← The GaryVee Audio Experience
The GaryVee Audio Experience
Great Marketing Won’t Save a Bad Product (Business & Marketing Chat)
00:42:34
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- [00:00]
A
One of the great mistakes that small businesses make is they may be so good at marketing. They have that salesmanship, they have that marketing, but their product sucks, you know, And I think, you know, all that good marketing does against a bad product is speeding up everyone knowing that your product sucks. This is the GaryVee audio experience.
- [00:23]
B
When you hear the phrase branding that bites, what does that mean to you?
- [00:28]
A
When I hear that, it sounds like someone wanted to use the word bites to mean, you know, works or hits or whatever word you want to put in there. But at the end of the day, what I think, you know, Alison so masterfully did and other companies that have done it, there's so many people in the business world that are so obsessed with understanding how every single penny returns a dollar, right? Or a nickel or a dime. And for me, when I hear that sentence. Before you go to the podcast, I've got a big announcement. I know several years ago, a lot of you bought 12 books of 12 and a half to get the NFT, the book games NFT. I also know that a lot of people have dropped off on their journey with veefriends, which is a massive mistake, because what we're doing on Burn island and what we're doing on base with book games is remarkable. So you need to go to Vee friends vfriends.com oldbooks go to veefriends.com oldbooks with an S. You will go to that landing page and we will help you explain if you are trying to figure out where your NFTs are, how to bring them over to the website and how to start activating them so that you can start using them for all the incredible exchanges and draws and raffles and experiences that we're doing for people that actually own the book games. So please go to vfriends.com, where you can start your journey on reactivating your book games journey. I'm so passionate about branding and marketing because I know it's more effective than sales. And sales is so important. So many of you. I myself am a proud salesman. I love selling things. In fact, probably the thing I'm most passionate about right now is live social shits selling, right? The QVC ification of social media with whatnot and TikTok shop. But when I hear that, it sounds to me like someone understood the assignment. You know, at the end of the day, we all want people to come to us and buy what we want to sell. We don't want to go to them and knock on the door and ask them to buy it. And I think that sales and marketing branding are the two functions. And I think that the marketing branding is harder because it's gray. It's art. You don't see it show up right away. There's a level of trust that has to come along with it. And look, I'm sure all three of us can attest to this. There's to the credit of people that struggle with loving branding and marketing. They sit on validity. I spend a lot of my time in Madison Avenue, and 95% of marketing campaigns are very expensive failures. And that's a very. And by the way, I'm being kind this morning. You know, I truly believe that 95% is being kind. And so there's a reason people struggle with it as private equity starts to buy up a lot of things. You know, those are finance guys and gals. They struggle with it. They view it as a cost, you know, not a value prop. But for me, you know, branding, the bites excites me.
- [03:52]
B
Awesome. Awesome. And Alison, you started your brand literally in your kitchen sink, and now you have national distribution and you have billions of dollars. Yes. Yes. When did you first realize that Poppy's brand was just as important as the product itself?
- [04:15]
C
So we're lucky that we were mother beverage before, because let me just tell you, that brand was shit, you guys. And I know that I can say that our shark told us that, but we did have a great product. So it does start with the product, but you have to have both. You have to have product and brand. And I'm so blessed that we realized that really early on. So. So after getting a deal on Shark Tank, we took nine months off and did a brand exercise. And yes, I said nine months because a lot of people think building a brand is just something that you're like, okay, I know my mission. I know my values. I know my consumer. Let's go. There's so much more that goes into that, from brand guidelines to understanding where you show up, how you show up. I mean, we have a brand book that's like 180 pages long. It's kind of crazy. So for us, we went through a big exercise of what is Poppy? We're soda for the next generation. What do we do? We give people the freedom to love soda again at its best. I love saying, as an adult, I've given you the freedom to enjoy grape soda. And that's just really powerful. It's nostalgic. So you want to move, really, the thinking of what a brand is. You move it from the head to the heart, you want to emotionally connect with your consumer. And so a lot of the work that we did is we want to call ourselves a soda. So it's obvious we're in a 12 ounce can, not a bottle. Right where mother beverage was in a bottle before, we want to scream soda. Soda tastes good. At the end of the day, people drink soda because it tastes good. What looks juicier than colorful, bright cans with, like, glistening in ice, Right? That's juicy. That's like soda. Not a white can with clean girl aesthetic. You want to let like, we knew all this going into it. So when we launched Poppy In March, in 2020, literally the first week of COVID we knew we were soda. Now, nobody else believed we were soda, right? That was a big thing. And the retailers, they didn't know where to put us. They thought we were sparkling water, a sister to kombucha. They didn't have anywhere that they knew kind of where to put us. So. But we knew. And I feel like if you kind of stick core to your values, right? Think of Nike. Just do it. They don't talk about their sneakers. It's an emotional way that they connect with the consumer. And so we just led with the brand first. Take the time, invest in it, build the brand. But you also have to have a fantastic product as well.
- [06:43]
B
Amazing. That's amazing.
- [06:44]
A
I'm sorry to interrupt, but it's such an important point. Probably my favorite thing to do at VaynerMedia, our marketing branding agency, is when we actually tell clients that we would like to not work with them, which is very unusual in the agency landscape. And it always comes from a good place of really talking about product. I think we're very proud of what we do. If you're in this audience right now and you feel good about your marketing skills, I think one of the great mistakes that small businesses make is they may be so good at marketing. They have that salesmanship, they have that marketing, but their product sucks, you know? And I think, you know, all that good marketing does against a bad product is speeding up everyone knowing that your product sucks.
- [07:34]
B
Awesome.
- [07:36]
C
It's so true.
- [07:38]
B
Don't fire me.
- [07:41]
A
Hey, everybody. Hope you're enjoying the podcast right now. Make sure you follow the podcast. That's why I'm interrupting. Let's keep going on this show, but follow the podcast. They'll make my mom super happy.
- [07:52]
B
Branding is one piece of the equation and marketing is the other piece. And I remember, you may not remember, about a year ago. Was it a year ago? You sent me your new book. We were on, all the marketers were on our way to Khan the creativity Festival. And I read it on the plane, front, back. And when I got back home, I asked my entire team to have that as a part of their book club reading. Because marketing has changed so much over the last 10 years. Five years, one year.
- [08:25]
A
Yeah.
- [08:25]
B
And you often talk about attention being the number one currency, 100%. How do small business owners decide when to show up? And how do they break through the noise, Break through that noise in order to really plant the seed of attention?
- [08:42]
A
I think you know when to show up is as often as you possibly can afford. Like, why would you not? Right. I think where to show up is what I think a lot about. You know, to me, that book was called Day Trading Attention. And it was important that I called it Day Trading Attention. Cause I had finally understood what I'd been doing for my whole career. You know, to remind some of you or if you don't know, really. I learned my craft working in my dad's liquor store. It was a local one store liquor store in Springfield, New Jersey. And I built that business from a 3.8 million to a $60 million business in a very short window, which is nice and a nice number and a big accomplishment. But as I've gotten older, it's even more profound to me because I did that without raising any capital. And my father was so immigrant, we didn't even have a credit line. And the business did 3.8 million on 10% gross profit, $380,000 before expenses, and in a six, seven year window. I built that business so quickly. And I was able to ask myself what from that point in 1998-today was I doing? And I was day trading attention at the time. There's a lot of youngsters in here. Having a website for a liquor store was like, what are you talking about? It'd be like if I showed up on stage right now with an AI robot and we were just chilling up here. It was very advanced. And then email marketing was advanced. And then the big one at the time was Google. I bought Google AdWords when nobody else was doing that. And then it was YouTube and then it was social media. And right now it's live shopping or it's working content to show up on LLMs to be the first results when you're in ChatGPT for what wine should I buy? Or who's a good entrepreneur or whatever it might be. Everybody here needs to do underpriced things. I Learned how to market with no money, which is the greatest way to learn, right? As we know, big budgets, you didn't have as many dollars. Things were scrappier. Now in a PepsiCo world, they'll spend more money on a production day to promote this than you did in your whole year. So for everyone here, this is why I'm completely obsessed. How many people here know my content or follow me a little bit? Just give me your hands. Thank you. So the people that raise their hands, you know, I'm screaming on a daily basis in a hundred different ways saying the same shit, which is make unlimited social media content organic. It's free. It's free. The fact that every person in this room is literally one post away from things being different now, one post away sounds nice. On paper, it's hard. How do you break through? That's why I wrote a 300 page book on it. It's details today. The second, the thumbnail, the first three seconds. How you keep people's attention at the 10 second mark on a 40 second video, the copy you support it with. Do you do a reel or a carousel? Are you on Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, Spotlight? Because no one's going there. YouTube shorts, Facebook, Twitter. It's a complicated framework, but for every face that I'm looking at right now, it is worth the 25 hours of deep education to get good at it. Cause it is the lowest cost, highest upside to build your business.
- [12:31]
B
Amazing. Amazing. Alison, you started on Shark Tank as someone seeking funding and then you came back as a shark. And through that journey, you've seen a lot of brands, people, I'm sure, come to you for mentorship and advice every single day. What are, what's the single biggest mistake you see entrepreneurs making in their branding that you want this room to avoid?
- [13:11]
C
Yeah, I think, you know, just to comment on you, I was one post away from going viral and I did go viral and it changed my life. So that video now has 250 million views and I have 3 billion views on my face on TikTok. So don't give up. Like that is such good advice and I really feel like it was such an important part of our journey. You know, when it comes to brands making mistakes, that's almost like a loaded question because you can't, you don't know what you don't know and if you don't take risks, you don't know what's next. So for us, yes, we knew what we were and who we were in our consumer kind of like I was saying earlier, but what I love what we did at Poppy is we had like the 80, 20 rule. 80% of our budgets, our AOP calendars were planned to cultural moments or big moments in retail. They were very structured or organized. We had, you know, months of planning, years of planning ahead of time, projections, and then we left 20% for cultural relevant moments. So, for example, Love island was going really viral this summer. We did an Amaya papaya meme, and we were like, let's make this flavor. It got picked up by people, it went viral. It got hundreds of thousands of views and likes. So much so we had a DM waiting for her when she got out. And we were able to do that within three months. And we're a huge company now. There's so many instances that we did that back in the day. So we took risks. We spent money not knowing the ROI or the KPI or anything behind that, because it was culturally a moment that we needed to be a part of. And another example that I love is we're the official soda of the Lakers. We actually can't sell there because of contracts. I think it's a Coke stadium. But the Lakers are part of culture, right? Celebrities go there. We, we have our logo with Kim Kardashian sitting on the sidelines, Right? That's a cultural moment. It wasn't like, oh, my gosh, we can't sell there. We can't do it. So I think a really big mistake that brands do is not taking enough risk and not testing enough things and not doing things that make VCs and probably the money very uncomfortable. And if that's one thing I would say is like, take way more risk. At least 20% more.
- [15:31]
A
Yeah.
- [15:32]
B
And so, you know, as we think about entrepreneurial brands and the big guys that do the same exact thing, the playbook is exactly the same. You have a budget plan, a certain amount against things that you know will happen, that are static, that hit retail windows. The other 20% opportunistic, to really take advantage of what's happening in culture. And so, Gary, as you have seen, so many brands, big brands, little brands, and you work with all different types with your agency. What do you think the big brands are doing wrong?
- [16:11]
A
Everything.
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C
Okay.
- [16:13]
B
Okay. All right, tell us.
- [16:17]
A
Big brands are still running marketing departments based on a book that was written in 1991 called How Brands Grow. That book was written in 1991. Now, a lot of CMOs and big brands don't realize they're running it. They just have bought into the philosophy Ironically or maybe not ironically. The philosophy is incredibly sound, Right. The problem is it was written in 1991 and couldn't factor in the fragmentation of the media landscape. It was written based on the principles of having television be the disproportionate, most important medium and still living in a world where television commercials could penetrate culture. We're now in a world where the only television commercials that have a prayer of being ROI positive, our super bowl commercials. The problem there is it's such a financial risk. You know, it's incredibly high risk, high reward, but still worth it. All of us, when I said that, everyone's like, I mean, we literally watch for the commercials, not even the games. Sometimes, depending on your fandom. I definitely don't watch the game anymore. I'm a Jets fan. I'm super pissed this morning. So big brands also make a very critical mistake right now that I think entrepreneurs, we rely on common sense a lot more because we have to. So, for example, in big brand land, one of the things that they're obsessed with is reach and frequency. We gotta reach you all. A lot of times the problem is the. They assume the reach was garnered. So they will run banner ads on websites, television commercials, billboards, in places where everyone's on their phone, and they'll say, we reached this many people. The reality is you could potentially reach this many people, and you reached none of them. So I think the disease that's destroying Fortune 5000 land is potential reach versus actualized reach. It's why I'm so obsessed with social. And let me be very clear here, with a lot of you, I couldn't give a shit about social media. I care about attention, and attention happens to be at scale in social right now. But when Zucks is done with his master plan with the glasses and the phone that this gentleman just dropped, and I watched him pick it up, that is our remote. This is the remote control of our life. Lives right now. We all know it. We're all trying to figure out how to be on it less. It's that powerful. This is about to go away. This, you know, for the OGs in the room, this is about to be the beeper. Like, you're gonna buy this thing in 20 years on eBay as, like, a nostalgic reminder. And for the parents in the room that are so stupid about their kids being on the iPad or the phone too much, this is gonna be child's play to the world we're about to go into. AI, AR, VR, robots. What do you think technology just Stops because you're living right now. So I think the big mistake we're making is not taking advantage of where the attention actually is. And then finally, and I'm sure you went through this and I'm sure this is something that you spend a lot of time thinking about. This is her. Now, there's going to be custodians of this brand and they're going to make subjective calls on what's on brand, what does it mean? And they're going to be subjective calls of one or two or three people. The other biggest issue in Fortune 500 land is subjective opinions make trillion dollar decisions. There's an incredible lack of humility in big brand marketing. It is based on politics and audacity and subjective opinions. It is wild. And then we guess and spend all our money amplifying it from the top. When we have this new world where you can do social at scale, do you know how many different ideas all of us have of what this brand could talk about? Now that's tough because to Alison's point earlier, when you want to be on brand, when you're trying to do relevant things for everybody and in the audience, there's a lot of different people here, you could start to be off brand by people's opinions. My issue is that I'd rather be relevant to as many different people as possible. Cause relevance leads to consideration and consideration leads to buying stuff. So I'd rather, in this room, if I was selling this, really know you one by one and get you to buy this based on what you fuck with, which is going to be different for everybody in this room. And so I think they're losing on relevance at scale. And I think they're getting destroyed on potential reach versus actualized reach. And that's where our work has been in trying to change that playbook.
- [21:26]
B
That's amazing. So, Allison, In a very crowded category that you compete in, how do you get the balance right of reaching and scaling to new audiences and staying true to who people have known this brand to be and maintaining the core of your relevance? How do you get that balance right? Or how do you think about that as you are now entering a whole new frontier of growth?
- [21:59]
C
You know, to his point, Poppy is me and going into the Pepsi system. To your point, they're like, can you just write everything down and we'll follow a book? To your point, it is a little bit hard. But you know, I did sell my company, so I do have to do that. And they, you know, good luck. But I will say for Me, it's interesting with just the way that you kind of like look at that. But look, I struggle with men and gaming and sports with poppy. We are a female company. It's core to who our audience is. We do know that once you get to a scale, you do have to open your audience and get more people in the fold. It's the only way that you can scale a business and be successful. So that was a topic of conversation that we had for almost three years. Poppy girlies, right? The college girlies, the moms, the genzennials as well. What we call it was just the core of our community. So we're like, okay, how do we get men into the fold? So we did the Lakers partnership, we did inner Miami, we started working with Fortnite streamers. But what we did really well is we did all that. But probably you guys maybe know about the Lakers in inner Miami. But we don't put any of those things on our social feed. So we are working with gamers, we're working with youtubers, we are working with sports athletes. We're doing all these things, but they actually never come into our social ecosystem. Because then the people that are our core community, they still know us as the poppy girlies and the core too. And it's so fun and all the trend and the cultural things, but we are talking to the men, right? And so I think a lot of people get confused and it's almost very jarring to all of a sudden see men just showing up on our feed. And I think that I know I would be curious to think like what you think about that. But it's something that's just work worked really well for us. We also know that within the Pepsi portfolio they have 20 brands that are for men and Poppy is really the only one for women. And like that's okay too, right? To capture the women do all the shopping for the household. The amount of times I have someone come up to me and be like, my daughter introduced me to it. That's a man. So like that is an avenue to gain new men into the fold. You know, one of my favorite stories was we were trying to get into Publix, it's a grocery store in Florida. And the buyer kept telling us no. And then finally he called us one day and he's like, you have a full rollout. And we're like, what happened? He's like, my 17 year old daughter came home and said, dad, why do you not have poppy? And so I think that people, you just kind of have to think of it differently. You can expand your audience as you do it, but you don't have to do it necessarily in the traditional way of all of a sudden and changing the core of who you are to build on that.
- [24:45]
A
What's happening is we're living in a fractioned media landscape. Let me just go very deep. We are probably within the next two or three years where the content you put out on social, the algorithm is going to find the audience that is interested in the content itself. Right. So I'm sure everyone is aware of this. The social media I grew up with was more like email marketing. You had to get as many followers as you could, and then every time you posted, a certain percentage of those followers would see every post. I would actually argue we are past the social media era and I think we're in something I call the interest media era. So I think we're seeing the things we're interested in, not the content from people that we follow. And so what would happen in that sense, Alison, is that you would have a lot of control of what people can see. To your point, the way you broke that down, you're talking about people coming to your Instagram and seeing that grid, that's less than 3% of the consumption of Instagram content because everyone's consuming in feed, you'd still be able to control that. In fact, if you look carefully, the platforms are always addressing what people want on both the company side and people side, they're rolling out on Instagram. The ability for you to control the grid completely, not just the top three pins, but the whole grid, because they know so many brands care about that. At the same token, I think at the end of the day, you wanna get as many people to be interested in what you do. And so there's platform strategy. Like if we were jamming four years ago and you're like, what do I do with this? I would say, where are you at with YouTube shorts? Where you at with Snapchat? Where you at with Instagram? Reels only posting? So you'd be able to post only reels only. So it doesn't show up in the grid, but it can still hit that male audience. So this is why it gets into the details. Like, once you really know your. This is why the point I made earlier, if I can just get all of you into that 25 to 50 hours, just on social, just on the six platforms and how they work, you can start getting into your optionality, which helps you execute your strategy.
- [27:00]
B
Amazing. So, Gary, I asked you earlier what are the big guys doing wrong? Now I'm going to flip the question. Is there anything the big guys are doing that's right, that this audience should adapt?
- [27:20]
A
Not really. And I'll tell you what I mean by that. Like the things they do well come along with scale. What do they do well, they got fucking money. That's good for y'. All. Like you should do that. But the execution, we all in here, 0 to 100. Looks nothing like the big guys. Looks nothing like it. You can't afford to be that stupid, you know, you just, you know, it's just different, you know. And by the way, this is important because of the way I'm talking. So many of the people in these big companies are smart. They're stuck by the system. You know, they're checking like I'm in me. That was the most shocking to me when I got into that game. I'm like, wait, but you know, but then I was like, oh, you're burning Bonus is tied into getting that many views on television. So how could I possibly ask you to do the right thing when you've got a mortgage to pay? You know? So, you know, I think that, I think that, no, I do not believe that anyone in this room that's on their quest from 0 to 100 million should spend much, if any, time figuring out what the big guys are doing. I think you can learn about, let's use this brilliant woman. You could learn about what the big guys want to buy. My favorite part of watching Allison and her husband, the team, build their company was it never felt to me like they were guessing or it was random or they got lucky. Lucky. Like every move I was watching from afar, I'm like, they have an agenda to sell this company to Coke or Pepsi. That's literally what I felt within the first glances of what was going on there. And so I would say that you don't need to look at the big companies to decide what to do. Cause they're different than you. They have scaled retail distribution, they have unlimited funds compared to you. You've gotta play a different game. It's David and Goliath type stuff, right? But there is a lot to learn about how they think or what they need. Because that may lead to you expanding into a product category with your brand. That may lead to the exit that you want. So reverse engineering them and understanding them. By the way, that's why I started my company. VaynerMedia was started because all I knew was small business and Silicon Valley startups. I knew nothing about Fortune 500. And I wanted to know it because whether I wanted to disrupt it or buy it to it or sell to it, I wanted to know it. So you should know it. But your actions in building your business, there isn't a lot of great things to get out of there. It's a different game. And I do see a lot of people, in fact, and this might be on your radar, given how your track has gone. A lot of people that are in big companies try to do this and fail horribly, often all the time. I never invest in startups started by people who just left full career at Procter and Gamble or PepsiCo. Not because they're not smart or good. It's that they're bringing corporation thinking to a startup game. And that'd be like being a great. Like, LeBron's the fucking LeBron. He's a goat. But if he was like, yo, Gary, I'm about to get into hockey and I'm starting to play tomorrow, invest in me. I'll be like, get the fuck out of my face, LeBron. And that's how different it really is from corporate to, you know, this early stage. And so that's why I answer the way I answer.
- [31:08]
B
Awesome. Awesome. And so, Alison, as you have now paid, pivoted your company from Shark Tank exposure to now being a part of a huge Fortune 500 enterprise of Pepsi. What have you done to really take that momentum that you started with at Shark Tank and ride that to really get you to the big payday at Pepsi? How did you take that momentum?
- [31:41]
C
I think it's easier to go back to the early days because I think it's more contextual to the audience of, look, we did an update on Shark Tank and it aired April, the second month of lockdown. And how many people are sitting at home in front of the TV? April of 2020, it really early on. Look, that was the second month of business for Poppy. We launched the first week of COVID We had to throw the traditional marketing playbook out the window because it was such a crazy time. But what it did at that moment is overnight we hit number one on new Amazon top product list. I think we were trending higher than Kim Kardashian and Donald Trump. But it opened our eyes to being digital first. It opened our eyes to, quote unquote, a National Commercial Month 2. We went from doing like $5,000 on Amazon to $250,000. So we're like, oh, we can reach a lot of people if we figure out a way to do stuff not in person. And so we. At that moment, the cameras go off. Shark Tank's done. I became completely obsessed with TikTok. We were one of the first brands to get on and really talk to our community and put. Put myself out there. And I have a lot of founders that are like, oh, man, I don't want to do it myself, or I don't want to be the face of, like, that's a you problem. Because then you don't want to be successful. It's like, let that go. And you know what? Okay. If you don't want to do it, hire someone to do it. And I think they're like, well, I don't want someone else to be the face of my company. The Internet moves on after three days. Who cares if they leave? Hire someone else. Right? I always feel like people are making excuses. And. And to Gary's point, like, so social media is the core of who we built our community on. And I don't say customers. I say community. And I know people are like, ugh, authentic community. I'm so sick of hearing those words. But it's true. It's true. And so, like, do it. Feel cringe, get online, do these things. So for us, even with the cameras going off, we found a way to just keep the conversation going. And then we did. Did invest in a Super bowl at year, I think three at Poppy, which is kind of wild if you really think about it, and how that came about. Saying moving at the speed of culture. We created a beautiful piece of content that was really anthemic. We were really wanting to show people that we were soda for the next generation. I think we said soda in the commercial 17 times, because at the time, people were like, this functional. Drink this better for you soda. And we're like, no, we are soda. And we're gon to tell everybody about it. So we saw the creative. It was incredible. Super bowl comes. It's a week at the Super Bowl. We could not find a Super bowl ad. We wanted to buy one. We couldn't do it. I ended up. I'm part of, like, this TikTok collective. I was at dinner, and this guy worked at a media company, and I was like, hey, do you have a Super bowl ad? And he's like, I do. And we bought that super bowl four days before the Super Bowl. And that's how much we believed in what we were doing. And we were just moving at the speed of culture. We tripled our awareness overnight. We had never even tested linear before that. I think we'd Done like a little test in the November before, we just were like, nope, we know this is going to work. And after that, the doors that opened for us were insane. I mean, I remember like the Uber driver knew what Poppy was on the. On the way home from the airport. And like, before that just like, had never really happened before. And then, you know, we doubled down with it after that. We were like, okay, this whole whole new linear is working. Let's keep the social engine going. And so it was just like this momentum. It's. It's the right time, right? You don't want to start doing these things if you don't have the distribution. Because we had the distribution, we had the creative, we had the momentum, and we just stayed at the top of our game. Like, we just moved quick. And so I think that's. Big companies can't do that. But still in the. The poppy system within Pepsi, they're still allowing us to really move to this point be to culture.
- [35:35]
B
Awesome. Yesterday you said the word community. Yesterday we had a lot of conversation about community and what that means to business building. Gary, you're known for saying that community is the future of marketing. How can small businesses really build their brand and build their business model? If that is what you believe, what tips can you give this audience?
- [36:00]
A
I'm going to quote the great poet. I think when I think about community, this is the best thing I think about. The great poet says, never get high on your own supply. Let me tell you why I just quoted that. I believe that small businesses are very good at getting high on their own supply. You start thinking you're someone and you start to take your community for granted. I am blown away when I leave a conference like this. I see some people say good talk or they tag me. I do a lot of listening. It's funny. I do so much speaking, it seems because of the way I do content, but 95% of my life is listening. I would say that that's what I actually am, a human anthropologist. I'm curious about everything that all of you are interested in and everything is why? So that I can figure out what I want to do with it. I am blown away by how many of you posted something for your business yesterday. Got 7 comments and you replied to none of them. I do not understand. Community is like working out, meaning you can't talk about it, you can't read about it, you can't pontificate about it. Y' all either went to the gym this morning or you did not. And knowing how early this Session was you probably didn't, you know, but if you did, you got those results. And so for me, community is imperative. I do not actually. Back to Alison's world. Do you know that new Coke, this is like a very incredible all time Fortune 500 brand story. Coca Cola for some of the OGs in here. Either you studied it or you lived through it like I did as a kid. Coke changed its formula. The reason we have Coke Classic is because they had to change it back real quick. If you remember, it's a very famous story. It's worth reading about if you're a youngster and don't know this story from the 80s. The reason they had to change it back, and I don't want to get the number wrong, but it's some. This is Coca Cola in the mid-80s where like we brushed our teeth with that shit, right? Like it was at the height of the height of the height and they had to change back to their formula because something like 20,000 customers who were super heavy users who were drinking like four cases a day and they didn't like the new formula, the collective, and they had to switch it back. I do not think that most people realize how big of a business you can build with just 20,000 crazy people. And the best and easiest way to get 20,000 crazy people is to actually go all in on community and engage with them. Scale I again, it hasn't happened to you. It's already happening. Your story gets rewritten with success. It gets blurry. You yourself forget every detail. I am sitting on this stage. One tactic from 2007 to 2011, me, GaryVee on Twitter replied to every single person that tweeted at me for four years. You can go see the receipts right now and go on X and really go look at them, all of them. And it was in that depth. I would go do a talk like this back in 09. I'd be heading to the airport. Back then, it was a heavy tech community. I was speaking to heavy on Twitter. Every person I made any comment, pro and con, of anything I said in the stage got replied to by the time I was on the airplane. So I think the number one thing that everybody in this room tactically should do is reply to every DM and every comment they get on their brand.
- [40:16]
B
Allison, as we prepare to close, if you had to give one piece of advice to this room to push them and encourage them and inspire them to create branding that bites, what would that one piece of advice be?
- [40:40]
C
Oh, my goodness. One piece of advice that's always like a loaded question. It's like, what is the one thing that I can tell you to be successful? Successful? Look, I think that I get that question a lot and it's different for every single person. If you're starting your business and you're like figuring out what are your non negotiables, is it, do I lean into brand? Do I want to put my face out there? I think understanding the core values of you as an entrepreneur because you are the culture of your company, right? There's so many, like, ways that you can go with that. But if I had to kind of give one, one piece of advice is do not let your ego get in the way of growth.
- [41:20]
A
Never get high on your own support. It's true. Humility is the secret weapon of the successful. It's not seen often. You can't really see it. You know, people struggle with understanding that humility's easily balanced with confidence. It's not a contradiction. But I think you're absolutely right.
- [41:43]
C
I never want to be a CEO of a company and I'm okay with that. Like, you don't have to be a CEO of your company. You can allow people to come in and help you. You don't have to be the cmo. Find out what your superpower is and build a team around you to allow you to get to your best and don't let your ego get in the way of growth.
- [42:01]
B
So Gary and Allison just gave us the place. They just literally gave us the playbook for how to build a brand that bites. And remember, it's not about budgets. It's about being bold. It's about knowing where your audience is, showing up where they are, and creating something that they can't forget.
- [42:24]
A
Everybody, if you enjoyed this podcast, please go back and look at the prior episodes. They're loaded. I appreciate your attention and thanks for being part of this journey. See you later.