Marketing Like a Challenger with Chuck Hengel

Summary

Podcast Summary: The Marketing Architects - "Marketing Like a Challenger with Chuck Hengel"

Introduction Date Released: March 18, 2025
In this episode of The Marketing Architects, host Alena Jasper and co-host Angela Voss welcome Chuck Hengel, the founder and executive chairman of Marketing Architects and the founder of Misfits and Machines. The discussion centers on leveraging challenger brand strategies to drive growth, drawing from Chuck's extensive experience in building and marketing challenger brands.

Defining Challenger Brands The hosts begin by exploring the concept of challenger brands, referencing Peter Field’s article, "Challenger Thinking is How Brands Drive Growth." Field contends that challenger thinking is a universal growth strategy, emphasizing emotional connections over purely functional messaging. Alena Jasper highlights that even large companies benefit from challenger principles, which advocate for a long-term focus rather than immediate, efficiency-driven wins.

Notable Quote:
Chuck Hengel (00:00): "When you can truly collaborate, you'll come up with those insights that when you bring them into market, will drive your ROI much higher."

Chuck Hengel’s Marketing Philosophy Chuck shares his foundational belief that marketing should deliver true business results, not just aesthetic appeal. He recounts his early career experience where he was tasked with connecting marketing's P&L to every company function, learning the importance of data-driven decisions and customer insights.

Notable Quote:
Chuck Hengel (04:29): "Marketing is a function of everyone in a company."

Case Study: The Hurricane The Hurricane, a revolutionary walking cane, exemplifies challenger brand success. Chuck discusses the breakthrough insight: traditional canes lacked emotional appeal and innovation. By observing seniors in real-life settings, Chuck identified the need for a stylish, functional cane that empowered users rather than stigmatizing them.

Notable Quote:
Chuck Hengel (08:55): "Nothing has changed in that space for the last 1000 years. We went to build something amazing for the first phase of mobility loss."

Advertising Strategy for The Hurricane Recognizing the absence of digital conversations about walking canes, Chuck opted for traditional television advertising to create demand. This strategic choice resulted in 100% share of voice in the market, establishing The Hurricane as the go-to cane in the category.

Notable Quote:
Chuck Hengel (12:50): "Television, that was the only place we could go to create demand because there was complete silence everywhere else."

Expanding to Stuffies Building on the success of The Hurricane, Chuck and his team launched Stuffies, a distinctive children’s toy. They applied broader marketing strategies, targeting not only kids but also grandparents who were enthusiastic buyers. This dual-targeting approach, coupled with a memorable jingle, propelled Stuffies to widespread recognition and retail success.

Notable Quote:
Chuck Hengel (16:03): "Stuffies became incredibly famous because of that insight. But truth be told, we started with the very traditional media plan, and we no longer do that. The broader the audience, the more the success."

Key Marketing Principles for Success Chuck introduces the concept of "smashable branding," where every brand element is distinct and orchestrated across all functions. Collaboration across departments ensures that marketing insights are integrated into product development, driving higher ROI and creating memorable brand experiences.

Notable Quote:
Chuck Hengel (21:51): "We worked so hard to make everything distinct and unique in everything we did. We took the time to do that, and when you orchestrated all of it, it worked incredibly well."

Lessons Learned from Successes and Failures Through the successes of The Hurricane and Stuffies, Chuck emphasizes the importance of brand fame, mental and physical availability, and the power of emotional connections. He also shares insights from product failures, such as overly rigid weight loss pants, highlighting the necessity of aligning product functionality with consumer needs.

Notable Quote:
Chuck Hengel (25:14): "We all really contributed to this. There wasn't anyone that wasn't super important to marketing. Every single business function was connected."

Embracing Strategic Failures Chuck recounts the value of strategically failing to iterate and improve. By embedding failure into their testing process, Marketing Architects could swiftly identify and pivot from unsuccessful products, fostering a culture of continuous learning and innovation.

Notable Quote:
Chuck Hengel (06:51): "We built failure into all our testing. We knew we were going to fail a lot, but we wanted to be strategically failing."

Closing Thoughts and Future Outlook The episode concludes with Chuck and the hosts reflecting on the dynamic nature of marketing and the importance of balancing bold ideas with strategic execution. They underscore the necessity of collaboration, adaptability, and a deep understanding of consumer insights to sustain challenger brand momentum.

Notable Quote:
Chuck Hengel (27:59): "We are true artists in this space, and there's a room for that artistry. And that's, I think, what I'm most excited about. Just continuing to be excited about all the stuff that's out there and how do we market it?"

Conclusion This episode of The Marketing Architects provides a comprehensive look into challenger brand strategies through Chuck Hengel’s experiences. Key takeaways include the significance of emotional connections, the benefits of broad market reach, and the value of cross-functional collaboration in building successful brands. Listeners gain actionable insights into applying challenger principles to their own marketing efforts, ensuring sustainable growth and robust ROI.

Notable Quotes Compilation

• Chuck Hengel (00:00): "When you can truly collaborate, you'll come up with those insights that when you bring them into market, will drive your ROI much higher."
• Chuck Hengel (04:29): "Marketing is a function of everyone in a company."
• Chuck Hengel (08:55): "Nothing has changed in that space for the last 1000 years. We went to build something amazing for the first phase of mobility loss."
• Chuck Hengel (12:50): "Television, that was the only place we could go to create demand because there was complete silence everywhere else."
• Chuck Hengel (16:03): "Stuffies became incredibly famous because of that insight. But truth be told, we started with the very traditional media plan, and we no longer do that. The broader the audience, the more the success."
• Chuck Hengel (21:51): "We worked so hard to make everything distinct and unique in everything we did. We took the time to do that, and when you orchestrated all of it, it worked incredibly well."
• Chuck Hengel (25:14): "We all really contributed to this. There wasn't anyone that wasn't super important to marketing. Every single business function was connected."
• Chuck Hengel (27:59): "We are true artists in this space, and there's a room for that artistry. And that's, I think, what I'm most excited about. Just continuing to be excited about all the stuff that's out there and how do we market it?"

For Further Engagement To connect with the hosts and guest, follow The Marketing Architects on LinkedIn. If you enjoyed this episode, leave a review and share your thoughts on how challenger brand strategies have impacted your business.

Transcript

[Chuck Hingle]

We knew the marketing insight would really work. So let's make the product align and that is that powerful connection between all the departments and the marketing team. When you can truly collaborate, you'll come up with those insights that when you bring them into market, will drive your ROI much higher.

[Alena Jasper]

Marketing Architects hello and welcome to the Marketing Architects, a research first podcast dedicated to answering your toughest marketing questions. I'm Alena Jasper. I run the marketing team here at Marketing Architects. And I'm joined by my co host, Angela Voss, the CEO of Marketing Architects. Hello. And we're joined by a special guest, the founder and executive chairman of Marketing Architects and more recently, the founder of Misfits and Machines, Chuck Hingle.

[Chuck Hingle]

Hello. Happy to be here.

[Alena Jasper]

Happy to have you.

[Angela Voss]

It's going to be good.

[Chuck Hingle]

Must be a slow news day with all the famous people you've had on here recently.

[Angela Voss]

We have had quite a few of those, but no shade to you though.

[Chuck Hingle]

All right, well, I have to stand in the shoulders of some of the giants and look forward to this.

[Alena Jasper]

No, this wasn't a filler episode. We're very excited.

[Chuck Hingle]

Okay.

[Alena Jasper]

To have you.

[Chuck Hingle]

Well, I feel better about that.

[Alena Jasper]

You can feel good about that. All right, we're back with our thoughts on some recent marketing news. Always trying to root our opinions in data research and what drives business results. Today, Chuck's joining us to talk about marketing like a challenger brand. Not every marketer who listens to this show manages a brand that's a category leader. And great marketers know how to do more with less. So any brand that can think and act like a challenger is going to be more successful. Today we'll discuss why that is, Chuck's experience developing marketing and selling brands that were challengers in their categories and how you can apply Challenger principles to grow any brand. But let's start as we always do, with a piece of research or an article. I chose one by Peter Field and it's titled Challenger Thinking is how Brands Drive Growth. This is part of eat Big Fish's 20 years of challenger Brand series. In the article, he describes how 20 years ago, Challenger brands were seen as exceptions, companies with unique founders or lucky circumstances. But Field's research found that Challenger thinking isn't a niche strategy. It's how brands grow. Today, even global companies embrace the power of building emotional connections rather than just relying on functional messaging. But thanks to the rise of digital advertising and efficiency driven metrics, many brands now focus on quick wins rather than long term health. Those wins might look great today, but they kill momentum over time. Challenger brands like Aldi succeed because they play the long game. They don't panic over one bad quarter and they don't sacrifice brand building for immediate returns. Field argues that CEOs need to think more like marketers building bold moves that might not pay off immediately but build real long term value. That final takeaway I had to include because I am a marketer talking to two CEOs today. But a good place to start here might be by defining what we mean when we say a brand is a challenger because there can be, I think, different definitions depending on who you are. So ang what comes to mind for you when you think of a challenger brand?

[Angela Voss]

Yeah, I love the question. I would imagine if you ask 10 people that question, you get 10 different answers. It's sort of like what's your definition of brand? So probably a good place to start. I have thought of a challenger brand as typically bold. They're really fast moving, they shake up an industry. They're really savvy in their use of data digital tools. They've got smart strategies that really stand out. They focus potentially on finding nich markets and personalizing experiences. They stay really agile, they grow quickly without heavy investments in production or logistics. But I will say too that I don't disagree with your point or Peter's point in the article. Isn't being a challenger sort of operating with a belief system that just defines conventional thinking? For example, you've got mountains of data to tell you to spend more on digital and yet your belief is that reaching new customers through top of funnel marketing is going to drive growth in your business. That's challenger thinking and you operate by that belief in everything you do.

[Alena Jasper]

I think he'd agree with that that it's not so much the size of the brand, it's yeah type of thinking. A philosophy that can help any brand, big or small. And it turns out it is like the best path forward no matter the size of your brand. So let's talk more about that but I want to get to our guest. Thanks again for joining us. One of the defining traits of a challenger brand is the ability to outmarket the competition. And I know that Chuck, you see marketing as not just a make it pretty department, which I know is a phrase that we like or just a comms function or a logo and some colors. You believe that marketing can and should deliver true business results. So where did that belief originally come from?

[Chuck Hingle]

I did start as a marketing statistician so I do look at marketing through analytics. But more important than that, my first job. They actually told me on day one, you're not going to make a marketing decision for five years. And I'm like, what? Five years? What do I do? And they said, you need to connect the marketing P and L to every function in our company and understand the leverage that function has to marketing. I'm like, okay. First exercise right after that was they gave me a list of 10 products. They said, rank these products from bestseller to worst for what you think we're actually doing in market. And I had it completely wrong. The best product I had is the worst and vice versa. And I quickly learned the value of merchandising. I then later worked on understanding why we have bad debt, why there's returns. I ended up calling hundreds of customers. And to this day, when I talk to marketers, very few actually talk to live customers. And I learned where some of the data variables were going to need to go to improve our bad debt forecast based on things like small area variability. Every part of the country was very different. People were very different from me socioeconomically. So that hands on work made a huge difference. I learned the power of pricing and offer. I saw teams fighting over great offers that they would go to the finance team and go, we really need to be able to do this to make our marketing work better. All things that had nothing to do with comms. It had to do with the infrastructure of the business and the impact on marketing. So I actually left there after two years because I couldn't stand it. I'm like, I want to make marketing decisions. But the message was clear. Marketing is a function of everyone in a company.

[Alena Jasper]

Yeah. And you definitely took that and brought it into eventually the agency that you started, which is marketing architects. And you believe in the power of marketing to drive business effects so much that you decided that we would build and market our own products. The most successful being the Hurricane. We talk about that a bunch on the show. That was the first like true brand in Walking canes and then Stuffy's, which is also mentioned a few times, which was a very popular children's toy. And I want to talk about both those in a moment. But Ange and I also know that there were a lot of brands and products before, in between and after those that didn't succeed. So I thought it might be more fun to start with what you learned from some of those brands you created and invested in that failed to challenge or change their category.

[Chuck Hingle]

Well, I will say learning hands on with our own brands was super valuable to the entire agency. You can come to the same conclusions we had through live testing, through educational tracks, marketing effectiveness, the IPA database, goldratt's theory of constraints. There's unbelievable amounts of scientific evidence on how a company can grow through brand and what marketing effectiveness is what's nice. The tacit learning we had was super valuable. For example, we built failure into all our testing. We knew we were going to fail a lot, but we wanted to be strategically failing. So, for example, if a product wasn't working, we always took learnings away. For example, the deeper the sales process was in a website, in other words, the number of clicks, if they were a lot of clicks to get to an order page, we lost a lot of customers. So we quickly figured, I better start selling in the homepage. So what we ultimately could prove is you gotta love the process of marketing more than your product. It didn't matter what brand we're working on. The process of marketing was very universal amongst all our brands and it allowed us to try and test a lot of things and find winners and quickly walk away from losers. But all these first principles, these frameworks, they applied to all of these brands. So that learning I think we can apply today to our agency clients because these universal truths do translate. So, I mean, we had an unbelievably large amount of learning beyond that. But that would probably be the biggest learning that I took away.

[Angela Voss]

I guess Elon would say, if you're not failing, you're not innovating like him or hate him, he innovates pretty well, so you gotta do that to get there. Let's transition into some of the big wins and maybe we can start with the hurricane. The most successful challenger brands tend to have this sharp consumer insight at their core, something they recognize potentially talking to customers, as you had mentioned, that maybe their competitors have overlooked. What do you feel was that breakthrough insight behind the hurricane?

[Chuck Hingle]

I love the process of hearing the story of a new customer and how they came to that insight. That's like the thing. They're like, wow, how did they think about that? So we got to do it for ourself. I had a friend who is a local advertising executive and she had lost both parents within a year. And she was so frustrated by the process of going through that with her parents. She said, we have to change some things. I'm like, what do you mean? She said, will you come and talk to me about what you do and what I do and maybe we can join forces? So we. She said, meet me at the Mall of America. I'm going to go on A walk with you. And we spent all day at the Mall of America watching seniors people aging in a live fashion. And she explained to me that the whole marketplace for seniors hasn't changed in a thousand years. Products were gray, products were boring, products were uninspiring. And she found it incredibly hard to help her parents through this rapid aging that they went through because of health issues. For example, her dad became incontinent, and he wouldn't wear adult diapers because they were like children's diapers. So she's an artist. And she drew Superman things on the diapers and said, dad, these are Superman pants. And then he wore them. Her mom's favorite color was yellow, but you couldn't find a single product in yellow that she would have thought was beautiful and she'd want to use. She's like, why did we take color out of senior products? And then she said, most importantly, there's five stages of mobility loss. Like, well, what does that mean? Well, first phase of loss is you need assistance walking. The fifth phase is death. And there was three phases in between. And I'm like, well, why does that matter? And she said that first phase of mobility loss is incredibly emotional. People really struggle with that. And she said, can you solve that? And we looked at that and said, well, that's maybe really simple. That's when you start to walk with some assistance. A walking cane. And then we looked at it and said, wow, the walking cane is basically a stick with a handle. For the last 1000 years, nothing has changed in that space. And that was the insight. We said, let's go build something amazing for the first phase of mobility loss.

[Angela Voss]

Well, and I love it. Just gave that empowerment to help maintain that active, independent lifestyle. But to your point, like, the loss of what's happening, their old life, this, like, mix of psychological and emotional factors, their pride, their desire for independence, the. The fear of acknowledging that they're aging, they might need to use a cane. It just can feel like this concession to frailty rather than a tool for mobility and confidence. And I love. We all loved being behind that and seeing what the hurricane was doing for that audience. Let's get into a bit. The advertising strategy behind the Hurricane. In those early days, what was it like marketing the product? Obviously, a lot of excitement. But looking back, what strategic and channel decision did you think made the biggest impact on the success of the product?

[Chuck Hingle]

I love your statement about the insight being important. And our team was super enthusiastic to solve this problem. And then we did our traditional research. Is there search happening what's the social dialogue happening? Where are people conversing about walking canes? And there was nothing. It was complete silence. People are embarrassed to admit that they need a cane. And so we knew right away, there's no way we can launch this product digitally. There is nothing happening digitally. We had to create all of that. And I think we got really lucky there. We had to go to brand building and broad growth marketing techniques. Television, that's the only place we could go to create demand because there was complete silence everywhere else. And that turned out to be an unbelievably smart decision because we quickly had 100% share of voice. Things just expanded and grew and people attributed all innovation in the walking canes to. So that launch through television was a game changer for us.

[Alena Jasper]

So one story that I love about how we advertise the Hurricane that has to do with that TV launch is how the team discovered the audience was even broader than we initially thought, which is, I'm guessing, something that other Challenger brands might have to face or adapt to. You know, did the audience change? Do you need to adapt to that? How did you figure out that a whole other group of customers was also likely to buy the Hurricane? And then what did the team do differently because of that?

[Chuck Hingle]

This is the moment where I learned to hate the word targeting. We had this amazing product, this incredible insight. People just when we shot the TV commercials, we had huge crowds around us in the restaurant. People wanted to get a hold of that product, they wanted to buy it, they wanted to use it. Anyone that saw it just got that. And we're like, okay, we're going to target seniors because that's where the market is. And we spent four months with getting zero results on television. We're like, what in the world? We show it to people, they love it. We can't get anything going. And we were ready to almost give up until we had a major airing become available on a weekend in a football game. Specifically, it was a Joel Porterno game where there was all the controversy around the Penn State game. We knew there'd be huge ratings, but advertisers were afraid to be in the game. So it was brought to me. They thought I would say no. And I'm like, let's go for it. We aired it, crashed our website. The difference was buying a cane is a conversation amongst people. Dad or mom aren't going to make the decision on their own. They're going to make it in conversation with their adult children. And it blew up the success of the hurricane and that's where we learned brand fame comes from wide mental availability. The products that are the most famous, like Harley Davidson, you may never ride it, but everyone knows a Harley. You may never drink Coke or Pepsi, but everyone knows that I've never worn Air Jordans. Everyone knows them. That is so important. Your non target awareness, once it's high, it becomes famous. And this cane became incredibly famous because of that insight. But truth be told, we started with the very traditional media plan, and we no longer do that. The broader the audience, the more the success.

[Alena Jasper]

Now I'd say too, for listeners, once you start looking for hurricanes, you'll see them everywhere. They were the first cane to stand on their own. And there was recently a photo that we were passing around the agency of Warren Buffett using the hurricane at an investor conference. So how's that for brand fame when Warren Buffett's using it? But that story about broad reach, it reminds me of the second product I wanted to talk about. I don't know. Did Stuffies follow the hurricane? I thought that it did. It did. So we learned from the hurricane, and Stuffies also ended up having a bit of a broader audience.

[Angela Voss]

Right.

[Alena Jasper]

Than we might have initially thought. Maybe you could tell us a little bit about what Stuffies is too.

[Chuck Hingle]

Yeah. Everyone knows in the agency, this is where I really got to know you, Angela. But we had targeted kids like we should. And, you know, we knew not to just target. So we thought, well, how do we broaden this? And Angela brought the idea to us of the biggest audiences out there are not kids. How do we tap into that? We learned from our own research that the most enthusiastic buyers were grandmas. From talking to customers, Moms were reluctant buyers. They really don't want to buy a stuffed animal.

[Angela Voss]

We don't need any more toys in the house.

[Chuck Hingle]

Right. Your kids are still at an age where you're priced by saying no more than you're saying, yes, I'm trying. Yeah, exactly. So that was a very easy insight to see. And we started to test how do we broaden this to grandma? And we actually use radio to build messaging. We found something that really resonated. It was dear grandma, thanks so much, my stuffy. But grandma needed to know that grandchild would love the product as well. So that's the children's advertising. And then mom was in between. So we reached everybody and it just exploded. We were the featured product in Target on their main end, cap in their toy aisle. In our peak season, people really wanted Stuffies because we reached a broad audience. Now with different messages, but they all understood the potential for really kids to love this product and for grandma to love giving the product. On a practical matter, that's where most of the inventory is in mass media. So it all just worked incredibly beautifully by thinking very broad.

[Angela Voss]

Well, and it allowed the Stuffies to stand out, too, because guess what? You weren't seeing a lot of toy products on Hallmark or Fox News. So talk about share of voice and what you can attain there in the eyes of the grandma as compared to being on DXD and everywhere you can see hundreds of toys on a daily basis.

[Alena Jasper]

I would say one thing that was a little different when we advertised Stuffy versus a Hurricane was we had a jingle. How much stuff can you stuff in a stuffy? Till your stuff, you stuff enough stuff. Which, by the way, I was researching Stuffies the other day just to see, like old commercials and things. And people still complain on the Internet about how annoying that was. So it's really was quite an earworm. It's really stuck in people's minds. But I think you just talked a little bit about this. But did anything else change about the way that you approached advertising Stuffies, you know, based on what you learned from the Hurricane?

[Chuck Hingle]

We were aware we needed broader physical availability earlier. There are D2C launches, the Hurricane. And when we added retail, it was an and not an or. We just expanded our market. So we focused on that heavily. And with Stuffies, we launched with having broad availability earlier in the process. We went to the New York Toy show and we won display of the year that we were there. We said, we're going to go big. We're going to get physical availability. And the retailers loved it because we had had television marketing going, but we really focused on that. So, yeah, there was definitely learnings that became principles that are really just foundational to brand building. Mental availability, physical availability. We really built upon our distinctive assets. That Stuffies were incredibly distinctive. They came with a storybook. They had a surprise inside. They had the seven secret pockets. There was a friendship bracelet available. You could put a heart in the Stuffy. We had that incredible jingle. We spent unbelievable amount of time on the zipper mouth so that it was super cute. And we wanted every element of that to be distinct, just like the Hurricane was. And the insight on the Hurricane was we took it to the creative team before we took it to the product team and said, how do we sell this cane? And the creative team came over and held the cane in their hand on my desk, slammed it down and said, can you make it do this. And I'm like, what? And they let go of the cane and it fell over and they go, can you make that cane stand? Because then it's the cane that stands alone. I'm like, ah. That was the core insight that really drove the marketing message. The hurricane, the cane that stands alone, that came from marketing, not from product. Now the product that cost a million dollars to build the functionality into the base to make it stand because it needed a spring system. It has snapped back in place. But we were willing to do that because we knew the marketing insight would really work. So let's make the product align. And that is that powerful connection between all the departments, the divisions, or whatever you call it in a business and the marketing team. When you can truly collaborate, you'll come up with those insights that when you bring them into market, will drive your ROI much higher.

[Angela Voss]

One of my most favorite memories of being at Marketing Architects dealt with one of the challenges in the difference between the Hurricane and the Stuffies was seasonality. It's a toy product. Obviously there's some big weeks at the end of the year that really matter a lot with the holidays. And I will never forget no one that was at Marketing Architects at this time will ever forget Chuck pulling the entire company together. We had no idea what was going on. But it was the day of the holiday party. We were supposed to have our holiday party and we're all excited about it. And Chuck had a message, which was what? Chuck?

[Chuck Hingle]

We were 35,000 orders behind in the warehouse. It was going so well. And if those don't arrive in time for Christmas, how many unhappy kids are there going to be? So we were. The Grinch sold Christmas and we were just going crazy. And the sad thing was we worked all night. I think we only got like 2000 items shipped. It was like we were busing people out of the city out to this warehouse to ship.

[Angela Voss]

Yeah.

[Chuck Hingle]

Our IT team was helping improve the efficiency of the warehouse. But to this day, we all loved being a part of solving that crisis.

[Angela Voss]

It was so great. Such a great moment. Trading the dresses for hard hats. Just a pack. As many Stuffies into boxes as we possibly could. So these two products couldn't be more different. But it feels like the same sort of challenger principles played a key role in both things. Like power of emotion, having that long term focus, strong advertising category leadership. So what, Chuck, in your view, are the biggest marketing principles that made Hurricane Stuffy successful? And what lessons do you think any brand can take from them?

[Chuck Hingle]

That's a great Challenge. To summarize that much learning into, I'll try to do it into a statement. We actually ran across a term that we liked, and we called it smashable branding. We worked so hard to make everything distinct and unique in everything we did. We took the time to do that, and when you orchestrated all of it, it worked incredibly well. So the importance of working across our team in every single functional area was amazingly important. The customer service team was empowered. If there was an issue with getting the wrong stuffy, they were empowered to send another one out instantly for free. We protected the customer experience. Oh, and what we do if they got the wrong stuffy, we'd say donate that to a local charity. The amount of emotional stories we had, they're like, what of people walking in and donating a stuffy to a kid in a hospital bed because they got the wrong one? And that was magical. So all of that we called smashable branding. That comes from the idea if you smash a Coke bottle and give someone a piece, they're going to recognize it's a Coke bottle. So, yeah, there's a lot of famous brands out there. But we said, how do we build brand fame right out of the gates and make sure every decision is orchestrated? We were going to launch the cane. We had a million dollars in tooling cost in the cane, and we said, it's not good enough. And we walked away from that because it's not going to be distinct, it's not going to be special. And we found a new manufacturing partner, and, boy, did they nail it. And that worked because we told the manufacturing partner, be a partner for us to make this cane amazing. Instead of working off of spec, they came back a day later. I couldn't believe what they came back with. It was incredible. We eventually had to sell that product to a large competitor because we're not the right home for durable medical equipment. And they're a billion dollar company manufacturing thousands of products. They said it's the best manufacturing agreement because these people became partners of yours. They gave us better pricing, they gave us better turnaround, and they were a part of our success. So that smashable part and having everyone collaborate and work across the entire ecosystem is what I think why everyone tells these great stories. We all really contributed to this. There wasn't anyone that wasn't super important to marketing. Every single business function was connected. Now, was it really easy then to get our CFO to improve these media budgets? And you remember the tension around trying to sell that much in that narrow window?

[Angela Voss]

Oh, absolutely. Eat our own dog food, 20 million.

[Chuck Hingle]

In inventory for an agency sitting in a warehouse. That all has to be sold in six weeks. Our CFO is in that warehouse, running that warehouse for four weeks while we got behind. So it was really easy to work with him on budgeting because he knew exactly what the success factor was. He's like, yep, I will support this because I know what my role is. But that's what I love about working with these challenger brands. They really, they all work like that. They start small and they all have to collaborate to build this really cool thing. I love our large clients as well, but our best large clients, they're incredibly collaborative cultures. You just have to be. Everyone knows that if you become too functional, things will stop working. But the people that collaborate and look at marketing as a process and we all contribute to it, that's where the success comes from. So that's why I think people still tell these stories and they really stick with us and then we can really apply these to new marketing challenges.

[Alena Jasper]

One of the statements that I read about when I was preparing for this was what makes a challenger brand? And one of the statements was, they out market the competition. Not necessarily they're the biggest or they're the smallest or the newest. And I think that those two products are such a great example of out marketing others. And like you said, that started from the very start of creating them. Like creating them with marketing in mind. And all those marketing principles, they all connect to business principles too, if you follow them. So that's great. One thing I wanted to end with, for fun, I asked you earlier about product failures. I was hoping you'd give some examples. But you're coward and you didn't. And I'm wondering if that's because some of these products we don't want to talk about. But every entrepreneur has at least one terrible idea. And I know that you've invested in many. All right. We've tested out a lot of different product ideas. So I'd like to know what's a business related bad idea that you seriously considered before realizing that might have been a bad idea?

[Chuck Hingle]

Out of the thousand I think are.

[Alena Jasper]

Bad ideas, you can do more than one.

[Chuck Hingle]

It could be the pants that had such rigid stitching in them that when you walked it created the need to have more calories expended. So they were like weight loss pants.

[Alena Jasper]

No way.

[Chuck Hingle]

Because they were so hard to walk in. And boy, when you put those things on and tried to move, you're like, I can't even move in these. These things yeah. Is that a good idea? I don't know. But most of my experiences are saying no to something that would be amazing later, and it's really hard. So, for example, I remember when an entrepreneur came to me and said, I've got this really new up and coming social influencer behind this cosmetics line. Do you want to market that with us? And I said, well, tell me who it is and what you have. And it's this new influencer that she was more infamous at this time than famous Kim Kardashian. And I'm like, no, no, no. We're not going to work with Kim Kardashian. She's too hot to handle. And, well, so I said no. And I go home that night and ask my wife, I go, do you think I made the right decision walking away from the influencer? Kim Kardashian? She's for cosmetics. She's like, what? Who wouldn't want to look like Kim Kardashian? I'm like, oops. So I've really tried to love everything that comes to us, but it's a bad habit. And thankfully, there's people like Marc Randolph on Netflix that says, you know, every bad idea at Netflix is a bad idea until the team made it a good idea. And so we really use that as an agency. Not yes, but yes. And. And I think that's the spirit of marketing, that we can do a lot to take a product that maybe isn't going to work and find consumer demand for that marketing. We are true artists in this space, and there's a room for that artistry. And that's, I think, what I'm most excited about. Just continuing to be excited about all the stuff that's out there and how do we market it?

[Alena Jasper]

Well, Ange, did you have a. Did you have a bad idea you wanted to share?

[Angela Voss]

Oh, I don't know if you can.

[Alena Jasper]

Top the weight loss pants, but I.

[Angela Voss]

Definitely could not top the weight loss pants. I grew up in the media side, so I thought long and hard about what if we were to develop our own TV network, We'd have total ownership of all the content, all the ad space. Like, who could be better at driving viewership than an agency that's grown up in performance marketing? Like, we're experts in gaining attention for commercials. What could we do with actual content? Like, it's a terrible idea.

[Chuck Hingle]

I kind of like that idea.

[Alena Jasper]

Yeah, you shouldn't have said that. I like it now.

[Chuck Hingle]

Well, there goes the rest of my morning.

[Alena Jasper]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So mine. I was thinking about this and my team, we send, like, usually annually or twice a year, we send direct mail campaigns to prospects. And it's become a bit of a tradition. And every year we start brainstorming what could we send? And we had one idea we really liked for a while, which is our best customers refer to us as kind of a secret weapon. They have us under NDA. They don't want us to talk about them because they really see us as so important to their business that they don't want others to know about us. And so we were like, let's send, like, a secret weapon in the mail. And we got pretty far thinking about what type of what we could send before realizing we actually can't do that, because no matter how you try to frame that bill, that. That is objectively terrifying. To open a direct mail package and even see a fake weapon. That could have been the end of my marketing career, actually. So thank goodness we didn't do that.

[Chuck Hingle]

Did you catch yourself or did someone else stop your career?

[Alena Jasper]

It definitely wasn't me, because when I get excited about something, I'm like, let's do it. Like, let's go. But sometimes you walk a fine line, though, you know? Is it too crazy?

[Chuck Hingle]

I don't know.

[Alena Jasper]

I think that, yes, that was a bad idea.

[Chuck Hingle]

We all know it's not so easy to speak up.

[Angela Voss]

Oh, there is a very thin line between having unwavering belief and just being absolutely bad. You know what? Crazy. Yeah.

[Chuck Hingle]

There's a reason. Strong beliefs loosely held is a thing.

[Angela Voss]

Yeah.

[Chuck Hingle]

All right, well, we're gonna keep our eye on you a little more moving forward. Elena.

[Alena Jasper]

Yeah. I do have to run all the direct mail stuff by Ang before it officially ships, but. So someone probably would have caught it.

[Angela Voss]

Between you and me, though, I don't. I don't know that we're going to catch a really bad idea because.

[Alena Jasper]

No, we're both. We're both a little, like, kamikaze in us. We're like, let's do it.

[Chuck Hingle]

I'm not on the audit and risk management committee for a reason.

[Angela Voss]

I'm more of a test in market person. Let's let the market tell us whether.

[Chuck Hingle]

Or not our internal mantra of do, learn, fix doesn't always work. Well. Yeah, sometimes it's research. Well, and then do is a better plan.

[Angela Voss]

Just more boring that way.

[Alena Jasper]

Yeah. Shout out to our legal team that we now have.

[Angela Voss]

All right.

[Alena Jasper]

Awesome. That's a fun place to end. Thank you for joining us.

[Chuck Hingle]

Thank you, Elena. Thanks, Ange.

[Alena Jasper]

That's it for this episode of the Marketing Architects. We'd like to thank Taylor de Los Reyes for producing the show. You can connect with us on LinkedIn. And if you like the podcast, please leave us a review. Now go forth and build great marketing. Marketing Architects.