Marketing Can't Save Bad Products

Speaker 1 0:22

Hey, welcome back to Marketing Qualified. I'm Mike Griffin and I'm Chris Newman. Chris, happy Friday to you, Real Friday, just like every other episode that we've recorded right.

Speaker 2 0:32

Of course. Of course, Friday after 5 pm or 6 pm.

Speaker 1 0:35

Naturally, eastern, eastern. If you're selling the West Coast, we're going to help you, of course.

Speaker 2 0:40

Right, exactly, yep, hey, speaking of things that can't be helped man, I have to say I don't want to turn this into like a rings of power, uh, like dissection podcast, but are you, are you caught up? How far along are you? Um, I grudgingly got through episode five, where I'm pretty sure my wife and I both spent more time on our phones doing whatever was more interesting on our phones than watching the show. But it was on and we did get through episode five and I think that the sixth episode just came out yesterday, uh, during the uh, the patriots game, when they got the shit kicked out of them by the jets whoosh, uh.

Speaker 1 1:14

There's so much bad stuff in those couple of sentences that you just said, not the least of which are the, the pats and the jets. I too have finished episode five. I too share, too, share the sentiment. It's actually a pretty good measure of engagement. I have no idea how you track this without breaking all kinds of privacy laws, but second screen time when a primary show is on the screen is actually something of interest. We should look into that. There's our get rich quick idea.

Speaker 2 1:42

We've got to get rich quick but we've got to stay out of jail Right of that. There's our get rich quick idea.

Speaker 1 1:50

we gotta get rich quick, but we gotta stay out of jail right it's like, uh, like picture in picture, like you remember picture in picture back in the day where you could have like, oh my god, did nfl red zone just copy picture in picture and make it better I'm pretty sure.

Speaker 2 1:58

Yeah, because you used to. You used to only be able to get the games in your market. And if you want to watch, like a west coast game and you're on the east coast, then red zone is basically picture in picture, for you know, watching games that you can't get in your market, yeah, it's genius, yeah, that's real talk. Uh, talking about a good product, I mean, it doesn't get much better than that. I mean, at this point, I, I think you know watching any other game other than the patriots, even though I'm a I'm a big patriots fan.

Speaker 2 2:24

I've lived in new england most of my life, um, or pretty much all my life, except for one one year, not in new england. But yeah, I, I mean, it's just, it's so terrible to watch like it's just not even enjoyable. They're just not investing in the team at all and it's, you know, it's just the same shit as last year, just with different players and a different coach, and I'd almost rather watch, like, pretty much any other game of a team that I'm not even a fan of, and you know, having like fantasy fantasy is not really going so great this year either, Mike.

Speaker 1 2:56

It's not great, man. Everything is just not great right now. I am glad that you specified the same team. I wasn't sure if you were still talking about the patriots or you're talking about the rings of power when it comes to a shitty product I was.

Speaker 2 3:07

I was 100% talking about both. I'm uh I'm not.

Speaker 1 3:11

I'm not on team rings of power by any means oh, man, you and I were talking about this for like 30 seconds before we started recording. But so the rings of power. It goes back to something we were talking about with salty Dan, and that is just the best. Marketing in the world Can't fix a shitty product. You want to want to take this one for a minute? I'll let you, I'll let you go for it, and I guess we should say no, I mean it's.

Speaker 2 3:37

You know, I feel like I saw rings of power at. Like every single commercial break is. Last night night, the game was on thursday night football, thursday football's on prime prime is desperately trying to salvage their one billion dollar. I I shouldn't even say it's a bet like if you spend a billion dollars on something, it shouldn't be a bet, should be a sure thing, especially with a, a franchise as popular as you know, lord of the rings. Like it should have been a slam dunk for them to make this interesting.

Speaker 2 4:03

But for whatever reason, like it's just. It's like it feels like watching a network TV show and like it's not a good product. Like a network TV show with like a budget like like 1% of what they're spending on Rings of Power. It feels like that. Like the storytelling is boring, the characters are boring, there's nobody to root for. I honestly don't care if all of them die.

Speaker 2 4:28

And like it's oh, boys, like they. I mean it's it's well marketed too, like they did like a global marketing campaign. There's like I'm sure that you probably see them all over new york city. Like there's probably like on the buses and on the you know, the bus stations and in the subway and you know, I've I've heard you know ads and like billboards and stuff in like UK and like it's just all over the place and like you know the the huge ad blitz and everything. But yeah, to go back to campaign, getting the word out there, it's like people the issue isn't people don't know about it, it's that they don't give a fuck right, it's this terrible fucking product. Yes, yes, like you can't, you can't out market and you can't outsell your way out of a shitty product and shout out to to my homeboy, salty dan on that one, and um, I think he hit the nail on the head there he certainly did.

Speaker 1 5:19

Man, like the one place that I haven't personally seen an ad for rings of power is actually on, like the physical Amazon packages that we're receiving. Maybe I'm alone there, maybe I'm an anomaly, but I seem to recall when they were doing an initial push for season one, on all the packaging tape and that kind of thing there was logos or, uh, you know, a quick whatever. It is like a visual of like one of the elves or whatever. So Anatar is the face of this season. I guess. Haven't seen his mug really anywhere. I'm the classic like snail mail or like an outbound what's the word I'm looking for here, where you said a direct mail kind of campaign like that. Haven't seen him there.

Speaker 1 5:55

But all the other avenues, channels that you were describing yeah, you can't avoid it, even in video ads. For a lot of the YouTube people that I follow, it's just like again, a picture in a picture before they get to the native advertisement, which pisses me off. Separate conversation yeah, rings of Power can't out-market your way to a shitty product, and that's like a real lesson for B2B budget. If your content isn't good, you're going to fail, but if your content's great and the product like it's real easy to get to the bottom of why the failure occurs when you're just trying to solve it by pumping money into it. Big brand awareness, play right. Big brand awareness, big failure. So that's our segment on Rings of Power. Anything else you'd like to conclude this section with? On Rings of Power. Anything else you'd like to conclude this section with?

Speaker 2 6:44

No, I would just say that ever since you know the past couple of jobs that I've had, I always try to kind of before I, you know, accept an offer at a company, I always try to like look into the product a little bit more. Like what are the reviews? Like how does G2 look? How does Captera look? You know I tried to sign up for it and see you know how it could be valuable and all that kind of stuff. So I think that's really important if you're looking for a job is to kind of explore the product a little bit more, especially you and I working in marketing. Like I've worked at companies where you're asked to do almost the impossible to like sell and market a terrible product that nobody wants, Like there's no demand for it. You know there's no such thing as like creating demand. Like, as far as I'm concerned, like 99% of the job is demand capture. And yeah, it's just really difficult as a marketer if you don't have a good product to back it up. And especially, like if some companies are like, oh, you can't criticize the engineering team, you can't criticize the product team. Like back in the day, like when HubSpot first started not to put it down HubSpot at all. Like I think it's a great product now. I use it every day, have for the last eight years or so when it first started.

Speaker 2 7:45

I'm pretty sure the founders themselves will tell you that it was fucking terrible. It was a terrible product. It solved a really niche use case that a lot of people didn't really understand or know how to use at the time and they just kept iterating and they kept building on it and eventually it did become a good product. But they were able to be successful in the early years just because they had such a strong sales and marketing organization. But that's not the case anymore. That was like back in 2006, you know, early 2010s. You can't do that anymore in 2024.

Evaluating Product Quality Before Job Offers

Speaker 2 8:12

You need a good product, you need to lead with product-led growth and if your product sucks like there's so much more competition, especially in like the SaaS space that you need to, you know, stand out with a quality product that actually provides, you know, value and utility to your users. And the same thing can be said about media. Like you know, Netflix was early with streaming. Like in the late two thousands, early 2010s, you know, Netflix got huge with all the original series and everything. And now you know every, there's a million different streaming networks Now, all of them with their own original series. Like media is so much more crowded because it's so much more accessible now. So, like that, you know, rings of power, it would have launched 15, 20 years ago. It would have been a major hit. But after seeing like a lot of the quality stuff that hbo puts out, like the original game of thrones series, like all that kind of stuff, it's just they can't compete and it's just can't compete.

Speaker 1 9:06

I got a couple things for you on that before we before we move on first, I do think there is. So there is still like a pretty strong need for demand gen and capture, right, I think the disconnect for me in in my several most recent roles is that leadership, especially c-suite, only seem to want to invest in demand capture because it's been easier to attribute historically. But you do have to create, especially when you are going after like people and you know I'll give six cents a positive shout out for the first time on this podcast right, you do get a sense of the lay of the land with respect to where your tan is in their research stage, because you do have to sense of the lay of the land with respect to where your TAM is in their research stage, because you do have to invest in warming up those people that are in like target or awareness. But it has to be done correctly and it does still have to peak interest in an actual quality product. I really liked your suggestion to go in and get a you know sign up for a free trial or something like that.

Speaker 1 10:03

That's actually a part of the interview process that I had with an older gig. They actually demoed the product. For me as part of it. It's like do you think this is something that you could get enthused about actually marketing? And I did. I think I underappreciated that part of the interview process at the time. In hindsight that was actually super rare. Having said all that, my question for you as a marketer is don't you feel guilty about showing up as a high intent MQL in these jobs that you're interviewing for by beginning a free trial? What do you have to say for yourself?

Speaker 2 10:33

Well, it depends on how deep I am in the process. If it's getting pretty close to an offer, I like to think I have enough rapport at that point to be like, hey, I'm going to do this, just so I can check it out, and I feel like that actually helps to show interest in the process, that I'm actually looking into the project a little bit deeper. If it's just like a recruiter reaches out outside recruiter, inside recruiter whoever and haven't really gotten that far in the process or not even sure if I want to take the initial interview, I have zero shame becoming a high intent MQL by trialing the product and unsubscribing from all the nurture. I usually don't reply to the emails and I won't waste anyone's time. I'm not going to hop on a demo and waste a BDR's time and go through discovery and all that kind of stuff. But also a lot of the times I will just completely straight up get ignored because they just use my personal Gmail Interesting.

Speaker 1 11:25

So that actually says something right About the accepting that in the target audience are you going to take personal emails, are you not? Is it business email only? What does that say about the vetting process that occurs? Obviously, this makes a difference in the b2c versus b2b environment and also just the uh, how to put it. I think there's an argument to be made for some of those open line text fields. Right, those were the enemy for a while. It's like what message do you want to send to the group? Or like how do you hear about as long them to type in some text. You can be less of an asshole if you're being like hey, I'm candidate, I'm just submitting this to get a sense of how the product works. They'll probably be better, easier to receive that than if you're just spam.

Speaker 2 12:02

Spam me with your follow-up. Yeah, exactly, and working with sales teams as closely as I have for the past several years, like, trust me, I know how to make myself look like a shitty lead Like company size what's a company? Or company size one. Lead like company size what's a company? Or company size? One uh, job title assistant to the regional assistant, manager or something you know. Just like terrible job title. Like no, like I, I these forms tend to like give it away. Like what the company is looking for. Like if you answer the things correctly, and like you're a fortune 500 company and you know you're the, you're a director or vp like you're gonna get called pretty quickly. So I just do whatever I can to make myself look like a little piece of shit that's pretty clever and actually quite thoughtful.

Speaker 1 12:51

In a twisted sort of way, the assistant to the whatever made me think that way back in the day when you and I were on the same team at hubspot it was actually it was joe del bene that would always, when he was doing a demo of stuff and showing how stuff works, he would always use the contacts from the office. So you would see, like michael scott, twice shrew, whatever, it's the people in the crm.

Speaker 1 13:08

We're going through. Love that, love that for him, uh, okay, so that hell of a start today, man, I feel like both of us are on. We're peaking right now. This is like Pete, chris and Mike a caffeine intake is hitting right. All that good stuff, but we're talking about being less of a pain in the ass to the sales team. I think that you had a question or a prompt, right, it was like what is a pain in the ass about? Is it like your day to day or like what was the?

Speaker 2 13:34

Yeah, so either what's the biggest pain in the ass that you deal with on a daily basis in marketing or um, I guess this kind of goes hand in hand. But where do you spend too much of your time? Where you wish you could spend less. Just just thinking about your, your day-to-day in marketing. You know we have to deal with a lot of different priorities and you know shit coming up at the last second and things going wrong and all that stuff. So just thinking on like a typical week, hopefully without any recency bias from however this week went, what's the biggest pain in the ass that you deal with on a daily basis?

Daily Marketing Pain Points

Speaker 1 14:07

Biggest pain in the ass is just, I think, the project management of things. This has been a case largely throughout my career, but I think it's been most palpable in some of my more recent stops. It depends on the size of the organization, it depends on team structure and all that kind of stuff. But, dude, I got to tell you and forgive me if I've used this example on air before but it's like to get a HubSpot e-blast out the door. I need to create a copy ticket with my content team. I need to create a mops ticket with my marketing operations team to help compose the recipient list and get that actually configured to send out of HubSpot. I need to create a design ticket with the design team who operates on a two-week sprint to get the email banner image that we want to include.

Speaker 1 14:53

It's just a whole thing in the project management of getting something out the door and I just a whole thing in the project management of getting something out the door and I just wish it was more streamlined. I wish there wasn't as much red tape, because I like to move faster than that, and so I think like habitually, for me that's the biggest challenging. So, less marketing pain in the ass more like marketing process getting something into market. Pain in the ass. What's yours?

Speaker 2 15:20

getting something into market pain in the ass. What's yours. So I, I've got a couple. Uh, how much time we got. I mean my, my initial default is meetings like I. I actually have been having a lot of success with, uh, clustering a lot of my meetings onto the same day or two days this week. So I'm hybrid. I'm, I'm in, I'm in the office in Boston two days a week, three days, remote, and clustering all my meetings into one day even though I don't get much done that day.

Speaker 2 15:44

Um, it's at least easier to, you know, not have to constantly be shifting focus. Uh, you know, nothing kind of grinds my gears more than when I start doing like a like, start working deeply on a project like you know, start getting into the weeds with something, and then I have to stop for a meeting. That's, you know, even if it's just half an hour, it takes, you know, time to shift back into focus and okay, where did I leave off? And all that kind of stuff. So the constant like shifting of focus is something that really frustrates me. So I think that by clustering all my meetings in one day when I just can assume, okay, I'm going to have six hours of meetings on this Wednesday you know two hours to do work, but it's not going to be like deep, like good work, so I can just write this day off as a as a loss, and then you know, the rest of the days I can I can focus on on doing the other work that I need to get done, that's so interesting man.

Speaker 1 16:34

I've heard a lot of people go the opposite direction. Right, They'll be like no meeting Fridays or Wednesdays or whatever, and you're talking about actually stacking them into a single. I really like that. I feel like it lends itself well to both you and I. Share that kind of like customer success background as well, where you're used to just marathoning and calls for forever. It sounds like that's been effective for you. That's really cool.

Speaker 2 17:01

I'm going to steal that. Yeah, yeah, give it a shot, cause you're hybrid too. Yeah, it's, I mean it. It does make the days when you're, you know, back to back to back with with meetings a little difficult, but I feel like a lot of the you know not every company does this, obviously, but a lot of the reasons that people want people in the office, it's they want to make sure that people are actually working.

Speaker 2 17:14

Like it's it's probably just a trusting on the company's end and by making yourself look as busy as possible like in my mind, like when I'm in a meeting, like I'm not busy, like I'm not doing work. A meeting is just a way to share information, or, you know, get information. Like it's either you're collecting information from somebody or you're sharing information with somebody. That's really the only outcomes of a meeting. I personally hate working meetings. I usually like to do my my deep work on my own and not have to, like you know, go back and forth that way. I'd rather take things offline, do a little bit of work and then, you know, come back together and discuss what we all put together and then kind of like take the ideas that that everyone's got together rather, rather than like having like a working session where you're spending an hour like actually like working with somebody.

Speaker 1 17:57

Does that change for you, like if you're working with other marketers versus if you do a cross-departmental collaboration, or are you in general just prefer to approach the meetings like that?

Speaker 2 18:08

I think it depends. I mean, there's a couple people on my team that I really like working with, where I don't mind, like the working sessions where it's like it's actually easier just to get in a room and like camera something out, like we're doing some like web development work or something like. If we're like troubleshooting like some code or something, sometimes that's easier to do like as a as a working session. But yeah, I think it it really depends on who, on who you're working with. Heard like nothing. Nothing is more frustrating than when you're in a meeting with somebody and you need to like build a report on the fly. You ever have to build a report on the fly, like you're you're in a meeting with your boss or something or you know higher ups and they're like hey, mike, how is this random, obscure metric that we've never thought to ask you ahead of time doing? And then you have to build a report and help slaughter something to pull the data uh, that happens to me, and when does?

Speaker 1 18:57

it's this weird thing. I always have internet connection problems.

Speaker 2 19:00

I don't know Comcast man, you can't trust them. They're always going down. Yeah, I'd say that's the big one for me. And yeah, just trying to find ways around it. Just because I'm not great at shifting focus and especially if I'm doing something deeply like, it always takes me a little bit to get back into the swing yeah, a couple things for you on that.

Speaker 1 19:25

One of them is so I know we're going to talk about amazon in in a moment or two here, but I saw read somewhere recently that they like to start some meetings where there's like a briefing document that's been put together for a go-to-market plan or whatever. They'll spend the first 10 minutes of the meeting. It's okay, everyone just like be on this call and consume this, because they're betting that people aren't really gonna take the time to do that prep work in advance and so the meeting itself won't be as productive because everyone's not starting at the same like base knowledge level, what do you?

Meeting Management Strategies

Speaker 2 19:59

think about that I, I've heard that too. I actually really like that and I want to start using that in my own meetings. I actually really like it. I think they call it like a memo or something. It's just like it's a written doc. It's not like slides, it's not, you know, anything fancy. It's, you know, much easier to type out a written doc and put together a slide deck before every single meeting or something. I like that a lot If it's limited to a page or something. Get everyone up to speed, give all the context and everything, and then you can have a meaningful discussion. I think it's really smart. I've also read, too, that I think this is like a Jeff Bezos thing, but he has like a two pizza rule where no meetings could be bigger than uh, what is it's like some? A meeting can't be bigger than the number of people. Like you can't have more people in a meeting than the number of people you'd be able to feed with two pizzas or something. What size pizza?

Speaker 1 20:51

is my, if it was my preference.

Speaker 2 20:54

I would say, like the pizza hut, personal pan pizzas. Like you can't have a meeting with more than two people. If it's more than two people, then you're. You know it can't be, can't be a thing.

Speaker 1 21:02

But this has nothing to do with what we're talking about, but can I just tell you I we ordered pizza hut recently. Yeah, I know it lives in new york city, gets pizza hut. I get it. Okay, if I can.

Speaker 2 21:11

You're gonna get so much hate mail from the two people that so we why do you order pizza?

Speaker 1 21:14

you order it for the stuffed crust, so we order our pizza. It's not stuffed crust, so I gotta call in and the guy's like, oh you know, sorry, it's been a crazy day. It's just me here today, like I need to remake the pie or give you a credit on the account. It's like, well, there's a certain certain value in having obviously, there's literally a monetary value in having the store credit. But, dude, I wanted my fucking pizza. Just remake it and ship it to me. I'm so sorry that you're buried, but like I'm gonna be that guy right now. I think that was the thing we did in an earlier episode. Like there's no shame. Like there's no shame like calling pizza hut and asking for more pie when you've already ordered. Uh, I mean I yeah, the stuffed crust.

Speaker 2 21:52

As far as I'm concerned, they don't even have any other kind of crust there. It's stuffed crust or death. So they basically gave you a crustless. They basically gave you a crustless pizza. It's like what am I supposed to do with this?

Speaker 1 22:02

yeah, it is like missing an ingredient almost. It's just not, not terrific, not terrific. Then there was something else I wanted to say about like the, the meeting thing where you go you spend the first oh yeah, because then that takes away the shame from it, right, how many times you got on and be like oh, someone says something to the effect of, oh, I'm not sure if you've all had a chance to review this kind of thing, but then they move forward with the assumption that they have. They don't even give anyone a chance to answer, or like, put them on the spot, or something like that. So I think that's a good way to hedge against it.

Speaker 1 22:28

Yeah, also on the note of like, yeah, totally, we said no recency bias, I have to say I was asked to crunch, analyze two and a half years worth of data in four hours in a work recently. It's like, hey, this is urgent. By the way, and like, the way that we break everything out in terms of attribution is based on the campaign level salesforce campaign. So each form on the website has its own unique salesforce campaign. Each high intent website page has its own salesforce campaign events, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Speaker 1 23:00

And that just like isn't an apples to apples comparison with how my team structures variable spend, and so the idea was to do like a spend to pipe ratio and it just like. It was like using the metric system versus whatever the fuck the US uses, right. So this was imperfect conversion, so I learned a lot about like subtotaling by colors and sheets and it was this real fucking hack job, job. But I ended up getting it put in front of someone and I haven't heard anything bad yet, so I'm assuming that it's one of those like no news is good news kind of situations you gotta love that too.

Speaker 2 23:31

You get, you know there's an urgent fire. And then you're like well, what's so urgent? They're like we need numbers. I'm like so you basically need to look backwards, you're. You're saying that looking backwards is urgent instead of like oh, I don't know.

Speaker 2 23:44

Like you know, working when I used to work in, like you know, on the consulting team, you know that there's like a client emergency, like the client threatened him to cancel. That's an emergency. Get on the phone with the client, tell them not to cancel. Like that's a little bit more pressing than like, oh, we need to urgently pull these numbers from two and a half years ago. And then you know, you send it over and then it either doesn't get looked at Like. I think you used to be able to do this in Google Docs. I don't know if you can still do it, but you can see, like who opened and like when they looked at your document, like the date stamp of when they look at it.

Speaker 1 24:15

Yeah, version history.

Speaker 2 24:16

I feel like managers everywhere complained about that because their direct reports would send them documents. The managers would never open it and then the direct reports would call them out on it. So I think Google actually took it away. I feel like you can't. You can see version history. I don't think you can see when the date stamp of when people actually looked at it anymore. It might be like an organizational setting to actually see the views Talk about a red flag. It might be like an organizational like setting to like actually see like the views. Talk about a red flag. I mean, I can't count the number of times I've been asked for something urgently and then I send it over and, like you know, work late or stop all the other important stuff I'm doing just to get to get it done and then like crickets for weeks and then you know nothing happens from it.

Speaker 1 24:55

That drives me insane. If you are going to and listen, I acknowledge that there are legitimately time-sensitive requests that come in that just are going to be a Herculean lift for the recipient. If you are the asker for this time-sensitive information, then please follow up. Please let the person that you asked know if it was useful, how it was used, what next steps are. Just for the process, you owe them closing the loop there, and if you don't, then I kind of think you're an asshole.

Speaker 2 25:25

Exactly. Yeah, I love that. I think that you know any, any type of requests like that. Like having the context behind it, like it'll a make your job easier. Like nothing's nothing's worse than like you're asked to put together a presentation or put together numbers without any context behind the request. Like hey, who am I presenting? To Like B? Like what context do they already have? How deep do I need to go into the details? Do I need to treat this like an SEO 101 course, for example, where it's like you don't know a single thing about SEO, so I need to like really take it really high level and then go slowly deeper? Or, you know, the context is important with any of those kind of asks. I agree with you.

Speaker 1 26:02

Super, super important. You know who's really good at doing that kind of thing Like, oh, what's the end goal of that? It's any kind of like operations professionals that you work with. They're very, very good at breaking out like cool, so you're asking for this in order to obtain this. Here are the different ways we're going to get there and the different checkpoints and milestones along the project. Shout out to all the operations folks.

Speaker 2 26:21

A good marketing ops person or a good sales ops person or rep ops or anything is worth their weight in gold for sure.

Speaker 1 26:29

Without a doubt, Speaking of things worth their weight in gold knowledge, marketing knowledge. We try to share some useful tidbits here from time to time. I believe that you have a tidbit queued up for today. I'm unaware of what this is.

Speaker 2 26:46

So I'm not really sure if it's necessarily marketing knowledge, but it was a fun fact. We'll edit that out. Super fun, we'll edit that. Brain fart out that brain fact Are all farts fun? Is that redundant, I mean? Mean, I don't think I've ever had one. That's not the only ones that are not. You're getting a little bit more than you bargained for uh, we're keeping all that in. That's so good okay that's why I don't wear khakis anymore, Mike.

Speaker 1 27:22

I envy Jake from State Farm.

Speaker 2 27:26

So here's the fact. This is going to need some careful editing. I'm not going to let this one go there. So the fact is, the Pringles potato chip was originally named Pringles Newfangled Potato Chips, which I personally love that name Pringles Newfangled Potato Chips which I personally love that name Pringles Newfangled Potato Chips, but the name was shortened to make it catchier. What's more, the inventor of Pringles, Fred Bauer, was so proud of his creation that he requested to have his ashes buried in a Pringles can. His children all honored this wish when he passed away in 2008, burying part of his ashes in one of the iconic cylindrical cans.

Speaker 1 28:06

The quirky tale adds a personal and somewhat humorous layer to the brand's history.

Speaker 2 28:10

I'll say what an understatement. It just immediately makes me think of Big Lebowski, where they put Donnie's ashes into the Folgers can because they couldn't afford an urn or anything.

Speaker 1 28:21

Oh man. So first it was the Pizza Hut statement earlier, and now I got to come out with this. I've never seen the movie.

Speaker 2 28:27

Oh man, it's a classic. It's probably one of my favorite movies of all time. I think I've probably seen it at least 10 times at this point, in various stages of soberness. I don't think I've ever seen it sober, it's always. You know, usually when I drink it I usually have a couple white russians which, once you see the movie, you'll know where that reference comes from.

Speaker 1 28:47

But okay, I was gonna say that's, you're an ipa guy. Where'd the white russian come from?

Speaker 2 28:53

it's, it's uh, it's just a, you know it's. It's a great movie. It's a great form of marketing for folgers. I feel like folgers probably paid good, good money to have that scene with the ashes in the can. So once you're done with your coffee, now you have this can that you can use for other purposes. You can put candy in it, you can put your best friend's ashes, you can put lots of things in a Folgers can, yeah, put that in an ad line.

Speaker 1 29:16

That's beautiful, by the way. Going back to the beginning segment here great marketing, shitty product. Dude unfolders does not taste good to me. But boy, is that jingle, yeah the jingle, catchy right yeah, yeah, the, the jingles.

Speaker 2 29:30

You know that I feel like that's the kind of thing where, you know, back in the day, back in the 60s, when there wasn't a ton of good coffee available, I'm just I'm not speaking from experience, just kind of guessing, but uh, you know, back then, like the marketing, like you could sell and market your way out of a bad product and like you know, especially back then, all the products were the same. Like back then all the beer was shit, I'm assuming, a lot of the coffee was shit, and now we get spoiled with a lot of better coffee and stuff and folgers taste terrible. So I actually do still like folgers because it makes me appreciate other coffee way more, because when you when you're only drinking like really good, like you know really good roasted coffee and everything, and then you go backwards.

Speaker 2 30:08

It tastes terrible. But when you drink the terrible coffee like Folgers, and you just keep drinking it for like a month and then you go to the good coffee again, you have a newfound appreciation for the good stuff. You don't, you don't get used to it that's true, and you know what?

Speaker 1 30:21

I think that's also a mark of a decent, like lodging or hotel accommodations, right. So you walk into the lobby for breakfast and they have that, for example, proudly brewing starbucks coffee or whatever. What are the places that aren't brewing that serving? That's my question. I bet it's not tasting as good as what, uh, as what you might get elsewhere. Um yeah, back to the pringles thing.

Speaker 2 30:44

So I do uh, before we jump back to pringles, I do have a little bit of a rant about uh, jet, blue and duncan, so anyone? Who flies jet blue. Jet blue proudly serves duncan coffee on their flight. It never tastes as good as an actual duncan like I. I don't know why. Like, maybe their flight attendants are professionally improved baristas like the ones that duncan. But uh, that's a joke, obviously. But uh, you can't, you can't tell that through audio.

Speaker 2 31:11

But uh, yeah it just never tastes the same and like I used to always look forward to jet blue and, you know, having the duncan. But I've recently started, uh, bringing my own duncan on board and you know I'm happy that decision.

Speaker 1 31:21

I feel like that's the right move, man, because I've heard stuff about the infrequency at which coffee pots are even cleaned on airplanes. They kind of skeeve me out. I don't know if that's a myth or not, but it sounds like you're better served doing what you're doing now and actually fuck Pringles let's go to the next coffee thing. All due respect to you, Pringles. Let's go to the next coffee thing.

Speaker 2 31:42

All due respect to you, pringles. I personally love Pringles. I'm not going to lie, it's probably one of my favorite chips.

Speaker 1 31:49

Would you say that once you pop the phone?

Speaker 2 31:50

don't stop. I would say that 100%, and I think I'm actually going to start saving my Pringles cans, because, if anything were to happen, I can't think of a better spot to be laid to rest.

Speaker 1 32:05

So, note to self, don't accept any Pringles offered at Chris's house. You never know what the hell is going to be in that thing. Very well, oh yeah, coffee. Okay, you put this on the radar for me.

Coffee Badging and Return-to-Office Policies

Speaker 2 32:18

Oh yeah, so yeah. So we talked about this a little bit for the call, Amazon announced rather abruptly this week that they're going back to the office five days a week, which predictably sparked riots amongst employees who are used to three days a week. And I feel like three days a week is a lot and, you know, requiring everyone to go back into the office five days a week is even more restrictive than it was before the pandemic, which a lot of employees pointed out. But I learned a new term this week, called coffee badger, which it's not an animal. It's not a badger that happens to live in a coffee swamp or anything. It's a person who goes to the office. They might have their coffee with them or whatever they badge in and then they immediately leave.

Speaker 2 33:07

Interesting, First of all, I don't really know how that works. Like maybe I'm just used to working under micromanagers, but how would a manager not know that somebody is there? But they have all these badge scans or whatever. But what are your thoughts on? First of all, do you have to badge into work and have you ever thought of coffee badging?

Speaker 1 33:24

I, like you, learned of the term a very short while ago. My question is do you not have to like scan out? Is it just like a scan, in kind of I guess not right Cause it's not like a time clock that you're punching in, it's just like getting entry into the building. To answer your question, yes, I do. I have, like this mobile access app that I had to download for my phone that, instead of a fob key right, that allows the door to open when you get to the office and what have you, to my knowledge, that is not audited by HR or security or anyone like that to keep track of how many times you're doing or you're hitting your minimum quota or whatever, for days in the office.

Speaker 1 33:59

But I don't like the idea of that kind of just oversight. It makes me real uncomfortable and it just you and I talked about this, I think, in one of our earlier episodes, like dude, who the fuck cares? Like, if you're able to be productive and that's one of the biggest arguments, right, if you're able to be productive, you're able to get what you need to do done then, like, why does it matter where it happens? Like we, we both know the answer to that is because these big companies don't want to lose value on these stupid like decade-long leases that they sign. And now they're stuck with trying to get something out of out of nothing. That's, I don't know that kind of running out of steam there. But what do you think?

Speaker 2 34:33

yeah, I agree. I mean, I wish most white collar work would be based on um outcomes and not, you know, not time in office. I was actually reading another article today that said that 10 to 4 is the new 9 to 5, where people get into office a little bit later, leave a little bit earlier because they're trying to beat rush hour, catch an early train or something. And I'm trying to make Mike die laughing right now because I just pulled up a bunch of AI-generated images of coffee badgers.

Speaker 1 35:02

That last one was a madman.

Speaker 2 35:09

Yeah, I just wish that work was based more on outcomes and a little bit less of the performative stuff and the politics and bureaucracy and all the stuff that doesn't contribute to the bottom line of a company but you unfortunately have to deal with as a as a white collar worker you do, you do?

Speaker 1 35:26

I mean hey, to the company's credit, at least they're not serving folgers, like presumably. The coffee on site is is decent, so people are coming in to to enjoy that yeah, yeah, 100.

Speaker 2 35:37

I actually I I kind of want to try coffee badging now because, uh, the coffee in the, the shared workspace we work out of a co-working space Coffee is decent and it just doesn't make any sense because it takes me like an hour to get there and then just to get coffee and come back.

Speaker 1 35:55

Yeah, it would have to be unbelievable coffee to justify that type of time commitment, unbelievable coffee to justify that type of that type of time commitment. Uh, speaking of time commitment, hey, we are just about at the end of our time here today. We got through probably like two bullet points we wanted to talk about, like our, our loose agenda, but once again, that's the brand baby. Uh, if you like what you heard, let us know, leave us a comment, please subscribe. If you don't like what you heard, do the same same thing. We're still on the way. So, on the lookout for any kind of critical feedback, send this via text to a friend, let us know any critical points of feedback and have a lovely weekend or rest of your Wednesday morning, commute whenever you're listening to this. Thanks everybody, thanks all.

Speaker 2 36:39

Bye.