The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Diana Fryc, Chief Sales and Marketing Officer at Retail Voodoo on Branding and Building Business

Episode Date: July 20, 2023

Diana Fryc, Chief Sales and Marketing Officer at Retail Voodoo on Branding and Building Business Retail-voodoo.com Retail Voodoo is a Seattle-based branding agency that specializes in brand strategy, development, design, and marketing. The agency serves a global client base and has worked with many market leaders, including Starbucks, KIND, REI, Pepsi, and HighKey. Retail Voodoo's founder and president is David Lemley.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms, and legs inside the vehicle at all times because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. This is Voss here from the chrisvossshow.com, the chrisvossshow.com. Ladies gentlemen boys and girls children of all ages uh should children be listening to this show i don't know i'll check with the attorneys welcome the big

podcast we certainly appreciate you guys being here 14 years we're going on 1500 episodes i actually got to change the 1400 thing uh and uh we're just looking to have a great year uh lots of great podcasts we just released a great podcast with the guy who created first person shooters he created wolfenstein 3d doom and everything else go check that out uh and uh just a wonderful interview that we finally we've been sitting around the can we finally got to release it so go check that as well uh today we're going to talking uh with an amazing top expert in branding marketing building a business, and image, and all that sort of good stuff.

And she's going to be telling me, of course, probably how to dress better and brand things better on the Chris Voss Show, which usually involves looking better, which, of course, I don't, which I think we talked about in the green room that your suggestion was that I should be replaced by AI. We might talk some AI stuff, so we'll get into that as well uh we have an amazing woman on the show uh diana freik is on the show with us today and she's gonna be talking to us about her uh amazing journey that she's done she is a marketing industry executive with over 20 years advising brands from Fortune 50 to startups on how to address their toughest growth challenges. As a partner and chief growth officer of branding firm Retail Voodoo, she uses her expertise in brand development, innovation, consumer markets, marketing, and packaging systems to help clients generate meaningful and sustainable growth.

Tireless and determined, she's obsessed, obsessed I say, with the world of food, something like me, beverage and wellness brands. I'm wearing most of it too. And she has been building longstanding client relationships. People trust her to put the right combination of people and business assets together to move mountains. She also hosts the Gooder podcast. Is it Gooder or Gooder? No.

Gooder, although I like Gooder because with the beverage and the food connection, that's nice. Sola Wine, this is Gooder. The Gooder vodka. Why drink it? Because it's Gooder. See, look, I know a little bit. You a little bit i know about five minutes of branding you can fit on a thin bowl uh she interviews powerful women executives in the food beverage and wellness industries about their branding leadership and related topics in the consumer package goods industry today welcome to the show diana how are you i am fine chris might be the best intro to a podcast i've been on since i've been doing this and it's been for several years so

i just loved it thank you thank you thank you this is why they pay me five dollars a show um can i get my check yet they said next year um anyway uh Anyway, I think the writer's strike for the checks are with the actors in Hollywood. So there you go. Did I get your last thing correctly? I want to make sure I got it right. Yeah, you got it perfect. Yeah, absolutely. So give us your dot coms. Where do you want people to find you on the interwebs

and learn more about you? For sure. Yeah, so Retail Voodoo, you can find us at retail hyphen voodoo. So some people say retail dash voodoo.com. And that's where you'll learn about the our business of branding and marketing. And you'll also find kind of the homepage for the good or podcast. And if you are looking for the good or podcast, we are on all the platforms, the Apple, the, the, I don't know, what are they all on anymore? Spotify, Amazon, Google plus all of them. Um, and you'll find

I've only been doing the podcast for, uh, just over three years now. So, uh, congratulations. Yeah. Yeah. Plenty of, um, amazing guests on the show thanks for letting me share that there you go we love it uh yeah most podcasts don't make it past what is it uh episode 20 or something oh is that right yeah yeah um one of my friends who runs one of the big houses uh told me one day he goes the average% of podcasts will die by episode seven. The 20% that live will die by episode 2025, especially if they don't have their own.com. Oh, really?

And sites like Anchor have like probably half a million dead, what I call zombie podcasts on them. Yeah, yeah. And so that's why, if you can last, you know, and put out, you know, at least past 25 episodes, you're in the top percentage. Oh yeah. I'm around 200, something like that. There you go.

Good job. Yeah. So give us a 30,000 overview of what Retail Voodoo is and how it works. Sure. So Retail Voodoo, we're, we're a branding firm and branding is a super slippery word right now because it could mean a number of things. So branding is not just graphic design, but it is also in our world what we call strategic marketing. So when you're building a brand, it's all of those elements of, we call it North Star and business development. So target audience, what do you stand for? What are your mission, vision, values, all of those elements that you want to pull together to make sure that when you get to design and marketing, and all of those other kinds of activities, that you're all in alignment, and that you're creating materials and design elements that are all pointed to the same part of the business.

So it doesn't come across sort of disjointed or confusing out for the marketplace, if that makes any sense at all. So yeah, so we do that business part, and we do the design part, and we do design or marketing, and mostly for brands that are in food beverage wellness fitness all of that sort of anything you put in your body or on your body that's the that's the world that we work with there you go and i know we were talking about this uh cpg yeah consumer brand packaging or no hold on yeah cpg is consumer packaged goods there you go and it's kind of broken out in our industry in the in the packaging industry or the consumer goods industry you have everybody knows consumer electronics that's its very own category cpg is anything that you would

buy that you would put that would you would buy that's in a package or in a box or a bag or something like that and then it's delineated between fast-moving consumer goods so anything that you would purchase weekly or monthly like groceries or shampoo and then there's hard goods and soft goods like clothing and water skis and you know luggage and that that sort of thing there you go so how did you get in this business and we'll get into some details with advice on branding and stuff that people can really yeah that's a really crazy story so uh let's see when i first when i first uh was in the industry i was just a marketing generalist and then decided a marketing generalist a general generalist. So, yeah, I know. Touches my heart.

So, that means I did a little bit of everything for, you know, I was working at an insurance company at the time, which was a really great company to work for, but not exciting business, unless you're really into finance. And there are people that are really into finance and that's not me, but it's okay. Then I, then I started dabbling around and jumping around and I went to work for a.com at one point. This is in 2000. And then the.com,

those of us that are old enough to remember this, there was a.com crash. Really? Yes. Never heard of it. Never heard of it. I'm pretty young. Yeah. And I lost my job and I was scrambling and decided to jump into sales, which was not something I knew.

Working for a company that sold commercial paper really like went from boring to kind of boring. You know, outside of the dot com, the dot com was very fun and exciting. Was it done done done for a very similar format absolutely done dunder mifflin done something like that but along that journey i had made a pit stop at a small graphic design firm and had the uh called workhouse which doesn't exist anymore We were doing a lot of dot com. But somehow our owners managed to get a project working for Jane Goodall. And we, I wasn't responsible.

I was responsible for manufacturing the products that the designers came up with for her brand. And in 1999, the internet was super, super, super, like those of you that don't know this, before there was the internet, there was a lot of paper being used for pretty much everything. The internet was very, very young. And my job was to create all of the marketing materials

that you can easily access now digitally. And Jane Goodall came into our offices and she told me, because I was responsible for manufacturing everything. We had a one-on-one conversation where she said I was to make sure that everything that was produced was not detrimental to the planet, paid fair wages. All the things that kind of like this green movement is right now that is very common did not exist back then and so it was my job to find paper manufacturers that didn't dump wastewater into farming fields and so i was calling all around the world and i started to realize how absolutely challenging finding that information was.

And I spent, I think I was usually allocated like three hours for a project. And I think I spent nearly 100 hours calling all over the world trying to find product and manufacturers that could build all of these assets. So that sort of seeded the back of my brain in a sort of weird way and marinated. And when I went into the dot-com, this dot-com industry, which was one of the first companies that created cookies that we all hate, it was called Ad Relevance. And our job was to, we were the first company out there that created cookies for brands to own and plant on our computers.

Oh, the cookies from the computer. Yeah. Yeah. So you guys can blame me for that one too. Although I was not the tech person. I was a marketing person at the time. She knows that she's on the company. Don't blame her. No, we called it spiders at the time.

It was probably, we called them spiders at the time because they crawled the web. Yeah. So then I went to work for a manufacturing company where all of a sudden i realized that i had some intel on paper manufacturing for environmental purposes from my experience working with jane goodall and i started working with all the design firms in our region i'm in washington. So in our region to encourage environmental efficacy in their marketing materials. So how do you use post-consumer waste products, products that use natural bleachers, all stuff that we consumers don't think about. But from there,

really embedded myself in the design industry. And then in 2006, I joined my business partner here, David Lemley, who I've been working with since then. And he and I worked on REI when we converted REI onto 100% post-consumer waste paper. So we had been working together for a few years there. And then I started working for him and the rest is history. And David's experience is with consumer packaged goods. So I just joined him, brought my environmental experience into the conversation. So it's kind of an added experience and benefit that when brands come and work for us, especially those that want to leave a negative or positive footprint, however you want to look at it, on their marketing, which is a big deal for packaging right now,

is how not to create a bunch of garbage and try not to destroy the earth in the process of making a buck. So we have my history and David's prowess as a strategic brand builder, and we have worked on some pretty killer brands so that's my um 45 minute 5 000 foot 30 000 30 000 when you're up that high you know i know i know so that's just my background coming into like how did i get here is a strange journey right i met a number of people where it wasn't a linear path it was definitely one thing influenced another on the way hey well you've inspired me you know we've specifically used paper that is built by child labor and uh maybe we'll think about getting rid of that

i think that stuff still exists they don't they don't market it that way i can see these little chinese people putting together receipts of 8x11 paper. Oh, yeah. I don't know that it's China anymore. The paper that's done with child labor is being done in some of those countries that aren't as economically strong as China, which they've really turned into a thing, haven't they? Yeah. We still use faxes here. That's what we call the Internet.

So they're still behind. We use smoke signals. Yeah. That's good, too. The fire department says we can't do that anymore uh after that environmental after what we like to call or they like to call the incident and so the incident the judge calls the incident um so moving on now how long has retail voodoo been around and tell us about some of the brands you work with sure maybe tease out a a couple success stories. Sure. Well, okay, so Retail Voodoo in its Retail Voodoo incarnation has been around since 2011.

But prior to that, it was Lemley Design, and that's my business partner's name. And so technically the firm has been in existence since the early 90s. We converted it to RetailVoodoo in 2011 for a couple of reasons. One was because I joined because we were turning me into more of a partner and we wanted to have some equitability in there. And then also we had been a generalist firm that had done a lot of a lot of food and beverage, but we really wanted to kind of say, okay, we're really changing who we are as a business and moving towards a business as a

force for good. So we use this retail voodoo moniker because the kind of results that we are able to deliver for our brands are pretty remarkable. We see a lot of early and mid-stage brands that come to us and early to mid-stage could be a startup that doesn't exist or anybody less than five to 10 years, usually stuck somewhere in the five to $10 million range and really wanting to catapult to something much, much larger. But we've also worked with larger brands that many of your folks might be familiar with, like Essential Water, Russell Stover, are on the more recent side on the larger brands, but also retailers like West Marine and REI, we've worked with Starbucks, we've worked with PepsiCo. And then some of the smaller kind of

fun brands that are really, really growing right now, Lesser Evil, a fun brand that I like to point out is we've rebranded and basically developed a brand that maybe many of you have not even heard of because they just relaunched this year under a new name in March called Henrietta Said. It's a snacking brand. It's peanut snacks. It's buffalo flavored, buffalo mix flavored. So ancho chili and some really yummy flavors. But they launched in March and by May met their annual sales goals. So those are the sorts of results that the brands come to us expect is exceeding sales goals,

sales velocity, and also sales margin, which in layman's term means we sold more product and the company made more money per product than they had been in the past or than they had expected. There you go. Well, I like the name, Retail Voodoo. That sounds like a fun iteration, and it kind of seems like that's maybe what more consumers are looking for, something that's kind of a fun, spunky brand or, you know, some sort of flavor to it as opposed to, you know, Wilson & Wilson Associates. Well, I think it really depends on who you are. or a Walmart, which we've worked with in the past, they typically come to us when they're

wanting to do something different than what their current agencies are doing. So when you're a brand and you're a multi-billion dollar brand or multi-million dollar brand, where a 1% growth or 1% loss is in the millions of dollars, you tend to make more safer decisions or less risky. I'm going to call them risky decisions. And when you're really wanting to shake things up, you need to kind of step outside of that safe zone for a moment and be willing to take a calculated risk. So you come to a firm like ours, who is going to say, okay, this is the here's the safe zone. And just outside the safe zone looks like this. And here's what the relative opportunity looks like your relative growth opportunity or customer acquisition opportunity, or margin opportunity, all of those types of things.

So people come to us when they want to be challenged in their thinking and they want something different or if they're wanting significant disruption. On the other side is we've had brands come to us that were, there's one brand in particular that was a major national brand came to us after three years of sales decline. And they said, we're not quite sure what to do in this scenario. And they hired us to come in because Walmart had said, if you don't fix this, we're going to remove your product off the floor, which if you're selling product like this is a big deal. So yeah, so they came to us and they said can you help us figure out what the scenario was and we really needed to age down their positioning so earlier i said we did we

developed like what's your what's your north star we call that positioning in technical terms so we had to age down their north star they had been technically marketing to older americans and what we found was that opportunity was saturated and older americans meant also less viral virality you know there's you know social media there there's no potential growth so we had to take their positioning and age it down to an audience that was at the time uh younger millennials who really wanted access to the product, but they didn't want to buy something that looked like something their grandmother right. So it was a matter of like, okay, well, who are we talking to? Why did they buy? What is it? What's important to them? And then build that opportunity and then use our design language and

our marketing language in such a way that it would not only deliver on the messaging that we had created in the positioning this North Star, but then also resonate and turn into sales. And within one year time, they had recovered three years of sales decline and they were in the number one position in all what we call KPIs, basically everything that you would measure possible sales. They had gone to number one position in all what we call KPIs, basically everything that you would measure a possible sales, they had gone to number one. So we were able to revitalize that brand by just redefining the audience and then designing a language system for them that worked for them. Does that make sense? That totally does. And so basically by rebranding and re-imaging, perhaps they're rebranding their image to a more younger, maybe hipper audience. They were able to turn their sales around.

Do I have that correct? No, that's exactly what happened. So that's very, very important. One of my favorite brands when it comes to positioning that I think, I don't know if your listeners might know, because this is also for a younger audience, is a water brand in a can called Liquid Death. Are you familiar with this? Yeah, that's really popular. It's really popular. And for two or three years, they really struggled, maybe even a little bit longer because people, the industry had said to them, this is not our brand, but I love to talk about them as a as a case of positioning and strategy. People were within the industry said nobody's going to buy

water brought water in a can, that's just not going to happen. And then one of their marketers, and I give this to their founder, who is a marketer as well said um let's double down on the fact that aluminum is recyclable and we're going to go after this whole environmental play so liquid death is basically water and it stands for the death to plastic and all of their brand positioning if you go under their website and you look at their videos, it's very edgy because Generation X and younger millennials are very self-conscious about their environmental footprint and all of the elements of the generations before them and the damage that's been done in their mind. And they also wanted something that did not smell like mom and dad's water. So let's move away from the smart water.

Let's move away. I don't want that. I want something that talks to me. So they have like Tony Hawk on there and all of those brands. And the minute they started to talk about this environmental footprint and its alignment, their North star around liquid death and death to plastic. And then they started using all of these viral video techniques

that really spoke to this younger audience that brand took off. So rather than trying to be this water in a can for everybody, they said, our positioning is going to be for this younger audience. This is what's important to them. We can deliver on it. So let's go for it. And so to give people an idea, they seem like they were an overnight success this is a few years of them working on this and this is what positioning can do for you if you're flopping around and not quite sure what to do with your brand brand positioning start there because then you know what to do with your design then you know what to do with your marketing that's pretty brilliant and the the cans are really cool to look at. Totally. Kind of like a tattooish sort of lookish design.

You know, what's funny is for the longest time, and I'm not hip or cool, so I'm just an old guy. I don't believe that, Chris. Come on now. I'm a nice one on the lawn going, get up, my lawn. I've reached that point. Do you have a cane yet? I probably should have one so that I can whack people. There you go.

I don't need it to stand up because I go to the gym every day, but I just need one so I can hit people in the reach. Exactly. Because they get off my lawn. So I didn't really get it, but I looked at the branding on the can, and I always thought it was beer. Yep. Yep.

I thought it was like El Loco, you sort of yeah mexican-based beer and i was like i don't know why i put that two together and for the longest time i didn't get there was water and one day i was looking at one going what the hell is this again and and i'm like wait water yeah was it beer water like yeah and uh but you know i don't hang out with the hip crowd they don't tell well you're yeah. You're not the target audience, so you're not getting any of the messaging, right? I'm still drinking out of plastic bottles like an old bastard. Yeah.

So, well, what are you going to do? What are you going to do? What are you going to do? I'm not cool and hip. I learned I wasn't cool and hip sometime in my 20s when MTV started putting bands on, and I was like, who's that? Exactly. Yeah, and then they quit putting music on all together and I was like shit um so why why is branding important for brands entrepreneurs that are out there people that are out there

running companies why is branding important to them and and sometimes either repositioning or something really thinking about how they're building out that brand when they're coming to market. Yeah. Well, the long and short of it is this. When you know who your target audience is, how they want to interact with you, what they expect from you, and how they want to be communicated with, you end up saving a lot of time and a lot of money with your marketing dollars. That's number one, right? Otherwise, you're doing what you call a shotgun approach. Let's try this. Now let's try

this. Maybe they want this or maybe they want that. And you can certainly get to the end results of finding all of that brand position or all of your target audience and what brand positioning might work for you from just trial and error. But it takes a long time and it usually takes a lot of money and let's face it most of us are not multi most of brands that were that are out there in this universe are not multi-billion dollar brands or even in the nine figure million dollar brands and to be spending 40,000 or 100,000 or, you know, on activities that on marketing activities that don't generate simply because you're doing trial and error, it is frustrating. And I also think that or not, I don't think that I also know that most brands, and this is all businesses, service service business it could be any business

when you understand what your brand is and you understand what your audience is looking for then you can create even more products that fit their needs you can dump the products and services that don't fit their needs like there's just an overall cost you know we could get into the technology cost benefit to understanding your positioning you invest in what all of that looks like up front and you save yourself time and money on the end there you go and and it i mean do you have to sit down with people nowadays and say hey jenna what the hell do you people want already a little bit i I mean, there's, you can buy research for sure, right? You can buy research and you can pull people. Pulling people is a little bit tricky because most people, when they're being pulled, are trying to figure out how you want to answer, how you want the answer. And so they give you information that may be somewhat accurate, but maybe not 100% accurate. So it's a combination of polling people and researching people.

There's actually an amount of anthropology that goes into it. So we take a look at what are the buying trends, what's happening with social media, what's happening in popular culture, and then overlay that with any kind of research that we might do independently. And then say, based off of this information, here's, here's how we would position the brand, or here's, here's a kind of a design language that would work well for them. And when I say design language, I mean, all the graphic design elements of a brand that you would have. That's the design language. So, you know, is blue going to be better than green or sharp angles versus soft angles, that sort of thing. But, yeah, I don't know if I answered your question.

I think you did. There's a lot that goes into it. You know, we used to, back in the day of brick and mortar companies we used to use the shotgun approach yeah because we didn't know who our target market was absolutely so we you know we'd hit different uh industries or venues that we thought were doing that we sometimes dumpster dive competitors um and and and then we we kind of feel out where it would come and then and then we respond to the market and whatever the consumers are like, over here, we'll use you. And I've always admired people that can do branding and stuff because, you know, we're not good at it.

The Chris Voss show, you know, I remember when we started years ago, we were like, you know, we're going to name it something about social media and we're talking, you know, social media is really hot then. And I had the vision and foresight or the lack thereof, one of the two to say, I don't know that I want to be talking about this 10 years from now. Right. I don't know this is even going to be hot 10 years from now. Yeah. So what should we call it?

And so we called it the Chris Voss show because it could be whatever I want. Absolutely. Now it's just really an old man on a lawn with a mic yelling at young kids. Get off my lawn do you have kids no i don't oh my gosh have you ever seen that disney movie called nomeo and juliet no okay well there's a clip in there where one of the i have kids right so one of the one of the gnomes decides to attack another gnome garden for those listening you'll know this one and goes online and orders something called the terra firminator which is like the the um this basically this

lawnmower that basically will do construction on your yard and completely destruct it i'll send you a clip so that you can sure because you will totally laugh and say i need one of those well gnomes are terrorists but they are. Absolutely. Everybody knows that. I don't trust gnomes. Anytime I see one, I go the other way. And I don't trust anybody. Smart. No.

You never know when they're going to turn on you. No. They just have that funny face. They stand there and they're just waiting for you to turn your back. Yeah, see, now you got to go watch the movie because it'll all come to life. You may have nightmares, but it is a disney movie so i actually actually you know people fear clowns yes gnomes no you don't i'm just kidding okay but i don't know it sounds like a bit i could do instead of or something there you go i have a you know people have a clown thing i

have a gnome thing there you go um i but there's also a gnome OnlyFans that I subscribe to as well, but we won't get into that. There probably is one. There probably is. So this is kind of interesting. You've taken companies that are struggling with sales. They're struggling with their image. You know, there's lots of different probably examples,

probably some simple ones are like, you know, Federal Express, you know, came out out and said we're just going to be fedex because everyone calls us fedex yeah there's probably a few different um um you know like my name you know chris voss everyone just calls me stupid so now we just go with stupid and four letter expletives um but there's lots different ways that that brands can do that um and so so why is it important to hire an agency like yours to try and figure out a way to maybe get out of the box or whatever the case is to try and figure out a new way to rebrand? Well, it really depends on what your end goal is. So I want to go on the record of saying that not everybody that comes to us is struggling. There are many brands that are doing quite well and trying to figure out how can I do better or setting themselves up for what's really popular with small

to midsize brands right now is creating a brand that they can exit with an exit means that they can sell for a lot of money. And so they'll look to us to create something with incredible value. So why is it that you would go with a branding firm, particularly if you're in CPG? Why would you go with a firm with a CPG expertise? Or if you're in medical industry, why would you go to somebody with medical expertise? It's no different than if you are training for a marathon and you want to get better at your PRs or you are a weightlifter or do yoga, you typically want to go to those people that can help you get to that next level because it's

really hard to what I like to say, operate on yourself. You you get to that next level, because it's really hard to what I like to say, operate on yourself, you can get to a certain level, but what you can't see or what you don't know about the marketplace, or it could be hindering you. And in whatever your end goal is, so you want to come to somebody that's been doing this for brand over brand over brand over brand, because we bring continual upgraded expertise. Not only do we do brand work, but on our end, we're constantly educating ourselves. And that's a question that I would also recommend that when you're working with any expert, whether it's a CPA or branding firm, just find out how do you guys stay on top of trends? How do you guys make sure you're implementing something that is 2023 looking forward,

not something that you've been doing since 1989 or whenever. So we also know that if you are in a place of, you know, listen, our sales are flat or we're losing margin or something's going on. Sometimes the changes that need to be made are ones that are hard to make or hard to see. And so it's much easier to have somebody external do the quote unquote, operation and say, this is really where the error is. Mostly there's blind spots in place. It's not that people don't know what they're doing. We work with many, many smart people,

many, many smart brands. But if you were working with a brand, and let's say you have wearing too many hats within your organization, you're probably not going in deep enough, or you don't have time to do the investigative work, you want somebody to partner alongside with you, you need that external expertise, like you would a doctor or a teacher or a therapist in any other particular way. Those are all the reasons why you would want to use somebody externally for any sort of expertise, marketing, finance, HR, that sort of thing. Do you guys do brand repair? And, you know, it sounds like you keep brands from getting in trouble, but do you do brand repair? Like if they miss brand or they, they step outside of their norm and they end up kind of in the PR,

uh, poopoo toilet. Yeah. That it really depends on what the situation is. Most people, if you're having, uh, what we would call a PR crisis,

that's going to be more communications. That's going to be a PR specialist. That would not be us. We can help triage after the fact, especially if it's something that is brand centric. So if there's a problem with the brand intrinsically that needs to be updated, then that's when we partner up with PR folks and firms will sometimes reach out to us and say, hey, we need to do some triage on this brand positioning or the brand in general, then we'll assist. But typically, if you are having a PR crisis in the moment,

you usually have a PR expert that's in there immediately, because brand work takes about two to three months before it can be done and then it takes it's like four to six months to investigate develop and then implement and if you're in the middle of a crisis four months is could you could be out of business by then yeah i don't know if you want to get into this but we we we have uh one of the uh anheuser-busch family members on next week. They published a book, and the book is about how it went from a family business to being taken over. There's a story, I guess, where it was taken over by a company, and it ended up being, I guess, a hostile takeover.

Kind of a story about the brand and stuff but there is kind of a famous kerfuffle right now about uh i guess bud light trying to maybe do a little rebranding or expanding the brand or yeah segue yeah and and you know we've talked about how you know branding and and and and managing your brand in such a way sometimes it can backfire it can yeah it can so it can end up some different ways yeah well the bud light situation the bud light situation is a little bit tricky because you can tell that their intentions on the front end were to create an inclusivity in a category that generally doesn't have any. So what that means is light beer is not really known to be a really wide-ranging category of types of drinkers, right? And I think the biggest challenge that they had was beer in general is seeing decline in sales because gen z and younger millennials are not drinking alcohol at the rate that those gen xers and older and even older millennials uh drink and

so beer is really getting hit very hard and this inclusivity play that they were doing with the can was a pivot to talk to a younger generation that is open to all of this kind of life every lifestyle and i think this is without me seeing what the strategy was and this so i'm just like i am what do you call that quarterbacking yeah we're just we're just kind of kicking the can around if i if i was to have be sitting in the room with them i'm imagining that the conversations were around how to um how to bring in this new audience and what happens with with all of the brands that we work with is the same thing that happened in this moment how do i get a new audience without alienating my existing audience and i think that the bud light the recommendations on the bud light audience side when they were looking at it perhaps were um not thinking about what the what the current audience how they might respond to it. That's the first part. Now, the second part

of this is, unfortunately, it only takes a few people. And when I say a few in a country of billions, it only, you know, it could be a couple million people that have an issue and start flooding social media and creating a negative backlash where it's possible that a majority of their audience is like i don't care i'm gonna drink the bud light beer but now you've got a million or two people or a million people that are talking shit out there excuse my french and now we've got a pr crisis right and the unfortunate component is is the influencer that they that bud light used was caught in the crosshairs and i am not sure that that person was supported when all the shit went down so there's a number of things that happened there and i don't know all the backstory

but well all i'm looking at is you could tell bud Light was just like going, let's just create a more inclusive product. We know that this audience is open to it. Oh, crap. These people are totally against this. Bud Light did exactly what they should have done from a business standpoint is they tried to see if they could keep that campaign going. And once they realized it wasn't going to fly, they abandoned it and move back to some more traditional, that more of the traditional marketing. I don't know that they've recovered that audience yet. It's possible.

Or the business for that matter. Right. Right. Yeah. Evidently they haven't. Yeah. And it, it's the same beer.

It's just, for me, it's just it's just like light beer for hell's sakes who drinks that crap like i was i was just like who there are people drinking white beer well probably gonna lose my light beer oh you might oh the i just was like really i personally was a little bit shocked about the the violence that was demonstrated on social media. Yeah, like people shooting their beers. If you don't like the beer, don't buy it. Yeah. End of story.

Done. Wasting good beer. I mean, I used to drink and wasting good beer. That seems like a heresy in and of itself you know uh there's a lot to that whole kerfuffle and and uh and it seems like it's going to be written about in business books from years to come because a lot of beer brands have have uh have embraced or or you said you know we're acceptance of uh being inclusive and btq community and you know how they responded to it where they just kind of went blackout with no

not saying anything for like 30 or 60 days one thing that was interesting to me was the and I and I found it offensive actually as a man was the young lady who was one of their VPs and they caught a video of her where she basically just crapped on the people who bought the brand and she's like well it's a frat boy brand and yeah just the thing men do to get together and it's time to change all that and throw you know fuck that model yeah and that was the whole thing and i was offended by it i was like yeah yeah well fuck you man and i'm very supportive of the lgbtq community yeah um but i was just like, wow. It's like the PGA Tour just saying, fuck people who play golf.

We're going to go with Frisbee golf or something. Yeah. It's not a smart idea. So when we talk about brand positioning, let's circle back to this whole brand positioning thing. If your company does not honestly believe in the audience that got you to where you are, you need to check yourself. So if she genuinely said those things and she meant those things, that to me is an indication of poor leadership. Because you cannot discount, regardless of whether you align with the beliefs or the people of of the brand you can't discount the fact that they're the consumer and if you are not consumer first your consumers will know

right away and if so if she's discounted this brand and started targeting a new audience and then talking publicly about what the former audience is like, that's going to be hard to recover from. And there will probably need to be a little bit more. They'll see more PR as the brand tries to recover their sales and their audience. And that regard, you have to,

you have to respect your consumer and your clients. Otherwise you're going to have a problem. If they feel like you don't respect them then you then you have problems and i think i think her video was the real impetus really yeah they caught on to the they locked into that really clearly yeah because you know most most beer brands have done lgbtq uh inclusive in some way they've done it in some way every brand has yeah but you know so why did it go? And I think it was just her catalyst sort of video that they caught.

Really? Because I saw that right away in the thing. And even I was offended. I don't drink light beer. I'll drink normal beer. Yeah. I'm a man, damn it. I'm not drinking any light beer.

American beer is so awful anyway. But next week we'll have Billy Bush on, and that's not Billy Bush from Jimmy Carter days. Right. Um, that's Billy Bush, uh, from the Bush, uh,

and it's going to be interesting. He wrote the book about something else completely Bush and their family and stuff. But it'll be interesting to see his take on how that spun out. Uh, the, the moral, the lesson here is branding is important and honoring your brand and honoring

your consumer is important. Absolutely. What else haven't we touched on that we can move on to? Oh, man. Well, I don't know how much of your audience is in the CPG space. But on the packaging front, one of the biggest things. Let's talk a little bit about we're going to just talk about design here for a moment and the hot topic of the day, which is this generative AI. Oh, there you go.

And its influence in design right now. So one of the biggest things that we are seeing in our industry are startup brands using what I'm going to be very very clear generative ai versus ai so ai is something that is technology that we've told the computer to think about and do and generative ai is kind of this open platform where it's creating from sources out in the universe that it has access to incidentally I don't know if you know this, but there is a, I don't remember, but part of the government is going to be investigating the chat GPT platform because the something about where and how chat GPT collects information, whether it's copywritten or not, and uses it as an aggregation tool is something of concern. So I thought that was interesting. But let's talk about AI in the world of marketing

and in the world of design. And that is what we're using. We use generative AI as a kind of a foundational tool, you cannot create something net new. Like AI takes what's out there and creates an aggregate of what's out there. And if you are looking to create something new that's disruptive, generative AI won't do that. Generative AI will create something that fits whatever is happening

out in the marketplace right now. And if you need massive disruption, you can't use something that's already out in the marketplace. So how our team uses generative AI is in two ways, whether we're looking at writing or design, we create, we have a set of prompts that we like to use to help us kind of create a thinking point. So rather than starting with a blank page, you know, we've got our brand positioning, we've got all of our tools, we know who our target audience is, that's great. Now it's time to do the creative component. We use AI as kind of like a what is a blank slate? Where do we start from?

Because what AI generative AI is great at that humans are not at is generative AI doesn't have a bias. And as humans, we always have a bias. We always take it. So there is a particular approach. So when you're looking at design firms, you might notice there is always a there's always some consistency between design. Some design firms sell their design and their capabilities based off of having a style. And because people come to us asking us to build these businesses that make loads and loads of money are incredibly disruptive. They look to us for opportunity to crack things open. So it's really how we recommend with, and we recommend this to any marketer out there is to use AI as a way of

looking as a tool to kind of look at whatever work they're doing in a way that they might not naturally do it so that they can remove bias from the work from whatever their outputs are does that make sense definitely definitely uh it's interesting how the whole thing is going to work out i believe the uh copyright uh patent uh u.s government thing has already said that you know they're not going to allow you know certain things like that to be licensed there's kind of an interesting thing with copyright where you have access to parody. But they may have to

rewrite the rules on it because it's one thing if I'm parodying something. So if I take the Chris Voss show and I'm a brand and I write stuff on it or hey, look at this idiot with all the blue stuff in the background. That's parody.

And commentary and I think hey, look at this idiot with all the blue stuff in the background. That's parody and commentary. And I think there's some rules that has to kind of improve the product or something a little bit. But when it's being taken from like 200 different sources or something, and you're just like, it's kind of interesting how that whole thing is going to work out. Yeah. I just finished up my mba program and the my last quarter we talked about we were talking about legal and we were and our professor was talking about how generative ai and uh is going to be challenging

a lot of copyright laws then we'll probably see a lot of changes in the next several years. Yeah. And I know some ad agencies and different agencies like yours have banned it because they're worried that they'll pick up other people's work or copyright issues. And really what the essence of what they sell is the individual talent. Absolutely. And the skill and their, their, their copy that they sell. Yeah. And that's the hard work of it. And the skill and their copy that they sell.

Yeah. And that's the hard work of it. And, you know, if you're just, I don't know, editing whatever GPT is spitting out. Yeah. I mean, how much value is in that really? Well, it depends on how you use it, right? Yeah, that's true.

So, for example, like I'll tell you, like we just finished up um another packet we're going to be delivering um some concepts to a client and for us we usually do somewhere i don't know 60 to 100 concepts internally before we present about two or three and uh there was, I think there were a couple of concepts that were foundationally came from chat GPT, whatever the equivalent is. But when we layer it against the positioning, it wasn't working. It wasn't meeting the needs. But that doesn't mean that that idea didn't go, oh, I like how that's happening. Let's pull that part of the idea and

apply it over here which is all creative is creative is take what the need is and start to go oh i like this color i like how this is interacting or i like how this does something like that so it i think if you are lifting chat gT wholly for itself, you're going to get shit. It'll look, it'll look beautiful. We call it lipstick on a pig. It'll look beautiful. It's not going to do the work that it needs to do,

but that doesn't mean it's, it can't be a tool. Just like when in branding, I, I, this was before my time, but I know about this is when it went, when computers were first brought into graphic design, it was all being done by hand.

People were losing their mind. Computers were going to kill the industry. It was going to do it was going to and and if anything computers has amplified creativity to a point that at that time they couldn't have even thought of yeah like at all so i think we're on the front end of that and i don't think people should be afraid of it i think they have to be vigilant is probably the word doesn't make sure that you're not you know like everything that we do we run through copyright everything that we do is cross-checked because if we do anything whether it's creating a name creating a package creating marketing activities if it isn't legit that's our credibility on the

line period end of story but is it something to be afraid of? No, it's gonna, it's gonna, you know, don't use it 100% of the time quite yet, watch what it does. But what you don't want to be is a marketer that avoids it. And then in five years, when it's now working as it should be, you're going to be behind, like you have to start to think about how to incorporate it into, and I think this is going to be true with all businesses. Just play with it. See what happens. Don't use it as a crutch. Use it as kind of another tool. Does it help you think differently? Does it help you think better, smarter? That's what I would say on our end. What we're being told, at least in the design industry, as all of us senior levels are talking about ourselves, if we aren't looking at how to leverage AI as a tool in five years, those that don't know how to use it are going to be unemployable. There you go.

And I believe you're true. You're correct in that. Because, you know, I think to me, and I believe you're true. Uh, you're correct in that because, uh, you know, I think it's, to me, it's a wonderful idea of playground. Like you can fart around with ideas where you go,

uh, Hey, uh, try this and see what works. And, you know, I mean, I think I had someone on the show,

one of the professors or authors from some big school. And he said, he said, we're going to be maybe creating less and writing less but being more editors yeah than anything else maybe yeah maybe yeah yeah there's a recent story of the attorney who who used uh chat gbt to write his uh argument and references like then none of them existed yeah like it just made up Yeah, somebody didn't do their homework. The internet has fake stuff on it.

Who knew? What? Yeah, a small portion of it, I think. Oh, wow. Maybe it's the vastness of it. I'm shocked. I forget. It's one of the two.

Shocked, I say. Shocked. So there you go. Well, this has been really insightful, Diana. How can people reach out to your company and work with you, get from you consult etc etc sure well you can always reach out to me on my i'm on linkedin i'm on linkedin all the time diana fryc there's only one of me um thankfully or unfortunately however you want to look at it and i communicate a lot through there you can also and you can link in with me too you don't have to communicate with me you can just follow my bs you can also take a look at us at

retail dash voodoo retail hyphen voodoo.com and my um we're on linkedin facebook and instagram right now that's our only channels. And you can email me directly on diana.fryc at retail-voodoo.com. There you go. And did we get a plug-in for the podcast? Sure, yeah. And those of you that are interested in hearing about women leaders

in this kind of food, beverage, and wellness space on the CPG side, take a look at the Gooder podcast. We are on apple apple is our where our biggest audience is and spotify on amazon all the major platforms were out there as well you'll find more details on the retail voodoo website as well for that uh for the podcast there you go well it's been fun diana we've learned a lot and kicked around the can uh thank you very much for coming on.

We really appreciate it. Oh, gosh. My pleasure. Absolute pleasure. Thank you. Thank you, Chris. And thanks to my audience for tuning in. As always, you can find us on Apple, too, as well.

You can find us at GoodReason.com, FortressCruzFonts, LinkedIn.com, FortressCruzFonts. Subscribe to the LinkedIn newsletter. Go to YouTube.com, TikTok, you know, all the crazy places all those kids are playing and whatever. Thanks for tuning in. Be good to each other. Stay safe, and we'll see you guys next time. YouTube.com, TikTok, you know, all the crazy places all those kids are playing and whatever. Thanks for tuning in. Be good to each other. Stay safe, and we'll see you guys next time. And that should have a sound effect.