Jordan buckner (00:00)
Welcome everyone to today's conversation. I am super excited for this one because I have on the myth the legend Duncan who runs fire belly marketing Duncan welcome on to the show today,

Duncan / Firebelly (00:12)
man, Jordan, I love everything that you do and I love you, so I'm excited to be here, man. Thanks for having me.

Jordan buckner (00:18)
So you're used to being on the other side of things, interviewing other brands and telling their stories, but I wanted to flip the camera around and talk with you because you do some amazing things from traveling the world, helping CPG brands and others with their marketing and growing, and really just wanted to kind of download some things from your brain.

Duncan / Firebelly (00:38)
Thank you. That is true. And

very much an advocate for machine driven food and beverage brands. And that's one of my favorite things about my world. And so I'm excited to talk to you.

Jordan buckner (00:48)
So you know, starting out, I actually just wanna know what's been your favorite place to travel to this year so far?

Duncan / Firebelly (00:56)
this year, let's see, I haven't been that many places this year. You know, I went to the World of Coffee in San Diego earlier this year. I love San Diego, it's always, mean, never enough time, San Diego is such a fun place. Last year we were in Italy on the Adriatic, you know, the...

near Amalfi and that was pretty spectacular because we picked a small village. You walk down into the square, the restaurants are in there and it's super old. We just really like old places. The food was amazing and you're not paying tourist prices either.

Jordan buckner (01:30)
that sounds beautiful and I've definitely been issuing do a little bit more traveling myself. But you know, I'm curious because you've been seeing a lot of things around the world. You see things are in on with CPG brands across the country. And I would love just to understand, you know, what you're seeing more broadly from like where CPG brands are going kind of what's standing out in your mind that's kind of affecting businesses these days where it might be something.

new or different things that brands need to keep an eye on.

Duncan / Firebelly (01:58)
Well, I mean, that's a big question. I'll try my best. mean, I think that people's, you're dealing with a number of things, right? You're dealing with, in both the food and beverage space, you're seeing a changed environment. I mean, I think, you you've got some inflation, you know, the cost on the brand side, you know, ingredient costs are up. I think social media in general has created very fragmented attention spans. There's a lot of products, new products,

constantly coming out. And then we've also got this whole, know, I don't know if we can call it post GLP, but you know, we're living in a GLP world where people are either post GLP or mid GLP. And so there, I think those people, there's millions of them now, they're being a little bit more thoughtful about what they want to eat and what they want to drink. And I think they're also consuming for different reasons. So I think that it's definitely a much more

competitive space and I think it's very

Jordan buckner (02:53)
So let's dive into

some of that competition, because I know getting just the share of attention is really tough, right? There's so many different options. There's all this short-form video. And so I kind of want to dive into how brands really earn attention in today's consumer environment when there's so many things out there. So maybe let's start, you talked about it a little bit, but I'd love to dive deeper. What are some of the biggest problems

brands are facing in terms of like, do I get my new product or new brand in front of the right consumer?

Duncan / Firebelly (03:22)
Yeah, I mean, I made a video about this recently where I was talking as if I was, you know, I also have a tiny tea company. So I was just talking from that perspective. Okay, I've come up with something really great. Now I'm going through compliance and I'm finding a manufacturer and I've got all my products ready. And guess what? Now the work has really begun because now I got to sell it, right? And so I think that the piece that...

everyone thinks, a lot of people think is that I gotta go retail, which we both know is super challenging and super competitive and super demanding. know, just the capital requirements to go into retail are so high. Someone says, hey, you know, come on down to, you know, a thousand Publix. And it's like, okay, well, now I gotta have the inventory to go to a thousand Publix and I gotta pay slotting fees, you know, and there's all these, you know, and the risk of failing and then I gotta

do all the reverse supply chain stuff. So I think it's very difficult. And I think that that choice that people make, whether to go into retail and

e-commerce, know.

exclusively and then all the alternate marketing channels like you know our friend Mike Levinson talks about you know do I go do I try to get into a convenience store do I try to go to a travel center do I go to a university or a corporate campus and there's people that are just exclusively focusing on corporate campuses so I think that's a tough decision but I think even once you're making those decisions people still want to know

more about you. And I think the playbook I recommend is a founder has to have a presence, assuming there is a founder and it isn't, you know, private equity. The founder has to have a presence, founders leading the story. I think the brand has to be very well aware of its story. Like

the story and how does the overall story trickle down into multiple smaller stories that support the overall story. And then you got to know how to build awareness and familiarity.

And then of course, lastly, you got to support wherever you're at, you got to do sales support. So that's also coincidentally the FireBelly framework. So I think that is very difficult for people because they think that I'm here and.

My job is done, in fact, the hard work is just beginning in some ways. It may be actually easier to do all the other things than to actually sell. And I think, I don't know who it was that told me, and we were joking about this at one point, you and I were, about how when you...

get excited about, my gosh, look at this new brand on the shelf. Like I'm one of those nerds that walks around the grocery store looking at the brands, right? And we always have to think about, well, for that brand to get on, someone had to get thrown off, right? And so I think that's, or they opted out, whatever it is, but that's the kind of the two sides to that coin. So I think it's a very challenging environment and the brands that are doing it, you know, are constantly looking for ways to be better and they're scaling.

But I think the opportunity in this all is that big brands are built for size and scale and small brands are agile and lean and mean. So hopefully I think in the era that we're in today, know, smaller brands actually can do some things better than many things better than bigger big brands. And so while they may not have the shelf space or the sheriff voice or the share of mind, they can actually do some things quickly. So just like some

Some people open restaurants to be open for five years and then they're going to milk it, they're going to do something else after that. Maybe we'll start seeing more of that. It's like, this product is only coming out for a limited time. We're going to build a brand around the product and then we're going to launch something else.

Jordan buckner (06:40)
Okay.

So I love that you kind of break down the framework of stories, familiarity, and sales support. And I want to dive into there. But first, I want to go back. You say you mentioned you're starting a tea brand.

Duncan / Firebelly (07:00)
Hahaha, yeah,

Jordan buckner (07:01)
want to

you just lie past that to get away with that.

Duncan / Firebelly (07:04)
It's

an homage to my father. so, well, my father was very sick and

while we were going through his end of life, was spending time with a friend who likes to go and drink, you know, like esoteric tea. And so you're drinking tea, you know, in little cups, just tasting it, you're not really drinking it, you're tasting it, and sometimes spitting or not. And I was like, well, you know, my name is Duncan, which is a, you know, interesting name for an Indian guy, but it's a Scottish name. It means either brown head or brown warrior. And so I was like, well, you know, my dad is my brown warrior, so I'll just name the company.

the round warrior. And so there are actually like eight SKUs and this packaging and I hate it all already. And it's not been, it's only available for private sale at the moment, but I've got new things coming on there. But I think what I did it because I wanted to walk in the shoes.

And it's incredible, you know, just to get off the ground, to have a product that's ready to go to market is a Herculean task in many ways. And then as I was saying, then you've got to sell it. So I think that I've learned a lot by doing it. And I still think that Round Warrior will get to market.

It is tea and it was originally tea coming from a very specific part of India, the Northeast, with small tea gardens that only produce less than two tons of tea a year. It turns out that that supply chain is very difficult to navigate and not consistent and with all the kind of inconsistencies with...

importing things today, I decided to just partner with someone locally here and they're already handling the import for their own tea brand and you know so then I can focus on the marketing and even looking at a sparkling tea option so

that's what's going on with the Brown

Warrior.

Jordan buckner (08:45)
off, I mean, how powerful creating a brand.

and through the inspiration from your father, I think that's incredibly powerful. no matter what it becomes, whether private or a large company, I think even just that act alone is a huge testament. So I think that's amazing. And I live even, you're getting the experience of all the behind the scenes of what it takes to build a brand so that that can inform also your process as you're working with founders and understanding those struggles and those experiences. And I like that you started talking about the story.

I love to dive deep into is you mentioned like story being the first part of this framework of helping brands to grow. I'm curious what makes for a really effective story versus a interesting story but doesn't have kind of market legs to it.

Duncan / Firebelly (09:33)
I mean, so we're just talking to a new client today and it's a salad dressing. And we're talking about how the ingredients are super clean. The ingredient panel is just like five or six ingredients, everything that you can pronounce, nothing weird. And it's compelling. It tastes great. Now I'm like perking up like, wow, it tastes great. I have tasted it. It's killer.

And so we're going through the motions and I'm like just sitting there thinking like, man, I'm not getting the hook. I'm not getting the hook. And then they said that they all come from a farming.

background, some of them, know, some of the founders are still active farmers and they're working very closely with the ingredients and they were looking for something that was next level, that's, know, seed oil free. Now I'm starting to get an idea of the story, right? It's like, this is the story. The story is that it's clean and it's coming from a family of farmers. Like for example, like this story has not been fully developed yet, but I think stories is something that hooks you, you know, so.

I think that when you have a story, you've got an almost an unfair competitive advantage in a way, as opposed to someone who's selling olive oil. It's like, no, no, this olive oil, you know, it was, these olives were grown in this part of California, you know, and, you know, the owner, it's a family that's been doing it for a hundred years. And, you know, the advocate for the rights of the employees and, you know, they...

they do this and then this is why it's better than the Spanish olives. It's like, now you've got some like, kind of compelling, it's like going to a debate, right? You can't walk up to the dais or the podium at a debate and say, this is better. It's like, no, where's the evidence? Like, what's the stories? And so that's why I think, and maybe I didn't do, you know, we both know Arshad Baal, with Amrita Foods, right? It's like he's been in the food bevy, insider box. I mean, his story is his kid had,

terrible gut related problems that were almost life threatening. And so he was making food for his child and that's how the product came to be. And that's of course, you you hear that with a lot of founders that was solving a very specific problem, but that's the piece that's compelling. It's like this guy developed it specifically for his kid and now he's bringing it to everyone. So I don't know if I answered the question, but I think that story is very powerful.

Jordan buckner (11:49)
You know, and I think that one thing that happens is like, there's the, lot of times founders will tell the story of like, you know, so I had this experience and this is why I created the product for me. And so I wanted to bring the product for everyone else. And I think that's very much like a self-reflective story. I think there's others, which can resonate with some people. I think there's other stories where it's about,

a vision of the world, a vision of yourself, of themselves that you want to achieve, right? So you look at, just even, as an example, like Nike, right? It's about selling that vision of having high performance, like elite athletes in the world. You're not putting on the pair, know, and their market's kinda changed over time, but like, you in this heyday, you were putting on a pair of shoes because you could...

wanted to be as close to that professional athlete as possible. And so that was like the really strong story and that's really inspiring and something to be. And so I'm always just curious in terms of like how founders and brands are creating what I call like quote brand, like what are the values that you stand for? What are you trying to help people achieve before even kind of showing up in the world?

Duncan / Firebelly (12:59)
Yeah, and I think that what makes it, that's why I said kind of the overarching story or the master story, what makes it more challenging is that the way people are finding you these days, yes, it's broadly word of mouth, you've got some word of mouth that's in real life, and then you've got a lot of spread on social, right? And the reality of social is it's not linear. It's fragmented, it's a mosaic.

You might see one 30 second clip today and you know, have to, try to explain this to people. when people are thinking about this, they're like, well, I got to tell my whole story. It's like, well, you can't tell your whole story. Not only that, it's not going to go from one to two to three to four. So you have to tell it in a way that it hooks people with the part of the story that you're telling. And then the hope is that they'll see the rest of the story or they'll go find it rare that they'll go find it. They have to keep seeing it. So I think that that is.

the piece that makes it even more difficult is that you have a limited amount of time to say something. But the benefit is, as opposed to in real life where you're limited to telling someone a story with nonverbal and verbal cues, whereas on social, there's a visual story and an audio story. And so we've been doing some work with how can you intersect music in there and what kinds of music and what...

story does the music tell you if it's more for participatory purposes, but that's getting off track. So I think the story piece, it's very difficult. is also, then there's a story like, okay, so I know the story that I wanna tell my consumers, but I also now gotta tell a story to the retailer, right? Why is my product important for you? And where should it go? So I think we both know.

the, without mentioning any names, the Indian founder who has a good product. And instead of getting put in the general snack aisle at a retailer, she got put in the ethnic food aisle. It's like, well, that's death by the wrong category, right? And so I think there's so many stories, like why does my product belong with you and where should it go? And of course, how does it taste? But I think you have to tell that story because then people are kind of scratching their heads, like, you know, what is this?

And I think a lot of any brands are dealing with that. Like, why should I buy this brand? Yes, it's any, but I got 180 choices. Like, what am I gonna buy?

Jordan buckner (15:19)
do people buy any drinks, right? A lot of brands are finding that a lot of people who drink any beverages also are having alcoholic beverages certain times. And so it's not purely as a complete replacement. What are those use occasions? Why? And then how do you build that into?

the storytelling. Is it really just about non-alcoholic adult beverages? That like you're building this larger experience around drinking, whereas non-alcoholic could just be for the enjoyment, for flavor, for taste, for experience. So interesting.

Duncan / Firebelly (15:45)
Yeah, I mean, I

think

you're absolutely right. I mean, there's that whole concept of zebra striping where I'm not gonna drink alcohol on Monday and Tuesday. And in fact, I may use my any beverage and I'm gonna add some tequila to it on Wednesday. And I think that a lot of the aspirations that any founders have is not to...

get not to preach to people that, hey, you should not drink alcohol. It's like, hey, have you tried an any beverage? Because you may actually feel better and you could go to a cocktail party, you don't feel like drinking, you can still hold an any beverage in your hand and feel included, right? So I think, I mean, back in the day, we used to work with Abbott's, you know, the plant-based meat. And that was the exact philosophy of the founder was like, I'm not trying to get you to give up meat.

I'm just trying to get you to include another choice, you know, one or two days a week. So

Jordan buckner (16:36)
So let's talk

about kind of

building that awareness. So once you kind of have that really strong story, what are some of the mechanisms to build that familiarity so you're not getting lost in all the other noise?

Duncan / Firebelly (16:47)
Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, we used to, I used to think about it. I used to think that, you know, organic social, for example, did one thing or content did one thing and then paid did something else and UGC did something else. And as I was saying to you earlier, marketing agencies might think that way, you know, or marketing people might think that way. The reality is, is that consumers don't behave that way, right? Consumers will hear a story and they'll be like, well, I need to...

Think about that, do I want that? And then if they see it, like let's say they're on YouTube, they see an ad for, let's say it's an any beverage, right? Let's say it's a chai with THC in it. They see it, they'll be like, wow, a chai with THC. And they're gonna see it again. And again, they may see it six or eight or 10 or 12 times, but then when they're walking down the aisle and they see it, or maybe they'll see a link to click to buy it, then they will.

maybe act on it. They'll say, I'm gonna click. How many times have you done it, right Jordan? It's like, this sounds like a really great product. I'm gonna go to the website and either the website wasn't compelling or I'm at a traffic light and I'm like, the green light came on and my wife said, I have to go. And so I abandoned the transaction. Now, if they're retargeting me, they'll find me again. You know, but so I think that you gotta be on social,

Jordan buckner (17:53)
Yeah, never look at it again.

Duncan / Firebelly (18:03)
And you've got to think about social in a way to tell the story, build familiarity and then support sales. So it's a full funnel, but as opposed to marketing speak and like making the client think about it, like marketing people do, it's like, Hey, we're thinking about it with the consumer, you know, behavior approach or the, you know, the customer journey. So I think that's a more interesting way to work because that's ultimately what we're trying to do. So.

Jordan buckner (18:27)
Yeah,

and think it's so interesting because there's a lot of content to create and I think that goes into another thing of like with this short-lived content, I feel like a lot of times people use to more time and more effort creating this really high-value content, but now it's almost like you create something and it's only seen for a day or two days, right? And thinking about how you, beyond that.

Duncan / Firebelly (18:45)
Well, exactly.

Yeah, I mean, very well put that has actually been on my mind a lot in the last few weeks. It's like, hey, you know, there's another player in our space. They do very well and they do really great content. The content is very expensive. And so my question is, okay, like I know you're telling, know you can use that on social. You can use it on email. You can use it on your website.

But the reality is, that what is the difference in ROI or return on, you know, whatever the cost is of buying that in terms of like views and can you then correlate the views to sales? You can, you can, you can get, if you can't get all the way, you can get part of the way, depending on how you're measuring attribution. The point is like, hey, how do I justify?

$50,000 on one piece of content versus $10,000 on one piece of content versus $400 on one piece of content, right? I mean,

both entrepreneurs. I'm interested in the $400 piece of content, you know, and I want to buy 40 pieces of $400 content, not one piece at $16,000. I the math right? I think I did.

Jordan buckner (19:54)
No, but I think that's so key because

cycles quicken, you just need more out there to grab attention because you could create something that's really good, but it might be the day of the week, it might be other news and people just don't see it. You release the same thing a month later potentially and it has a different result. You also never know what's really going to catch people's attention because a lot of times what you think people might resonate with and then you find out that they actually resonate with something else entirely.

Duncan / Firebelly (20:19)
And I think, you you just touched on something really important is the, we used to live in a new cycle that was, you know, a couple of days, you know, and then it became a day and, know, then it became, you know, 18 hours and literally the political economy we're living in, the new cycle is never ending. You know, there are stories that have broken, you know, 20 hours ago.

that are irrelevant or everyone's moved on, is normalization happening, you know, but the reality is is that when we're putting content out there on behalf of our own brand or our clients or whatever it is, it's like, man, it's competing, everything is competing. And so it's very difficult.

Jordan buckner (20:58)
Yeah, I think that's okay. know, one thing that I like to do as well is just

really work to understand how to find that strong message that resonates with your consumers, the people that you want to target, the problems that you're solving, and then finding multiple ways of just sharing that story from different angles, different perspectives, so that people can find the content that resonates with them. And maybe you put out 100 pieces of content, they only see the four that resonate with them, but everyone else finds their own other set. I think that's so

Duncan / Firebelly (21:24)
Yes. Yeah. I mean, and

you have to have commitment and a little bit of cash, you know, for creative testing and you've got to stay lean and agile. But, you know, the other thing with, with your original question is people trust people, right? People don't really trust companies. They trust people. And so whether you're doing your own brand content in-house, whether

an agency is handling the content for you or a content agency is handling the content for you or you're using creators, the point is that people trust people. So regardless of how you're doing the content, you gotta feature people. And I think that's really difficult for some people to swallow. It's like, you know, they want this perfect grid. They want it to look amazing. And that's just really difficult.

Jordan Buckner AI (22:08)
Thank you so much, Duncan.