← BRAVE COMMERCE
BRAVE COMMERCE
Heaven Hill Brands’ Matt Blevins on Long-Term Brand Building, Consumer Behavior Shifts, and Modernizing Spirits
00:23:32
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- [00:02]
AWS Narrator
300 sensors, over a million data points per second. How does F1 update their fans with every stat in real time? AWS is how from fastest laps to strategy calls, AWS puts fans in the pit. It's not just racing, it's data driven innovation at 200 miles per hour. AWS is how leading businesses power next level innovation.
- [00:30]
Rubrik Narrator
AI agents are everywhere, automating tasks and making decisions at machine speed. But agents make mistakes. Just one rogue agent can do big damage before you even notice. Rubrik Agent Cloud is the only platform that helps you monitor agents, set guardrails and rewind mistakes so you can unleash agents, not risk. Accelerate your AI transformation at rubrik.com that's R u b r-I k.com foreign.
- [01:05]
Matt Blevins
I'm Nate Silver.
- [01:07]
Maria Konnikova
And I'm Maria Konnikova. We're journalists who moonlight as high stakes poker players and on our podcast Risky Business we bring an analytical lens, thinking about odds, incentives and outcomes to the choices shaping our democracy.
- [01:21]
Matt Blevins
Because every move in politics is a calculation and sometimes our leaders can make bad bets.
- [01:27]
Maria Konnikova
You don't say Nate. If you want to understand what our politicians are thinking and what's at stake with each decision they make, this show is for you.
- [01:35]
Matt Blevins
Listen to Risky Business wherever you get your podcasts. There is so much noise for marketers and we're a pretty insecure discipline and we feel like no matter at the top of our games and it could be the biggest marketing companies out there. I think they always feel like they're behind and somebody else knows something that they don't know and it can lead to chasing a lot of very short term could be fads. I don't want to sound like head stuck in the sand because whether it's AI or real time performance marketing and tools, there's a place for all of it. But I always just want to anchor back to I don't think the principles of marketing have changed that much in a long time.
- [02:25]
Rachel Tippograf
Welcome to today's episode of Brave Commerce. I'm Rachel Tippograf, the founder and CEO of Micmac.
- [02:30]
Sarah Hofstadter
And I'm Sarah Hofstadter, chairwoman of Profitero plus. And this is a show that talks about what's relevant in commerce for the world's biggest brands.
- [02:46]
Rachel Tippograf
Sarah, if you were going to teach a Marketing 101 class, what would be on the first page of your quote unquote textbook?
- [02:54]
Sarah Hofstadter
What a good question. So this takes me back to about 10, 15 years ago when I had first started working with Tom Boudet at Nestle. He was heading up global marketing and media capabilities. And I was trying to introduce concepts of digital marketing to Nestle's global leadership. And he just would hammer back into me, know your consumer deeply. Tie it all back to the consumer. There are certain core fundamental principles. I know I sound like a funny dude, but this is the most important thing you need to remember. Then you can build from there, but use a frame of reference of what the human beings who buy your products actually end up caring about. You can then worry about how they go about expressing that, care whether that's in certain different formats or behaviors or whatever. But ultimately, this is a sociological and psychological understanding of the kinds of people that would be interested in buying your products or having a relationship with you. And it's just so core. It's just so core to who we are and what we do. And admittedly, I never really took any courses in marketing when I was in college, but I did take a lot of sociology courses. I was associated, and I took a lot of courses in journalism. I was a journalism minor. It all goes back to the combination of really understanding human behavior and being curious about it, which is very different, let's say, than a marketing one on one course.
- [04:20]
Rachel Tippograf
My. You didn't ask me, but I don't need to. My opening statement would be a quote from Marshall McLuhan. The medium is the message. Everything that I believe to be true about marketing goes back to this notion that.
- [04:38]
Sarah Hofstadter
And it's.
- [04:38]
Rachel Tippograf
It's what you're talking about, Sarah, just through a slightly different lens, that all consumer behavior is shaped through how we consume media. And my translation of that in my universe is whatever happens in media will soon happen to commerce because it's the same relationship with the end user. And so that's for me how I would sort of summarize everything. But we have a very different. Not different, but we have a different articulation around how to engage with the consumer. From Matt, who is the chief marketing officer at Heaven Hill Brands, where he continues to reinforce the four Ps which.
- [05:20]
Sarah Hofstadter
Sarah, are products, price, place, and promo. Giddy up. Let's figure out how we adapt that for the multiple shelves that people shop on today.
- [05:29]
Rachel Tippograf
On that note, let's bring Matt onto the show today. We are very excited to have Matt Blevins, the chief marketing officer at Heaven Hill Brands, onto the show. Hello, Matt.
- [05:41]
Matt Blevins
Hello, Rachel. Sarah, it's great to be with you.
- [05:44]
Rachel Tippograf
Well, we're excited to have you. You know, on the topic of you in preparation for this, I always love checking out our guests LinkedIn profiles and something stood out to me about you, which is that you started in economics and then somehow made your way to the booze space in marketing, which I have to be honest is not a pairing that I've often seen before. So how do you feel that your background has shaped how you approach brand building?
- [06:12]
Matt Blevins
Yeah, thanks for the question and the due diligence. I started as a economics major. I was at a liberal arts college and it was sort of the most business oriented major. I fell in love with the science. It's a social science and it also is highly quantitative and or at least I gravitated toward the quantitative side of it. I think that balance of art and science is true in economics. It's very obviously consumer led and markets and consumers and then you try to put data and analysis to that. And that was sort of my background. I thought maybe banking something along those lines. But when I got into the world of marketing I just fell in love with both. Obviously the category that we work in in spirits, advertising and marketing, the balance of building brands, appealing to consumers, understanding consumer behavior, there's endless amounts of analytics that you can do. That's what got me into it actually started in the world of consumer insight, market research and brought my skills to that discipline. But then proper brand management kind of became my love and particularly in this category of spirits. And that's where I've grown up as a marketer.
- [07:37]
Sarah Hofstadter
That really makes you the epitome of the art and science, if you will. Within Heaven Hill you've got lots of different levers that you can pull within that art and the science. So how do you think about both the levers you pull but also measuring the impact of it because of that challenge of getting the art and the science right all at the same time?
- [08:01]
Matt Blevins
Yeah, I mean it's sort of the million dollar, billion dollar question, I think for a lot of marketers. How do we know what we do works? I would start with what's the time horizon that we look at Things in our industry often say, you know, we are a slow moving, good. The fast moving goods of consumers. We're a little bit slower. You know, we're not looking at daily performance. The average consumer, they're going to go shop during the holidays for bottles of spirits, for gift giving and then obviously for themselves. But it's not a rapidly moving catego. So we think beyond quarters. We're also a privately held company so we also have the luxury of thinking long term. So with that long term orientation it comes down to looking at all Holistically, what you're trying to measure, what does success look like long term brand building that we do a lot of. Just because something is measurable doesn't always make it a good measure for that long, long term orientation. So we think about all of the types of measures that we can look at, whether that can be performance and we look at how things perform. But what are our objectives? You know, are we looking at a program that is going to be in and out of the market in a short amount of time, that's going to have a different set of what success looks like versus building consumer awareness and what we call mental availability with our consumers? That's a long effort that takes consistency and investment and time and often a lot of strategic pivots along the way. And so we want to look at those metrics over a much longer time horizon. Ultimately it is, we're, we're very outcomes based. What are the outcomes that we're trying to achieve and are there ways that we can get at what we think the outcome was? Because we live in a messy world and usually the answer is not black and white. So we really strive to take a really holistic view of what we know, what we don't know, and focus on what good looks like for us. I often find that pretty good measurement gets you what you need to make decisions. And ultimately it's about that. Make decisions, try, test and learn and then keep moving forward.
- [10:30]
Rubrik Narrator
AI agents are everywhere, automating tasks and making decisions at machine speed. But agents make mistakes. Just one rogue agent can do big damage before you even notice. Rubrik Agent Cloud is the only platform that helps you monitor agents, set guardrails and rewind mistakes so you can unleash agents, not risk. Accelerate your AI transformation@rubrik.com that's R U V R I K.com how does F1.
- [11:03]
AWS Narrator
Turn data into insights at 200 miles per hour? AWS is how fans get inside the strategy. AWS powers next level innovation for millions of businesses.
- [11:18]
Rachel Tippograf
It's interesting you're bringing up things like long term impact, pretty good measures as being good enough to run the business. And I find that interesting against the backdrop of just like the modern day landscape that we live in, which everything is real time and optimized and removing human intervention. And like, how do you balance what's happening in the ecosystem from a technology standpoint versus these core principles that you've been operating the business around.
- [11:49]
Matt Blevins
Yeah, I think it's a really great point. I think there is so much noise for marketers and we're pretty insecure discipline and we feel like no matter at the top of our games and it could be the biggest marketing companies out there. I think they always feel like they're behind and somebody else knows something that they don't know and it can lead to chasing a lot of very short term could be fads. I don't want to sound like head stuck in the sand because whether it's AI or real time performance marketing and tools there's a place for all of it. But I always just want to anchor back to I don't think the principles of marketing have changed that much in a long time and I don't think they're going to change overnight. And so if we can anchor back into what consumers what their natural behaviors are, what they're looking for, it's awareness, it's the four P's of marketing. If we can just anchor in those things that we know will work over period of time that's where we put a lot of our energy. Now how do we make sure that we're listening and there's never been better technology and tools for us to connect with consumers and for sure we want to do that. But as I said earlier we're also skeptical I think of just because something can be measured a click through rate or there are things that roas or things that look very scientific that in our business and I can speak to us, you know we don't have a huge E commerce. There is certainly an element of E commerce in our business but by and large we're not selling real time. So that's maybe unique to our industry. We don't have that optimization culture for the algorithm so to speak. But we have a lot of other tools that we can use in the short time but in the short term. But my general feeling is anchor back to the principles of marketing. Are you making consumers aware? Is your brand distinctive and standing out and are you relevant in the right occasions for your brand? Those basic tasks that we have to do, that's what makes the difference in the long term. And so that is a benefit I think too of of as I said, we're a privately held company so we can have that strategic patience of what we're intending to do. What's our strategy, what are consumers, what behaviors do we want to change about our brands and and then let's set about it in a thoughtful way over a longer period of time than a month or a quarter before we change and pivot.
- [14:25]
Sarah Hofstadter
I'm 99% aligned with you this Whole idea of back to basics because we lose sight, we get easily distracted by bright shiny objects. In this world of marketing and certainly in brands, whether they're fast moving or slow moving.
- [14:38]
Matt Blevins
Sure.
- [14:39]
Sarah Hofstadter
Or as I like to call them, considered purchases. Actually, I got caught saying slow moving consumer goods at one point and I was talking to an electronics manufacturer and he was like, we like to call them considered not slow moving. I'm like, I know, but it's so much nicer to say FMCG or smcg. And he's like, yeah, but it makes us feel slow and I don't want to create a culture of slow. I'm like, all right, cool. Anyway, we're in marketing fair as we look at all the things that could benefit from this whole application of whether it's the 4Ps or just the simplicity of knowing your consumer deeply, that will make sense. But then in your comments you said we're not big in e commerce, but if knowing your consumer deeply knows that part of the shopping journey includes checking the digital shelf or I don't know. I was actually at a Total Wine recently and I was looking for something. I just didn't know what aisle it was in. It's helping me on my journey. So how do you think about those new technologies while staying true to the consumer? That is an art and science in and of itself, if you will.
- [15:46]
Matt Blevins
Yeah, completely agree. And I don't want to be misinterpreted when I say, you know, we don't have a big E commerce business. What I would say is like, buy now online and it arrives at your door. Certainly retailers have that option and we service that, but we're not sending our product directly to the consumer. There's obviously some legal and responsibility reasons that we want to make sure we don't in our industry, don't do that. And also the store experience that you just mentioned is really important because this is a category people care about, they want to explore. And where I think digital technologies and consumer behaviors change is is exactly that. So it's I'm actually going to get some education from a tequila expert who has a YouTube channel and maybe watch that show before I go into the store. Or he prompts me to go into the store and I'm trying my hand at mixology and I'm following some mixology accounts on Instagram and that has led me to try my hand at making the perfect old fashioned that behavior and that digital engagement. Reddit as a tool, as a place where people are trading information and education, we're very dialed into that and ensuring that we're engaging communities, we're creating community, creating content creating and that we're listening, you know, to our consumers about what they're saying about our brands and what they're saying about their behavior. So again, like I said, there's never been more tools to do that and show up obviously in our media, paid, earned, owned channels. We're making sure that we are engaging the consumer and feeding in some ways feeding that algorithm to, to make sure that we're showing up in ways that the consumer is aware of us and takes the influence of our activity into the store shelf, which primarily is where we, we win, which is in the on and off premise. And restaurants, bartenders are obviously an important part of our trade ecosystem and we, we do a lot of work to service that industry so that they know our brands and are educated. So I think you're, you're hitting on sort of that duality of, in our industry of behaviors and that shopper journey and consumer journey that takes a huge path through the digital space before they then end up in real life. And we kind of want to win in both sides. We want to be in real life as well. We, we see a lot of value in that. We spend a lot on showing up as well as digital.
- [18:25]
Rachel Tippograf
We talked a lot about maybe what's over engineered in marketing and that could potentially be one thing that the industry is either getting wrong or getting right. I think there's, there's different debates around that. But what else do you feel is going on? There's a lot of headlines obviously about the bev alk industry right now. We've talked a lot about it on the show, so we don't need to belabor the points and you know, changing consumption behaviors. But are there other things that you feel the industry is missing right now?
- [18:53]
Matt Blevins
Well, I think the, the commentary is mainly missing nuance. It is a much more nuanced discussion than the headlines, which I know that's the role of headlines is to get a click and they're written in pretty bold and simplistic ways of describing what's happening. We've just come through one of the most historic periods in Spirits, which was through the COVID experience and the boom in consumption. And just think about how much downtime people had and disposable income went up and it's kind of nice to have cocktails even when you're six feet away from each other. And there was a lot of that that happened. So the category, like many categories kind of boomed during that era and we're kind of unwinding from that. And I think in that process we're, I kind of describe it, we're in a storm as an industry, both up and down, riding the waves. And when you're in a storm, even a lightning bug looks like it could be a lighthouse in the distance. And so there's just so many data points that are flying around where I think we're headed. I think we are unwinding from a historic growth cycle. There are real changes to consumers having come through that cycle mainly in sort of what they're interested in. I think it bodes well for spirits by and large. And the nuance that I think is missed is one, it's often blamed on generations. So the Gen Z generation and by all evidence their behaviors really aren't a whole lot different, but how they show up is a lot different. So there's new categories, maybe new flavors that are coming online driven by them. But I think the three main things of premiumization continuing, people want to enjoy beverages and higher end beverages as a treat, as a luxury and it's actually a pretty affordable luxury. So that has been a decades long trend that I think continues moderation. A lot has been written about moderation in consumption and I think that is not new. That has been happening for a long, long time. And by and large as a spirits marketer that is a good thing because people are trading maybe volume of beverage, alcohol and other categories and enjoying a cocktail or two in the spirits category might be replacing other categories. And then innovation has been winning. With innovation in this category there's never been more opportunity and the Generation Z I think is more and more open to give me new options. They're looking at new ways of consuming and are not maybe as stuck in old category definitions. So we're seeing spirits based RTD ready to drink products that are winning in the marketplace that are a huge trend and those are examples of long term that turns into spirits consumption favored over maybe other other categories. So I think nuance is what's being lost. And I think while there are a ton of factors going on, those major trends, moderation, premiumization, innovation are going to continue to drive our category forward.
- [22:21]
Rachel Tippograf
So when it comes to Heaven Hills specifically, given everything that's happening in terms of category dynamics, what brands are you deciding that you have to modernize?
- [22:32]
Matt Blevins
Right now we are blessed with a portfolio that's deep in its breadth of categories, price points and consumers that our brands serve. You know, right now we are fortunate to have two Brands that are leading the way in one of the hottest categories in spirits, and that is in Tequila. You know, the most recent facelift that we unveiled was for our Tequila brand. That's called Tequila Ocho. It is Highlands Tequila. It's one of the more successful brands in the category right now. And that was a case of. It wasn't a massive shift in that brand, but it was really about bringing its positioning. And it's the truth that it's aimed to be the world's best sipping tequila, Bring it to life through a beautiful new bottle label that really emphasizes the Tequila Ocho name. And we decide generally around ensuring that our brands are meeting what's inside the bottle, what are they about as a brand? And so we look for, are they relevant to consumers? Do we hit all the marks on telling the story of the product? Do we have distinctiveness of our brand coming through in the touch, the feel, the look of the package and product? Ultimately, you know, we look over time across our portfolio and evaluating, you know, is it time to refresh a brand when it is or when it's sometimes capturing momentum on a brand and just slight tweaks to ensure that we're doing right by the brand. And usually consumers and our partners out in the market will tell us when it's time or when they see an opportunity.
- [24:17]
Rachel Tippograf
Well, Matt, we could pick your brain on everything that's happening in the category, but we gotta ask you our famous last question, which is, what's the bravest thing you've ever done?
- [24:27]
Matt Blevins
It's a very provocative question. I'll start by saying bravery. I reserve that term for really brave people in our firefighters, our soldiers. But I'll take the bait and say bravery for me is sometimes it's showing up every day. I think in a professional setting, it's taking on leadership. This leadership role that I've taken on, it takes a lot to serve the organization. And leadership is always an act of stepping out of your comfort zone. So that's probably my professional answer. And then personally, I think I've raised two wonderful children. And all of you who are parents or have raised children, that is an act of bravery every day. So I'll take that.
- [25:16]
Rachel Tippograf
Well, I'm sure your kids came out great. We appreciate your time and you sharing the lessons. And everyone's gotta go check out the best sipping tequila on the market.
- [25:26]
Matt Blevins
You bet. Thank you for having me. We'll catch up again soon. Thanks.
- [25:32]
Rachel Tippograf
If you like what you heard and you want to continue down this fundamental education series, go check out an episode we did with Monster Energy's Ben Galvin, where he really talks about the fundamentals of category management. If you like what you heard, write a review. Thanks for listening.
- [26:09]
Matt Blevins
I'm Nate Silver.
- [26:10]
Maria Konnikova
And I'm Maria Konnikova. We're journalists who moonlight as high stakes poker players and on our podcast Risky Business, we bring an analytical lens, thinking about odds, incentives and outcomes to the choices shaping our democracy.
- [26:25]
Matt Blevins
Because every move in politics is a calculation and sometimes our leaders can make bad bets.
- [26:31]
Maria Konnikova
You don't say Nate. If you want to understand what our politicians are thinking and what's at stake with each decision they make, this show is for you.
- [26:39]
Matt Blevins
Listen to Risky Business wherever you get your podcasts.
- [26:52]
AWS Narrator
300 sensors over a million data points per second. How does F1 update their fans with every stat in real time? AWS is how from fastest laps to strategy calls, AWS puts fans in the pit. It's not just racing, it's data driven innovation at 200 miles per hour. AWS is how leading businesses power next level innovation.
- [27:23]
Jackie Cooper
Hi, I'm Jackie Cooper, Global Chief Brand Officer at Edelman and the host of Touch of Truth, a new podcast launching on the Adweek Podcast Network. My dad gave me this incredibly smart piece of advice. Meet everyone once. As a result, I've met some of the most fascinating and inspiring people on the planet. Now on Touch of Truth, we're coming centre stage and sharing the mic to experience stories of truth, insights and visions for the future that will challenge your way of thinking. Touch of Truth is available wherever you listen to podcasts. New episodes come out every Tuesday. I do hope to see you there.