Creating Brand Personality & Consumer Trust

Creating Brand Personality & Consumer Trust Speaker 2: Hello, everyone, and welcome back to the Better Advertising with BTR Media podcast. Today, I am incredibly excited to have one of my, can we say friends? Are we friends now? Speaker 1: Friends. We are friends. Speaker 2: We are friends. Domenic DiSiena. So Dom, you have worked at Nestle for quite some time. You've worked at Newell Brands. You've worked at L'Oreal. Can you tell us a little bit about what your role is like now as VP of e-commerce? Speaker 1: Sure, yeah. It has evolved quite a bit over the last several years. I hit my six-year mark this week, my sixth birthday. I look a little older, I guess, for my age. It's funny, if I think back six years ago and what the role that I signed on for was and how it was defined, it has evolved unbelievably. It was initially about establishing a brand presence, getting the sales model in a good spot, identifying resources that are needed, investments, and just figuring it all out. And now fast forward six years later and it's, all right, we've still got opportunities for sustainable growth, but the market's changed, right? The people have changed, the consumers changed. And so it very much has gone from blocking and tackling to Hey, how do we strategically position ourselves to take advantage of the next three months? Because three months after that, it's going to change again, right? This digital landscape, it changes with the wind. And then, oh, by the way, now we've got these macroeconomic uncertainties to navigate. And we've got a consumer base that is If I, you know, cares about their health, right, given the brands that we sell, but they're also price sensitive. And so, you know, my job now is really been how do we redefine this strategy and educate our consumers in a different way and speak to them in a different way. Speaker 2: It's a lot more reactive, I feel like. And even coming from similar, I remember my first two months of running the agency when COVID hit. And I'm pretty sure we lost 10% to 15% of our brands within three days because there was just this ultimate panic, the world shutting down, inventory issues, supply chain issues, no one's going to purchase anymore, we can't afford an agency. And I feel like ever since that timeframe, my role has been similar. There's no playbook for anything. It's like solving these problems. And we're in the same position now, like you said, on the economic side of things with, okay, we have no idea how much goods are going to cost. All of these different factors that are playing, it's like you have to just be incredibly reactive and good at solving problems on the fly to be successful. Speaker 1: Absolutely. I'll tell you what, I'm just happy I don't sell eggs because that seems to be like the pain point of America right now. Speaker 2: Absolutely. That is definitely one of my problems. I have a burrito every single morning, three eggs, bacon, some green onions, and I can tell you it's definitely taking a hit. I've had to re-look at my finances. Speaker 1: Yeah, you don't have to take out a loan if you're going to keep eating it. Speaker 2: So six years ago, you kind of mentioned the blocking and tackling, and I feel like the playbook was just, you know, let's get up and running and try to build some systems. Nowadays, it's a lot of change. How else have things like from a very specific actionable end, what does the day-to-day look like? Speaker 1: Yeah, so that's a great question. You know, I think from a day-to-day standpoint, What my job is really to do is to make sure that my team has the right resources and they're enabled in an appropriate way. And so a couple of things. One, our cross-functional relationships become really, really important. And we spend quite a bit of time focusing on that, right? We sell a bunch of brands, but brand building, our own brand, our identity is so, so important. And we spend a lot of time on that. We've put a lot of effort into making sure that the organization wants to get behind e-commerce in the right way with the right investments. And then you've got your normal stuff, managing sales, managing budgets, making sure the ad placements are what we want them to be. But when you kind of boil all that stuff away, those are table stakes, right? That's what you're doing. What we're really trying to do on literally a daily basis, is account for, how do we, how do we account for capture consumers time, right? Because that's the most, to me, that's the most critical and valuable really to them and to us commodity, which is their time. There's literally, I think, We have 10, 15 million data points a day that were served on mobile or on our laptops. And it's our job to figure out how to melt all that noise away, right? And really make sure that our message is shining through. But in order to do that, you've got to have a compelling message to begin with. So keeping it dynamic takes a lot of work and it's a daily effort to say, okay, this is how we're positioning ourselves today. How are we going to do it tomorrow? What do we need to do it differently the next day? Trend spotting is a big deal. What's happening in the marketplace so that we can make sure that we are positioned appropriately to win? Speaker 2: Which is incredibly difficult because from everything I've seen and I do think a lot of it's driven from the younger generation and we could probably tie a lot back into just attention spans in general, but trends change incredibly quick. And I think you have to walk a fine line. You have a bunch of individual brands with individual brand identities. You have a very large pool with a lot of crossover in your general audience. You drive the authority of Nestle Health Science as a whole and make sure that you're capturing that across the audience while still allowing for each segmented brand to have their own personal identity, their own culture, and their own segment or niche audience to target from a trend perspective. That seems incredibly difficult. Speaker 1: It can be challenging. It can be challenging for sure. Our brands stretch, as you said, not only multiple categories, subcategories, but here's the benefit. They're transversal, right? And so when you think about something like women's health, We've got a lot of options for our consumers, right? Everything from Garden of Life and our probiotics, right, to vital proteins and our collagen. And by the way, I'm just rattling off things that I take and I'm not aware of. But it's a really important Platform for us, you know, GLP one is another one, right? So it's about identifying or identifying your complexities, right? And the complexities of the marketplace and trying to simplify the complex, right? And that's, you know, kind of a mantra of mine is how do we simplify the complex and make it Easy for the consumer to understand what it is that we're offering, what solutions we're offering. Sometimes you don't even know, the consumer might not even know exactly what they're looking for, right? And so it's an exercise in just trying to eliminate noise and trying to focus, pinpoint focus on the specific benefits, solutions, and honestly diversification of the items, the products that we sell. Speaker 2: I think diversification is a fantastic point. I was giving a webinar with Amazon the other day and we used the example of a mason jar. Someone brought it up and thought it was easy and they were like, look, the keywords are mason jar. And I was like, well, Not necessarily. If you think of a mason jar, you could sell it to an audience that's looking to can. Maybe they want to can vegetables and they care about that. Or you could sell a mason jar to an audience that's looking to have a barn wedding. Or you can sell it to an audience who just wants it for their general house decor and that's what they want to drink out of. There's so many unique ways to position yourself. How do you, as a whole, allow the brands to find that and lean into that and build their own identity without diluting? Because you're all having to build similar operations and similar systems to flow into an organization of your size. How do you allow for that creativity and that uniqueness across each brand? Speaker 1: Yeah, so our brand teams are obviously charged with creating, or at least You know, defining what they want the brand to be and what we've got the benefit of is, is, you know, reaching millions and millions of consumers. In one shot, right? So, so what we do is work very, very closely with our brand counterparts. Okay, how do we want this brand to look and feel and show up? Right? And it's, you know, we don't always get it right, right? Sometimes it's trial and error. There are brands that we've got that are tried and true and you don't want to deviate from the foundation that you've built or those brands have built. It becomes more complicated with a new item and some innovation launches, maybe less complicated. Actually, I won't say that. It's a different type of complication to keep a brand message consistent while trying new things. And so that's why, you know, I call it dynamic content. I'm not the only one, but I like to, I throw that around internally quite a bit because I believe content specifically needs to be dynamic. It should be changing every three months. Do something different, try something different, and then use the resources that you've got to tell you if it's working or not. You know, AI, Gen AI, right? Big deal these days. It gives us the opportunity to test things faster. I love the term fail fast, but you can literally fail faster and then pivot. And if you go back even 10 years, maybe you want to try something. It took you six months to get the creative together and the look and feel of it. And if it didn't work, now you've got another six to 12 months to try and fix it. Whereas now you can kind of fix it on the fly. Speaker 2: Absolutely. I think that's one of the biggest advantages of e-commerce. If you're in-store, your opportunity to change the packaging, it's not that simple. On e-commerce, you have a lot of opportunity to adjust your content and your creative to align with that new consumer without actually changing the core product. It's more of the messaging, which can flow from advertising to positioning to just digital shelf in general. I think we've talked about some of the negatives or the difficulties with having so many sub-brands, but I think there's a really big positive that I've seen you all do really well. You guys have the opportunity to offer a product to almost any life cycle. We have Garden of Life prenatals. And then as someone matures, we can, you know, hand them probiotics. As they start getting into weightlifting, we have protein. If they start getting into running, they can move over to noon hydration and things like that. How do you use that to your advantage when you have access to so many data points to move someone from brand to brand and kind of drive that, again, value? Speaker 1: Yeah, so that's a great point. We literally have products to take you from birth To into well into your 80s or 90s. And so there's a couple of ways we do it. We have a very very specific focus on loyalty and retention. It is it is so important not just for the sale, right? but you you're building trust a certain level of trust with the consumer and so when you when when you now you're that that mom is Is has moved past prenatals, right? They're taking, you know regular every day maybe a multivitamin or a probiotic but it's also time for you know, their their kid to Take, yeah, hey, the protein shake to get them more protein, right? You know, with our Orgain brand as an example, right? You've built that trust. So now when we speak to that consumer, whether it be through an ad, through an email, whatever it might be, They're going to immediately give us more consideration than a brand they haven't tried, than a brand they haven't heard of. And so that allows us to integrate into their lifestyle in a very specific way, in a very personal way. And that carries a lot of weight in the decision-making process of that consumer for whatever it is that they might buy that we offer. Speaker 2: I think evangelism plays a much larger role in e-commerce and advertising than I think brands. I realize because it's not trackable. I mean, from an agency perspective, I would say evangelism has probably been one of our number one growth drivers, whether it's as simple as someone sharing a LinkedIn video I did and saying, hey, this is great. I love this or word of mouth or referral. But you think about on the brand side, I get sent a lot of, you know, PR packages from different brands who we work with or so-and-so. The ones that I go and post on my Instagram story are the ones that care. They have an incredible unboxing experience. And to your point, When a mother trusts the prenatals or the daily supplements, They go and talk about it. They send it to their friends. They send it to their family and then that evangelism spreads and that's how you really build a brand in my opinion, but it's never perfectly trackable and I think that's the issue. You can't go to a leadership meeting and be like, everyone loves us. I mean, you can justify it with loyalty metrics and things like that, but it has a much greater impact and you all are able to do that with all of your brands. I feel like you can really speak to the consumer in that way and you have access to data that no one else does, which in itself is incredibly powerful. Speaker 1: Yeah, for sure. And, you know, it really does lend itself, the platforms that we operate on lend themselves extremely well to building and, you know, we talked about brand identities, right? It gives it a personality, right? You can't, it's very, maybe I shouldn't say you can't, it's probably really, it's really, really difficult to create a personality for your brand by having a box or a bottle on a shelf. That doesn't really do it. And no disrespect to my brick-and-mortar friends. They're fantastic, right? But we can make it personal. We can make it fun. We have the avenues that enable us to connect with consumers in different ways. You might be looking for something that's really serious for your health. Doesn't mean we can't make you smile while you do it, right? And feel good about the product that you're about to take. Because we make, I mean, we make top-notch products. We really do. Top-notch ingredients. We're tapping into someone's life in such a personal way, that is their health, right? Well, health comes in many different forms, right? Mental health is a very important aspect of that as well. So make the consumer not only feel good about the product that they're going to take, but mentally they're feeling well already because they've got a connection with the brand. Speaker 2: Absolutely. We've talked lightly about how the brands play nicely together and you mentioned brick and mortar quickly. So diving into that, how do you manage so many platforms? I mean, even just on the e-commerce side alone, leaving brick and mortar out, it's a lot to keep up with and it's a lot to balance and each platform has their own identity as well and different audiences. How do you manage all of that? Speaker 1: Yeah, that's a great question. You know, for me, it's all about Understanding what's critical. What are the critical aspects of each platform? How do the brands play, you know, meaning, you know, is Amazon more important for, you know, any given brand versus a walmart.com or versus our D2C or, you know, whatever it might be. But you can't get too Drag down by some of the noise, right? So the way I think about it is if you're going to do the laundry, right? And you've got a basket full of clothes and you drop a sock as you're walking down the hallway, what do you do? Stop and pick up the sock, right? Well, it's no different than at work, right? It's, hey, we're managing all these platforms where something's bound to drop. Just pick up the sock. Pick up the sock and keep moving. As long as you've got your goals in focus and you have clearly defined what it is that you want to go do, you can drop a sock and you can pick it up. It'll be just fine. Speaker 2: What you're saying is don't drop the sock, set down the basket, look at your dog, realize he needs food, go get distracted, go get food, and then forget to ever come back to the sock. Pretty much is what I'm hearing. That is incredibly important because I think that also gets into like shiny object syndrome of the space that we're in. There's a lot of changes. There's a lot of adjustments. So we're pushing this narrative of fail fast into test and test and that you have to have that mentality to be successful. But on the flip side, you also have to be able to Learn fast and focus on that end goal. Focus on even though you're going to pick up the sock, you're still going to do the laundry. Speaker 1: Yeah. Speaker 2: And it's having that end goal in mind. Speaker 1: Yes. And it's keeping that focus. Right. You've you've you there's stuff happens. Right. And I guess that's kind of the point. Stuff is going to happen. Particularly when you're managing multi-platform businesses, over a billion dollars in sales, stuff happens, right? But it doesn't matter if it's a billion dollars or a million dollars. Know what it is that you're trying to accomplish and keep your eye on the ball. It's so simple, but it can become really, really difficult when you've got so much going on and the pace is, As it is here in the e-commerce spaces, anybody in the space knows it, it is fast. It takes some discipline, of course, and everybody works differently. But for me, if I can make sure that I'm staying focused on the task at hand or on the bigger picture, it certainly helps to eliminate a lot of the noise. Speaker 2: In the last 12 months, what have you been the most excited to dive into and to work on in your role? Speaker 1: Um, I was really pumped about, uh, for our vital proteins brand. We, we conceptualize pretty quickly, um, a, uh, colostrum capsule. Uh, so late, I guess it was late summer. It was like, cause this happened quickly. Colostrum, um, for anybody that's taken a look at that category, particularly on Amazon, it is fire right now. I mean, it is, it's crazy. And so, I approached our brand lead and she and I had a chat and we're like, we can do this. Like this is not, it's not something that we should have a long path to launch. And we were able to work internally and somehow, some way we made this happen. And by December, right from August to December, somehow we had a Vital Proteins colostrum capsule live and selling on Amazon. And it was so much fun to be a part of. Oh, yeah. It was nuts. It was nuts. Speaker 2: For those who aren't familiar with this category, I believe it's also so difficult to enter because there's a really big issue with the amount of supply available. You can only source from a certain amount of farmers, dairy farmers, I believe. And it's very limited. So it's not easy to just like no one can go in and just me to PL this product. So that's incredible. I mean that timing. Speaker 1: You're absolutely right. And so what we have the benefit of being Nestle and having this scale of brands that we've got. Some of our other brands, believe it or not, had colostrum offerings. And so what we were able to do is kind of barter some of the raw materials that are required for this and make sure that it was top-notch quality, just as you would expect for vital proteins. And we, you know, when you think about doing something like this really quickly, right, you're going to have obstacles. And if you can't go around the obstacle and you can't go over the obstacle, You go through the obstacle. And we had to go through the obstacles a couple of times. But ultimately, we got there in four months. Four months from inception to launch. Really challenging. And I give my friends on the Vital Protein brand and our friends in supply chain and all like The utmost respect and admiration for the stuff that they had to go and do and they got it done. Speaker 2: That's amazing. I'm going to kind of highlight a few other examples in the industry of this. Because I think that's one of the biggest problems with large companies right now is they move too slow. We can see it almost across the board. But then you have brands like Liquid Death and Sean Reilly and Dude Wipes and even Elf Cosmetics, another straight growth quarter. The reason those brands, I think, have been able to compete with the OGs in the space, the traditional baby wipes companies, the L'Oreal's of the space, is they innovate so quick. And that's the exact example you gave. I mean, Colostrum's been absolutely insane on Amazon. I believe it started on TikTok as kind of this like miracle solution that went viral. You could immediately see the search trends on Amazon growing and there was not enough supply for the demand in the category. You were able to move on that so incredibly quick at the same pace as what we're seeing, the Elf Cosmetics and the Dude Wipes do. But you guys have, I would say, a little bit more of advantage because you can source the connections. Financially, if you can make a use case for it, I think you're probably in a little bit safer of a position. That's huge. We've seen those disruptor brands take up share from large brands for the last year or two years because they've leaned into the speed and efficiency of e-commerce. They can react to the market so much quicker. So for you all to be able to take that approach is incredible. And I think that is how you continue to succeed in the future. Speaker 1: A thousand percent. I mean, the large companies like Nestle, It does. It takes a long time to get things done. But we were very purposeful in this example of saying, We need to move at the speed in which the market demands. We can't allow, no egos, no, hey, let's get this done, right? And it was a fantastic experience. It was a lot of fun, I gotta tell you. Speaker 2: We need to move at the speed the market demands. That's like one of those little mic drop moments where you're like, that's gonna be the title of the podcast. That's the head of the LinkedIn. And that's exactly it. I mean, there's a level of risk there, of course, and I think that is what most people are trying to avoid. But I think if anything, the industry is relatively more risk tolerant nowadays. I think, you know, social keeps everyone accountable. You release a bad product, you run a bad ad, you're going to go viral for a few days and everyone's going to roast you. But if you handle it well and have the accountability to move on, then it puts you in a good position. I think of big brands can lean into that of like, look, you're not going to do everything perfectly. We've all seen the terrible PR campaigns, but if you handle it well, it's going to drive so much more authenticity in the space. Speaker 1: Yeah. Don't overthink it, right? I mean, when you overthink things, and I know it's easier said than done, right? You certainly have to make the business case for it. And there's an operating model you work at. But when you over overthink things, that's when you become tense and you maybe you start to feel like you're forcing something or you're deviating from the whole point of what it is that purpose of the brand, what you're trying to convey to the consumer. And moving so quickly, you know, what it really ended up doing is making us be just organically reactive, like, hey, Let's go by gut. Here's the financials, here's what we think, but here's how, when it comes to the consumer, we think it should feel this way. It was a fun project and we made it the launch fund and I think it's showing up that way now in the market. Speaker 2: Absolutely. And I think it goes back to, again, like the loyalty aspect of you served a need that is obvious in the market. You're probably bringing in a lot of new customers who are like, oh, wow, that is really innovative. Like this is a brand that I know of already and now they're producing a product specific for my needs after I saw my TikTok. Like that's huge. And like I said, it's kind of the authenticity I think is going to go much, much further with the younger generations than maybe the older generations who were a little bit more conservative. They wanted the same ingredients every single day, day in, day out. I think the younger generation is a little bit more loyal to that vibe. Speaker 1: I would agree. I would agree a thousand percent. The great thing is that for the older generation, those products don't go away. They're there. They're still there. Speaker 2: They're in stores. You can go buy it in Walmart. Absolutely. Well, this has been absolutely incredible. I've loved having you on and diving into all of the complexities of your day-to-day. I will say I have no idea how you manage it all. I think I just manage Amazon advertising in a very small portion and most days that's enough for me. So incredible hearing your insight. Is there anything else that you'd like to say or add from this discussion? Speaker 1: No, listen, it's been fantastic catching up with you. I appreciate you having me on. What a fantastic forum to get to speak with you and keep killing it. I love seeing what you're doing in the market and you're touching a lot of brands. I get a lot of folks that reach out and say, wow, Destiny's awesome. You're killing it. I'll leave it at that. Speaker 2: Thank you. Speaker 1: You're killing it. Keep going. Speaker 2: Well, listen, you just crushed your first podcast appearance with me, so you better be careful or we're going to go the Gabby Fillion route and you're going to be brought on stage with the three of us. You're going to have no idea and I'm just going to sign you up. Speaker 1: I'll be a regular. I don't mind. Anytime I'd be happy to. Speaker 2: Amazing. Well, thank you so much and have a fantastic rest of your week. Speaker 1: Thank you, Destiny. You as well.