BRAND SECRETS AND STRATEGIES

PODCAST #36

Hello and thank you for joining us today. This is the Brand Secrets and Strategies Podcast #36

Welcome to the Brand Secrets and Strategies podcast where the focus is on empowering brands and raising the bar.

I’m your host Dan Lohman. This weekly show is dedicated to getting your brand on the shelf and keeping it there.

Get ready to learn actionable insights and strategic solutions to grow your brand and save you valuable time and money.

LETS ROLL UP OUR SLEEVES AND GET STARTED!

Dan: Welcome. Today we're talking about the single most important thing that every brand must do, I mean every brand. Every brand must get their product in more consumers' hands if they're going to be successful. Nothing happens until somebody buys something, and consumers can't buy your products if they can't find them, that means that you need a successful selling story to get your product on retailer’s shelves and into the hands of more shoppers.

Today's guest is John Foraker. I'm honored to have this candid conversation about this very topic with John about, how do you help brands get their products on more retailer shelves and into the hands of more shoppers? This was perhaps the number one question at Expo West this year. I heard it repeatedly in the keynotes as well as in the breakout sections. This came up in almost every conversation that I had with brands as well. On today's podcast John shares his in-depth insights as well as what he learned while at Annie's and now at Once Upon a Farm. Here's John.

I'm thrilled to be talking to John today. John, I'd love for you to tell us a little bit about yourself. And I'm really curious, how did you make the transition from banker to entrepreneur?

John: Hi Dan. I've been in the industry for a long time. My first role was in a startup company in about 1994, while I was at grad school at UC Berkeley, which was a transition for me away from corporate banking. I had been in the wine industry as a banker and really interested in brands, and so I had to go back to business school to learn a little bit about business and then jumped into something entrepreneurial. And then, that startup grew into a small specialty food company, and led me to make an investment in Annie's in 1999, and then in 2004 I began running Annie's full time and brought it out to the West Coast. I was with Annie's up until September of 2017, and now jumped on to a start up, Once Upon a Farm.

Dan: And then in fact, actually one of the things I wanted to talk to you about is, you consider yourself to be an entrepreneur at heart, what do you mean by that?

John: I think entrepreneurs have a stereotype about them, but when I think of entrepreneurs I think of people who are unbound by conventional wisdom and are always thinking of different ways to do things, and thinking of ways to advance a situation or a business opportunity by doing something new and also having a tolerance for risk, and getting involved in something small and scrappy at the beginning. It requires a little bit different mentality than going to work for a big stable company and elevating the traditional career ladder.

Dan: And I would have to agree with you completely. And that's in fact actually why I do what I do, because I'm trying to help these young entrepreneurial brands find a way to compete head-to-head, toe-to-toe with the big guys, while not becoming corporate in terms of their focus, not the 9:00 to 5:00 if you will. So I really appreciate that. At Annie's, could you share a little bit about your corporate culture? And the reason I wanted to bring that up is, you wrote an article about how you're assembling your team at Once Upon a Farm, and you tied it back to what you did it Annie's. And I thought it was very inspirational, especially in the sense that you leverage the best people around you to help you really succeed.

John: Yeah, I did not grow up in a traditional big CPG company. Much like a lot of the entrepreneurs in this space who have grown businesses, I learned a lot by doing it myself, and most of that learning came by surrounding myself with people who knew more about certain elements of marketing or operations or finance than I did in the context of a CPG company. So I learned a lot the hard way, at Annie's the business grew from about $6 million a year in 1999 to about ... It was 400 million when I left it, though it was about 200 million before we were bought by General Mills in 2014. And through that whole period I was learning and once that business really got a team that was scalable in place, our business really took off.

And I always learned from my mistakes, and I always am trying to learn every single day, actually it's a philosophy of mine. So if you're a small entrepreneur out there like I was, you’ve got to surround yourself with really great people. Great people are going to be what makes you successful. I always say, Annie's was a really great brand in many ways, but the reason the business was so successful over time was 100% due to the really high quality people that were working on the business throughout its entire life, even the people that weren't there through the whole run. People are going to make the difference in your business, and learn to look for and lean on the best quality people you can get to associate with you.

Dan: I appreciate you saying that. On that note, I run into a lot of brands, startup brands trying to figure out what to do, and fortunately, unfortunately they effectively hand their keys to someone else and say, "Here drive the ship." What words of advice would you have for those brands, for those entrepreneurs that are trying to start something, that are trying to figure out how to go to market, that are trying to learn what you learned? And also, the fact that you're able to surround yourself with a really good team, how would you leverage that or how would you recommend leveraging that methodology or those ideas with a young brand?

John: The interesting thing about this space is that there are so many people that are willing to help and to mentor, and it's a very close-knit entrepreneurial community in the natural organic space. Get out there and network and get to know people. Some of the experience you'll get in your business will be by hiring the right quality people that have the right level of experience, some will come from getting involved in networking groups of entrepreneurs who are sharing their experiences with each other. The thing is, every problem you face as an entrepreneur in the natural organic food industry or supplements or personal care, whatever it is, somebody else has faced it, there's almost no new problem.

And the key is, when these companies are growing fast and need to grow really fast to stay ahead of competition and build value for their investors and shareholders and yourself, you don't have time to like slowly figure stuff out. And so you’ve got to go get good access to the best quality help you can to really scale the business. And that's the advice I give people all the time is, surround yourself with people who are great, whether it's the contractors, consultants, full time employees, partners, co-founders, whatever.

Dan: Thank you for that. I would also add that it’s really about making an investment now while you're early in this cause, this mission, is so much more valuable than having to go back and fix things down the road. Do you have any insights or any thoughts about that?

John: No doubt about it. I mean, I could tell you many, many stories of companies that didn't have the packaging right or didn't have the positioning right and went and invested a significant amount of resources in building out broad distribution, spending slotting money, getting out there and then realizing that the products just didn't work. It's so much better to get stuff right at the beginning or experiment small scale and really work it. And it has to do with everything from the way the product looks, the way the product is, how you price it, how you promote it, all those things. If you're going to make a mistake, make it early when the business is small versus letting it manifest and then becoming a really big problem that you have to clean up later. It's much better to do it early.

Dan: Absolutely. In fact, it's not just a small business problem. I shared with audience on one of the podcasts that I used to work for the largest CPG company in the world at one point. And we came up with a product that was just phenomenal, but the people that did all the marketing, putting it together and trying to come up with a concept and stuff didn't bother to involve some of the other groups within the company. Long story short, the product was too tall for the shelf. And so, to get it on the retailer shelf meant completely resetting every category thus the product failed. So this is not something exclusive to a small brand. Do you have any other insights around that?

John: Yeah, that's right. The silliest thing in retrospect can be the reason that you don't succeed. We haven't talked about the manufacturing part of the business like what kind of a co-packer you align yourself with if you're going to choose to do your production in somebody else's facility. That can also be a big deal. Do they have the capacity to keep up with you if really grow? Do they have the right equipment that you need to succeed? This gets back to the question you asked at the beginning about an entrepreneur.

Entrepreneurs obsess about these things. They live out in retail stores. I'm very much like that like, when I'm on the road or if I have a little free time, I'm in retail store looking at what the shelves are like, what is placed where, how high things are, how many items fit on a four foot set. You just have to obsess with all those details and make sure that you get that all right before you go to a trade show or go sit down with a customer and sell to make it work.

Dan: Makes so much sense and I can't emphasize it more. And earlier in my career, that's how I got my start in terms of really understanding how the categories are put together. And I guess where I'm going with that is that, I'm now at the point, I'm sure you are too, where you can walk into the store and almost instantly tell who designed the schematic, whether it was a big brand or a little brand and what their strategies were behind where they put the various products. What I'm getting at is that, usually the larger brands are the ones that are trying to drive their products at retail. And sometimes there's a strategy there to have consumers overlook those small disruptive brands in favor of their products. Do you have any thoughts or insights about how does a small brand become more relevant on shelf?

John: Yeah. In terms of the way it physically manifests at shelf or actually get there in the right place?

Dan: A little bit of both and thank you for bringing that up. What I'm trying to do with my free course, articles and in this podcast is I'm trying to help brands get that healthy start from day one, where do they go on the shelf, instead of just saying, "Hey, I'm a nice guy, we’ve got a cool slogan, and great packaging, and a great mission." How do they help the retailer drive sales in their stores? But that includes, where they go on the shelf, how they're positioned, and how they help the retailer help their shoppers find their products.

John: Yeah. So I mean obviously, like one of the most basic things is you’ve got to have a package that pops and that is seen on the shelf irrespective of where it is. But obviously you know like location on shelf matters a tremendous amount, if you're on the top or on the bottom, or even worse if you've got one item over here and one item over there and they're not brand-locked. I mean that's a disaster and it'll decrease your odds of success dramatically. I think one of the most important things, assuming you get the look on the packaging right, is to really understand the category story. And this is one of the big challenges that small brands have. They may not have access to category data, but they can get it.

You can get it through your broker or you can get a snapshot, you can learn enough to know what are the best selling items in the category or what is no longer selling well in the category and then develop a really strong story for how you build the category. What is it that you do incrementally? Are you trading consumers up from something conventional? That is, that they want a better, maybe organic option. Are you bringing new consumers into the category that wouldn't otherwise be there if you weren't there? Those insights I think you can gather very scrappily and put them together in a PowerPoint deck that you can use to present to a retail buyer. And when you do that as a very small company, you're already putting yourself in the top 5%.

I mean you're already showing that you understand how to sell and how to get the products into distribution. You can get that by engaging somebody who does consulting like you or others, or you can talk to friends who are working and have trade marketing experience in other big CPG company who are willing to mentor on the side. You can get it from a lot of different places but it's amazing to me the number of entrepreneurs that develop a product and then go start to sell it without really understanding the broad context for the category and what they're trying to do. And your odds will be dramatically better if you take the time to do that.

Dan: Thank you so much for saying that. This is the same thing I've been saying and trying to really focus on all these years. And I've had such a hard difficult time helping brands understand this, so anyone who's listening, replay the last section. This is so critically important and to go one step further, one of the brands that I was working with early on when I started working in the natural channel, had an energy shot. Energy shots were in 12 different locations within the store and they had no idea. So there are ways to do it as you mentioned, you can Google, you can do research and there are a lot of cost effective ways to truly understand the category. And again to reemphasize, getting people to help support you in developing your selling story is the key to your success.

Thank you again for mentioning that. So how did you leverage those insights with Annie's to help you grow the sales and help you become the Category Leader? And by the way, Category Leader as I would define it, is anyone as you said John, who is willing and able to take a leadership role in the category by helping the retailer understand who your consumer is, how they shop the category, when they buy your products what else do they buy and then what does that consumer look like in terms of their dynamic, how do they share with their friends et cetera.

John: Yeah. So Annie's was one of the first, really natural organic brands that really connected with this coming wave of millennial consumers. It was founded in 1989, the first 10 years or so, people were finding it in hardcore natural shops - there were really not any alternatives. There were a couple grocers in the North-East that were very progressive, Stop and Shop and Wegmans for example, but others who actually put the product into the mainline set, which was really way ahead of its time. And so what we learned is that we appealed to this coming shopper and we knew that the shopper had very different values around food and we were able to just Google and get basic demographic information about the shopper and learn about it.

We were talking about this group of shoppers even before people tagged them as millennials. And we would go in and talk to retailers and say, "Hey, there's this big group of shoppers coming, they're very different than the shoppers before them. And when they get to the place where they're buying product in your grocery store, they're going to be looking for brands like this." And we used success stories from certain retailers and explained how that could work in there, we showed how when we were in the mainstream set of the store, the total category grew faster and not because we were necessarily trading people up from Kraft for example, although we did a little of that.

We were mainly bringing consumers into the category that wouldn't shop it if they weren't a brand like Annie's there. And that was such powerful insight and we had to sell at that, but once people really figured that out we got lots of distribution that came with that. And then we used that learning to expand the brand into other parts of the store. So we moved it over into crackers and then ultimately into little Graham Cracker ... Bunny Cheddar Graham Crackers. And we use that same philosophy of building a category story, telling it to retailers as a way to really grow our business.

Dan: I'm so glad you did. And actually on a side note it reminded me of something. When I was the onsite business consultant at SPINS working at natural specialty sales, I was highly involved in this project at the beginning and my argument was, how you needed to be integrated next to the other products because, for the exact reasons you said John, if a consumer can’t find your product one, they can't buy it and two, your consumer is more valuable because they read the labels, they understand what's in their product and more importantly, it's that consumer that will buy other products that are healthier, that are, more premium to the category. So thank you for getting into that. Take me back down memory lane. That was a lot of fun. What other types of insights or strategies would you want to share around Annie's? And then I want to get into Once Upon a Farm in a minute.

John: Yeah, I think ... Again, we've hit on a lot of the key ways that we build the brand with retailers but I think when it really comes down to the thing that separated us the most from lots of other companies that were our peers early on, we really understood our consumer. We started doing our own version of Consumer Research. In the beginning was, a card table with a bowl of Cheddar Bunnies in front of Whole Foods with a questionnaire asking questions. We got more and more sophisticated as we got bigger obviously. And that consumer knowledge and insight is so powerful, not only does it increase the odds of the things that you're doing are going to work and your consumer will respond to them, but it's also incredibly powerful to sell with.

And I think too many times people, especially entrepreneurs they kind of fall in love with their current product and why it's important. And they may have empathy for the consumer because oftentimes they are their consumer but they need to get into a habit and discipline of really talking to consumers and testing and learning and informing them what you're doing by talking to the consumers that are going to buy you. And if you can do that, represent that information well you're going to increase your odds of success. You won't guarantee it because there's no such thing as perfect research but you'll definitely increase your odds. And I see a lot of companies that do well over time, really learn that, they gather that information and put it to their benefit in the way that they manifest the brand.

Dan: Absolutely. In fact, another funny thing I used to say when I was working with brands back when I was helping with their project, was, "Just because your mom likes it doesn't mean that everyone will."

John: Yeah, of course.

Dan: As part of the pitch slam at Expo West, and my brand made it into the final four. In my mind a solid final two. But the point is, mentoring these brands you've got to know this. And thank you for bringing that up again. So to reiterate what John's talking about if I may, big brand use focus groups. Focus groups have people that get paid to come in and share an opinion, that is night and day different than paying attention to what your consumer looks like. So John you said, going into the store and talking to people on the shelf ... I was talking to Phil Lempert in a previous episode. He will walk up to a perfect stranger and ask him, "Why did you buy this product?" If you do that kind of research as a brand, you can learn far more.

And then, thank you again for mentioning this, leveraging those insights with the retailer, that's far more valuable. The consumer that you drive into a store than any slotting, any type of menu fee that you would pay to a retailer to have your product on the shelf. And it's all about that selling story. And again, it's about leveraging the strengths that you bring as a brand to the retailer to help drive sales, and then being able to communicate that effectively. So thank you for sharing that. Any other thoughts before we transition into Once Upon a Farm and learning more about that?

John: Nope.

Dan: Well, thank you for sharing that. Okay, so now Once Upon a Farm. I think it's great you're going down this path. And if I can frame it this way, I've been talking to a lot of venture capitalists et cetera, and they think, "Wait a minute, there's not a lot of money in baby food or baby products." That's not the argument that you want to bring to the table. The argument in terms of why the brand matters is that, as Jennifer Garner said at Expo, it is that core consumer that will do anything or spend any amount of money to get the very, very best for their child. And it's that core consumer that will drive sales to the category. So when I worked for Kimberly Clark, there's really no margin in diapers, but it was about the consumer that we drove into the store, that profitable consumer that bought all the other things while they were there, any thoughts on that?

John: Yeah, that's very important. Back to the comment that like there's no money in baby food. Yeah, there's no money in the orders, there's tight margins and compressed margins in center store baby food because there really hasn't been any innovation there over the last decade. And so what you do is you end up getting a situation where you have three or four big conventional CPG competitors just imitating each other. And then once there's perceived to be not that much differentiation between the products, the next level to follow is everyone just buys volume by promoting.

And you get categories like that, where margins get compressed, obviously the manufacturer margins get compressed because of the heavy trade spending. You get channel proliferation too, where for example because the items are out in Wal-Mart or Target or on Amazon at a very low price, the conventional retailers need to match those prices, so they end up getting their margins compressed to be very low. To me that's a category opportunity that's just ripe for disruption. And when you look at baby food, and this is why I went into this business opportunity with Jen and the other two founders is because you can buy pet food, refrigerated pet food in about 20,000 stores in the United States.

And when you talk to the consumers of refrigerator pet food what you find is very similar behavior to moms and kids, and dads and kids. They're like, they love their pet, they're willing to do almost anything to give them a better opportunity at health and they're willing to invest in that. And so you look at category, you're, "Why is there no refrigerated baby food?" It's not because consumers aren't open and ready for the idea. It's because manufacturers and retailers haven't created the right products and put them in the right part of the store where consumers could buy them.

And so, I've never seen a dislocation like this in my whole career actually. And so, we are taking this great brand, we're expanding the product line and we're getting it into lots and lots of retailers, you'll see by the end of summer. And we're largely placing it in existing refrigerated sets, it's kind of adjacent to a Kid Yogurt, in that area because it makes sense for moms and dads that's where it would be. Down the road we're also experimenting with refrigeration, and so we have a lot of different places to grow and it's a fun opportunity to grow something small and hopefully create a whole new subcategory that didn't exist really.

Dan: Well, there's such a need for it. You’ll get a kick out of this as a side note, there is a retailer in Nederland, Colorado that the majority of the store ... I shouldn't say majority, but most of the store is dedicated to pet food. So it shows you where their priority is up there. But getting back to what you're saying, true innovation is started in the natural channel. And what I mean by that, you kind of mentioned that, is that the big brands just copy what everyone else does. The rinse and repeat mentality. So coming up with a disruptive product, coming up with something that actually meets the needs of the consumers, consumers will spend more money on organic, to be able to tap into that I think is brilliant.

And the fact that again, it's not necessarily the story in terms of the product but the consumer that buys a product. I love the idea that, that you found a way to help connect those dots between the better consumer, the consumer, the new parent that is willing to spend a premium, that wants the best for their child and then solving that problem where it's not just the old ... I'm not going to mention any names, but some of the old baby foods where it's just the same stuff only in a different package. So thank you for going down that path. What other thoughts or insights would you want to share around that? And can I ask, how is that going in terms of your conversation with the retailers?

John: Yeah, you're right. I mean the natural channel is often where these innovations spring up. And one of the first retailers that put this product in even before I got there when I and Cassandra had found this company in late 2015, early 2016 was ____________________________in Southern California.

Dan: The retailer.

John: A really high quality natural retailer and they put a fridge into a couple stores and the product really started selling like crazy. So we do, ours is HPP, pressure processed baby food that hasn't seen heat, and so it's got 120 days shelf life or so. And because we manufacture it that way, we're retaining all the real fresh ingredients and fresh nutrition just like if mom and dad were making t at home. And so when I first was thinking about coming over here and talking to Jen and Cassandra, I always thought that the biggest challenge would be getting retailers to understand that they needed this in their store and it was a big wide space for them, and then to get them to actually put it in. And we got on a lot of airplanes flying around talking to retailers and we've gotten really great response and success. And we will be rolling out, we're now in Sprouts stores as of last week and we're rolling into a number of other chains.

Dan: Congrats.

John: Yeah, thank you. Now we've accomplished the first big thing, which is getting this brand out there and really getting a footprint that'll allow hundreds of millions of people to see it, now we've got to focus to make it work. We've got to drive really great marketing, we've got to make sure that we get good trial and repeat and that we really continue to focus on making sure it looks great at shelf, and that it's in the right position and all those fundamentals that you probably talk to your customers and clients about all the time.

Dan: Absolutely. In fact, on that note and thank you for mentioning it. The true mission of any promotion is not to get a consumer that was already going to buy the product to buy it again. It’s to get trial. So the majority of trade spending, I got into this, in the last podcast about, trade marketing is one of the single largest line items on a brand’s income statement. And yet, most of trade spending is wasted, meaning that it doesn't accomplish its objective. So as you were talking about that compressed margin, that really dramatically impacts your ability to compete.

I've been arguing John and I would imagine you'd agree with this, that price is not the driver for the consumer itself. You hear that all the time, but where I'm going with this is that, if price were the only driver to get a consumer to buy a product, then luxury items items would be declining in sales but they're not. Consumers will spend a premium for products that meet their needs nutritionally and otherwise. And so for you to have a product that meets the nutritional needs for their infant, for their child and more importantly supports that parent's belief about healthy nutrition starting at day one, I think that's brilliant. Do you have any thoughts around that and then how you structure that conversation?

John: Yeah, I agree with everything you just said Dan. And a lot of people vilify trade spending and that's because trade spending done wrong is really bad.

Dan: Oh, yeah.

John: But trade spending done right, reduces the barriers to purchase. It provides that little extra incentive for somebody who sees it. It oftentimes makes it visible in-store, in some categories it's very difficult to get secondary display. So just getting a little price tag up, a little flag that catches a consumer's eye can be very important. And then getting into the category and trying it and then watching what happens to your baselines. If you have a great product and consumers love your product and you've got the right price value on it every day, good trade spending will get them in to the product, they'll try it and repeat and they'll buy it full price.

You want to make sure that you don't promote too frequently, so that you're not on deal every day. You need to make sure that you ______________ stuff. There’s a lot of people like yourself that have a lot of experience in this area, and early stage entrepreneurs can get some good advice for how to stage their promotions and how to make sure that they're as effective as they possibly can be accomplished the results we just talked about.

Dan: Absolutely. And I think it even goes back to where you were talking about how you would have a small table sitting up front of a store giving out Bunnies. And the point being is that, that trial spending money on those vehicles that drive sales, and I love the idea you're talking about the shelf talk and some of the other creative things that natural brands are famous for doing. And then, when you're talking about promotions every day, for anyone listening, think about some of the categories that are promoted on a regular basis, where consumers go in and they only make a purchase when it's on sale.

Those brands have effectively trained the consumer to only buy the products in those categories when they're on sale. And so, where I'm going with this is that there's no growth. They have compressed the margin, the brands don't sell anything off of promotion and that's what brands are really shooting, for an opportunity to drive base sales, base sales in the absence of any promotion. That's what matters at shelf, and that's what's driving sales within other categories as well. So thank you for bringing that up.

One of the things I really wanted to do if I could get into the weeds a little bit about your product, what you're delivering in terms of Once Upon a Farm. You said in an interview that you're committed to the farmer and the supply chain. I love the fact that you're doing that because the small disruptive brands that stay true to their mission and stay true to that no compromise objective, I think it's so important because consumers want to feel good about what they buy. And they want to have that trust, that transparency, that authenticity in the product. You are effectively baking in all those co-ingredients into your offering in your product, and then how do you leverage at shelf?

John: Yeah. So the most effective way to leverage at shelf is to make sure we're communicating well on our packaging. And I'd say we're doing a pretty good job of that. We have the opportunity to improve that. And then also on media MPR. For our brand, especially having Jen Garner as a really active operating partner in the business, we have the ability to really get a big megaphone on to issues that we care about. And I mentioned before, this industry, it's been so successful and it's over 50 billion or whatever now. And what a lot of people lose sight of is that, it all comes back to farmers, it all comes back to the ground.

And we know that consumers love. We did lots of consumer research at Annie's over the years and we could see the consumer shift to this over time. We know that consumers care a lot about where stuff comes from. They want to know the name of the farmer, when it was picked, was it's sunny on the day it was picked. And we can't deliver all of that information but we can deliver a lot of it. And it's an advantage that small entrepreneurial brands have. Let's say you're existing $500 million business and you're buying 10,000 container loads of organic wheat flour or oat flour, whatever a year from Cargill.

It's very difficult for you to get that level of transparency to compete with the little small brands that are at the edges. When you're early on you can set your supply chain up so that you're able to identify and articulate where stuff comes from, and then you just build the back end systems around that so that you can scale it. And that's what we're doing here. We don't have it all figured out yet, but we're working hard on it and I think we'll be leading the industry on transparency in this space. I have no doubt about that, but we have a long way to go.

Dan: Absolutely. I think you guys are doing the right thing right now. We talked earlier about setting it up right and doing it right from day one and one of the things I talk about John is communication be other than on the four corners of your package. You talked earlier about that core consumer, millennials. Shopping is changing today and what I'm getting at is that, consumers go to the shelf, they do research on their smartphone, they find out who likes it, how to use it in a recipe. They do the research in terms of understanding, not only validating their purchase decision but learning more about the product and getting into that transparency that you talked about. That is important for brands and retailers to work together to figure out how to solve this, how to help make shopping easier so that they don't invite a consumer to go somewhere else. So could you go into a little bit more about that?

John: Yeah, so Annie's was one of the first brands that really led ... I mean it's hilarious to say this now but just for all you younger listeners out there, social media actually didn't exist and it wasn't that long ago.

Dan: I know. I remember.

John: I know. Guys like you and I remember. But it wasn't that long ago we were one of the first brands in the food space that built out a really active platform on Facebook and really started connecting directly with consumers. And we've built out a really strong social media platform across channels that matter to consumers Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest et cetera. So marketing 101 in this space, you got to decide who your consumers are you're targeting, who are they and then where can you most likely find them. So you need to build out a really good social presence.

Now that doesn't mean you need to spend a fortune doing it. You can do a lot of this very scrappily. And there's lots of great tools out there. But you need to show up in the places where they are in a quality way, so that when consumers do that click, some significant majority of consumers are now finding out about you first on their handheld device. And so you need to make sure that when they populate a search box that you're going to at least pop up with something that looks good and communicates what you want.

You need to make sure, and this is a pro tip — most people don't realize this, but a lot of consumers will hit the search box at Amazon first before they even go through a web search, and they'll look and see what shows up on Amazon, what do the reviews look like, what does the product look like. Some of them will buy directly there, but a lot of them may choose to just store that information in their head and then buy it next time they're at a retail store. So you need to make sure that you show up, and you look like you know what you're doing with the basics. So that's the fundamental point I'll make.

Dan: You get a kick out of this, I was talking in front of a group, basically sharing what we're talking about now, how brands can leverage social media. It was kind of funny, I held up my cell phone and said, "I've got a son who's a millennial, who doesn't know that you can actually talk on this thing." Because you get it, I mean they really don't ... I mean they know how to text, they know how to do all that research, but he won't answer the phone, he won't return a phone call. Anyhow, you get it because you're my age. But it is so important on media.

I mean you're right, that is so critically important. And then okay, another pro-tip for every brand, if you can leverage that social media to drive sales into a particular retailer, it's far cheaper than buying any ad space or any should I say, media within that store. And it's typically a lot more impactful because if you can drive a new consumer into a store that doesn't frequently shop there, that is a win-win for both you and the brand. Again, that's far more important than you paying slotting or anything else.

John: Yeah. Back to this idea of creating a really effective story to help sell your brand at retailers it's now you know entry level. You need to make sure that when you've got a few slides in that presentation that talk about your digital program, like what are you doing? Where are you focusing in your social and on media campaigns? And like you said to the extent that you can show that you can direct some of that traffic specifically to retailers, and there are ways to do that on all the platforms, you will again put yourself in the top tier in terms of consideration for new shelf space or better shelf space or expanded distribution in stores.

Dan: Absolutely. And if I can really bring some of this together, as a category captain for one of the largest CPG brands on the planet, this is many, many years ago. It wasn't about being able to walk into the retailer and say, "Look here's a pretty graphic, and by the way I'm ranked number three in the category." It was that story. One of the biggest success stories I had in the industry was beginning to get exclusive distribution for a brand. And the way that I did that, was by helping the retailer understand who the shopper was. This is way before social media. So leveraging all these things that you've been sharing with us John, thank you again for doing that.

That's the key for any brand to drive sales. And you don't need to spend an exorbitant amount of money to buy a lot of data, to buy a lot of ad media, support media et cetera. As you said, there are ways to do this very scrappily. So thank you for sharing it. That is so vitally important for every brand. Any other thoughts that you would have for a new brand or a startup or anyone that might listen to this show which would be any entrepreneurial brand or retailer primarily in our space? And by the way, I do get some mainstream brands and retailers listening to this too.

John: Yeah, sure. No I think what I would say like high level is it's never been a better time to be in this space. There are so many opportunities to grow. It wasn't that many years ago when in mainstream grocery stores, natural organic products were confined to small natural organic sections in limited store counts and all that. That's all over now for the most part and you can launch the brand and get it out there in a number of different ways. One of the tips I'd give would be to be thoughtful about channels and understanding how these channels play together and how launching in one channel and pricing a certain way will impact another. That's a common mistake I see is, people getting their channel strategies and pricing strategies cross-channel all mixed up. So focus on that.

And then the other thing I'd say is, when you think of your business, most of the big successful brands in this space over the last 20 years if you go back and look at the formula, most of them have really built off the back of one or two or maybe at the most three really big retail or online relationships. And so, when you get something that's working really well with a great retailer, really leverage that and go big. It's better to fish deep in a few pools and really, really drive your resources there to be successful than to be an inch deep and a mile wide, we see that a lot. Those are two things that come to mind.

Dan: Thank you for sharing that. And on that note, the fact that you guys are being blessed in natural with Once Upon a Farm, that gives you so much more credibility in other shelves. So another thing that you could do is as you're saying, when you're focusing on your strategy, where does your core consumer shop? And so going back to the storytelling and of course the podcast and everything else, if a brand understands ... First of all a brand needs to be an expert in their products. That sounds really weird but as you stated, a lot of brands really aren't. Two, a brand needs to be experts in all of their competitor’s products.

Three, you need to be an expert on who shops the category, why they shop the category, how they shop the category and when they buy your products, what are the products that they buy. And then you add in all that other rich information that you shared John, and that's how you develop a really effective selling story. And you don't need to be a category Captain. Category Captain as I talked about in my course is a privilege for larger brands but it's extremely labor and cost intensive. To be a Category Leader, you can do that just by sharing the passion that you're sharing with this audience today John, so thank you for doing that. Any other parting thoughts or anything that we missed that you want to share?

John: No, it's been really fun and I wish all entrepreneurs out there great luck. And go build great businesses and make a positive impact and make sure your brand in business stands for something unique, and that you're driving positive social impact through your supply chain or the programs you support. We need every company in this industry to really drive forward to make a difference, a positive difference in the world. That's something I'm still very passionate about. And there's a lot of research by the way that shows that consumers respond to and connect uniquely with brands that are doing that and communicating it well. So it's another really important way for you to give yourself an edge to make sure that you're focusing on making the world a better place as well while you're building a great brand.

Dan: I love that. In fact, actually I don't know if I shared my mission with you. My mission is to make our healthy way of life more accessible by getting healthy natural organic brands on more retailer shelves and into the hands of more shoppers, which is exactly what you just stated. It's critical that we get more of these brands on shelves so that we have more traction, more runway, we're able to fuel that conversation. Let me get your take on this — I believe that it's the small disruptive brands that are going to be the future of CPG. And where I'm going with that, going back to the innovation piece, the core natural brands are more closely aligned with their core shopper. And the point being is that, they are developing the products and the solutions that their customers want, whereas big brands are busy talking at us and so it's my belief that it's the small disruptive brands that are going to start owning the shelf. Do you have any thoughts around that?

John: I mean there's been a lot written, it's true there's been a very significant share shift from the big mainstream conventional brands and companies that you and I grew up with to smaller more entrepreneurial brands. As a result, many of those brands are being acquired as a response and I don't think this is going to slow down. I think it's going to continue. And I think the more that companies in this space get more sophisticated, learn and do the kinds of things we've been talking about for this past hour, they're going to increase their odds. I just think we're at the very beginning of a golden age of entrepreneurship and food and you don't have to go to Expo West and see 80,000 people and feel the energy there.

You can look at the quality of the people that are coming into this space I mentioned, in an interview recently, the quality of people that are coming into this space now are the types of people that created Microsoft many years ago, that created Google. Just intensely smart passionate people. We're getting the best people coming into the space and to me that's because there's a great opportunity here, and it's just an exciting time to be in the business and for us to make a difference. And you’re providing a really great service Dan.

Dan: Thank you.

John: All the people that listen to this podcast get actionable insights and knowledge that can help these companies grow.

Dan: I really appreciate that. And I couldn't agree with you more. In fact, I've been talking to a lot of people about this is the new tech launch. Not literally, but in terms of this is where the focus is. And as we just talked about, these small disruptive companies there's so much opportunity, especially since the big companies are struggling at shelf. So John, thank you for joining me today. And thank you so much for all you do in our community, in our industry. And I mean that sincerely from the bottom my heart, you've been such an icon and such an inspiration to so many of us, so thank you.

John: Thank you very much I appreciate it. We're all one big family, we’ve got to be successful. The more success we have, the more healthy our population will be, the better opportunities will be for people to grow up and live better lives, so we are really doing some important stuff, we need to do a great job of it.

Dan: Thank you John I appreciate that. I really want to thank John for coming on the podcast and making time for us, and more importantly, for sharing his insights with us, as well as all he does in our natural community. I am absolutely thrilled that what he shared echoes so much of what I've been putting out in my content, my free course and in this podcast. John's insights were invaluable. This is an episode you might want to listen to again and again. And I urge you to share it with everyone you know and any brand looking to grow sustainable sales. I'll put a link to Once Upon a Farm in the show notes and on this sessions web page. You can find it at brandsecretsandstrategies.com/session36.

Today's freebie is my Turnkey Sales Story Strategies course, it's free. We talk about a lot of the things that John and I shared. And a lot of the things that I share in other podcasts with other guests as well. Again, this course is free. I produced it and made it free because one, the industry has been good to me. And two, more importantly, the brands need more than they're currently getting today from the business schools, the seminars and the other resources that are out there. As I continue to say my mission is to make our healthy way of life more accessible by helping you get your products on more retailer shelves into the hands of more shoppers.

You can access the course at turnkeysalesstoriesstrategies.com/growsales. You can also find it on my website, www.brandsecretsandstrategies.com. There's a special tab there just for you. As always, I really appreciate your listening. If you like the podcast, subscribe. Share it with your friends and leave a review on iTunes. This helps to promote the podcast to other brands looking for the valuable insights that John shared with me on today's episode. I look forward to seeing you in the next episode. I've got a lot of exciting things planned, and if you've been paying attention I've had to bump up my podcast to two a week. I have so many phenomenal guests coming on. Stay tuned.

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