Ep. 274 Polly Hammond (5forests) on Wine Marketing

Do you produce a wine that is exceptional? Register your wine for this April's five star wine selection. Over one hundred judges, including masters of wine, Master Somides, analogists, and wine professionals will select top wines for feature in five star wines the book. The best certified biodynamic and organic wines also will be presented through the dedicated section, wine without walls. Feature wines will gain continued worldwide visibility through VIN Italy in National promotional support. Find out more at five star wines dot it. Italian wine podcast. Chincin with Italian wine people. Hello. This is the Italian wine podcast with me Montewood, my guest today. Is Polly Hammond. Poolly founded a company called Five Forest. What is Five Forest? Are they really five Forest? And if so where are they and what kind of trees are involved? Five Forest are the five Forest from which we get French Oak Bear URLs. That was Really? That was ostensibly the name, but at the same time, because it's a digital company, we use best practices. URLs and names, therefore, that start with numbers, get higher hit rates, and eight characters is the sweet spot for a URL. Really? Yep. Oh, that's interesting. Yeah. There's there's method in your madness. There was a lot of method in our madness back in the day. So how did you get into, the business that you're in the marketing side? And why are you so good at it? Yeah. I I got into it. Every modest. I got into it. Accidentally, no, circuitously. I suppose this is probably the answer. My father-in-law was an executive for Southern for thirty five years. So what southern? So Southern Glasers. So what's that? It's huge distributor in the US Nice. Along the West Coast. Yes. And so that was the company that put food on my husband's plate growing up kind of thing, you know. So there was despite the way that that large scale distribution is looked at. We had great relationships with them. Let's put it like that. And we made a decision when we were early in life by husband and I that we didn't want to go into alcohol because we wanted something that we felt was, I think, a little bit more normal, normal family life, you know, normal hours. And so we went in a different direction. Always kept wine there in the background. It was a part of our life very much in prosumer sense. What do you mean by prosumer? Prosumer. So that space between a consumer and a professional. So you know more than than an average consumer, but you don't make your money off of it. That was where we were. And then we expatriated to New Zealand from the US. So how did that happen? That's not something that you do in five minutes. No. It's not something that you do in five minutes, but it took about seven days. At the time, it was pretty easy to and it's, yeah, that's a long time. It was pretty easy easy to get residency back then. This was over twenty years ago. We were living in Hollywood, and we were newly married, and we just wanted something different from life. And so we sold everything we own, took twelve bottles of wine and two cats and left. For LA to New Zealand. From LA. That's such a jump in so many ways. Isn't it? I mean, obviously physically in the in the hemispheres and and, I mean LA is a, an incredible place, but it's quite a I would find it a difficult place I've been there a few times. I it's not the current place I wanna live to be honest. Isn't isn't using it just like in the middle, it's a little island. I bought islands in the middle of absolutely nowhere. It wasn't that a little bit of a gamble. It's a huge culture shock. Oh, yeah. And it was, but you know what when you're twenty three, you feel fearless. That notion of what the hell we doing just didn't happen back then because worst case scenario, you find a way to go home. But it was pretty isolating. At the time, it was very expensive to get off the island. And because we literally had sold everything, there was nothing to go home to. And so we had no choice but to succeed. And actually, you know, when we talk about the work that I do now with wine, I think that that that experience was formative to how I work, I I work specifically with small to medium size independent wineries. I don't work with big conglomerates. And these are the people where they are working. I mean, they're working their asses off to build a brand, to pay their mortgage, to care for their family because it's something that they love, and they find they find worth and and personal you in it. And so I think that, yeah, being there and having no safety net and having to learn how to build a business properly from the ground up, and we've now built three of them very successfully has meant that when I go in and I work with wineries, we are talking about, you know, do you have strategy? Do you have goals? Do you understand your numbers? Why are you making the decisions you make in an area where a lot of people go in because of romance? Yeah. The wine industry, they're gonna classic, we we make lime make wine because we love it, and they haven't thought about the backend, which is actually keeping yourself financially viable. Absolutely. And then there's no point in making something that you can't sell, and you're just gonna you're gonna close-up shop. Okay. So you run brand work shops. What is a brand workshop? We do. That was a surprise. That grew up over the years. So just a little bit of history to answer that question. When I first started going in to brands, I when when I originally founded five forest, I thought that it was going to be much more on the creative side and a lot less on the business side. And we started getting in with wine businesses all over the world, and what we would find out is they had no strategy. They had no clear message They didn't understand how to use data, or they didn't even access data. And they didn't know what their customer experience should look like. All these things that are quite basic for businesses often outside of wine, but we don't do it so much in wine. And so I just started doing discovery workshops, and I mandated it for all of my clients that before we would take a creative client, we had to go through this so that we had any kind of possibility for success at the end. And then that kind of just evolved into its own its own offering, which is we will go in with wineries, and I I do it all over the world, sit with their data, their stakeholders. Normally, it takes three days, and work through actively and intensively work through getting the answers to all of those questions that can give them the strategy and the filters so that when I leave, they can make good decisions about how do they build a brand that's going to be here in five years or in ten years without those constant to day struggles of should I do this, or should I do that, or where do I spend my money, or, you know, why? So go and give us some concrete examples of of, you know, you come to my winery. I make, right? It's ten million bottles for sake of argument. You know, red and white wine are usually kinda stuff, and I'm a little bit lost. Know my wines are pretty good. I'm not ridiculously uncompetitive, but my brand is unknown. So just give me some concrete examples of what you're gonna how you're gonna kick me up the ass. Okay. So the first thing we're going to be looking at is what are your real goals, not your bull shickles. And this is this is a super important thing because right now we are living in an era where we are all expected to have these beautiful altruistic goals. But in fact, a lot of business people, their goals are I I wanna build a legacy, wanna be known for having the most awards or the best points. I wanna make a truckload of money. Awards or rather not awards, goals that they don't feel comfortable saying. I mean, we really have to push to that. Why are we really in the room? Why has somebody flown me around the world and booked out three days for all of their stakeholders because if we cannot get to that, there's going to be a very powerful disconnect. That means that whoever doing their marketing for them is never going to achieve what that owner really wants to see happen. Did this sound so obvious? Isn't it? It sounds so obvious, but it's discomfort for a lot of companies. You will spend the first two hours where they're just like circling around on what it is until you finally get to what we're really trying to do there. Could you know you know when that moment's come where finally the the straw that they finally ditch their preconceptions almost to view. Maybe they is it about, you know, we we really wanna just make money or whatever whatever it is, whatever their goal is, but is there like a moment of release when that happens? Everybody kind of like Yeah. Okay. We finally got there. We squeezed it out, and now we we we can address properly what we've been circling around for the last three hours. Did you get a bit annoyed? Do you think, you know, we could have we could have done this in the first five minutes? Or do you think this is all part of the process of almost explicating your off from these these confusions in your brain say, actually, you know what? We need to find a clearer route. So my honest answer is that, yeah, there are a lot of times I could go in. I've already done our research. We know what we're walking into when we go to do a discovery. And I could go in and I could tell them. I could say, alright. This is what your goal is. This is what your numbers are. Here's the strategy, yada yada. That serves no good purpose because that's actually commonly an an experience someone has with an agency. So the entire experience is Socratic. Socratic. I guess. Yes. So that I am extracting from them the answers. And and when they go through that process, what it means is that they have that emotional connection to their answers and they have buy in. And a really good example of something that can happen because I do mandate that we have as many stakeholders in the room as possible. And the largest one we've ever done had fluctuating numbers between fifteen and eighteen people in a room. And I'm the buffer, you know, like, they're able to share with me things that have felt confrontational in the past to share with each other. You see this in multi generational wineries a lot. So at some point, I often cannot be talking at all, and you have them really sorting out their issues that sometimes have to do with representation or voice or agency you know, when you are in that instance of multi generational, when you are looking at, well, what are the goals? Are we talking about an exit strategy? Is it a secession plan? You know, where are we going with all of this? And that can be quite intense between the the stakeholders themselves. But quite cathartic as well. They get it off their chest. I hope so. Aren't they? Yeah. So what's the next step? Where people put things on the table Mhmm. Face to face, they get it out. We've been keeping it inside for weeks, months, or years. You've you've broken a wall if you like, well, the glass. What do you want to call it? What the next step. Okay. So something that we noticed wine is notoriously bad at is actually understanding who their customers are. We have this generic set of wine personas that were generated about eleven years ago, and everybody keeps using those. And I think that there was an era when the, you know, very bland generic customer persona might have worked, but what we know now from how, consumer expectations have changed and how connectedness and the internet have changed that is that we need to really get hyper specific. And so that's what we do is that we will work through generally, you know, a handful of customer personas. We use data and what I call Anic data, which is well informed stories. So why it's important to have everyone in the room is that sometimes the people who are front of house for you will know a lot more about what customers are asking, what they're expecting, how they're engaging with the brand, and they are often not given a allowed credible voice You know, we've had that happen. I had one instance where a key person was leaving. She was a young millennial and she was on her way out of a brand to go and do other things in life. And having her in the room was vital because she was able to share a ton of feedback that hadn't that space had never been there for. Did she stay? No. It wasn't a goal to stay. I mean, like, part of the reason we we chose to have her in the room is because her life was going on. She was staying in line, but she was going in a different direction. So we go through and we document. That's a really big thing is that we are documenting what we are doing so that this is scalable beyond the three days that I'm in the room with them. We do brand values. We do customer journeys. So we could spend easily a whole day with our personas and our brand values in hand now again socratically auditing the customer experience from the very moment they even discover in some cases that wine exists? Like, why are they there? Because again, as an industry, and we've got two very disparate opinions on this, but we think we know why people love our brand. I mean, another thing that we do is we talk about what is our competition and and this ties in and that we think we know what our competition is. But in fact, our competition isn't other wineries. It's not other wine, in most cases. You know, our competition is a good handbag or kombucha or, you know, all these ways that people might choose to fill a need. And if we can't get down with that, then we're just circling we're circling the wagons. We're hoping that something succeeds, and that's a bad way to build a business. Okay. So what sort of feedback do you get? And do people take it in immediately, or do they just sit and reflect and get back to you after, I know you're physically there, but, a week or a month, we'll send an email. I remember what you said on the fifth of May and the seminar. I finally got it or what's the feedback? So that was really surprising to me is that it we get tremendous feedback and we do have a lot of people say that was the first time that they ever sat down and looked at their wine this ness through, you know, through this more strategic lens. But one reason that that happens is that before we wrap up, we try to make certain that they have a flexible action plan so that we leave them with something tangible. When I leave that room, I don't want to spend this money to get me there and then have no impetus to continue on. So it is laying out. Okay. When I walk away, what happens? And then part of the experience is sometime in the next two to three weeks, they do get a full report on it where we have we have taken notes. We've documented. We've provided our own insights based on our experience. And, yeah, that's there for them, like, write down in some cases, if we've gotten to straight time lining, that they will get a full timeline of what comes next, you know, through maybe a twelve month period, you know what? You spend three days with a brand. I feel invested in that brand. Call me. Like, email me ask. Solve a problem. So what reaction to some companies you're, I'm guessing, but you'll have people that absolutely get your approach. Oh, thank goodness. Finally, we've got somebody that understands where we've been going wrong or where we could do better, and there'll be other the company, oh, who the hell? Who does who the hell does she think she is? This lady coming here telling us what to do. How do you deal with those people? And is it mainly men that are a bit antsy with you or is it, you know, is that too simplistic? Yes. I have had that happen. Go on spill the beans. I have had it happen, and it was learning experience for me. So most of the time, the way that we work because we do work with small to medium brands, is that I am in direct contact with the key decision makers, and they are the people who decide to bring me in. Awesome. That's great. Sometimes it happens that they might not be the person driving the conversation in the room, and that's it's a problem. I did one where I was really, really out of sync with the brand. This is the one where there were like eighteen people in the room. It was a man, to be fair, who was incredibly aggressive with me because I was challenging his view on how things happen, and I'm enough of a bitch that I looked at him and said, you know, if you wanna if you've paid for me to come here and if you wanna get what you need out of this, you'll list but you're welcome to leave. I mean, like, they can walk out the door because if they're impeding process, then I'm not helping that brand and I'm wasting their money. And if I'm a business advisor, the last thing I wanna do is cause some to throw money down the toilet. Yeah. And also there are still seventeen other people in the room that aren't prepared to listen to. Yeah. But I've had it happen in smaller groups, you know, and and also it is one of the benefits of not being a a part of their team, precisely you know, I go in, I do a job, I don't do it to pitch for more work. And so if I walk out the door at the end of day three and they've gotten what they needed, but they don't, you know, that that person doesn't love me, they don't have to that that was never part of our agreement. Yeah. I mean, the idea I think with your job is you fly and you sort it out and they shouldn't have to call you again if they've understood what you said. Maybe a few follow-up emails or whatever, but it's not like they're gonna you're gonna have to keep firefighting every year because then something's gone terribly wrong if that's the case. Yeah. Is that right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And it's so I hope understanding that it is something that needs to be a living document. You know, the work that I do with them right now may not be the same in a year or in two years. I would love for them to be able to do it themselves I mean, you know, my full agenda is made public. I don't hide it at all, and all the information you need in the world to do it is out there thanks to the internet. But sometimes it helps to have a person leading leading that charge. To what's what's your next step? I mean, you obviously love what you do. Yeah. And you, you know, clearly are good at what you do. You know, what, what's your next step? What is my next step? We've got two. You're not gonna have a great again somewhere else. Are you? I go to Barcelona and next to try to buy an apartment for my retirement. Yeah. Retirement, and you look like you're twenty three. Thank you. God bless you. I don't think that's gonna show off in those pictures we just took. So our next step, we have one that is wine related and one that isn't. And the isn't is, well, another The isn't is no. Not at all. So because we work in specifically digital, we work all the time with tech and data and wine, something that's going on behind the scenes is that we are really looking at the ways that we can use data that doesn't come from Google and Facebook to drive better marketing. I personally am becoming more and more aware of the issues of surveillance capitalism and my own discomfort, you know, with using these platforms. And I think that ethically, if that's a problem for me as a individual, it needs to be something that our businesses need to be looking at. So, I I, you know, I don't have an answer to that yet, but I mean, it's funny funny you should say that is this is true. I mean, last night, I mean, to but we won't name the actual social media platform, but it it's one that's been in the news recently. And to deactivate your account, again, without naming that, is a real polava. I mean, you know, both my parents are dead a minute to ease easier to handle the the death estate, whatever the will of of a of a dead parent than it is to to get out of the clutches of this particular social media platform. And you have to have almost a strategy to leave. It but, when I get the time, when I you do need time, I I will do it. And so you're saying is you're gonna look at data more for, what consumers are actually buying on the street in in in shops, etcetera, rather than big data from the internet. Is that correct? Well If you're working with supermarkets, right? Well, so there are options where you can and this is gonna go into geeky stuff. Sorry. Go on. Where instead of embedding a Google tracking pixel or social media tracking pixel onto your site, you can actually own your own data collection platform that sits under that site. And I I don't know if that's the route that we're gonna go, but I think that it's something that we need to consider. And we also do have, we do have good data coming out of the wine industry finally, that we can rely on to get a better clearer understanding that is cleaner and more specific to our purpose than using big, you know, big aggregators. What was wrong with the data before on the Windness? It was just people not counting properly or there wasn't the technology to count properly or people bullshitting or Bingo. I mean, I I think that we have self reporting issues. I think that we have what is the purpose of who's providing the data an issue. But more than anything. I mean, this is why I say I feel like that not coming from wine is a benefit to my clients because what we have is we have a lot of people who keep looking at the same subsets of data and they're not seeing a product in a context of a much larger changing consumer, you know, experience, expectation, marketplace, that kind of thing. We can't continue to only look at wine data. We have to look at wine data, and then we have to look at all of the other data that affects spending that is affecting wine. So, you know, right now, we're talking a lot in wine about the temperance movement in moderation. Well, that that information came from external to us because our numbers were do dwindling. So I Interesting into whether temperance movement. I mean, I know that's always been quite strong in America. I mean, you've got a quite a complex. Puritanical background. Yeah. And, obviously, in Europe and France, even there, they've been laws passed or just a bit of when people should drink much less. And consumption is generally declining. It seems also in Italy, generational changes. So so you're also saying to companies as well as brand building. You've got to insulate your brand against these these these trends? Well, so if you go back to other businesses or what big businesses are doing, there's a list of things called the pestle factors, and let's see if I can remember these political economic social, technological, legal, and environmental and the massive list of external factors that impact our businesses. Obviously, we're looking at that from sustainability climate and the environment right now very heavily in line. But do we pay that much attention to all of those other factors? Are these something that small to medium sized wineries are sitting around talking about? What are the pestle factors that are affecting our our potential business sales in five to ten years? No. And and that's even another thing is that we're we're for an industry that plants vines in the ground and, you know, hopes that it grows what we want it to grow. Like, we are so short termism in a lot of our business and our marketing, and that is profoundly confusing for me. And also kind of contradictory almost. It is. It just seems inherently at odds with one another. So last to end on the environmental line, especially for someone whose company is called Five Forest. I wanna say thanks to my guest today, Paulie Hammond, your credit a really impressive, interview. I have to say. I, you know, almost didn't have to ask any questions. But I'm sure if you wanna come and audit my business sometime, we'll take you four and a half seconds. Well done. Awesome. Thanks so much. So, let's the data that you, you have to crunch and the the conclusions that you have to draw. I mean, that's a massive responsibility for you. And, but you seem like where you are the kind of person that can handle that massive responsibility and and just cut to the chase, which is what we do always doing why we we waffled. I think I think that comes from our our tasting notes. We just do you like the wine? Yeah. It was kind of fruity and a bit this. We've got into that patina of just of not really saying what we think or even thinking what we should be thinking, and, and you're just, like, kicking it hard and saying nope. Well, a good team standing behind me, making that possible. So I'm Yeah. But you're the leader, you're the you're the you're the big cheese. So thanks very much, buddy. Thank you, Matthew. Thanks. Thanks. Gotta get you back again. You you gotta come and order the podcast, you know, order our books and everything. Wrong. Oh, brand values. I know. So, yeah, so it's quite funny because my husband's really familiar with your podcast much more. Oh, he's all this now. That's great. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And so he can tell me all about about my podcasters and how that goes. But thanks. That was great. I've never done that before. Really? First time for everything. Yeah. Woo hoo. Listen to all of our pods on SoundCloud iTunes, iTunesify, Himalaya FM, and on Italianline podcast dot com. Don't forget to send your tweets to eta wine podcast.