As an emerging business, your branding and messaging are some of the essential pieces you must pay attention to. How do you create a strong brand impact that addresses the needs of your target audience? In this episode, Casey Harshman, the Owner and Director of Frooishen, joins Elliot Begoun to discuss how telling your unique story can help establish the power of your brand. He explains why you must showcase every single thing you do on your online platforms to create genuine customer connections and gain solid marketing leverage. Casey also discusses the value of packaging that serves as the foundation of the readiness of your product. Delve into this episode and learn how to unleash your power through an equally powerful story.

—

Listen to the podcast here

Finding Your Brand Impact By Telling Your Story With Casey Harshman

I’m here, as always, with a friend. Before I turn it over to Casey to share a little bit about him and his background and for us to have one of our typical, far-ranging and very deep pool conversations that you guys are all going to be privy to, just my normal few commercials. First of all, I want to share my excitement about our new partnership with New Hope.

The New Hope TIG Brands partnership is going to be what brings to you the Natural Products Business School at Expo East. Between post-Expo West and Expo East, we will be jointly performing and providing interactive virtual workshops, online videos, as well as articles all aimed at providing entrepreneurs with real tools that are actual things that they could take into their businesses right away and implement.

We’re going to talk about topics such as capital efficiency, shopper continuum and other important things like JEDI principles and ESG. We’re going to investigate how to build better pricing models and put profit before growth and cash before everything. It’s not the high-level theoretical stuff that you hear so much about, but the stuff that is real, actionable, and, hopefully, impactful. More to come on that. We’ll give you all the dates and links coming up. Be on the lookout for the TIG Brands New Hope Natural Products Business.

Two other quick things, the TIG Collective, something I’m extraordinarily proud of. This is our opportunity to reshape the boards of our future to see more women, BIPOC and LGBTQ board members. It’s an opportunity to get founders surrounded by unbelievable industry wisdom. It’s a way to ensure that entrepreneurs have everything at their disposal that they possibly glean to succeed.

It’s a very simple process. If you’re a brand at our community, we simply sign an agreement with the Collective standard advisor agreement and issue your advisor options or profit interest units to the Collective. On the reciprocal side, the Collective has signed agreements with the advisors. They get equity equivalent units sharing in the pro rata of all the unit deposits in the Collective. Everybody’s given masterclasses to craft their trade.

Most importantly, as an entrepreneur, you have incredible access to a myriad of experts across all functional areas. If you are an interested advisor who wants to give back, you have an opportunity not only to minister to great entrepreneurs, but also to grow your craft and, hopefully, find yourself as an independent board member on great brands going forward. We’re partnered with the Women on Boards Project, JEDI Collaborative, and others. If you’re interested in learning more about the TIG Collective, feel free to reach out to me or to Jenny Cawthon, our team.

The last of my commercials with about the TIG venture, I’m passionate about this. I’m passionate that there are other ways to build and fund brands. I feel like we are stepping over good brands in the hunt for that mythical unicorn. We have built a venture community based on investing in emerging brands that are committed to profit before growth and cash before everything. We’re leveraging very innovative new structures and terms like the care instrument, and we are ready and able to help businesses take that next step, not only from our small, nimble fund but also with the greater venture community. Come learn more about that.

We’re going to be doing an open house. We’re also going to be sharing some of that with NCN. All of this is available at Expo West. We’re in the Sunset Room at the Hilton, so come visit us. Casey, that’s it. My commercials are done. The rest of this is about you. Take a minute, if you would, and introduce yourself, who you are, what you do, and then we’ll go from there.

Thank you, Elliot. It’s great to be on here with you. I’m Casey Harshman, Owner and Director of Frooishen. We specialize in branding and package design, but then really taking that branding and package design and expressing it across the marketing spectrum. I’ve been passionate and fortunate to have some really great mentors in my life who have shared their knowledge and skills with me, which I like to pass on to the team members that I’m working with and the brands that we support, sharing that same passion of supporting emerging brands and helping them fight the good fight.

As we know, it’s difficult to survive as an emerging brand, especially in this day and age. My team and I like to roll up our sleeves and get in the trenches with the people we partner with and be an extension of their team. We give a shit. It might not always go the way people want it to go, it might be the last second, so what? That’s life. We like to roll with the punches and help these brands compete, fight and really express themselves consistently. That’s a word that you’ll hear from me a lot, is that consistent expression of brand everywhere.

Let’s delve into that a little bit. Operationally, define what you mean by the consistent expressional brand everywhere.

I think what happens, especially for an emerging brand, say it’s a CEO or founder and maybe their marketing really isn’t at a core as a skillset. Even if it was, at some point, the brand is going to get to be so busy with them. Raising funds alone will tap them out in terms of available time from what I’ve seen with the different founders that I’ve worked with. What ends up happening is that to the best of that founder’s ability, they’re trying to provide creative direction to potentially multiple different agencies or freelancers that are supporting the brand.

What ends up happening is if that creative direction isn’t expressed well to those people that are working in service of the brand, you’re leaving it up to that agency or freelancer on their own devices in terms of what they think the expression of the brand should be. That brand then begins to erode maybe slightly, but eventually, it gets to be too large of a change and I think that’s a risk from a consumer perspective as they’re engaging with a brand. If they see the brand in one area and then they find it in another area and it’s different, then I think this causes a blip in the brain of the consumer.

To me, whether it’s package design or marketing, it should be very simple math. If 1 plus 1 is 2, awesome. Plus 1 more is 3, now we’re creating a connection with them. If 1 plus 1 is 87, then the consumer doesn’t know what to do. If they don’t know your brand, they probably buy a brand or product in a specific category, even for myself, I’m busy and at a store. If I bring home a product that my family or kids don’t like, I’ll never hear the end of it. They won’t eat it. I can’t buy it again.

If I’m going to trade out a product or a brand that I typically buy for something that has caught my eye, I need to feel pretty confident that my family or I am going to enjoy it. This nuance of how we present ourselves on the shelf and pay that off in every other channel that a consumer might engage with the brand is super nuanced and important stuff that shouldn’t be overlooked. Sometimes, it’s overdone a little bit in that way, but that’s okay. We’d rather err on the side of making sure that the brand is tight everywhere.

To follow on there, you talked about a brand being tight. What are some of the elements that are indicative of a brand having owned that and being clear in its essence, presence and method? If you’re coaching a team and they’re trying to be introspective in looking at their brand, what are you asking them to look to see if what they feel is forensic in both packaging and message?

I think it starts with a foundation. That foundation might be part of brand strategy. There may be a multitude of things that go into that soup or recipe. Mark Rodriguez was really influential to me, an amazing CEO and has run many companies. He always had an anchor of whatever we were going to do from a branding, messaging, or design perspective, it needed to map to three main pieces of criteria. Those three main pieces of criteria may be different for other brands in terms of it being very unique for each brand. Does it represent the mission of the brand? Is it going to have an impact with consumers? Is it going to drive sales or engagement? I’m spitballing those.

Again, they can be different for each person. Every decision that we would make then and as we build out that foundation, it needed to map back to these core pillars of the brand. Whatever those core pillars of the brand are, it’s good as a leadership team or brand team to understand what those are. From there, we build out that foundation of who we are as a brand and call it communication. We have brand guidelines that represent design, improper and proper uses of logos, fonts and colors, but I believe we also need a communication guideline so that it speaks very clearly to who is our target audience.

Even before our target audience, who are we both internally as a mantra that we’re all going to cultivate as an internal team, but then how do we express that outwardly to say primary, secondary, tertiary and demographic? When we have that design foundation of design and communication guidelines in place and we know what our pillars are, now, especially for an emerging brand, at least starting there and defining that as this represents who we are and then marching forward from there. It doesn’t mean that that foundation piece can never change. It should change.

I always say if the tree is not growing, the tree is dying or dead. There needs to be some evolution of change. I think where people, whether they get nervous about it, but they might try to make those changes too frequently too soon versus establishing the foundation and the variety of it could be, say you’re running ads, let’s run five different ads. Let’s test which ones are working. I think that’s another place where people will get maybe nervous about how is my brand evolving? If they don’t have that foundation, there’s no foothold.

It’s like running a race without understanding where the finish line is. Going a slightly different tangent now, we’re talking a lot with our brands about, in this marketplace, trying to put profit before growth and slowing down the art of growth, therefore slowing down the reliance upon outside capital and also rethinking of what the right way to capitalize the business is.

That also means that the coffers are a little skinnier than they have been, and they’ve already been skinny historically. If you were to be coaching entrepreneurs in terms of prioritization of marketing activities, what would you suggest that hierarchy of needs be? Let’s call it the Harshman’s Hierarchy of Needs, similar to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.

Setting that foundation 100%. From there, it depends. Are you primarily a direct-to-consumer brand? Are you primarily a brick-and-mortar brand? If direct-to-consumer isn’t where you’re at or is going to be too difficult of a mountain to climb at the moment, then I would suggest that we understand what the brand and product are, the category that it’s in and the primary sales channels. Based on those factors, we can create, I like to call them, what are all the levers we need to pull. Certainly, we need to have all of the trade sell sheets and buyer presentations. All of those things need to be in order.

If it’s from a retail perspective, we need to drive awareness of brand and trial and repeat sales through the retail channel. There can be a variety of ways that we can do that. Based on the budget and impact of whatever that marketing initiative might be, then we like to put all the cards on the table and have an understanding of what the investment would be for each one of those levers to pull, so to speak. From there, work out from a prioritization perspective. What are the top four things that are going to drive brand awareness or sales and impact the brand in the short-term?

When we have that in place, we have our foundation and priority list and we know what our brand and our communication guidelines are, then it becomes a lot easier to be efficient with the marketing dollar. When we know everything that needs to be executed against and all of the content or copy we need to create, we can do that very smartly and efficiently and get photography that can be used everywhere. That is where we give purposeful art direction so that that content can be utilized in an email template, social media, website and digital ads. It’s hard to say, what are those specific things? It’s so brand dependent in product, category and sales channel dependent.

Those are some of the overarching things that I think brands should really be focusing on in identifying those key levers or activations and focusing on those activations. If everything else, say, if you’re not selling direct to consumer, I still think it’s really important you have a good solid website that’s representative of the brand, so that when someone does engage with your product and they do go to your website to learn more about you, that whatever they felt, that emotion and feeling, when they engage with your brand, they feel that same way everywhere that they go. It’s like a friend. Is the friend trustworthy? Are you growing with them? Do you have an experience with them?

I always think about that as conformational marketing. You can have a website that you use as a business driver. You can have a website that’s conformational marketing. Everything you do and how you show up should conform to how you want to show up. If you show up on shelf one way and someone goes to your website and you’re messaging and look completely different, that’s a challenge. People do spend the time to do that. Speaking of which, I know you’re like me. We no longer shop like normal people. We walk the aisles and look at things.

I remember when my kids were younger, they hated going the store with me because I’m an introvert. It was the only place I ever acted like an extrovert because I would ask people, “Why are you buying this?” As you walk the aisles of the store and look at things, there must be times when you look at a package or brand and ask, “What are they thinking?” When that happens, what are typically some of the things that set you up like, “What are they thinking here? They’re just missing an opportunity.”

You can see when someone has invested in someone. I think there’s a difference between a package design agency versus a graphic design, or in some cases, even creative design. There’s such nuance that’s taking place there so that you can see as you walk the store and look at products on the shelf. What brands did the diligence? I think a lot of people will say, “This is what I want for my brand. I want these colors and fonts. These things are representative of what I want for this.”

If the person who receives that information never go out into the store and audit the category or look at other close-in categories that could be learned from and they just design in a vacuum, when I see packaging in store, it looks like it’s been designed based on the clear direction of the brand owner. God bless the brand owner. It’s incumbent upon me or us to receive the information and vision of what they want to accomplish and we need to translate that into honoring that vision but also presenting something that is going to compete and work really hard in a crowded category and a busy store with people who have busy lives.

When I see packaging that isn’t all that great, it’s either done in a vacuum or it’s done by someone who isn’t experienced in package design. This is subtle but also very important because I think it’s an insurance policy. You’re going to do all these things from a marketing perspective. Package design being at the heart of what we do, if the packaging is amiss, now, the foundation is shaky. It’s the biggest insurance policy that you could possibly have with your brand is to make sure that your packaging is primed and ready for competition.

I’m going to put you on the spot a little bit, and I’ll ask you outside of our industry because it’s hard to pick a favorite kid and all of that. An example of a brand you feel is killing it and an example of a brand you think is leaving something on the table.

The brand that I always think a go-to when we’re talking to people is Siete. I think they have done an amazing job. They’ve understood the foundation of who they are as a brand. Now, it’s almost like they’re in every category. It seems like every time I look, they’re in another category. Everywhere you experience them, even if they’re not in chips, salsas, or sauces and in shortbread cookies, you still know it’s Siete when you see them. That may be an easy answer, but I think it is really clear how they’ve done a masterful job of maintaining brand authentic story while traversing multiple categories in the store, and I’m pretty sure they’re doing fairly well. You know me. It’s hard for me to speak about a brand specifically because I honor their staff.

You don’t have to name the brand. I know how hard it is. I don’t want to be disparaging to any brand, but what you’re seeing out there in terms of being missed by a brand. We’ll speak to it as Brand A.

Probably the frozen category, in general, is a really difficult category. Certainly, whether it’s direct-to-consumer, way difficult. In store, also quite difficult. There are a number of factors that are at play. Within that, in the frozen set, whether that’s ice cream or frozen pizzas, the missed opportunity, I would say people are trying to do what other people in the category are doing versus figuring out authentically what makes them different. Sometimes, I’ll have the initial conversation with brand owners. I’ll go to that and they’re like, “I just want to do and make this.” It isn’t that they’re passionate about changing something in someone’s life.

There’s no knock on this that they’re looking to be more of an entrepreneur, want to start a business and this is what they want to do. Often, in those categories, I’m using frozen in this case, it’ll be like, “I like the design of Magic Spoon. Give me a Magic Spoon design.” If that’s the right answer, then maybe that’s an okay thing to do, but I prefer the philosophy of what’s important to you and pulling that out. Whenever we start a project with someone, we have a very long kickoff call and we ask them a number of questions, things that they might not assign value to, but myself and my team will Slack or text each other and be like, “Did you hear what they just said?”

Some little nuance thing that they gave nothing to, but as we bring about brand and design, sometimes, it’s the dotting of an i and crossing of a t, and then they’re like, “You heard us say that,” and we’ve represented it in that design. That’s what I think when people are not expressing themselves. My mom wrote a book. She’s a Doctor of Psychology. Her book is Learn Your Story, Find Your Power. If a brand has not learned their story, how can we find their power? I think that’s really at the core of what we help people do is we help them dig into what is that story? It’s all there. It might not be put in the right pieces and parts and the right places. Once we help them understand that, that power is that foundation and build it from there with every design and communication choice like the flavor names.

How can we make the flavor names resonate with consumers but be on brand? The brand essence should flow through all of every little detail. That’s what I think often is amiss because people are rushing to market and I get it. Sometimes, you not doing it is far worse than doing it incorrectly. Doing it is better than doing it incorrectly. People will also stall or wait, and someone else will come to market because they’re noodling around. When you have to move fast, creating that foundation then is even more critical because every misstep is time and money, not just from what you might be investing into an agency, but you’re not in market and you’re not creating that connection with consumers.

At least you’re not optimized. Let me take us down a different path for a second. One of the things that has been happening for a while, but I think it’s happening at a deeper and faster pace now, is the continued tribalization of the way consumers purchase. For a while, we’ve had our dietary tribes, our plant-based, paleo and keto. Now, I think there are growing deeper other tribes. There are those that only want to buy climate-friendly brands, those that want to support diversity and social justice and those that are CrossFitters, fitness or functional. There’s all this continued tribalization.

While that excites me because I think we’re seeing that demand trickle into online and retail where those things are winding up on shelves, they’re not going to be necessarily those brands that rocket to $100 million. How do you walk that tightrope between a brand that can lean in and really capitalize on their tribe, a highly motivated, potentially evangelical following, but not do it in a way that alienates the broader audience? I’ll give you and you can call complete bullshit on this, but I really believe that the best marketing general tends to be polarized. The marketing that tries to appease everyone is less effective than the marketing that pisses off. I’m going to leave you at that and tell me what you think.

It’s a very tricky balance. We had a client and we arrived to an agreement. It’s launching here soon and we’re excited about it, but the Hamilton, you stand for nothing, Burr, what will you fall for? I agree that they’re anchoring to an authentic brand story and you have to lean into that. If you try to appease everybody, then it’s going to be more difficult to find that tribe. A client that we worked with, they have an unbelievably passionate story about climate change and change in regenerative agriculture. Their old packaging and branding represented that, but it did not live up to how it needed to perform and function in space and on the shelf.

What we’ve tried to do with the new brand is soften the brand and celebrate the deliciousness and allergen-friendly aspects of the food. Joni, the owner of this brand called Snacktivist, really would like to boot-stomp the current food system. We’re balancing that on packaging and then bringing to life the incredible passion and energy she has around climate-smart ingredients and walking the walk while she talks it. It’s amazing. Now, in all of the other channels that the brand is in, we’re going to amplify that position that she wants to take.

On shelf, we didn’t want to alienate or confuse someone or make them sign up at the point of sale to like, “Do I have to become a social justice or regenerative agriculture soldier at the point of sale? I just want to make some bread.” However, our hope is that as people engage with this new brand, packaging and the products speak for themselves, that when they engage the brand everywhere else, they absolutely have an opportunity to educate themselves and become part of the new Snacktivist tribe that they’re growing.

To carry through on that, one of the things that I see and try to encourage entrepreneurs to understand is that they’re building a platform and that platform they can be the change they want to see. I have impactful conversations with their audiences about things that matter to them and the brand. I think that’s great. What I hear some talk is sometimes, it’s the fear of not doing that and sitting on the sideline. This came to light during some of the recent issues societally. Brands were showing up. I felt like some of the brands were showing up out of obligation and it was ringing untrue.

I was encouraging brands and say, “It’s okay. You can sit on the side. If you don’t have anything original or authentic to say, it’s okay not to say anything.” Even better yet, it’s okay to use your platform to say, “We’d like to hear from you, our customer. What matters to you? What are you thinking about this?” From a marketing perspective, what’s your take on how a brand can be both a voice and a conduit of greater or societal communication?

Ideally, that’s part of the essence of the brand. I think that anything that they do around that in supporting something that might be happening within society seems more authentic if it’s baked into the DNA of the brand anyway. I think more of the brands now are the brands that we like to work with. They give a shit about what they’re doing. They care about how the brand is perceived and received. I don’t know if this is bigger brands, but this is maybe where bigger brands get hit of where they try to do things like a smaller brand would. In the same way, if a smaller brand tries to do something that a big brand would do, the better that that can be anchored to things they truly believe.

I think at the end of the day, they have that pulse and that understanding of their tribe and what the tribe expects from them. At some point, a founder or CEO might be driving that ship and maybe making some decisions based on their own sentiment. I think if a brand is looking at it through the lens of their tribe and what their tribe expects them to do about X, Y, or Z and it ties to what you do authentically as an essence of a brand, I think that’s where the win is at.

How the specifics of any particular issue, whether you come off the sideline or not, is up to each brand. To your point, if you’re always on the sideline, consumers will see this, too. If they think that you’re going to be a champion for them for whatever it might be and you’re not, that will ding in their minds their expectation or what they thought your brand was about. I think that’s where the risk lies by not doing anything.

Again, doing nothing is worse than doing something because even if you didn’t do it the way maybe you should have or that you wanted to, your ability to follow up on that and accept the responsibility for whatever it is that you may have had a misstep on, I think consumers love that, too, because the brand is human. We’re all human and we all make mistakes. If we try to shirk the responsibility of a mistake that we’ve made, then that’s bullshit. People see it and they’ll call you on it. If you take the responsibility of like, “I fucked this up. I know I did. I’m going to do better now,” not that you have to do penance at that point, but just owning what it is.

For every one of the brands, you’re going to have a failure or two. You’re going to let consumers down. You’re going to let somebody down. That happens. The way you respond and take ownership of that could actually do more to build the brand up than never having the failure, to begin with. It’s not how we show up when things are good. It’s how we show up when things are screwed up. To your point, when we fuck something up, the way we show up and respond, “I did it, we didn’t handle that well, I apologize, that wasn’t clear communication, we have to learn,” whatever it is, own it.

You have more opportunity at that moment and window to build a more profound and deeper relationship with your consumer than if it had never happened. Don’t be afraid of missteps. Don’t be paralyzed about your messaging or any part of your marketing. It’s fine to be bold, as that boldness comes with ownership and accountability.

When people are about to execute something like that or push a button and post it to social, I know in corporate structures, as direction maybe comes down from the top and the person doing the work is maybe afraid to say something, but I think it’s also powerful internally to give your people the permission to challenge back. When I work with my team, I’m always saying, “Just because I said whatever, it doesn’t mean shit. If you disagree with me, say it. It’s all good.” Maybe an idea that one person has is not all the way there.

A couple of other people share some ideas and you take it 85% and make it 100%. Internally, you can also avoid some missteps if you empower your internal team to say, “I have a different thought or I’m concerned about this.” Before posting something, the beauty of digital is you can always take it down, but someone’s likely to screenshot it, but to sound it out, say it out loud and share it with someone. Their initial reaction, especially if they have no idea what it is, if they’re taken aback by it, maybe you need to tweak the message and the visual a little bit. I think there’s this balance of poking the bear of standing for something and pushing the envelope a little bit.

We’ve seen it of all growing up when Marilyn Manson would do something or Metallica and people would freak out about it. Now, look at where we’re at. That’s tiddlywinks at this point, some of that stuff. All of those people get attention when someone does something wild and crazy. That balance of doing something wild and crazy just for the sake of it, I would say do something wild and crazy that’s germane to your brand and that’s built on some essence or foundation of who you are. Do something wild and crazy in that light, not just to do it because we need to do it. I think it helps balance it a little bit.

What’s changed? Has anything changed from your perspective in terms of marketing, communication, branding and packaging since the pandemic?

Clearly, there’s been a way bigger push in direct-to-consumer because the pandemic forced any brand that wasn’t fully baked in that channel to dive in. I think as we see the market’s changing or the changes of Facebook and how ads are being deployed or the cost to acquire a consumer has changed in some of the older school marketing tactics. They have some relevancy again, be that billboards or direct mail, depending on your brand or what you’re trying to sell, communicate, or connect with people.

I think that opening some old doors is interesting to see how it comes back around, where everyone went all in on digital. To have them retract a little bit because people are back in stores and what they have to invest into the digital space to drive sales in the digital space, this is clearly at a moment of where the heavy investment in the digital space may not be the great investment at the moment. It’s just too costly.

If you have to spend $15,000 a month collectively on email, social, Amazon, digital ads, content creation across all of that, let alone the ad spend itself and you only have $10,000 in sales and that continues to stay the same, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that that’s not working. If that’s the case, then it should pair back, streamline a little bit and tighten that up to try to ensure that at least you’re outperforming spend or on track to do that. I think that’s where the biggest change is.

Something I want to explore there on what you just said, there’s such a fine line between being too impatient about a marketing activity and being too patient. One of the things that I would like to see entrepreneurs do more of is think about it as a growth hack. Put an anticipated return or result on every activity and then measure its step.

One of the harder things to ever do is directly correlate an ROI to a lot of marketing activities. What’s your coaching to founders about how to balance? Am I being patient enough or too patient? I don’t want to continue to throw good money after bad, but I also don’t want to give up on something too soon. How do I judge that?

Especially for an emerging brand, if they don’t have the resources and dollars to invest, a misstep can be crucial. I see it as a playbook for each of these brands. There are only so many things that you can do. You can come up with some amazing pie-in-the-sky campaigns and try to do some giant activation, but that homerun is rarer. I would rather see a bunch of singles. Understanding all those levers that we need to pull based on who we are as a brand, based on the channels that we’re selling in, now, with just that little bit of diligence, we can aim and fire and then assess, “How did that work? Did we get a return?” Especially if we can do some A/B testing.

From there, again, not overinvest and have it not work. Maybe it isn’t that we have to assess. It’s the way you went about trying to market in whatever particular channel and you overinvested and that return didn’t come. I think it’s also important to measure, was that broken in the first place? Was it not well executed? Just because something didn’t go well, I think then there has to be critical thinking. Often, it’s hard for people. Back to that accountability, a lot of people will say, no, it’s that over there or that wasn’t my responsibility.

I think being patient enough, especially if we have that foundation and diligence in the initial launch of that marketing activation will give us a better understanding of what that return is. I think the redoing, retooling and improving it along the way over some set amount of time, again, based on whatever it might be, that’s a better way to measure success. It’s rare that someone hits a home run right out of the gate. It happens. It’s awesome when it does, but otherwise, it’s just a bunch of singles over and over again.

Please feel free to call BS on this. One of the challenges that I witnessed is when marketing efforts are too diffuse. It’s like sprinkling pixie dust over too broad of an area and then wondering why it isn’t working and happening. What I’d rather see more founders do is say, “I don’t have an endless supply of dollars. I have a very limited supply of dollars, a very finite resources. I’m going to prove to myself, potential investors and others that I can do this in this small area. It could be a geographic area, a specific channel, whatever way to do it. However, rather than trying to market to everything that I’m in, I’m going to sacrifice the many for the few, and I’m going to just see what I can do because then I have a buildable proposition.”

I could understand what those efforts can do and then decide if it makes sense to find the capital to support those efforts in a broader way. What’s your feeling about how to allocate resources? If you’re in a lot of stores but don’t have the resources to do it, or if you’re online, narrowing it down and focusing on a specific area, keyword, or activity, or fully to really be able to quantify its impact, talk to me about that for a second.

This may be a game within the game. Say, for retail, you are launching nationally or regionally in some chain. Maybe, instead of trying to support every store, let’s say, 50 stores, that’s difficult. That’s going to be a costly endeavor. Maybe, we isolate the top 5 or 10 markets and then we invest into those 5 or 10 markets and then be able to go to a retailer and say, “Look at this. We were able to support these areas. These 5 or 10 areas performed really well. If we’re able to do the same to all of these areas, then we can expect said return.”

Similarly, when we identify all of the marketing levers that need to be pulled, say in the digital space and then we prioritize those, then we should invest primarily in design and in effective communication so that those marketing vehicles are primed to succeed. Say, we isolate whatever those top 5 things are, but it doesn’t mean that we leave the next 5 alone. We just try to apply what we’re doing in those first 5 to those other 5. Thereby, we extend the content that we’re creating, we extend our dollar and that’s how I think financially efficiently that you can create that consistency with consumers.

Again, who are you as a brand? What are your products? What are your primary sales channels? Like a communication hierarchy, it’s, what’s that marketing hierarchy? What are those top things? Table stakes. We have to do these five things. If we don’t, we’re more likely to fail, even if it’s, what’s the next five? As brands and budgets grow and we can then tend to those than the second 5 or the third 5 better. That’s how I think how we overcome something like that.

I couldn’t agree more. That’s also one of the reasons why I tell entrepreneurs to start smaller, go narrow and deep because you can build a business case that is more investible and more supportable to retailers online. There’s this counterintuitive reality that as you get bigger, you have fewer levers to pull. You’re usually so far over your skis building revenue that your dollars for supporting that revenue are lagging behind. You just don’t have as many levers in 500 stores as you do in 5 or in 50. If people want to learn more about what you do, how do they reach out to you? Tell everyone reading a little bit more about your practice and approach to things and how they can contact you.

A last point I had on that goes into the philosophy of how we operate and I’ll speak to that. If someone needs a table throw, they’re going to go to a distributor show and they need a logo put on a table throw, that shouldn’t cost $2,500 to design. It’s almost like go to the bar and you go to the bar enough and they give you a free beer because you frequent that place every now and again.

A table throw, philosophically for me, is like that free beer. Obviously, it costs money to design, but that should be a nominal fee. An image in an email that’s going to be sent out once important, but it doesn’t need to cost $2,000 to design an image in the email. That speaks to the overall philosophy that myself and my team take.

Frooishen is a collective of industry experts both marketing strategy, brand strategy, digital strategy and amazing creative talent that I’ve worked with for a really long time. When you come to work with fruition, it isn’t just me. There’s a group of other amazing human beings that are a part of our collective mind.

We’re really passionate. We will do the smallest thing to the biggest thing. We’re bound to do the right thing for the brands that we work with. I’ve been doing this for a couple of years. The beauty is if we need printing help, we have printers. If we need mockups, we have mockup people. Whatever we don’t do, we have other people that my team or I have worked with for years.

We know that they’re legit. I’m not going to offer anybody from our network to one of the brands we’re supporting if they’re not an incredible team who knows exactly what they’re doing and will support the brand in the ways that we know how. That’s part of what makes us unique is that hive mind, so to speak. When the bell rings and we have a new opportunity, I’m blessed to have a number of incredible individuals who rise to the occasion and we go to work with that client until it is done, hence, the name Frooishen.

It’s the point at which a plan or project is realized. You do branding and package design, the game has just begun. Although that particular project might have come to fruition, but the marketing of the brand has just begun. That’s the part where I don’t like failure myself. I don’t like to see other people fail. If we can, we’d love to help people establish a foundation for their marketing structure and system. Whether we continue to service them that way or they can take that foundation and work it out themselves, that’s what we want to do for the industry. I’m super excited to be a part of the collective. It’s something that is ingrained in me to help people, and we really want to help. It’s not a BS thing.

I’ve seen that in action, so I can echo that. We’re at the end. We’ve got to be good about it. I appreciate you joining. Thanks, everyone, very much for being part of this episode. I hope to see many of you at Expo West. Casey, we will see you then. Thanks so much for your ongoing support to all of our founders.

Important Links

• Casey Harshman

• Learn Your Story, Find Your Power

• Siete

Love the show? Subscribe, rate, review, and share! tigbrands.com/tig-talks/