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Insights Unlocked
The truth about consumer insights marketing with Archer's Andrew Thomas
00:49:04
Learn how consumer insights drive brand positioning, simplify messaging, and fuel growth with Archer’s Andrew Thomas on Insights Unlocked.
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- [00:02]
A
Welcome back to Insights Unlocked. In this episode, I sit down with Andrew Thomas, head of marketing at Archer Meatsnacks, to talk about what it really takes to build a brand that stands out. Starting with understanding how consumers actually think, shop and make decisions, we dig into rebranding, creative risk taking, and why simplicity often wins. Enjoy the show.
- [00:25]
B
Welcome to Insights Unlocked, an original podcast from User Testing where we bring you candid conversations and stories with the thinkers, doers and builders behind some of the most successful digital products and experiences in the world, from concept to execution.
- [00:45]
A
Welcome to the Insights Unlocked podcast. I'm Nathan Isaacs, content marketing manager at User Testing and our guest today is Andrew Thomas. Andrew is head of marketing at Archer Meat Snacks where he's helped transform the fast growing brand through a modernized identity and its first national stick to Reel campaign. A seasoned CPG leader with experience at Chicken of the Sea and PepsiCo, Andrew is known for turning deep consumer insights into breakthrough brand growth. Welcome to the show, Andrew.
- [01:17]
B
Thanks for having me.
- [01:18]
A
Nathan, to kick us off, you've helped and we were just talking about this. You've helped drive explosive growth at Archer while also modernizing iconic brands earlier in your career. What's the through line in your approach to marketing? And how has understanding the customer shaped the way you build brands?
- [01:38]
B
Yeah, the thing I always like to keep in mind, and honestly I learned my first job in marketing at General Mills was that the consumer does not think about brand reasons to believe positioning at all, but especially in the way that we do when we're on the other side of the table. Not that that work isn't meaningful and important because subconsciously there's a lot that they do respond to. But we spend so much time with our products and our brands, we tend to live in a bit of an echo chamber and get to our own heads. And it's very important, especially when you start designing new products, visual identity, branding, ad campaigns, to remember consumers are cognitive misers. They don't want to spend a lot of time on this stuff and you really got to keep it simple for them. So it's a lesson I learned to apply day one when I was on Hamburger Helper, and I've continued to apply it over the course of the years, throughout my career.
- [02:38]
A
Yeah, it's always amazing to think about that. My experience, I did not do that, didn't come from that background in marketing, but I was actually a crime reporter. And you know, I remember the police chief in the city of Kennewick in eastern Washington said the criminals don't respect boundaries. You can't just think, oh, I am only protecting this. You know, the criminals live in the neighboring city and they're coming over to our city. I have to work with these other partners and try and deal with this stuff. And you just have to put your mind. And for me as a reporter, I was like, oh, okay, that. Yeah, that makes sense. That makes sense. It's. It's like the story of the engineers who design everything on the fanciest gear and say, what do you mean the consumer doesn't know how to do this? Right?
- [03:22]
B
Totally. Yeah. It's. It's the same with categories. So here at Archer, you know, we're. We're in the meat snacks category. First and foremost, I would challenge you to find a consumer who calls it the meat snack category. They call it the jerky category. We sit here and we segment and we say, jerky and sticks and smoked sausages. It's all jerky for them. But outside of that, they look at it as snacks. Yeah, they use the wayfinders in a grocery store to figure out where I need to shop and find the thing I'm looking for, but they're thinking about snacks. When they're hungry, they're hungry. There's a million options in front of them. And so if you're so myopic about how you define the category and think about these things, you're going to miss a big opportunity. One other example I'll share is when I worked at Kavita, you know, it's a sparkling probiotic drink and Kombucha brand. And at the time, you know, Kombucha was really hot, and everyone's talking probiotics. And a lot of what we were talking about as a brand was gut health. 70% of your immune system lives in your. In your gut. And it's all about the health of your microbiome and what probiotics do and the. The number of CFU's and strains and all that stuff. Consumers1 don't want to know about all that. They don't have time to learn about it, too. If you want them to buy your beverage and drink a lot of it, you should probably not position it as overly clinical, because then it becomes medicine. Then it becomes, oh, I will drink it when I need it, versus this is something I crave and I want to drink all the time. And we actually, we leveraged a lot of consumer insights. We did some really interesting store visits where we wrote Personas, and we adopted the Personas and tried to go shop and look for things you know, in that context of like, we're this consumer looking for X, Y and Z, and we realized it's actually more about better for you refreshment. And so we launched the alive like you campaign on Kavita because the product itself was bold flavor. It's very invigorating, effervescent, bubbly. That's what people were looking for. And yeah, they wanted it to be better for you, but it's a beverage. So talking about that consumption experience was a much bigger unlock for us rather than focusing on the things that we felt made us differentiated, which was the probiotics and organic acids and all those things. So really approaching things from that consumer lens and understanding how they think is, I think, critical for any marketer.
- [05:39]
A
So, you know, in getting to that and coming into this role at Archer, you know, how do you use those insights that you're. You're picking up that you've learned from your predecessors and whatever roles they had from the team, the sales team, whatever it might be, and then make that decision to say, hey, I think we need to kind of like take a look at this and do a brand redesign.
- [06:04]
B
Yeah, the. So when I, When I landed at Archer, which at the time was. Was country Archer, you know, the brand was still scaling, so not a. Not a lot in the ways, in terms of, like, marketing budget. You know, there's really. There was really no strong brand positioning statement. We didn't really know where a consumer target was. And by the way, all. All very typical stuff for, for a brand at that size, very commercially focused, all about distribution, you know, getting in store and trying to. Trying to start to drive those velocities with things like trade promotions and whatnot. And rather than come in and say, I'm going to put my stamp on this and we need to do a rebrand, it was all about disc data and insights to diagnose where we were in the first place. And part of that was, all right, well, what data do we have? Well, we didn't really know much, so we didn't have panel data, so we had no knowledge of things like household penetration, repeat rate, and buy rate. We didn't have a brand health tracker, so I had no idea what our aided and unaided awareness looked like. So that was the first order of business, was getting those insights to figure out where the brand stood not only with our consumer base, but with our retail customers as well. And then we decided, well, okay, we need to figure out who our target consumer is and understand the category a little bit better. And we conducted a consumer segmentation study. So we talked to 1600 consumers. But as we designed that, that survey and that approach, I told the agency, I said, I don't want to just talk to meet snack consumers and I don't want to just ask them, why do you eat meat snacks? I know what they're gonna say. They're gonna say it's high in protein, it's high in protein and it's portable on the go. Great. I already know that I don't need to conduct expensive, you know, extensive research to get that. What I wanna know is what are their snacking need states overall and how do meat snacks fit into that? Like what, what itch? Do the meat snack, does the meat snack category scratch for those folks? So you took a different approach than I think a lot of folks do, and got back to that mindset of get outside of your category and try to think about how consumers shop in. Talking to those 1600 consumers unveiled a lot of great information for us on how they snack. And it revealed that, yeah, within these snacks, but more broadly, there's a cohort of consumers who want to buy snacks made of only real ingredients. And yes, there's a lot of brands that talk about real ingredients. But what we learned is that if we got too detailed and specific on things like grass fed beef, all natural turkey, some of these other things the brand had really stood for. Yeah, there's a, there's a segment of the population who cares about that, but you're actually missing a broad swath of people. And it gets back to this idea of them not wanting to spend a lot of time on it. So I need to, I need to be relevant to them and speak to them in a way that they respond to and they quickly identify with and understand. I liken this to the way political elections go, like presidential elections to get on shelf, you need to be super differentiated and distinctive. You need to go into a retailer and be like, here's why we're different. It's grass fed, it's more tender, jerky, all these things. But as the business scales in the same way that candidates in the primaries go really extreme, when you get to the general election, as you scale, you got to move to the middle. And that's how I looked at what we were doing, is yes, we still want to be unique and distinctive, but we have to speak to a larger consumer base in a way that covers a lot of basics. Because real can mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people. And we still need to credibly stand for those things. But you don't want to get too general, but at the same time getting too specific, I think sometimes will paint yourself in a corner.
- [09:48]
A
Sure, sure. And I like your earlier point about like, hey, I already know why people bias. I, I want to know why they don't buy us or what are they buying instead of us? Not, you know, maybe they weren't even aware about, but, you know, could we fit, you know, into these different needs that the consumers have the stick to? Real was your first, you know, big national or not your but Archer's first national brand campaign with when you're launching something like that at scale for the first time, how do you balance that, you know, bold, creative ideas with also ensuring that it resonates and not just. Not just makes noise?
- [10:31]
B
Yeah, I'm with you. You don't want to just be wacky for wackiness's sake. That's always the balance you need to strike. And I will tell you, having a large human sized blue bolt and our ad campaign is wacky, there's definitely a bit of surreal, you know, nature to it. But when we did the campaign development, we looked at a lot of ideas and our, our ad agency, DW is, was fantastic at showing us a broad spectrum of things that we could go do. And the safer paths were certainly great. You know, they would have been, they would have been workable and with enough media weight, I think they probably would have been successful. But there were two things we needed to think about. One, yes, our marketing budget is significantly larger than where it's been in the past, but compared to our competitive set, it's still pretty small. And so we needed a campaign that could punch above our weight class, that could drive more attention, get a little more of that virality, if you can get it. Look, I'm not one of those people who says like, oh, let's go make a viral video. If it were that easy, everyone would do it, but you want to take a shot where you can. And then the other piece is some of the safer campaigns that. The evaluation criteria for me was if I put a competitive brand in this spot, would it still work? And if it did, that's to me, that's a problem. So yes, you need to make sure you're talking about, you know, product benefits category benefits. You need to talk about taste and make sure it looks delicious and portable and convenient and easy to use. But beyond that, it needs to include those distinctive brand assets that only your brand can own. And the fact that we had A blue bull on the front of our pack as part of our rebrand was a great springboard for us to say, okay, well, we think we can own that. Let's do it in a way that's not too wacky, too slapstick, too much of like a traditional kind of mascot. Let's do it in a way that is uniquely Archer, but at the same time in a way that's going to stand out to people and one that, frankly, no one else can duplicate.
- [12:37]
A
And how do you. Can you talk about that sort of iteration process? Like, you know, the aging agency says, well, you guys have turkey. We could do a. A blue turkey or a blue bull or a green. You know, like, is. Is it that sort of thing? Are you also. Is it your choice or, you know, in the end. I guess it is in the end. But, you know, how are you informing your choices as you go along and. And making the decision whether we should do a bull or something else?
- [13:09]
B
Yeah, like that. That bull versus turkey versus other, you know, animals was. Was a heated discussion for sure.
- [13:17]
A
What? Yeah. Or you're just pulling my leg. I'm sorry.
- [13:19]
B
No, it was first and foremost, even having the bull and the abstract art style that. It is a lot of discussion on that. Right. There was. There are some folks who said, ah, it's jerky. It's kind of on the nose. Like, everyone else has got a cow or a ball on front, and sure they do. But again, it's. How do we. How do we do it in a way that's uniquely Archer? And then the question was, wait, if that's going to be our, you know, our logo mark in the way that, you know, you have your logo type with Archer, your logo mark with the bull. And it's like Starbucks. Sometimes the word and the logo lives together. They're often separate. And hopefully in the way the Starbucks can just put the mermaid on stuff and you know who it is. Eventually we can just put the bull on stuff and they'll know what it is. But it was rightfully pointed out, we got turkey and we have a bison jerky. Like, we got to put the ball in there. That doesn't make sense. And if we put a turkey and bison on those packs, is it going to work? And this is one of those areas where I said, I. I think we are overcomplicating in a way where the consumer is not going to care. Right. Ultimately, I need them to see Archer in blue and on orange. The bull is going to be our go to because it is a beef Driven category. Yes, there are other proteins, but I actually would argue that having that artistic turkey and then the bison that we have in our bison jerky, I mean, it's great. It looks like he is the head of a garage band. Hey, with all that hair, he's like, looks very grunge. I think that just drives further playfulness with the brand when people say it. There's not going to be any confusion on, oh, wait a minute, I thought you were the bull brand, but now I'm seeing this turkey. I just don't believe that consumers track things that way. So as it related to the pack, you know, we landed there and then, because again, we're, we're largely beef driven, made all the sense in the world to doable. Now is there a world down the, you know, down the road where we bring in a turkey, we bring in, you know, another protein maybe, you know, in the, in the age of AI, you can rapidly iterate creative and maybe have some fun with some animated shorts or whatnot. But we're, you know, we're just getting started, so we know that there's a lot of different ways we can go. But yeah, it's, it's one of the joys of working in brand marketing, the kind of conversations you have, which is, well, what about the turkey? What about the bison? How, how do we animate those? How do we draw those? Should we even do those in the first place? And people get heated about it, which, which it's really funny because at the end of the day, it's almost, it's almost ridiculous that those conversations get as, as robust as they do.
- [15:54]
A
No, I've been there, you know, not with turkeys or, or bison or bulls, but I've been in those marketing rooms where we're having those debates on colors and font styles and stuff like that. And we're like, really, really guys, we need to go out and like, do some real work, you know, like, let's go break some boulders or, or look,
- [16:16]
B
one, one other thing I'll see. So I, I, I kicked off the, the rebrand at Chicken of the Sea. You know, super iconic brand. It needed an update and a refresh and you know, if you looked at a can of tune, it's a very small, small real estate for, for communication. And at the time it looked like a NASCAR with all the logos on it. Right. And so there was a lot of simplification that needed to be done. But, you know, the mermaid Catalina needed some updating and similar to the discussions on the bull, I cannot Tell you how. How much back and forth there was on every aspect of the mermaid, like, size of the lips and the curl of the hair and, like, the body shape and how high or low does the. The mermaid top go? And it's. It's funny because it's so patently ridiculous, but at the same time, it does matter because you want to make sure you're. You're sending those subconscious signals to consumers in the right way. And, you know, you don't want to offend people. You want to remain relatable, but you want to be distinctive. So I think you end up with such lively conversations on this stuff because it is a fine line to walk.
- [17:25]
A
Yeah. I mean, that just brings to mind, you know, and we. So many rebrands in the last five, 10 years have just fallen totally. Well, maybe not. Yeah, some that have really just, you know, they've not hit the mark. And. And maybe it's harder. I don't know if you have any thoughts on this. Is it harder to come up with a rebrand now because you have a, you know, like an online community of who are inclined to be haters and just think you're. You're ruining tradition, even though, you know, and not to name brands, you know, but there was a restaurant chain last summer that did this, and you're like, none of you guys even go to this restaurant. Why do you care? You know, but it's. It's got to be challenging. It's got to be scary, and maybe that's why you need to have those conversations.
- [18:17]
B
Yeah, I, I think that's part of it. And I think folks do, do get a little hesitant or timid as they think about what the reaction is going to be. One thing I've cautioned, you know, other folks on the executive team is we can't design things. Being worried about what the social media mob may say because, one, they're going to move on to the next thing pretty fast. I. It's just in the world we live in, there's so much information and stimulation. I. I'm like, look, don't feed the trolls. If you don't feed the trolls, they're going to move on and find their next meal. Same idea of, like, getting canceled. Sometimes you can only get canceled if you let yourself get canceled. Right. And I know what example you're referring to. I. From a marketer's lens, I question a lot of what they did there. I didn't really understand the strategy. But at the same time, your point is spot on. A lot of People complaining, didn't dine there in the first place. So, you know, if it was strategically sound and insight based, then, then they maybe should have stuck with it at the end of the day, but only they can know that. What I'd also say about how much information and, you know, social trends and what's going on is available, I actually think that's a problem. And I think you can overvalue or overemphasize that consumer perception element of it as well as you can test yourself to death. The thing I think folks sometimes forget is intuition is not just raw gut, like, oh, I'm making stuff up, it's all the vibes. Intuition is built off of your years of experience both as a consumer and as a marketer. At the end of the day, things should certainly be data driven decisions, but at some point, you should make a call based on what you think is strategically sound. And look, we, we leveraged our consumer segmentation to drive the positioning, and then the positioning was leveraged to drive the brief for the rebrand, which then was fed into the brief for the campaign. So it was all tied together, all strategically sound. And yes, we tested things with consumers as well to make sure we weren't breaking anything. But at the end of the day, we made a call that we felt was best for the brand based on what we were seeing. And so I think, yes, you need to rely on consumer input. But what is it Steve Jobs famously said? Like, if you had asked consumers, you would have never come up with an iPhone. So at some point you got to go with what you believe is the right path and then figure out how to manage the message and manage the backlash after the fact.
- [20:44]
A
Sure. When, when you're doing this and you know, I've, I've, you know, subscribed to all the advertising, you know, magazines over the years and stuff like that, and they're like, oh, yeah, our campaign was wildly successful and we have like 10,000%, you know, increase in awareness and, But I never really hear like, oh, our revenue increased. Yeah, you know, xyz. How do you connect the dots there? How do you, how do you know that we have both a successful national campaign going out there? People are talking about us and it's driving business.
- [21:24]
B
Yeah, it's, it's a great question. Like the, the impetus for the rebrand in the first place was at the time we were the fifth largest meat snack in the country, but we had the 11th highest aided awareness. And so I looked at that and I said, okay, this is actually a Good problem to have. For now. We're selling a lot of products, you know, we're doing really well, gaining distribution, but nobody really knows what brand they're buying. And of course the long term risk there is, well then other folks can come in and launch the same thing that you make and steal your share. So you know, it's about building that brand moat around your business. And so that's what, that's what really drove it. And yes, one of the key metrics is going to be our brand awareness. Is it increasing as well as other elements around brand perception. So are we moving the needle on things like a brand made of only real ingredients, a brand made 100% grass fed beef, a brand that tastes good, a brand my whole family will love because those are things we know that consumers care about, that our consumer target cares about and will drive higher purchase intake. But yes, at the end of the day we have to drive velocity. That's absolutely the end goal. And so I say there's two things that I look at. One is obviously tracking velocity over time because awareness takes a while to have its impact, especially at the media weights that we're at. We need to be patient. If we had a lot more money, I think we could be a little more hard on ourselves in terms of is this moving the needle from a velocity standpoint. But it's going to take a while to get that awareness up. What I'll also say though, the other thing I look at is anything that's lower funnel still embodies the new brand. So as I think about things like Instacart or advertising assets on Amazon, I can easily compare if they're doing better or worse than before the rebrand. And that will give me a good idea on are we visually striking enough? Is the pack resonating in these like smaller spaces? Is the copy that we're using? Are the taglines and the reasons to believe, are they resonating? As we think about our Amazon detail page, the way we're talking about the brand now is is it the right, is it the right way? So there's a lot of ways you can get an early read on whether or not you know the new Viz ID and the new positioning is doing its job. So you really want to look at both. And the good news is on the lower funnel stuff is great opportunity to quickly adapt and edit and change and test and learn and be really nimble. And then that should hopefully inform over time broader changes you make to the campaign. As you look at things that you know Bigger, more expensive assets like video and whatnot that you can't change quite as quickly. But it's really a little bit of both that long term purview, but making sure you're driving those short term results because that's ultimately what the business needs
- [24:19]
A
in your role in business today we're really mindful of all the data that we're collecting and what's moving the needle and so forth. Do you have any examples where just talking and user testing, we're all about customer insights and learning from our customers and what we, you know, good or bad, whatever it might be. Do you have any instances where they didn't line up like we, we, we thought the data was going one direction and by talking to our customers we actually learned. Oh, I understand why that I understand the data now in a way I didn't without talking to these customers.
- [24:58]
B
Yeah, I'll, I have an example. It's a little bit in reverse though. Yeah, sure. So we, we, we launched a product that we had done some concept testing on and the results told us that it should outperform Our number one item, which is our original beef minis, our 16 count. And it was surprising from a results perspective because our core item does exceedingly well. But consumers played back, oh, this drives even greater taste appeal. I think I'll purchase more of this than the original now. Huge caveat, I'm super skeptical of concept tests. You're not asking consumers to make an economic decision or trade off while they're in the store after a long day at work, kids in the car, everyone's hungry, you haven't got paid that week. A million things that drive purchase intent. You ask people in a vacuum like that and they're like, yeah, sure, yeah, great, love it. 8 out of 10 liking 8 out of 10 person intent. So I do take those things with a grain of salt. But comparatively to other benchmarks that we had, it performed exceedingly well. Well, we launched the product and it did not, it did not perform anywhere near what the expectations were. And we actually believe that the problem was what was on the slide. What was on the stimulus in the research was so, not that it was different, but we realized that what consumers perceived the product to be was actually not what we felt we were telling them what it was. We believe that they looked at the product on shelf and looked at the name and said, oh wait a minute, that doesn't line up with my expectations. And then tried the product and we think it didn't line up with their expectations either. So it was one of those things where the data led us to believe one thing and then the end results were another. But it actually, at the end of the day, really great insight for us to just even further understand how consumers perceive things like naming and flavors and different product types. Back to that point of get out of your own echo chamber and really understand how they shop and how they think about it.
- [27:11]
A
So in that example there, do you, does that inform other decisions, packaging, pack sizes, flavors, channels that you're going to be going into, or is it, is this going back on to your, you know, own experience and like, hey, we've I this worked in the past and maybe we should try it this way.
- [27:37]
B
Yeah, I'd say it certainly has informed decisions around like further flavor extensions and impact types and whatnot. The first thing I would say is it, it was informative in that, in this category, unlike let's say protein bars or even, or even chips, there's actually not as big of a demand for flavor variety. What we've learned is consumers, when they come to meat snacks or come to jerky, they want it to taste like beef, smoky salted beef. Sure, there's some flavor varieties they will occasionally want, but if you're buying a 16 count bag of this stuff, one, that's a lot of mini sticks to have have on hand, and two, price point, you know, anywhere between Walmart, you know, about 13, 13 and a half dollars, up to some other channels that can get up to 17 bucks. So it's a high price ring for, you know, for consumers to shell out. And if it's the original plain flavor they're all in, it's a flavor they haven't tried before, or flavor they don't want to eat all the time, then it's a little more challenging. So that was one key learning for us is that ancillary flavors and flavor extensions have a role to play. But how we launch them and position them should change. And so moving forward, what we're going to do is we're going to launch new flavors in a smaller pack size, under an eight count. So lower commitment, lower price ring. And then if something is successful, then we'll promote it back up to the 16 count. But it also underscores the need for a really strong price pack architecture. The category has been so on fire, you know, ourselves and you know, one of our bigger competitors have really high dollar range products that have just been juggernauts, been really performing well. Well is, you know, the country has hit some economic uncertainty and people are feeling a Little bit of the pinch. You need to respond quickly. You know, it's not about downsizing, it's about offering incremental pack types that still allow people to come into your brand. You want to remain accessible and affordable to a point. So that, but that lesson on that one item has informed some of that as well. So, you know, we, we do the post mortem and we figure out what we did right, what we did wrong and absolutely use it to decide what optimizations we make moving forward.
- [29:52]
A
As I'm thinking about it, I'm remembering like, I mean you have a, it's a. I mean, you don't need me, some dude up in Portland, Oregon telling you you have a hard job. It's. I'm just thinking of like, I've seen all these sort of hacker videos or blog posts about like, hey, start your own beef jerky company, how I made a thousand dollars in a weekend type of thing. And so you have all these little ankle biters coming to you. And I am also a parent and I am not, I am only going to buy a product that I trust too. Right. If I'm thinking about feeding my kids. And, and so you have that. You have to be something that people trust. You have to. And then also, yeah, the, the wild flavors or whatever it might be. I have to say if my kids don't eat that, I have to eat that. Do I, do I want to invest, you know, the, whatever the 15 bucks and eat the other 12, you know, bars, or do I want to get one and just like, oh yeah, I can try more of this. Right? And my kids are like that. They will. I, I don't invest in a big, you know, I don't experiment that much unless it's, it's, it's a. More of that sample size and like, ah, okay. You know, anyway, all those random. There's not a question there. So I don't know what your comment is to all that though.
- [31:21]
B
Yeah, to your point of like it being a tough job, you're spot on because a lot of what you do here is taking a flyer on stuff. It's trying things out to see what works. We actually started our minis business on an eight count pack and because it was so successful, we upsized to 16 and there was some conversation on, well, do we just kill the eight count? Well, we had the eight count at Whole Foods and it was doing really well. And Whole Foods said, no, we'll take the 16 count as an incremental item. The 8 count didn't see any cannibalization loss at all. Once we launched the 16 count, the 16 count was almost entirely incremental for us. But those are the kind of things you could have made a very strong argument to just swap out. And so that's one of the hard parts of the job is you often don't know. You can do all the research and get all the data and feel really good about the rationale and, and then the thing goes south or it goes way better than you expected. So that, that is, that is a tough part of the gig for sure. And the thing I try to remind folks is you need to evaluate the quality of the decision based on the information you had available at the time. You cannot evaluate the decision based on the outcome because you're just, you're never going to be right 100% of the time. I've actually tried to teach my 10 year old son this lesson. Say I gave you today $10,000 and you went and bought $10,000 worth of lottery tickets. Is that a good decision or not? He's like, well, it depends if I win. I said no, because even if you did win, it was still a stupid decision. And so I tried to explain to him, like, more likely than not you're going to lose that money even if you won it. Good for you, Great job, awesome. But you got really lucky and that was still a poor decision. It's something I think a lot of folks in business, it's hard for them to remember that because when things go south, there's a lot of finger point and oh, what did we do wrong? Oh, what did we miss? And yeah, sometimes you may have missed something. A lot of times you're just at the whims of the marketplace and that's a, it's, it's, it's humbling, but there's a little bit of like ego release that goes along with that to realize like, you don't know everything.
- [33:46]
A
The, when, when making some of these choices you're trying to get, you're, you're relying on that intuition that's built on all these, you know, decades of experience. You are talking to customers, you're seeing, you're looking at the data, you're looking at all this kind of stuff and you're like, oh yeah, let's do a rebrand. We, I think this is what we need to do to make that next step. What's your advice for other brands who are thinking about this when they're dealing with their sales teams or others internally who, like, who may not like oh yeah, we launched a new color but we don't see it next quarter. The results of this right where building a brand is, I mean it can go wrong really quickly. But to be successful it may take a year or more or whatever it might be. How do you, how do you address that?
- [34:41]
B
Yeah, the, the, the buy in is just so, so important and to the extent you can bring your cross functional partners along on the journey, absolutely critical. So we, we made sure that as we were in the process of the rebrand, talking to sales, getting their input and part of it too is having a, I mean a commercial and sales focused mindset. A good example is, you know, on the pack, some of the early designs had really interesting stuff at the bottom of the back. Okay, well when I'm looking at renderings on a screen looks great, half the time the bag is in a tray. Well, that stuff's going to be hidden. So thinking about those things and making sure you're getting the sales team input on, well, where's it going to live on shelf, how's it going to look is really, really important. But even beyond that, it's getting them on board with the rationale for why we're doing it in the first place. See, I can come in and say, hey, fifth largest meat snack brand, 11th highest aided awareness. They get it. But at the same time they're like, but does it matter? We're growing so quickly, why would we change this right now? Not only do you have internal folks asking that, some key stakeholders outside of the organization, we're asking that too. And that's where it gets back to you got to put people in the shoes of the consumer. You have to remind folks, well, think about when you shop, what are the things you think about? What do you look for? How much time do you spend making these decisions? What's the importance of brand? And quick tangent. I love when people are like, oh, advertising doesn't work on me. As they're sitting there in Levi's jeans, Nike shoes, you know, fully branded out. You know, they got a car that's a well number. And it's, it's funny to me, advertising and marketing doesn't work and yet everything you buy is, is a brand. But I digress. So the, one of the exercises that actually worked really, really well for me and I can't, I can't take credit for it. I, I saw it from a research insights guy I used to work with. His name is Ethan Decker from Applied Brand Sciences and he does a great job on LinkedIn and sharing all these little tidbits and, you know, insights on how to think about this stuff. He said, go to Google Images and type in your brand and then zoom all the way out as far as a browser will let you zoom out. Take a screenshot of what you see, put it on a slide, do that with other brands if you can. I at that 30,000 foot view, see which brand is which. Your brand's not distinctive enough. And so I did that with our category. I did Jack Links, I did Slim Jim, I did Chomps, did Tillamook. And they're so consistent with their color. Their colors themselves are either bright, bold, or just very iconic and associated with their brand. You put those on a page, it was very, very easy for folks to say, I know what each of those are. And then the next page I put four other brands, including Country Archer. And each of those images was black, gray, brown. You had no idea the difference between them. Now I saw people, some people kind of like squinting and looking at the screen and they're like, ah, ah, there's the blue of our original. Ah, see, I got it. I'm like, you spent like 20 seconds on it. That's like, that's my, that's. The point is consumers aren't going to spend that much time on it. And so that exercise was the strongest tool I had in my toolkit to tell people why we needed to do that because it put them in the shoes of a consumer. It was like, huh, Now I get it. Because when people are walking through the aisle and they see the sea of brown and black, but there's an occasional, like, pop of yellow or pop of dark red, they know what brand that is. And that's why for us, going with the bright bold orange and the dark blue navy was so key because, one, no one else was owning that patoot. That was going to be how we stood out in the aisle. So that that was the, the best way for me to make inroads and get the buy in for folks.
- [38:49]
A
Yeah, it reminds me of, you know, we, I went through this exercise when we rebranded the podcast. We had acquired another company and we're bringing the two podcasts together. And so we're going to launch as Insights Unlocked. And I was like, let's just put all the thumbnails of all the shows out there and see what we see, right? And when you look at that and you look at thousands, all of a sudden you're whatever color is just like, I don't even see us anymore. And then there was another example of a customer for user testing who is a consumer product that's in the big box stores. And they had people go in there and try and buy their product and make their observations and stuff like that. And what they found out was because of the boxes size, everything was turned on sideways on the shelves. And so all that energy that they had spent on the front of the box, right, this is what our product is and buy us. And this is all the technology and all this kind of stuff. Nobody saw it and nobody was like, I don't, I can't find your brand here, I don't know where it is. And they're all screen, you know, the, the people who are watching these videos are screaming saying, no, it's right there, it's right there. And they moved. They essentially put their front of their box on the side of the box because of the way it's being shelved at the store. And bam, sales increase, you know, whatever, a couple percent. But a couple percent means billions of dollars. It's an amazing story. And just going back to the room right when you're having these discussions as a marketer and like, oh, I love that front of the box, how is the consumer actually going to see the packaging? Right. When you're out there in stores and making that decision, you know, buying a piece of technology, you're going to spend more than a few seconds.
- [40:50]
B
But still, yeah, look, I'll even say we were. People get so enamored with your key, you know, with the bag, with the key, you know, selling unit. No one wants to talk about that tray. I said, I, I think we need to spend more time on the tray. That's the thing people are going to use to shop for flavor. That's where they're going to see the brand name, you know, locked up with the brand name on the bag. And we actually had some internal debate because it's way cheaper and more efficient from an operational perspective just to have a standard tray. You know, it's our master case where you, you rip off the top and you put it in and having it by flavor got to print each flavor and they got to store each flavor and different item numbers and it adds all this complexity. But that's why like going to the shelf and putting the damn thing on the shelf is really important because one, all the big brands are doing that. It's flavor specific. And then two, if you want to stand out, the whole thing is the brand distinctiveness and improving that. If you got a tray that just is kind of lazy in its Effort. You're really just shooting yourself in the foot. So that. That your example of the boxes on the side, that merchandising piece, I think so many people forget to just go into the store and think about how it's going to show up, and that's a huge miss. Like you said earlier, like, it's a hard job. That's one of the hardest parts of it is. Again, thinking about all the many ways this could show up in the world and making sure every single way it shows up in the world, your message is coming across
- [42:27]
A
kind of one of our last questions here before we wrap it up. And, you know, it's not a podcast episode unless we talk about AI. And just as a marketer, I'm just wondering, what are your thoughts? How are you guys thinking about using AI? Whether it's, you know, audience targeting, creative development, forecasting, you know, what. What are the things that you're doing there at Archer to leverage AI?
- [42:51]
B
Yeah. I'll start my answer with something interesting. I saw on Reddit, on one of the AI threads, someone who is an engineer or a coder just straight up asked chatgpt, when will you replace me? When will you replace my job? Now there's a little bit of a doom scroll response of like, oh, six months and you're done. I don't even believe that for those folks, but I thought, no, that's an interesting thought exercise. So I went and I was asked Gemini, because I have trained Gemini to understand my brand and what I do, and I ask questions all the time. And I said, okay, when will I be replaced? And the good news was AI said probably never. They said, the output piece of what you do, generating creative and copy and ad types and all of that, and to some extent, consumer research and analysis, that will be more automated. But at the end of the day, as a marketer, you still got to have that human touch. You got to understand how humans think and feel, and it's going to be a really long time before AI gets there. And so for me, it's less about how can I design all these agents that are going to replace folks on the team or that are going to do my job. For me, it really is more about efficiency and how do we get to decisions more rapidly. Now, do I think we will eventually be generating creative with AI? Absolutely. I still don't think it's quite there. I still think you can really tell that it's AI, even though it's very, very high quality. And I think consumers are just not quite accepting of it, you've heard all the same sort of conversations and backlash against this stuff, so we'll see where that goes. But for me, it's the analysis piece. We, we talk so much today about like data and consumer insights. You know, I look at how we process syndicated data to understand our market performance today and it's a fairly antiquated way of doing it. And it's largely the same way CPGs have been doing it for decades. Not that the tools haven't gotten better and easier to use, but, you know, you still are building tables and charts and generating your own insights. That is what I'm working on is how do we get to insights more rapidly and how do we get people out of the tactical table and chart generation role, you know, part of their role. I think that's going to be a huge unlock. I envision even having a chatbot where I can go say, hey, I was on display at Target last month. How did it do, how did it impact the competition? Did it, did it steal volume from other, other channels or other retailers? And how should I think about it in relation to how much I spent on it? You know, was it efficient, did it drive return? Those sort of things were, we can all do the analysis and we should know how to flex those muscles. But if I could get those answers in the matter of minutes versus a four week project where I got a, have a project team, my finance and data people go look at these things. It just frees people up to spend more time on more valuable work. So that data and insights piece is one element of it. And things like trend tracking, I would love to develop something down the road. It's a little bit of a scenario planner. Like if I do X, what do I think the competition's gonna do just to help anticipate and see around corners a little bit. So that level of reasoning and getting more quickly through, through that analysis, that's how I think here at Archer, we're going to use AI and I would guess the smart folks out there, that's probably how they're going to use it as a tool as well. Like I said, rather than this idea of like, you see it all over LinkedIn, like, oh, I replaced my team with like six AI agents. I'm like, Nathan, I'm sure you're more efficient, but at the end of the day I think you still need humans at the wheel.
- [46:46]
A
Excellent. Andrew, I appreciate your time today and I really enjoyed our conversation. How does someone learn more about you, your thought leadership and what you and the team are doing at Archer. You know where should we buy our as much go ahead.
- [47:04]
B
Well the product you can find everywhere. So you know our 28 count minis are available at Costco, 24 count minis available at Sam's. So great we got a great club business and great value for volume there. Strong presence in the natural channel, Whole Foods and Sprouts and then on any major grocery store. So folks haven't tried it. Love for you to pick it up. And then in terms of learning about what the company is up to, you know, we've spent the last year really upping our trade PR presence. So LinkedIn is a great spot. We post a lot about the company there, all the news, all the great things we're working on. And then you know, my LinkedIn profile, you know, I've been doing a lot of the thought leadership work, sharing information like I am today on the rebrand as well as just some other thoughts I have about, you know, key learnings throughout the course of my career. I'm very fortunate to have been doing this for, for 18 years now and worked on some really, really great brands, some iconic brands and feel really blessed that I've worked on a lot of better for you brands, which I think is where the category is going. So LinkedIn profile easy to find me. I think I got this very hat on in my profile picture, big orange sweater. I live and breathe the brand. I'm, I'm, you know, I'm out there repping it every day. But yeah, LinkedIn right now is the place to go.
- [48:20]
A
Excellent. Again, thank you so much. We will include show links to everything in the show notes, including commercials that you guys have done that are pretty hilarious. So thank you again, Andrew. I'll talk with you soon.
- [48:34]
B
Yeah, thanks so much. Want to keep the conversation going? You can find the show notes@usertesting.com podcast if you haven't already, don't forget to follow us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast or Google Play so you never miss an episode. And if you enjoyed today's show, please share it with a friend or leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts. And until next time, this is Insights Unlocked, an original podcast from User Testing.