A Look Back on 50 Years of Advertising - Experiential Marketing

This week, the positioning duo wonder about the power of AI to do the irrational, emotional, creative task of ideation and creative concepting. MKHSTRY claims to reduce concepting from 6-9 months down to hours. What do our fearless positioning experts think about that claim?!

Next up, Mark and Lorraine cover the rise of experiential marketing. This is more than virtual or in-person events - such as the Barbie Movie's AI generator or Lean Cuisine's #weight this - but much more as we see brands today connect with consumers. Starbucks, Nike, and even some small B2Bs are trying to connect with consumers at the top of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs.

Spend 30-ish (or 40-ish this time) with Mark and Lorraine as they discuss all things marketing, advertising, and positioning!

Transcript

Mark Vandegrift
Welcome to the latest episode of the Brand Shorthand Podcast. I'm your host, Mark Vandegrift, and with me is the Sovereign of Selling, Lorraine Kessler. Lorraine, we're back one last official time to talk about all that's happened in advertising over the last 50 years as we celebrate our own 50th year in business. We're concluding our discussion this week on that history by covering the rise of experiential marketing.

And this one gets a bit complex in the way that we're going to talk about it, but we'll define it and provide some examples for what we might mean by experiential marketing. We're even going to dive back a little bit and grab a little snippet from Dr. Scott Powell who was on with us a few weeks ago on Maslow's theory, because he did one of his doctoral papers on Maslow. And we'll play that clip at some point during this episode.

But before we get to our topic, Lorraine, you sent me a Facebook post about M-K-H-S-T-R-Y. And had I not read the article, I wouldn't have known that we're supposed to pronounce that “make history.” It's just basically taking the vows out. So, it was started by the former CMO of Aflac. He was at Progressive and some other large brands and supposedly it will shortcut the process of creative concepting from six to nine months – I've never had six to nine months to concept anything – but whatever, down to a few hours. And he says, it's not supposed to replace humans, just help them come up with ideas for marketing concepts. Oh, Sovereign of Selling, what say you?

Lorraine Kessler
Well, I think he is talking about one aspect of creating a campaign within the context of the article, which is the first upfront, like vetting concepts. Well, first ideating and then vetting among kind of approaches or creative, what we would call creative concepts. So, you have a strategy that might be positioning, but then how do we get that idea across? That's the creative concepting. And that can be just words, a headline, just something that's very briefly described. 

So, my first feeling is, look, we're not going to stop the AI train, right? It's a’comin’ and the question, and the only question is what will be the end destination? I mean, where will this really become useful? And like so many of the technological advancements that you and I have seen over the years, that the forecasts or predictions tend to be wholly off in some way. They might be right in some way, but they tend to be 180 off in a lot of other ways. So, no one has that crystal ball. And I don't know, you'll remember Seth Godin, right? The god of permission marketing. And do you remember his big prediction with social media? It was, it's the end, the death of intrusive advertising.

In fact, the opposite has happened. Social media is the birth of an unbridled intrusive advertising at a level that the networks and TV and radio never even imagined. So totally off. You don't hear a lot from Seth these days. 

Mark Vandegrift
I don't know. Where is that purple cow anyhow?

Lorraine Kessler
Right? And then there was this fear about the cookies and cookies disclosure.

Of course, regulation has mandated that people accept now their level of acceptance, but still, and America leads every other country, only 32% of Americans don't accept all cookies. So, it's pretty astounding, really. So again, there's a lot of people who talk a lot, but then history has a way of being acted upon, or let's say, in a way, by other forces that change the end destination.

Now, AI in concepting, I could see, as a matter of fact, we worked with a guy who did names, he only did names. And he didn't have artificial intelligence, he had to use his own list of, I mean, it was copious, almost volumes of names, and then he would go to that kind of on his own. I can imagine AI for naming to be extremely helpful, because you can database all that stuff and just run through stuff quickly then still it's going to take the human intelligence to say, oh, I think that will connect. 

Now, I'm not sure “make history” spelled the way it is, which really made me a little suspicious of this whole thing. I couldn't even remember how to write it to you. I had to keep looking it up. I like vowels. Sorry. So, I thought that was kind of funny. But I could see in concepting if it can winnow down several concepts very quickly people ultimately have to make the decision.

Mark Vandegrift
I have to tell you a story about that since you're talking about naming. So, there was a nonprofit that had to change its name because of trademarking. And I happened to serve on the board. And as I'm concepting names, I thought, you know what? I'm going to see how ChatGPT does with names. So, I went, and I described it and I had to do a few different queries. And I kept getting these lists of names back.

And Lorraine, what's the first thing we tell our team to do when they come up with a name? Google it, right? Every single name that came back, regardless of how I changed the query, was already taken in some form or fashion. And so, you know, it goes back to what we talked about last episode when they asked Mark Ritson how much he thinks marketing is science. Well, you so eloquently described the fact we're playing in the irrational side of the brain, aren't we? And marketing's over here trying to be made into some formula and made programmatic and systematic in some way, and yet our brain is beautifully created by God to be creative, and that irrational part of it is what makes it creative.

It's not a math quiz. It's not two plus two is four. Actually, some people want it to be five. You know, one plus one is eleven. Is that accretive?

So, this is where it's funny. He says it takes the six to nine months process. We have never had six to nine months, first of all, to concept any campaign for any client because they want it yesterday. So, first of all, I thought that was funny. And then to say that this could help you get it done in hours, I think that part of concepting is you take things in and then you ruminate on it.

Like my best thinking, I always tell people, I love mowing because I'm doing something brain-dead that allows my brain to rest. And that's when the ideas pop into my head. I don't even know I'm thinking about something and something pops into my head. So, there's a process to the creation of things that I just, if AI ever gets there, I will be surprised that it could ever be.

Lorraine Kessler
There is the power of suggestiveness right like if you had on that list, I always remember we named this product I thought it was a great name for a medical device that brought, or helped with spinal injuries and pain we called it so leave because what we saw on the list and If that all AI did was pointing out a great list and then you had to do the synapses. 

We kept seeing the word Aleve and Solice. And so we came up with the name of Soleve, which is a beautiful name, because it's that Solice and the Aleve together and it was unique and no one had it and all that. But it did take that next step, but it did cut down the time. If AI could cut down the time to even call all those early lists, that would be great. 

I think the big, and they certainly have to correct the trademark search and Google search problem. They have to be able to… the system will have to be able to hone out names that are likely taken, so you don't waste time. So, there is a lot of room to go, but one thing I do see, I do see it has the potential to change how we monetize the agency business. And here's my rationale. So, let's say now you take a team of four or five and they each spend 10 hours to come up with those initial ideas, right? Whether it's a name or whether it's just concepts to turn out. Well, now you've just had 40 to 50 cumulative hours for 4,000 to $5,000 spent on just that part of campaign development.

This doesn't include the designers and the people at the layout, the ads, and render it into a real material. So, but now let's say with AI that can be done with two people in four hours. Well, that's $800 and that's a $3,200 difference. So how are agencies who are stuck in this world, most of us in, um, people, hours times dollars.

Right? All of a sudden, we're going to charge $800 for something that was $4,000. And we haven't yet figured out, agencies haven't yet figured out how to value price in a way that makes sense. And so, we know the traps of performance-based marketing. You know, we don't control so much of what happens.

That's why Roy Williams was so interesting because he demands to have control over the sales force, the whole budget. He is literally running your company budget. But most agencies are not in that position. So, performance based doesn't really work. And I've always hated this, you know, hours kind of factor that we've had because you come up with the Pillsbury doughboy and you did that in 10 hours and you charge $1,500, was that worth…? What's the real value of that idea?

Mark Vandegrift
Well, and you and I know as we've priced things over the over the years, we call it the art of pricing. The science of costing and the art of pricing. And the fact is that like you said, you could come up with an idea in two hours or it could take you 40 hours and you still don't come up with a good idea. So, even when someone says well, what's that going to cost me and we have to give an estimate, right? Because everyone wants to know what something's going to cost, you don't know when a person's going to have an idea that perfectly dramatizes a position, or in a campaign, dramatically dramatizes what we're trying to convey to achieve the objectives of the client. 

We've had ideas come from every corner of this agency, so you can't just give it to the same four people. So, that's where what you're touching on is just a dynamic or an operational situation that's going to be very, very hard to overcome. 

How do we know that the input of one guy, this history guy, he says he's the one that gave it all of its inputs. The AI is regurgitating basically the perspective of one guy who's done some great work, Progressive and Aflac. He was in charge of a lot of those campaigns, but who's to say that his inputs were even the right thing to develop an output that's going to make that process either 1) faster, but 2) better or even equal. If it did say money, then is it at least on par with what other creatives are coming up with? And I don't think so.

Lorraine Kessler
Yeah, there's just, so what I think with AI, the way I think about when the web was evolving is what should be our posture is obviously be aware, be engaged, keep engaged on what's happening, but then be circumspect about it and its real value and does it really fit and where does it fit? Because there's just too many unknowns to make some sort of, I don't want to be Seth Godin. And I want to keep my hair!

Mark Vandegrift
No, no, not. Yeah. Well, at this point, I am now going to replace my personage on screen with an AI generated podcast host. We'll see how that goes. And while the computer gets that set up, let's move on to our topic. 

As our listeners will recall, we're starting this season with a look back on 50 years of advertising and covering a few major developments that we grouped into these categories. And believe it or not, we're on the last one today, Lorraine. So, we've already covered media proliferation, technological changes, targeting and personalization capabilities, transactional media, B2B advertising, last time, the growing importance of branding. And today, experiential marketing. And before we discuss it, let's define it. Okay. So, here's the definition.

Experiential marketing, also known as engagement marketing, is a marketing strategy that invites an audience to interact with a business or a brand in a real world situation. Using participatory, hands-on, intangible branding material, and I would add to that, virtual, the business can show its customers not just what the company offers, but what it stands for. So that's the definition.

Now, while a surprising number of people haven't even heard of this concept, it's kind of a big deal. 77% of marketers who were interviewed say that they are using experiential marketing as a vital part of a brand's advertising strategy. This can be in-person or virtual as some of the following examples use one or both. So, the first is a one that you, in particular, might love is the Barbie movie Selfie Generator. So, before you went to the Barbie movie Lorraine, did you use the Selfie Generator? That's okay.

Lorraine Kessler
No, and I didn't even know it existed, but that's okay. I'm not really their target audience. I'm their target grandmother. Okay.

Mark Vandegrift
Well, by visiting the website, BarbieSelfie.ai, users were greeted with this message. Welcome to Barbie Land where you can be Barbie or Ken. Click below to become an instant icon. #BarbieTheMovie. So, this experiential marketing campaign is a good example of a campaign that made movie goers feel good to see themselves represented in the coming Barbie movie. You know?

And they thought they were part of the Barbie fantasy experience that kids feel when they play with Barbie and Ken products. So, this was completely a virtual campaign. So, experiential doesn't have to be, you know, hands on. It can be virtual.

Another example, and we're giving examples here just so you understand.

Lorraine Kessler
First of all, I want to go back to your definition. That was like kryptonite to Superman. I like, I don't know who wrote that. It must be some sort of academic textbook because I mean, I was like, what are they talking about? I mean, to me, the experience comes down to simple things. How do you get me to self-identify with your product? And it could be virtual, it could be just, you know, creating a cozy coffee space for me to sit by a fireplace and chat with people or do my work and it's the experience of the coffee culture. And how do I get to experience the culture around your brand or whatever that is? That's really what it is.

Mark Vandegrift
Yeah, very good. And we probably should tell the academia types that they need to use that one instead.

Lorraine Kessler
Because most people don't think that deeply about this stuff.

Mark Vandegrift
Yeah, really. Well, Lean Cuisine is another one. And I thought this was kind of neat. It's called the Weigh This campaign. W-E-I-G-H. Weigh This campaign. So, they curated a gallery of scales, okay, in New York's Grand Central Station. And they invited women to weigh themselves. But here's the catch, Lorraine.

Lorraine Kessler
It took 50 pounds off… part of the value menu. And then you can go to Wendy's and pay a surge pricing and buy a double cheeseburger.

Mark Vandegrift
And get 50 pounds off. Well, the scales were actually small boards where women could write down how they really wanted to be weighed. And rather than focusing on their weight in pounds or anything pertaining to body image, the women opted to be measured by things like being back in college at age 55, caring for 200 homeless children each day, or being the sole provider to four sons. And Lean Cuisine figured out what message it wanted to send. It said, sure, we make stuff that fits into a healthy lifestyle, but don't forget about your accomplishments. That matters more than any number on a scale. So instead of blatantly advertising that, it created an interactive experience around the message. And of course, from that, you get the PR, right?

So yes, only people in New York who went to Grand Central Station got to experience that, but obviously we heard about it. We found the example and they merchandised that PR that came out of it.

Lorraine Kessler
Yeah, and I think what these two are pointing out is there are experiential brands like Starbucks, right, which creates an experience around coffee and coffee drinking and community. That's not a gimmick and a one-time PR promotion or a one-time thing. These are kind of stunts, in my opinion, that speak to the culture, but they have a promotional feel. They're short-term. They reach a limited amount of people. I wouldn't think of Lean Cuisine as an experiential brand, in other words, because of this. I think that's kind of important to point out.

Mark Vandegrift
Yeah. Well, and that I think what you're defining is we experience brands now differently than we ever have. They're part of our identity. So Nike logo or a Starbucks cup. And then there are experiential events to get people to understand deeper meaning behind the brand. 

Lorraine, you have one, I thought, that's very near and dear to you with your husband when he was with Mitchell Fabrics and The Erasable Man at a trade show. So, share with us a little bit about how we turned something that was maybe, I don't know, less interactive to something that was more interactive or more experiential.

Lorraine Kessler
Sure. So, I guess, and again, I would put this in the category of the company didn't make experiential products. It made polyurethane or PVC upholstery, just like, you know, Naugahyde. Okay. 

And it had come up with a fabric that was the first ever dry erase. You could write on it with a Sharpie even, and you could just dry erase it off. You didn't need solvents, which take off the finish and have all sorts of problems with fabric. 

Now, this particular polyurethane fabric is the type that you would want to use in restaurants, casinos, any place where people are going to have pens and tend to make stains, mustard, whatever. So, to demonstrate the properties of this first dry erase product, you have to keep in mind our audience isn't the consumer at this point. The audience is upstream because they have the lever on the market and their design specifiers who work for fabric distributors. And these fabric distributors are huge, and they buy fabrics from all over. And then they re-swatch them. So, if you've ever seen those cards, you know, that are hanging and they have patterns and colors, that goes through distribution.

And these distributors have large marketing budgets. They're very sophisticated. They sell to the Marriott's of the world, to all the casinos and all the big chains. And so, you want to really get in front of the design specifiers so that they put this in their line, this whole collection. And where do they go? So, this is just basic marketing. 

So, you say, well, where does my audience go for information? Number one, they go to trade shows because this is a product they want to touch, they want to see, they want to feel. There's a thing called hand, which by the way, Jack Trout, who brought Naugahyde to market when he was at Uniroyal, was all about the hand. It's the softness of the product. So, they really have to see it to know what they're buying. And the trade show was the place, and this one was in Las Vegas. So, we got the idea of making this an experience.

The genesis of this idea was something I heard years ago when I worked on Owens Corning fiberglass. Owens Corning came out with, or maybe it was Libby Owens Ford, because it was a glass. I can't remember which one, but it was one of these sales stories. 

They came out with a glass that when you hit it with a hammer, it would not splinter the way glass would. It would break into very safe little like kind of balls. So, they told their salespeople, when you go in, we want you to demonstrate this product. So, when you open up your sales kit, there's a hammer in it take the hammer out, hit the glass, and show the customer the benefit. Anytime you have something you can demonstrate, that's rule number one. That's an Ogilvy rule. 

So, this one sales guy was just knocking it out of the park, and they finally asked him, what are you doing differently? He said, oh, instead of me hitting it with the hammer, I hand the hammer to this customer. And I said, hit this glass with all your might.

So, the idea of involvement, that's thinking about the involvement. So, we got the idea of taking that idea of making jackets and having a spokesperson in a jacket made of this material, equipped with ballpoint pens and sharpies, who would go up to designers in the show and say, write on it. And this jacket was really hot. It was a very good looking jacket. And these designers would write on it, and someone put their phone number because he was a very cute guy.

And then he'd say, wipe it off, and they'd wipe it off. So, there's no better demonstration than that. And it really became, it won an award, I think, as one of the best marketing exhibits at the show as it deserved to win.

Mark Vandegrift
And if I recall some of the ladies say, wait, don't wipe off my phone number. I want you to call me.

Lorraine Kessler
Oh, yeah. Don't wipe it off. Yeah. Brett, Brett Chuckerman went on to become a Home Shopping Network host. He's one of their top hosts. Yeah. He might, yeah, he's a good guy. And ironically, his family, either his father or somebody was in the fabric business. So, he knew enough about the product that he himself was just the perfect spokesperson.

Mark Vandegrift
That's great. Well, so you've touched on the other side of experiential marketing, which is the identity part of it and why we as consumers now feel the need to connect with brands differently than ever. And again, we're talking about what's changed over the last 50 years in this. So, I think what we use most of the time to explain that is Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs.

Lorraine, you've done a great job of explaining this in the past. In fact, you've pulled it up in some of our Appreciative Discoveries™ at times just to talk to those brands where they really have to get beyond features and benefits and understand how to connect with their audience. Can you explain that and how Maslow's theory relates to the rise of experiential marketing over the years and how those brands meet different needs today than they did in the past? I'm going to display the one interpretation of Maslow's hierarchy on the screen while you share your insights. So, if you want to speak to that at all, it'll be on the screen for our listeners.

Lorraine Kessler
Yeah, I'll speak to that a little bit and also speak to something that in the book, Authenticity, Gilmore and Pine talk about, which is a very simple evolution from, and I'll get to Maslow's in a second, but it's a very simple evolution from goods to products to services and then experiences, right? So, goods are the commodities that come out of the ground and then we, and then, or rather commodities or things that come out of the ground, then we go to goods that are based on some sort of product advantage that gives us some advantage. 

Then services which start to talk about quality and kind of qualitative improvement over something. And then finally experiences. And so, it's, that's kind of a good simplistic way of looking at it. But when you look about how these things connect to Maslow, it kind of goes from basic needs and wants to, or essential to now desires, right? 

So, when we look at Maslow, first, you need to feel that you have food and sleep and water. I mean, the things you need to sustain life. That's biological, physiological. You're a caveman, you got to be able to fry food. You got to have water, et cetera. 

Then we go to safety. I have to have some kind of security about either having a roof over my head, being able to have food and water and all that on a consistent basis, not always in a panic mood about that. So, these are the basic needs. And many brands solve them, I mean, in different ways. 

But then to elevate, it goes to what Maslow would call psychological needs, right? Which is this idea of love and belonging and intimacy and connections. And then having some amount of respect and recognition and self-esteem about yourself. So many brands will focus on this. And this is like a higher level kind of, I mean, we've already got the baseline covered. It's always kind of like table stakes here. I got a home; I have a roof over my head. I'm taking care of basic needs financially. I don't feel food insecure or money insecure. 

Now you're kind of free to start to want more, to desire more. So, I think you think of this as desire just keeps going up. Once or down here, you know, basic once, and then desires go up. These are all the things that you can layer. And then finally you get to the self-fulfillment, and sometimes we've talked about people who achieve a lot of success, a lot of wealth get to a point where they want to be significant. Like now they start asking, well, what do I do with this money? 

What was that woman who just gave free tuition to every student at the Einstein Medical College? I don't know if you just saw that. The largest private college grant ever. Her husband was, I think, a Goldman Sachs. No, he worked with the guy from Omaha. What the heck? Why am I forgetting his name?

And he made a lot of money at… Warren Buffett. 

And she was a teacher, and she gave some sort, I don't know how she did it exactly, but free tuition for any, this is a college for doctors, for any student enrolled. I don't know how that works, but that made the news. So that's about someone who's saying, and this became from a mandate from her husband. He said, please do something really significant with this money or something of that ilk.

So, when people achieve a certain satisfaction and comfort and they feel they're not threatened, then some people, not all, start to think about how do I achieve significance? How do I get these self-fulfillment needs of meeting one's potential in a different way for every person?

Mark Vandegrift
Well, and I think from the evolution of a brand too, as we go up that hierarchy, Starbucks is a great example because, as we see brand categories, as we see categories evolve, what's the thing we saw about coffee? Were you not able to get coffee prior to Starbucks? And the answer is obviously no, right? Folgers had it. You could pay 25 cents and get it from McDonald's. Any diner had it.

So coffee wasn't something that was difficult to get. It didn't necessarily meet the most basic requirement of food, but it was something that was categorized that way, because it's so basic. Then all of a sudden, we have a Starbucks come around and it touched into this self-actualization in the sense that it gave me an experience because the whole experience of the store was what? To go in, hang out, yet it was more than that. Right Lorraine?

Lorraine Kessler
It's community and feeling cool and feeling connected. And then they had this whole humanitarian side.

Mark Vandegrift
Yep. And then even beyond that, what was it saying about me when I had that cup? That's the esteem part, right? I've arrived. I can afford a $5, $6… now I've seen drinks cost $9 and $10. So, I've arrived. Here's my badge that I'm carrying with me. And I always think it's funny how many people can make that coffee cup last till three in the afternoon.

I drink my coffee in about an hour if it takes that long. So, it has moved us past what we would say are your basic needs into, or a commodity. Yep.

Lorraine Kessler
… or a commodity into an even past good and even past service into an experience that's bigger than all what's in the cup. So, one of the things in one of the books I read years ago, and I can't remember which one now, but it said we taste images, not products. So, people are tasting the image of Starbucks and what it means to them more than what's in the cup. And it would be an interesting study, if you want to put the little science into this, to somehow sneak into everybody's Starbucks regular coffee from their Bunn urn and see if they notice the difference. It would really be interesting because I think as long as they think it's Starbucks, they're going to say yeah.

Mark Vandegrift
Oh yeah, it's going to be different. Well, we have a little snippet from Dr. Powell that I'm going to play right now. And I think what's intriguing is going back to why was Maslow even doing the research in the first place. And we're going to learn a little bit about Maslow's past and the fact that his mom… he hated his mom, I thought was very interesting. So, we'll play that right now.

[Dr. Scott Powell interview.]
Building on that… so in the class the topic today was motivation. And looking at what motivates people to buy certain things. And so we talked about Maslow’s hierarchy and my paper… I took a little different approach because he’s kind of the father of motivational theory. I wanted to know what motivated him to be a motivational researcher. And it’s a really interesting background as to why he got into the field that he did.

And then we kind of look at the pyramid and say ok, which brands are positioning themselves as this… we’re going to meet your safety needs, your security needs.

But today’s focus was really on just the concept of understanding your client’s or prospect’s desires. What motivates them? What’s the motive for them wanting to buy something. 

It was really interesting because the more I studied him, the easier it was. He had a very disfunctional and very abusive childhood. And he literally said, “I hated my mother.” And my entire life’s work was aimed at refuting everything that she told me. 

And apparently, she was very cold. Very abusive. Very detached. And if you recall, he got into Resis monkey research, where they would take monkeys, one away from the mother, and one would stay with the nurturing mother, and one would go onto this wire manachin, and the manachin monkey that never received love eneded up being very very angry, and violent, and not well balanced. 

And he said, I’ve always wondered, why wasn’t I like the monkey, because I never had motherly love? And what motivated me not to sadly commit suicide or to give up? Given the sad childhood that I had?

It’s a really interesting path that took him into studying motivational theory.

Lorraine Kessler:
That’s really interesting becuase one of our clients, Dr. Merle Griff, and she is actualytrained as a child psychologist from Temple University in Philadelphia, and she has said… we were in a book club, and she made astatement, that a child deprived of a mother’s love almost never recovers. So here’s an example of someone who recovered. It would be really interested to know what else happened in his life because you will find this is a pretty common problem in today’s society with those people who become sociopathic or psychopathic or whatever.

Dr. Scott Powell
Absolute. So yeah, it’s a very interesting topic to me.

Mark Vandegrift
Okay, Lorraine, we're back. And I think one of these things this teaches me is we all behave in our unique ways, but we mostly all love experiences now. And when we can integrate that into the brands that we buy and consume, that's a game changer. So based on what you heard with Dr. Powell's statements or this incredible rise in experiential marketing since you first started in business?

Lorraine Kessler
Well, not every brand can be an experienced brand, right? I mean, there's still a lot of business to business and a lot of products that are commodity-based or goods-based. So, it is relative. It tends to be, the more luxury the product, of course, the more experiential. 

So, Starbucks wouldn't have, and we've used them as a good example, wouldn't have been successful if they were selling a 10 cent cup of coffee or a dollar cup of coffee. So there has to be some sort of mesh between the experience and what you're paying for something that makes it kind of a luxury brand. 

And so, as we get more successful, we tend to want better amenities. We tend to want to surround ourselves with things that fulfill our self-esteem and whatever, but it's not every... There are no hard and fast rules for every product or brand or customer. You have to be intelligent about what you're marketing.

Mark Vandegrift
Yeah. You know, you mentioned business to business, and something just happened last week that jumped out at me. And that was, we have a client down in Orlando. He has an existing business, but he's doing a, he's starting a new business just as a DBA to reach a certain vertical. And it's in the concrete business. And when we are going through the corporate identity, he goes, well, we need stickers too.

I said, stickers for what, packaging or? He goes, no, the guys like to put them on their hard hats. And I said, oh, so you're talking about your brand on the hard hat of one of your customers. He goes, absolutely, they wear it with pride. 

Lorraine Kessler
That's a badge of honor.

Mark Vandegrift
Already thinking ahead to ask his new name, new company name, which I can't even share yet because it's still in development, but he's already thinking, at some point, I'm going to hand out stickers and these guys are going to want to slap them on their hard hat. So, tell me that isn't telling about the way that we experience brands today that wouldn't have even been given a thought of that in the past.

Lorraine Kessler
That's an excellent point. So, we should be thinking about how every brand can within its realm create an experience that's differentiated. So, every brand should think about that. We should be thinking about that too.

Mark Vandegrift
Yeah, very good. Well, Lorraine, I hope you had a good experience today on this episode. Thank you to our listeners who hopefully also had a good experience. If you haven't liked, shared, subscribed, or told your friends about the Brand Shorthand Podcast, please do. And until next time, have an amazing day.