everyone is like us so we need those multiple touch points so we have the banner they may see us they may not that's fine but when they're leaving the stadium they get free samples of dude wipes that they can take home and use. Okay, now we have that second touch point. What about the people that weren't at the game, that couldn't partake in that game, that sponsorship game for us? Okay, now they're seeing us on social. Or they did see us on TV because we were on one of the LED screens. that envelope how many people were there in the stadium irl versus how many people can we touch afterwards beforehand outside of those stadium gates yeah that's a great thing to be thinking

about i think for um events activations partnerships etc so thanks for sharing that i'm curious to to hear your response to this question but what is one thing that you think brands are not paying enough attention to and what do you think they should be doing more of? So I think like things that brands aren't paying enough attention to is like what are consumers talking about? Like we talked about a little bit was that social listening piece. What are consumers talking about? What are consumers DMing you about? What are people asking about through your customer service channel? And then hyper-focusing on what that might be. So if it's a product issue or it's a product request,

looking deep into what that might be. And maybe there's a whole new product innovation that can come from that request, that constant DM, that constant tweet, like, hey, we want X, Y, Z, Y. That is something that I feel like is underused in the brand world. Okay. So another question that I have for you is for marketers who feel like a bold, disruptive brand ties into their brand essence, their brand personality. And they're like, I want to do something like that. Get inspired by dude wipes, kind of build a similar persona, for example, obviously not copying the brand. But what is your best advice for just stepping into and kind of honing and owning that kind

of personality through every channel, really, so that it's consistent? Yeah, create that community guideline book. I know everyone hates to create these PowerPoints, but create this guideline and stick within those guardrails. That's the biggest thing I've seen success with is once you have those guardrails, you can then go and bring your social media manager on board. They have the guardrails to follow. Or if you have a PR agency that's pitching stories,

we have these guardrails, let's follow these guardrails. Everything then is going to fit within that brand voice and tone without getting any confusion because it is in black and white. I think that's my biggest advice on keeping the same vein in every single piece of social media, in all of your content even, in your copy. Really, everything should kind of be within that same vein of your tone of voice. And that will be really helpful as you're looking through your career. And even it doesn't have to be a PowerPoint. It could be, you know, scrapped on a piece of paper and pinned on your wall. But have those pieces of tones that you want to stay within. Keep your brand voice strong

and prominent within all of your copy and you'll be just fine. Yeah, absolutely. Making sure it's documented, making sure your team is all aware of how are we going to present this brand in every single channel so that it's consistent. That's such an important reminder really to any brand, no matter what personality you have, to be honest, like making sure that your team is streamlined on that is incredibly important. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So I got to ask you as we close out here, a career question. I'm just curious again, what you're going to say to this, but is there anything that you know now that you wish you knew earlier on in your career, thinking back to Caitlin in college and just starting out? Like

what, what do you wish you knew back then? Um, I don't think I knew it back then, but I did know it deep down is, is take a chance on yourself. Yeah. That's going to be my number one advice. And I think that kind of streams through the entire conversation we've had today is take a chance on yourself and believe in yourself because with all the research, all the DD, you can do whatever you want to. And it sounds so cliche, but really it's, it's very true. Take a chance on yourself. No one else is going to do it if you can't do it first for yourself. Um, and put yourself out there, put your, put your best foot forward. You never know what's out there. Yeah. I love it. Straightforward,

but it's so, it's so important to remember that no matter how far long you are in your career, don't be afraid to take those chances and opportunities for yourself. Yeah, this has been awesome, Caitlin. We, of course, want to stay in touch with you personally with Dude Wipes. So what's the best place to connect with the brand and also you personally online? Yeah, feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn. I'm just super happy to always, you know, chat in the DMS. I'm constantly in there and just replying to everyone that comments in DM. So feel free to free to ping me on LinkedIn, but follow, follow the brand on social media, follow dude wipes on, on Instagram and Tik TOK Facebook. I think Tik TOK is probably,

probably one of the bangers right now. So at the very minimum, follow us on TikTok and then Instagram. But if you want a good laugh, tweet at us. I'm sure you'll get a reply. I love it. I'm curious to try that this week and I'll definitely do that. Yeah, but all of Dude Wipes channels as well as Caitlin's channels are linked below.

Go check them out. Follow them as Caitlin said. But Caitlin, this has been awesome. Thanks for peeling the curtain back on your story and just everything you're working on over at Dude Wipes. Really appreciate it. Thanks, Cassie. Talk soon. Thank you so much for tuning into this week's episode. If you enjoyed this conversation, I would love your feedback. And if you're ready to take things to the next level, sign up for my weekly newsletter in the show notes. You'll get weekly career and marketing insights straight to your inbox. And if you have an idea for a future

marketing happy hour episode, shoot me an email. Hello at marketinghappyhr.com. Thank you again, and I'll see you next Thursday.