The Empire Builders Podcast Stephen Semple and David Young

Even if you make an awesome product, if you don't help your perfect customer identify with your brand, it won't sell.



Dave Young:



Welcome to the Empire Builders Podcast, teaching business owners the not so secret techniques that took famous businesses from mom-and-pop to major brands. Stephen Semple is a marketing consultant, story collector, and storyteller. I'm Stephen's sidekick and business partner, Dave Young. Before we get into today's episode, a word from our sponsor, which is, well, it's us, but we're highlighting ads we've written and produced for our clients, so here's one of those.



[Tapper's Jewelry Ad]







Dave Young:



Welcome to the Empire Builders Podcast. Dave Young here, along with Stephen Semple, and we talk about brands, building big brands, big, exciting, profitable brands, and yet, during the countdown, Stephen didn't mention which brand we're going to be talking about, but he did mention a category. Somebody built an empire so big that their product actually created the category of light beer.



Stephen Semple:



Yes, and the reason why I have to look at it that way is it's a big company that made it happen, but it's still a pretty interesting story, because light beer, look, it's a huge category in the beer business, and it was not always that way. In fact, when light beer was first launched, it was a huge failure. It bombed, and it was Miller that created the first success in this space and really created this as a category. At its peak in 1977, Miller Lite was the number two beer in America.



Dave Young:



We've talked about Miller Lite and their campaign, and they had the world by the tail with Miller Lite.



Stephen Semple:



They really did, yeah.



Dave Young:



Then somebody talked him into changing the campaign.



Stephen Semple:



Yeah. Yep.



Dave Young:



Because it was at their peak, when it was the Less Filling, Tastes Great.



Stephen Semple:



Yes. That's what made it, and we're going to talk about how that came about, because it's a really interesting story. Because calorie-reduced beer was introduced in the market in New York by Rheingold Brewery as Gablister's Diet Beer.



Dave Young:



Yum.



Stephen Semple:



Sorry. Gablinger's Diet. It was introduced as a diet beer, and it was made using a process developed by chemist Herscher Gablinger of Basel, Switzerland, so it's this Swiss chemist created the process. The version used by Rheingold was developed by Joseph Owades. Now, Joseph then offered the recipe to Peter Hand Brewery, which created Meister Brau Light, so the second one that came out was Meister Brau Light. Now Peter Hand Brewery got into financial trouble in 1972 and sold several of their labels to Miller, and Miller relaunched the light beer as Lite Beer from Miller, not Miller Lite at first, it was Lite Beer from Miller, and Lite being L-I-T-E. It didn't do well. In fact, it was a dud. Around the same time, another brewery was struggling with a light calorie-reduced beer, and the category was simply not working. The problem was the ads were aimed at dieters.



Dave Young:



This was the era of Tab soft drink. There were diet things. Everything was diet, diet. My guess is they steered the diet industry in a different direction.



Stephen Semple:



The whole diet thing, just for the beer category, didn't work, but here's when things get strange. When they were doing market research on it, because Miller really believed there was an opportunity here, and when they did market research on it, it showed that 90% of Miller drinkers had tried the light beer once, they had tried it. They didn't say they disliked it, but they didn't buy it again. On one hand, you can go, "Well, the advertising's working, the promotion's working, our drinkers are trying it. They're not saying they dislike it, but they're not buying it again." Here's basically where they landed. The Miller beer drinker at that time was really described as the two-fisted drinker,

David McConnell ditched his door to door book selling gig to pursue the bribe that he we giving for attention.



Dave Young:



Welcome to the Empire Builders podcast, teaching business owners the Not-So-secret techniques that took famous businesses from mom and pop to major brands. Stephen Semple is a marketing consultant, story collector, and storyteller. I'm Stephen's sidekick and business partner Dave Young. Before we get into today's episode, a word from our sponsor, which is, well, it's us, but we're highlighting ads we've written and produced for our clients. So here's one of those.



[Travis Crawford HVAC Ad]







Stephen Semple:



Ding dong. What makes you think of when the doorbell rings, what ad? Ding dong.



Dave Young:



Ding dong. Well, I was expecting a topic, first of all.



Stephen Semple:



Okay, well work with me here. What do you recall?



Dave Young:



Shoot, in the last five years, just chasing people away from my front porch.



Stephen Semple:



Oh, okay.



Dave Young:



Avon calling.



Stephen Semple:



There you go. Avon calling. That's who we're going to talk about.



Dave Young:



Yeah, I don't think they're doing that anymore.



Stephen Semple:



No, they aren't. But that recall is really, really interesting from the fact that you were able to remember those ads. Because those ads have not run, they stopped running in the late sixties. We were like...



Dave Young:



Oh my gosh.



Stephen Semple:



We were really young when those ads stopped, and yet you were still able to recall it.



Dave Young:



And I'm probably recalling it as a persistent meme in our culture that Avon calling, it became, not, it was woven into probably movies and TV and mass culture, so that for the next decade or decade and a half, it was still echoing, right?



Stephen Semple:



Correct.



Dave Young:



Yeah. Yeah. Wow.



Stephen Semple:



So think about how powerful that was. We're going to talk about Origin, a little bit about Avon.



Dave Young:



I think that's a fascinating phenomenon. I'm anxious to hear the Avon story. It reminds me of cigarette jingles as well that ended when they banned cigarette advertising in the mid-seventies. Yet for the next 20, 30 years, I mean, anybody that was alive then could still tell you Winston tastes good like a cigarette should, right? There's so many of those. So yeah, they just become a part of us.



Stephen Semple:



And they're powerful enough that they're, as you said, spoofing them on Simpsons and things along that lines. But back to Avon. So Avon's a really old company. It was founded in 1886 by David McConnell, and today, it's still around today. They do 9 billion in sales, they have 23,000 employees. There's over 6 million representatives of Avon, and it's still privately held by Natura Holdings out of Brazil. And they're giving you an idea, there are four Avon lipsticks sold every second.



Dave Young:



Dang, that's a lot of lipstick.



Stephen Semple:



Boom four, boom four, boom four. Isn't that incredible? Isn't that amazing? Avon's founder, David McConnell, started in sales back in the 1880s as a door to door book salesman. And so we've heard this happen with other businesses because he then used a popular gimmick. Remember Wrigley's? Remember how Wrigley's didn't start by selling gum? The gum was the free giveaway? McConnell offered a free gift in exchange for a moment of the customer's time. So it was a gift with appointment. And guess what he gave away? Perfume.



Dave Young:



Oh, okay.



Stephen Semple:



Most of the customers McConnell dealt with were housewives who were home in the afternoon hours while their husband was away at work. And so he decided to work with a local pharmacy to create a fragrance that he could give away, little quantities for anybody who was willing to listen to the book pitch. But a funny thing happened, they were way more interested in the perfume than the books. So just like Wrigley,

Do not confuse Strategy with Best Practices. Creating a great strategy will allow you to stand out, not fit in.



Dave Young:



Welcome to The Empire Builders Podcast, teaching business owners the not-so-secret techniques that took famous businesses from mom and pop to major brands. Stephen Semple is a marketing consultant, story collector, and storyteller. I'm Stephen's sidekick and business partner, Dave Young. Before we get into today's episode, a word from our sponsor, which is, well it's us. But we're highlighting ads we've written and produced for our clients. Here's one of those.



[Colair Cooling & Heating Ad]







Dave Young:



Welcome back to The Empire Builders Podcast. Dave Young here, with Stephen Semple. The topic you whispered in my ear today is not a brand name, it's not a service, it's not an invention. My favorite word to describe this is President Bush, the young one, the W.



Stephen Semple:



Okay.



Dave Young:



He called it strategery.



Stephen Semple:



Strategery.



Dave Young:



You want to talk about strategy today.



Stephen Semple:



I do.



Dave Young:



Or strategery.



Stephen Semple:



Strategery. Well if you think about it, this whole podcast, every episode is really about looking at a business and strategically, what did it do that made itself really successful. I get a bit frustrated because, a lot of times, businesses don't invest in strategy. They don't want to have a strategic session and invest in that. We all know that strategy ends up becoming really important. Then there's lots of things that are being paraded around as strategy, that frankly, aren't strategy, they're other things.



What I wanted to do is talk a little bit about what strategy is, isn't, and how you create it, and why it's important. Basically, I think it distills down to this. When people sit around in a group and go, "Hey, let's think about this thing that we can then parade out to people in an industry, we have this idea." That's not strategy. That's best practices.



Dave Young:



Okay, yeah.



Stephen Semple:



They're best practices because they're looking at, "Oh, here's the best things that have gone on in the industry." Those are best practices. If it's something that's really common, it's a tactic. It's not a strategy because a strategy can't be repurposed.



What a strategy is, is a business looks at its problem, "I've got this problem. I have these assets that I can leverage. Here's a creative way in which I can use these assets to solve this problem." Now what often ends up happening is it solves the problem so well, that they then systematize the solution, and now it becomes a best practice. Then that best practice gets so adopted in the industry, it becomes a common tactic that everyone does. That's what happens.



But for it to be a strategy, it can really only be used in that situation.



Dave Young:



Okay. Can you give me some examples?



Stephen Semple:



Great examples. M.M. LaFleur. They invented this whole idea of mailing out clothing to people on this subscription basis, where they then try it on and send it back. They didn't start off going, "Hey, let's do this." They had a problem. They had clothing and they couldn't find a place to store it. But because they had been doing these private fittings, they had an asset. The asset was, "We have the contact information of all these customers, along with their sizes, and their preferences. We can actually send clothing out to them that we think they would like." They did it to solve a problem, and in the process, made more sales in a month than they had done in the entire history of the company. They then went, "Huh, let's turn this into a thing. Let's systemize it and make it actually our business.?"



Dave Young:



Yeah. I looked it up, it's episode 54.



Stephen Semple:



Thank you. That was looking at their problem, looking at these unleveraged assets, and solving it in a way in which it had not been solv

What do you d



What do you drink when water is not good for you and your only other option is alcohol? Well, you rename root tea to root beer.



Dave Young:



Welcome to the Empire Builders Podcast, teaching business owners the not-so-secret techniques that took famous businesses from mom and pop to major brands. Stephen Semple is a marketing consultant, story collector, and storyteller. I'm Stephen's sidekick and business partner, Dave Young. Before we get into today's episode, a word from our sponsor, which is, well, it's us. But we're highlighting ads we've written and produced for our clients, so here's one of those.



[Tapper's Jewelers Ad]







Dave Young:



Welcome to the Empire Builders podcast, Dave Young here along with Stephen Semple, and we are sharing stories about empires, business empires, brands that were built and grew really big, and figuring out what they did to make them grow really big. And Stephen just mentioned today's topic, whispered it in my ear as the recorder was counting down, and you said that I probably haven't seen this in a while. But I feel like it's maybe still around, but it's Hires Root Beer.



Stephen Semple:



Hires Root Beer, yes.



Dave Young:



Hires Root Beer, and I was kind of a root beer snob when I was a kid.



Stephen Semple:



Oh, were you?



Dave Young:



Not so much anymore, right? But I knew the difference between Hires and Dad's and A&W and all the big root beer brands.



Stephen Semple:



Which was your favorite?



Dave Young:



There was nothing that compared to an A&W root beer coming out of a fountain, not a can.



Stephen Semple:



Yep.



Dave Young:



Going to A&W and having a root beer in a giant glass cold mug. But we're here to talk about Hires Root Beer.



Stephen Semple:



Yeah, which is now owned by A&W. I do not believe that Hires is still available in the US. You can get it still in Canada. But at one point, they were the largest in the United States. And Hires is actually kind of the inventor of the root beer business. And today it's like $600 million a year of root beer sold.



Dave Young:



Wow.



Stephen Semple:



So I thought-



Dave Young:



That's a lot of root beer.



Stephen Semple:



I thought it was worth exploring.



Dave Young:



Yeah.



Stephen Semple:



Because this is the origin of root beer.



Dave Young:



Okay.



Stephen Semple:



So it's the early 1870s, and the population in the United States is booming due to massive immigration. And sanitation is becoming a huge problem in cities. Polluted water is spreading disease and people frankly turn to alcohol for safe drinking. The average American at that time was consuming seven gallons of alcohol a year.



Dave Young:



Wow.



Stephen Semple:



Primarily beer and things along that lines, but part of it was because of water. So in 1874, protests start around alcohol, the anti-alcohol movements start. But the challenge is there's no good alternative to water. And so, Charles Hires is a pharmacist, and he always had these little side hustles and was always looking for opportunities. And while he's on his honeymoon, he is served this beverage called root tea. And it's made by fermenting, so it's carbonated, but the fermentation is cut off before alcohol forms. And it's really popular in these rural areas, but not in urban areas.



And he's a member of the Temperance Movement, so he knew it was hard to find good alternatives to alcohol. So he starts to experiment on recipes for root tea. And he felt this could be a temperance drink because it had the feeling of a beer, and it could be sold in stores. And it was delicious, and he felt he could create a shelf-stable version. The first version of it was this powdered mix that you would boil, add water, add sugar, add yeast, let it ferment, cut it short, and there it would be. Right? And so, he met with this local Reverend, Russell Conwell, and he was sharing with him this idea of this root tea.

The secret to creating something viable is you better be highly engaged in it. Tope Awatona learned this lesson the hard way.



Dave Young:



Welcome to the Empire Builders podcast, teaching business owners the not-so-secret techniques that took famous businesses from mom and pop to major brands. Stephen Semple is a marketing consultant, story collector, and storyteller. I'm Stephen's sidekick and business partner, Dave Young. Before we get into today's episode, a word from our sponsor, which is, well, it's us, but we're highlighting ads we've written and produced for our clients. So here's one of those.



[No Bull RV Ad]







Dave Young:



Welcome back to the Empire Builders podcast. Dave Young here with Stephen Semple. Today, Stephen mentioned, it's the app, Calendly, C-A-L-E-N-D-L-Y, Calendly. I've used it. We still use it for a couple of things. It's a way that you can give people a link to sign up for a time on your calendar to talk to you or make an appointment with you or make an appointment to get their haircut, or I think all kinds of things now.



Stephen Semple:



The first time I was exposed to it was through you-



Dave Young:



Oh, all right.



Stephen Semple:



... where you had sent me this link, and I was like, "What the heck? What the heck is this?" which then caused me, after experiencing it as a customer, because the cool thing as a customer, it's just a link you click on, there's no software or anything, and then it sends you something that immediately populate your Google or iCal or whatever, that I ended up exploring it. Now I use it for absolutely everything because it even has automated follow-ups and all this other stuff I'll do. I found, especially if you're trying to get a group of people together, it's a complete game-changer because you can also put all your calendars on it. It'll look at everybody's calendar and find the free spot. This experience I've just talked about, hold that in your head because it becomes important to the story. Calendly was founded by Awotona, I'm sure I'm pronouncing it wrong, in Atlanta in 2013. Today, it has over 400 employees and is valued at $3 billion.



Dave Young:



A real unicorn of a startup.



Stephen Semple:



Really, really is. Interestingly, in 2021, Calendly moved to a completely remote workforce. They have no office space anywhere any longer. Tope was born in Nigeria and immigrated to the United States when he was 15. He went to the University of Georgia where he did computer science, and he graduated with business. During school, he was working for a while at CVS as a cashier. Then he got a job doing door-to-door selling alarm systems in Athens, Georgia, on full commission. One of the things he learned was the best time to knock on doors is right before dinner. He's one of those guys, right before dinner.



Dave Young:



Yeah, right before dinner because everybody's home.



Stephen Semple:



Yeah. Now, he made good money, way more than CVS. On the first day, he made like 500 bucks because he sold two units. But the rest of the week there were no sales. But he still liked doing it because he understood there was a hit rate. He also liked that he could influence how much he could make, become better, work harder, make more. And it was a different outlet for him than coding.



He graduates from university. He had a few offers. He landed a sales job at a luxury travel company and then IBM. But he started looking for a small, fast-growing company to work for because there'd be more advancement opportunities than a big company like IBM. So gets a job where he moves to Kansas City, and he's working for a company that digitized files and managed content. Now, this was an interesting experience for him. Because while there, one of the onboarding things that they did for all the new employees was they would meet the founders of this company where the founders shared their story of starting this company and growing this company. For him,

Edwin Lowe, yes the Beano... uhm Bingo guy took all he learned and created Yahtzee. You need to be observant.



Dave Young:



Welcome to The Empire Builders Podcast, teaching business owners the not-so-secret techniques that took famous businesses from mom and pop to major brands. Stephen Semple is a marketing consultant, story collector, and storyteller. I'm Stephen's sidekick and business partner Dave Young. Before we get into today's episode, a word from our sponsor, which is... Well, it's us. But we're highlighting ads we've written and produced for our clients. So here's one of those.



[Travis Crawford Ad]







Dave Young:



Welcome to The Empire Builders Podcast. Dave Young here alongside Steven Semple. And as we always do, Steven... Wait a minute. You didn't whisper anything in my ear during the countdown?



Stephen Semple:



No, I didn't this time



Dave Young:



We're going into this blind. I have no idea what we're going to talk about.



Stephen Semple:



I didn't this time, but there's one thing I ust wanted to mention before we got into it is we're north of 156 episodes. I think this is 157 or 158. And when you think about it-



Dave Young:



Isn't that crazy?



Stephen Semple:



It is crazy. We've crossed the three-year mark. And for you and I, we haven't missed, we've not missed a week in that three years.



Dave Young:



I'm amazed. That's double the number of birthdays I've had, at least.



Stephen Semple:



I wanted to recognize that because I was looking... when I was doing the preparation and looking at this, I went, "Wow, three years. That's quite amazing." When we started this adventure, I knew we had committed to a year, and here we are still at it, which I think is pretty cool.



Dave Young:



It is. I don't have any stats handy, but I know that podcasting, this is one of these things that is like, "Oh, this is going to be fun." It's going to be fun to do a podcast. And it is. My participation in it is a lot of fun because I show up, you do a countdown, and I chat. But I know that it's a heavy lift, and people thinking that they're just going to start podcasting, unless you're just going to just start your own live morning show without any back-end production, it's not an easy thing to do. And you've got a whole team working behind the scenes.



Stephen Semple:



Yeah. There's you and I. And then we have an outsourced person who does the production, and then Dylan Bernier turns all this stuff in the shorts and whatnot. And then Matthew Burns and Gary Bernier get it all posted to the social media. And I'm going to say, if this group of people were not working on it, this would not still be going today. And I think last I looked at the stats, most podcasts I think are 10 or 12 or 14 episodes or something like that. They-



Dave Young:



Yeah. That's as far as you get.



Stephen Semple:



As far as you get. And then all of a sudden it's like, "Oh, this is a grind. This is more work than I thought it would be." And things along that line. So, well-



Dave Young:



You're like, "I'm going to go back to grad school," and, "Oh, God, what was I thinking?"



Stephen Semple:



Exactly.



Dave Young:



I started podcasting in 2010 and got 30 episodes in before I gave up. And I think it was just because the shine came off, the shiny object, for me, and nobody knew what a podcast was in 2012. So-



Stephen Semple:



Yeah. So I just want to thank you, thank the team, and just recognize this milestone. But onto the reason why people actually have tuned in, it's not to hear us chat back and forth.



Dave Young:



It's not.



Stephen Semple:



Well, it's not about that. It's not about praising ourselves. What we're going to talk about today is a game called Yahtzee.



Dave Young:



Yahtzee. I grew up with Yahtzee. I mean, Yahtzee's been around for a long time.



Stephen Semple:



Sure has. Yeah.



Dave Young:



And I never played it until, I think after I got married.