For Brand Strategy, GoGo squeeZ This With Mark Edmonson, Chief Marketing Officer at GoGo squeeZ
Mark Edmonson is the Chief Marketing Officer at GoGo squeeZ, where he is responsible for ensuring the sustainability and profitability of the brand while maintaining market share and positioning. His expertise lies in holistic marketing and advancing digital marketing experiences which transform a brand's way of marketing to its consumers. Mark finds brand marketing strategies that align with the company’s general approach and ensures optimal position for the brands and products. He partners with sales, finance, supply chain, and HR to identify and execute the best marketing vision and strategy.
Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:
Mark Edmonson explains where GoGo squeeZ gets the jokes that appear on its packaging
Why jokes on packaging can be of great value to a brand even if they’re corny
How GoGo squeeZ markets to both parents and young children and continues to appeal to kids as they get older
The new strategies GoGo squeeZ is using to attract new customers and introduce the brand
How GoGo squeeZ personalizes its communication from a marketing and messaging standpoint
The challenges currently faced by GoGo squeeZ
Why Mark says it’s important to take risks
What you’ll learn in this episode:
How can a food and beverage brand make a connection with its audience? Obviously, tasting good is important, but what are some other ways? What if the brand has audiences in multiple age categories? Will the same method or communication channel work the same for all generations?
When parents decide whether or not to buy a box of GoGo squeeZ, it’s usually with their children in mind. The product may taste good, but the brand should have other strategies to hold their interest to encourage repeat purchasing. According to GoGo squeeZ Chief Marketing Officer Mark Edmonson, the brand has put jokes on each beverage pouch for the past eight years to make it more fun for kids and encourage them to share the joke with their parents, so they can engage and interact with the product. Are there other ways to personalize an experience for different age groups?
On this episode of From Persona to Personal, Roger Hurni welcomes Mark Edmonson, Chief Marketing Officer at GoGo squeeZ, to discuss how to personalize a product experience for an audience of multiple age groups. Mark says it starts with understanding different cohorts. For GoGo squeeZ, the first cohort is age five and under, where parents control snacks. The second cohort is ages 6-12, who want to choose for themselves. To learn how they personalize by age group and much more, tune in!
Resources mentioned in this episode:
This episode’s sponsor:
Today’s episode is brought to you by Off Madison Ave. At Off Madison Ave, we create meaningful moments of brand trust and influence how people interact and engage with brands.
There is a science behind tapping into your audiences’ desires and motivation. After all, if you’re not changing your audiences’ behaviors, you can’t truly unlock all of your brand’s potential.
The proven models and methods of Behavior Design is the strategic foundation for your brands’ success.
Episode Transcript
Roger Hurni 0:13
Hello everyone, I'm Roger Hurni, the host of From Persona to Personal, where I get to speak with top leaders in food and beverage and I've got an amazing one today. Before I get to that, today's episode is brought to you by Off Madison Ave, at Off Madison Ave, we use behavioral science to create meaningful moments of brand trust, which influences how people interact and engage with companies. Our behavioral approach taps into your audience's motivation and prompts them to shift behavior. After all, if you're not changing the behavior of your audience is you can't truly unlock all of your brand's potential. These proven behavioral models and methods are the strategic foundation for your brand success. Today, I have with me, Mark Edmonson. He is the Chief Marketing Officer of GoGo squeeZ, where he is responsible for ensuring the sustainability and profitability of the brand while maintaining market share and positioning. Sounds like a pretty tough job. He finds those brand marketing strategies in line with the general strategy of the company and ensures the optimal position for the brands and products marked guarantees the brand image is consistent with the marketing commercial and general strategy by using the appropriate communication media and carrying out additional efficient promotional actions. In addition, he partners with cross functionality with sales, finance, supply chain and HR to identify and execute the best marketing vision and strategy. Mark has a massively big brand and be doing all of that kind of stuff. Mark, welcome to the show.
Mark Edmonson 1:47
Thanks, Roger. Thank you so much for having me.
Roger Hurni 1:51
Oh, it's a pleasure. I always like speaking to people who are like minded given your background in big product brands, like Procter and Gamble and and now with GoGo squeeZ. I have a whole host of questions, I think that the listeners will gain some great learnings from you. But the first one I think might be the most important. Yeah, where do you get the jokes from the packaging? That's what everybody wants to know.
Mark Edmonson 2:18
I think it's a mixed bag on the jokes. My consumer care team would probably tell you that we go a lot of complaints on the corny jokes. But we have a group that writes our jokes and we pop them on our couch on the bottom of the bounce. I think that's the first time anyone's ever asked me that question.
Roger Hurni 2:41
Well, I do like to say when people said I, but seriously, I know that different product, Vitamin Water, when it first was introduced, there was some very, very snarky copy. And I had another copywriter who wrote that some very, very snarky copy, they gave it personality. And I think the jokes are really not valued, because there's a personality to the brand. And I think they exemplified was that. What were the jokes planned from the beginning? Or? Or how did you get that whole thing started?
Mark Edmonson 3:15
Yeah, absolutely. The jokes have been on the bottom of the pouch for about maybe eight years. It was just really to bring fun to the pouch. Because if you think about it, the box, the out of cardigan for GoGo squeeZ, is really communication to the purchasing. Right? So the purchaser is looking to understand, what am I getting for my kid? The pouch is the fun for the kid. So we want to bring some type of fun, exciting communication, something to engage the kid on, and possibly have a moment with their parents, or being able to, you know, ask the question, ask a joke and see if their parents could get it.
Roger Hurni 4:02
I think that interaction and engagement is honestly genius. And I think people just look at the surface of the job. And they might say corny, but I will tell you all of my friends who have kids and I did a little bit of research study here prior to this interview, they're all the jokes and they do exactly what you say they actually like engaged with the kids. And one of them will tell the joke what the answer it and they have this moment that lives beyond the actual consumption of the product. And I think those behaviors that you're drawing out of them are absolutely wonderful.
Mark Edmonson 4:37
And I think that's a critical piece to the moments because now that COVID has happened. More and more families are disconnected. They sit around a table to eat consume food, but they're not connecting like they used to and we believe If and our biggest purpose right now for the brand is to become a beacon of nurture, how can we nurture those types of relationships that fostering, that those types of connections with parent and child so that we can get out of this habit, we can break the routine of disconnecting the family.
Roger Hurni 5:20
I that's, that's fantastic. I know that most organizations are flipping out over the consumer habits and how they change. And I'm not talking about just eating habits, because that's obviously sort of at the top of the of the list. But there are those connection moments. And as a brand, you found a way you wait and make the happen. Amy, you have an interesting problem that you have. You know, I mean, lots of companies have different audiences. You have two different audiences with terms of parents and kids, but they feed off of one another, and they influence one another. How do you from a marketing perspective, outside of the jokes, because that's one way of doing navigate that? Well, you also had to do it from the standpoint you said from the packaging, right? The packaging appeals to the parents, the kids jokes and product line? How do you do? How do you manage that bifurcated approach between those two audiences?
Mark Edmonson 6:26
Absolutely, that's the that's a fun task to have. And it really starts with understanding different cohorts. So when I talk about cohorts, let's take households with kids under the age of five, those households have no say in what happens to them, what goes inside their body is controlled by a parent. Because we know that we ensure that we're designing everything for the purchaser, which is typically the parent and making sure that they understand what beyond just fun and playful is this kid getting from GoGo squeeZ, but also the functional nutrients that we're going to provide through this wholesome snack. So that's point one. The second cohort, six to 12. This is the cohort where they've been introduced to a lot more snacks and their parents have introduced them to why because they went off to school, they may have went to a game sporting event, and one of their friends may have had a fun snack that their parents had never purchased that for them. Whether that's a salty treat, or a sweet treat is something beyond possibly GoGo squeeZ. So now they're going to start demanding the six to 12 year old, they have a voice and they want to demand what they have. And parents then lose control, they give it up and they're like, whatever makes you happy. We'll give it to you. So by knowing those two things, what we then do is we work on ensuring that everything we do from packaging, to pouch design, to our communication to the parent, we just put that lens on it to make sure that we are messaging those specific cohorts in the right way at the right time.
Roger Hurni 8:30
That's that's very, very, very smart. It's probably why you also have a very wide range of flavor profiles. Has there been given thought to package design shifts as those two cool hordes sort of age so that they it becomes a little different? I don't know if you're doing that or not. I'm just.
Mark Edmonson 8:52
Oh, we know you're absolutely correct. We recently launched a product called those threes bit bigger pouch, it's 120 grams, our typical pouch is 90 grams. The design is incredible. We actually bring in we we took off all the characters and the characters are typically core to logos. These people recognize our characters, we remove them because a kid six to 12 they want to be cooler, you know, they want to have some form of a badge to actually carry around. We create a design that has that's full of color we actually brought in through photography versus sometimes we we are photography in regards to fruit is a little bit more playful. This is a little bit more serious. And that's how we plan to track this older target.
Roger Hurni 9:54
How how very smart how are you how you acquiring new customers, then you get your packaging, what kind of marketing strategies are you using to to attract new customers and introduce the brand?
Mark Edmonson 10:10
Yeah, this year, we tried something different. We had a holistic marketing plan that reached out to those households with kids under 12, through radio. So I know a lot of people may not use radio today. But I think it's a great math reach tool to reach your demographic. So we've been leveraging radio and not just the traditional radio, but actually looking at streaming. During the pandemic, a lot of people's behaviors change. And right now someone's listening to this podcast, and they may hear a GoGo squeeZ ad, because we were going after those households that will potentially listening to streaming music or podcasts. But then you know, that's just driving awareness of the brand, we then go into our consideration part of our funnel, where we layer on a lot of digital, and we've had some great success with video in the digital landscape, to really just tell our story, and we have a very immersive story to tell. We have a campaign called squeeze out their best. It's a campaign that we launched last year, and we it's strictly video content that talks about kids who they had to overcome a big challenge, and their parents helped them overcome that challenge. And by that their parents were squeezing out their best, then finally, we've been leveraging a lot sharper media. Shopper media is a hot topic right now with a lot of the retailers coming out with their retail media groups, we've been opting into a lot of them testing and learning certain ways to actually drive conversion. So I will tell you that that's our way right now to actually attract new buyers, I forgot to mention, we also have local marketing activity, old school, but I love it, we have a group called the squeeze squad. It's a local marketing group spread out across different cities and states in the US, they create programming that are, that's basically tied into our US Soccer sponsorship, to really engage people at a local market level, we're doing sampling, we're sharing product benefits of our new innovation, but that's also helping us drive new consumers into our portfolio.
Roger Hurni 12:48
So it, you know, I think, a good learning here, I'm gonna point it out to people because I think I might be missed. So many people will look at a campaign. And they just changed that campaign based on the channel. So it's like, here's the idea. And then here's what it looks like on Snapchat. And here's what looks like on Instagram, here's what looks like, it's not the report here. So it looks like an on radio. It sounds like you have multiple campaigns running in yours honestly have to change and adapt as customers interact with them. Because your customers are literally maturing every year. And their their tastes are changing, that what they're attracted to is changing. That's your marketing to a moving target. And I think that's really, really hard. It's Is that a fair assessment?
Mark Edmonson 13:37
It’s a fair assessment. We still have the campaign idea, one singular campaign idea, but we're definitely bringing it to life in different ways across multiple different channels. And you're absolutely correct, consumer preference is changing. Often, consumers are getting bombarded by so much content that we have to be quick in being able to be agile about how we change our messaging. That's super critical.
Roger Hurni 14:07
Yeah, I noticed that honestly, with my own children, you know, the way you and I were raised, we didn't have exposure to as many marketing messages or, or any kind of content. And today, it's just it's so difficult to break through the clutter. If you're not making every message relevant in a way that can tap into the motivations of that audience. You're not going to see success, the work is just going to be wasted wasted money at that point.
Mark Edmonson 14:42
Absolutely. And, and you're upset the consumer by they also don't want to be bombarded by useless content. They want content that's actually going to enrich their lives. So it's super important to build the right content strategy.
Roger Hurni 15:01
You know, you, you make another one before point a lot of people I interview and a lot of things that I read. And even in my home work when we're looking at shifting consumer behavior, personalization is a really big deal. And some companies are tapping into and doing a little bit better of a job. Others pay lip service to it. Are you I mean, there's a personalization that happens in the experience of GoGo squeeZ, naturally, but from a marketing and messaging perspective, are you able to do any sort of one to one, you mentioned the local teams, but what else is there for you to to tap into a certain level of personalization, and maybe even at scale?
Mark Edmonson 15:45
Oh, I'm dying to get there with this friend. And my past lives, personalization was critical. I can never forget. One of the last campaigns that I conducted on the personal brand carousel is a laundry brand made by Henkel German based company. But I was able to work on a campaign for the brand, leveraging Rondelle targets Media Group, to actually be able to create messages based on segmentation. And not only were we able to craft different messages, but we were also able to change up imagery based on what we knew of that set segments profile. And through that, we were able to optimize to the best, best creative, best messaging to actually drive the best return on investment. And we did see better engagement when you lead with personalization. So I cannot wait to bring that to life on this brand. I think our our challenge right now it's just managing the foundation. And hopefully in the next year or so we'll be able to get to personalization.
Roger Hurni 17:07
Excellent, excellent. Outside of that, kind of curious, what are the challenges that you're facing? Now? I
Mark Edmonson 17:15
think the biggest challenge right now for me, you know, this looming cloud of Google removing cookies, and what brand do now that cookies, at some point, I think now is 2024 will be removed? And what do we need to build as a foundation to be able to lock what cookies unlocked for the brand? Think that's one big challenge that we're working through. And I come from big companies. So we already had things established, like consumer relationship marketing programs that allowed us to store all this rich information about consumer, because they've opted into a brand. We don't have that. So I'm starting from scratch. That's new for me, I'm super excited about this opportunity to try to figure out what's next. Because I don't believe building these huge databases is the next thing. I want to figure out something unique and different. And to be able to help my brand. See once cookies are gone.
Roger Hurni 18:23
Yeah, I know, there are tons of companies and everyone I speak to third party data going away privacy being an issue. The cookies going away, it is a struggle for many, many, many companies. I know that when I've done some of my counseling, you know, shifting to a behavioral platform, you know, so that you can have said the same kinds of customer insights from a behavioral perspective. I know that's a shift some kinds of organizations are making. It's a tough challenge. It's a tough challenge. You're not alone. You're definitely not alone in that. That being said, what advice do you have for others in your industry, your your experiences is amazing. So what advice would you have for them?
Mark Edmonson 19:13
Absolutely. And my biggest advice is take risks, and fail quick. I don't know how many people you know, believe in that. But I truly believe and learnings come from failure. And if you're not learning from your failures, you're not going to grow with grow professionally. So I throughout my career, I can tell you, I've made a lot of mistakes. But through those mistakes I learned and I got better. And what I learned about having mistakes was always communicate quick that oh, this is a mistake or oh this is not going to work so that people knew ahead of time and that you can manage people's expectations. And then immediately after that, talk about what you learned, what went wrong? How would you repair what went wrong? And what will you've done different? So that's my biggest advice. I think people are so terrified of failure, because they're thinking that that's going to stop the career. But I'm proof that you can fail and still get to the top.
Roger Hurni 20:27
That's amazing advice. Thank you. I think everyone can take something away from that. All right, I got two questions for you. We can wrap up. First question is, look, it's just you and me here. What kind of big announcements? Can you tell me about that? You can't tell anybody else?
Mark Edmonson 20:48
Oh, that's a great one. Well, we are, you know, for our brand, we're currently in the process of launching. It's pre launching right now with Walmart, and mazing platform that allows us to bring functional nutrition to households with kids under five. That platform is soft launching right now at Walmart. But we plan to make a huge splash next year with all of our retail partners. That's that's it's juicy if I can get you.
Roger Hurni 21:25
Okay, fair enough. Fair enough. I won't press because I don't want to get anybody in trouble. Trouble. I have one or two questions I always wrap up the show with based on the advice that you give, and I kind of feel like this one leads the top. Where do you get your inspiration from?
Mark Edmonson 21:47
Most of my inspiration, right now, is coming from the younger generation of marketers, I now have conversations with up and rising brand managers and associate brand managers and even students at universities and they're telling me all the new things that they're learning from a marketing perspective, new ways of communicating to consumers, new channels that they're learning at university. And quite frankly, that's, that's inspiring to me. Because it allows me to know that, you know, as a leader, you're hoping that you're inspiring the next generation. But I also want the next generation to inspire me and help me continue to grow within my career. So I've been leaning a lot on just the younger generation helping me understand what attracts them because they are going to be the future of who we target, and how we can actually get them to convert to being GoGo squeez virus in the future.
Roger Hurni 22:59
Wonderful, wonderful. I love it. Well, I really appreciate you being on the show. I had been speaking with Mark Edmonson who's GoGo squeeZ's Chief Marketing Officer. Mark, tell me, tell everybody where they can learn more about you and more about GoGo squeeZ.
Mark Edmonson 23:16
Awesome. Yes, you can go to www.gogosqueez.com to learn more about our product. And you can follow me on LinkedIn. Mark Anthony Edmonson on LinkedIn.
Roger Hurni 23:31
Perfect, perfect. Well, Mark, again, thank you so much. This is Roger Hurni, From Persona to Personal and we'll see you next time.
