The Hidden Cost of Trying to Reach Everyone

Hey, I'd like to welcome you to another episode of Mission Matters. My name is Adam Torres, and if you'd like to apply to be a guest on the show, just head on over to missionmatters.com and click on Be Our Guest to Apply. All right, so today I have Gary Frazier on the line, and he is a retired marketing professor from the University of Southern California.

And we're going to cover some of what we're going to cover today is why most businesses fail even when the product is good. So, Gary, first off, welcome to the show. Well, thanks, Adam. I appreciate it.

All right. So we've got a lot to talk about today, but I want to go back in time a little bit here. I see you were a marketing professor. How did you get into marketing?

How did you kind of go down that path? Lots of different things you could have done. Why marketing? What drew you to it?

Good question. I grew up in northwest Minnesota in the country. Went to a one-room schoolhouse, grades one through six. A humble beginnings, lower middle family.

I went to a university called the Michigan State University in northern Minnesota to play baseball close to home. And my intent was to get into politics originally, although I soured in that quite quickly. And I soon hit upon history and social studies. I decided to get a minor in business, and I took my first marketing course.

Bill McCarthy, let's say, and I remember the professor article had a wonderful job teaching the subject, and I just fell in love with marketing, so it turned into a nature in business with emphasis on marketing, and I graduated in 1975. There was a recession, so few jobs. I think from Bemidji State University, you probably wouldn't even get a job, a very good job in good times, but I needed money. I had no money.

And a friend of mine told me, oh, Indiana University is a new school of business building. Why don't you apply there? And I was so naive. I thought, oh, good, a new building.

So I applied. And I found out that if I taught a marketing course each semester at IU, I would be paid. And I said, hey, that's it. I'm applying.

So I got accepted somehow. And things just blossomed. I graduated in 1979. with a PhD degree.

I didn't even know what a PhD degree was when I entered, but it turned out I left it. My first job was University of Illinois at Shaddington. I got married to my wife and then moved to USC in 1984. And so I just fell in love with marketing upon the first course I ever took on it.

And I just sort of fell into it. I'm a lucky guy, I guess. So I hope that answers your question. It does.

Listen, and what's interesting to me too is your perspective, just based on how long you've been doing this, based on like the transition. I mean, you're doing this before the internet. You're doing this before all these other terms, all these other things. Now we're dealing with AI and all these other things.

So like just your tenure and what you've seen in the scope from being everything from academic to, I mean, your students and seeing them out in the real world, what worked, what didn't. So it's interesting to me when you think about something like why a good product could be a good product but still fail. So I think it's an interesting topic. So how do you want to tee this one up?

Where do you want to start with that discussion? Because I think it's highly interesting. Just let me clarify that over time, I've consulted for many more than 100 companies. I also was an expert witness in over 120 cases.

So I've done work for companies like AT&T Technologies, 3M. I mean, you were a professor at USC. I wouldn't expect anything less, of course. I have to.

What do you mean? The best of the best. Of course you did. Go ahead, please.

But I think I never would have come to this topic unless I had the help of a lot of really great business people and lawyers who put up with my fantasies and naivete. And so I learned a lot over time that for sure And yeah you mentioned AI and you mentioned brand equity And I think early on in my consulting I just found it is so difficult for companies to gain brand awareness and then positive brand associations and amass brand equity. And, you know, you could have it and then lose it.

Look at Cadillac now, it's reforming and going after a much younger client base than it did for many, many years. Or Harley-Davidson now is facing extreme competition from lower-priced motorcycles from all around the world. So, you know, and so many small businesses, their brand activity is terrible. And many of their services, I mean, I'm not criticizing them.

I'm just glad I never tried to start my own business. I think it's very difficult. And I just think that you can have a great product, but if you don't target the market correctly and go after the right customers and slowly build brand awareness and then build positive brand associations, if you don't know the steps to do that, you're almost doomed to failure. Business is a very tough profession, that's for sure.

What do you think, I mean, you've seen a lot. What are some of the big mistakes you've seen companies make when they're trying to build a brand? What do you normally see? Well, the biggest mistake by far is firms target too many customers.

They go after too many. When somebody tells you, oh, well, who can help? Well, everybody can use it. That's the kiss of death, isn't it?

Oh, isn't that true? You know, I learned from someone close to me, my wife. She has a woman's clothing company, and she targets the junior market, which is roughly women 18 to 34 who will buy blouses if they have disposable income or slacks or clothing if they like the look, if it fits them. And we all know the woman's apparel industry.

You know, there's some giant companies with great brand equity, Gucci, even the double-waste product. Sorry, I was trying. No, you got to do it. It's okay.

Try to make a joke there. But my wife's company, it's called Easy Chicks. No one knows it. She doesn't have the money to advertise or promote her brand.

So she goes to major retailers, and the retailers know that none of their customers know Spicy Chicks. So instead, my wife has to do private label. She has to put Boot Barn or Forever 21 or other retail or brands or labels into the garments that she manufactures. And so she may survive poorly, but no woman really ever learns what the brand is.

And, Adam, that is so true for many, many companies, so many small businesses. No one knows who they are. I mean, it's tough out there. I mean, we have limited cognitive capacity.

We have a limited ability and interest in learning everything. There's just too much to learn, at least for me. And so low brand awareness based upon companies targeting way too many customers is a problem. So what should a small company do for women's apparel?

I would say, so go after sorority members. Go after cheerleaders. Go after young women's attorneys. You know, segment.

Not only go after a segment like juniors, but go after a niche in that general segment. Get them aware of your product. Get them aware of your name. Slowly build.

Then go to an adjacent niche. And build and build it. And unfortunately, it takes patience and time and a lot of capital. But that's a major problem I see.

Yeah, no. I see that. And I learned that kind of early on and people would tell me but then I guess the other side of that though is when you do find your like niche or you find your tribe or your community or whatever the term is that we want to use your market fit whatever it is Right. Then amazing things can happen, right?

Like small groups of people can become large groups and create a movement. And then it can even spill over to maybe some demographics that you didn't expect to, you know, get value out of your product that you weren't even targeting, right? Yeah, that's true. And you know what's interesting is large companies have certain who are multinational, global in nature.

They have markets where they don't do well. So, I mean, almost every company in the world can learn from a premise that don't go after too many customers. Build brand awareness with a niche. Then once that's done, target another niche and keep that niche after niche after niche until your brand awareness is very high and have positive brand associations among many consumers or business organizations at B2B.

And so that's the way to go about trying to be successful, in my opinion. So what are you working on nowadays? I feel like you've got a lot of knowledge, a lot of things going on. What are you working on?

Well, the book that we're talking about is from Springer Nature about the market and channel management for low-brand equity firms. I have a marketing channel management textbook designed for MBAs and advanced undergraduates in December, a few months before this one. I just have a sales force management textbook to be published by Cambridge University Press. I have another book from Springer Nature, Commandments for Market Management, how to organize and coordinate.

I'm working on a marketing management textbook, trying to take on the beast, Kotler. Kotler has been a market leader in marketing management textbooks for 50 years. We're trying to take him on. So I have a lot of calls in the fire, so to speak.

And it's interesting that I know a lot about marketing and channels. I know little about anything else. I'm so naive. You know, I do the tribute games.

I don't feel very good because if they go beyond my knowledge base, I strike out most of the time. You're a specialist. That's good. That's a good thing, I think.

I don't know. I like it. I like it. I get it.

But don't give them a marketing channel quiz or some type of like, I know who I want on my team, Gary. yeah i guess it's good to the focus i guess that's necessary for you what fuels your creativity and continuing to write books and continuing to get this knowledge out like what what like personally for gary you don't you don't have to like why do you still enjoy doing this and why do you enjoy like creating books and getting that content out well fortunately god's been good to me i'm wealthy i have a lot of money so i don't need money i'm retired i can march to the beat of my own drummer to speak, and I love that.

But I have to stay busy. I'm 74. I have to have a purpose. And I just find that writing books, mainly I'm driven by, well, I want to share my knowledge before I die.

So that's why I write books, seriously. I mean, that's the reason. I'm such a huge fan of this, by the way, and I tell people all the time. I'm like, It's paying it forward.

It's getting its legacy. There's just so many different things. And what I enjoy is that even right now, like you coming on this show right now, of course, I enjoy that. I'm learning and I hope my audience is as well.

But I'm hoping that other people are inspired and they get to hear your voice and your words and your knowledge passed down through years of doing this work. Pick up the books, of course, and go further down that path for those that want to. And you're inspiring other people to start going down this marketing route and to create. And I just, I'm a huge fan of books and people that take the time to write them because it's not easy, right?

Like I'm looking at one of your books right now and I'm like, man, that took some time. It's not easy to do this, right? It takes time Yeah it takes time You know interesting legacy is not that important to me I just like to keep busy and share knowledge That really it I could care less if no one remembers me But I hope through talking with me or listening to me on podcasts or interviews on your great show I just hope that it sparkles some interest in people and they learn They learn what I know.

That's really what drives me. Why would you say, and you may not say this, by the way, so let me not say that, but I mean, there's other ways you could spend your time. I'm not saying you're a golfer or anything like that, but some people kind of, and this is me, these are not your words, they're my words, but some people kind of check out. They retire, they're done, they're like, okay, let me go on the golf course or whatever else, and they're staying busy in other ways.

But I do feel like there is a certain like, I don't know if I'd use the word responsibility, but it could be responsibility to kind of giving back to humanity with the knowledge that you've acquired while on this planet, like for the for the common good, I mean, even. And I don't I just mean to be able to give back. So when I say legacy, I don't mean from like just me personally, when I use that word, I don't mean like from an ego standpoint or like being remembered necessarily.

I mean more so the legacy of your time that you were on this planet and that you contributed to the wealth of knowledge. For me personally, if I'm the last host on the Mission Matters shows, then I failed. That's the way I see it. I'm building this so that some other host can take over one day whenever I get to not be doing this anymore.

It's going to be a long time, by the way, so I don't want any emails or anything else. I'm young. We're not accepting applications. Let me say that one real quick, Gary, before I get in trouble with some emails.

Adam, let me compliment you. You've done wonderful. I know you're a lot younger than 74, so I hope you've wrapped this a long time. Oh, man, that's funny.

I'm not commenting on anyone else's retirement. I'm just commenting on me. I'm a terrible golfer. I love baseball, but unfortunately, my favorite team is the Minnesota Twins.

So just for me personally. Hold on, are you still in L.A.? Are you still in L.

A.? No, I live in the South Bay of L.A., but I don't want to move back to Minnesota.

That's stressful. But the only thing I really enjoy doing with my spare time, and you're right, it's a lot of work in writing. And that's just me. I'm not commenting in anyone else's retirement at all.

No, I'm just focused on myself. That's fair. Gary, this has been a lot of fun having you on the show today and getting to know more about you and your work and also the book factory you got going on over there in SoCal, where I'm located as well. That being said, if somebody wants to connect with your work, they want to pick up some books, they want to continue to follow your journey, how do they do that?

Well, good question. I know the major bookstores, I believe, have my books. And there's go on Amazon as well, definitely. I just get on Google, John and I, and do a search on Gary O.

Fraser. And the book that I think is really good generally, aside from textbooks for students, is this book from Springer Nature. It's for managers or owners of small businesses, marketing and channel management for low-brow equity firms from Springer Nature. I would just go online.

I think you can find it there and go on from there. Wonderful. For everybody listening, just so you know, we'll definitely put some links. And I see on Amazon, you can see a Gary L.

Frazier. Pretty easy to find the book. But that being said, we'll put some links in the show notes for you as well. And speaking of the audience, if this is your first time with Mission Matters and you haven't done it yet, hit that subscribe or follow button.

This is a daily show. You heard me correct. Each and every day, we're bringing you new content, new ideas, and hopefully new inspiration to help you along the way in your journey as well. So hit that subscribe or follow.

And Gary, thanks again for coming on. It's been an absolute pleasure. Adam, thank you. I've totally enjoyed it.

You're a great guy.