[Warrior TV] Building a Billion Dollar Brand with Nick Robinson CMO of Quest Nutrition June 25 7PM

This Thursday I'm really excited to be interviewing Nick Robinson from Quest Nutrition with Alaister.

When I first contacted Nick he couldn't wait to hold an event with us and share the growth and marketing strategies he used to grow Quest.

If you're not aware what Quest is - it's a global powerhouse for supplements (EDIT: Food, not supplements). They revolutionized the supplement industry with protein bars that have optimum nutritional content while still tasting as good as traditional 'junk food' bars. Since then, Quest have expanded into protein powder, Protein Chips and building out their brand with their own talk shows. While doing so, they've earned a host of accolades, high profile fitness advocates and a huge social following: @QuestNutrition #OnAQuest.

Personally really excited to be holding this event. For marketers and entrepreneurs alike - learn the strategies Quest used to build a BILLION dollar brand: Only on Warrior Forum.


@WarriorForum @QuestNutrition #WarriorTV #OnAQuest


Update:





Transcript of the Warrior TV Event with Nick Robinson:

[00:22]

Alaister: Welcome to Warrior T.V. This is Warrior Ask Me Anything where we bring to you the worldís best internet marketers and online entrepreneurs for you to interact with.

Iím Alaister Low.

[00:31]

Daniel: And Iím Daniel Burford.

Today we are excited to be talking with Nick Robinson, chief marketing officer of Quest Nutrition. Quest Nutrition makes the worldís best selling protein bar. Aneek magazine named them the second fastest growing private company in the U.S. In the first three years ago they grew 57,000%. Welcome to Warrior T.V. Nick.

[00:49]

Nick: Thank you, thank you, it is great to be here guys.

[00:51]

Alaister: So Nick I know in the first few years Quest Nutrition experienced phenomenal growth but tell us a little bit about how you got started with Quest and what brought you to Quest Nutrition?

[01:02]

Nick: Yeah so Iíll give you the long version and do with it as you please. So I grew up, I was the chubby computer dork in the early days when internet was just sort of coming into its own and an experience working at a Nursery taught me that manual labor wasnít for me. So from that experience I decided to start a web design firm and this was back in the day when everyone had a web design firm. But I was from small town Maine so that was the one place in the late ë90ís there wasnít a web design firm on every corner.

So I learned very quickly the passion for storytelling, for technology and for community building. So in high school I made a website called Mainestreet.com which was the home for the Maine car enthusiasts who modified their cars. This was a form for them to hang out and we had meet ups and fun stuff like that.

And at the same time I was making these really terrible short films, editing them on Adobe Premier 2.0; it crashed all of the time. And then finding ways to upload those online which back in the late ë90ís early 2000ís, it was fairly difficult to upload a video to the internet.

So from there I went to film school, Syracuse University and then after graduation I knew that the thing, Los Angeles was the place for me to be. L.A. had been calling my name since those early days tinkering with videos.

So I got a job working for Michael Eisner, and Michael was the former head of Disney. After leaving Disney with his golden parachute he started a company called Tornante and Tornante made T.V. and new media. This was pre You Tube, this was pre Facebook so we had a hit with a show called Prom Queen and we distributed that on My Space of all places where it got millions of views. And from that I started learning okay there is a way to combine these passions that I have of storytelling, technology, community and it is all happening online.

So I was at Michaelís shop, the new media division was called Vuguru and I was there. We got an investment round from Writerís Communications which allowed us to really spin out and do some pretty cool things with real budgets so I learned how to spend a lot of money making web content but I didnít quite know how to make money with web content.

So around the three year mark I was getting hounded by a recruiter saying, youíve got to meet these protein bar guys. And you know I had lost the chubbiness that I had as a high schooler but I had absolutely no interest in selling protein bars. I knew enough that eating protein bars wasnít good for you so why would I want to go work for a protein bar company. But the recruiter was relentless and she hounded me, hounded me, hounded me. So finally I said okay I will meet these guys.

So I went to a place, it was in Marina Del Rey, this beautiful, beautiful, beautiful conference room that was overlooking the Pacific Ocean, and this was their tech start up so they hadnít started Quest yet. Quest wasnít really in full form yet. So they were about to exit this Tech start up that was selling security software. So beautiful conference room and after about an hour and a half of these guys I realized they are either going to change my life in no uncertain terms or they were full of shit. It was literally one or the other on that extreme scale.

Second interview we go to the manufacturing facility in Compton, literally in the heart of some of the worst parts of Los Angeles. It was this little dingy warehouse. There were no tables, there were no chairs, so the second interview was, ìHey this is where you will be workingî and you are sitting on orange buckets from Home Depot. But there was something to it; there was this weird magic in the air. I had long been searching for mentors that were further ahead than I was, guys who had done, who had walked the path that I was trying to walk who could guide me because I knew that would save me a lot of time if I could find people who had already made these mistakes, learn from their mistakes and propel myself forward much faster.

So my family thought I was insane, they were going to stage an intervention. My brother was in private equity and he said, ìThese guys know nothing about what they are doing, they are going to fail and you are going to fail with them.î But I said, ìNo there is something here.î So I took the gamble and joined as kind of the first official hire of Quest Nutrition January 17th, 2011.

They had been making bars in the test kitchen up to that point and just sort of kind of selling them online but they brought me on because they said, ìWe know we need to build this company through social but we donít know how to do it. We just know it is the right answer. So here kid go have at it.î

And so I did because I knew this was the place I could really combine my passions. And I told them, ìEventually we are going to have to have a content studio to be able to do what we really need to do but for nowÃ-î This was 2011, Facebook didnít yet have business pages but I knew that would kind of be a nice home base for us because clearly Facebook was going someplace special.

So early days that is where I concentrated most of our efforts, on Facebook and on our blog. And it was the tried and true tactics and that is the thing is that the stuff becomes tried and true for a reason. So I built up an athlete team, I paid them in free product and I would have them write articles. We would share that on our Facebook page, they shared it on their Facebook page, and then we shared it to Reddit and bodybuilding.com places like that.

So we got a big advantage at Quest and it is something that I would really urge everyone who is watching this t consider. We started with a great product. There is nothing that can overcome a lousy product. And your life is so much easier if you start with a great product. And what people will realize, any entrepreneur will realize is it is the same energy units whether you love the product or hate the product, whether the product is great or the product is shit. You are going to have put that investment of time in, the same investment of time no matter what. So start with something great. That saved us so much heartache because the product really is different and it really is better.

But at the time there was a real negative perception about protein bars. So the original party was bodybuilders, guys who survive on chicken breast and broccoli, guys and girls who survive on that, they are going up on stage, competing in bikinis and swimsuits so every calorie counts and I knew if I could just get them a bar and have them look at the ingredients and then eat it, we are good because they are so used to deprivation that when I say ìCookiesî they are going to come running and they did.

So bodybuilding.com (it was actually the forums on bodybuilding.com because we werenít for sale there yet) was a really important original place where we were finding influences. Guys who as I described they really understood the nutrition they were putting in their bodies and they were meticulous about what they ate. So we would ship them the product for free and we would say, ìListen if you love it tell a friend, if you hate it tell us.î We donít want anything in return we just want you to try this product.

And so that is when we started really rolling with things, finding these niche communities of people we knew would really like the products. And at the same time going to events, we would lose our voices after a few hours of standing in the aisles saying, ìGet a free Quest bar, get a free Quest bar.î

No one wanted them; we literally couldnít give them away in the beginning because again everyone thought that protein bars were bad for them. So while I had a better product I had a really bad perception in the marketplace about what that product is and I began to learn, okay we have to shift public perception about what a protein bar should be in order to get people to really join in on what this is.

[08:44]

Daniel: Yeah it is interesting you brought that up because one of the things when I posted the announcement in the thread and then I labeled Quest Nutrition as a supplement company, you came and corrected me, it is actually a food company and I know that also in bodybuilding.com forums as well people when they are discussing Quest bars they are not sure whether to put it in supplements or whether to put it in their diet. So would you tell us a little bit about that evolution and how you shifted focus from starting out being just for bodybuilders and how that expanded?

[09:20]

Nick: Yeah great question. So it was a really interesting evolution for us. So in these early days we are still in the place in Compton, we are sitting on buckets; this was before we made tables from IKEA. It was four dudes witting in this tiny room so of course we thought this was going to be a really masculine company. We liked talking about nutrition and diet and exercise and power dynamics and all sorts of new stuff. And so that is what we were sort of marketing to; we were marketing to ourselves.

But that wasnít true and it took about a year to kind of find ourselves within the social eco system and I would say that is actually fast for a new brand to find their footing so quickly. And that is because it is social right; we are able to get hat instantaneous feedback from the fans about what they like, what they donít like, what they are responding to. Because it is such a low commitment to like a post, people will do that right, you can kind of count on people to do that. So if your post is getting no likes you know you are doing something wrong and you need to change.

So there was this really important point where I sort of had this gut instinct about what we were but a lot of people internally kind of thought what I have called changing things. That is your very traditional supplement company; they have got a guy with ripped abs on their packing, sweaty ripped abs and a chain around their neck. That is what that general perception is of what those companies are. And I realized we were the opposite of that but people are going to want you to be that because it is the default state and that is death right if you follow the default state you become one of [10:55 _.]

We consider, if you have read Peter Fieldís book Bold, learning about going from zero to one instead of one to ten and Quest protein bars really were a zero to one. And you do that both through a great product and a different style of messaging.

So I remember one day we knew we were something different and we werenít communicating it correctly. We were very frustrated. So myself, my president Tom and our community manager Clark, we locked ourselves in the conference room and we said we are not leaving until we figure this out. We are not leaving until we figure out the positioning of who Quest is supposed to be.

And so classic case of going on a white board and just writing words, writing down the words that we thought were use. And it took less than an hour and we left that room with ìCheat Clean.î And cheat clean has served us so well even today as that guiding principle of what the brand is. And so it is fun, it is playful but it is also delicious and actually truly good for you. And it is that important distinction that has really made us who we are today.

And it really can start with something as simple as a hash tag or a headline or just some sort of defining statement because that is your beacon right, that is the beacon of light when you have got a thousand opportunities coming your way, you have to know that to say no to. It is so easy in the early days that people are starting to recognize you and you want to say yes to everything. And we have had those days but the quicker that you can get very specific about who you are and who you are speaking to, the bigger you can become.

[12:27]

Alaister: So with Quest Nutrition it is a little bit different to a lot of the other guests we have on Warrior T.V. Most of the guests they run start up technology companies; they run SAS software companies and predominantly online companies that are selling informational products. However with Quest obviously you are selling a physical product. I donít know if people can see that but that is the actual physical Quest Nutrition bar and that is what you guys are selling.

How does the marketing strategy change compared to a solely online company. What is a mix between offline and online sort of strategies that you guys employ?

[13:06]

Nick: Yeah so what is interesting about us is that pretty much our first year we were online only. We are one of few food companies and one of few sports nutrition companies that sells direct to consumer and that was a very early strategy that has served us well to this day. So the goal in the beginning was we are going to build this ground swell, we are going to build it through social.

The first goal of Quest marketing in the first year was donít talk about Quest at all. So we werenít pitching product, we werenít talking about the brand. Now today that has changed because our fans want to talk about it and that is fine but in the early days it was not pitching product, it really was just articles that werenít written for SEO, they werenít written by someone in a different country and translated and translated again. They were written by me or an athlete. So as high quality as we could possibly do with original photography, truly try and find ways to add value and that was all to build community because we knew we would bring them into community and then we would have a very easy way for them to purchase by going to our website.

Now our website in 2011 was one of the most embarrassing things in the world. It was a template site. It had that standard stock photo of the customer service rep with the little headphone thing; it was so embarrassing: but it worked. It worked because it was an easy sales model.

So we got people in online only, purchasing the product and mind you I mean we werenít Zappos selling shoes to people without them trying them on, but selling a food product online is not the easiest thing because no one has tasted it before. And we have had some pretty amazing success with that which we can talk about later with launching products.

So year one was online only. And then finally the big distributors came knocking and that was kind of the plan because we knew the fans would go into a shop like GNC or a Vitamin shop and say, ìI want Quest barsî and they would say, ìWell what is a Quest bar?î Eventually that would get to us.

So in a very rare turn of fate the buyers would contact us and say, ìHey want to carry your productî versus what would normally happen with a physical product is you are beating down the door to the buyers begging them for one little slot on their shelf, which doesnít put you in a great position.

So to this day our online channel while as a percentage is pretty small, from a dollar standpoint it is pretty significant. And that is because we have put so much effort into community building and influence or engagement that for a lot of people it is easier just to click and buy online.

I buy something from Amazon every single day. It is insane; I would rather buy deodorant online than go into the store because Iím too lazy to go into the store. And I know a lot of people, especially millenials which Iím strangely part of that cohort, that is our preferred method of shopping. So making it as easy as possible is our preferred method of shopping. And because all of our efforts are really concentrated digitally it makes sense to have that digital sales channel. But again it is really rare. I canít think of too many other companies where the manufacture, because we are a manufacturer, we manufacture our products ourselves, it is rare that people do that.

But you know I really urge, because I think a lot of people that are watching they set on this path to create a product whether it is an informational product or a physical product because they want freedom. They have got that burning passion to create something and bring it to the universe and they want the freedom of being an owner. Donít be scared of physical products. If you can make something different and something better the trajectory that you will go on is insane.

We now have 600,000 square feet of manufacturing space, we pump out millions of bars a day but it started, you know Iíve made tens of thousands of bars by hand myself. Our president has made ten times that himself. It is possible and I think people get focused on what is the lowest barrier to entry to release a product, and while an information product yeah it is, you better ask yourself how am I adding value? What am I really bringing the world? What is the unique thing I can give that no one else can give?

And at Quest we really see ourselves doing that in two ways. One, through the product which really is different, really is better and then through our content. So today we have got a 10,000 square foot stage, we are releasing content every single day and it is largely [17:15 value wide] content. It is stuff that I think people want to see. We spend a lot of money making that, and it is not to look at it as an ROI positive endeavor, it is to add value to the community.

[17:27]

Daniel: Great so how do you actually go about creating content in terms of generating ideas? Is it all just sort of, ìOh that would be a great ideaî or is there some research you go into and look online and see what else other people are doing?

[17:42]

Nick: Yeah I mean it is a bit of a hybrid approach so in totality of the grand vision of our marketing is I copy Apple and Red bull; it is very simple. It is hard but it is simple right, I mean I always just look to brands that I admire for inspiration and see what they are doing right and then copy their techniques. So Red bull has done an amazing job being not just a beverage company but being a media company and that is the way we are going as well.

Obviously a deep passion of mine is content creation having been making films since I was at high school so it is a process that I know very well and obviously working for Michael Eisner helped hone that process. So we have got a team now, there is 15 people who do the physical production, so that is directors, editors, producers, camera guys and then we have got a team of two right now, [18:30 _ expand pretty quickly] who are writers.

And we do it in Pixar style. So if you have read the book Creativity Inc, the pros from Pixar go into great depth detail about how they create their projects at Pixar because it is all internal and that is really the process that we have. So we have a brain trust and sit down in a room and we start talking. Usually someone will have a seed of an idea and then from that seed we will beat it up and figure out what that show could be.

And easy example is we were shooting on Friday a new series called [19:01 Eda Lee].I was on the phone with Sports Illustrated one day and they were asking what shows we had in the sports arena coming out; we didnít have anything. So I just opened my mouth and said, ìOh weíve got this show that is like MTV cribs for an average refrigerator.î And the person responded to it so I said, ìOh yeah okay we will do that.î So that is what we shot last Friday. And it took a ton of development from that one little germ of an idea. But the spark of an idea will come from anywhere and then it is really the hard work is in gathering everyone, going through iterations and coming out with something that could be really viable.

On the other end of the spectrum is working with influencers. So that has been a key strategy for us since day one. And now that we have got this ability to create content it is another way to engage at a deeper level with our influencers. So Matt Santoro is a big Quest fan, he is a You Tuber with over 4 million subscriptions and he liked Quest from the beginning. And we noticed that he was talking about us so we started Tweeting back and forth, met him at Playlist live which is a You Tube convention in Orlando, had dinner with him and his girlfriend and realize alright this guy is awesome we have to do something together.

So again internally the brain trust convened and we started coming up with what that series would be. But that started with talent and what is nice about that of course is we build that programming around talent knowing what his audience likes. And listen if you have got an audience of four million of course you are going to want to make sure that you are appealing to their sensibilities.

So our show Food for Thought is very much in the same theme as what Matt does on his channel, only I would like to think we amplified it a little bit better. We have got an in-house animator who just went nuts on this thing doing these animations. And it is so cool to see Mattís fans commenting on the content, saying how much they love it, saying, ìOh my god those animations are great.î And knowing that we are making an impact.

Now listen eventually that comes back to a sales perspective that eventually it does sell Quest bars but my content team they are not thinking about sales. I do not talk to them about sales. They donít know what our revenue number is and that is intentional. I donít want them thinking about that. Same with our social media team. I donít talk about sales with them. I talk about building the community, giving back, creating content. That is what is important to them.

[21:19]

Alaister: Yeah a lot of the success of Quest as you mentioned being built on the back of community; it seems as if very early on you consciously built a strong community around your product. But I can imagine as you mentioned earlier on in the early days I suppose peopleís perception about protein bars was quite negative. How did you overcome that in the beginning and was there actually a tipping point where you felt hey we are actually making an impact and shifting peopleís view and perceptions and did that see a huge increase in the community and the contribution from people?

[21:55]

Nick: Yeah, cool, cool question. And you are cutting out a little bit so let me just see if I can iterate it. Going back to the early days and reversing the negative perception of what a protein bar is. Is that essentially the question?

Alaister: Yeah thatís right.

Nick: Yeah so again because we were creating a community we are in that great position where we can talk directly with our fans and try to adjust concerns. So that is one easy thing right where we are bringing them into this ecosystem where it is a supportive community, it is a community where we want to see people succeed. It is not about being elitist it is about being involved and supportive.

So step one is they will feel that right, they will come into the community and feel oh this is maybe a little bit different. But I will give you the honest truth because that is sort of a wishy washy answer. The honest truth is in the first year we sampled over a million bars. There were two bars in a box and ship it to anyone. It cost $5 as an expense. That was pretty much my entire marketing budget for the first two years, shipping bars to people. And it was the smartest thing we possibly could have done.

This is very, and I know it is a brute force thing, it is not super sexy, it is not some CPC hack but sometimes the best answer is the simple answer. And in this case really it was guys rally the troops we are sending out a lot of free bars. Brace yourselves because it is not going to be cheap but in the long run it is going to work. And I think it did so we continue to do that today. We do huge sampling online and offline. It is actually, I would love to hear from the warriors some of their techniques to overcome, when you say you are giving away a free product, the people come, they stamp down the doors and they are people that just want free things, they donít necessarily just want a free protein bar.

So that is something that is constantly wackamole because there are massive sites dedicated to saying, ìHey Quest is giving away something for free, go and get it.î And they donít care what they are getting. So that is something that we always sort of battle against, employing various tactic hacks to try and overcome it but I canít say we have ever been successful there,

But yeah the easy answer to your question is overcoming the perception: Sample. Sample, sample, sample, give it away for free. If your product is good they will return,

[24:22]

Alaister: What was some of the initial feedback that you received from people after giving them samples for free that maybe helped shape what Quest has become now? Was there certain feedback around the taste or the actual nutritional value that you incorporated into the actual product or how did that work?

[24:39]

Nick: Yeah so the great thing about giving our product away for free is people would try it and they would be blown away. It really was especially in 2011, 2012 because it took the competition about 2.5 to 3 years to reverse engineer us. So no one had ever seen anything quite like a Quest bar of course.

Now listen of course you are going to have your detractors, people who are going to say it is too chewy or whatever and that is fine right, you canít please all of the people all of the time. We are very aware of that, thatís fine. So we wouldnít use social as a mean to sell and we donít really use it as a means to defend. So if someone were to buy a box of bars and comment on our social saying, ìI didnít like the taste.î Then, ìNo worries write to our customer service and reach out. We are going to refund your money, donít worry about sending it back, give it to a friend or throw it away we donít care.î And we take that to the extreme.

So a person brought 12 boxes and they were left on the front door by Fed Ex. The neighborís dog came and tore open the package, ate a bunch of the bars and destroyed the shipment. Now obviously that is not really our fault. Fed Ex dropped it off and it is the neighborís dog. There is a handful of other people that really could be held responsible. But no, no worries do you want your money back or do you want us to reship it?

So it is really deciding how you are going to use your channels and how you are going to communicate.

So we are not our job isnít to convince people to like a product that they donít like. The job is to really amplify the people that do like it. And what we found is yeah the majority of people love it and not only do they love it but they want to talk about it.

So another very early successful technique that we continue to use today is how do you incentivize people to talk about us? If you look on our socials we have so many posts of people holding a bar in front of a cool location and just really interacting with our product. This is a protein bar, like no one was ever posting pictures of themselves with their protein bar as if it was their best friend in the world. And that was by design right, we very much by design created the community where that was going to happen and you created a positive feedback loop where more people do that, the more you are going to give away free product and if their picture gets posted on our socials they are going to get a free box of bars. And really a) Creating a supportive community and b) setting up that positive feedback loop where people continue to do it.

It is insane like, if you look for our hash tags you look for cheat clean, you look for quest nutrition, you look for love protein. I mean hundreds of thousands if not millions of posts with people and their Quest bars. And to this day our fans are so creative and that is another part of the positive feedback loop where it goes beyond just like holding the bar in a cool location. People sky dive with the bar and doing the craziest things. It is also how we discovered cooking with our bars; our fans figured that out. Our fans started rolling out protein bars and doing crazy things with them and making these cheat clean creations. And that became a huge initiative for us. So it is another great example of listening to your fan base and reacting to it.

So we have got a cookbook, we have got an in house chef team, we really scaled up based on a handful of fans saying, ìYou can do a little bit more with the Quest bar than just eat it out of the wrapper.î

[28:00]

Daniel: The Quest nutrition constantly innovates, like from day one introduces a new protein bar the world has never seen but it continually does that. I know recently you have launched protein chips and you are also building out new flavors. How do you go about building that product, starting with an initial idea and the product development?

[28:22]

Nick: Yeah so we are unique in that we built one of the largest R & D teams of any food company in the world. So when I say food I am talking Kraft and Nestle and all those guys. Usually they are not in house R & D teams but here we do so we have got over 50 people who are actually here in our corporate headquarters who do our product development. That is run by our CEO Ron who is, the guy is just a genius with food and it comes across as trite, but oh my god the things that this guy comes up with is mind blowing.

And he is just, he loves researching food and nutrition and health. This guy is 220 pounds, 5% body fat, he is the real deal. And he knows a lot about food. He understands the nuances of what makes it all tick. But it is also, we are hyper collaborative environment. So just like we have the brain trust for creating content, there is a brain trust for new products. So a handful of us, myself, a person named Tom, and then other guys downstairs in R & D, they are artists. And essentially they have a blank check to create. So they are incentivized to come up with the worldís most delicious things that are truly good for you.

And listen a lot of them you just canít bring to market, they are impossible to produce. As I said we do our own production and that is a huge operation in and of itself. Again 600,000 square feet, about 1,000 people who create that. That is a whole beast. So we will put that to the side. So with product development it isnít marketing driven. I am not going downstairs and saying. ìGuys I need a protein powder.î That is not the way it works. They are down there tinkering with protein powders for two years trying to find the perfect flavoring system and the ideal gum system to make something special.

And then we release it. So we are very much R & D driven which is surprisingly rare in this industry. The world doesnít really understand how food affects the human body. It is all correlative studies. So a scientist will say, ìHey what happened when you ate this?î Instead of hooking you up to the sensors and understanding what is happening. So there is a handful of scientists who are really trying to understand this and those scientists we have direct personal relationships with.

There is a guy who wrote a book who worked for Pepsi for a very long time. And he was talking about the different flavor systems and the perfect crunch that you give a chip to make it be a good experience and the way you use special seasonings to make you want to eat it. And at the end of his book he said, ìI just wish that a company that was focused on creating healthy foods would use these techniques.î And he wrote this book in the ë90s. And Ron our CEO read the book, called this guy up and now he works with us.

So food development is a crazy thing. It is a ton of fun from my perspective because I donít have to dig the ditch as they say I just get to try all the samples every week. So yeah it is a beast unto itself and we put a ton of just muscle behind it.

Same with originally making the Quest bars. Why did no one make a Quest bar before? Because it was hard. Every contract manufacturer said it canít be done. And when you say, no we are going to go do it; that is what separates us.

[31:39]

Daniel: So your best selling protein bar is the cookie dough flavor and that is the best selling protein bar in the world. Why donít you tell us a little bit about how that was developed from day one?

[31:54]

Nick: Yeah so cookie dough was a turn the corner flavor. Obviously things were going really well, the fans were responding, the community was building, sales were really increasing, things were going great, better than expected right. You are a start up Food Company, that is a weird thing to do, start a food company that is only doing social media marketing; thatís weird, but it was working.

Then we released chocolate chip cookie dough it was an explosion heard around the world. People just flipped out. It is still to date my favorite flavor and every once in a while you get perfect timing and I would say the release of chocolate chip cookie dough was perfect timing. So we really dialed in the marketing message; we knew who we were. Which up until then we only kind of sort of knew who we were. It goes back to that meeting in the conference room to come up with cheat clean.

So cheat clean had hit and then cookie dough hit and it all just combined to be the perfect storm of a product release. I had been refining our process for product releases. So we do something sort of unique that I will quickly go over. We release our new products online first and that is where it is such an advantage to have our online sales channel. So we will tell our social fans, hey in a week something new is coming. That will always be our number one post of all times. The fans just go crazy and we do about a week of hype up where we kind of slowly tease out what that flavor may be. And then it is online only for the first month or two.

Up until, actually cookie dough happened as well, when we release a new product when it is finally on our site, our fans flood our website and our website would always crash. That happened up until a year and a half ago. And that shows you that crazy enthusiasm people had for a protein bar which in this case they had never tried before. And it is really a tribute to what happens when you build a great community built on value first where the fans have a deep trust of us and I would say we have a deep trust with our fans. So when we say, ìGuys we have got a new product,î they are so excited and they trust, like they know they are going to like it.

And on the rare case if they donít, they know we are going to refund them. So with that high level of trust you have got swarms of people regularly knocking down your doors to purchase. And it is a kick, it is a thrill to sit on the real time analytics and watch as the fans come in on these new product launches.

So we had the strategy, we had the messaging and then with cookie dough we finally had the perfect product and everything just hit. And yeah, it continues to be our best seller.

[34:33]

Alaister: In the early days when you first created the very first protein bar, you guys mentioned you guys were in the lab I suppose hand making it. And you said that there was nothing on the market that was like this protein bar. What actually was the difference between Quest protein bar as to everything else on the market and how long did it take to develop that protein bar that you actually first went to market with?

[34:58]

Nick: Yeah so the three founders, Ron, Tom and Mike they were moonlighting essentially. They were running a software company for 12 hours a day and then they would come home and be developing bars. So Ron and his wife Shannon, she had been making, kind of tinkering with protein bars in her kitchen for a long time. She has competed in body building shows and she has got kind of a pedigree. Her dad was one of few people to go up against Arnold Schwarzenegger on stage. So they knew a lot about performance nutrition.

So she was making bars and they go to the point where they were good enough that the tech guys at their old company wanted to eat them. And that is always a good indicator right, if kids like it or if tech guys like it you know okay we have got something special here.

So she was really one of those early bars with vanilla and peanut butter, kind of tinkering away, finding that right formulation, understanding the right ratio of almonds to the fiber source and all that stuff. So that process was, they started that in 2009. And then all through 2010 was ramping up really understanding the formulation.

The thing that most people donít know is that our very first bars had chicory root in it, which was our fiber source. Most people react violently to chicory root where you need to be close to a bathroom. Now the nutrition was great but the stomach, the gastrointestinal effects werenít. So that was actually the first two flavors had that in there. While looking back on it, in the moment it wasnít the best thing in the world, they tasted great, they had great nutrition but they had a little defect. But that kind of set a pedigree in us of always innovating.

So then we found a new fiber source and we started using that. And that made the bars better. And we found some other flaws, and even today we have got some flaws with the way our product ages. So they have actually developed a new fiber source that makes it age better.

So we really see all our products as iterates. So we donít release the Quest bar and call it done. We release it and at the same time R & D are doing crazy things downstairs to make it even better.

[37:07]

Alaister: So now you mentioned you have got a huge team around content creation, R & D, marketing and social media. Obviously in the early days you were the first hire. What were your first hires and what was your strategy for building a marketing team around the Quest nutrition brand?

[37:24]

Nick: Thatís interesting. So because I have always been so close to it right, Iíve drank a lot of the Kool -Aid and Iíve made a lot of the Kool-Aid, it really becomes your baby. And the way that we messaged, every word up until a year ago, I approved every single word that was released anywhere which is stupid right. The chief marketing officer shouldnít be proofing every single word that goes out, it should be a team that you trust and empower and let them take care of it.

But the building of the marketing team I did very slowly. And now it has really exploded and the team is huge and growing at a very fast rate. So because I was sort of learning about, learning and developing the brand at the same time right, we didnít go in with a playbook like, ìHere is what we are going to say and here is how we are going to do itî; we had to discover it over time. So I had to make sure okay that piece is rock solid we can bring someone in to do it.

So the first hire was our community manager. So for the first two years every single Facebook post all that stuff, everything was me from ecommerce to social. It is not a good strategy, it takes a lot of time and you quickly discover once you bring on those hires, you realize oh that is a whole team, that is not just one person, they need a whole team behind them. So building up a social team was the first thing that I did and then building up a copywriting team, the content team. We are building our ecommerce team right now, we have three people but we will have twelve people there by the end of the year.

Building up the retail marketing team, there will probably be 15 people on retail marketing by the end of the year. Our events team has 300 ambassadors around the country. We are in 70 countries around the world so there are ambassadors in some of the other key territories as well. The event team from a support staff perspective has twenty people I think. So very quickly you kind of find the high level person, start running a component and you realize that is going to blossom into a whole channel.

But because I was so picky about how we communicated everything that goes out, hiring is a really hard thing to do. I spend 20 to 40% of my days interviewing people to hire them. And that is because they have to have that raw force power and skill set but they have to have what we call the Quest spirit. It is really hard to find people with the Quest spirit. And without that it is just not going to work.

So one of the keys the reason that we seem like this well oiled machine is we hire many great people and the key to my hiring is I hire people who want to be here, specifically here. Iím never going to convince someone to come into work. If they arenít waking up Monday morning with a pep in their step wanting to be here then they are in the wrong place. So it is about what we call aligning selfish desires. So it is finding people that coming to Quest is the best possible thing they can do because coming to Quest will allow them to achieve their goals. And we get very specific about what that means in the interview, so our interview process is very weird. And it is all designed to figure out what they really want to do because if you are coming in to interview to be a copywriter of course you are going to say what you really want to do is write copy; thatís the obvious answer. So it usually takes a while to extract out of the person what they truly honestly want to do.

And then once you find that person who that is where they want to be, it is just magic.

[40:50]

Alaister: You mentioned a lot of the team consists of influencers and ambassadors; how does that actually work out? Are they actually employed by the company and what is their actual role within the marketing team?

[41:01]

Nick: Yeah so this is something that is going to expand out a lot this year going into next year. To date it is mostly about actually all the ambassadors are 10-99 so they are contractors, but what we have done is because we were getting a lot of event requests from all over the country, random places, I call it the North Dakota problem. So we had ambassadors in North Dakota but not New York City. That is a little silly .So this year we focused on ten core cities, the cities you sort of expect, Los Angeles, New York City, Boston, Chicago, Austin, San Francisco places like that, and building up core teams.

So in each of those ten core markets we develop lead ambassadors. So we fly them up to Quest headquarters, we spend a lot of time with them and really develop them as leaders so that they can, it is essentially taking the community experience that we have developed online and localizing that offline. And really spreading the Quest spirit and enabling people to do that.

And then from there a lot of cool things materialize. Once you are in 70,000 stores there is a lot of work to do, to be done. A lot of people walk into a grocery store and think that those beautiful displays are put up magically. But no, the bread has got have a merchandizing team who goes in there and sets up the displays, and making sure they are on the proper shelf and making sure you are in stock, and making sure all your products are forward facing. There is a lot to be done.

So building up these big teams that work side by side with the sales team. There is this whole fascinating world of offline selling and retail marketing that we get to play around in now.


[42:39]

Alaister: So with, and that was basically the ambassadors. On the other side you have also got these influencers that you work with and you are talking about maybe producing content with them and leveraging their networks. Talk to us a little bit about the strategy with the different influencers.

[42:56]

Nick: So there is a handful of different tiers but the goal is all the same. So weíve got about 20 now people who every month we are creating some sort of content with them. And these are people with, maybe they have 10,000 followers, maybe they have 5 million. While yeah of course the number is important right, everyone one of the first things you are going to look at when you are looking at an influencer is the number. For better or worse there is no way around that right it is human nature, it is social proof, we want to see the number. But that is the starting point for us. And again we have people with very small numbers and that is because it is about their passion.

So just like what we do with interviewing people to work here, to be one of our influencers online you have got to be after something special that we can help you with.

From there it gets kind of interesting. So you know we will get on a program, whether they are producing content about us with some level of frequency. We start seeing what their passion points are, really understanding who they, who their audience is and then we find ways to engage at a deeper level.

An interesting thing we are doing right now for our online influencers is snapchat takeovers. So we give them the password to our snapchat account every Friday and let them just show a day in the life. So they snapchat their day, they do it on our account, they promote it on their social, we promote it on ours. It is our highest viewed content, our highest viewer [44:28 get] content right now in that time period is our stuff on Snapchat. So it took a while, I was beating the drum loudly for us to start doing something special on snapchat. And it is funny it is just you only have so much energy units in the day so we finally brought on someone who one of their sole focuses was on snapchat and running our music vertical.

And then once you kind of put that person and focus them it just blossoms into something incredible.

So it is really, the goal with the influencers is find opportunities for them; so creating content, doing snapchat takeovers. In cases like Cassey Ho or Matt Santoro we are creating big series around them with pretty substantial budgets. We do events with them so we will fly them to big fitness events. It is really like what opportunity can we create that is meaningful to them? And of course it is good for us but it is all about creating opportunities where they want to be there, they are excited to show up and their fans should be excited to participate as well.

[45:32]

Alaister: Yeah there arenít too many companies effectively I think using snapchat and platforms like that. I mean you guys obviously use lots of different distribution points, Facebook, Twitter, things like that. Have you found any other maybe newer more unique distribution channels that you guys have found worked really well for your audience?

[45:50]

Nick: I would say the newest platform that we are using is for sure snapchat. The most interesting one that didnít take off for us was Pinterest although it is getting better now. Our content is primed for Pinterest and it never really took off which is interesting. We are not very big on Vine. So when Instagram released 15 second video that was my Trojan horse. So I had been pitching to create our content studio for a year before then. When we were still pretty small and I was trying to get a pretty big budget to start creating content, and then Instagram released video and myself and our community manager shot on my iPhone and said, ìHere look it is video.î And it did pretty well on Instagram. So that finally allowed me to hire the first person to come in and create content. And then you know two years later we have got a studio with tons of people working in it.

So there is definitely a fast mover advantage on all of these new platforms. And our success on snapchat I think is the prime example of that. You get in early, find the right way to engage with that community, you are rewarded with this new loyal audience. So I really encourage people to get in there and get in early. And you know maybe it wonít work but if you have got a good team, they will be excited to try it out.

Another new one for us: periscope. We have been on periscope ever since it kind of hit [47:16 during south by southwest.] So we stream live our show inside Quest which is a talk show format every week where our president interviews people that have done something extraordinary. So we stream that live and that is actually going very well. I am very fascinated by periscope; I think it has actually got legs. I think now is the time for real time streaming to take off. We have had it before, Justin T.V. and even before them, but the audience is ready now. I think the creators are ready now where that should actually take off.

[47:47]

Alaister: Yeah I think a lot of people spend a lot of time trying to find and read about different channels or different strategies that work rather than spend time actually experimenting with new ones and being okay with failing perhaps with a new channel.

Letís talk a little bit about your snapchat. A lot of people I know donít effectively use snapchat as a marketing channel. What do you guys actually do on snaphat? You mentioned briefly you do snapchat takeovers; what other content do you push out on snapchat and how do you see that working?

[48:17]

Nick: Yeah so I mean it is an important distinction for a lot of your viewers I assume is we are short on time, alright. So if you are a one man or even a five man operation you can only do so many things during a day and where are your efforts best focused. If that is your case I would be focusing on getting the strongest CPC in your field, owning social ad as well, that should be your baseline. We spend six figures every month on CPC, six figures every month on social ads. We have got huge investments in there; they are all very ROI positive. Super important, re marketing as well right, those should be the foundation of what you are doing.

Again we are lucky that we have a good product, because our landing pages are terrible, but they are going to get better very soon though. So with all these new emerging platforms you have always going to look at return on time. So to create really good content takes a lot of time. And video is only amplifying the time that it takes.

Here is what is nice about snapchat; they donít want good content. They donít want high quality content right. They are expecting this to be shot on the cell phone, it is edited on the phone, it is not color corrected, it is not fancy, it doesnít have great audio; it is raw.

It used to really upset me that, so every Wednesday we post a meme. Our memeís even today are our highest performing content. That used to drive me nuts. It would take, you know we would put some creativity behind it but no more than an hour a week all in right, versus a 15 second recipe takes two days of multiple peopleís time. It takes thousands of dollars to make each one. And that would get half the interaction.

Now the reason that is working is it has got a long tail and eventually over time those perform very well and actually drive revenue in. But that used to drive me nuts.

So the reason I bring all that up is you have got to decide with so many new platforms emerging, where you are going to spend your time that you can get a return.

Snapchat right now isnít very trackable. You canít click out to a website and go purchase a product. So for now what we are doing are the takeovers on Friday and then we will have some channel specific things that we do. Like one of our in house chefs Brian, he did a thing on Saturday. So it is very simple content, creating it as quickly as possible and really just finding fun ways for the fans to interact.

So cooking is obviously, cooking is one of our primary channels. We break our role down into different verticals. So we have fitness, cooking, music, sports and e-gaming are sort of the big ones that we are running right now. All of those have their own socials with content for those.

So once you look at the tree of content that we have to have, you have got your verticals, and then your channels on each vertical; it is a big beast to fill. So you have got to think even for us right we have got a huge team, but where does it make the most time to create that content and which platform makes the most sense?

You Tube is kind of the premier destination for that but Facebook is nipping at their heels. As soon as Facebook comes out with a successful ad serving platform I think you are going to see a very big shift and I am hearing that is early next year.

So where can you track? While it is fun to create good content you want to get very practical. It is super important to be able to track back and see what is happening. So having that data and having someone analyze that data and really make sense of it is ever more important and that turns into a beast onto itself as you create your business intelligence team, that becomes a whole thing.

[51:59]

Alaister: You mentioned the core of your marketing being the CPC sort of channels, so whether it be like Google Adwords or Facebook and things like that where you are pumping in money and getting paid traffic, how do you go about tracking it? I mean obviously you are able to track sales, people who purchase it from your website. But I suppose it is difficult to attribute and track exposure and brand awareness that would drive someone to walk into a store and purchase a Quest bar.

[52:30]

Nick: I heard about half of what you said. So tracking, but are you talking about just tracking online?

Alaister: No I am just talking about being able to use those advertizing channels and being able to track what actually is driving people to do things whether it be actually purchasing online or walking into an actual store and purchasing [52:50 a bar] from a retailer perhaps.

[52:50]

Nick: Yeah it is basically the struggle of the next few years is really attribution right. Attribution is a huge pain in the butt; it only gets worse as you get bigger. Yeah that is one of the things that I really thought by now we would be good, I would really be able to get a clear picture of what is happening and where by which channel. We know roughly for every one person who buys online you have got around nine walking into a store to purchase. But that is based on very bad math. It is not, there is very little that we can do right now but it is getting better.

So obviously Google Analytics is your baseline. We are setting up some more sophisticated systems now but I will say that we donít get bogged down in technology and I think a lot of people might. We to date use the bare necessity to get the job done quickly. We cry speed above everything else so whatever it takes to get this up and running, get this campaign going, we are not going to wait three months to do the sophisticated solution because I donít have three months to wait.

So to date it has been Google Analytics for tracking but some other platforms are getting very sophisticated and Pandora, certain Pandora campaigns can track you walking into a store based on a fairly large sample size. That is fascinating to me and a handful of other guys can start doing that too.

So you are going to see obviously mobile, mobile, mobile, mobile, nothing is more important than mobile and because of that we are going to start getting that location data back. It freaks people out and I get that, if you think too hard about it maybe it will freak people out. But as long as it is anonymous and it is [54:38 value add] I think this can be done in a way that the consumer benefits and the advertiser. And people need to understand that advertizing is supporting a lot of what they do online and offline.

So if I can serve a targeted ad to you, if you have never heard of Quest and I can find you and serve you an ad for Quest that is actually helping you, that is good. It is good for me and good for you. Versus me serving you an ad for a hair transplant and that has nothing to do with anything you are interested in. So being able to get targeted, and this is just a rant, if they were properly explained it I donít think the consumer would be as freaked out as they are. That is a whole different conversation.

So yeah I think in the next five years we are going to get super targeted, super sophisticated in what we will be able to do with I hit somebody with an ad online and they walk into their store and buy it. Being able to see that complete path is super important and we are getting close to being able to fill that in but to date I canít fill that in. Maybe Kraft foods can with a very expensive system, but yeah we are not there yet on the mainstream level.

[55:49]

Daniel: Great. One of the most common questions that we actually got through from the attendees that are listening in today is that they created what they believe to be an exceptional online product. The question was what do you think is the best strategy for them to market that content if they just have say a website at the moment.

[56:14]

Nick: So obviously it is going to depend on what the product is. There should always be very specific tactics to use depending on what the product is but this is an information product, letís just pretend it is something unique. Iím giving away a lot of it, thatís for sure. Iím hoping that this is something that is a broader concept where it needs to be learned over time. That way I can bring you into a community and give you a lot of it for free, support you in your learning of that and ultimately have those multiple sell points.

What I love about Quest bars of course is that you donít buy them once; you buy them once a month. So if you are creating an information product, make sure that this is a product that you can sell them more than once, especially now when information is cheap, attention is rare and expensive. And that is the state that we are in right now.

So if you are just trying to sell information you are going to have to really bring people in, bring them in through a long tail and really be able to, once you identify this person as wanting your product, you need to be able to sell them multiple times.

And you do that through community, you do that through building up your community and adding just a ton, a ton of value.

[57:30]

Alaister: So unfortunately we are actually running out of time now Nick but thanks very much for your time here. Just to wrap up what would be I suppose maybe three things that you would advise people who are looking to start out right now, three things that you think Ã-

[57:47]

Nick: Sure letís see. Everything that you ever want to know is in books. If you are not reading every single day you are falling so far behind everyone else. I use audible, Iím not going to get paid to say it but I use audible and I use it because I can play back at 3x. So I do 65 minutes of cardio a day and I listen to audio the entire time. My commute is 20 minutes each way; I am listening to audio the entire time. When you play back at 3x you are able to go through a ton of content very quickly.

That to me is the closest you can get into plugging into the Matrix that we know [58:22 yet today.] But if you can speed read I donít care how you get it, read, read a lot.

If you are going to start something, be passionate about it. So just because you find a little tiny niche in the market doesnít mean you should go out and start a business around it. There is plenty of bad businesses out there already so find that thing that you would die for because you are going to wake up early every morning and you are going to work on that product. So love it. Love it. If you are not waking up at 5:00 am in the morning because you are jazzed to be working on it you have probably picked the wrong thing. So choose wisely in whatever you pursue.

And then add value. I mean it is such a common saying these days but oh my god is it real, it is true. By really truly focusing and being obsessed with your fan, they will do anything for you.

Our fans truly honestly, we have one of the most amazing communities on the internet. We fly fans out here, we do crazy things for them and they truly, truly reciprocate the love. So find those crazy ways to add value. Donít be scared to spend money on your fans it will come back to serve you long term.

I think that was three. Was that three?

[59:37]

Alaister: Great, yeah perfect. Well thanks very much Nick we really appreciate you giving up your time for our community. I know the community will gain a lot from all we have discussed today so I really appreciate your time. Thanks very much Nick.

[59:50]

Nick: Alright, absolutely my pleasure guys. Thank you for tuning in. Thank you for the opportunity, it was really great getting to chat with you guys.

my head hurts after trying to follow the camera around

Just signed up. Looking forward to this
Have a very busy day on Thursday. Will there be a replay?
Thanks

We were trying hard to become WORLD'S CHEAPEST Brand Builders...............waiting for your BILLION DOLLAR tips...... registered

Just reserve seat. Hope I will find a way to Building a Billion Dollar Brand. I have some blogs and site.

I want to launch my book virally but I don't really know how. I need suggestions.

It seems you follow the model ... Content is king ... As a leader how do you keep on top of things? Or do you?

Registered and waiting!

Will there be a recording? Thanks.

We're live in just under 10 minutes!

Thanks to all for watching today's event and for your great questions.

You can follow Nick & Quest Nutrition on Twitter here: https://twitter.com/NjRConcepts https://twitter.com/QuestNutrition

This was a great event. Nick had a lot of incredible insight into starting and marketing a physical product and building a community of passionate fans.

One of my favorite quotes from the event:

"If you're going to start something, be passionate about it. Find that thing you would die for."

We're producing the video now. As soon it is ready we'll post the link to watch the replay.

Thanks Nick for the great event!

Great content, thank you Nick!

I could not attend the session with Nick Robinson. Was it recorded? How can I watch it?

Thank you very much.

Best regards,
Mario Krsek

thanks for sharing!

خودتان سايت شخصي خود را بسازيد بدون هيچگونه نياز به تخصص خاصي
کاملا ريسپانسيو با بهترين امکانات
فقط با چند کليک
طراحی سايت رايگان
طراحی سايت

thank you very much

Thanks, I got myself registered. I want to make billion dollars out of my sport services (giving training on firearms).

Why are these old WAMA threads getting resurrected? I can hardly figure out which one's are upcoming in this. Can we lock these old threads?

I have a web site and now I am on that stage when I need some help running it, because I expand the service I give people on regular basis, but now I have problems, tried to get my sister and father help me, and it all finished very badly, we still don't talk, and this is all ober money, I am afraid of making a team, because I have no idea where to find people who would be loyal and so I could trust them, can you tell me where to start to create the dream team?