Stay ConnectedBrand Builder brings you the people, stories, and lessons learned from the most innovative brands in the world. Presented by SnackNation. Hosted by Sean Kelly, Jordan Cohen, and Jeff Murphy.
Similar to How I Built This, The Dave Ramsey Show, and Seeking Wisdom by Drift.
Customer Obsession is a hot topic right now. Inspired by the success of Amazon and other customer-centric organizations, brands of all shapes and sizes are realizing that putting the customer's needs first is a recipe of success.
At a surface level, being obsessed with your customer creates exceptional experiences and generates goodwill for your brand.
But when it's really working as it should, being customer-obsessed actually drives innovation, and expands your organization's capabilities.
But how does this dynamic work in practice? And what does it take to practice Customer Obsession at your company?
At SnackNation, our theme for 2019 is Customer Obsession, so we sat down with SnackNation CEO Sean Kelly to find out exactly what this idea is all about.
Here's what you'll learn in this episode:
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Brand Builder is a co-production of SnackNation and ForceBrands.
How do you go from side-hustle to CEO? This week's Brand Builder guest Kelly LeVeque can tell you - because she's done exactly that.
Kelly is a health coach and holistic nutritionist to the stars, advising celebrity clients like Jessica Alba and Jennifer Garner, and the owner & CEO of Be Well by Kelly, a full-service nutrition, wellness and lifestyle company.
But before she was running the show at BWBK, she spent years in the oncology field, working on cancer treatments. She had a stable career, but deep down she knew she could make a greater impact by focusing on prevention rather than treatment. She tells us what inspired her to change careers, plus the specific tactics she used to build her brand and set herself up for success.
As inspiring as her story is, what listeners might find even more valuable is her perspective as an influencer. Kelly has built an impressive personal brand and a massive reach, and she breaks down exactly how she built that influence and how she evaluates the brand opportunities that come her way.
In other words, if you want to work with celebrity influencers, she's going to tell you how.
Kelly is super smart, with an amazing story and great energy… and that makes for a fantastic episode.
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Brand Builder is a co-production of SnackNation and ForceBrands.
Stop me if this sounds familiar:
You're a brand new employee at a company that values teamwork and collaboration. Eager to prove yourself, you come out of the gate swinging. You do good work early on, and garner a reputation as a high contributor and team player.
This reputation results in more people from across the org asking for your assistance on all sorts of projects. You, of course, say yes (you are a team player, after all).
Before long, you feel yourself spread thin. You make a millimeter of progress on a thousand different fronts, but no significant progress on any. Your "priority" list is thirty items long. In an ironic twist, your early success has now undermined your ability to contribute at a high level.
The quality of your work goes down, while your stress level skyrockets.
It's a surefire recipe for burnout.
Luckily for us, today's Brand Builder guest has developed a solution - Essentialism.
Greg McKeown is a renowned speaker and author. His New York Times best selling book, Essentialism, is all about helping readers discover the disciplined pursuit of less - that is, helping them find their unique abilities and highest leverage activities, and realigning their lives to focus on making the highest contribution possible.
The concept of essentialism was inspired in part by McKeown's experience working in Silicon Valley. What McKeown found was that the early success of these startups was actually a double-edged sword. It presented them with an overwhelming amount of opportunity - in the form of partnerships, new markets, acquisitions, and the like - which ultimately detracted from their ability to focus on the essential activities that made them successful in the first place.
In this way, success can actually become a catalyst for failure.
The experience lit a bulb in McKeown's head, and the framework of essentialism - the disciplined pursuit of less but better - began to take shape.
This was an incredible interview, packed with tons of practical tips and engaging stories that will start you down the path of Essentialism.
Key Takeaways
Recommended Reading
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Brand Builder is a co-production of SnackNation and ForceBrands.
The first thing you notice about Watermelon Road is that it's a beautiful product.
From the pastel packaging to the vibrant strips of fruit jerky itself, Watermelon Road almost looks tailor-made for Instagram.
Turns out it's no accident - and a big reason why the product has resonated with consumers.
This week on Brand Builder we have Jamie Melzer, the brand's founder and CEO.
Watermelon Road make clean and delicious dried fruit jerky, with mouth-watering flavors like Watermelon Lemonade, Mango Margarita, and Pineapple Mojito.
Jamie is a big believer in "food as medicine" - the idea that changing what we eat and how we think about food can lead to healthier lives. She put this to the test when her husband was diagnosed with an autoimmune disease, and it was this experience that inspired her to launch Watermelon Road.
A little over a year in, Watermelon Road are accelerating into their next big growth stage.
To date, the brand has grown almost entirely organically, largely by word of mouth and press. Jamie talks about how her early investment in a strong visual and brand identity from the get go has been the key to garnering this buzz.
We loved what Jamie had to say about the future of CPG, particularly in the way new brands reach consumers. She also tells us how she's been able to fill the knowledge gap that all first time entrepreneurs have, and
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Brand Builder is a co-production of SnackNation and ForceBrands.
Wellness can sometimes be a confusing space, with dubious or contradictory claims, and even pseudo science.
Which is a shame - because focusing on health and wellbeing is one of the best things anyone can do.
This week on Brand Builder we have two people who are helping consumers and entrepreneurs navigate the sometimes confusing landscape of wellness. We're talking to Erica Huss and Zoë Sakoutis, the hosts of Highway to Well, a podcast that we are very big fans of.
To say that Erica and Zoë are wellness experts is a major understatement. They helped bring the wellness category mainstream with Blueprint, the hugely popular juice cleans brand they built and sold. Now they're giving back to the wellness community through their HTWpodcast, bringing a fresh voice to the business of being well.
Zoë and Erica bring a unique perspective because they built their own brand, they have experienced investing and mentoring, and now they're building a community with Highway to Well. In this interview they also talk about exit strategies, plus the need for brand to be platforms in an age when content is king.
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Brand Builder is a co-production of SnackNation and ForceBrands.
You know we're all about company culture on Brand Builder - because brand is culture and culture is brand.
In that vein we have a very special episode this week.
It's a conversation between two extraordinary leaders about a very specific cultural topic - one that will help you become a better leader, and build the team your business needs to level-up in 2019.
We're talking about Radical Candor.
To discuss it we've got Chelsie Lee, a culture expert and the SVP of Customer Strategy at SnackNation, speaking with SnackNation CEO Sean Kelly.
We love this conversation because it not only defines Radical Candor in a simple, usable way, but Chelsie does a great job of dispelling one of the biggest misconceptions about giving Radical Feedback… it's not license to be an asshole!
Of course, we'd be remiss if we didn't mention that the discussion here owes a lot to the ideas in Kim Scott's amazing book Radical Candor: Be a Kick-Ass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity.
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Brand Builder is a co-production of SnackNation and ForceBrands.
This week on Brand Builder. Protes, the pea-protein infused chip that's pushing the envelope when it comes to functional food.
Co-founder and CEO Krik Angacian is a self described "no-B.S. guy" - and that trait actually shows up in the brand. Protes is all about transparency. They don't claim to be anything other than what they are - a great tasting, better-for-you functional product, packed with high quality protein.
It also showed up in this interview, in the form of practical, no-B.S. tips for growing your business - like Krik's low-budget tactic to learn exactly who your customer is. He also explains us why you should listen to everyone, but why success ultimately depends upon forging your own path.
And we can't forget the amazing true story about the time Protes would've gone out of business, if not for the company-saving actions of a food scientist named Marv...
and former athletes came up with an idea that's so smart and so simple, it's kind of a shock that no one else was really doing it yet - Greek Frozen Yogurt.
Amanda and Drew seized their moment in 2011, founding the brand and becoming the first mover in the category. Today Yasso has about 30 employees and closed out 2018 with north of $80M in revenue.
We got very tactical in this interview, learning their approach to R+D, how Yasso drove growth through experiential marketing, and why they favor IRL events over digital influencers. But mostly we learned how to create something that doesn't exist yet.
They also told us an epic story about some friendly(ish) trolling from one of the biggest ice cream brands around.
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Brand Builder is a co-production of SnackNation and ForceBrands.
Welcome to the fourth and final installment of our founder's bootcamp mini series.
So far we've learned all about business law from lawyer Nick Giannuzzi, fundraising strategies from investor Andy Whitman, and organizational culture from engagement strategist Lisa Kane.
To round out our program we have Blake Cadwell, Vice President at Day One Agency.
Day One is a Creative Communications Agency with offices in New York and LA. They've done outstanding work for big name clients like Nike, YouTube, American Express, and Chipotle, and they were named the 2018 small agency of the year by the Holmes Report.
What Day One does best - and why we had to have them on this series - is find creative ways to make headlines.
Earned media matters for smaller brands. Because while you can't always compete when it comes to ad spend, you can get creative and leverage cultural trends to build real, organic buzz. And that translates to sales, distribution, and more.
We spoke to Blake about how smaller brands can drive growth through earned media, specifically by inserting themselves into consumer trends and cultural conversations. We also spoke about how brands can cultivate and engage those early adopters, and turn them into lifelong brand evangelists.
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Brand Builder is a co-production of SnackNation and ForceBrands.
Prepare to get really smart, because this week's Brand Builder is all about fueling your brain for peak performance.
Our guest is Will Nitze, the founder and CEO of IQ Bar. Based in Boston, IQ has the distinction of being the first and only "brain food bar" that leverages nutrition and neuroscience to boost everyday brain function.
Will has had cognition on the brain for a while. He first became obsessed with brain performance as an undergrad at Harvard, where he studied psychology and neuroscience, but the idea for IQ Bar didn't strike until 2017 while he was working in the software industry. After noticing his own focus and cognition flag during the workday, he started experimenting with ways to boost performance using nutrition. IQ Bar was born in his kitchen soon after.
The concept resonated immediately with consumers. A successful Kickstarter campaign saw $90,000 worth of orders... before Will and his team really had a fully dialed product.
We talked to Will about those early days of IQ, delved into the brand's current challenges, as well as the neuroscience behind the IQ formula. He also lays out why he thinks of the IQ brand as having two-layers - the surface level message, and the deeper meaning, and why that can be a powerful strategy for functional products.
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Brand Builder is a co-production of SnackNation and ForceBrands.
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