Big Brands. Big Trouble. Part 3.

In the final installment of Big Brands, Big Trouble, Mark and Lorraine discuss the last two mistakes from Jack Trout's 2001 book: the Live by the Numbers/Wall Street Mistake and the Not Attacking Yourself Mistake. Once these last two of Jack's nine codified mistakes are tackled, the positioning duo adds four of their own: the Out-of-Touch/Ivory Tower Mistake, the Go Woke, Go Broke Mistake, the Chasing the Politics Mistake, and finally, Handing Customer Service to the Robots Mistake. Does it seem possible these brands could be in such hot water? Well, Mark and Lorraine share some positive stories of those who are following Jack's guidance and getting it right as well.

Spend 40-ish 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 totality of positioning, Lorraine Kessler. Thing one, today is the solar eclipse and we're almost here in Canton, we're almost in the path of totality. Have any big plans for the big event today? I bet you're going to pull out a good Italian wine and enjoy the view.

Lorraine Kessler
Well, that's exactly right. That's funny that you said that. I'm glad you didn't call me a totalitarian. Which I think some would say fits. Sadly. But no, we found this wine that's from the region of my, the Procacci family. It's the Puglia region in Italy. And the Procacci’s are from a city called Bari, Italy. B -A -R -I and it is called an Apacimento and it is just a beautiful wine. The vinter is Casa Moroni, so the house of Moroni. It's just an amazing blend of Italian grapes and they can vary in grapes from Montecucciano. Those are people who know wine, right? Primitero, Malvasio Nero, it could even have Ouvia of Troia, which is the grape of Troia. So, I mean, it depends on the vinter how they mix this, but it is such a great wine. 

And then one of the cool things, if anyone's listening, is from a brand perspective, this is what caught my eye, which usually we know wine, so we don't buy based on the packaging. But in this case, this drew us in. They use a thing called a Spago, which is a string on the bottle. And...yeah, this goes back to ancient days when winemakers would put a string to make sure the cork stayed in the bottle. So anyone looking for this Casa Moroni, Apaz Cemento, will find a string on their bottles. And I think it's really cool. Yeah.

Mark Vandegrift
Yeah, that is neat. I don't know how many of our listeners are big wine connoisseurs, but you certainly are at the top for any that I know.

Lorraine Kessler
Well, for affordable wine. So now, I mean, we kind of stay, unless someone gifts us something, we stay under $100 somewhere. But this wine can be purchased for like $14 to $20. Fantastic. Absolutely fantastic.

Mark Vandegrift
Yeah, we went to a place in Charlotte this last weekend. We were traveling to see our girls over Easter. And so a week ago, but we went to a restaurant called Sixty Vines. 60 wines and their whole menu is designed to put a flight of wines on your menu. And it was really an interesting concept.

Lorraine Kessler
That is cool. That is cool. And you don't drink wine, so.

Mark Vandegrift
No, but the whole restaurant concept was neat and the food was fantastic. I mean, you can't serve bad food just because you serve good wines. So they did a neat job of what I would call the brand side of it, the branding, and then the merchandising of their product offering. They even give you a postcard at the end that had three wine rings on it, as though your wine was spilling over and that was the postcard and it had a little label on each one of them as to what the wine ring represented. So the one wine ring was really, really stained. It said, you're having too much fun. And one that wasn't stained enough, barely you could tell it was a wine ring, said something like, have a little more fun. And so they were, I guess, putting labels on these different types of wine rings. It was a neat.

It was a neat way to do it. And you walk away with something, right? And of course you're supposed to mail it and that promotes it. So it was a good bit of marketing that was done. Yeah, it was good.

Lorraine Kessler
Need experience, need experience. Well, we are the Epicurean culture today. So keep upping the touches.

Mark Vandegrift
Well, and I think the involvement with the eclipse today, you know, big things are supposed to happen and, you know, they're warning this and warning that, but I think people are making an event because again, it's about experiences and I think that's, that's connected to what you just, the statement you just made.

Lorraine Kessler
Yeah, in some cities, we're declaring like a state of emergency, right? Like, it goes like, right, right. Yeah.

Mark Vandegrift
Niagara Falls just did that because there's going to be so many people descending on Niagara Falls to see the eclipse. So I just hope that, you know, things don't result in any big trouble. Speaking of which, we are back for part three of our topic on Jack Trout's 2001 book, Big Brands, Big Trouble.

Lorraine Kessler
Wait a minute, did you plan that transition? Because that was really good. That was really good. Oh my gosh, I think I'll just give you a credit score for that. Oh, my wine ring, yeah.

Mark Vandegrift
INo, you just made it happen naturally.

Thank you.

Well, we've covered seven of Jack's nine mistakes and today we'll tackle the last two and then we're going to add our own four or five that will make up our official 2024 edition book by Mark and Lorraine. Or you can call it a revision of Jack's very popular book. So before we get into that, we again, we've covered seven of these. Just watch the last two episodes if you are interested in the seven mistakes that Jack covers.

Any commentary on those that we've gone through so far, Lorraine?

Lorraine Kessler
Yeah, and as I thought of this, I thought, you know what, you could wrap all of these up into one larger problem. And I think that larger problem is losing focus, right? I mean, if you look at this, you lose focus on who your core audience is and what they care a lot about to try and grab audiences that don't care about the same things or expand or line extend and doing those mistakes or that you lose focus again on the audience and instead you're trying to please Wall Street and investors, right? You might even focus on changing, lose focus on your positioning idea as being a direct idea and then you water it down and you kind of confuse it with other messages or you stop advertising that works prematurely because, oh, someone gets bored, right? We have CMO fatigue or ego, whatever that is that leads to that.

And I think most core is sometimes I think you see the companies that lose focus on what made them successful and what they initially started in their DNA to value. And I think the perfect poster child for this is Boeing. I mean, Boeing was an engineering safety driven company. They buy McDonald Douglas who had two seminal crashes with cargo doors blowing off. And instead of the Boeing culture overtaking McDonald Douglas, they now subsume everything to their investors and to being competitive and they really messed up and they became like McDonald. And now they're having yet another CEO resign and all sorts of problems which we're talking about. So I think this can almost wrap them all in this losing focus.

Mark Vandegrift
Well, and what's maybe a tag onto that because I happen to be teaching at a couple of colleges coming up, just guest lecturing. And what I'm finding is we do brand examples and they're not even that old. I mean, within the last 10 to 15 years old is there's always a generation that doesn't know what you stand for. So rather than going out and trying to be all things to all people, just remember that each day there's a potential new customer that you could create if you just stay focused on your position and keep at it, keep that focus. 

And then if you decide you want to expand, create another company. You know, you DBA all day long, do business as you can DBA all along. You mentioned last season about the restaurant group. I think they have Taco Bell and KFC and a couple others, I forget who is in that list, but you can almost think of it that way. You know, keep your focus. 

Consider your business as much like what's the type of fare that you're offering. Are you tacos in Mexican? Are you chicken in KFC? Are you, you know, name the type of restaurant, right? And if you can think that way, I think that helps keep your focus. And if you get bored with one of those companies, don't play with that company. Go start another company that would be an adjacent. And I think that's a good way to think about keeping focus.

Lorraine Kessler
Or just another brand or just another brand in your portfolio which is a lot of these companies have especially big food companies like Kraft and Campbell's have a wide portfolio of specialty brands that appeal to a particular category and customer and that's the way that's really the way to do that.

Mark Vandegrift
Yeah, with the caveat, as long as you put enough resources and money behind it to promote that brand. So, you know, the P&G model where they have multiple brands in the laundry aisle. We talk about that all the time, but they all have their own marketing team, their own marketing budget, etc. Don't create a brand to create a brand if you're not going to support it with marketing. 

So, well, let's move forward then on the screen for our video viewers are the nine common mistakes that Jack codified in his book and I won't reread them again but for those who want a definition of each and several brands in big trouble listen to our last two episodes we're going to jump to mistakes number eight and number nine right away so we have time to finish up this topic today which originally I thought would maybe be one long one or two but now we're on episode three. 

So number eight of Jack's codified mistakes is the live by the numbers mistake or what we call the Wall Street mistake. And we'll do a definition here for you in a second. Lorraine will give you the short definition. Then we'll go a little bit longer with it. 

And then the number nine mistake, the not attacking yourself mistake. And we talked about how that relates to some of the others. So give us the two short definitions of number eight and nine here, Lorraine, and then we'll dive back in with a couple brand examples of where we see some big trouble going on. So the live by the numbers mistake, the Wall Street mistake.

Lorraine Kessler
Well, that's where companies are more focused on responding to Wall Street pressure and to show more sales and profits by setting really unrealistic goals and forcing marketers to reach them as if competition doesn't exist, as if they don't have competitors. 

And a lot of times you'll see this, let's say a category's average growth rate is, you know, 4%. And all of a sudden, managers are given a business plan that they didn't put together, but that their executives put together. Let's say they want 20% growth. I mean, how are you going to get 20 % growth in a 4 % growth market? And then, of course, they're using often with that corollary is we're either going to have the same budget we had last year or less. So none of that correlates. That's wishful thinking. That is just, it's fantasy thinking.

And yet the managers closest to the market are now saddled with unrealistic goals. It's a losing proposition. And that's that. 

But I also think there's another part to this that kind of amends this. It's also this idea of an arrogance of being too big to fail. So if you don't mind, I might take a little segue to talk about a company I think that's in dangerous water right now. And that's CVS.

So I've long had problems with CVS Pharmacy here in Jackson. And then ironically, in February of this year, right, they got fined by the State Pharmacy Board of Ohio, $250,000 for having too few staff, you know, being understaffed and then having like a three month delay in prescriptions that risk people's lives. I mean, if you're a diabetic, you can't wait three months for your prescription.

It's absolutely horrendous how bad that store is, but it's not the only one. There was a store in Dayton in January that, in addition to their staffing problems, people were stealing, their staff were stealing amphetamines and fentanyl. And so they've gotten fined in Dayton and then Columbus… there was a $1 .3 million settlement with CBS over problems with the 22 stores in Northeast Ohio.

That's our area. So what are the allegations? Missing drugs, dispensing errors, improper drug security, prescription delays, understaffing, lack of cleanliness. I mean, this is in Ohio, but it's it's bigger when you look at the federal picture. There's one article. 

I love Reddit because people are so out there. What the hell is going on with CVS Pharmacy? And I read this whole article and this complaint all hits on this. But here's the bigger scandal I think.

The bigger scandal for me is the PBM scandal because CBS is vertically integrated. They own Aetna, the insurance provider who is Medicare, who then has you directed to certain stores. And then they own the PBM. And for those who don't know, the PBM is the Pharmacy Benefits Management arm that negotiates prices with drug pharmaceuticals and then comes to an arrangement for what Medicare, Medicaid will pay, and then passes that on or works with stores to deliver that. But what they were doing, because CVS owns them, there's been a huge complaint, and it's backed by a lot of evidence, that they have been underpaying independent pharmacies, undercompensating them, some of them to the extent that they couldn't even meet their cost of goods and because they have the power to do that, and that is putting out independent retailers out of business. And just look at our market, right? They're going out every day. 

And it's also putting out others, like Rite Aid, it's really hurting them. And so you would say, well, why would anybody use that PBM? But it's really important, I think, for people to know that the PBMs are the biggest part of these corporations.

And the three biggest control 80% of the market price. And the two largest are Express Scripts, which is owned by Cigna, well merged with Cigna, and CVS Caremark, which merged with Aetna. So those two control half the market. And when they contract with insurers, they're often part of the same corporation.

So talk about friends deals, right? And then, so this has been, this is huge. And I think in terms of monopolies, I don't know why this one, the federal government, I think the federal government was stopping Kroger merging with Albertsons, I think it was. But Albertsons is West coast, Kroger's more East coast. I mean, are you not looking at this, right?

Mark Vandegrift
It's this and punching you over here.

Lorraine Kessler
which represents far more money, far more people being hurt, the whole competitive landscape being monopolized. It's really something. So I don't know how it's affected CVS yet, but I do know we're seeing some of these stores from a state level being attacked. And I just think they got to clean up that house. And I think the federal government has to look at that. So I would call that too big to fail. Like we just think we're so big, we can keep approaching on all sorts of things and doing what we want to do, not thinking about the customer, the end customer and their benefit.

Mark Vandegrift
Well, and we saw that, I think, a lot in 07-08, where you had banks, you had car companies, common across the board because they quit being entrepreneurial in nature. They quit understanding the value of marketing. Differentiation is completely gone.

And I think it goes to just playing to Wall Street and doing things that really are unnatural for a business to do.

Lorraine Kessler
Sure, it's profit over people, and we've all heard that cliche, but it really applies. And that's what happens when this hubris takes over. And it is fueled by Wall Street. In fact, I saw a documentary the other day about the crisis of the United States. There was… most people only think about the Great Depression in the 1920s at the end of the 20s, but it actually, there was a greater, there was an equal, if not equal, depression like in 1893 at the end of the 18th 19th century and it was really bad and you know who drove it Wall Street and It hurt farmers and workers like crazy from the West. It's a really interesting part of history that's overlooked.

Mark Vandegrift
Follow the money. Follow the money. Okay, well number nine is the not attacking yourself mistake. And you already gave a quick definition of that, but go ahead and talk a little bit about what that looks like from maybe a positive side. Like we mentioned the laundry aisle today, Tide or Downey or something like that. Give us what the mistake is and then how this is done correctly in the market.

Lorraine Kessler
Right. Well, typically this is how a leader, as we said in Marketing Warfare, plays offense to defend their market share, right? So they're always attacking themselves. And that means they have to have their pulse on changes in the marketplace and where consumer attitudes are perhaps changing or bending and be ready with that. So I think a great example of brands that have done that well…

Tide. I mean, in the old days, there was just one box of tide. It was the orange and the blue, and it was, you know, the whitening was the idea. And people bought it because mothers wanted their kids to have the whitest clothes. So, you know, played on kind of a social acceptance psychology. So great. But now Tide, there's a Tide that's for anti -allergy, right? There's fragrance Tide. There's cold water Tide.

There's the standard Tide. There's just, yeah, Tide sticks, stain sticks and things. They have really, so does this fit or is this bad line extension? Well, I think it's really exceptional attacking themselves because the franchise of Tide is we know how to clean clothes the way you want, right? So if you want whitening, if you need allergy sensitive, product, if you want fragrance, we know how to do that better than anybody else. So they're building on a single kind of concept. They own the whole franchise. So I think that's a really great example. 

And then I'd say that Downy has done a similar thing. They now have the beads and they have, I just saw another product the other day, I can't remember what it was, but it fits within the idea of making your clothes fresher, softer, and kind of an extra treatment for your fabric, beyond clean. And they've done a really good job, I think, in exploring all the niches within that broader concept and done it well. And so in doing so, I think they've kind of put new energy into the brand, right? You were talking about new generations. Downy to me is something really old, right? But what they've done is they've now approached it, and I'm sure they're gathering all new generations who want to different kinds of scents about their fabric, protecting it and keeping it soft and wearable and comfortable, but also smelling good and et cetera. So I think they've done a really good job with that. So I think those are two great examples.

Mark Vandegrift
Yeah, and I think another one that comes to mind is Domino's. You know, they've been about delivery for a long time. I told you when they presented, the CEO came to Hillsdale back when I was in school and said, one day we'll be delivering pizzas where the pizza is made in the in the actual vehicle and we won't have stores. 

Well, that hasn't happened yet. But I mean, you look at the different ways that they've executed on delivery with their cars, you know, the electric vehicles, you know, they invented the bag, they invented the heaters to keep the pizzas hot when they deliver, all of that. And they continue to do that with this pinpoint delivery that they just came out with recently. So I anticipate they'll keep attacking themselves with different ways. They were smart, as you pointed out a while ago, to attack themselves on their menu items and on their recipe because people really thought Domino's pizza sucked.

And they went back and said, we're going to come out with a new recipe. And they have adjacent items that people typically order when they order pizza. So I think they've done a good job as well at attacking themselves because what they look like when the CEO talked to us back a long time ago to what they are today is wildly different. And yet, guess what? They're still about delivery.

Lorraine Kessler
Right. And look at all three of these examples, I think, display a core sense of focus. I mean, Domino's started by Monahan was all about delivery. They haven't left that. They've only enhanced that idea. And fixing the product was essential, but really, and announcing it was a way of kind of getting them back to equal. But the delivery Downy with the kind of augment to your washing of clothes, making them more wearable acceptable, and then Tide being the leader in all sorts of cleaning laundry in every form. That's an enormous focus. So kudos to those companies.

Mark Vandegrift
Okay, well, let's add in our last few minutes here and to discuss our, let's call them new mistakes, that if we wrote our 2024 edition of Big Brands, Big Trouble, what they would be. So the ones we'd like to add, I think we've talked about this in our separate meeting, our planning meeting, the first being the out of touch or the ivory tower mistake.

And we kind of just touched on that a little bit. The go woke, go broke mistake. That's number two. The chase the politics mistake. And number four, I think is where we'll end this, is the handing over customer service to robots mistake. So why don't you cover the first one, or maybe the first two here, and I'll take on a couple of them. So the out of touch ivory tower mistake.

Lorraine Kessler
Yeah, and it does kind of relate with the Wall Street thing and the hubris that comes into companies when elitist CMOs and CEOs start thinking about themselves more than about who their customer is, as if their customer is beneath them. So they have this kind of condescending attitude towards their customer, which relates to that inaction that they take. And they try to impose their own values on these people. 

Worse yet, they show that they really don't live in the world of their customers at all. They lack total, not only customer intimacy, but sensitivity. We've heard the term their tone deaf, right? 

So I think the best example of this in recent headlines is Kellogg's, right? Because here you have a CEO, thank you very much, who comes out in very crass way in midst of times when people are having a really hard time making their grocery bill. I mean, earnestly, I'm now more aware of my grocery spending than ever because I'm participating. And I can't believe the prices, right? And what it takes just day to day to eat. And so we have a lot of Americans who feel the real pressure of not being able to afford their groceries, or if they can, they can't afford much else.

And so what he basically said, very Marie Antoinette -ish, is let them eat cereal, like for dinner. Like, oh, okay. And meanwhile, kind of completely unaware of what's going on in his own company, Kellogg has raised the price of cereal. And if you've ever looked at the price of cereal, it's not cheap. It's not inexpensive. So of course this created a very much deserved backlash and then a call for a three month boycott of Kellogg's products. 

Now, if I worked for Kellogg and I was the CEO, I would politely but in forcibly say to the CEO, please don't talk. We do not need CEOs sabotaging our brand. And it happens more often than not, right? I mean, whether you love the guy or not, Elon Musk is gotta be a marketers worst dream when he goes public so we were seeing more and more of this and it just throws me back to like the JP Morgan days of Business, right? I mean we're right back to that.

Mark Vandegrift
Guys in cigars, feet up on the desk in a cherry wooded entire boardroom have no perspective on customers.

Lorraine Kessler
Yeah, I mean, it's just you go back and look at history and look at the Carnegie and the strikes and the things he said to his people and JP Morgan and the things they said. And it's like we're right back to that. Nothing's new under the sun.

Mark Vandegrift
Well, a nuance to that then would be not only being out of touch, but thinking that your values are the ones that we need to convey to our customers and change their values. And so that's our number two, the go woke, go broke mistake. And I'll list a few, but believe it or not, this mistake, before you accuse us of being out of touch, there's a Wikipedia entry for it.

And they cite Bud Light in the last year, right? Target and Disney as prime examples. And recent entry entrants have been Doritos and just a couple of weeks ago, Planet Fitness. And Planet Fitness, if you hadn't heard. Yeah, they actually canceled the membership of a lady who walked into a restroom and saw a guy who was identifying as a woman, shaving and exposing himself in the women's restroom. And she complained to them, and so they just canceled her membership.

Lorraine Kessler
Oh my gosh. And how is that resolved at this point or what's going on with?

Mark Vandegrift
Well, at this point, from what I understand, there's now a boycott on Planet Fitness. So who knows where it's going to go? I mean, it's still pending. And who knows what's going to happen with the lady who lost her membership or anything else that's going on. But, you know, this just goes back to they immediately sided with the traditional values rather than thinking through how can we adjust to accommodate all of our various members, regardless of what they're identifying as. And it just is going to cost them a lot of money because now they have a boycott against them.

Lorraine Kessler
So here's my, here's my, I have an architect friend. He's a very smart person, very funny. And here's the obvious solution to all this, right? You ever been to a planet fitness and see how much space they have? Build another restroom with a locked door. Like, hello, women, men, locked door, and you go in and whatever you want to identify with, you can be in there to your heart's delight. I don't understand this. It's such a solvable problem. It doesn't have to be a problem. I don't know. It's simple.

Mark Vandegrift
So then another nuance to this is chasing the politics mistake. Okay. And I think of the EV market. I was just talking with someone today, a consultant, and they were talking about our area embracing the EV technology and how a local car dealer has an entire lot of electric vehicles that he can't move. 

And we've just recently seen Ford is jettisoning their electric vehicle line due to a lack of sales. Apple, of all places, not even a car manufacturer, is abandoning their technology research around electric vehicles. So it was interesting. 

Only Toyota who has been betting on the hybrid for about 20 years is seeing growth around vehicles that are friendlier to our environment. They're realizing, you know what, the battery and the gas power together creates a really high miles per gallon and they are seeing tremendous growth. People are betting on the hybrid. We have a couple of hybrids because we love them so much. 

But, you know, I just saw a TikTok video last week that this gal was crying because her typical trip that took, I guess, seven or eight hours was taking 12 to 15 hours because she couldn't find an EV charging station. When she did, it took two hours to charge the vehicle and just making the trip horrible. So, I mean, I think what we can see here, and you can throw solar into this, wind energy, and many others who just totally jettison their core products and chased after new technologies that haven't developed as anticipated. We have a client that happens to be betting on clean energy, but they're not going just the way that the politics are sending them with solar and wind, but they're developing, or they have developed a hydrogen technology that is net negative, not just net zero, but net negative. The source of the fuel can be like biomass or waste, stuff we throw away, that's turned into clean 97% pure hydrogen and capturing the carbon as it is burned, not post. So that's 60% efficient, but during production, which is 90 to 95% efficient,

They can grab it in one pipe, grab the hydrogen in the other pipe and the one and the carbon can either be, you know, ported away in a, in a trailer. It can be pumped into the ground to do whatever it does underground or in any other application. And then the hydrogen that's 97% pure can be used right on site. It can be, you know, transported away, whatever. 

So, you know, the politics aren't bad, right? The pressure to develop clean energy is not bad. But what a lot of these companies have done is they've just thrown their core customer out. They're chasing a new customer that really doesn't know if they want the technology yet due to cost, effectiveness, whatever it may be. So I think this is chasing the politics. You can see both sides of it. And the fact that the EVs are just doing this is a good example of that.

Lorraine Kessler
Yeah, well, you know, first of all, should our client that you were talking about ever get to the point where they want to do pull through marketing for the power plants and the people who adopt their way of processing? I think they should adopt a character and that should be our doc from back to the future. The biomass ...

Mark Vandegrift
That would be awesome. That's brilliant.

Lorraine Kessler
I really think that they could do pull through, like just to kind of build the market for their customers who are buyers. There are not a lot of markets. It was like garbage. It was like his flux capacitor. We call it the hydrogen capacitor. So I think we could we can make use of that because that will really catch on. But yeah, I think you're right. You know, we know that petroleum and fossil fuel is not the future.

But the issue is what is the right alternative solution? And there's high risk in chasing one bet down, right? We don't, you have to make the right bet. Now I don't personally see EVs as the total right bet. And I think one of the reasons that you mentioned it is, well, first there's so many problems with them. 

Like I know, for example, we have a friend who moved to Florida and when they had that tornado or the hurricane they had, what was it last spring and that major storm hit Florida, these cars caught on fire. And when they had to transport like Teslas to a parking lot, they had to leave like enough space between cars, like two car space, because one would catch the other on fire. And it's almost like it became a land problem. And then we know the batteries are just grossly expensive, not to mention what it costs to the lithium itself to process that is not good for the environment. The cost of lithium, the fact that the Chinese frankly have cornered the lithium market creates I think global destabilization. So they're like the new OPEC or could be. 

So I also think there's a real possibility what you were talking about is that hydrogen has the potential to leapfrog EV. So you've invested all this and the next thing you know, wake up and hydrogen has leapfrogged. Now we still have infrastructure problems with hydrogen and it's going to be a long time solution. 

But I think the key is to what I've seen is that the government has tried to kind of force people, forced consumers to buy these EV cars, right? Or to force them in there's some states that have passed laws about that. And I think that is such an overreach of government, such an overreach. And it is so...

I don't even know the word to put to it, but all I think of is in the time of Henry Ford, right, the number one cause of pollution was horse manure. And I don't remember the government outlawing horses, right? I don't remember that. 

Mark Vandegrift
They outlaw cattle now, so who knows where they're going.

Lorraine Kessler
Oh yeah, because Bill Gates is buying all the farms to make meat. But.
Yeah, and I think that this government overreach is just forcing the market. You have to allow natural forces, however they work, to work their magic. And no one has a magic ball. So there's a lot of things on the table, and it's a big risk to choose one just like this.

Mark Vandegrift
Well, this last mistake is pretty self-explanatory. The handing over customer service to robots mistake. And we probably could have never imagined this 20 years ago, but there are more brands who fail on customer service that we now believe there are certain industries where an up and comer could actually position around service. And Lorraine, I remember when we realized there was a switch that was happening, because you used to say, you can never position on service because why? You had to be a customer before you could experience the service. 

But now because service is so bad, people are willing to switch providers, whatever that may be, product may be, just with the promise of better service. Cable companies, I think, were notorious for this. But share a little bit about why you saw that switch happen and maybe some companies that have landed on service as a position.

Lorraine Kessler
Well, I think, yeah, I think, you know, it used to be that every, I think Jack Trout's thinking was every, all of your competitors to do the same market research that you do. So they'll know the same things that customers want to be happy as you do. Well, that was before social media, right? So, I mean, I can't, I mean, you cannot downplay the value of social media because now you have reviews, people sharing their experience. Amazon started that with the review kind of checklist and scoring. So what we have now is a very open review process. So now customer service is a factor. I can experience it vis-a-vis other people who I trust who are consumers like me. And I don't have to be a participant in order to experience it. So I think that's huge.

Mark Vandegrift
Yeah, yep, that's very well said. Well, thing one, I hope you stay out of big trouble during the big eclipse. To our listeners, stay safe this afternoon. And thank you for joining us. 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 solar eclipse.