An Interview With Martita Mestey
BUILD A MOVEMENT: Great brands build what we call “Irrational Advocacy” for the cause. The “Raving Fans” at Chick-fil-A have been known to dress up like cows and camp out the night before a grand opening of a new chicken store. Many chicken stores open, but few enjoy this level of love. If you follow the first two steps, you are on your way toward your own Irrational Advocates.
As a part of our series called “5 Things You Need To Create a Successful Food or Beverage Brand”, I had the pleasure of interviewing Daniel Brian Cobb.
Daniel Brian Cobb is the CEO and Chief Strategy Officer of Daniel Brian Advertising. Dan leads branding and performance marketing campaigns for retail and financial brands, franchise chains, and health systems toward digital and social transformation.
As a marketing innovator, thought leadership expert, and social media marketer, Dan developed some of the first prime-time branded TV shows accompanied by live web chats in the 1990s. In the early 2000s, Dan’s team introduced social media apps and influencer engagement to the retail brands, including Hungry Howies and Chick-fil-A, as well as Hollywood film studios, Disney and Warner Bros.
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dive in, our readers would love to learn a bit more about you. Can you tell us a bit about your “childhood backstory”?
I love franchise marketing. Especially pizza franchise marketing, because pizza is a communal food. I grew up with a family that held a weekly ritual called, “Family Pizza Night.” It was so sacred, we missed other activities with friends to make sure we were all together to watch a movie and eat pizza together. When we started DBA as a family business, Domino’s Pizza was our first account as an agency, and we’ve had many franchise brand partnerships since that time, including Hungry Howie’s, Papa Johns, Chick-fil-A, among others. So, in a sense, the QSR and fast food industry is in our DNA and has a values-based connection that drives the agency to this very day.
Can you share with us the story of the “ah ha” moment that led to the creation of the food or beverage brand you are leading?
When Chick-fil-A charged DBA to build the local engagement marketing and national social media campaign, we were given the request, “Don’t sell the chicken. Love the people. If we love the people, the chicken will sell itself. Building a digital platform called “Center Stage,” we launched local activations at scale, including “Daddy-Daughter Date Night,” “Father-Son Football,” “Military Appreciation Day,” among other localized campaigns that was given the credit for many of the Raving Fans Chick-fil-A enjoys today.
Today, we ask ourselves, “how can we love the people” in all of our food and beverage campaigns.
Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?
We ran an ad for Tubby’s Submarines that we thought was funny, until the client didn’t. It was the Three-Cheese Submarine sandwich. We decided to go for irreverent humor. Our proposed headline was “Who cut the cheese?” The direct client and everyone thought it was funny, but the new marketing director did not. We lost the account shortly after that incident.
What are the most common mistakes you have seen people make when they start a food or beverage line? What can be done to avoid those errors?
The secret to food and beverage is scale. In a commoditized industry, if you don’t go big, you can’t make the numbers work. The most common path to scale is franchising, and that means many owners. This is not an environment for control freaks. Owners want freedom. The most common mistake of a corporate office is to try and control a group of franchise owners who joined the franchise to get freedom from control at their previous employment. The way to avoid this problem is to honor the franchise owners by giving them a voice in the marketing and a seat on the advertising advisory council. Adoption is critical, and this is the secret to a successful campaign in franchise marketing.
Let’s imagine that someone reading this interview has an idea for a product that they would like to produce. What are the first few steps that you would recommend that they take?
- Research. First, identify the pent-up demand for that product. If there is already a competitive solution that is “good enough” for the potential customer, do not proceed without extensive research or improvement on that product.
- Co-Create. Second, engage the potential customer with an opportunity to voice into the creation of the product. This customer can become your “Raving Fan.” This is how we worked with the Raving Fans and operator teams of Chick-fil-A. Co-Creation was their secret sauce behind the brand love.
- Engage Locally. The best franchise locations that perform at the highest level of profitability always engage locally, with highly motivated franchise owners or managers.
- Use Marketing Automation to perform as many of the above functions as possible. Start with a strong Digital Asset Manager that offers extended tools that incentivize use.
Many people have good ideas all the time. But some people seem to struggle in taking a good idea and translating it into an actual business. How would you encourage someone to overcome this hurdle?
Research to see if there is a market for your idea, and be open to the possibility there isn’t. Be open to the idea that the competition already exists and there is no need. IF the need is clearly evident, then focus, focus, focus, and never give up. It may take years longer than you think it will take, but stick with the vision, changing and adapting to the challenges until you figure out how to solve the problem. It’s a lot harder than you think, but it’s worth the effort.
There are many invention development consultants. Would you recommend that a person with a new idea hire such a consultant, or should they try to strike out on their own?
The cost of a consultant in the early days will potentially sap your resources. Get free advice and offer a tiny bit of equity for advisory roles, but you are not likely to have the budget for a consultant in the early days. If you are a corporation with resources, read the book, “The Innovator’s Dilemma” by Clayton Christensen. You will need to break out a small development team, and don’t over-resource the team. Lack is the driver of innovation.
What are your thoughts about bootstrapping vs looking for venture capital? What is the best way to decide if you should do either one?
You have to bootstrap for the first couple years. Venture capital isn’t interested until you have six figures of revenue. Once you are sustainable, you may not even want the capital. Raising capital is a full time job, and very hard work for gamblers. If successful, you will give up your time into the effort of negotiations and selling yourself. Rather spend your time building your business, and start small. When venture capital comes to you, and you don’t really need the money as much, you will set the terms and negotiations will be easy.
Can you share thoughts from your experience about how to file a patent, how to source good raw ingredients, how to source a good manufacturer, and how to find a retailer or distributor?
My first patent took almost a decade. Be patient. Don’t accept the first rejection. The nuance and detail of your application is very important, so make sure you look for the uniqueness of your idea when faced with competitive concepts. Sourcing a good manufacturer and retailer is simply a matter of searching wide and narrowing by your “feeling” of trust. That’s a gift you will gain over time, but trust is the only foundation of a great business supplier or partnership.
What are your “5 Things You Need To Create a Successful Food or Beverage Brand” and why?
1. START WITH WHY: That’s not just a great book title. That’s a philosophy that built some of the world’s best food and beverage brands that we’ve worked with, including Chick-Fil-A, Coca-Cola, Papa Johns and Dominio’s Pizza, just to name a few. Purpose-driven brands eat money-driven brands for breakfast, lunch and dinner. If you don’t love what you do with an obsession, don’t do it.
2. LIVE YOUR VALUES: Once you have determined your “Why,” establish your “Way”. Your values should never be generic. Differentiate on what you will do, and more importantly, what you will not do. Like Steve Jobs would often say to his team, “What did we say ‘no’ to today?” Marketing is about promoting your values, but sales is a result of living them.
3. BUILD A MOVEMENT: Great brands build what we call “Irrational Advocacy” for the cause. The “Raving Fans” at Chick-fil-A have been known to dress up like cows and camp out the night before a grand opening of a new chicken store. Many chicken stores open, but few enjoy this level of love. If you follow the first two steps, you are on your way toward your own Irrational Advocates.
4. DISRUPT YOUR CATEGORY: Category creators outperform the market. We didn’t advise Hungry Howie’s to win on discounts against the $5 Hot-N-Ready. Instead, we worked with their flavored crust and a $15 “flavor of the month” deal. Customers celebrated with us at a 3X higher ticket average on the offer. Chick-fil-A didn’t model after the fast food industry. They fold their toilet paper because they modeled after the hospitality industry.
5. GO LOCAL OR GO HOME: The top natioinal franchise brands are not built nationally. We’ve studied top performing stores in every franchise category, and we always get the same answer. The winners, who represent up to 3X performance metrics are always involved in their local schools, generously providing sponorships with local causes and team sports. Don’t wast local ad funds on print. Invest in geo-fenced HyperLocal Digital campaigns that support local customer loyalty programs and events that build emotional connections like the Spirit Days, Daddy-Daughter Date Nights and Thanksgiving Day Parades. Down stores never get it.
Can you share your ideas about how to create a product that people really love and are ‘crazy about’?
Ask your customer what they want. Then ask why they want it. Then, produce an unexpected solution that answers the why? The customer doesn’t even know what they want, but they know why they want it. Don’t look to customers for innovation. That’s your job. Look to them for unmet needs and unfulfilled passions. Help they fulfill desires that nobody else is willing to explore.
Ok. We are nearly done. Here are our final questions. How have you used your success to make the world a better place?
Under our ageny mission of “Better Brands for a Better Human Condition,” DBA has measured more than ROI in dollars. We measure ROI in human life improved. Currently, we have improved the lives of more than 12 million people through programs with our franchise partners who fed needy children lunches at Papa Johns during COVID, brought families together at Chick-fil-A for Daddy-Daughter Date Nights and Father-Son Football outings. SVS Vision was able to serve families with “Kids See Free,” and Hungry Howie’s provided life saving diagnosis for women to help them avoid cancer via the “Love, Hope & Pizza” campaing, where the box was printed pink to raise money for the National Breast Cancer Foundation in the month of October.
You are an inspiration to a great many people. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger.
We are already inspiring a movement for brands to self actualize as agents for culture change. Our vision at DBA is to build “Branded movements to improve a billion lives.” We are just getting started with 12,491,825 and counting…
- 5 Critically ill children granted a life improving wish from Make-A-Wish, sponsored by DBA staff and our clients.
- 67 Lives saved from the Love, Hope & Pizza campaign, signified by the pink pizza box. Effective breast cancer treatment are estimated from 1,500 patients screened for breast cancer at the cost of Hungry Howie’s.
- 556 Lives saved from drunk driving — Worked with the Office of Highway Safety Patrol to reduce drunk driving fatalities in Michigan by -7.9% from 11.4 per 100,000 pop. In 2009 to 10. Per 100,000 pop. In 2013. That’s 139 lives saved per year over four years.
- 12 Lives saved by the DBA Dream House, built and furnished with beds and graphic design computers for homeless orphans in India.
- 1,258 People have clean water from the DBA Dream Well dedicated in Ghana, Africa.
- 44,198 Patients treated in foreign aid programs to South America with Missions.Me, made possible by donated medical supplies from various pharmaceutical brands.
- 545,729 Total people received humanitarian aid, including Sketchers’ “Bobs” shoes as well as food distribution, home builds and clean water filtration systems, in-part made possible by a sponsorship from Coca-Cola.
- 1 Million Lives improved by daddy daughter dates and mommy-son dates, sponsored by Chick-fil-A. A Google or Facebook search shows +600K happy photos.
- 1 Million Estimated hungry people fed following the Meijer Simply Give brand refresh by DBA. The $3.5 million in donations raised set the record for food pantries throughout the Midwest, making it the most successful campaign in the program’s history.
- 9.9 Million people living in Michigan will save a billion gallons of water and be coal free by 2040 following a Consumers Energy campaign promise developed with DBA in 2018. Additionally, 7,000 of the lowest income households will be able to get help through the Consumers Affordable Resource for Energy (CARE) Program.
- Last, but far from least, we recognize the untold health system partners saving countless lives daily at the hospitals and medical centers we are privileged to serve.
Special thanks to all of the Better Brands for a Better Human Condition
Thank you for these fantastic insights. We greatly appreciate the time you spent on this.
Daniel Brian Cobb On 5 Things You Need To Create a Successful Food or Beverage Brand was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.