How Do You Market a 128-Year-Old Brand? Word-of-Mouth With Venae Watts, Owner of Minerva Dairy
Venae Watts is one of the two fifth-generation owners of Minerva Dairy, where she combines her aptitude for creating the richest, creamiest batch of butter with her knack for unmistakable branding and shrewd business instincts. She is responsible for overseeing production, sales strategy, and marketing. Thanks to Venae’s vision, the 128-year-old Minerva is now known for its dynamic packaging and vibrant marketing campaigns.
Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:
Venae Watts explains how Minerva Dairy went from 26 locations, where butter and cheese are made, to one
What did Venae learn from the operational changes mandated by the pandemic?
How Minerva Dairy has stayed relevant through five generations over its 128 years
Venae discusses the product extensions that Minerva Dairy has implemented
What is cold smoke butter?
Minerva Dairy’s most effective marketing method
What potential difficulties keep Venae up at night?
Why Minerva Dairy still uses an old-fashioned churn to make butter
What you’ll learn in this episode:
If your brand has been around for 128 years and people haven’t sampled a taste, what can you do to get your product noticed so they’ll give it a try?
According to Venae Watts, a fifth-generation owner of Minerva Dairy, the answer is simple: word-of-mouth. She proudly states that making a quality product and getting someone to taste it speaks for itself. Once that happens, Venae has found that people want to talk about it and says Minerva Dairy is often tagged on various social media channels by enthusiastic customers who want to share the tasty benefits of using the family-owned company’s products.
On this episode of From Persona to Personal, Roger Hurni welcomes Venae Watts, a fifth-generation Owner of Minerva Dairy, to discuss the most effective ways to market a brand that has been in business for well over a century. Venae talks about the benefits of being a family-owned business for multiple generations and why word-of-mouth has been the brand’s most effective marketing channel. She explains why Minerva Dairy has evolved in some ways but remains strategically old-fashioned in others.
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
Intro 0:02
This is From Persona to Personal podcast. Today's episode is brought to you by Off Madison Ave. Off Madison Ave creates meaningful moments of brand trust and influences how people interact and engage with brands. The science behind their approach taps into your audience's motivations and desires. After all, if you're not changing your audience's behaviors, you can't truly unlock all of your brand's potential. Now, let's get started with the show.
Roger Hurni 0:35
Hello, everyone, I am Roger Hurni, the host of From Persona to Personal, where I get to speak with top leaders changing consumer behavior so they can propel their brands forward. Before I get to today's guest. This 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. And if you're not changing your audience's behaviors, you truly can't unlock all of your brand's potential. These proven behavioral models and methods are the strategic foundation for your brand success. Visit offmadisonave.com to learn more. And today I'm really pumped to have with me, Venae Watts. She is one of two fifth generation owners of the 128 year old Minerva Dairy, and she oversees production sales Strategy, marketing, Venae has married her instinct to create the richest creamiest batch of butter, which I can attest to, within a cute business savvy and a knack for truly unmistakable branding. Venae’s vision has propelled Minerva into a company not only for its time tested quality, but its dynamic packaging and vibrant marketing campaigns. And on a little side note when she's not trimming up really interesting flavor combinations. To take the dairies butter recipe to the next level, the nays reading, traveling and preparing for the next generation of cheese and butter makers, Venae, welcome to the show.
Venae Watts 2:13
Thank you for having me.
Roger Hurni 2:15
Please correct me everything I got wrong there. Nothing. I think you got it right. Oh, my God, you did it. Usually I mess that up. And that becomes an edit. But that's not today. So I'm feeling good. This is a really fascinating brand. Most companies don't make it past 28 months, let alone 128 years. I know it started in 1894, because I did a little bit of research. So that was obviously a very good year for the dairy business. And you have a really rich history. Can you tell us a little bit more about that? And what makes the dairy so special? And the products you produce a lot to unpack in that question, but
Venae Watts 3:00
varies a lot on their salary history. We'll start I back in at 94 Our founding father which was like Max P brava what they think is my great, great, great grandpa, if ur great, great if you go back all that way. But it was out of necessity. At that time, you couldn't transfer milk very far refrigeration. So he started bringing together the family farms and saying, Hey, you're going to make butter and cheese on your farm and everyone around you is going to bring them out to you. And at one time we had a 26 locations in Wisconsin and Ohio. And now today we're in one location and Minerva, Ohio, I think we were number 22. But it was all said and done. But there's only one location now in Minerva, Ohio, thanks to the modernization of transferring refrigerated mouth and tankers that you may see on the road from time to time. So we're we're now in our fifth generation, and we are training the sixth generation of butter and cheese makers. So we have kids from as young as grade school, through college, and the next generation and we made sure that we were good to go out and find generations, I have seven kids, my brother has six kids. So one of them is getting, you know, one or many will to you know, continue the tradition.
Roger Hurni 4:15
That's one way to get quality and loyal employees.
Venae Watts 4:19
And if you want it really helped out during October, we had a lot of high school and college family to rely on to help work.
Roger Hurni 4:26
Oh, that that is spectacular. You know, let me ask you about that. And I'm gonna skip ahead to some questions. But since you brought up the COVID thing, I gotta imagine COVID didn't affect you all that much. Maybe because people were at home baking and cooking so much, but maybe I'm wrong. Is it? What what happened during COVID for you and
Venae Watts 4:48
yeah, for us, we kind of had the opposite effect of everybody else. We actually had more work to do. Because we do make a you know both of our cheese and butter at the end and up on the retail shelf. Have the butter and our brand. And then the cheese in goes to another few manufacturer, but the end product does end up on the retail shelf. So for us it was that uncertainty. And that needs to come together to make sure that we were doing what we need to do as being a food manufacturer, we need to stay open, we need to make sure that we had everything in place where the protocol for what's happening with COVID set of employees were safe. And we were safe here working but also that we could increase production during that time to make sure that product didn't stay on the shelf. And so we ran and ran more during COVID than we did any time and a lot of people did jobs that they were only to do I had a great, great group here with me, great team, my employees are great. Everybody says what do we need to do? And we that's what we did?
Roger Hurni 5:44
Did you was there was there any lesson learned during that time that you're carrying over to today,
Venae Watts 5:50
I would probably just say Teamwork was a good lesson that we all learned. I learned a lot about who we are as a company, more than we knew we were very family ordering oriented companies in our culture. And that really came to light to you know, say, Hey, we're a family owned business, family culture. And when the time was needed, we were that like, everyone came together and had each other like, you know, hey, I don't normally do this job. But I it's needed over here. And you know where I can help? I will help. So I think that servant mindset leadership, family, is what we learned. And hey, we may say we have this, but we now know we actually do because when you get tested through a pandemic, it really shows you know, you really see who you are. As a company is females. It's our family. Yeah.
Roger Hurni 6:37
It seems like your family and so roll up the sleeves and get the job done. group of people that may be all your employees are.
Venae Watts 6:45
Yeah, I guess we are, we're kind of that's a little bit of our culture is we're all hands on managers or owners. I live across the street from the creamery. So I'm here right now. And my brother lives a five minute drive. He lives right outside of town, you know, but he is five minutes away. My dad walked to work. So when we were younger, we were right here. So it's the involvement. We're here every day, with everyone doing what they're doing.
Roger Hurni 7:14
Yeah. In business school, they call that cross functional utilization. So you could easily thrived at that.
Venae Watts 7:21
Maybe I learned that, but not the turn. fashioned way by doing it not by reading about it. Yes.
Roger Hurni 7:28
Well, you you discover should something that is taught in business school. So there you got, you know, I want to get into some other things. There are really famous brands that died, because they never stayed relevant. Sears Howard Johnson's like, I mean, the list is, is really long. How has your brand done that? How, how have you stayed relevant to every generation?
Venae Watts 7:59
Well, I'm I don't know how exactly we did, we did. But I think a lot of it has to do with change part of our mindset. And as family isn't, as we always said, The only thing that won't, you know there's going to not change is change, there's always going to be change, you have to change with it, you have to listen to the customer. And another if you make a good quality product, then you're going to stick around. So guess keep it simple. Make a quality product and listen to what your customer needs.
Roger Hurni 8:27
Yep. Does that include? Now product extensions? I mean, what are you doing in that area?
Venae Watts 8:34
We do, we work on a flavored infused butter. So that would be a product extension. That was something that the customer brought to us that the consumers were looking for more in their butter, more flavors, more options, different things. So our first one we came up with was the garlic and herb butter in our label. So that one is a flavor infused with garlic and herbs that's into our sea salt, butter. And then we also do a lot of r&d for private label, we have recipes that we keep on hand, or we can try and duplicate a recipe that maybe a consumer has for themselves, that they're like hey, you know, I came up with this recipe in the kitchen and I want to you know, but how do we move that into the church into a creamery type, you know, dairy atmosphere. And so that's something that we specialize in that we've listened to this over the years that that's what they're looking for the consumers looking to have that added flavor and the premium butter like so you could call them finishing butters. Or you know when they want to add it to a dish they want a certain flavor. We did another one called a smoke butter that you want to bring that smoky flavor to your dishes but you don't have the smokehouse you know at the you know out your back door in a restaurant so we called smoke butter with maple wood chips and that's something that adds a different layer of flavor when you're cooking in the kitchen. So
Roger Hurni 9:50
we wait this is like a you know pseudo amateur cook and I mean amateur with capital letters and an exclamation point. What is cold smoke Okay,
Venae Watts 10:00
so normally, when you smoke meats or other things in the smokehouse you bro, you know, you get a fire going, and it's getting hot. Well, if you went to do that with butter, what would happen? It would throw it everywhere. So you have to keep the wood chips, but you have to have the smoke come over to the butter when it's not hot, it still has the flavors that the butter can absorb. So it's like a 40 degree smoke instead of the hotter smoke. So it's a different controlled.
Roger Hurni 10:32
It's really, really fascinating. There's something else that you do that, that I've not seen anyone else do on their site? Because Because butter is such a staple. I mean, I always loved that joke, like, what's the three ingredients of French Cooking butter, butter and butter? Please tell me, you've heard that joke.
Venae Watts 10:48
Might not. But I'm gonna use it now.
Roger Hurni 10:54
You're totally gonna use it all the time. Yeah. Anyway, you do something interesting on your website. And maybe this is an area we don't want to talk about. But people are always looking for interesting food or recipes, you have a shop button on your site. And when you go off, it looks like it links off to a third party site. And I don't know if your butters and all those companies or you're just featured. But it is an amazing resource of, of food products that you can you can order and I don't think you're associated with the company. Or maybe you're just that's a link but you know, the whole like New York foods and La foods and what's what's the association I was the name of the good billion things off call
Venae Watts 11:40
belly gold belly there. Now if you're a foodie, and you liked food from different areas, you know, like New York, or if you like certain breads from Tampa or like it wherever you want to go, they get a lobster roll from main goal belly is like a foodies. You know, access to those foods that you can't get unless you travel there
Roger Hurni 12:00
are. So what's the association with them and the Strategy behind connecting that on your website?
Venae Watts 12:05
Well, they hold our shop. So our website has our products and our information, but it's an have an actual e commerce page. So the reason when you hit the shop and you go to go belly site is because they're holding our E commerce site. And we still see if you order some butter off a go belly, I'm still the ones going to pack it in office here and shipping out. We're just having them host our E commerce portion of the site.
Roger Hurni 12:29
But still with me, indeed, I got to imagine it's good for your brand reputation to be associated with so many other great products that are unique, and a bit of high quality, at least perceived to be that way.
Venae Watts 12:44
Yeah, I think it does. If you're, you know, because you might get fired our product a different way getting on globally, maybe you look for someone else's site, and then you got on there and you look around. So it makes sense is we're a premium butter used to make, you know, essentially an ingredient in your kitchen. So if you're also ordering other foods that you're looking for that, you know, higher and premium ingredients and foods and we're all found in one place.
Roger Hurni 13:07
So that's that's one way that people discover you what, what has been your most successful marketing efforts for getting the dairy out there and people really learning about you.
Venae Watts 13:21
Word of mouth, it's been my best marketing just making a quality product and you know, getting someone to taste it. And that speaks for itself. That's been the best way a lot of people is that oh, my friend told me about you or I was at someone's house and they had this button and ask them what it was. Or you know, I was in a store when I was traveling I found your better now I want to find it my local store. So our best you know, marketing has just been getting a quality product out there and having consumers try it customers try it and and talk about it.
Roger Hurni 13:52
Have you tried leveraging any of those kinds of word of mouth, turning it like into a campaign on social media where people can sort of just talk about it? Have you done a lot of that kind of work or any of that kind of work?
Venae Watts 14:06
No, I have not but that's a great idea. I feel like I should know I probably should that's probably very well we've done a lot of camp, influencer campaigns as an ingredient so recipes if you go to the website, we have a lot of recipes that influencers have made with our product that I thought other people would like to you know have when they're in their house with the butter saying okay, I want something different to make and they can go to the website and find some recipes. Some of the recipes on there, they'll say, you know, we'll give credit out for an influencer but if it doesn't give me credit outs, probably they're my recipe, my husband's recipe or my grandma's recipe or my mom's recipe. So we put our own family recipes also on there. But you know that's one way we tried to help with by word of mouth saying okay, now I got this great butter what I do with it, but we haven't done a campaign that just says a talk about your dairy barn or why you love it. So maybe that'll be next.
Roger Hurni 14:59
Well, you have Uh, and a massive amount of evangelists that love your product, because I mean, in all honesty, the reason food tastes good in the finish food is because the quality ingredients that go into it, you know, and and if I don't use local ingredients here in Arizona, anything I make doesn't taste as good because it has to get trucked in from San Joaquin Valley or something. And next, that extra three or four or five days of transport, right, the food just doesn't. It's not as fresh as when I lived in San Francisco. So I try to always buy locally grown kinds of stuff. When you have a high quality product like butter, it's such a main ingredient into the flavor profiles of anything you make, it's, of course your food's gonna come out better. And
Venae Watts 15:45
yeah, you know, I mean, best chefs and everyone will tell you, you know, you have good ingredients, and you keep it simple, and you let those flavors shine and butter is, you know, a premium ingredient that will make the other flavors of your dishes stand out.
Roger Hurni 15:58
Well, you need to leverage that army of evangelists that you have out there who love because it's not like snooty foodie, I mean, there are those, right. But there's so many people out there who they end up going to a restaurant or cooking at home, like food's expensive. And if you if you're gonna put something in your, in your body, at least make it make it taste good, make it feel good, you know, and your, your product seem to grow out there anyway, that's social media for you, that's, that's an opportunity that you can take advantage of, and happy to give you that idea. Or for that,
Venae Watts 16:28
thank you. I might I mean, that's just my you know, but a lot of people do it already on their own on social media. So it would be something you I get a lot of messages or write about, you know, tags, like, you know, 500 about or making, you know, making this recipe, so that's good.
Roger Hurni 16:43
Well, that's that opportunity of social listening, and then taking content and weighing in on it and leveraging it in some way short, in some way, shape, or form amplifying it. You know, there's there's efforts there to to really spread that out. I'm kind of curious, you know, after 128 years, what's, what are the biggest challenges you're facing now I vote what's keeping you up at night?
Venae Watts 17:05
Wow, the other bag of things keeping me up at night would be thinking about new flavors, what is going to be trending next year, what customers are looking for, like the day went on, you know, what flavors are coming up, and you'd like to see in butter, what would go well, and for gradients. So that's, that's the fun stuff. Probably the other things that I look at just longevity, to make sure that we continue to grow, and that we're going the right way, and that we grow at the right speed. You know, we've been here for a long time. So we want to keep growing, we're bigger today than we were yesterday. And that we want to keep going that direction. But we don't want to go too fast. We want slow growth, we're a family business, and we enjoy what we're doing. And we want to keep doing it and keep expanding new things. But we also don't want, you know, we're not looking to excel and be you know, humongous and publicly traded and take over the world. You know, it's not our it's not our goal as a family, but it is our goal to definitely be here to outlive ourselves. So tip artists, something that's bigger than ourselves. My generation was thought of before I was, you know, born and the next generation, the seventh generation, we are thinking about them also.
Roger Hurni 18:16
That's fantastic. You know, in the in the scheme of growing too fast. I mean, obviously, going crazy and becoming this nationally recognized unaided awareness brand is, is crazy for a lot of companies. I mean, sometimes keeping it small, you really main control. But if you were to get an extra 20% in sales next year, does that too fast? Or is that like
Venae Watts 18:42
growth? No, no, that that's we did an expansion in our bedroom that we had planned. Great timing, for March of 2020. So that's when we planned our expansion. So it did when I say I have a great team and a great team, because we had expansion plan equipment arriving right when the pandemic hit. So we do have room for volume, we're not at capacity with our curtain setup here. So we can definitely expand 20% Just with what we currently have under, you know already in play it we have to add additional lines right now. So we're not even at capacity for space. And we're not at capacity for the current production that we have. So there's a lot of room for growth, just what we already had set up a few years ago. So we're Mize that. So we want to keep doing that. But we want to also make sure that we hold the quality to it because I you know being a brand that excels and goes everywhere. Sometimes they're really great but and their quality is really good but to get really really bad. They have to sacrifice something. But that's not something that we want to do we'd rather stay besides we are and you know we enjoy life. We enjoy what we're doing. But continue to, you know, get better and bigger but at the pace that we can we can go well, we want to make it not the way you No, others have made it.
Roger Hurni 20:01
I agree I plenty of opportunities and I have worked for for massive companies and the stuff I do now it's small, but it's much more enjoyable. It's definitely much more rewarding.
Venae Watts 20:13
I think when you're it is, you know, like you said, We're here our sleeves are rolled up or part of it. You can see something come to life, it's now a lot more rewarding work.
Roger Hurni 20:23
Absolutely. Let me take the the other side of the equation. What is What are you most excited about right now? Like what's happening in the business that you're, you're super pumped about.
Venae Watts 20:36
I'm really excited about their new partnership that we just partnered with Adelina food distributors. That's something new for us. I've worked with their team. They're a family owned business and generational family owned business also. And we're partnering together so it'll help Minerva Dairy butter reach across the United States, and hopefully into Canada would be something for the future. Because right now, we're just naturally just shipped to the United States, but they have the distribution capability for North America. So I'm excited to partner with them be national distributor, but we're not in every area. So you can't say hey, I'm in this area of the country, I can't find you. Well, we're nationally distributed. But that doesn't mean you might not have to drive an hour and a half, to wherever you are to find us in some areas if you're not near, you know, big city or certain chains. So I'm excited to see the reach of our product to reach more people that are saying, How come I can't find one over dere here. So that's our bugs.
Roger Hurni 21:29
All right. Well, you have been really wonderful a time I have just one last question for you. What you don't do is as important as what you do do. And so many times when you have a business, I'm sure for generations, your family has been like, do you need to do this? And someone said like, that's a great idea. I'm kind of curious as to what's the worst advice you've ever gotten can be in the business can be personal. But you were like, No, I'm not going to take that.
Venae Watts 21:59
Now worst advice, all that I don't know, the worst advice I've ever gotten. I've gotten some great advice. I guess I have gotten some bad advice before. But
Roger Hurni 22:09
that's a good one. Hopefully, it wasn't your parents saying go into the dairy business.
Venae Watts 22:14
They didn't we everyone, including my kids, we always had the option. And I wasn't going to the dairy business. I was at it. I was like, No, I'm not doing what mom and dad want me to do. I'm not going to do whatever he wants to do. And I would do my own thing. I guess it'd be good advice because I was in college. And I was not doing it. I guess I was taking my own advice, or just being a teenager, and in my early 20s, do what I want. And then I was taking, I was a biology major in chemistry major. And I really liked the sciences. And I was in there. And so my grades weren't that great, though, when I started getting the harder courses. So I flipped over the business and economics and pick up a class and she raised my GPA family professor sat me down and he goes, Why are you not in here as a major? Like, who? Why are you taking these classes to help boost your GPA? And then it dawned on me like, you know, do what you love? Maybe that fight? You know them like, yeah, naturally. Why? Why that comes easy. Why not do more of that and learn more in that direction? But that is the opposite answer to what you just asked me. So the worst advice that I was giving you time to bank? I probably think the worst? Yeah, I'm just stalling. Do you like my style technique, they are all totally I'm stalling on you. The worst advice ever got was to be trendy. I have gotten some advice from different, you know, you reach out to third party to help you with like, where should we go next? Or what consumers want? Where do they want to do and they gave me a very trendy advice to how to change up our packaging and change up our flavor profile. And that's not who we are. And that's not what the consumer expects from us, because we're long a business has been around a long time. And we know what we do and we do it well, we do some flavors, but trying to keep those flavors as an ingredient flavor that you can add in your kitchen, and not the trendy flavors. That was that was some advice that we tried a little bit and I was like, well, we knew better than this. Why do we listen to that?
Venae Watts 24:05
Yeah, you know, the problem I see in marketing, and we're good law companies new is really appealing for a lot of people. But it's fleeting, you know, it just changes dynamically all the time. But that that emotional level of nostalgia is it's something that people connect with. And it does last for generations. And I find that to be much, much more powerful from a marketing perspective than the bright shiny object that lasts three months and goes away.
Venae Watts 24:38
Yes, that's I didn't have to learn that I was everyone's doing this, you need to be doing this or nobody does that anymore. You should change and it's like, well, maybe that's why we made all these generations we still have a batch churn and we still bashed her in our product. And that's something that we've never changed but we've been you know, told by a lot of you know, they're so new equipment. Why do you just We'll do the old fashioned church you can have brand new, shiny everything we're like, but if you take away the Batchi take away this, you know, the magic of the art of crafting on it.
Roger Hurni 25:11
Very true. Very true. Well, I appreciate you being on the show. I had been speaking with Venae Watts. She's a co-owner of Minerva Dairy. Venae where can people learn more about you and Minerva Dairy?
Venae Watts 25:26
I am, you can go to our website, Minervadairy.com. And there's part you can learn about our history and our products there. We're also on social media, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and contrast.
Roger Hurni 25:37
Wonderful. Well, again, enjoy the interview immensely. Thank you so much, everyone. I am Roger Hurni. This is From Persona to Personal. We'll see you next time.
Outro 25:47
Thanks for listening to From Persona to Personal, the podcast that takes a closer look into how organizations personalize their marketing. We'll see you again next time and be sure to click Subscribe to get future episodes.
