Lessons Every Marketer Must Know from Ben & Jerry’s

After my second time visiting Ben & Jerry’s factory in Vermont, I’ve learned a few invaluable lessons about marketing. (And enjoyed some delicious ice cream in the process). 

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:00

Hey, I'm Tim Parkin. I am a coach to marketing directors. And today I wanted to hop on and share with you six or seven lessons from the number one ice cream brand in America. Do you know the name of the brand? Think about that. I'll tell it to you in just a second. But this past weekend, I was on vacation up in Vermont. If you don't know, I live in Orlando, Florida. Not by choice, but here I am. And my wife and I went on vacation and went up to Vermont, enjoying the fall weather, watching the leaves fall from the trees, the nice cool breeze driving through the mountains, and visiting the factory of Ben Jerry's, the number one ice cream brand in America. Ben and Jerry's is an amazing company for a lot of reasons. Number one, they make chocolate fudge brownie, the best ice cream flavor ever invented, if you ask me. But I'm curious, drop your ice cream flavor. What's your favorite ice cream flavor? Drop it in the comments. I'd love to hear what you like. But Ben and Jerry's also is well known. They're worldwide. They're known everywhere. Everybody's heard of Ben and Jerry's. And hopefully everybody's tried Ben and Jerry's. I think it's the best ice cream ever made. But Ben and Jerry's also is a profitable company, an amazing company that creates positive change in the world and has a unique, distinct brand. And so in visiting the factory, I walked away with six or seven things I learned that we can all benefit from and apply if you want to build a business and get leads and do better marketing. So I wanted to share the things I observed. The first is if you take the tour at the factory, you get to see the factory floor, which is really cool. And they do a good job of explaining all the steps in the process. But the big idea, the big takeaway is that there are seven specific steps. Every single pint they make, no exception, goes through these seven specific steps. And in marketing, a lot of our marketing, your marketing, is probably shooting from the hip, marketing spaghetti, throwing stuff at the wall and hoping to see what sticks. And that doesn't work. You need to have a process. You need to have a system. You need seven specific steps, or five or twelve, or whatever it is, but you need to have specific steps you follow to create the same result every time. So what if you had seven specific steps that you followed like clockwork? Wouldn't that make your marketing a little bit easier, a little bit more consistent? Dare I say, a little bit more predictable. So that was the first big idea is to have steps. What is your marketing process? That's not enough to have a marketing plan. You need to have a marketing process that you follow to do marketing. The second big idea comes from the lab they have. And it's actually where Ben and Jerry first started in the factory, and it's the innovation lab. It was a small room where they test out new ideas, new flavors. And they've tested some weird flavors, let me tell you. They mentioned that one of the worst flavors they've ever created was sugar plum, which sold only one pint in its first three weeks. That's a pretty rough start. So having a lab to create these ideas and test them before mass production is a huge, big idea for marketers that we can steal, that we can apply. And in my coaching group for marketing directors, we do this. We have a triangle model that we follow where we validate first, fast and cheap. How do we test something really fast to see could it work? Then we graduate it to optimizing. If it could work for us, and there's some evidence of that, we could test it and prove that. Then we can spend some time optimizing it, making it a little bit better. And then we can graduate to scaling, where we can spend more time, money, or people deploying it everywhere, benefiting from it, using it to maximum effect. So validate, optimize, and scale. And this is what Ben and Jerry do at the factory. They tinker and test and innovate with new ideas, but they test them out on a small scale first before investing the time, the effort, the resources, the money into mass-producing it. And this I found is a big problem in marketing that your CEO or your boss or your company says, let's do this thing. Or maybe you, as a marketer, says, let's do Google Ads. Let's run a webinar. Okay, but how do we test it? How do we make sure it could work for you and that it will work for you and not have to build the whole thing out, that we can just build a piece of it and run with that, launch that. So test first, test-driven marketing is the most effective way to do any marketing. The next thing that was really fascinating about the tour was that every hour or thereabouts, they have a quality assurance room where they would pull a pint from the current production line and literally cut it in half. They wouldn't take the lid off and open it up. They would just like take a chainsaw basically and cut it in half. You'd have two halves of a pint of ice cream. And they would test all the ingredients and test the quality of it and even eat the ice cream. Can you imagine that? Someone gets paid a salary just to eat some ice cream and test it out every hour. That sounds like a dream job to me. So I thought that was really cool to see the quality assurance. I have a daughter who has allergies, so that was meaningful to me. But I think the big idea here is that someone is checking and measuring and monitoring at every single step on a cadence. And I'm curious for you as a marketer, when is the last time you actually dug deep into the analytics, looked at the numbers, and not just looked at what the numbers are, but really tried to understand where they're coming from, what they mean, how they came to be, what the story behind the numbers is. It's not just about quantity, it's about quality, understanding what's really happening and checking that and making sure we're monitoring and measuring. The other thing that was really interesting is when we were there at the factory, they were cleaning the factory floor. So they don't rush from making chunky monkey to cherry Garcia. In between flavors, they clean the whole factory and do a system reset, basically. But they clean it to make sure there's no contamination or cross-contamination, but also just to reset, to have a pause to reflect and to prepare for what's next. And I feel like this is a huge missed opportunity for most marketing directors that you're probably running from one campaign to the next or running multiple campaigns at the same time, which can be overwhelming, right? And if you're running so many things simultaneously or trying to do too much at the same time, how do you know what works? You're left wondering why nothing is working. Or how do you know if this thing's working, if you're doing too many things? It's hard to tell when it all gets mixed together. And so I think having a reset is a really good idea to pause, to go slowly, to do a couple of things at a time. Recently at the conference that I run, the Momentum conference, I mentioned do less with more speed. We don't need to do more as marketers, we need to do less with more speed. One of the most interesting things though that I witnessed at Ben and Jerry's factory is outside, up a hill, they have a graveyard. The flavor graveyard. The funniest thing I've ever seen at an ice cream place. And there are literally headstones for all the failed flavors they've had, like Dastardly Mash or Neapolitan Dynamite, if you get the reference. And it's really cool to celebrate failure, right? That they can laugh at it and they can learn from it, they can move on and do better next time. But failure is inevitable. If you're not trying new things, you're not learning what works. And not everything will work. Marketing is a lot of guessing. It's a lot of testing, it's a lot of experimentation. And so it's okay that things don't work. That last email you sent got zero opens. That ad got no leads. Cool. You learned something. That means you're doing stuff, you're trying things, and you're learning from it. So use that and move forward from it. So those are a couple of ideas that I hope help you. You don't have to take all of them, but take one of them. I guarantee you can use one of these ideas right now in the marketing that you're doing. Because there are two ways to get leads in marketing. The first is random acts of marketing. Cross your fingers and hope the campaign works, hope that the leads show up. The second is to build a factory that works every time, that pumps out new leads. That's what we do in my coaching group. So if you need more leads, click the link below, reach out to me, we'd love to give you the details on that. And if you want more support, as I said, I run a coaching group for marketing directors. We'll love to have you join us. But know this marketing is very much a process. It's more science than art. And you too can learn from Ben and Jerry's. Can build a factory, a system, a process to do your marketing so you can build a memorable, profitable, successful brand while having fun. Drop a comment, let me know what's your favorite ice cream. We'll love to hear what you got. As I mentioned, mine is Chocolate Fudge Brownie. It's the best, but hey, I'll fight with you in the comments about it. We'd love to hear what you got. And next time you're at the store, pick up a pint of Ben and Jerry's. Enjoy, and remember these lessons from a company that we can all learn from.