Generational Marketing

This week, Mark and Lorraine discuss generational marketing and why it might be a bad track for marketers to take. Tune in to learn about the implications of advertising based on generalities, what happens when you target too broad of an audience, and how to effectively expand your core audience. The positioning duo also shares their thoughts on Liquid Death's most recent chaotic collaboration. 

Join Mark and Lorraine for 30-ish as they discuss all things marketing, advertising, and of course … positioning!

Transcript

Mark Vandegrift 
Welcome back to the latest episode of the Brand Shorthand Podcast. I'm your host, Mark Vandegrift, and with me today is our advertising ace, Lorraine Kessler. Lorraine, how you doing?

Lorraine Kessler
I'm doing well, Mark. Good to see you.

Mark Vandegrift 
Yeah. Well, for today's episode, we're going to dive into the topic of generational marketing and don't, you know, don't do this to me quite yet. And we'll discuss a little bit why we think it may not be the best track for advertisers to take, although there are exceptions. But before we get there, I know you love Liquid Death. So just at the beginning of April here, they struck out on media again with another one of their crazy out of the norm ads. And we covered this before. This time it features a clown slashing spree and the ad itself promotes the brand's newest collaboration. And that's with Mary Ruth's which I had to look up. It's a health and wellness company known for organic vitamins and supplements. Yes, Liquid Death.

Lorraine Kessler
Death, known for death. You take their vitamins and supplements and you die.

Mark Vandegrift 
And you die. So this introduces a limited time product called Liquid Nighttime Multi-Mineral. And to highlight the vitamins dead serious results, the ad shows a woman dozing off to sleep after taking her liquid nighttime multi-mineral and beginning to dream of her music and maniac clown hunting journey. Lorraine, we did an episode, you know, like I mentioned discussing Liquid Death's strange promotions and how they do a good job of focusing on let's call it extremeness. It's not extremism. It's extremeness and What do you think? Did you see the the Liquid Death ad? What do you think about how it's differentiating its brand?

Lorraine Kessler
Well, you know, their tagline is murder your thirst. So, you know, we tell clients when you have a position to bleed it, and they are definitely bleeding it, albeit in bright, clown colors. So I think they're proving that creative execution can be a way to differentiate, right? It's like the creative kind of is the shockiness of it. And they're really doing what the great direct marketer, copywriter, Herschel Gordon Lewis, talked about in his book, The Art of Copywriting or The Art of Writing Copy. I always misname that book. Now, what's interesting about Herschel Gordon Lewis, in addition to being one of the great direct copywriters of all time and a gracious man with a vocabulary that would said you just make you very jealous. He was also known as the godfather of gore. He was the man credited for creating the genre of shock horror. So I think he might appreciate this current spot on two levels. He writes about the shock dim munition rule in his book. And what this rule basically is, it's the idea that shock diminishes in the exact ratio to repetition. So the first time we see something, right, that's forbidden, and then it becomes kind of mildly naughty, and then it becomes ho hum. So there's kind of a trajectory, but it goes downward. And you can think of things like, you're too young to remember, but All In The Family 

Mark Vandegrift 
no, I remember that. We watched that quite a bit.

Lorraine Kessler
Okay. And then Six Feet Under, and Dexter, you know, and Queer As Folk. When these first hit the airwaves, they were really shocking. So right now they're playing shock and it does fit with the brand position, but we can talk a little bit more about whether this is a long-term strategy and what some of the risks are.

Mark Vandegrift 
Well, I find it interesting because we're going to talk about generational marketing, right? In other words, do we go after a target audience based on their generation? Is that the best way to select an audience? Well, their VP at Liquid Death, Andy Pearson, he's the VP of Creative. He mentioned that the various collaborations they do, the co-pros, give Liquid Death the opportunity to reach new audiences. And so, you had the CoLab, we talked about it with e.l.f., bringing customers corpse paint. They did the co-branding with Yeti for the casket cooler.

Lorraine Kessler
Alright, that one is unbelievable.

Mark Vandegrift 
Yeah. And then there's the liquid Death with Dr. Squatch, the Dirt Murderer Soap. So he's basically pointing to the fact that they're able to reach new audiences because they have this focus on a new audience. What do you think about taking this approach to finding new audiences versus what we're about to talk about?

Lorraine Kessler
Well, I mean, I think it's the right approach. They're not demographic. They're not starting with demographics. And we're going to talk about that. Demographics is a data point, but it's not the starting point. And I'll make a big point about that. It's never the starting point. It's psychologically where people are, right? And you know me, my favorite thing to watch is every murder trial and dark thing going on. And then I have to go back to my room and read my Bible and do my rosary. I'm sorry, God, I'm so obsessed with this stuff. But it's the human condition. yeah, so I mean, look at my age, my demo. I could be very much interested in this brand from the approach they're taking or at find it, at least register it in terms of awareness and what it stands for. So I'd say these partnerships, kudos to them. They're staying again. They're bleeding. They're bleeding murder and death to its death. so I think that I think more than and maybe the CMO or VP that he quoted hasn't said this, but he's very much trying to build a cult brand. And you don't do that by following normal paths, Of communication and what have you. Do that by creating something completely new and different. And he's doing it through the creative. It's no surprise to me that he comes from the creative side. And that this is a way of using creative to differentiate a brand to get it into the, to get it attention and get it into the psyche. But I think the key question, you know, and this is where the business part of advertising has to come in. Is, is it working? mean, building awareness we've talked about is like number one, familiarity is you have to have that. Building a fan base is certainly great and they seem to be doing it. But the question is, is that leading to long-term loyalty or just are we really just realizing a lot of media pumping the story because it's so media friendly, right? The media loves this kind of controversy, gets a lot of, certainly social media loves fanning the flames and the fact that all this is very viral. It reminds me a little of the subservient chicken we talked about for Burger King. Like, oh, you would think that was the best advertising ever done for Burger King. No, it was the best advertising ever done for the ad agency, right? Bogoski Crispin, not for Burger King because they ended up losing that contract and sales did not go up for Burger King when it went down. So I just think that, you know, there's a risk in this in that we're not seeing, of all the hype, there's not, we've not seen, and I've seen no evidence that the bottom of the funnel is really doing something spectacular. Now, people are gonna Google and they're gonna say, well, look at the valuation. It's 1.4 billion. And I'm gonna point to this. want our viewers to be very cautious about valuation, because that's done by investors and all I can say is like, remember the Alamo, remember WeWork. Right? Yeah. All right. 

Mark Vandegrift 
Yeah, I was thinking of Snapchat actually when he said that.

Lorraine Kessler
These operators of these companies sometimes do unbelievable things. I mean, what was WeWork other than really a leasing business, right? But they build it up into this thing that was culturally transforming and and they suckered in big investors like SoFi and others. So I just say, remember we are. you know, Liquid Death might be just milking a fad. And we'll see if that fad has life after death or if that fad just dies out.

Mark Vandegrift
So you touched on the IPO there and they hired Goldman Sachs to do evaluation and get them launching. They don't have any announcement yet, but certainly they are talking big dollars like you threw out there. And the other one you mentioned, which is interesting is Burger King. Just saw an article about how well they're like their same store sales, all that are going nuts and didn't we call it when we said, just get back to have it your way. And now we're seeing that the number of times that we've mentioned, we thought they were doing the right thing and guess what? Their store sales are growing. And like you said, adding you rule to the end of it brought it into the 2020s here. they're doing a great job.

Lorraine Kessler
Yeah, it refreshed it and it's great because everybody wants a rule. And I think I said this, I told this story, but I pulled into a Burger King recently to get a cup of coffee. And the attendant there, you know, I'm in the drive-through, sang the whole Burger King song. He was real. And then he said, you rule. What would you like to order today? I was like, you know, that was astounding.

Mark Vandegrift 
Well, customer experience is coming back. I had not been going to Starbucks, but because they said they were gonna get back to their original coffee experience, I've gone a few times. I had coffee delivered to me. I walked in one day, everyone said, good morning. I had a guy at the drive-through yesterday say, hey, just wanna give you a tip. If you bring in your tumbler, your metal tumbler, we will fill it for you and it will give you 25 extra points per visit and you get 10 cents off your drink. And he goes, you know, maybe you've heard this already, but I just wanted to let you know. So they're really engaging with the customer and it's kind of nice for us old fuddy-duddies to hear again that customer service is being valued and the new CEO at Starbucks obviously is killing it because their sales are up too.

Lorraine Kessler
Right, and in proof that everything changes. I remember in one of the Trout books, maybe it was Trout and Ries, but Trout, he talked about how you cannot differentiate on customer service because everybody knows, does the same research you do and knows what customer wants and what not. But, you know, times change and the fact that we've come into a very disconnected interactive community online and companies went away from just basic customer service in terms of the things you just mentioned, I think there's great opportunity. And that's why we sometimes position people around this idea of being customer intimate or very personal. And I think there's very tangible ways to express that through training with your sales team or sales force. So I think there's more opportunity. Everything, you you have to look at some of these principles and then kind of put them within the context of what's happening today.

Mark Vandegrift 
Yeah. Good. Well, let's get into today's topic. We're talking generational marketing. And just as a definition, the easiest way to understand this is we all know gen alpha and gen Z and millennials and gen X, baby boomers, et cetera, et cetera. Right. So this would be taking one of those groups and saying, well, all we're going to go after are millennials because they have the buying power right now. And if we just advertise the Millennials will be all set. And when it comes to each of these different generations, what we do is we make assumptions, which we would call stereotypes. And there's cliches that come out of it that are associated with each one. Right. So we've always said in our discussions that generalities are a bad first step in marketing and focusing your marketing efforts using these assumptions. I think you just mentioned it, you know, saying, well, it's all demographic based. That can be a really bad first step and be very ineffective. So, if you're building out a campaign and aligning your marketing message based on these assumptions, Lorraine, we've talked about it being a bad first step. Do you want to discuss kind of the implications of advertising based on let's call them generational generalities.

Lorraine Kessler
Well, and I think that it's idiotic, right, to start with demographics and to be myopic tunnel vision on we're appealing to this demographic as if everyone in that demographic thinks exactly alike. That would be like saying all Christians think alike. They don't, as we know. that all gay people have the same political views. They don't. So whenever you're making these kind of huge bets, I think to call it, on demographics, I think you're making a huge mistake. So I would never start demographics. I would start with understanding the essence of the brand value, what it is you're offering that's differentiated and who cares a lot about that. What is it that they care about, right? For example, I really want the fastest, sexiest car on the planet because I want to look successful and rich and cool and hip and attractive. Well, that could appeal to many demographics. And certainly there's a money dimension. You have to say, who has the money for this luxury? The demographics come in second. I think they're always a data point and always one to look at, but not to start with. And I think anytime marketers make generalities like that, they're going to make mistakes. So certainly you need to understand the culture and the context that the consumer occupies. But I think great advertisers understand human behavior and motivations, not broad stereotypes. So I would argue that start with the psychology first. Sometimes it's called psychographics, but understand what it is, like what are the main motivations, right? We want to be emulated by others. We want to emulate others we think are successful or we want to be like, greed, feeling secure, not feeling like we're taking unnecessary risks. What are the underlying motivations? What is that customer care a lot about. And then I also advocate creating a core customer profile based on those drivers, those motivations and behaviors, not demographic. what you do is you find who's Uber motivated by these ideas, whether it be aesthetics and the beauty of something, whether it be the speed or sexiness of it or just the effectiveness of it, the feeling of security, but really who's going to be uber core focused on these ideas. And that's where we get this idea. It's not new, but it's newer to us because it happened in the digital age. That's where you get the idea of early adopters, right? Same thing.

Mark Vandegrift 
Yeah. Well, one picture I want to paint for people, my wife and I love James Taylor, right? So we go to our first James Taylor concert together.

Lorraine Kessler
Wait a minute. And that's right.

Mark Vandegrift 
That's okay, you're allowed to throw up. So we go to our first James Taylor concert together and we look around and kid you not, every generation, every demographic you can think of, you people that are still living in the 60s and potheads and whatever you call it, to very white collar folk. And it's everything in between, every age in between probably every interest in between there. So if I said, you know, we should just go after James Taylor people, you're basically going after everyone, right? At the end of the day. So now you're too broad, right? You haven't really thought through, well, what connection would James Taylor have other than everybody seems to like his music that's sitting here? There would be none of that. So it's the same way with saying, all millennials are the same. They all think the same way. Well, no, did you ever put a bunch of millennials in the room? They're all over the place. So we think of it as, you know, it's sometimes being too narrow minded, right? But in fact, it's the opposite. It's the broad problem in that you haven't really done your done and gone and done enough research, enough effort as to what your audience would care about when it comes to your differentiation and how that connects to a particular group. If you are truly trying to identify a group before you even go out. So, Lorraine explain some of the issues that a marketer might run into. If you try to just go, okay, James Taylor fans, boom, go and market. What's the problem with that too broad of an audience?

Lorraine Kessler
Well, I don't think that's a problem. I think you've already said it. You people of all demographics and all stages of life and resources and socioeconomic class at this concert. I'd like to separate message from media, right? Brand from media. James Taylor is a brand that speaks to all those demos. So why would I say, no, no, no, we only want James, we're only going to talk to millennials. We really want James Taylor to be really the big guy with millennials. One, it's never going to happen. And two, your audience, your auditorium will be partially filled. So I want to separate, and I think this is really important to do, is what you do from a media standpoint and what you do from a message standpoint. From a media standpoint, you want to have as much reach as you possibly can to as many people as you can as resources dictate. Our problem with most marketers is resources dictate strategy and most of our customers and clientele don't have the unlimited resources to do broad reach marketing, right? Because what that's saying is, I don't really know who loves James Taylor, who's 20. I don't really know who loves James Taylor, who's 30 or 40 or 50 or 80. I'm gonna reach everyone with the brand and he's the message. of this type of music, this type of vibe, this type of experience and see who bubbles up, right? Then I can look at the demos and I can learn a little bit more. Hey, we were surprised that 55 plus is our strongest demo. But if I tried to say, no, we're only going to go millennial, I'd miss that. So from a reach standpoint, you know, go for as much reach as you can afford. And that's, you have to put those two together. This is why it makes marketing difficult is you have to prioritize. It's not a spread it around game when it comes to money. It's an allocation game. But if you have unlimited resources and I do think that James Taylor being as wealthy as he is and his promoters, they have pretty good ability to reach as many people as they can reach. So now let's talk message. The message is where you narrow the focus. The message is about that brand, its particularities, why it's unique, what it stands for, and that is not going to appeal to everybody. So you've already got a filter for selection built in if you're doing your brand positioning right, because not everyone's going to care a lot about James Taylor as representative of the 70s music or focused type music that he stood for or whatever. That's not going to be their cup of tea and they're not going to be your audience. So you reach them and they don't go. But the good thing about the reach that I have is even if I hear that, I may not be James Taylor interested, but I might know that you are. And I can say to you, Hey, Mark, did you see that James Taylor is coming to Cleveland? No, really. So I think that, and I'm going to go back to our podcast we did with The Wizard of Ads, Roy Williams. He's big on this reach idea and on, and you know, not trying to make bets that you are based on nothing, but some sort of, I don't know, media obsession with demographics. I think again, you can with, from media, go as broad as you can afford and with message, stay tight to what the brand is about. That will call out the right audience.

Mark Vandegrift 
Yeah. And, you know, one of the challenges I think we run into with the generational approach to marketing is it puts the audience above the message, right? We lose sight of the difference that we stand for. And it's amazing today how many people forget their core. I mean, we saw that with Bud Light. They're probably the best example of here's our core audience and we want to grow that and that's okay to grow things. So why don't you talk a little bit about, think you always say, protect the core, right. And expand the camp or something like that. forget what you're saying is, but it's something close to that. Walk us through how to preserve that core that has got us to where we're, you know, where we are today. It's also store core customer base. And then how do we grow the camp from there?

Lorraine Kessler
Right. Yeah, I mean, the core is the people who care a lot about what you're doing or how you're doing it or what you stand for, right? Apple, for example, right? Always a great example for this. When Apple started, they were very focused on their difference as creating a beautiful, aesthetically gorgeous interface computer, one that people would want to use versus in the day, the PC was seen as a work tool only for the workplace, right? No one thought about PCs or laptops being something you'd want to not only have in your home, use all the time but phones and things, devices that were so beautiful, they were like fashion items. So who did that beauty of blended with tech? They're created an uber core, the early adopters who really kind of the creator makers is kind of what was expressed as the core. But that core is being watched and listened to by a larger ring who then look at those people and say, well, if so and so really thinks Apple's the bomb, right, the Macintosh or what have you, the iPhone, then I should want that too. So you always need to remember that there's more people listening. And that's kind of what my example was to you about the James Taylor thing. More people are listening. And we look for peer approval. We look for those we think know better, know the better restaurant. Maybe know better wine, maybe understand technology better or more hip in their choices or seem young and we want to seem young, right? Pepsi generation. And so there's always people listening, that's your next rate. And then there are people that are just totally tuned out and you know, you don't have to worry about them. They're never going to, all you have to worry about is, the total customer market the core plus that outer circle of listeners, is that big enough for me to be profitable? And if it is, and you can cultivate it, go at it.

Mark Vandegrift
Yeah, you know, we'll wrap up here, but it's interesting that it feels like some of the younger generations, okay, have broad brushed each generation. So you know, millennials calling boomers something or Gen Z calling millennials something or rolling their eyes at something that's said. And I think that's where we get into this one track mind that everybody is the same. But I would challenge anybody that thinks that walk into two different millennials homes or walk into two different Gen Z homes or baby boomer homes. You're going to just look around and immediately you'll realize, totally different consumption pattern. So If you're making a broad brush, broad strokes, you know, brush here that is going to think it's gonna cure your way of shortcutting the process for finding an audience that's going to keep you in business, it's just a bad move. So, you know, from a generational marketing standpoint, it's, I just don't even like to go there, don't even like to think about finding audience.

Lorraine Kessler
Right. I would advocate segmenting more based on attitudes and motivations. know, like the Uber house of, the person who's Uber interested in a clean house, but wants it made easy. The person who just hates cleaning, but wants it made easy. You can have these segments if you make cleaner easier, right? and you have to satisfy segment one that it's effective as well as easy. Who loves cleaning and wants to clean now. segment two, who hates cleaning that, hey, this is great. You don't need to feel guilty. It is easy as can be. And so what do you have? What's the common thing? You target your message a little slightly different here that it's easy and effective and it applies to both segments. So, you know, most brands might have four or five different clusters or segments based on those kinds of characterizations versus boomers or generations.

Mark Vandegrift 
Yeah, good. Well, let's wrap up today's episode of the Brand Shorthand Podcast. Thank you, Lorraine, for joining us and thank you to all of our wonderful listeners for tuning in. Don't forget to subscribe, subscribe, and subscribe, and like and share and tell a friend. So until next time, have an amazing day.