EP377: Maximizing Your Marketing Budget for Impactful Campaigns With Chris Knock | Gallant

Stacy Jones: Welcome to Marketing Mistakes and how to avoid them. I’m Stacey Jones, and I’m so happy to be here with you all today. And I want to give a very warm welcome to Chris kochek. Chris is the founder and CEO of Gallant, a strategy and design studio dedicated to building brands for a better world. With over a decade of digital expertise, chris is known for using strategic planning and design principles to transform brands for startups and small businesses. He’s led the development of nationally recognized campaigns for iconic brands and nonprofits, including Ace Hardware, Hyatt Hotels, lowe’s Home Improvement, and the Christopher and Dana RIA Foundation. As a frequent speaker at the University of Texas in Austin and author of The Practical Pocket Guide to Account Planning, chris actively shares his vision on how to craft brand strategies to drive positive change.

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Stacy Jones: Today, Chris and I are going to be chatting about how businesses can maximize their marketing budgets to create campaigns that are impactful. We’ll learn what works from Chris’s perspective, what should be avoided, and how some businesses miss the mark. Chris, welcome. So happy to have you here today.

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Chris Kochek: Thank you so much for having me.

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Stacy Jones: Well, what I love doing always is starting off of how did you get here today? You’re an agency owner in Austin, you’ve worked with lots of big clients. What has been your career?

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Chris Kochek: Oh, well, like so many strategists, it’s very circuitous. It’s a winding road. Cheryl Crowe would so I would say that kind of the big break for me was when I was in graduate school. My girlfriend at the time, she is now my wife. Her parents were standing outside of a school in Connecticut waiting to pick up their son, and they were standing the head of BBDO Worldwide. So Andrew Robertson was standing there waiting to pick up his son. And they didn’t know Andrew didn’t know them. And so they started chatting.

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Chris Kochek: And they.

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Chris Kochek: You know, what do you do? And he says, I work in advertising. He didn’t mention he was the CEO of BBDO Worldwide. He just said he worked in advertising. Very humbly. And they said, oh, our daughter’s boyfriend is getting his master’s degree in advertising.

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Chris Kochek: And he said, oh, really?

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Chris Kochek: Okay, well, you should have him send me his resume. So I looked him up online. When they told me this, I was like, oh my gosh, nobody gets higher than this. So I need to throw out my old cover letter. I wrote a new cover letter and I said, there are three things you need to know about me. I believe in doing well by doing good. I wear my heart on my sleeve, and I believe in the power of ideas. And I later found out that believing in the power of ideas was what hooked him, because he said, look, we work in advertising and it’s all ideas.

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Chris Kochek: And so he set me up with three initial interviews with folks internally and ultimately Tracy Lovat, who was the planning director of BBDO at the time, after she interviewed me, a little while after, she said, well, I think we’d like to keep you here, if that’s okay, in the planning department. So that’s how I got started.

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Stacy Jones: Planning is a good place to start building your strategy capabilities, too.

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Chris Kochek: Absolutely.

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Stacy Jones: And so now, today, here you are. You are coming out, I believe, with another book as well. You are a strategist. What is it you think is working in this land of advertising?

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Chris Kochek: Oh, boy.

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Chris Kochek: I mean, there’s so much happening right now. I think some of the most interesting campaigns to me, usually leverage technology in some interesting way. Not all of them, but definitely some of them are using technology interesting ways to engage people, because people’s attention spans are so short these days, right? So there’s so much entertainment. There are so many TikTok videos and Instagram videos and threads and you name it. So how do you stop somebody in their tracks and hold their so I think that there are interesting ways that some brands are doing. I mean, some of my favorite campaigns, this one’s a little bit older. Not that old, but a little bit older. Like the share of Coke campaign. That’s a wonderful example of a campaign that harnessed something true about the human experience. People love their own names.

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Chris Kochek: Nothing is sweeter than the sound of one’s own name. And then they leveraged their ability and the technology and the data to get the most popular names printed on labels and then ultimately to scale that up. And so your average startup can’t necessarily scale like that. They can’t do that with the kind of breadth or depth that Coca Cola can do it. But that’s a great example to me of a campaign that really kind of generated a ton of buzz. There are other campaigns out there as well, but that one is one that stands out. So technology can be a big piece of it, but I think that smaller brands can still leverage a lot of similar techniques.

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Chris Kochek: Right?

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Chris Kochek: So Coke found out that the thing that they uncovered was the idea that people love the sound of their own name, and they ran with that. And I think that brands can also uncover or build insights, which is what the new book is about. Any insights yet? Building insights really starts with talking to your customers, and any brand can do that, right? Nine times out of ten, I find even larger brands, they have charts, they have data, but they don’t necessarily engage with their customers and talk about what’s going on in their lives. Usually the conversation is about, did you like our product? Would you recommend our product to a friend? On a scale of one to ten, how much did you like it?

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Chris Kochek: It’s always about the brand or the product, but if you really want to uncover or build an insight, you have to kind of go deeper than the usual questions.

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Stacy Jones: And so how do you do that?

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Chris Kochek: Well, one of my favorite techniques is to keep asking Why? Ask somebody when they do something, why.

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Chris Kochek: Did you do that?

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Chris Kochek: It can start to get a little annoying sometimes depending on how you do it. So you have to do it delicately. But if you keep asking why, you’re going to get to something deeper because a lot of times people will give you surface level answers, right? Why did you buy this instead of that? Why did you do this instead of that? And they’ll tell you quickly. But if you ask them why again, then they’ll usually stop and they’ll think about it and then they’ll tell you a story. Well, I do this way now because two years ago XYZ thing happened and so now ever since then, I.

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Chris Kochek: Do it this way.

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Chris Kochek: Okay, that’s very interesting. Tell me more. So you get people into storytelling mode, and this is actually one of the reasons why I love qualitative research before doing any quantitative research, because you can uncover a lot of things that you.

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Chris Kochek: Can’T necessarily get from quant initially.

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Chris Kochek: Because with quant, you’re already creating the answer set. With qual, you let people tell their own stories and you have to be a really active listener. So one of the ways in terms of just an easy tactical thing that you can do to get these kinds.

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Chris Kochek: Of things, let’s say you’re a food and beverage brand and you’re going to be doing sampling. It’s just par for the course.

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Chris Kochek: You’re going to be at a grocery store, you’re going to be at an event, you’re going to be sampling your product. Well, I would recommend having one other person, at least one other person from your team there with you so that after the person is done sampling, after you’ve given them your pitch about how wonderful your product is and they’re chewing or drinking, that second person pulls them aside and asks them a handful of questions and is recording those answers either on a phone or scribbling something down on a notepad, whatever it may be.

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Chris Kochek: Whatever works.

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Chris Kochek: And getting those little glimmers of not quite an insight yet, just those little glimmers of human truths or certain things that you can start to stack on.

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Chris Kochek: Top of each other to build something bigger.

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Stacy Jones: And so when you’ve done this and you’ve figured out how to get feedback in a way that people are open and willing and able to give it to you, how much feedback do you need before you feel like it now actually is something that is able to be quantitative?

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Chris Kochek: Well, that’s a good question because qualitative by its very nature, is going to be a small sample size. So you do have to be careful of that. But one of the things I often say is that directionally, if you’ve got 80 or 90% of the people that you’ve spoken to are saying something that’s very similar to each other. It’s not to say that you shouldn’t do quant, but if you’ve got a limited budget, then try testing that out. Try testing out some things that they’ve said or take what they’ve said, transform it into some compelling new headlines, some new copy, a different campaign idea than one you’ve run before and see if that takes you somewhere. Now, if you have the budget and you can do quant on top of the qual that you’ve been doing, then go ahead and run that survey.

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Chris Kochek: Get 500, 600 people if you can. I mean, I think for solid statistical significance, you’re usually looking at anywhere from 1000 people just to keep your margin of error down. But I don’t think you need that if you’re getting high consistency with the.

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Chris Kochek: People you’re talking to.

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Chris Kochek: You just have to be careful that you’re not pigeonholing yourself too much with like, well, we talked to eight people from this one metro that can get.

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Chris Kochek: A little bit dangerous and the entire.

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Stacy Jones: Brand future is now based on those eight people’s preferences.

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Chris Kochek: It is.

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Chris Kochek: You got to be careful, so you got to be mindful of that for sure.

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Stacy Jones: When were talking earlier, you shared that you would go out and when you first were starting, you would speak about the seven different things that brands do that get screwed up along the way. What are some of those? Can you share?

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Chris Kochek: Yeah, one of them is what were just talking about is not talking to your customers in the first place. So just saying, I got an idea, and throwing ideas at the wall like the proverbial spaghetti noodles and just seeing what sticks. And the problem with that approach is that you end up with too many.

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Chris Kochek: Messages all at once.

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Chris Kochek: And someone told me years ago when I was at BBDO that messages are like tennis balls. If I throw one at you can catch it. If I throw two at you at the same time, you might be able to catch two. If I throw three at you’re not going to catch any of. So the tennis ball analogy has really stuck with me because I see it on packaging all the time, cluttered packaging, cluttered ads, trying to say too much. And I think the old adage is true, which is less is more. So try to say less so that your packaging has room to breathe.

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Chris Kochek: And so the only way that you can do that, though, I think the reason why people end up putting seven to ten messages on a very small piece of packaging is because they’re not sure which of those things is going to work. So the two end up being very intertwined, right? You put all the messaging on the packaging or in the ad because you’re not sure which thing is really going to resonate. But if you talked to your customers.

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Chris Kochek: More, you would be able to very.

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Chris Kochek: Quickly figure out these are the top three things that everybody, no matter what the audience segment is, that’s what they care about the most. And then you can pepper in some other things. So those are two big ones for sure.

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Chris Kochek: Well.

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Stacy Jones: And even as you pointed out earlier in our world today, where you are getting peppered with advertising. And when I say peppered, I literally mean clubbed over the head, nonstop incessantly throughout your life, anytime that your eyes are open, that if you have those seven messages, you’re not possibly going to in the blip of a moment that someone is actually taking notice, actually get all of that across to be digested.

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Chris Kochek: Right. Yeah.

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Chris Kochek: I love permission based marketing. I love the idea of permission based.

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Chris Kochek: Marketing because it allows the person on.

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Chris Kochek: The other end to engage with you in a conversation. So when were helping not a moo ice cream or not a moo dairy free frozen dessert, because it’s not a moo. So when were helping them, one of the things that we did early on was I tagged along to one of their sampling experiences at a grocery store, and they started out by asking customers who were passing by, hey, you want to try a healthy ice cream? Now, kudos to them for asking a question and seeing if they’re interested. But that word healthy ice cream. Never the twain together, never the twain shall meet. And so what we talked about with them was kind of changing the cascade of the messaging. So going from, hey, you want to try some cookies and cream ice cream? Oh, well, yeah, cookies and cream, that sounds good.

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Chris Kochek: Now, just on the flavor alone, which is the number one reason why people try new things is flavor in the food space or beverage space. So now they’re trying it. Now it’s in their mouths. And now the next thing you can.

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Chris Kochek: Say is, so creamy, right?

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Chris Kochek: It’s really good. And they’re like, yeah, it’s really creamy.

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Chris Kochek: And you’re like, I bet you’d never.

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Chris Kochek: Guess that was not made with milk.

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Chris Kochek: They’re like what? Yeah, that’s crazy.

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Chris Kochek: It’s so creamy. How do you do that?

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Chris Kochek: Yeah, well, it’s made with coconut milk.

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Chris Kochek: And actually, did you know that coconut milk has naturally occurring less sugars than regular milk? And then you can kind of start to go into those reasons to believe down the road, but you hooked them with flavor in the first place, and you hooked them with something that was going to be of interest to them. Not healthy ice cream, but something else.

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Stacy Jones: It’s a good way. I bet you’re really good at getting kids to eat things that they don’t want to eat.

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Chris Kochek: I got my son to try roasted crickets at one point with one of our clients at one point.

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Chris Kochek: And as a hard product, to sell it is.

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Stacy Jones: I did that. I was at the Expo West for natural Foods, and I didn’t realize that I had stumbled across the aisle that was all things crickets, and I went to my pitch mode. This is so many years ago. And of course, when someone says, Try it, before I even noticed what I was trying, you have to shove it in your mouth. Not all crickets are made equally.

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Chris Kochek: They’re very earthy. They have a very earthy flavor and very dry.

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Stacy Jones: They can be very dry, which is very hard to do a sales pitch with dry crickets in your mouth.

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Chris Kochek: Yeah.

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Chris Kochek: Well, that was a very intriguing client that we worked on, because, of course, as soon as you tell somebody, oh, that’s made and they made energy bars, actually. So they sold roasted, dried crickets, but they also sold energy bars, protein bars.

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Stacy Jones: That were not dry.

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Chris Kochek: That were not dry. They were made with cricket flour. Okay, so it’s just flour.

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Stacy Jones: Flour.

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Chris Kochek: You just take a bunch of crickets that you dry roast, and then you end up turning them into a form of flour, and then you turn that flour into a bar. And again, those bars were very earthy tasting. But again, as soon as you tell somebody, oh, yeah, it’s made with cricket flour, there’s that pause, and they start imagining antenna and legs and things like that. Yes. And so one of the things that we did to try to understand well, okay, at one point in this country, sushi was not super popular. Raw fish, not very popular.

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Chris Kochek: Lobster.

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Chris Kochek: I mean, lobster is considered isn’t it.

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Stacy Jones: Considered like the dregs from the sea that only the poorest of people would possibly eat lobster? No one with money would deign to eat something that eats the dead things on the bottom of the ocean.

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Chris Kochek: Exactly.

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Chris Kochek: I’m so glad you use that. I was struggling for that word, the dregs of the sea. But at some point, it switched. How did it switch? So were studying, how did these other food movements have that flip? What did they do? How did they do it? So, again, sometimes you’ve got to ask the customer. Sometimes you’ve got to look to history a little bit to find out how certain brands were able to do it and then really just kind of follow.

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Chris Kochek: That playbook, more or less.

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Stacy Jones: So what is another of these magic seven things that brands do all the time and screw up?

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Chris Kochek: They obsess over their tagline. I think it’s a good exercise to go through to, of course, understand your brand positioning that’s critical, and then see if you can turn that into an effective, compelling, and memorable tagline. But the thing with the tagline and I’ve done this in talks before, where I’ll put on the screen, okay, here are four taglines. Unaided awareness. Tell me, which brands do these taglines belong to?

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Chris Kochek: Right.

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Chris Kochek: We could play this game right now. Here’s a tagline that’s printed on numerous packages. It’s a multibillion dollar global company. Here’s the tagline.

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Chris Kochek: You tell me what it is.

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Chris Kochek: Family Greatly.

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Stacy Jones: Family Greatly.

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Chris Kochek: Family Greatly. I think that’s the tagline. I’m pretty sure that’s the tagline.

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Stacy Jones: I have no idea. But for some reason, I’ve decided it’s Great Lakes and it’s butter.

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Chris Kochek: That’s a good guess. It’s craft.

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Stacy Jones: There you go. They make lots of things out of Butter. And they do have lakes.

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Chris Kochek: Yes, but they’re everywhere. Another one, I just ordered something recently. I don’t want to give it away, the category, but they’re a national chain. I believe they’re everywhere. They should be out there in Los Angeles as well. The tagline is better because it has to be.

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Stacy Jones: I have absolutely no idea. But better because it has to be. It has to better because your competitors are sucky and your food is even sucky, too, but yours is just a little less sucky.

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Chris Kochek: Yeah, that’s good rationale. Not the most compelling tagline, but they do make a good product.

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Chris Kochek: It’s jets pizza.

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Stacy Jones: Well, to be fair, I don’t even know what Jets Pizza is, but not a good tagline.

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Chris Kochek: Fair fair. Maybe you got Domino’s out there. I know Domino’s.

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Stacy Jones: Oh, we have domino’s.

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Chris Kochek: Definitely a national chain. So point is that there are brands out there who have invested millions of dollars into not only coming up with the tagline, but then making sure it is stamped on every package, every piece of collateral, everywhere you go. And yet we don’t know what their taglines are. With unaided awareness, sometimes even with aided awareness, we don’t know what their taglines are. So the solution that I have for that or the thing that I recommend to clients and to brands is instead of obsessing over your tagline, make sure that your brand vibe, your brand know everything about you, is in lockstep and is recognizable from a mile away.

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Chris Kochek: Right.

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Chris Kochek: So the example I like to give.

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Chris Kochek: For that is if you were to.

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Chris Kochek: Walk into a Quentin Tarantino film or a Wes Anderson film halfway through the film, you didn’t know that it was from that director.

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Chris Kochek: You walked in, within a minute, you.

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Chris Kochek: Would be like, is this a Tarantino film? Because I’m detecting a lot of dialogue, a lot of or violence, a lot of cussing. Yep, something like a lot of cussing, things like that. If it’s a Wes Anderson film, everything is so stylized. The outfits, the placement of the camera, all of these things. And so it jumps out at you right away. And that’s going to be more memorable.

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Chris Kochek: Than just a tagline, probably.

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Stacy Jones: And see, you’re speaking my language because my agency is Hollywood branded, and what we specialize in is product placement. And so a lot of times we’ll have someone say, oh, I want to get my product into X, Y, and Z. That’s great, that’s fine. We can get products left and right, but it’s about building a brand and it’s getting your brand to be associated with the best of Hollywood that makes your brand now be seen in a bigger way. Could be a product, could be a brand, but it’s using and leveraging your essence.

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Stacy Jones: And the brands that do the best at that are the ones that you can recognize because it doesn’t even have to have a logo if they’re streamlined and sleek, or if they do have the right logo or even if they’re positioned with the right people, if it’s spot on, you just automatically will make that assumption.

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Chris Kochek: I love what you said there about associations because at the end of the.

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Chris Kochek: Day.

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Chris Kochek: We help our clients with social media. We look at a lot of social media accounts and what are the biggest brands doing to be successful on social media? And you can make images today just as good as another brand, right. But you’ve got to build the network, you’ve got to build the associations that you have with your brand. I love what Truff Hot Sauce did in the very beginning. I’m a big fan of Truff, I’m a big fan of guerrilla marketing. And they started out not in any grocery stores, they started out in fashion boutiques. They said, well, this is a $15.

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Chris Kochek: Bottle of hot sauce, so let’s place.

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Chris Kochek: Ourselves next to these hundreds of dollars or thousands of dollars bags or shoes or outfits and see if we can get some attention that way. So that sort of zag strategy of showing up where others aren’t willing to.

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Chris Kochek: Show up or just showing up where.

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Chris Kochek: Your market is going to say, oh, this stands out, there’s no other hot sauce in this clothing store. So having those associations and so they became associated with high end pop culture boutiques. And I believe one of their initial ideas was or one of the kind of AHA, moments they had was how come you see certain alcohol brands in rap or hip hop videos, but you.

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Chris Kochek: Never see a hot sauce brand?

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Chris Kochek: So they said, let’s make the world’s.

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Chris Kochek: First luxury condiment, luxury hot sauce brand. That’s what they did.

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Stacy Jones: That’s smart marketing. They differentiated from competitors. And it doesn’t matter why. It’s not that their hot sauce is necessarily better than this other hot sauce. It’s just, it means something different to the consumer who’s purchasing it.

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Chris Kochek: Absolutely. Well, I will say this, it isn’t like anything I’ve ever put in my mouth before. So the taste of it is off the charts. But then beyond that, they invested. They’ve never repackaged. So a lot of brands, they’ll do their first packaging, second packaging, third packaging. It costs them a lot of money to keep redoing that. And they stumble and they lose time and they have to tell everybody, hey, it’s the same great brand now in a new package. Well, they spent the time in the beginning to make sure that package looked like it belonged in a music video. And so it jumps off the shelf.

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Chris Kochek: Because it looks so different, and then.

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Chris Kochek: It tastes so different. And people, I mean, when you go to their Instagram channel, every single comment on there is like, this is the most amazing thing I’ve ever eaten. So between the price point being so crazy high, some are $15, some are $35 a bottle, and all the great feedback, and then, of course, the rest of their marketing and the associations that they’ve developed, the partnerships that they’ve done, they have this wonderful award winning partnership with Hidden Valley Ranch. They’ve done partnerships with Super Mario Brothers, so on and so forth. So they’ve built that network through very carefully curated partnerships where they’re blending a.

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Chris Kochek: Kind of a high low type thing. Like, they partnered with Taco Bell, which.

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Chris Kochek: Sounds shocking, but I believe it was very successful.

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Stacy Jones: Why not? Taco Bell does not care so much about their sauces. They care more about creating cool publicity stunts at this.

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Chris Kochek: Yeah, I hope that helps answer that one. There’s even more, but keep going.

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Stacy Jones: So what’s the third option? Of what? Think brands screw up all the time.

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Chris Kochek: So functional versus emotional benefits.

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Chris Kochek: Right.

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Chris Kochek: So just talking about your rational reasons to believe, why should you buy this? Well, because we got this many megapixels or we got this many cameras on it, or we’ve got this or we’ve got that. We’re non GMO and we’re gluten free. All of those things can be reverse engineered in a heartbeat these days. So focusing on the top of the brand pyramid, where you’ve got the emotional or irrational reasons to believe, and that’s that cool factor to some extent.

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Chris Kochek: Right?

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Chris Kochek: Well, we want to be cool.

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Stacy Jones: Okay, speaking my language again, this whole product placement and pop culture partnerships, when brands are cool, they stand out and people take notice, and then they purchase them.

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Chris Kochek: Right.

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Chris Kochek: But it has to be natural. I’ve seen some product placements that feel so forced, understand, and so it’s got to be natural. But I think with functional versus emotional benefits I love that scene, and I’m dating myself here, but did you ever see Coming to America? I know that’s a classic. Of course that’s a classic. But you’ve got the Big Mac versus the Big Mic.

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Chris Kochek: You do right there’s.

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Chris Kochek: McDonald’s versus McDowell’s. And Mr. McDowell talks about how they’ve both got all beef patties, pickles, onions, lettuce, tomato. But their bun has sesame seeds. Our bun doesn’t have sesame seeds. I think that’s right. It’s one or the other. Somebody’s got sesame seeds in one. And Akeem, you know, played by Eddie Murphy, is just, oh, okay.

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Chris Kochek: So that’s the one.

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Chris Kochek: You know, that can mean, you know, if you know to Burger King, you’ve got the Whopper. And some people are very true to their Whopper enthusiasm. And Burger King even made a great campaign years ago called Whopper Freak Out? Where they gave him a burger that wasn’t a Whopper. It was actually I don’t remember what they gave him, but it wasn’t a whopper. And the people would come back, and they filmed it with hidden cameras, and.

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Chris Kochek: They were like, what is this?

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Chris Kochek: I’m not paying for this.

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Stacy Jones: This isn’t my whopper. I want my whopper.

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Chris Kochek: Yeah, I need my whopper now. So some people are very brand loyal. But a lot of times, the test that we do with clients or one of the things that we’ll show them and this isn’t to not gatorade or powerade, but a lot of times, when you look at those ads, if you remove the logo from some of these even big brands, okay? I mean, Gatorade’s a big brand, but sometimes you can take away their.

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Chris Kochek: Logo from the ad and just ask someone.

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Chris Kochek: So who’s behind this ad?

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Stacy Jones: It’s just content.

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Chris Kochek: Yeah, it’s just somebody dunking a basketball or it’s someone running around the track or something like that. It’s an intense, beautifully shot picture if it’s in print or it could be a video, things like that. But it’s not different enough. And that’s the challenge, is you get a lot of copycat brands. So the challenge is to always keep finding ways to differentiate yourself and differentiate yourself, though, in an emotional way. You have to have the functional reasons to believe. But even more important, you have to have those irrational or emotional reasons to believe. Which, again, the only way you’re going to get there is by talking to your customers and finding out what moves them in their lives on a daily.

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Chris Kochek: Basis and then trying to tap into that.

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Stacy Jones: And did you know that McDonald’s partnered with Coming to America Too to do a whole co promotion when it came out with Paramount in the last couple of years?

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Chris Kochek: Interesting. I did not know that. I didn’t see coming to America too. It didn’t get great reviews. So I decided to save the precious.

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Stacy Jones: Hour and a know it’s on Amazon. It’s not the same, but it’s not something that is. It’s not dreadful. It brings you back into time of the memory. If you like the first one, you’ll like the second one. Just not quite the same. There’s just an evolution that’s happened, and it’s a little bit more over the top and in your face.

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Chris Kochek: Well, and that’s the challenging thing, whether you’re in movies or you’re a brand, the kind of self consciousness, right? Like, we know where we’ve been before. I mean, I think about again, I’m dating myself. But all the Lethal Weapon movies, as each new sequel came out, or the Scream movies or the Marvel movies, they know that the audiences know what the tropes are. They know what the formulas are. So then they kind of do, like, a little bit of a wink and a smile, and they have fun with it. You know who does this really well? Who’s really I mean, I just admire the heck out of their branding is liquid.

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Chris Kochek: Death. Yes.

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Stacy Jones: They’re excellent at their branding. They unbelievable. Skyrocket to success. Brand for a reason.

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Chris Kochek: Yeah.

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Chris Kochek: And it’s water. It’s water in a can. Now they’ve got some iced tea. Everything from the name to the way.

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Chris Kochek: That they’ll take criticisms and turn them.

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Chris Kochek: Have you seen this thing? What is it? The hateful eights. They’ve made these playlists on Spotify where they’ve made songs that leverage some of the hateful comments that people have shared about the brand because they don’t like it or what it stands for. Boy, that’s such a stupid name. Things like that, they just feed off of it. What they do really successfully that I talk about in any insights yet is that they’ve managed to harness conflict. One of the techniques make it their own from doing yes and make it their own.

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Stacy Jones: It’s the same thing as stepping into fault and just celebrating it and sharing that yes, that you own it. This is yours, this is who you are and what do you want to do about it.

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Chris Kochek: Yeah, I’m not perfect. It’s not for everybody. So either take it or leave it. If you don’t like it, fine. You can critique all you want, but they’ve done such a marvelous job of taking the negatives and fueling them in the media for as far as they can take it. I mean, it reminds me know, NWA albums and things like that. Oh, the more negative press we get, the more albums we’re going to. So they’ve done it in a very clever way. Now, if you’re a brand and you’re not going to necessarily do a campaign the way they’ve done it, but even in a focus group setting, even in a conversation with customers, one way that you can start to get toward an insight is asking a conflict driven question.

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Chris Kochek: Which is better?

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Chris Kochek: This or this? Which is worse, this or this?

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Chris Kochek: Right?

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Chris Kochek: So just the use of that little.

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Chris Kochek: Word or and creating polar opposites will.

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Chris Kochek: Start to bring out a lot of emotion in people. So we did that with a beanship client where we said, hey, are beans boring or amazing?

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Chris Kochek: You tell us.

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Stacy Jones: Was it bonitos?

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Chris Kochek: It was bonitos, yeah.

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Stacy Jones: I put it together often. And you and worked with them at one point for a heartbeat.

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Chris Kochek: Yeah. Yes.

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Chris Kochek: So we asked that question, and I was amazed at how many people were waxing rhapsodic about beans, their love of beans, and how colorful they were, and how versatile, and how they just soak up so much flavor, and they can carry whatever flavor you want. And it led to so many different new headlines and new ideas for the brand. And so just creating a little bit of conflict, either in your focus groups, in your research process, or as part of a campaign, I think can be.

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Chris Kochek: Very effective for brands because it creates.

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Stacy Jones: Passion when there was none.

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Chris Kochek: And passion is connected to emotion, and.

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Chris Kochek: Emotion is connected to brand well, Chris.

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Stacy Jones: How can our listeners find you?

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Chris Kochek: They can find me on LinkedIn. Definitely over there. They can find [email protected]. Last name is spelled K-O-C-E-K. Got a website? Got the books on it. It’s got some other goodies on there as well. I’m on the usual channels LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, and then I like to talk.

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Chris Kochek: With folks like yourself.

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Stacy Jones: Well, I’m glad you do. And we have time. I don’t want to use up all your time because I could keep on talking to you for hours. But one more thing that brands do to screw up, can you share that with us?

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Chris Kochek: I’ll give you two. It’s a twofer. So the quick one of them is spending too much time on organic social media and hoping for the Hail.

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Chris Kochek: Mary, hoping that you’re going to have a post that goes viral. Okay.

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Stacy Jones: Only 6% of your following sees it if you’re not putting any dollars behind it, and you’re spending all this time and energy on your employees versus actually getting eyeballs onto it.

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Chris Kochek: Exactly. So if you had to make a trade up, if you only had $5,000, $10,000, whatever is your budget, and you say, okay, should we be spending this on organic social media or should we be spending this on guerrilla marketing? I’m thinking of like, food and beverage brands. You want to get that product into the hands, into the mouths of your potential customers. What is the cheapest, fastest, best way to do that? As opposed to, hey, let’s do this photo shoot and let’s take this picture and do all these kinds of things. You want your cost per post to be as inexpensive as possible. So that’s one area and then the last area is not having your data house set up. So a lot of brands, they go to market and then they forget to keep track of their data.

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Chris Kochek: So, yeah, they’ll run some reports here and there every now and again, hey, how many people are coming to our website? Or of course they care about sales. They’re always looking at sales, are sales going up or down? But there’s so many other data steps before you get to sales that if you’re moving the needle in the right place in the right ways, then you’re going to start to see an uptick in traffic, or you’re going to see an uptick in engagement on social media for paid campaigns or for organic. But keeping track of those things, creating a useful, regularly or automated data dashboard, that’s a huge thing that I see a lot of brands don’t do initially, and those that do tend to be much more successful.

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Stacy Jones: Yeah, I think it’s everything. It’s not just like your data, of course, is something that’s important, but it’s all things that as a brand you put together, it’s all data. And you now have to keep a library to keep track of it all. But even that content that you’re saying on organic for social media brands spend so much time investing or trying to get little glimpses and nuggets or content that they’re creating and the like and they don’t know how to. Have a repository for it and they don’t have someone who is so ingrained, I think, in the company always to know through the years where everything actually is. Unless there’s a system that’s clean. And I see it with clients all the time, where new people will come in, new people come out.

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Stacy Jones: It happens at my agency as well, where I ended up being the keeper of all things, because if you don’t have enough of a platform for it, you’re not going to be able to go back and look at that. Even with social media, with clients, if you’re doing an ad campaign thinking about what are your metrics and numbers before you start the campaign versus after the campaign is over, because you can’t dial back if you’re not tracking.

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Chris Kochek: All right.

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Chris Kochek: I mean, every brief that we do, if we’re going to be doing a paid social media campaign, one of the first background questions is, have we done a campaign before? What’s the benchmark data? I always say data, but it’s data.

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Stacy Jones: You’re right. No, I wasn’t trying to correct you. I say words that sometimes come out and sometimes don’t.

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Chris Kochek: But yeah, I mean, having that benchmark data there so that, you know, what’s the high score you’re trying to beat? And to the repository thing that you said, too. We call it the missing car keys problem.

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Chris Kochek: Right.

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Chris Kochek: If you’ve ever misplaced your car keys, you spend 30 minutes trying to find out where it is unless you have a tile or something on it, and then you’ve just lost 30 minutes. Well, how many pieces of collateral have been created that’s labeled image?

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Stacy Jones: At least it has image on it.

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Chris Kochek: At least it has image it’s in some random folder. And again, that knowledge, that institutional knowledge.

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Chris Kochek: Resides with, like, one person, and then.

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Chris Kochek: Everybody’S going around searching for it, and it’s like a hair on fire moment because it’s a great image and you need it now for a press release or you need it for something else. And so having systems in place so that you’re organized, you know what your benchmark data is, and you’re able to move quickly when the opportunity arises, that’s key.

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Stacy Jones: And I have to say, in terms of Data and Data, there is an entire Star Trek character named is it Data?

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Chris Kochek: I hope it’s Data.

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Stacy Jones: I think he’s data.

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Chris Kochek: Yeah, I’ll go back and double check. I didn’t watch Star Trek as a kid, and that’s what I thought, so that’s probably why I say Data all the time.

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Stacy Jones: There you go. Or it’s just a Texas thing, but you can’t say that because I’m also from Texas, so I don’t. Well, Chris, thank you so much for coming on today. Really enjoyed talking to you have a great mind and a way of perspective of looking at branding. So appreciate your insight.

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Chris Kochek: Well, thanks for having me.

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Chris Kochek: Enjoy the conversation, of course.

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Stacy Jones: And to all of our listeners, thank you for tuning in to another episode of Marketing Mistakes and how to avoid them. I look forward to chatting with you this next week. And since I kept on talking about product placement today, if by chance you ever are interested in exploring how your brand can become a star on the silver screen, reach out. I’m happy to connect and we will talk further. Until then, have a great one.