The Zoomers to Boomers Business Show

Harnessing Customer Insight to Revolutionize Your Business w/ Andrew Deutsch

• Hank Eder / Andrew Deutsch

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What if understanding your customer could revolutionize your business? In this episode of the Zoomers to Boomers Business Show, we promise you'll gain strategic insights from Andrew Deutsch, a multilingual marketing strategist from the Fangled Group. Andrew takes us through his transformative journey from a global trade consultancy to a leader in multicultural marketing. We discuss how truly grasping the value proposition from your customer's perspective can make or break your marketing strategies. Dive into a fascinating case study featuring a steel drum manufacturer, where focusing on customer priorities like on-time delivery and reliable service not only fostered brand loyalty but also elevated the company's market position.

Ever wondered how targeted marketing strategies can double your business growth while slashing costs? Listen as Andrew unveils the nuances of effective market research, blending qualitative and quantitative methods to identify your niche. We explore the importance of pricing strategy and fair value with compelling examples from Walmart and an Amish organic farm. Learn how operational support in sourcing and manufacturing can help scale your business without buckling under demand. This episode underscores the vital role of implementing strategic knowledge, ensuring your company sustains its growth and doesn't falter when demand spikes.

Website: https://fangledtech.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrew-deutsch-2445936/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@thefangledcast5819
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@WeCallBS-mr8wk

Be sure to visit BizRadio.US to discover hundreds more engaging conversations, local events and more.

Hank:

This is the Zoomers to Boomers Business Show, and you're listening to bizradious all entrepreneurs all the time. Welcome everyone, I'm Hank Eder, also known as Hank the PR Guy, host of the Zoomers to Boomers Business Show, the show formerly known as the Home Business Success Show. You're listening to bizradious all entrepreneurs all the time. Each week, we speak with entrepreneurs across all corners of the generational spectrum, sharing business gems, things that work, some things that don't work, and building bridges.

Hank:

Today's guest, andrew Deutsch, isn't your average consultant. He's a multilingual strategist who speaks the languages of business and psychology, having fueled business growth in over 100 countries. His superpower Seeing hidden opportunities and solutions others miss. He blends practical business smarts with insightful psychology to craft bold, innovative strategies for his clients at the Fangled Group. Fangled Group is your one-stop shop for strategic marketing and growth muscle. They offer a range of services, from fractional CMO leadership to in-depth M&A research, all the way to crafting killer branding and go-to marketing strategies, ready to turn every touch into an advocate of your brand. Learn more at fangledtechcom or catch Andrew on his podcast, the Fangled Cast. Welcome to the show, andrew Boy.

Andrew:

That sounded like something I might have written. Yeah, I think so. I wonder why?

Hank:

Yeah, it's great to be here. Thanks for inviting me. I wonder why.

Andrew:

Yeah, it's great to be here. Thanks for inviting me.

Andrew:

Oh, you're welcome If you would tell our audience what it is that you do.

Andrew:

You know I guess in as few words as possible, I've been known for a few words Really what's occurred over the years.

Andrew:

We began as a global trade consultancy helping American companies find their global footprint, and in that I've worked. Our office was originally established when I was living overseas in South America and we started to build incredible multicultural marketing strategies to help businesses figure out how to play in different markets and different cultures. And then, as that evolved over the years and I came back to the States and continued with the business, the incredible learnings that we had really applied to companies recognizing how do you understand the value proposition from that culture, who you're selling to, from those markets, and build that core go-to-market strategy before you start spending a fortune on a bunch of tactics that aren't aimed. So imagine a company that used to spend $300,000, $400,000 a year in the Google machine now know who their customer is, where they are and can target them directly instead of the old, you know, trying to kill a mosquito with a shotgun approach of let's just throw it out there and hope that one of them reaches back to us and filtering through all the nonsense that comes that aren't real customers for you.

Hank:

That reminds me of that old saying, and I paraphrase if you throw enough poop against the wall, you kind of hope some of it will stick. But that's not a great marketing strategy, not by any means.

Andrew:

Unless you're in the cleaning products business and you're trying to create a demonstration.

Hank:

Remember those demonstrations. I think it was the old Lucy show where somebody would Remember those demonstrations. I think it was the old Lucy show where somebody would stop by, knock on your door, throw a big pile of dirt on the floor without asking and then they would show you their vacuum cleaner. Yeah, yeah.

Andrew:

And there's a great joke about that too, where you know they're training salespeople to do that and they didn't realize that it doesn't do you much good to do that in the Amish community, where there's no place to plug in the vacuum.

Hank:

So then they would get thrown out of the place quickly. Anyway, I've had branding specialists on the show, but you know you mentioned a few moments ago that there are strategies that must go into things like advertising, marketing, even branding. You know people talk a lot about branding, people talk a lot about branding, but I'd like to know more about what you do for your customers, honing in on the branding, and what you do prior to actually coming up with the notion of branding.

Andrew:

Yeah, well, the challenge and there are some excellent branding people that I've worked with over the years, so I'm not by any means saying anything diminishing about the branding field, although there are a lot of folks that call themselves branding experts that really aren't. So your brand is really nothing more than what they're saying about you when you're not in the room and, depending on how you build that brand for your company, is really dependent on whether or not you understand the end user, the customer, more than your own belief in your product, so like, for example, or the customer more than your own belief in your product, so like, for example and I'll pick something super esoteric I worked with the company that manufactures steel drums. These are products that carry chemicals, coatings, very bland. In most people's eyes it's a commodity. It's not. It's a quite technical product with a lot of details you have to understand.

Andrew:

So this company was going to market talking about how they use high quality American steel, how they can paint the drums in certain ways. They meet ANSI standards. They meet the standards required by our government for DOT transportation of goods and all of this kind of stuff, and they were very proud of it and it's all correct. There's only one problem with it. Those are table stakes. You can't be in the business of making steel drums without using steel. You can't sell them if they don't meet standards. All of those things are very important and it was a pride of the business, but when we did the intensive research to understand why, in fact, do people do business with them? None of that. Of course they wanted something that wouldn't leak. They wanted something that would. But what they really wanted the buyers of these drums that worked in these manufacturing facilities they wanted on-time delivery. They wanted to be able to get them when they needed them. They wanted to know that if something went wrong, they could reach out to a person, and this is what they specialized in.

Andrew:

This is a small, independent company compared to multi-billion dollar multinationals, but when we talk to the advocates of that brand that love doing business with them, when I call those behemoth companies, they don't answer the phone. If I have a problem, they send me forms. This company, if I've got an issue, they're on the phone. They're resolving it within days, not months, not years. And, by the way, they have and this is something that we learn more from the customers that this unique way that they manufacture, which is to convert the equipment throughout the day. So throughout the day they're making every type of drum. They make gave what we call flex manufacturing. So if I was a buyer and all of a sudden I needed something with the other companies it could take months to get them because they don't make those all the time, whereas this flex manufacturing meant that I, even in a tough situation, these guys will be able to bail me out, not doing something special for me, but because that's what they do.

Andrew:

So when we converted the conversation and the brand to talk about personal touch customer service, making the lives of buyers better, making sure you don't lose your job because the chemical company needs a specific drum you don't have in stock and you can't fulfill your job, we made lives better. We prevented factories from shutting down. These were the values that they wanted, and the company went from 30 something million to $85 million in two and a half years and was acquired for almost $10 million over what the expectation was at the time that the thought of exit was. So that's really what it's about is let's talk to the people who love the company, let's talk to people who may use them every once in a while and let's talk to the haters and understand what all of that perception is about and what their needs and values are let's base our marketing strategy on the folks who actually want to do business with us, not on whether the head office thinks we're cool or not.

Hank:

Right, right. It amazes me at times how I speak to business owners, and not only do they not reach out to their ideal target market, they don't know who their ideal target market is, so they really can't brand because they think they're trying to reach everyone. What you talked about a minute ago was a great pain point. I mean, what if your whole production was halted because you couldn't get through? You needed something, but you couldn't get through to your supplier. You had to fill out a form. That's a great pain point, yeah, and I'm sure that manufacturers you know the customers can understand that.

Andrew:

Yeah, I've asked companies that I've dealt with over the years where I'm the consumer. Why do you guys think that I need to learn how to be an employee of your company to get the help I need? It's your job to get me the help. I shouldn't have to know what form whatever. I should be able to reach out and say, hey, I'm your customer, I need your help and get the help. I didn't go through your orientation. I don't know your internal methodology. It's bad.

Andrew:

But on the same note, again going back to the original question, in the process of expansion too, you have to look at and we do something proprietary to us that we call the fangled market attractiveness study. So if you've got a business that goes into multiple channels, for example in the drum industry, we'll just use that as our continued model. There are chemical companies, there are coatings companies, there are food companies and then, if you expand it even further, there's direct buyers, there's distributors, there's a whole matrix of different markets. You can play Well each of those channels. Do they have money? Do they need what we sell? Do they need it in the quantity we want to sell? Do we know people in that market? Who's their current supplier? What are their long-term, short-term?

Andrew:

And we score all of that and then, out of the 20 potential markets to sell into, we then were able to see which markets were the most attractive and go after first. If, for example, in the industry people who are packing road tar in drums, they don't need a quality drum, they use used ones. It's a garbage market. They pay pennies on the dollar. Why would you want to go after that market unless you've just got no other business? If I could sell it to those guys, I've got a margin of 3%. If I sell the other guys, maybe I can get a 30% margin. So all of that attractiveness study so many times we encounter companies that want to sell into 50 markets and the reality is there are three that they could make a fortune with and 47 that they should just leave for other people.

Hank:

Yeah, because they'd be spreading themselves too thin and the return wouldn't be very good. Yeah, because they'd be spreading themselves too thin and the return wouldn't be very good. Yeah, yeah. How do you help clients zoom in on their specific niche and how might you prepare them to market to that niche?

Andrew:

Sure, I mean, that is what we do. So we, on their behalf, do that research. Well, we have three methods. One is we will do it for you, where we go out we do all the research and do all the work. The second is we'll do it with you, where we'll come up with a strategy and charge and train your employees to go out and do that research. And the last one is a do it yourself, where we just we give you the framework and you take care drum industry.

Andrew:

We talked to the customers that had been loyal for 20 something years and only bought from them. We spoke with customers that use them as a second source. So in other words, they bought from the big multinational but they'd buy 10 or 20 percent from them just to have a backup If the multinational couldn't deliver. They had a backup. And then we also talked to the very few customers who had stopped buying from them. And then we also tried to reach out to customers that never heard of, and we did quantitative and qualitative conversations based on the volumes and what their impressions were.

Andrew:

And when we combined all of that data, we then found that magic niche that they filled, that the competitor could not compete with that, they filled that the competitor could not compete with. And that's how, through those results, we were then able to build that strategic plan which led to direct tactics. There was very little money ever spent on web search. We knew who every one of the potential customers were. Through the research that we did, we knew who the players were and we reached out directly. And then we did content strategies where those people would see information and understand who we were and what we were. The budget for marketing was cut to I don't know a third of what the spend had been prior and the company more than doubled.

Hank:

You can't argue with those kinds of statistics. You know, I discussed this with you the other day when we had an initial talk and I've known two companies that had a really unique product. Of course they were consumer products, but they had these. Started out they were overwhelmed by the amount of business that came in. They could not meet the demand. They went out of business. I think this thing happens all the time. It does.

Andrew:

It's the Walmart story. So many companies have gone broke because they wanted to start out selling to the big box retailers and they could not keep up with the demand. The first order came in and they couldn't find the finance and they couldn't find the manufacturing and were not able to fulfill what was there and scaled themselves right into the toilet. It's not an unusual thing. Sometimes scarcity is a sign that you're not charging enough. There was a story.

Andrew:

I live not far from Amish country and I had an Amish friend who had an organic farm and he would set up the stand at the end of the driveway every Saturday and he would sell out within two hours everything he had. And I asked him I said why don't you raise your prices? Well, my prices are fair. I said fair to who? Fair to you? Because marketing is about pricing strategy. Is it fair to you or fair to the consumer? And he said, well, fair, you were fair to the consumer. And he said, well, fair to the consumer. I said, well then it's not fair to you.

Andrew:

So next week raise everything a nickel, everything's a nickel, or 10 cents, and see sold out the same amount of time. The next week raise it again. I said at the end of the day if you have stuff left over that didn't sell back, your prices back down a little bit, but that's what you need to do because you're not charging enough. Well, the prices went up and up and up. And when he did his books at the end of the year he said to me you know, I made $35,000 more this year than I did last year. Those nickels add up, don't they?

Andrew:

And I said how many people during the entire year came out and complained about the price. He said this one guy who always was annoying me, he finally stopped coming. So you're welcome. So you know, pricing strategy is a major part of what we do also.

Hank:

Yeah, and also, do you help them acquire the means of production? Do you work with them to make sure that they are geared up for what they may encounter?

Andrew:

This goes back to the operational part of our business. Yes, and sometimes it's a sourcing issue. Sometimes it's it's an outsource to get to get manufacturing done somewhere else before you can scale up. We work with co-packers and we work with, uh, you know, third-party manufacturing people that we've worked with for years. Um, there's just recently we worked on a project where we needed kiosks manufactured for for uh, I can't share the business, um, but it was a kiosk system and we found a manufacturer who was able to mass produce those kiosks that they could have never done themselves to to and, of course, sourcing an American manufacturing company that had the ability to form, bend, paint and assemble these kiosks for for the business here locally. If we had not found that they they would have, they would have scaled themselves right into the garbage can because they there was no way that they could build and get the equipment and get manufacturing as quickly as the demand for their product.

Hank:

Right. Well, that's quite something that you don't necessarily want to overlook. I want to go back to something you said earlier with the three things, the three ways that you do it. You know one, two and three and three was. You know, we'll tell you how to do it and you go ahead and do it. You know we'll tell you how to do it and you go ahead and do it. I would guess you probably don't really get a lot of customers who want to do it that way, because in my experience, people don't hire you for your knowledge. They hire you for the implementation, and you can give them all the knowledge in the world, but if they're not ready to implement that knowledge, they need somebody else to do it.

Andrew:

Those cases are. For example, someone will come and say hey, we're stuck. Can we pick your brain for an hour? Can we maybe have three appointments? And they are prepared to do it. They just need the guidance. It's usually young entrepreneurs that have never done it.

Andrew:

I have on my website. It's called the Pick my Brain Session. People can sign up for it, matter of fact. I usually give three of those away a week for 30 minutes of my time at no cost, and there's two reasons I do it. One is I like to give back and two is it keeps me sharp. Somebody comes to me with something totally new and in less than 30 minutes I've got to get enough information to be able to provide some value to somebody. It's good for me. I'm selfish that way, but many of those go into the next level. Many of them don't.

Andrew:

But a few one-hour sessions with an expert, like having a board member come in, can be extremely valuable to jumpstart the movement within a company, because once they have the ideas and the clarity, they don't need the consultant. The second, the we set you up to do it. We literally will take your folks and we will do the training. We do the initial creation of the protocols to do the research and then train your people how to do it, and then we come back involved and help evaluate it. But if you're not well-funded and can't afford to have it handed to you as a completed product, where we become embedded in the company and all of it, it's a great way to go.

Andrew:

Most of the companies that use our full service are companies that have the funding to. We become the virtual marketing department, are we the fractional chief growth officers, chief marketing officer for a period of time, and we get great results from all three, depending on the status. The other thing we won't do is take somebody's money if we don't think we can help them or if you know. We also try to cut off relationships before they become parasitic, where there's like a dependence and they just keep wanting to pay and we're not delivering any value. Because our time's limited, I'd much rather be helping the next guy boom than hang on to a guy who's booming just for an extra buck.

Hank:

That's certainly an ethical way of doing business, and I think more companies need to look at things that way. If you could give niche startups just one bit of advice quickly, what would that be? What kind of startups? Niche, niche startup companies.

Andrew:

Make sure there's three kinds of products that people bring to market. Number one there's a known problem in the market. Nobody has found a solution or there's no good solution for it, and you've got one that everybody recognizes. That's the ideal. Second you recognize a problem in the market that people don't recognize necessarily as a problem, but when they see your solution they go I do have that problem. Wow, that's great. And then the third is I've got a solution looking for a problem. So if you're a startup and you've got a solution looking for a problem, think again. That's the. You know, we found a new way to open cans because, you know, americans have so much trouble opening cans. Now there's a new can opener. Well, that's the crap they sell on TV in between the news at 2 am and 2.30. The Shoe Dini is my favorite. We now have a way to put on and take off your shoes. There's nothing unique about it, but Gilbert Gottfried sold a lot of them.

Hank:

There's not even a need, I don't think, to put your shoes on in a different way. You know the time really flew here, so I just want to ask you how can our listeners contact you to learn more about your services?

Andrew:

We're very old so you have to fax us. No, I'm kidding, I'm on LinkedIn. You can find us there. You can go to thefangledgroupcom and reach out to us. Happy to take inquiries. You can send us a note right to the website or through my LinkedIn.

Hank:

All right. Well, thank you so much for being here with us today, andrew, and to our listeners, join us next Wednesday for the Zoomers to Boomers business show right here on bizradious. As you go about your day to day, I want to remind you all to practice kindness. It's the greatest uniter this world has ever known. See you again next week. This is Hank Eder, wishing all of you a fabulous, productive and successful day.