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Entrepreneur – Chewing Their Way to the Top

Michael Houlihan & Bonnie Harvey — Wed, 09 Jan 2019 18:00:45 +0000

We’ve often said, “If you really want to change things, put a buck on it.” That philosophy has been recently documented by Nielsen, the leader in CPG market data. The biggest mega trend we see for 2019 is being driven by consumers who want to “vote with their purchases.” They are increasingly demanding transparency from CPG producers …and getting it!

Americans love their dogs. So why shouldn’t they want transparency from the company that provides them with their dog chews? That was the catalyst for Nature Gnaws founders Jay Mokbel and Steve Mamak. The risk they took in 2016 to produce and sell, all-natural dog chews has been validated by stellar growth over the past two years.

To read the complete article, please visit Entrepreneur

Who We Are

Michael Houlihan and Bonnie Harvey co-authored the New York Times bestselling business book, The Barefoot Spirit: How Hardship, Hustle, and Heart Built America’s #1 Wine Brand. The book has been selected as recommended reading in the CEO Library for CEO Forum, the C-Suite Book Club, and numerous university classes on business and entrepreneurship. It chronicles their humble beginnings from the laundry room of a rented Sonoma County farmhouse to the board room of E&J Gallo, who ultimately acquired their brand and engaged them as brand consultants. Barefoot is now the world’s largest wine brand.

Beginning with virtually no money and no wine industry experience, they employed innovative ideas to overcome obstacles, create new markets and forge strategic alliances. They pioneered Worthy Cause Marketing and performance-based compensation. They built an internationally bestselling brand and received their industry’s “Hot Brand” award for several consecutive years.

They offer their Guiding Principles for Success (GPS) to help entrepreneurs become successful. Their book, The Entrepreneurial Culture: 23 Ways To Engage and Empower Your People, helps corporations maximize the value of their human resources.

Currently they travel the world leading workshops, trainings, & keynoting at business schools, corporations, conferences. They are regular media guests and contributors to international publications and professional journals. They are C-Suite Network Advisors & Contributing Editors. Visit their popular brand building site at www.consumerbrandbuilders.com.

To make inquiries for keynote speaking, trainings or consulting, please contact sales@thebarefootspirit.com.

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Entrepreneur – It’s Official: Customers Prefer Sustainable Companies

Michael Houlihan & Bonnie Harvey — Mon, 03 Dec 2018 19:53:23 +0000

When we built the Barefoot Wine brand, we lived and died on the latest Nielsen ratings. So if you are in the packaged goods space, you want to pay careful attention to the latest Nielsen report “How and Why Sustainability is Gaining Momentum with Customers.”

For the purposes of this report, Nielsen chose to study purchases of three of the most common fast-moving consumer goods, coffee, chocolate and bath products, because of their differences from each other. What they found was that products with sustainability claims generally outperformed the growth rate of total products in their respective categories.

For instance, based on sales for the 52-week period ending 3/24/2018, the weighted average of all three categories showed 3 percent more growth for sustainable products. Sustainable coffee 11 percent more, sustainable chocolate 2 percent more and sustainable bath products 13 percent more than the total of their respective categories.

To read the complete article, please visit Entrepreneur

Who We Are

To make inquiries for keynote speaking, trainings or consulting, please contact sales@thebarefootspirit.com.

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Are We Sacrificing Choices Just to Save a Little Time?

Michael Houlihan & Bonnie Harvey — Thu, 22 Mar 2018 17:00:20 +0000

It seems so wonderful at first. You don’t have leave the house to go shopping anymore! Everything just shows up at your door. But after a while you start to sense that something is missing…

You’re starting to get bored with the same old stuff that you get in your food box every week. There’s nothing new in there and since you’ve stopped shopping at your grocery store you’re no longer exposed to new branded products. It’s too much trouble to even change your order now because you wouldn’t know how to change it anyway. And so, you resign yourself to getting more of the same. You’ve sacrificed variety for convenience.

Sound a little far-fetched? It’s not as far away as you think. As more and more grocery stores promise speedy home delivery to save you the trip to the store, your choices are being reduced by the very technology that enables the ordering process. One of the ways this technology is dumbing down your shopping experience is with the assumption that you’ve already chosen the brands you like, and, unspoken but implied, that you will never change! This is especially true once you start reordering your “same as last time” purchases.

Sure, online grocery shopping will certainly attempt to account for this in a very profitable way. They will charge producers for pop-up ads that target the types of previous purchases you’ve made. They will also tell you what other products were purchased by people who have bought similar branded products. But in order to see these pop-ups you must be on their site every week. Not very likely.

What will happen in fact is that many people will not even go back to the site once they’ve set up their initial order. They will simply give the store permission to deliver the same order with the same brands as last time. But viewing the store visit as strictly an act of replenishment, collection, or delivery to replace your larder is forgetting something very important. Discovery! Not to mention, Entertainment!

When you go into a physical store you enjoy what some psychologists call “retail therapy.” The act of setting time aside, making yourself presentable, changing your scenery by physically going to a store, interacting with other people in real time, asking for and receiving suggestions, being exposed to a variety of choices in every category, and stumbling upon that new, impulse, notion buy, all add to revitalization and discovery.

Stumbling upon that new, impulse, notion buy doesn’t really happen online. So the last brand choices you made before you started getting your “regular reorders” are generally the ones you’re stuck with.

And what about new CPG brand producers? Their challenge of building a new CPG brand just got a whole lot tougher! With Walmart adding to the ever-growing list of retail grocery stores offering online delivery, impulse buys are going to become a thing of the past. The growth of online ordering with home delivery will inadvertently create repeat customers who want “more of the same!”

The brands that are already established will benefit greatly from this change because it’s too disconcerting to shop for new brands in the first place. There’s always the anxiety that the new brand you choose will not perform as expected. There’s always the worry that you will have to choose yet another new brand, and another and another until you find a satisfactory replacement. This is hard enough to do with the store visit. Imagine how hard it’s going to be without tactile comparison and displays of new brands that you stumble upon when in a physical store. May as well stick with the old brand even if it’s not performing…

Once again, we see technology that’s being sold to us as improving our efficiency really just dumbing us down to the point where we are willing to accept less choices. To save a little time, will we give up discovery? Will we let the improvement in our food brand choices end with the last trip we made to the grocery store right before we started re-ordering the “same as last time?” Sounds pretty boring, doesn’t it?

Who We Are

To make inquiries for keynote speaking, trainings or consulting, please contact sales@thebarefootspirit.com.

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Can Legislative Indecision Hurt Small Business?

Michael Houlihan & Bonnie Harvey — Thu, 06 Jul 2017 17:00:21 +0000

A small business owner recently asked us if we thought Washington’s indecision over the health care issue could affect her business. Our answer was not the one she wanted to hear.

It has been the public’s willingness to commit to the purchases of new cars, refrigerators, and houses that has greatly determined the state of the economy since the great depression. This is still the situation today. As long as we continue to make these major purchases, it’s smooth sailing. But will consumers be able to afford the payments on major purchases if they have a major increase in their health care costs?

What if consumers are thinking about that new car or house right now and reading the news about the government’s indecision on health care costs? What if, suddenly, consumers had to fork up another $300-600 per month …or more? Would they be more likely or less likely to make that new car purchase PLUS committing themselves to hundreds of dollars more in monthly payments? Just the specter of this possibility may be enough to make them second guess that next major purchase.

Once a considerable segment of the market decides to postpone these kinds of purchases, the dominoes begin to start falling and sales in most businesses are negatively affected. We saw this in the last recession. Initially the pundits said it would be contained to the real estate sector. But they didn’t factor in that consumers felt less wealthy, even if it their “wealth” was on paper. They immediately cut back on their spending, especially for those major purchases. This trickled down to startups and small businesses, and many jobs were lost.

We fear the potential for this same phenomenon is at work today. Real estate is now in a significant bubble, the stock market is once more overvalued. We have lived long enough to have seen the economy take a big hit, just because the press focused too much news on poor early holiday sales, which created a self-fulfilling prophecy scaring consumers out of their wits and out of the stores. How about governmental indecision on a major part of the consumer’s personal budget?

Whether you agree with the concept of government health care or not, it’s here and it’s here to stay. Americans now expect government health care at some level. So that’s a dead debate. Now the question is, what kind and how much? This is an important enough decision that it requires some bi-party cooperation. There’s no doubt the existing health care plan needs fixing and the new plans obviously need to be better thought out. There’s no simple solution.

No elected official wants to face reelection with their name on a bill that leaves 20 million people uncovered or facing radically increased premiums. Meanwhile, the indecision about the future of health care can cause unnecessary negative effects on the economy. Indecision creates insecurity, and insecurity results in more indecision.

We are pro-business. We especially love to support startups and small businesses. For us, this current situation directly impacts those businesses, since the postponement of major purchases will have a ripple effect that will hurt businesses at every level. We would like to see all elected officials understand that working together to solve this problem quickly is more important than honoring any pre-election pledges made without consideration of the big picture. The economy is fragile, so let’s not spook the consumers!

Who We Are

To make inquiries for keynote speaking, trainings or consulting, please contact sales@thebarefootspirit.com.

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