Robert Atencio is a true legend, having served as a research leader at many of our industry’s top brands including P&G, Coca-Cola, Frito-Lay/Pepsico, Walmart and Pfizer.  Robert is also the recipient of an ARF Great Mind award and EIGHT ARF David Ogilvy Awards for ad effectiveness.

Summary:

Scott was the magazine industry’s leading researcher, having led research at both Time Warner and Condé Naste. In this episode, he shares stories from the golden age of magazines – with important lessons for the future (particularly around the importance of ‘context’ which magazines did best). He also discusses the ARF and its future direction. Another episode you won’t want to miss!

Transcript:

Duane: Legends of Media Research is a podcast series featuring interviews with the media industry’s leading researchers where we go behind the scenes sharing stories from their greatest achievements and challenges, brought to you by MediaScience, the leader in media and advertising innovation research. Stay tuned at the end of the podcast for more information about MediaScience, but for now, I’m your host, MediaScience CEO, Dr. Duane Varan.

Welcome to another exciting episode of Legends of Media Research. We’ve got a great episode for you today. Today we’re gonna be talking to Robert Atencio. Now Robert has amazing pedigree.

He’s led teams at P&G, at Coke, at Frito-Lay, PepsiCo, at Walmart, at Pfizer. [laughs] I mean, this is remarkable. He has eight [00:01:00] Ogilvy Awards under his belt and won Great Minds Award with the ARF. I mean, this is just an incredible background and you could imagine that at each of these organizations, he would learn a new worldview.

So he’s bringing to us, you know, these leaders in brand space. Sharing with us their perspectives across how they look at the marketing world. So we’ve got a lot of really exciting ideas to discover. So Robert, welcome to Legends of Media Research.

Robert: Well, thank you, Duane. “Legends of Research”. I do feel like an imposter. Maybe I’m more of a myth than a legend, [Duane laughs] but I appreciate it.

Duane: Not at all, Robert. You are a true legend. You are a true legend with an amazing career, and the audience is gonna discover that in today’s little episode.

Robert: Well, thanks, Duane. All right. I’m gonna break protocol here, folks.

We need to let the audience know that Duane and I know each other, [Duane laughs] and I wanted to tell a little bit about the story of how [00:02:00] we first really got connected. And he’s become a super friend, not just a great leader in the industry, but he’s a great guy. And I think most of you already know that.

The quick story is I found Duane’s picture in a brochure for a conference, probably an ARF conference, and just through a lot of back channels had someone introduce me ‘cause the names seemed so familiar. And that’s when we found out, we actually did go to high school. It was a big class, over 850 people. We didn’t actually know each other, but you know, he was still a celebrity.

He was emceeing things. I knew the name.

Duane: Oh, you were the rockstar. You were the rockstar. You were one of the stars on the football team, Robert. [laughs] We hung out in different circles, I guess. [laughs]

Robert: It’s hard to be the star of the team when you’re the center, you know. It actually prepared me for career in market research.

[Duane laughs]

A lot of the hard work. No credit behind the scenes.

Duane: And I gotta tell you my version of the other side of that story, and especially ‘cause I’ll never get a chance to tell this story at any of [00:03:00] these legends podcasts. Now, Robert, you were in the cool crowd. I was a geek. I was a loser in high school, right?

I mean, I, you know, you hung out, you had a nice letter jacket. You were a superstar on the football team. [Robert laughs] You know, all the girls were hanging out with you. I was a geek. I didn’t have anywhere to go during my lunch break. [laughs] But I was on the speech team. In fact, I was captain of the speech team. And I wanted a letter jacket and so I tried every sport under the sun.

I joined the swim team. I had to do two hours of swimming practice at five in the morning, two hours at four in the afternoon. No matter how hard I tried, I was always in the slow lane. And you know, it just tells you that that American myth that with hard work you can succeed [laughs] doesn’t always work. I joined the volleyball team.

No matter what sport I joined, I could not ladder. And so in the end, ‘cause I was captain of the speech team, so I went and met with the principal and I said, “you know what, [00:04:00] we should be allowed to letter in speech”. Like, I practically laughed and I said, “no, hear me out”. And I had all this criteria. “We compete, we get points for first and second, we can create it so only the elite speakers can get letters”.

And finally I persuaded him and I got the first letter in speech. It didn’t happen until my graduation day, so it was a little bit posthumous. So I never got to walk on the jock wall like you did. [laughter] But I will say though, that after that other schools in Albuquerque did it, who knows? Maybe even in other cities.

[laughs]

Robert: I was so impressed. I was like, “okay, that’s why this guy is really one of the legends. He invented a whole new way to get a letter”. So I was very impressed. I love that story.

Duane: But anyway, you were truly in the cool crowd, you know? So you’re in the cool crowd then. You’re in the cool crowd now, Robert.

You know, what an amazing career. So let’s dig right into it. So what we’re gonna do, Robert, is we’re going to go through, [00:05:00] ‘cause I think the audience could really learn a lot from each of these key leading organizations that you worked with. So we’re gonna do a little bit of a trip down memory lane for you, and we’re gonna go back in time to the first of these great roles that you had at P&G.

What did you learn in your time at P&G?

[laughs]

Robert: Back in the day I was working on Bounty and our ad agency was talking about competition and they did their own analysis and they were looking at the other brands and how they were priced. They were very different products and very different price points.

But they then concluded that Bounty didn’t have a true competitor, and I thought that was odd, but okay. So that was something they came up with and started to be accepted around the halls. “Yeah, we don’t have a real competitor, so we’re gonna have to think about that when we develop our advertising and everything else we do”.

Separately, we’d been doing tracking [00:06:00] studies tracking the brands, and I was working with a supplier back then. Some of the older folks might remember NFO. NFO was our supplier. I had some good friends there and they were talking to me about doing some extra analysis. “Robert, we’d like to do some extra analysis for you”.

“We’ll do it for free if you’ll help us sell in the analysis to other people in the company. You know, if we find something interesting, something we can talk about, it’ll be a way for us to help them use this data that they’re already collecting and just do more with it”. And I was like, “well, yeah, I’m all for it”.

So they did a lot of great analysis and they didn’t know the issues about the brand. They just knew, “hey, we’re gonna go look at some of these different techniques and see what we learn”. And one of the things that came back was absolutely fascinating. It was a pretty simple cluster analysis. But what it brought back, looking at the entire paper towel category, was that Bounty and Bronny were seen very similarly.

The perceptions of those two brands were [00:07:00] very close, in fact, closer than any other two brands in the entire category. So what this did is this actually kind of blew up the thinking, the conventional thoughts around the office, right? That there was no true competitor. This was actually worse. Our competitor in consumer’s minds was priced lower.

And that’s a big deal. If they’re perceived similar to us and they’re priced lower, we have to make sure they understand why we’re a better value. And that became part of the catalyst to change the advertising at the time, and we started to get into more demonstrations. You guys have probably seen some versions of this.

You might see a Bounty paper towel holding some grapes under the faucet, and they’re washing ’em, but the paper towel doesn’t break. And then off to the side there’s a blurry lumberjack looking paper towel brand. You do the same thing, it falls apart. So you’re basically showing how much better the product is, trying to break that [00:08:00] perception of them being the same and showing the value, why it is actually worth more.

So they did that. Those ads were great. They helped drive sales, they helped drive share, and we call that a win.

 

Duane: Wow, that is a remarkable story because you think of an ad like that today and it’s hard to imagine the ad not having that type of competitive demonstration. It seems so intrinsic to the brand now.

What did you learn in your time at P&G?

[laughs]

Robert: Absolutely.

Duane: And what did you learn? How did it change the way that you worked, you know, within P&G? How did it change what you did in your day-to-day?

Robert: It’s interesting, going back then I was just trying to learn how to do research, right. They trained you there. So while I was there at P&G, I was learning. You know, I was learning how to do research.

I didn’t come out of a program that had me ready to just start doing it. So, I definitely learned lessons along the way and part of it also, you [00:09:00] know, I grew up here in Albuquerque. I’m like, “ah, I’ve fallen off the turnip truck”. I was just learning how to be a professional in a business environment.

I learned a lot about research, learned a lot about being a professional while I was there.

[music]

Duane: So you then transitioned and you went to Coke. I mean, what a great company as well. Tell us a little bit about your time at Koch.

Robert: Yeah, I was recruited to go to Koch and you got a picture as a young single guy in Cincinnati and a friend said, “hey, there’s an opening at Coca-Cola. Come live in Atlanta”.

I was like, “well, that, both of those sound great”. So I did, I found a job over at Koch and I went to work on the fountain side of the business. For the first five years I was there and fountain was a little bit different animal, right? It wasn’t things you find on the shelf the way you work with retailers.

Partners were very– it was very different. Oftentimes it was either you or Pepsi. [00:10:00] You either. One at all or lost at all. And so you had to go in and perform. And it wasn’t just a day-to-day share grind, it was about, “hey, you have to do amazing to keep these accounts or grow a new account”. And we did a lot of work there.

That was fascinating and very partner focused. And one of my favorite stories was doing a project with Walmart, which is one of our big partners at the time. Now remember this is Fountain, so you go “oh, they had fountain there at Walmart”. Yes. If you’re old enough to remember, Walmart used to have snack bars and they were kind of concerned ‘cause they didn’t think the snack bars were doing that well.

Now the original idea behind the snack bars, and this was part of Sam Walton’s genius, he didn’t want it to be big money makers. What he wanted them there for was so people wouldn’t leave the store. He wanted them just keep shopping. And so if they got hungry or thirsty, “oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. We got something [00:11:00] for you.

Oh, your child want–? Yeah. Yeah. Come over here. We’ll take care of that. You keep shopping, you keep spending your money here”. That was the original goal of the little snack bar. But looking around, they said the guy in charge of it, you know, you want to do better, do you want to grow it. Make more money.

So he said “I’d love to partner with you guys, do some research”. So we put together a research study and we learned a lot of very interesting things. In the end, the shortcut to the answer was basically, people were afraid of Walmart snack bar. They saw some hot dogs on rollers. Like, how long have those been there?

Where did those hot dogs come from? They were nervous because, you know, Walmart did sell a lot of things at very low prices, but that gave people pause. But what we found out is they did like the brands, like, “oh, you guys sell Coke? Okay, I like Coke. I know Coke. I’ll buy that”. And the big learning was: they needed brands.

All right, you’re gonna sell hotdogs there on the [00:12:00] rollers. Sell Ball Park Franks or Oscar Mayers. Show ’em what the brand is. Have some cookies, have some Oreos or Grandma’s, Cookies, brands they would recognize and that was gonna help them. That was gonna bring credibility to that part of the stores. We flew over there to go make this presentation.

I had to actually fly into Tulsa Drive an hour and a half, and we didn’t even get a real conference room. We just went behind some tall bookcases at a table. I was presenting this, no technology, it was like a handout deck and I was taking it through. But the merchant that was in charge of this area, he got it.

He understood and he said it made sense. And he said, you know, I think this is what we’re gonna do. We’re gonna start to push into the brands, and you guys were tremendous partners and of course we’re gonna keep you front and center. It was part of this, right? So, fantastic. It’s a win-win for everyone.

Well, it didn’t end there. So, the punchline to this story is a few years later, they started [00:13:00] creating the relationships with McDonald’s and they took it to a completely different level of branding. So I love the idea that we gave it a kickstart and took them in a great direction. And you think about it, it was a win for everybody.

So Walmart didn’t have to manage that, but they still were able to create a destination within their stores, especially if you’ve ever lived in a small town. Walmart’s like the shopping mall, you know, that whole area up front. There’s a beauty parlor, there’s a bank, and now there’s a restaurant, there’s McDonald’s, so you have a reason to go.

So it worked out very well. Expanded the reach for McDonald’s, it was fantastic for them. So that was really a win-win, win, win for everybody. And just a great project for us.

[music]

Duane: So you went from Coke to Frito-Lay PepsiCo. [laughs] I mean, that’s a pretty drastic transition. Maybe you could tell us a little bit about how that transition [00:14:00] came about.

Robert: You know what, as so many things go, it’s personal. There’s things that happen in your life, but living in Atlanta, I ended up getting married, having kids, and it was just hard to get home.

And I had a lot of family here and this opportunity came up at Frito-Lay, which was a great company and it was in Texas, and that became, you know, less than a day’s drive or a much less expensive, shorter flight. And I said that would be a better family move. And that’s what it was about at the time, it was more about being a family move, but it was fantastic.

I mean, I think about, at P&G I really learned how to be a researcher, a strong researcher. Coke spent a lot of time and money training me to be a marketer. Really there, it was like a lot of marketing training. You’re the market research guy, but we want you to understand marketing. We want you to have an opinion when you [00:15:00] give us your results.

And Frito-Lay and PepsiCo, they were really pushing you to be a leader. What are you gonna do that’s different to drive these brands? What’s the new thinking?

And it was, you know, really how do you push us? And they’re very open to it. And even though you’re in research, you can, you have a voice, what do we do differently?

And that was exciting. I didn’t recognize it immediately, but once I got there I was like, “oh yeah, this is a different animal”. That was a great time for me. It was great personally. But the brands themselves are fantastic. Familiar with all the Frito-Lay brands.

Duane: You went through a little bit of a career change when you made that transition.

You know, from that point forward, winning these Ogilvy Awards for Ad Effect has just seemed to became so routine for you. You won your first Ogilvy Award, in fact, once you joined the team at Frito-Lay. Maybe you can tell us a little bit about the story, about how that came about. [00:16:00]

Robert: Yeah, it was on Lay’s potato chips.

That was one of the brands I was overseeing. My boss said, “I’m gonna call you ‘brand man’”. I was overseeing some of the biggest brands we had in the research forum. I had a great team that was supporting us. There was a question, “can we do better with Lay’s in terms of advertising?” Again, conventional wisdom.

Oh, no, no, no. It’s not a brand that you get a payout on. If you advertise Lay’s, you don’t get your money back. You know, let’s put that money into some kind of trade promotion. Let’s get some displays, pounds on the floor. That’s how you make money, and that’s a great way to invest in Lay’s, but not in advertising it, you’re not gonna get your money back.

So that was the conventional wisdom to the point that we even saw it in an article from Ad Age. Ad Age had gotten ahold of some data and they came up with three big brands that wouldn’t make sense to advertise. And Lay’s was one of ’em. [00:17:00] I really– Ad Age, thank you, you’re not helping. [Duane laughs] Along came a new opportunity.

It was a new way to conduct some analytics related to marketing mix. Most people understand the concept, right? It’s a way to understand your return on investment. And marketing mixes kind of a fancy, big regression model, and what they do is you do a lot of work to basically say, “all right, if I spent a dollar on advertising, a dollar on trade, whatever it might be, how much do I get in return?”

And so they tell you, “yeah, for that amount of money, you got this incremental growth and that translates into incremental dollars and did it pay out”. So the way it was done traditionally, you’d look at your brand, Lay’s, we’ve done the dollars worth of advertising. Did we get more than a dollar back? No. You didn’t really make your money back in the growth.

Well, basically, new idea came forward. It said, [00:18:00] “Hey, instead of using marketing mix analytics, the old way, just brand focus, what if you looked at the whole portfolio? What if you said, ‘Does my $1 on a certain brand actually grow other brands?’” Remember, FritoLay was dominant. We had almost 70–

Duane: Wow. That’s an amazing idea. That’s a real groundbreaking thought there.

Robert: Yeah. So back in the day we had like a 70 share.

Duane: 70 share. [laughs] Oh, my God.

Robert: So, my old friend, Gloria Rosenberg, she was the one that did the analytics back then for us, developed these models, working with people on the team. So I take absolutely no credit for coming up with this kind of thinking. I’m taking credit for, once we found the answer, like, let’s go use it.

And what they were able to show, Duane, this is the powerful part. If you said we spent a dollar on Lay’s, we did make our money back. We made more money because it grew the [00:19:00] portfolio and Lay’s did it in a much better way than other FritoLay brands. So if you only looked at it brand to brand, you say “that dollar on that brand”. No, it didn’t pay out. “That dollar on all our brands”. Oh yeah, it does pay out.

All right, so now we have a little more information. We want to do this. We think we should really start advertising Lay’s. Wait, what are we gonna say? All right, so we’ve gone from the analytics. Now we gotta say, “Hey, we gotta get deeper into what consumers think and feel”. This amazing lady on the team, Pam Forbes, was leading the work. You’ve probably met her in your travels.

Duane: I did. I know Pam. Yeah. Yeah, that’s right. So, let’s just, let’s pause for a second. So now you’re transitioning, you have this marketing insight around the anchoring role, I guess, that Lay’s plays in this portfolio. And now you have to translate this marketing insight into a communication insight or an advertising insight.

Robert: Right. Well, [00:20:00] basically we’ve gotta develop some kind of communication. We know that this works, but we want to get deeper understanding. And the analytics alone wasn’t gonna do that. And I’m a big believer as you need both. We needed a deeper understanding. So Pam led this research that went in depth, really understanding what is it about Lay’s, what is it?

What’s the magic? And the magic? It’s multi-sensory. Duane, it’s multi-sen– stop. Do you, I dunno if you’d eat chips. You probably did at some point.

Duane: I love Lay’s. I love Lay’s. I’m a Lay’s addict. [laughter]

Robert: Perfect. Want you to go through the entire process sometime. You grab a hold of the bag, it crinkles, you hear that?
Then you pull it apart. There’s the pop, the swoosh of aroma hits you.

Duane: You’re making me hungry here. You’re making me, me hungry, Robert. [laughs]

Robert: Your mouth starts to water. You [00:21:00] grab that first light crispy chip. You put it on your tongue. The salt, the slight crunch. Oh, it’s delicate. But it’s meaningful and tasty. So all these things are happening and people will tell you that if you get ’em talking, they’ll tell you about this and some–

Duane:I think potato chip sales just went up right now. [laughs]

Robert: You got it. And basically that became the advertising challenge. Bring that to life. And that’s what they did. The ad team went–

Duane: Wow.

Robert: Developed this amazing piece of advertising that kind of takes you through the process. But what was great is there’s a lady named Maria Laura Devono, who was the head of advertising on the marketing side.

She basically came up with the idea of putting the right music to build this, right. If you’re just talking and doing this, you only get to one place, right?

Duane: Right Right.

Robert: Music builds and all of a sudden it [00:22:00] just tells the rest of the story like a good movie. It was amazing. So we had the ad, we tested it, it tested great.

We had the analytics learning, and then it was time to convince everybody, let’s spend our money that way. So our CMO was like, “okay, I’m convinced”. And he was showing an annual planning to the CEO of all PepsiCo. “Hey, this is what we wanna do. We’re gonna do this, we’re gonna advertise Lay’s”, and he used to be the CEO of the Frito-Lay division.

You can see him kinda look up over his glasses and kinda little smug, he says, “you’re gonna spend your advertising money on Lay’s?!” He says, [Duane laughs] “yes, we have the learning about the analytics. And he says, “all right, you run your business, but you know, have a backup plan”. He literally said, have a backup. [laughter] All right, fast forward first quarter of the next year, we launched this ad.

It rolls out breaking records for sales share and the CEO of all [00:23:00] PepsiCo. I don’t know if it was an email or a call. Let the CMO know, “Hey, you were right. Fantastic. Congratulations”. And we basically took that story to the ARF and it was a gold over.

Duane: What a great story. What a great story. What a great story, Robert.

Well, very well deserved. So I guess one of the lessons there, Robert, for you, which is probably characteristic of your career, is you didn’t really come to the industry, you know, as an evangelist for one tool. You keep discovering new tools along the way. You keep discovering new methods, new approaches.

That seems to be really kind of part of your style, part of the way that you do things.

Robert: Oh yeah, absolutely. I don’t know where it came from, Duane. I’m sure it was more of an accident, but with the success, you know, you use your happy accidents to keep driving your success. But you’ve been around the business, you’ve seen tools, you’ve seen snake oil.

There are a lot of things out there, and some of it works and some of it doesn’t. And that’s [00:24:00] part of our job, is we have to vet those things as research professionals. You know, there’s so many hats we wear, but that’s one of ’em. We have to be the technical experts. There were plenty of times my CMO would go to a CMO conference and come back and say, “here’s what we need to be doing.”

“Well, actually, let me look into the, well, I don’t know about that exactly”. So there have been a few things. I’m not gonna throw stones at tools. I know you’ve done some work in the neuro space. There were some there that were kind of snake oil and you know–

Duane: Yeah, absolutely.

Robert: So you have to go and do the work.

But when you find the good tools, and there are some, and they’re validated and you can use them, you can get to new learnings, you can get to new places. And with the new learning, that’s how you can help drive the business in that one analytical tool. This idea of looking at an entire portfolio instead of the individual brands was powerful and it fit the moment, [00:25:00] right?

Not every other company dominates their category with a 70 share. Otherwise it doesn’t quite work the same way. But just for fun, here’s a little side story related to that. One of the things we found out is that, you know, if you advertise Tostitos chips, you know you’ll sell some more salsa.

But here what was actually better was if anybody advertised salsa, any type of salsa, it drove sales of Tostito’s chips.

Duane: Oh, that’s fantastic. [laughs]

Robert: So my big idea, and I kept pushing it. “Let’s start a salsa war. Let’s take on all the other salsa guys [Duane laughs] and get ’em angry, and all the ads are gonna be flying. And we’re gonna be fighting for salsa shared.

It may not look like we’re winning and all it’s gonna happen is we’re gonna sell twice as many bags of Tostitos”. [Duane laughs] And we did more advertising with salsa than we had before, [00:26:00] but not quite to what I was hoping for. But, you know, the tools, they give you these kind of insights and that opens up doors to do things differently.

I learned a trick there, while I was at FritoLay and it was this idea to make time every year, maybe even twice a year, to bring in new suppliers, people with new ways of doing things and listen to them. ‘Cause you never know, we all get so busy. You’re running these brands, the researcher, these brands, somebody’s yelling, something’s up, something’s down.

Why? And you get these calls and you know, all those seem like nice people. I just don’t have time. But when you set aside a day and you bring all the people together and say, “we’re gonna listen to 12 suppliers today that we have vetted and we think may have something special”. And by doing that, we have found some very interesting tools and techniques and met some great people that have helped our business.

So yes, it became– part of my leadership was to keep [00:27:00] learning, right? Everybody should, that should just be everyone’s own personal growth. Even if they’re not working anymore. Keep learning, right? Keep ourselves fresh, keep our brains going, but in work especially, keep learning.

Duane: But you know, the stories that you’ve told us even so far in this episode, all of those stories have that core element.

I mean, you know, whether you’re talking about the Bounty Bronny, you know, the win-win proposition, you know, between Coke and Walmart, very unconventional. You know, when you’re talking about Frito Lay, not necessarily making money for Lay’s, but then doing it for the other brands. I mean, the portfolio.

This is a remarkable pattern, and I guess the pattern is really this ability to use new methods, use new tools to get to the insight, and then when you get to the insight, whoa, [laughs] it translates into, I mean, literally billions of dollars of sales as a function of your willingness to kind of like embrace new methods [00:28:00] and get to new insights.

Robert: Absolutely. So I encourage everyone to do that.

[music]

Duane: So then you transitioned. How did that come about? You were at FritoLay and then you transitioned to Walmart of all places. How did that happen?

Robert: Yeah so, I was reporting to the FritoLay CMO at the time, and he was recruited away to go become the CMO at Walmart. And one of the things he needed to do as a new CMO, there was build an insights function.

They had like two guys doing some research work, but they weren’t trained at all. They really weren’t a very strong professional organization and he wanted to build that. And he called me and said, “Hey, would you be interested?” And basically, you know, the selling line is, “hey, how would you like to build a real insights team, basically from scratch for the world’s largest company?”

[00:29:00] “Ah, I think I’m in I, that sounds like that’s…”

Duane: How long did it take you to struggle with that decision there? [laughs]

Robert: Oh, there are a few things I had to work through, but yes. So there’s other family parts to this. First, not everybody’s excited about going to Bentonville, Arkansas. Funny aside, I was there for interviews.

It was going well. They had me go out with a realtor. He showed me some of the areas and he’d been there. He grew up in the area and he’s telling “Robert, tell you a little secret, everybody brings their spouse in crying. But you know what? When they leave, they cry again ‘cause they love it here”. And there was a lot of truth to that.

People don’t wanna get, they don’t wanna go there. But you get there and it is actually fantastic. It grew over the years. They had their airports, they didn’t have to fly into Tulsa. You could fly in locally. There’s a million restaurants. Why? ‘Cause there’s a million sales guys there all week long. Then they fly home to wherever they were.

And the restaurants are basically [00:30:00] empty for the locals, all these great restaurants. Housing was inexpensive. There are beautiful lakes and outdoor things. You could live on a lake, you could live on a horse farm. It was a great place. I’m getting off track. So I’m not trying to do anything here for the Bentonville Chamber of Commerce, but it was in the end still a family decision, but it was an easy one.

It was a little bit of a risk. You have no idea, a company like that, a lot of people set in their ways like, “well, you know, we already know”. And part of what was going on was that the same store sales had been flat for a long time.

So I think people get the concept at all just real quickly. Same store sales, looking at all the stores that have been opened for over a year. They look and say,” all right, those stores, did they grow?” Because you can create growth by just opening stores, but that doesn’t always tell you the health of the business.

And so across the same stores, stores had been in business, they weren’t growing, and [00:31:00] the stock price had been flat for quite a while. And they said, “we need to do some things differently. We need to upgrade our marketing department. And the marketing department said, we gotta upgrade our insights”. So we did all of that as we got there and started working and built the team from two folks up to 40 by the time I left, and–

Duane: Wow, that’s really, that’s a lot of growth.

Robert: That was a lot. But it was fantastic. You know, as we were arriving there, like I said, things were flat. Well, we had to get this thing growing. Target was doing fantastic, and that was kind of the benchmark at the time. “Target’s doing great. They’re growing share, their same store sales are growing, their stock prices going. We need to do better”.

So as I was arriving, starting to build the team, I also had to do the research. So I had a nice title, had a big cushy office, but I was doing the work that I had done 10 years [00:32:00] earlier. I was actually running a very big important strategic study, and it was a segmentation study.

We really wanted to understand the segments better, and we did it in a couple different ways. We looked at segments of customers. We also looked at segments of occasions. In the end, the thing that we found, there definitely the people who loved Walmart. There definitely the people that loved Target, but there was one pretty big group that was open to Walmart and they were open to Target, and it was the jump ball group.

That’s what I started telling, calling ’em. They said, “yeah, they’re a jump ball. We can win with these guys. They don’t hate us. They just need something more”. And through the work, through the data, what they wanted, Duane, they wanted national brands at a great price. They were lower income people, but people, sometimes marketers, other executives, they jump to, “oh, they’re lower income. We gotta get ’em stuff that’s just a low price”.

And then this idea that it may be, you know, inexpensive, it might break after a while, but that’s all they can afford. [00:33:00] And that’s not how this segment looked at things. They said, “no, no, I don’t have a lot of money, so if I’m buying this thing, it’s gotta last”.

Right? That’s a very different view of value. It isn’t just the low price point. It is, “I want a national brand, I wanna wear Apparel”. You’ve seen these kids, you know, we were in high school together, we were off at college. You know, those kids, they didn’t have much money, but they did have the one nice Polo branded shirt, that was the brand back in the day for youngsters, you know, the great Nike pair of tennis shoes.

They didn’t have a lot else, but they did have the great national brands. And if they wanted, you know, something to work like, “well Father Entertainment’s around television, I’m gonna have a really good television. That’s my entertainment. I gotta make sure I will put what little money I do have into getting a good one”.

And so it made us look at brands differently. National brands. And how do we show, ‘cause we had ’em. We just weren’t showing them, so we had to show ’em in the ads. [00:34:00] We had to show ’em in the displays. We had to push ’em forward and say, “look at the TVs we have at great prices”. We were doing that, and then we started looking in other areas like apparel.

When you go talk to the big brands, “Hey, why don’t you come sell your stuff at Walmart?” “There’s no way I’m selling my fancy apparel brand at Walmart”. Okay, that’s a headache. We do some more research. Here’s a fascinating learning. You can use licensed material. Licensed apparel to work like brands.
And what I mean by that, we’re UT alums, so.

If we see three sweatshirts with Longhorns on ’em, one might be a Russell, another might be a Champion, another might be a Nike. But what we know is, hey, those are Longhorns. That’s a Longhorn sweatshirt I need to put on. I’m not putting on a Razorback and the licensed part of these apparel items. What’s the brand?

Back in the day, Hannah Montana was a very popular show [00:35:00] and we launched a line of Hannah Montana accessories and clothing for girls. Did fantastic. That worked like a brand, and that was a tremendous insight. So once we knew what we had to go do, it got us focused on “here’s what we need to learn, here’s what we need to deliver”.

Every category, right? Every department was different, the brands and some, it was easier to get the national brands than in others, so went great. There was a lot of other work we did that was all kind of rolled into one. We worked on the brand itself, we changed the logo. We went from this very bold, militaristic looking Walmart and all caps and a military star in the middle.

And we changed it to something softer, capital w, lowercase, everything else, and a spark, not a military star spark. Because we were talking to a lot of moms. The moms didn’t want military Walmart. The moms wanted the soft caring Walmart. They cared about the family [00:36:00] because they helped them save money so they could live better, which became the tagline that we also worked on and came up with a fantastic piece of work and marketing.

So we had a target, we had products to go get. We had a new logo, we had a new tagline. We developed new advertising based on all of this, and we launched it and it went great, and we won more Ogilvy Awards.

We won a gold Ogilvy for the category. And we also won a special award for brand repositioning. It was a great success story. That’s a big monster to move a bunch of other things we did. We got same store sales to grow. We got the stock price going and it was a tremendous success story.

Duane: What I love about the story, Robert, is it’s got another one of those features in your career where you have this ability to connect the [00:37:00] dots.

You’re getting this insight around the importance of giving the discount with the brand. A lot of conventional players would’ve looked at that and put all their energy in figuring out how to make that work. But you’ve connected the dots and made this transition. Working on taking that insight and then applying it to licensing.

What a great example, similar to your last story, again, where you’re kind of like taking one part of your function and then applying it to a different part of the function really, really, really effectively. Great, great, great story.

[music]

So you had gotten comfortable in Bentonville and you guys were happy there, you know, then you had another big transition. How did you end up at Pfizer of all places? [laughs].

Robert: The great recession, they actually, we were doing so well, but then the great recession hit and they cut a lot of jobs. They were cutting arms and legs and even though we had a lot of success, I’d had a nice promotion while [00:38:00] I was there, won awards, my job got eliminated. I was let go, so I was thrown into the tool of the unemployed and I had to go find a new job and took a while.

Duane: It’s reassuring. It’s reassuring to know that that happens to the best of us. [laughs]

Robert: That what I’m going with. The best of it. Yeah. And so, you know, you scratch your head.

I think I had a tremendous story. We had a great run, but yeah, things happened for a variety of reasons. So I had to go find a new job and I started looking and it took a while, but it was fantastic because it was a really nice compliment. It was a global job and it was with Pfizer, the consumer part of the business.

So not the hardcore drugs, it was the consumer over the counter part. And I was excited ‘cause this is gonna be my first global job. You know, I’m not like you guys living in Perth and traveling all over the world. I hadn’t been to that many places, so I thought this could be exciting. And [00:39:00] I really liked the person that was gonna be my boss, a gentleman named Charles Mohs who had a ton of global experience and it was such a great team, right?

There’s this idea of like everything he knew, but I was coming in with this retail knowledge that, you know, in some ways, yeah, they had to understand the retailer, but not at the level I did. And we all knew consumers and brands, but what a great combination. What a great team.

But here was something that was very interesting, Duane. So you look at my career, so I started at P&G. And you know what? We have a way of doing things. It’s very methodical. And here we do this piece of research, this piece of research, and we get an ad, we test it, and we get it out there, and then we get to Coke and, you know, things move a little faster.

It was like, “no, no, this is a soft drink, man”. We can get a new flavor out pretty quick. We got these bottlers, they’re going to the stores all the time. So the pace was quicker. Like, oh, we gotta get this research done. Right. All right. Right. Get the Frito Lay [00:40:00] and they’re like, “oh yeah, we’re out. We’re going, we’ve got our own trucks. No, no, we don’t have bottlers. We have our own trucks. Our guys deliver the product. If we need to make changes, we can do it. So we have questions. You gotta answer ’em fast cause we’re moving”.

I get to Walmart and they’re going, “yeah, we’re about to do $4 billion of business this weekend. I don’t have time for your four month study. You need to tell me today or tomorrow. Do I go left or right? What are we doing?”

The speed, right? [clasps finger] The speed. Then I get to a pharmaceutical company and it’s like one of those cartoons where they slam on the brakes and the character’s eyes are coming out of its head. [imitates brakes] [Duane laughs]
Whoa it down. Hold on. We gotta get things through legal. We gotta get things through medical. We gotta get things through research. The R&D team, there were so many people ‘cause these are drugs, these are things that are overseen by the FDA. We gotta [00:41:00] be very careful. And one example was, you know, a new version of Advil that they’d started working on before I arrived.

It’s Advil, it’s ibuprofen, but because of something they did the encapsulation. Seven years to actually get it to the market. By the time they’ve done all the clinical tests and everything to prove that it’s safe and we want safe products. It’s just different mindset from being at Frito Lay and like, “oh yeah, the seasoning guy, you got a new flavor. We can get that on Lays potato chips. We can start selling that in two weeks.”

What? Oh, my gosh. So innovation was a little slower. Things moved slower. So that was one of the big changes for me. Having a global view was fantastic, right? You just go from one country to the next and the way they approach things, their views on health can be so different.

Some places it’s so much more about natural, they don’t want a pill in their body. Others like, “give me the pills. I don’t have [00:42:00] time. I’m not afraid of your pills. Gimme these pills. I’ll take that”. Everybody’s different. The way you communicate, the way you connect with them. Doing research in different places is very different.

And then trying to find ways to connect the dots and find messages that can resonate in all around the world, which is hard, but we definitely were finding messages that would resonate in certain parts of the world. That was all very exciting. But one of the things that was happening because it was so hard to grow the business, is we were doing acquisitions.

We were looking for things that we could buy. They were already approved. You can put in market and basically we could just grow it faster. And one of the things we bought back in the day was Emergen-C. So Emergen-C it’s, I think it was originally developed to help with immunity like cold and flu season, a lot of vitamin C, a few other vitamins, minerals, mixed in.

It comes in a packet, you mix it with water, different flavors, but more [00:43:00] traditional ones like an orange or tangerine flavor and a lot of natural stuff in it. And it had a great little following. It was a small brand, but it had a lot of passionate users and it had some nice perceptions about the product again, and it’s just being a little more natural.

And the kind of thing people were very interested in taking just for kind of daily immunity, especially during kind of a cold and flu season. So we thought, okay, that works well at the time Pfizer owned Centrum vitamins, right? So it was like, okay, this helps with our portfolio there. So we get the brand and we were able to get immediately some better distribution just because of who we were and all the retailers.

So it grew like that. We got better distribution and that was one step, but it still wasn’t quite meeting the targets, right? There are targets. You gotta, things gotta pay back. Somebody’s paid a lot of cash for it, and the finance guys come around, they want their money, right? So I was like, all right, [00:44:00] this needs to grow faster.

We need to find new ways to grow it. So now they said, all right, we have our professional marketing team. We have an insight team. How do we find ways to grow this? There’s gonna be some innovation with flavors. Okay, that’ll help. But we took a hard look at, “hey, what is this? What is this product? What is it supposed to be? Who is it supposed to compete with?”

And I was having a discussion with a marketing manager in my office, and as we were talking about it, I said, “it feels like a positioning challenge, right? You’re kind of positioning yourself against other vitamin C products, some immunity type products on the shelf, and there’s only so much growth there.

What happens if you redefine competition?” I said, “well, what’s an example? What do you mean?” I said, well, you know, positioning, it’s kind of a core strategic element of marketing in that, you know, how do [00:45:00] you position your brand to grow versus some other brand of product?” And I said, “if I are you, I would think about positioning it versus orange juice”.

So when we looked at the package, you could see it right there, a thousand milligrams vitamin C. And I said, “well, okay, how many milligrams does a glass of orange juice have?” And it was about a hundred. I was like, “oh my gosh, this is like getting 10 glasses of orange juice in this one glass of Emergen-C. That’s amazing!”

The value, the convenience, the calories. And that was a catalyst for, alright, “how do we define this? How do we position it?” And after a lot of work, we basically came back and said, “this is the same amount of vitamin C as 10 fresh oranges”. And that became part of the plan for our advertising.

So we’re [00:46:00] gonna talk about the brand and then kind of the payoff is, “and a thousand milligrams of vitamin C or as much vitamin C as 10 oranges and this one glass”. So we did that. We tested it, it tested fantastic. Then we tested it without that claim, without pointing that out, tested horrible. We needed to point that out to people.

It did fantastic. It has helped the brand start growing. We got great payback on those ads, so the return on investment was off the charts and we took that case to the ARF and we actually won two more gold Ogilvy’s with that case. And great stories, some great people on the team doing a lot of research to basically kind of prove out the hypothesis of if you can redefine your competition, you have a great path for growth there. And that’s what it did.[00:47:00]

[music]

Duane: So, Robert, across these roles that you’ve had, you know, these leadership roles in particular, you’ve mentored a lot of great people. I mean, these are people who’ve gone on to lead teams at, you know, a number of different Fortune 500 companies. What’s that experience been like? What’s it like, you know, mentoring people who, you know, such amazing people who’ve gone onto these incredible leadership roles?

Robert: Well, it’s one of the more important parts of my career way now, I’ll be honest. You know, if you are lucky enough to be the leader of others, that’s really an amazing responsibility and one I never took lightly. One of the things I tried to do was, you know, be a servant leader. Lead with humility.

People talk about that, but I really did. I wanted to develop my people and it started off with finding great people. And I was lucky when I was at Walmart, you know, I told you the story. I had to hire, [00:48:00] basically hired almost 40 people and we had to go fast. And I said, here’s a shortcut. I was talking to the recruiters, like, I have a list. Okay, you can see the list. You can imagine the job description and experiences.

Said, “here’s the shortcut. Smart. Nice. That’s it. Those two things.” Smart and nice is gonna get me 90% of the way there. If they’re smart, they’re gonna learn, they’re gonna teach me things. We can figure most everything. If they’re nice, they’re gonna be good teammates and they’re gonna be open to hearing things and sharing things. And those two key points became a little bit of the mantra around. Walmart, the inside–

Duane:It’s so funny because it’s the same at MediaScience. We have exactly the same– There must have been something there about our time in El Dorado. [laughs]

Robert: Maybe nobody was that nice to us, I don’t know. But yeah, it was– smart and nice works out so well, and it does matter.

And you [00:49:00] know, I’ve been around smart mean people. That’s no fun at all. I’ve been around really nice people, not very bright. That doesn’t really work either. Those two things can really get you a lot of the way, and then some of the managing of other people, it’s just a little bit of training. It’s giving them advice, pointing ’em in the right direction.

I think there’s so much more to a career than just having a few brand accomplishments and a few trophies, but I am most proud of the people I developed and I didn’t– I believe from the people that have reported to me there have been 12 that have gone on to lead their own insights department, so I’m so incredibly proud of them.

 

So I’m not taking any kind of credit, but if I help them along the way, in any way, I’m so happy. That, I want to be my legacy at the end of the day.[00:50:00]

 

[music]

Duane: So what do you do these days, Robert?

Robert: So I had my own little business. So I was living in New Jersey and for personal reasons, it was time to come home. So just real quick, my father passed away, my brother was here helping with my mom, and very tragically my brother’s spouse passed away leaving him with two young daughters.

And it was coming up to be about the time I was thinking that I should move home. And my youngest daughter was about to go to high school. So I was either gonna come home before high school or wait another four years, and it just felt like it was the right thing for the family, and it was. We needed to be here.
I think I was able to help, had my own things going on where the family also helped me. But two months ago, my youngest finished high school and I was so happy. I’m around friends, I’m around family. I don’t know how we’re [00:51:00] gonna get you to move back to Albuquerque, [Duane laughs] too exciting lifestyle, but if you were here, you’d have such a blast.

But I basically do a lot of work with people that used to work for me. And I think it’s the dumbest business model in history, but it does work. And I’ve been able to do some very cool projects. I love this, right? So imagine, I’m now working with these people that used to work for me. You can’t imagine me trying harder to help them succeed, right?

They’re family. I’m not just here getting a paycheck. I am so invested in helping them succeed.

[music]

 

Duane: Wow. What a great story. What a great career, Robert. Our final question, and we ask this of all of our guests. If you were gonna give advice to, you know, this new generation of [00:52:00] researchers who are coming into the industry, what would your advice be?

Robert: My advice, well, when I was thinking about things I might wanna share with you tonight a number of these stories I wanted to tie back to advice I would give.

‘Cause I think each one has a little bit of wisdom in each of it. And, you know, trust me, I stumbled into all this, no genius here. I lucked into it like the Forrest Gump of market research, but I did get some fantastic experience and opportunities. Let’s go back as we review some of the little cases I talked about.

Talked about being a P&G and doing this extra work with our supplier, NFO, do this extra analysis on the data. That taught me about being proactive. That is absolutely something I carried forward throughout my career. It’s a way to demonstrate leadership to those around you. Like you’re not just waiting for someone to tell you to go do a research project, right?

You don’t wanna be an order taker, you wanna be a [00:53:00] thought leader. And often we, in the insights world, we’re closer to the data. We actually have better ideas, better questions, than some of the other folks around us. So why not go ahead and poke around, do some extra analysis nobody asked for. Come up with some hypothesis, see if you can prove them out.

So be proactive. I told the story about working at Coke and doing the project with Walmart and this whole idea of win-win, you know, I used to hear that, “oh yeah, you gotta look for the win-win”. No, I was living it. “Oh, wow. If I help Walmart sell more Coca-Cola, I sell more Coca-Cola, they win. We win. The customer wins.”

That’s fantastic. Look for the win-win. I think I told you this story about Lays. There’s this amazing breakthrough in the analytics and the marketing mix, but there’s also this very in-depth [00:54:00] qualitative, and I’m a big believer in trying to use all the tools, right? There’s gonna be sometimes that the question really needs a tool, but sometimes for the bigger breakthroughs, you’re gonna want to use both, and be careful.

The industry and the use of tools, the way I’ve seen it after all these years, it feels like a pendulum. Something’s gonna be very quantitative. And then, no, no, no, no. It’s back to qualitative. No, no, no. Now it’s back to quantitative and then it’s big data and deep analytics. No, no, no, no, no, no.

It’s back to empathy labs and deeper understanding, and it doesn’t have to be a pendulum swinging back and forth. I think it’s a balance. It’s like a balanced skills. It’s use both, use all the tools. So that’s another piece of insight. If you can build up muscles on both, and that doesn’t mean you have to be able to do everything, but you need to know how they work and know how to apply them and know how to get people to do them for you.

I think the story from [00:55:00] Walmart I think was a great one about, you know, you gotta go find the customer and understand the customer. You know, never forget about that. Sam Walton used to have as his cheer, “who’s number one? The customer.” Always, huh? It’s right. It’s the customer’s, the boss. Start with the customer, understand them, and the work we do helps us identify who is the target customer.

Then the last one is about competition and defining or redefining competition for growth. And that has been one of the best lessons I’ve learned from my marketing partners, is this idea of how do you position your brand? How do you identify competition? How do you find brands or extensions of other categories that you can go into and say, “my brand is better than your brand in this way, and this is how we can help you.”

And that’s a way to help grow the business. Those are the items I tell people to think about.[00:56:00]
[music]

Duane: Well, Robert Attencio, what an amazing career. You truly are a legend, and it was also a great trip down memory lane. [laughs]

Robert: I’m still waiting for you to come home. We’re waiting for you. Come to Albuquerque.

Duane: I’m looking forward to it. I definitely wanna come back one day soon. [laughs] Thanks again, Robert. And thank you, the audience, for joining us today.

Remember to follow or subscribe to this podcast so you don’t miss a single episode. Tell your friends about us and stick around at the end of the episode if you’d like to learn more about MediaScience. I’m Dr. Duane Varan, CEO of MediaScience, thanking you again and reminding you to join us next time on Legends of Media Research.

[music]

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