Episode 58 // Does Location-Based Branding Matter in the age of Remote Work?

Dec 2, 2022

Mike and David return to talk about the culturally-hot topic of remote work and to discuss the role of location and geography in the life of a brand. Plus, you’ll get to hear some off-the-cuff geographically-based names that pour out of another hilarious Name 10 Things (you can steal them for your new mattress brand if you want to).

Contact: Mike Jones mike@resoundcreative.com

Discuss at https://www.linkedin.com/company/resoundagency

The show is recorded at the Resound offices in ever-sunny Tempe, Arizona (the 48th – and best state of them all).

Show Transcript

Mike Jones:
Oh, you’re in Winnipeg. Oh, yeah. I was there three years ago for my niece’s daughter’s son’s wedding.

David Cosand:
Whoa.

Mike Jones:
This makes me pretty old.

David Cosand:
You’re an old fart.

Introduction:
You’re listening to the Remarkabrand Podcast, where authentic brands win. With your hosts, Mike Jones and David Cosand.

Mike Jones:
All right, everybody. We’re back for another episode of Remarkabrand Podcast. I’m Mike Jones, your co-host with David Cosand.

David Cosand:
Hello.

Mike Jones:
And our producer, Sam Pagel.

Sam Pagel:
Yo.

Mike Jones:
All right. I’m in my World Cup mode. I’ll get out of that now. I was getting all excited. We’re excited. We’re excited for the US. Aren’t we?

David Cosand:
Yeah.

Mike Jones:
We were just talking about that. Anyway, but that’s not what we’re here to talk about.

David Cosand:
Well-

Mike Jones:
Although it’s kind of related.

David Cosand:
Sort of. Because we live here.

Mike Jones:
Because we do, we live here in the US, and the World Cup is about the world and all these places and national pride and geopolitics and…

David Cosand:
Anthems.

Mike Jones:
Anthems and protests and anyway, whatever. We don’t have to get down that road. But anyway, we are going to be talking today about geography and location, and the importance or is there still importance to these things when it comes to your brand?

Mike Jones:
I feel like we live in kind of a new world when it comes to remote work, and people are kind of geo located all over the world that work together, and brands are trying to figure this out. I mean, you even have customers who you may never interact with in a real world experience, who buy from you, and never actually come into an office or come into a store, come into any kind of real world environment.

Mike Jones:
So, how do we deal with that? That’s what we want to talk about today. As brands, how do we deal with that? But first, Sam.

Sam Pagel:
We’re going to do a little name 10 things.

Mike Jones:
Yes.

Sam Pagel:
And today I want to hear 10 brand names with a geographical place in them, right? I want you to give us 10 geographically based brand names.

David Cosand:
No wrong answers.

Sam Pagel:
No wrong answers.

Mike Jones:
Phoenix Fire Brands.

Sam Pagel:
Okay.

Mike Jones:
Yep. For all your cattle branding needs.

David Cosand:
Okay. I’m going with Big Sky Brewing.

Mike Jones:
Ooh, Big Sky Brewing.

Sam Pagel:
What is that? Montana?

David Cosand:
Yeah, of course. See? So, you knew as soon as you heard Big Sky.

Sam Pagel:
Yeah. Because Montana has geographically the biggest sky.

David Cosand:
Yep. The sky is bigger in Montana. That’s two.

Mike Jones:
Yep. All right, two. It’s a Georgia peach.

David Cosand:
Three.

Sam Pagel:
It’s a Georgia Peach. That’s the brand name?

Mike Jones:
It’s a Georgia Peach. That’s the brand name, It’s a Georgia Peach.

Sam Pagel:
That works.

Mike Jones:
No, no, It’s a Georgia is the brand name.

Sam Pagel:
Oh.

Mike Jones:
And Peach is the product.

David Cosand:
It’s like an Italian guy. It’s a Georgia… It’s a Georgia Peach.

Sam Pagel:
I T Z A. It’za.

David Cosand:
It’s a Georgia.

Sam Pagel:
I like that. It’s three.

David Cosand:
Three. Oh, am I on crap. The North Pole workshop, toys for Santa Place. There you go.

Mike Jones:
I’m sold. I’m sold right from the name.

Sam Pagel:
Sure. Yeah.

Mike Jones:
Hey, but I know what I’m getting.

David Cosand:
You do.

Mike Jones:
I get a lot.

David Cosand:
It’s very clear.

Mike Jones:
I get a lot. I get a lot in there.

Sam Pagel:
Killer toy store, I think.

Mike Jones:
This one actually exists. It’s Texas Pete hot sauce.

David Cosand:
Woo hoo.

Mike Jones:
Made in New Jersey.

David Cosand:
This stuff’s made in New Jersey.

Sam Pagel:
Patagonia. Is that a place? It sounds like place?

Mike Jones:
It is a place. It’s a geographic location in Argentina, I believe. That is right, Argentina? Anyway…

David Cosand:
Nobody really knows.

Mike Jones:
Nobody knows, nobody… Maybe it’s Chili. It might be Chili. Chili. Chili.

Sam Pagel:
Chili. Chili.

David Cosand:
Chili. Chili.

Sam Pagel:
Chili. Chili, served at Chili’s.

Mike Jones:
Oh.

Sam Pagel:
For a limited time only.

Mike Jones:
Oh, I was excited until you added the third chili.

David Cosand:
Let’s, let’s go with Oregon cheese. It’s so good, it’ll be gone.

Sam Pagel:
Oregon, before you eat it.

Mike Jones:
Oregon.

David Cosand:
Yeah.

Mike Jones:
Alaskan King Fish.

David Cosand:
Because the crab disappeared.

Mike Jones:
It’s actually a mattress company.

David Cosand:
Did you hear that? The crab actually had vanished.

Mike Jones:
Really?

David Cosand:
That’s true.

Mike Jones:
What?

David Cosand:
Yeah.

Mike Jones:
It’s so disappointing.

David Cosand:
They canceled the season.

Sam Pagel:
Wow.

Mike Jones:
Wow. That’s wild.

Sam Pagel:
No crab.

David Cosand:
Yeah, it’s true. I’m going to go with the Appalachian Smokey Mountain mattress company.

Sam Pagel:
Two mattress companies made it in there.

David Cosand:
Yeah.

Sam Pagel:
Did not expect.

David Cosand:
This is a first. Did we hit 10?

Sam Pagel:
Yeah, that was 10.

David Cosand:
This was a great show, great show.

Sam Pagel:
Closed it out with two mattresses.

David Cosand:
Yeah.

Sam Pagel:
You got two.

David Cosand:
[inaudible 00:05:22]

Mike Jones:
We really went to the mattresses on that one.

Sam Pagel:
Yep.

David Cosand:
But Patagonia was an actual legit one, right?

Sam Pagel:
Yeah.

Mike Jones:
Yes.

David Cosand:
I’m kind of proud of that.

Mike Jones:
Yeah, that was a legit…

David Cosand:
Yeah, I just got something there.

Mike Jones:
Yeah, you get extra points.

Recorded:
Find your frequency.

David Cosand:
Location, man.

Mike Jones:
Yeah, location.

David Cosand:
What does it matter though, like is it a part of a brand or are we just making that up?

Mike Jones:
Yeah, I think that’s the question is how much does location matter? I mean, you can think back historically, it feels like location really has mattered for a long time for a lot of brands. I mean, we just named a couple. Like Patagonia, right? Where some idea of a place, even though the brand’s not located there, means something to people. There’s an image, there’s an idea. There’s a feeling that comes with certain places and certainly I can think of a hot sauce company that puts the word Texas in their name.

David Cosand:
Sure.

Mike Jones:
Whether they’re in Texas or not, has some kind of value to them, right?

David Cosand:
Yeah.

Mike Jones:
Hey, we’re this kind of hot sauce?

David Cosand:
Actually, it’s interesting because we’re here in Arizona and I suddenly remember all these brands that use the name Arizona in their brand, but they’re not here. They’re like Arizona iced tea, I think, was it JC Penney’s had Arizona Jeans?

Sam Pagel:
Oh, yeah.

Mike Jones:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

David Cosand:
I think it was JC Penney.

Sam Pagel:
I think so.

David Cosand:
Yeah, there’s a few of them like that. What is that? Or also think about the cars. There’s a Tucson, Hyundai makes a Tucson.

Mike Jones:
Yeah, there’s a Santa Fe.

David Cosand:
Kia makes Sedona. Yeah, Santa Fe.

Sam Pagel:
Yeah. Why’d they steal all of the Arizona cities?

David Cosand:
Tucson and Sedona.

Sam Pagel:
What’s up with that?

David Cosand:
Yeah.

Sam Pagel:
Interesting.

Mike Jones:
Yeah. So I think at that level, location still means something, right?

David Cosand:
Yeah.

Mike Jones:
It can be a way of identifying certain values or certain aesthetic or maybe some cultural norms or something and applying them to your own products and what you’re doing. But I think what’s interesting is for a lot of companies, you can think back to the history of the company. It’s founding, its original location can really matter a lot to how the brand kind of grows and gets expressed and what people think about it and even what it means to people inside the organization, right?

David Cosand:
Mm-hmm…

Mike Jones:
Oh, we were founded in 1923 and this small town and the Midwest, right? And these Midwest core values come in and family, we’re all about family and whatever. I’m making this up, but I mean, we can think of brands where that has resonated.

David Cosand:
Yeah.

Mike Jones:
And now we live in a world where maybe that’s a lot harder to do, where so many companies are really under pressure to kind of remote-ize their work and make it accessible for anyone to work from anywhere at any time. And so does location really matter as much? Is that something that we should continue to pursue in our brand building efforts? Or should we just move on and go with our global digitized world?

Sam Pagel:
Or is location purely just something we use as an external label similar to what those car make and model? Because in those scenarios, you’re just trying to imbue meaning into the product. It’s not that the Hyundai Tucson is made in Arizona. It’s not that the Kia Sedona is made in the Red Rocks. It’s that those things mean something and it should give you some kind of emotional response when you think of Sedona. Or they’re just cool sounding names, which is a super superficial way to do that. But yeah, Kia Sedona is a minivan and I don’t know what it has to do with Sedona. Maybe somebody in, I don’t know, maybe the Koreans are just like, Sedona sounds cool. And so we’re like, yeah, Sedona. Cool.

Mike Jones:
Yeah.

Sam Pagel:
So that’s very superficial kind of a label, a tack on place onto my product or my brand. What you’re describing is like, okay, does it matter that the place where we started things, does that need to stay with the company and the brand over time, over the decades, whatever. And then, I mean, I work for an e-commerce company. We work with a lot of them at Resound too. These companies that are purely virtual almost. I mean, they may have offices somewhere across the country, but they’re customers, they’re not going to walk in and talk to an employee of the e-commerce company necessarily. They’re just online. And so then what does place matter in that context? And then finally, I think I wanted to add one more thing, which is a lot of the times location or place makes a thing unique. Think about, I’m thinking of the term garage band. If you think a band that starts in a garage versus, I don’t know, Led Zeppelin or some studio band or cover band.

Mike Jones:
Okay.

Sam Pagel:
Cover band, it’s kind of like, well, you can get paid and you can gig and you can be a cover band. But it’s different than a garage band. Place makes the garage band what the garage band is, right? There’s a certain flavor, a certain kind of personality that you can understand immediately, just kind of intuitively when you hear garage band. Same thing with a startup, like a startup in a garage versus some… It’s 2022, and a startup can be some guy in Argentina and another guy, some girl in Wyoming and someone in Singapore.

Mike Jones:
Yeah.

Sam Pagel:
And it’s like, well, that’s our startup. It’s a lot different. They’re all drinking Red Bulls and smashing them in the garage, playing arcade games or something on their breaks. Does that matter? What does that mean? So yeah, just throwing that out there.

Mike Jones:
Yeah.

Sam Pagel:
A couple other ideas there.

Mike Jones:
Yeah. Yeah, and I think there’s still something very intrinsically appealing about location. So the superficial example we give, right? These car brands and the car product identities, right? That borrow from actual locations that in some way is seen as positive, right? To try that, and so I think even for brands that are really trying to build something authentic and true and meaningful and lasting. Who are doing that through a remote workforce, right?

Mike Jones:
Let’s say they’ve decided we’re going to be fully remote. We’re not going to have a headquarters, we’re not going to have kind of a central location. And yet place, I think still can give you a sense of identity and meaning, right? And a sense of we at least are maybe not located together, but we are in locations together, right? That these places matter to us. They provide a sense of community, a sense of shared culture, a sense of geographic and weather, right? Even all the way to stuff like that. I mean, how many phone calls or Zoom calls do you do now where the first thing is, hey, what’s it like for you? Where are coming from, you know?

David Cosand:
Yeah. It’s usually one of the first things you ask somebody.

Mike Jones:
Yeah. Because it becomes, even if you’re not in the same location, it becomes this point of connection.

David Cosand:
Yeah.

Mike Jones:
Where are you coming from, you know?

David Cosand:
Yeah, it’s usually one of the first things you ask somebody.

Mike Jones:
Yeah. Because it becomes, even if you’re not in the same location, it becomes this point of connection.

David Cosand:
Yeah.

Mike Jones:
Oh, you’re in Winnipeg. Oh yeah. I was there three years ago for my niece’s daughter’s son’s wedding.

Sam Pagel:
Whoa.

Mike Jones:
It makes me pretty old.

David Cosand:
You’re an old fart. Well, so actually when I think about branding, I mean if we go back to the original act of branding something physically, there’s physical constraints around that brand. You are marking something, you’re imprinting something here in the real world, physically, and there’s a constraint around that. So if the cow has my branding on it versus yours, I can go find it and see it in my ranch within this physical space. When we talk about branding, it’s also a way to limit or constrain what conversations from a marketing perspective, what conversations we choose to participate in and what we don’t. It’s kind of like a guiding force. And I see location as having that same effect almost. Like for example, Winnipeg. Well if we’re a brand that is more Midwest, I think you mentioned, well, I guess Winnipeg is kind of the Midwest.

Mike Jones:
It is.

David Cosand:
It’s the prairies or the plane, whatever they call it. But let’s say it’s a Florida tropical kind of feeling brand. Even if you have employees in Winnipeg, it’s probably not the type of conversation, the feel of the visuals, of the expressions of the brand are probably not going to give you that Winnipeg feel. That look and feel, right? Because it’s just not a part of our story. Even if we have employees there, which it’s great that we live in a world where you can have people from Winnipeg in that tropical 20, it’s 2022. So people can work anywhere. But I think it’s still a constraining kind of limiting factor, but not in a bad way. It’s in a good way. And maybe we’re too quick to identify this new virtual metaverse technologies as being something great for us. I’m forgetting about the ways that the constraints are actually a good thing. The limitations that we have that we place on our brand are actually helpful for us as a company so…

Mike Jones:
Yeah, I mean they provide anchor points of what I can latch onto to have a sense of identity of an organization. I think how many big corporate brands feel stark and soulless, because they lack those elements that have specificity.

David Cosand:
Yeah.

Mike Jones:
Right? It’s like, well, we’re trying to be everything to everyone.

David Cosand:
No, that’s a great word.

Mike Jones:
And so we’re really no one, we’re nothing to no one.

Sam Pagel:
We need to be specific.

Mike Jones:
And so being specific, Adam Pierino call now, call out there.

David Cosand:
Nice.

Mike Jones:
So, our friend Adam has written a book about being specific.

David Cosand:
Nice.

Mike Jones:
I believe it’s actually called specific in your marketing and your branding. So I think there’s a lot of value in really looking where can we be more specific? And location I think can be one that’s really helpful, really helpful for people. I do think that’s hard, right? How do you navigate that? I think we were just talking about that today as a team, local culture is one of our core values and we have people all over the US so it’s like how do we live that out in a way that’s true and real without it just becoming, I don’t know, kind of passé or cliché in the way that we deal with it.

Sam Pagel:
I think it’s important to remember that brands are really first and foremost made up of people and people have to exist somewhere geographically. And so not, like you said David, you may not include geographical elements in your brand and your visualization or your story or what you say about your brand, but everyone that works for your brand and interacts with your brand is going to be in a specific location. And in this remote work age, that stuff may not come out to be visual publicly. But how do you as a brand help your team members flourish in their own communities? For example, we have a designer we work with on a different continent. She and her husband were doing this, they used to own a restaurant and they went out over Thanksgiving, even though they don’t celebrate it in their country, but they did this big food event in their community and it was like, yeah, go do that.

Sam Pagel:
That’s awesome. Send us pictures. I wish I could be there and eat your hamburgers. So just things like that where it’s like how are you as a company helping your people flourish in their own communities, in their own local communities? And then what kind of impact are you having on those communities? You know, would hate for somebody that works for you, for your brand to go out and have a negative impact on their local culture and community. You want people to flourish where they’re at. So I think that’s part of it too, where we talk about branding and we talk about geography and branding doesn’t always mean that it’s like this front facing Patagonia style brand. But I think inherently if there are people involved with your brand, there’s going to be geography involved with your brand. So I think that’s a hundred percent of all brands.

David Cosand:
Yeah, it feels like so even if we make a conscious choice as a company to say this physical location is where we’re from and there’s certain elements from that physical location that we portray, maybe subtly. It’s not overt, but it’s there. There’s undertones to our visuals, our communication style, everyone has an accent. It’s almost like there’s a way that we have built into our language, these markers of where you’re from. Because you can recognize Texas, you could recognize the southern draw, that’s kind of cool. ‘Cause that’s another way is like oh, representing where you’re from as part of your personality, your human brand. So even if we’re sub not as overt and it’s kind of there under the surface, eventually that sense of place can marry with our other values, our other personality traits and we can draw those out no matter where we are across the globe you just described so…

David Cosand:
If someone’s in Singapore for example, they may not have this Arizona vibe to them, but what is it from our personality traits married with that Arizona vibe that we can encourage or draw out of people in Singapore. Like you just said, I’m making Singapore up but wherever that employee or that person is. We can say, hey, invest in your local culture. That’s a part of our personality. We do it in this way because it’s an Arizona vibe to it. It doesn’t mean you have to do it that way in wherever you live, but at least you’re imbuing or you’re affecting your location with that kind of feel that came from our brand right? It’s interesting, it’s kind of like multiplying. So again, I think it’s fine that it’s not overt, that it’s not Patagonia, like the Arctic or something, but it’s still there. You can still feel it and you can connect the dots and go, well it actually came back from this feel or this vibe or this personality trait that we have. And that’s how we started. And it’s kind of evolved, gone from there.

Mike Jones:
Yeah, and I think there’s a more tactical benefit that comes from leaning into location, right? And that is that physical locations for brands provide opportunities for additional ways people to experience the brand. It’s like you walk into an office, well that that’s a different experience than if you only ever had Zoom calls. If you ever only ever experience a website and maybe a Zoom call with a salesperson and then the product itself shows up at your doorstep, or they do something because they’re a service-based company for you and they deliver it back. If you never actually walk into a physical location in any kind of way, whether that’s a permanent headquarters office type location or maybe a pop-up type experience at a trade show or conference, or even just meeting someone, oh, I heard them speak at this conference and they had some swag with them or they had some slides, right?

Mike Jones:
And so all of a sudden there’s these other elements that just start to get brought into the experience that are really hard to do and hard to really make meaningful in a fully digital experience. I think brands understand this, but I would encourage any brand who is thinking about, okay, we’ve got to navigate just more and more digital experiences. I think there’s a opportunity to flip that on its head and say, okay, let’s do that. Let’s make sure we take care of digital experiences for our customers, but also think about how do we create real world experiences with our customers and maybe we don’t have a big headquarters anymore. Okay, well then how are we going to facilitate at some point either for a temporary amount of time or a permanent amount of time, some kind of experience for people that is actually real, that is tangible and physical and has a sense of location to it. I just think actually people are screaming for that.

David Cosand:
Yeah, they’re craving it. Absolutely.

Mike Jones:
Especially over the last three years. I mean I go to these events and we’ve been to some conferences that have come back since COVID and the people that are there. Obviously this, there’s a bias towards the ones that actually show up. But the ones that are there, they love it and they’re really into the location and they want to really experience things. And we’re seeing it across the board and lots of data points beyond just of our personal experience, you know? People are doing a lot of traveling. People want actual entertainment, they want entertainment experiences.

Mike Jones:
And in fact, I’m hearing that perhaps that’s part of the reason why some of the sales are down this year from the holidays, right? Maybe people are not as stuff oriented and they’re more experience oriented now, but every one of those experiences is tied to a location, is tied to a specific place in time. And I think there’s a lot of opportunities for brands to really not get too caught up in this metaverse digitization of everyone’s experience. I’m not opposed to throw that around the boardroom and have a conversation, but I think there’s a lot of opportunity in the real world to almost say, yeah, we’re going to zag while everyone else zigs into that digital stuff.

David Cosand:
I agree. Yeah, well said. And I think it plays into some of what we’re seeing with the workforce and the trends with remote work. People crave that human interaction. And so whether or not, so sometimes we see, I think their behavior and their beliefs are at odds. That’s true of a lot of people that everyone who’s ever lived has that, we don’t want to be inconsistent, but we are. So we say, oh, we love our remote work and we never want to go into an office again. And mostly that’s because it’s inconvenient. I have a long commute, I have to sit in the car. I don’t want to do that. I understand that. And it’s hard maybe to live close to your office because gosh, the rent or to buy a house there is impossible right now. So I get all those things. So we want the convenience of working remotely, but then we’re disengaged. We aren’t motivated. It’s not as much fun and we don’t know how to work remotely because some people don’t know how to collaborate well remotely yet because man, we miss our whiteboards and we miss getting into person.

David Cosand:
So we’re still at that, even after… What has it been? Almost two years now of trying to figure this out. Something’s just not catching. Unless you’re a very, very small focus group and you’ve been used to doing this already, or you’ve built in those muscles and those rhythms and those patterns to make it work. But I think a lot of companies are struggling with that because man, I’m disengaged and I crave that interaction, but they actually close the office. So now no one can actually go and have a happy hour anyway, and all the people that I used to work with aren’t either at the company, they moved on or they’re too far away for us to get in person together. So I feel this resounding sense in which things are not the way they used to be, and I’m not sure if I like it. There’s parts of it, but there’s parts of it that man, it’s just not great.

Sam Pagel:
Even if you’re a fully remote team and you’re really good at doing that, you have these tools set up. How different is it when you do finally meet in person? Like case in point, we have an operations manager, Chris. Hi, Chris. He’s in Idaho. He used to live here in Arizona. He moved away a year and a half, two years ago and I’m on Zoom calls with him almost every day. He comes into town about four times a year. Every time he comes into town, it’s like we give each other a big hug. It’s like we haven’t seen each other in three months, even though we’re face to face every day on a call.

Sam Pagel:
But how different are those interactions? Same thing with, we’ll work with clients across the country whom we’ve never met in person. We’ve just, we’ve done Zoom calls, we’ve done calls. And we finally, maybe we go out there to shoot a video or do something, but we finally meet them in person and it’s like we’ve been hearing about this person for a year and we finally meet them. Even though we’ve talked face-to-face on a Zoom call, it’s just different. In person physical, it’s just different.

David Cosand:
Yeah.

Sam Pagel:
So different, and I don’t know special about that.

David Cosand:
I think it speaks to just the way humans are just, people have bodies. People have…

Mike Jones:
We are physical…

David Cosand:
We are physical beings, and as much as we love to talk about the metaverse or these digital worlds that we can create for ourselves, it’s just not human. It’s a token, it’s some kind of visual reference, virtual reference.

Mike Jones:
Well, and we have five senses. And on Zoom you only really use two. I only can see you. And even then, I don’t think, it’s not the full expression. It’s not the full sense, right?

David Cosand:
Yeah.

Mike Jones:
It’s disconnected, right? There’s a digital divide between us, even though you’re being portrayed on a screen in front of me and I can see you, but it’s not really you, right? It’s my screen. I’m actually just looking at a screen. I’m looking at pixels and then I can hear you. But even that, I’m not getting the full sense of auditory experience. Stuff’s lost in the compression or just in the microphone, and certainly if there’s audio issues, oh my goodness. It’s like that’s a terrible experience, but we’re not smelling the same things. We’re certainly not touching, right? I’m not shaking your hand, I’m not giving you a hug.

David Cosand:
Right, right.

Mike Jones:
We’re not manipulating things in the world around us together, right?

David Cosand:
Mm-hmm…

Mike Jones:
You think about the experiences of people that have deep lifelong bonds. You think about a squad that goes to war together.

David Cosand:
Sure.

Mike Jones:
Part of that experience obviously is the emotions and the risk that you’re taking together that’s driving that bond. But part of it is also that you are like you, you’re living and dying together.

David Cosand:
Yeah, physical suffering.

Mike Jones:
Physically for long periods of time.

David Cosand:
Yeah.

Mike Jones:
And there’s just bonding that happens. You can think about experiences you’ve had where maybe you’re with someone that you haven’t, maybe a work trip. You can think about sometimes those work trips where you’re stuck with somebody for three or four days that you didn’t really know before.

David Cosand:
Yeah.

Mike Jones:
And you spend all this time together and you find out like, oh, we have all these opportunities to bond.

David Cosand:
Sure.

Mike Jones:
That just are not there when we don’t spend time together and you can’t do that over Zoom. I can’t eat a meal with you over Zoom. We can both eat, over Zoom.

David Cosand:
Sure.

Mike Jones:
But it’s not like I’m in the same room smelling what you’re eating and you’re smelling what I’m eating, and we’re conversating about the menu and the experience, this shared experience that we’re having. So I tangented there quite a few times, but I just, there’s this sensory experience that happens only when people are in the same location.

David Cosand:
Sure, and it’s interesting for e-commerce that also has a brick and mortar.

Mike Jones:
Yeah.

David Cosand:
So I was in a Best Buy yesterday and it’s almost kind of, Best Buy has kind of shifted to being just, almost like an Amazon warehouse. So more of the space is taken up by order pickup and just maybe customer service and not so much the gallery or showcase of I’m going to shop and I’m looking at all the cool merchandise because you do it online. I don’t know, what does Best Buy feel like? How do we? So compare that with a Disney, where the…

Mike Jones:
Super high.

David Cosand:
The masters at story and the physical and the experiential and the sounds and all of that combined. I never went to the new Star Wars experience, but I’ve heard it’s amazing because it’s immersive and you’re in a Star Wars world and it feels like it. And so how do brands that have that maybe ability financially or at least the footprint to be able to think about those different things? How do they keep that, I don’t know, moving in a direction that’s more experiential and more mindful of that’s not just e-commerce add to cart?

Mike Jones:
Ship.

Sam Pagel:
It takes work, right? I think it’s harder to do that.

David Cosand:
Yeah.

Sam Pagel:
I don’t think it comes naturally, this is a poor example, but I think of Applebee’s. When you’re sitting in an Applebee’s and you’re kind of looking around, it’s like, oh, there’s the local high school football helmet up there and with the pictures and the old jersey, and it’s part of their brand to take on the local culture.

David Cosand:
The neighborhood joint.

Sam Pagel:
Yeah, the neighborhood. Exactly. Eating good in the neighborhood. It takes time to do stuff like that.

David Cosand:
Or what should a Best Buy feel like, right? I interacted with two people, besides the website. I interacted with the wonderful cashier, who picked up my order and put a little label on it and said, there you go. And then I interacted with the guy on the way out, said thanks, okay, bye. But Apple, on the other hand, their stores are a different feel, I think than with a Best Buy.

Sam Pagel:
Yeah, very different.

David Cosand:
You can experience and kind of play with stuff and try it out.

Mike Jones:
Yeah, that’s a really good point. With Apple, obviously they could sell all their stuff online, right? But they have created this local experience, not that their stores have pictures of the Grand Canyon around, but it’s like you can go there. You can physically interact with the product, you talk to people, it’s an experience when you’re going to your local Apple Store. Like it really is an event to go in there, and I think they’ve meticulously crafted that over the years. I think, I don’t go into an Apple Store. Maybe once a year, once every two years. Every time I go in, it’s different. They’ve changed it, it’s like this new thing. And it always feels like, oh, we’re going into the Apple Store. Especially now that I have kids. It’s like we’re going into the Apple Store and it’s like, it’s different than shopping for a TV on costco.com or Amazon or whatever.

David Cosand:
Yeah.

Mike Jones:
It’s just different.

David Cosand:
But even Costco has an experience, right?

Sam Pagel:
Oh, absolutely. Sure do.

Mike Jones:
It’s a crazy experience. It’s like every time I go in there on a Friday night, it’s like, oh my goodness. So many people. But yeah, I like the Apple example. I think that’s a good one. And obviously you can think of brands that have tried that and not really succeeded. Microsoft and Amazon or two that…

David Cosand:
Yeah.

Mike Jones:
Personally, and I think this comes down to a little bit of culture, your own brand DNA, right? Apple’s not perfect. They don’t do everything perfectly, but they try to do everything perfectly, right? And they really care about physical experiences because their products are physical. Amazon, I’ve noticed this over the years, consistently fails when it comes to physical products. Over and over and over. I heard, what was this last week that Alexa apparently is probably completely bankrupt as a division.

Sam Pagel:
Oh, wow.

Mike Jones:
They’re spending upwards of over, I think 10 billion and losing most of it each year on that division. And I kind of thought, yeah, that actually makes sense because again, we’re talking about physical experiences. We’re talking about putting Amazon in your home through a physical device and it’s got AI and it’s got all these digital technology behind it, but the heart of the experience is physical. And that’s something that Amazon consistently does not, as a culture doesn’t get, because their core products are not physical. And I think of Microsoft in the same way. Their Microsoft stores did not do well. They tried to do these Microsoft, very Apple Store, their version of it. And I think they were particularly going after Xbox Consumers.

Sam Pagel:
Are they still around?

Mike Jones:
I don’t think so. I think they shut most of them down.

David Cosand:
Because I did go into one once and I was like, eh, it feels like they’re copying the Apple Store.

Mike Jones:
Yeah.

Sam Pagel:
Yeah.

Mike Jones:
And I think that’s where it’s like you can’t just take the template from some other brand who’s doing a physical experience and say, all right, we’ll do that, but we’ll put our logo on it, right? I think you have to actually go to the foundational level of this concept of we’re going to have a physical experience then we need to ask why? Why are we going to have a physical experience and then, how do we do it in a way that is true to us and who we are as an actual brand with an identity? And that’s still at the heart of who they were, right?

Mike Jones:
And I know people don’t love Amazon for the most part. And I think there’s reasons for that, that are very valid. And I think some of them are also that Amazon doesn’t know who they are. I think some of this is a brand issue, but one of the things I think of when I think of Amazon is books, right? That’s their core, that was the original product. It’s what they were known for and for years and years, it was also what they were decried for of putting bookstores out of business. And I think there’s an opportunity for Amazon to maybe earn some goodwill by partnering with bookstores and doing things in that field or with, they’re into grocery now with sort of, I guess. But I think there’s ways they could think about, we provide, where are our core values, right?

Mike Jones:
It’s this idea of democratizing product and allowing anyone to sell product anywhere in the world. That’s kind of the core of the Amazon model, right? So how do you do that and what if you let different sellers into your storefront as Amazon? Let’s say you do at Amazon store, “Amazon store.” What if you had different sellers come in and just set up their own popups within your store, so each one gets to create their own experience and kind of showcase new products and you just rotate that out all the time? That would be indicative of Amazon. It would also solve, one of their core fundamental issues is that most of the brands on their platform, nobody has any relationship with, right? So I don’t know, that’s me strategizing for Amazon.

Sam Pagel:
That might also…

Mike Jones:
I’ll send them an invoice.

Sam Pagel:
Yeah, that might also go against their, why people even shop with Amazon. I shop with Amazon because I don’t want to go out of my house and go somewhere and it’s easier, but when I need to go check something out in person, I’m probably going to Target or Costco or whatever.

David Cosand:
Yeah.

Sam Pagel:
It’s a different way of thinking so…

David Cosand:
Honestly, when I shop with Amazon, I almost have that same pit, that feeling in the pit of my stomach as going to Burger King or eating fast food.

Mike Jones:
Yeah, they’ve kind of reached, they’re the fast food of shopping.

David Cosand:
It’s like, oh man, ’cause I do a search and Amazon showed up on the first result and I’m like, okay, I guess we’ll go buy from Amazon.

Mike Jones:
Yeah.

David Cosand:
I start going, can I just look at any other website?

Mike Jones:
Yeah, yeah.

David Cosand:
No offense amazon, I mean it’s about convenience.

Mike Jones:
Yep.

David Cosand:
It’s interesting though what you just described too, because it’s almost like, well I think maybe what’s making a lot of money for Amazon is AWS.

Mike Jones:
Oh yeah, that’s where they make tons of their money.

David Cosand:
This platform, and so Amazon is a platform. Maybe that’s their brand, as we are a platform for convenience.

Mike Jones:
Yeah. I mean…

David Cosand:
Period.

Mike Jones:
And there’s something interesting about that. I don’t have an issue with that kind of core idea of, I don’t know, I don’t love the idea of Jeff Bezos’ original kind of concept of we want to be the one place that you can buy anything, right?

David Cosand:
Sure.

Mike Jones:
I think that’s…

David Cosand:
That’s not specific.

Sam Pagel:
Adam Pierino.

Mike Jones:
That’s not specific, but if you were to take a category and be like, we want to be the one place where anyone can sell product in this category. Okay, I’m down with that. That’s kind of a cool idea. We want to be a platform for people to sell. I think you could really lean into that a lot further and be like, we want to unlock this entrepreneurial spirit that people have to make stuff and sell it.

David Cosand:
It’s the digital shopping mall, yeah.

Mike Jones:
And I think Etsy has captured that really well. They are the craft person brand, right? We’re a platform to allow anyone in the world to make something and sell it online and reach anyone with it. I think Amazon maybe had that at some point, maybe for a hot second, but have not leaned into let’s actually make those people who make stuff the heroes. You go on Amazon and it’s not about the brands that you’re buying from like I don’t recognize any of them. I have no idea who they are, and they aren’t compelling brands. Even in the way that they’re showcased. They’re allowed to showcase, everything feels very stark and templated. And even when you do find one that’s like, oh, they put some nice pictures and there’s some good product spec documents on here, but there’s a bunch of typos because they’re not from the US. They don’t actually speak English, so that’s a whole different issue. But yeah.So yeah, location.

Sam Pagel:
Does it matter, guys?

David Cosand:
Yes.

Mike Jones:
I think it does. I think we answered that it does.

Sam Pagel:
I think it does for sure.

Mike Jones:
That’s a good one though, we’ll have to come back to that one again.

Sam Pagel:
Yeah.

Mike Jones:
I think there’s more to unpack.

Sam Pagel:
The Remarkabrand Podcast is a project of Resound and is recorded in Tempe, Arizona with hosts Mike Jones and David Cosand. It’s produced and edited by Sam Pagel. You can find us on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and at remarkablecast.com. If you’d like more episodes, subscribe on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, or wherever you prefer to get your podcasts. To contact the show, find out more about the Remarkabrand Podcast or to join our newsletter list to make sure you never miss another episode, check out our website at remarkablecast.com. Copyright: Resound Creative Media, LLC 2022.

 

AZ Brandcast - Subscribe on iTunes

Archives