The Startup CPG Podcast

Janice Greenwald
You want to maximize your shelf space, right? But you also need to leave Slack. You have to look at how the lighting is going to hit your product, like everything about it. I have just seen so many instances where a product could have done better if they had maximized their space differently or knew how they were going to be merchandised. Like if you were in the freezer, you're going to be in the door or you're going to be in the well. Like there's these different things and you have to know how you're going to show up in order to know how to maximize your product.

00:38
Daniel Scharff
Welcome, friends, to the startup CPG podcast. On today's episode, we are talking through some of the most frequently asked questions on our 33,000 person Slack channel. I love these ask me any things because it gives us the chance to really learn together some of these meaty questions that are so relevant for early stage brands. We're going to talk through them with one of the marketers that I respect most, Janice Greenwald. She is in the trenches with brands all the time. Today we're talking through what is the role of social media and PR for growing brands? Should you be spending money on it in the early stages and what should you be trying to accomplish? We also talk about how do you vet freelancers and agencies? How should you set your marketing budget? How should you choose your packaging?

01:22
Daniel Scharff
How should you build out your marketing team when you're looking at full time people or contractors? So much good stuff in today's discussion. I know you're gonna love it. Here we go. Welcome everybody. Got a question? I'll help in a pickle. Let me know if you're stuck. We're here. Don't you know, don't you know, don't you know you can ask us anything? All right, Janice, good job. That's the first time we've tried a duet, really here on the podcast. But it was really good to ask you for help on the duet because we're about to get into another one of our epic ask me any things this time on marketing. So, Janice, after absolutely crushing the how to drive sales with marketing episode, we're back to pick more out of your brain.

02:16
Daniel Scharff
And this time we have sourced questions from our Slack channel that has over 32,000 members who are constantly asking really great questions about marketing. And they start from the basics of just really how do I get my branding established and off the ground to really technical ones about just some of the ins and outs of marketing. And Janice, as somebody who has done on the ground in depth marketing with so many great brands and helped them so much, I'm really excited to get through a bunch of this with you today. So before I jump into my questions for you source from the slack, do you mind doing a little bit of an intro?

02:52
Janice Greenwald
Sure. Hi, nice to see you again. I'm a fractional CMO with about 20 years of CPG experience going on 20 years. Always on the marketing side. I was always on the client side spanning large companies like Unilever and then Sabra and then worked with startups for the last 12 or 13 years or so. In the last four years I've been doing the fractional CMO work where I'm a service provider, but I do feel like I'm part of the team as a fractional, so I just work with multiple brands at once.

03:19
Daniel Scharff
I know they feel that way too. And don't feel bad if you leave out some cool brands, but can you shout out some of the brands that you've enjoyed working with over the years? And again, if you love Janice, a lot of pressure.

03:30
Janice Greenwald
Yeah.

03:31
Daniel Scharff
If she doesn't name you, don't hold it against her. But can you just shout out, I know you work with El Nacho, which I love.

03:36
Janice Greenwald
I work with El Nacho. They're awesome tortilla chip brand cooked in 100% avocado oil with delicious bold flavors. I love Lonolife, which is a bone broth brand that I've been working with for coming on a year now. They're a great team. I work with Vigo Bears, a vegan gummy bear brand which is delicious and it's like unfortunately too delicious. I tell them to stop sending me samples, otherwise I eat candy at my desk all day. Salula, a really awesome tostone plantain crisp, really delicious salty snack. So I've worked with a lot of just really awesome brands.

04:12
Daniel Scharff
All right, that is quite a lineup. So let's get right into it. First one, people ask this all the time on the slack. Like, hey, who can help with social media? So Sarah recently asked this for her brand. Like, hey, I'm just trying to ask founders out there who helps you with social media. Like, I'm going to do some of this stuff. I can take some pictures and do some of this stuff, but like what really works on a budget? So what can and should a brand be looking for at that early stage?

04:41
Janice Greenwald
Yeah, sure. The post that Sarah had written was like, well, I'm going to take the photos and I just need someone to post it. And I sort of questioned that because I was like, social media is a little bit more than just posting. There's so many different facets to social media because yes, there's the content creation, which would be photography or reels, but there might also be a graphic design element, there's copywriting, there might be influencer outreach, brand partnerships when you want to do cool giveaways and things like that. And then of course, there might be an element of media buying if you want to geo target ads. So it's tough because very few people know how to do all of those things. And all of those things, well, if you can find a freelancer to do that's awesome.

05:21
Janice Greenwald
And with this particular poster, if they really just needed someone just to post and create a calendar, I do think that you could just use a freelancer. But personally, like, I have had a good success working with small agencies because they have specialists to handle all of those different elements for you who are community managers, who are photographers, who are copywriters. And I actually find that it could be cheaper because of some of the economies of scale as well. So for example, social media agency that I work with a lot works with a photographer who quite literally creates a set, like when it's the holidays, right? And the content like maybe is similar from brand to brand because they're kind of running the brands through the set, but it helps from like a pricing perspective.

06:03
Janice Greenwald
So they're not creating a Halloween set for just your brand, they're creating a Halloween set and then making it feel like your brand by just adding a few touches, which helps with cost. So because they're doing it for multiple brands at once.

06:16
Daniel Scharff
Okay, so I have a couple of follow up questions. The first is, okay, I know there are different components of this and you mentioned like paid ads. I know because we found them working with you that you love Garonsky Media for paid ads. I'll drop a link to them in the show notes here because they're great and they're great for early stage brands because their retainer is actually affordable, unlike a lot of people out there. What about that creative side though? I've never even asked you about that. Like, are there agencies you think people should know about on that side that are like good and affordable? Are there ways people can find those kind of right ones?

06:45
Janice Greenwald
I think that there's a lot of agencies. I think I've worked with one in particular a number of times. If I shout her out, this might totally overwhelm her. But I'm happy to do it. STEPH Nash MARKETING They're a great, small, nimble team. The price is right and I've had really positive experience working with them. There's ones that are a lot more expensive, more robust, fancier. But I don't think that a startup necessarily needs an agency that's going to charge you $10,000 a month. The content might better, but it's a tough one at that point. $10,000 sometimes feel like you might just want like a full time person, but again a full time person doing all of those different elements can be really hard too.

07:21
Daniel Scharff
Yeah, if they even have the expertise. Like maybe they're really good at videos but they're not as good as graphics or doing the paid side or. And then you have to do the community management. And then my second question is more of a strategy question which is should you even be investing all of this into social? If you, let's say, are a, a brand that really is going to make your money in retail, I mean people.

07:42
Janice Greenwald
Are going to have a different point of view on this. You do need to focus on long term brand building no matter what. So you always need some element of long term brand building. It's just a matter, I think of how you divvy up your spend. Right. So if you have a hundred thousand dollars to spend, I wouldn't want you to spend 60,000 of that, a hundred thousand on your social media agency because maybe you're waiting your brand building a little bit too much versus say the velocity metrics. We've talked a lot on the show about velocity, so we'll talk a little bit about budget later. But I think it just depends like how much you have to spend. I do think you need some social media to work on your long term brand building though.

08:17
Daniel Scharff
I like it. I like that answer which is like, yeah, have a plan and figure out how this is going to integrate into that plan and also just understand what it's going to take from you as a founder. If you love going out and taking photos and okay, maybe that'll be one of the things that you just focus on in the early stages when you can't hire somebody for everything. Like I feel like I'm pretty dangerous in portrait mode on my iPhone. I get some good shots, but it never is going to compare to a good photographer with a good camera.

08:46
Janice Greenwald
Yeah, I mean, yes and no. I think like some of the best content I see is the founder led content. So if you have a founder that's really engaged and up for doing it. Maybe you have somebody internally who's shooting a lot of the video for you. Like, sure. Then you can get a freelancer maybe to post it. Like maybe that's what this person was implying. But then it's like, okay, so who's doing the community management? Who's doing all of that? But if you do have a founder that's open to doing all that, I do think it'll perform a lot better than just like a generic like photo.

09:13
Daniel Scharff
Yeah, even like because I post a lot on LinkedIn, it takes a lot of time because it'll take me, I don't know, an hour to put together exactly a post for a day that I'm trying to put something out there and you know, hopefully it goes well. But that is a full hour that I'm not spending on other parts of the business and that'll be the same for anybody. And it just takes time to do that well. And then if you're really gonna make an effort at it and try to do community engagement on your posts and interact with people, like all of that stuff is credits out of your time bank.

09:43
Janice Greenwald
Exactly. And it depends, like I know a brand that has a few co founders and one of them spends, I believe about 100% of her time, maybe 80% on social media. So she is the face of the brand. But that's a unique situation where they've been able to divide the workload. If you're a solo founder or even two people, but you have divvied up your workload beyond social, then it's hard to maintain that.

10:05
Daniel Scharff
Well, I like the idea of just going into it clear eyed with just, yeah, this is how much time I'm going to spend on that and it makes sense for me to do this.

10:12
Janice Greenwald
Also, like have a strategy. What are you trying to communicate? What are the messages that you're trying to share? Like, I like to look at what the content pillars are. I always write like a really tight brief, like what is it that we're trying to achieve? Like maybe it's a certain amount of the content. We want to focus on the retailers, like shouting out where we are and maybe doing some geo targeting there. But maybe the other content is like usage occasions for your product or maybe some of it is founder content. But have a plan of what you want to do so that like the consumers like know that this is what we're going to get from this brand.

10:40
Daniel Scharff
I like that. And although this is unprompted, I will just take the chance to say, please, founders understand that a lot of the content that you want to hit will not hit. I've experienced this personally where we're like. But I want to have this, like, beautiful, just product shot of my thing. And it's going to be, like, out in this beautiful setting, and then I'm just going to tell them all the things about it and no one likes it and it doesn't go anywhere or get seen by anybody. But if I just rip out my iPhone and record some video of somebody actually tasting the product and it's supernatural, and that does do well.

11:13
Daniel Scharff
So I think you really have to really be open to that of just like, okay, you can post the things that you want everyone to learn about your brand, but they may never get the chance to learn about it because it doesn't actually hit the feed. So. Well, what do you think?

11:28
Janice Greenwald
I mean, yeah, totally. I mean, also, like, the algorithm, I think you have to put money behind the things that you want anybody to see anyway. So it's hard to say, like, what's really working versus what is, like, you're spending to make it work. That makes sense.

11:42
Daniel Scharff
It does make sense. Although the way you describe it's like it's just a marketplace, like, social attention now. And they've created this platform that we think the king of the hill for the content, like, best content wins, but actually it's just whoever's going to pay the most is getting in front of you, which kudos, Meta, for getting that to work. Okay, next question here. Pr. For me, this is a hot button topic, and I'm gonna admit, but I also am kind of like, I don't know a lot about marketing. I'm not a big fan of people investing money into PR at launch unless they truly have the most epic thing that has ever been invented. And anybody who gets eyes on it is gonna race to write about it and then buy it if they read about it.

12:23
Daniel Scharff
In general, I think everyone just, like, gets excited, like, oh, it's such a good idea. Of course it's going to blow up and someone's going to write about it. I'm always really cynical about that kind of stuff, but you're the expert. So Sarah from the Slack said, hey, for anyone who's gone through a product launch, how crucial was PR for you? Did working with an agency actually drive meaningful awareness and sales, or did you find other things more effective?

12:48
Janice Greenwald
I can go on and on about pr and I will.

12:51
Daniel Scharff
Yes, please.

12:52
Janice Greenwald
I'm going to talk.

12:53
Daniel Scharff
That's why you're Here.

12:54
Janice Greenwald
Yes, exactly. So PR for sales for a startup for a single product launch is probably not going to move the needle for you. If you know about brand awareness, which is what PR is. It's a brand awareness lever. It's top of funnel. Consumers need to see your product. There's this thing called the rule of sevens. I encourage you all to Google it, but like, consumers need to see you over and over and over again to decide like, oh, hey, I'm feeling influenced and now I'm going to go buy your product on the shelf. So these top of funnel brand awareness methods are not going to immediately move the needle for you. So from a sales driving perspective, that would not be my recommendation. Am I anti PR altogether?

13:34
Janice Greenwald
Not necessarily, but I'm not putting it in my plan specifically to drive velocity with a new brand. If I had a brand with national distribution, a bunch of accounts, that's maybe a different story. So why might I use pr? I'm going to go to PR for very specific reasons they might be. And it depends on what your objectives are. Right. So for example, I work with a brand where marketing to the investor community, it was a tech company, so marketing was food tech. Marketing to the investor company was hugely important. PR was a huge part of my role back with that company. It was getting into Entrepreneur and Forbes, like all of these business magazines, but then also even Lifestyle. But it was all like deep down it was so the investors could see it. It wasn't to drive sales.

14:17
Janice Greenwald
We were only in one market at the time.

14:18
Daniel Scharff
Isn't that interesting? You know, I go back and forth on this stuff because I think it is complex. And I just was sitting here thinking through the rule of sevens, like, is that true for everything? I think in some product categories it might not be. But it also probably depends on like, how expensive is this thing? Because if I get hit on Instagram with an ad for some dumb piece of swag that I'm just like, yep, I need that. I'll just buy it.

14:39
Janice Greenwald
Maybe yes, maybe no.

14:41
Daniel Scharff
But yeah, maybe a more expensive thing. I'm like, I'll think about that. Maybe, maybe I'll even send it to myself for later. But then, yeah, if I see it.

14:47
Janice Greenwald
A couple times, I'm like, oh, some candy bar that you see online. Like you're not racing to the store to go buy it when you see like one PR piece about it.

14:55
Daniel Scharff
Yeah, but then you see it enough. But I see what you're saying about the investor piece. And also I do think it can Influence buyers.

15:01
Janice Greenwald
Well, I was going to say the second piece is the trade piece and that's like the Bev nets of the world, the startup cpgs Nosh I Food Navigator. Like I would not discount those. It's just that they're different. Those aren't consumer. That's not like your mass consumer. Now granted, I always like, say like when you go to Xos, like all these people are your consumer, they're your industry peers, but they're also happen to be your consumer. So there's some overlap there. But by and large that's like your peer group and your investors and your buyers are going to be reading those different places. So if that's an important element for your marketing mix per se, then yeah, like you might want to be reaching out to those publications, but you probably don't even need an agency for most of those.

15:40
Janice Greenwald
You can reach out directly to the writers.

15:42
Daniel Scharff
That's true. And I think buyers do pay attention, especially when you can share those kind of articles with them. And I'm influenced by those publications. I look at stuff that's on Bevnet and Food Navigator and some of those other publications and I'll learn about some brands that way. And then if I see them in the slack, I'm like, oh actually yeah, we should learn more about this. And we're very different, I think from other media companies because we actually don't take media pitches from PR people. We only source brands from our community. Like if you listen to our Founder Fridays, it's all from the community stuff that Caitlin, for example, is discovered at our events, that kind of stuff. So we're not traditional in that way.

16:17
Daniel Scharff
But yeah, we may have our eye out a little bit more because we've seen some news about them and yeah, just a little microcosm. So for sure buyers are doing that as well.

16:26
Janice Greenwald
Like I work with a brand that like we're not looking for investors, we're not looking, you know, and actually they have the buyer relationships. They've been in business for a long time, so they don't really kind of need that PR That's a little bit maybe more vanity. I mean, would it help them? Like maybe, but they don't need that specific type of help.

16:42
Daniel Scharff
Yeah, I see what you're saying. Yeah, if you really don't need help with investors or buyers, I mean, then it would only be for the consumer reach. And that's a tough. Yeah, that's a very hard thing to get and to measure on the buyer.

16:56
Janice Greenwald
Side or actually on the consumer side. Too, though. A lot of like what the agencies I love is like, they bring you those best of types of boards, like on the consumer side, like if you can get into Wirecutter or something, like, that's pretty dope, right? Like, a lot of people will see that.

17:12
Daniel Scharff
The holiday gift guides, I know PR.

17:13
Janice Greenwald
People are always kind of like, easy. But on the. And then on the trade side though, you always have like these awards through startup CPG or through Nash or something like that. And the CPG oriented agencies, like, might have a list of those. That's probably something that you guys can work on your thing with Caitlyn and the team. Create a list of all the award. Of all the awards and the deadlines.

17:35
Daniel Scharff
It's a good idea because yeah, I definitely pay attention to that. If somebody is won like a nextie or a nosh award or something, I'm definitely going to try the product. Like, oh, they actually won. Somebody who knows something said that this was really good. So I'm going to give it a good look.

17:49
Janice Greenwald
And then there's so many of these awards out there. So we could probably like create a group list of them and then people can be applying for them on their own. They don't need a PR agency to apply, but they need the PR agency because they pull all that information together. So I just.

18:01
Daniel Scharff
The part that I struggle with is when I launched a brand even I was like, I don't want to spend a ton of money on this, but I guess we have like just the company had decided that were going to do it. And so I had to even ask around to find where there would be an agency that would work with us for $5,000 a month because that was our budget. And like the people that I had heard were good out there were like, oh, no, but, you know, pat me on the head. Like, here is maybe some like rando freelancer you can talk to who might do it at that amount. And then we hired them after hearing that they were good and we got nothing.

18:31
Daniel Scharff
Like, then we had to like pay PR newswire to launch a thing like, never led to any coverage. And it just, the whole thing was so ridiculous. And we just cut after I think five or six months of getting nothing out of that. But then. But I would get articles if I just messaged some of the reporters in our industry. Like, trade stuff. Mm.

18:52
Janice Greenwald
I learned so much when I worked with that food tech company that was very PR focused. I think our agency was like 15 or 20k a month. Like, it was insane. And then I learned a lot. So for example, they never did press releases. Like it was extremely high touch. They were anti press release. There wasn't ever a press release that came across my table. So they were extremely high touch. They had their relationships with reporters. Like that's really where it comes down. But we're looking for full articles. We were not looking for just like a shout out. We were looking for profiles on the founder, things like that. Right. And that's where the agencies they have or freelancers might have these relationships. But the other thing is that with PR that's tricky is it's long term.

19:32
Janice Greenwald
So a lot of times people will say can I hire a PR agency like just for this launch? And most will be say no. So because they will tell you that it's a long term, you have to constantly be seating and you won't see results right away. And you know all of these things. And so. So you're committing to this kind of slower long term play. Unless there's like different angles of PR too, which is like influencer and affiliate, which would be a whole different kind of element of it. But we're talking more about traditional pr.

19:58
Daniel Scharff
Yeah. For me it did not go well with the person that we hired and they also wouldn't give us, okay, so send samples out to all these people. But then like they kind of gatekeep whatever the relationship with them. So we didn't even know. And then once we parted ways, we couldn't even follow up with them about like, hey, like we sent you all those samples. Are you going to do something with it? Which I understand why they do that but the whole thing just was very frustrating. And so I understand it just being a long term thing if you really have the money for it. I just, yeah, that this is why.

20:26
Janice Greenwald
You know, like Series A. Ish.

20:29
Daniel Scharff
Yeah. This is why we have the startup CBG Newswire which we'll put the link in the show notes here. But that's a free service. It's just us trying to help save people money who are being scrappy where you can submit for free to our newswire. We do the roundup emails for the stuff that comes in through the news wire and some people do get some coverage off that. We do have reporters and buyers.

20:49
Janice Greenwald
We said this already but like look at the authors of the trade pieces and reach out to them directly. Like you could do that. I mean you could share a press release if you want or you can just say I'd love to share my story but you also have to have news, it can't just be like hi, we exist. It has to be really news work. Another thing about pr, maybe not on the trade side but on the consumer side is like you need to have big distribution for consumer publications to care. So on the business side it's different. It might be a founder profile or something like that, like a 30 under 30 type of thing. Right. If you have a really unique. So I mean again, there's all different reasons why you might do pr but not to drive sales.

21:24
Janice Greenwald
I don't think for an early company. So.

21:27
Daniel Scharff
Okay, great. Okay, next question. Changing topic here. Marketing budget. I think people start with this one also like, okay, I am starting out here. Lars asked, are there any founders willing to share how they budget for marketing for their products? Do you only do social or like how much do you spend on stuff? Just depending on how big the company is. What do you think?

21:48
Janice Greenwald
Yeah, so I'm not a founder, I can't give that perspective. But I've seen enough P Ls to know approximately how much people are giving to the marketing line item, not counting trade spend. So trade being a separate, promotions being separate from marketing. And it's often around 10% of net revenue. I think a steady stage brand, steady state could go as low as like 3, 4, 5%. But that's like maybe when you're a lot bigger, but you could also be spending a lot more than 10% because when you're a startup then you probably have a lot more of these early costs like packaging design, website design. Like these things might be a hundred percent of your net revenue.

22:26
Janice Greenwald
And so a lot of it's going to come to like how much money you're kind of willing to invest versus like your steady state P and L. So maybe year two, year three, you get into 10, 12%. Maybe if you have a lot of cash you want to go up to 20%. But you have to see how it's going to affect your overall margins for the long term health of your brand. The other thing is the question was asking about like do you want to do social media? Which kind of goes back to my comment before. When I look at budgeting, the number one thing I'm thinking about is what are my objectives with marketing. So it depends on the brand. Right. Like I mentioned the brand where PR was like the main objective.

23:03
Janice Greenwald
So that's you're going to have a higher percentage of your budget toward PR in that circumstance. But a lot of the brands that we talk to in the startup CPG world are focused on velocity. So if you're focused on velocity and you say again, I'm going to use an easy number, I have a hundred thousand dollars, then you better think that 60, 70% of your budget is going to go toward velocity. And very often I see those numbers reversed. People have spent a lot of money on influencer marketing, a lot of money on social, and then they forgot or didn't know that, like shopper marketing and demos and all those other things like, exist and that you should be doing them and that they're expensive.

23:39
Janice Greenwald
And so I always look at my line items and I quite literally have a pie chart that, like, I'm aiming for a rough percentage. And until I get that right, according to what the strategy is, I'm going to keep like rejiggering the numbers, if that makes sense. So I break it down by like trial driving, brand building, which might be like content creation, things like that. Social media awareness, which might be media buying, pr, things like that, maybe sales support, like trade events, things like trade shows might hit the marketing budget sometimes, maybe agency fees, things like that. So I kind of break it up depending on the client. But again, like, most of my clients are velocity focused. So I'm looking for 60, 70% to be toward Instacart Inmar. All of those things we've talked about.

24:23
Daniel Scharff
In the podcast, I like it. And before I go to the next question, I just want to pay you a compliment and just call it out for everyone where, like, do you guys hear how Janice talks about all of these things? And you just like, there are a lot of people who will give you advice very confidently who I think are often have like angle to it or it's really about like the thing that they were selling or they don't really know so much about it, but they'll still tell you really confidently what you should do. The way Janice talks about it, you can just hear how much experience she has doing this in the weeds with brands.

24:56
Daniel Scharff
I hope for everybody that, like, they have that filter or lens on when they're talking to people and getting advice, especially at the early stage where you just don't know as much how to like, filter advice you get from different people. This is why I love having Janice on the podcast because she just has done this with so many brands and, like, locked arms with them and like gone through the P. Ls and actually gone and executed the marketing with them. Then you can tell when you talk to somebody about it and they can just rattle off so many different things and the benefits the pros, the cons, the things to watch out for is just like, you know, when you're talking to somebody who, like, really has been in the streets with the brand so very much.

25:33
Janice Greenwald
Yeah. For boosting my ego. Appreciate.

25:35
Daniel Scharff
Yes, absolutely. All right, so now let's test you on another hardball question. Not a hardball, but I do love this question. So this is about packaging. So Destiny in the Slack channel asked. I'm currently developing packaging for my cookie brand. I've started talking to some suppliers. Some of them have asked me for custom box dimensions, which makes me a little confused. Like, I thought I would just go get a die line and then have it printed. Like, what's the process here? Should I be looking in stores, seeing what's out there? How do you guys all do this?

26:05
Janice Greenwald
I loved this question when I saw it because we spent a lot of time talking about packaging design, which I'm obviously passionate about as a marketer. But packaging structure is equally, if not more. It can vary, but even be more important than packaging artwork. Right. So structure is wildly important. I will start with saying that the product constraints is really important, like, making sure that your shelf life is going to work. Making sure your product isn't going to get crushed. Like, all of these basic things. If you need something that's resealable, like, for example, like making sure all those basic things that you need for your product are handled is like, number one above everything. But however, I do think that there's other things to consider for sure.

26:42
Janice Greenwald
And I have seen so many mistakes and been a part of so many mistakes that I have. Like, I'm excited to share some of those with you. But I will say definitely look at the competitive set for two reasons. One is, like, you want to see if there's a standard. Two, you want to see if there's a way that you can disrupt and differentiate without completely, like, angering the retailer, which we will get to, because you can anger the retailer because maybe it's not going to work on shelf. Another thing is you have to look at the dimensions of the shelf set. You have to. Have to. Have to measure things like take a tape measure with you and measure the shelves of multiple retailers where you might appear. You want to maximize your shelf space. Right. But you also need to leave slack.

27:20
Janice Greenwald
You have to look at how the lighting is going to hit your product, like, everything about it. I have just seen so many instances where a product could have done better if they had maximized their space differently or knew how they were going to be merchandised like, if you're in the freezer, you're going to be in the door or you're going to be in the well. Like, there's these different things, and you have to know how you're going to show up in order to know how to maximize your product. Another example is, like, I worked in beverage, where we had a six pack of cans, and the designer was always showing us the long side of the six pack, and it would drive me crazy.

27:53
Janice Greenwald
And I told them, like, I only want to see artwork on the side that shows the two cans, because that's the way of seeing merchandised. And it was the ugly side because the dial line had, like, one of those flaps. You were, like, designing over a flap. And I was like, I don't care. Like, this is how it's going to be merchandised. So this is how I want to see the artwork, because that's going to be the most important facing for us. So you have to have, like, a really strong understanding of your actual shelf set and then try to maximize it. And talk and listen to your sales team, like, please talk to them, because they're going to have input. They might want to stay conservative, and you're the marketer or maybe the owner or founder, and you want to push the envelopes.

28:29
Janice Greenwald
I think it's okay to have a healthy debate here, but they also are going to have insights for you. So I have a couple of examples that I've come into which I want to share. So a hundred years ago, when I was at Sabra, we bought a salsa company, and Sabra was breakthrough with the hummus container. You guys know, if you look top down, it's clear. And it was. The whole concept is that you wanted it to be, like, table ready, and you want to be proud of what you're putting on the table, as opposed to, like, my mom, who only will scoop it out and put it into a nicer bowl. Like, she is, like, horrified if I put a container of hummus on the table.

29:05
Janice Greenwald
But our, like, internal thinking was that we wanted everything to be nice enough to put on the table. And so for salsa, it was, like, really important that we create something totally new and breakthrough, because the packaging had been, like, totally new and breakthrough for hummus. So we created this, like, we worked with, like, genpact or whoever, I don't remember who at the time, but we created this, like, very unique and beautiful bowl. And that kind of had, like, these different curves and flares to it. It wasn't a traditional round container. Like, you See, Boring. The boring fresh salsa set where every single container is round or square. And square would have been a little bit more unique, too.

29:41
Janice Greenwald
I think went down that way at the end, but we created this thing, and it didn't merchandise well, and the sales team totally warned us about it. And, like, we pushed back, like, no, no, this is great. This is breakthrough. Consumers are going to love it. But what happened was it always got merchandise on its side because, like, it didn't fit the shelf space that was allocated for it. So. And, like, the people stocking the shelf don't care if your label is facing forward. So failure one costs a ton of money. All these, like, custom dies and plates and blah, blah.

30:07
Daniel Scharff
Mold.

30:08
Janice Greenwald
Sorry, Mold. That's the word I'm looking for. It was a total failure. Another example was when I worked in fresh produce. So it's these fresh companies. And that was. And, like, we. They worked with a super, super expensive agency to create something breakthrough. And they wanted their lettuce container to be different than everybody else's lettuce container. And you know what? Like, when I started there, I noticed immediately is that it didn't pack out a case on the shelf. And I was like, we need to make this a little bit more shallow and wide so that we could pack out a full case. Otherwise, like, every time, you guys understand. So there's just, like, some basic things that your sales team would understand. Like, they would recognize right away if you didn't have enough to pack out if the product didn't fit the shelf. Right.

30:50
Janice Greenwald
So, anyway, I wanted to show those examples because, like, I make mistakes and I learn from them. And that's. I think part of the thing about doing this for so long is that I've seen a lot of errors. Another one I see commonly, actually, is chips is like, no. Like, there's these chip bags on shelf, y'.

31:05
Daniel Scharff
All.

31:05
Janice Greenwald
They have a lot of air in them. And you don't want to be the brand that has a full chip bag, but it's a tiny chip bag because you're competing against the big brands, the big bags. You want to look at what everybody has and be parody to them on shelf. Does that make sense?

31:22
Daniel Scharff
It does make sense to me, and I hope everyone does that exercise of actually, like, once you even get close to final stuff before you print, just to go and, like, print out, using your home printer, what your label might look like, and go and tape it on some product that will resemble the one that you have and actually just go and put it on the shelf and think about it even I've talked to brands who for buyer meetings would just go buy a competitive product that looked like the tube or whatever that their product was going to go in and then just bring crappy print out of what their branding looked like to save them from having to print up expensive mock stuff. But also just, you know, get to see what it really looks like on shelf.

31:59
Janice Greenwald
Thinking of mocks, FYI, because this comes up a lot in the channel, there are some really good places to get mock packaging. So you don't need to do like a packaging run. It's expensive. But if you want to have a high quality product to take to a buyer, it's not so much a leave behind because it's about $100 per unit, 50 to 100. There's a lot of companies but I also shout out like virtual packaging is a really popular one that people use. I think they're out of Texas. I've been using them for like 10 years or so. Really great for product comps. Super high end. Great for trade shows. Like if you're launching something ahead of being able to produce it and you want to showcase it at expo, you need a final mechanical.

32:36
Janice Greenwald
But you could even have like a FPO for your nutrition facts or something like that. But they'll print you like the bag, the pouch, the container, whatever it is.

32:44
Daniel Scharff
You said fpo.

32:45
Janice Greenwald
Oh, FPO means for position only. Like if you're putting like a fake nutrition panel on, oftentimes designers write FPO on it.

32:52
Daniel Scharff
Oh, that's cool.

32:54
Janice Greenwald
Yeah, so that people don't print it and think it's final. But the company's called virtual packaging and they make beautiful stuff.

32:59
Daniel Scharff
That's a good shout out. All right, next one I want to get into with you. So we talked about it a little bit when were talking about PR and social media agencies. But just generally people are always asking for recommendations in the slack. Whether it's like, hey, anyone know a good PR agency or social agency or someone who's good at this or X, Y and Z. How do you think people should go about vetting them, seeing if they're actually getting the right person? Or maybe it was just the first one mentioned or maybe it is the buddy of another service provider. Like how can you know if this person really is going to be a good match for your brand?

33:33
Janice Greenwald
Recommendations are always good. I will say that like recommendations from people you trust is going to be a great start for you. I mean knowing your objectives. This always goes back to like take A step back, take a breath. Don't just say, I need a designer. Like, know what your objectives are and what you're trying to achieve so that you can find the right partner. I will say, depending on what you're looking at, it's helpful if you're posting something in the startup CPG channel to consider putting a budget. Because something like, I need help with packaging. You will get inundated with like 40 responses from freelancers who are going to charge you $300 to agencies that will charge you 100,000. So you need to have like a little bit of a range.

34:12
Janice Greenwald
Plus, the really good agencies don't have to do that as much biz dev potentially. So they have to be found by you through word of mouth and things like that.

34:19
Daniel Scharff
I agree with you. But if you're an early brand, you're like, well, I don't know how much this kind of stuff costs, so I don't want to just what's your budget?

34:27
Janice Greenwald
Like, maybe talk to other founders and say, like, what was your process for going through finding an agency or finding a freelancer? Because it is hard. Like, I don't want to say it's like a needle in a haystack. But to get truly breakthrough, I mean, there's plenty of freelance designers who can make perfectly good sell sheets, perfectly good coupons, like perfectly good, whatever, like smaller assets. But to get breakthrough and interesting packaging that isn't kind of like more of the same. Like, you do need to find these needles in a haystack, which can be really hard. So you have to know what you're looking for. And if you're looking at packaging, it's like, look at the style of the work that they've done in the past. So budget's a big one.

35:06
Janice Greenwald
Like, know what, you kind of want to spend, what you're willing to spend, things like that. Because I know it's going to help you. Like, if someone comes in too cheap, it too good to be true. It probably is too good to be true. I mean, oftentimes. Not always. Not always, but oftentimes. Right. But ask them questions like, understand their breadth of experience in cpg. Like, ask them for lots of examples. See if they've maybe worked in your category before. Like, that's even better. If they have category experience, ask them for references. I mean, you could do some back channeling as well. Like if they show you a brand that they claim that they designed, sometimes they didn't design the first iteration. Sometimes they just designed a line extension and align extension is a lot easier to design than the original brand.

35:43
Janice Greenwald
So you could always like reach out to founders and founders who've had good experiences, I'm sure are more than willing to recommend people. Or if you have a brand that you love, reach out to them and say, who did your packaging? Like, I love your packaging. I would love to talk with your designer.

35:56
Daniel Scharff
There's probably ways you can bucket it where it's like. Because, yeah, I mean, here's the reality is for anybody who's like been on the service provider side of this is like, yeah, I'm looking for somebody and I guess my budget is 20k. You're not going to pitch them something that's 6k. You're going to go and pitch them something that's 20k, that's their budget. But I think what you can try to understand is that there will be different tiers of agencies that are open. So if we talk about branding and design, for example, and it will depend on what exactly you're asking them for, like do you have a logo? Or they have to do the logo and they have to do the design for three different SKUs and different line, you know, all that stuff.

36:32
Daniel Scharff
But I think generally you could say that there are groupings where, okay, you can find some true indie freelancer type people who might be able to knock out one particular SKU or couple for let's say 5k. But it's a certain level of quality you're going to get and expect at that level as well. Then there's probably another tier that's sort of like up to 15 to 20, something like that, you know, then they're like, you get some good quality stuff in that range, hopefully you find the right person, maybe they work. It's an agency, a smaller one that's worked on a brand that you love, that kind of stuff.

37:03
Daniel Scharff
And then there's another tier that's like 50 to 100 probably where it's going to be a bigger scope of work and they probably have a couple wins in their bag that they can talk to you about and it'll be a very thoughtful process. And then I don't. There are some.

37:18
Janice Greenwald
And there's more designers on it. So one thing that I pretty passionate about is having more than one designer working on the project so that like you're getting multiple perspectives. So when you go to an agency, like there might be a lead designer. Sure. But like there's a creative director, there's a lot of people providing input into it besides just one person's kind of point of view. So one thing I've done, I haven't been like super successful with it, I will say, but I think it's a really good concept if you can hire the right people, is I've done a few times where I've hired three freelancers and paid them to do the initial concept for something. I've been super transparent.

37:53
Janice Greenwald
Like, I'm going to have you guys do the concept and then I'm going to pick one of you to take the project to the finish line based on the concepts you come up with. So at least you have a breadth of different approaches to a design. So maybe you're willing up front to say, I'm going to invest 8k in the beginning to get the right concept and then I'm going to just like spend the next 10 on the kind of execution side of it. So that's one thing I've done, is pieced it together. It is hard work. I mean, this is like, this is not easy stuff and it's finding those three designers that you think are excellent and all of that. But there's different ways to kind of do it.

38:26
Daniel Scharff
I think when the last time I hired a branding agency, they understood the scope of the project. I think when they actually did their pitch and were interviewing a couple different ones, it was so clear in their pitch that they really understood the brand and culturally aligned to it and had done similar work and had the right inspiration around it that it was just clear they were the ones we wanted.

38:49
Janice Greenwald
Yeah, I mean, it's just so different. Like freelance designers versus an agency. It's just really different. Like people who live and breathe CBG packaging all day, every day versus just like a graphic designer. Like, it's just a totally different world.

39:01
Daniel Scharff
Cool. All right, well, I think that is definitely all the right advice and it's very interesting. So maybe just to end one more question, which I know obviously as a fractional person you will have a specific point of view about this, but how do you think about when you're building your team as an early brand? Having full time people is a luxury and it's, you know, expensive. But how do you think about, like, how many marketing agencies should you be looking at versus freelancers versus when you figure out you should be hiring full time? How do you think brands should think about this as they grow?

39:37
Janice Greenwald
As you said, I'm probably very biased on this, but having done this fractional work now for a while, I'm getting more and more passionate about the model kind of Working whether it's a fractional cmo, not necessarily that, but like having specialists, right. Let's say you hire one generalist, you hire a director of marketing. A director of marketing for a startup is probably a promote up from somebody more junior. Maybe you're paying 80 or 100k, I don't know, I'm throwing that out there, right. But like that person has a lot of learning to do. Maybe they have four or five years of work experience. I mean when you can hire like specialists for each of the different functions it actually you're going to get much more senior people doing the work for you at a fraction of the price, maybe altogether.

40:20
Janice Greenwald
In the end it's going to cost your 100k employee, but you don't have any benefits, nothing like that either to contend with. So for me I have found that this concept of like having a generalist, like a fractional head of marketing and then hiring all the specialists for your needs, whether they are social or PR or whatever, it might be even shopper marketing, like having different areas of expertise covered by people who live and breathe. It makes the most sense to me. I think bringing in full time help is really helpful when this just becomes like too much on somebody's plate. But again it's like well what level are you bringing in and who are you getting rid of?

40:57
Janice Greenwald
So sometimes it's what I've seen work is like there might be a full time marketing manager but they might still have a fractional CMO to report to so that the strategy is still being overseen but there's somebody to do like a lot more of the hours of the busy work that's coming. So I think it's really helpful to have specialists.

41:16
Daniel Scharff
So just to turn this back on to you then if somebody is interviewing you, what would they be really smart to ask you as a fractional marketer to ask you and other fractional marketers like, okay, is this really the person who's going to be the best for my brand?

41:29
Janice Greenwald
Yeah, I think it really depends on like the size of your business and what you're looking for. Because for example, if you have a $20 million business, which there are people in startup CPG who do, it might be more about your leadership skills and can you manage a team of people. There might be three junior marketers on the team and already five agencies in place. Right. So like that's more about management, about strategy and management. But for a smaller brand, like I work with a lot of these like very small startups, a lot of it like, people are always asking me, like, can you execute? Like, will you. Will you execute? Right.

42:00
Janice Greenwald
So for me, it's a combination of both, like, showing off my strategic chops and showing them that I'm going to be a team member and add strategy, but also the fact that I'm willing to do execution work as well. And I know how to make a coupon, and I can probably make it faster than any marketing manager out there.

42:15
Daniel Scharff
Let's have a contest.

42:16
Janice Greenwald
I don't have layers of approval. The number of people who start up CPG that I've sent the same email, like, a cut and paste of, like, the process to make a coupon of. Like, because I've done it a hundred times now, I wouldn't even hire out for it because I'm so fast at it. It doesn't matter. I have the brief written for a designer. Like, I know exactly what I'm doing when I make my coupons at this point. But that's another thing is, like, I just don't have, like, layers of approval. So everything that I do is just, like, super fast when I execute, which is helpful. But again, so it goes. It's really varied in terms of, like, what your company needs, I would say, are if you're hiring, like, a very first marketer, then you're going to need them to execute.

42:50
Janice Greenwald
I do see people make the mistake of hiring people who are not, who just want to do strategy. And the fractional CMOs run the gamut. Some of us, I know a lot of us, Some of us are like mirror images of me. And I have plenty of people I can recommend to folks. And some are not excited to do execution and don't want to do shopper marketing, and they just want to do brand strategy, which is a different thing. And so it's important to kind of suss that out.

43:12
Daniel Scharff
I love it. And we're going to add the Make a coupon into our CPG Olympics when we run them, which will also include events like Assemble a Shipper.

43:21
Janice Greenwald
Okay. I'm not going to win on Assemble a Shipper, so I'm, like, not very handy at things. But, like, all the elements of a coupon, like the barcode, the design, sourcing, the printer, like, I got you.

43:32
Daniel Scharff
We'll. We'll have some good events. It'll be. Send out a sample who can sell the most during a demo. But there are a lot of good things.

43:38
Janice Greenwald
That's a good one. That's a good one. I like that.

43:41
Daniel Scharff
All right, well, Janice, you never disappoint. You always drop the good stuff. I really appreciate it and I encourage everybody to connect with Janice on the Slack or maybe on LinkedIn, something like that. And I am going to sing us back out here, Janice.

43:56
Janice Greenwald
Oh, am I duetting again for this one?

43:58
Daniel Scharff
Let's do it again.

43:59
Janice Greenwald
What am I supposed to say? Okay, I got it. I got it.

44:01
Daniel Scharff
Everyone ready? Here we go. All right. Got a problem? I'll help in a pickle. Let me know if you're stuck. We're here. Don't you know, don't you know, don't you know, don't you know? You can ask us anything? All right, good job. Only a little ridiculous, but yes, that's how we do it. Bye, everybody.

44:26
Janice Greenwald
Bye.

44:29
Daniel Scharff
Well, my friends, we've now arrived together at the end of another episode of the Startup CPG podcast, the top globally ranked podcast in cpg. As you may know, we're not just a podcast. We're a community of brands and experts. And you should join. You can sign up@startupcpg.com you'll then get an invite to our online Slack community. You're going to hear about amazing events near you, all of our special opportunities to get you in front of buyers, investors, brands and more. It's a free community. So what are you waiting for? I will see you there. Or on our next episode. Bye.