Interview with Grant Davidson

The companies that you’re dealing with, are they looking at multicultural marketing as a real segment where you can actually reduce your costs on all the third-party platforms if you know the right way to target it?

The quick answer is no; I think there was a particular company that identified the Indian market and said to us that ‘’you should be targeting the audience through very specific magazine channels’’.

The audience is there and the demand is there as well; what would it take for the corporate giants to take notice?

I am not sure of the answer to that question; maybe people haven’t put the commitment and focus on sorting Because the numbers are there and you’ve got the size of the audience. It should be a no-brainer. So it is just maybe people haven’t really put the effort into it and the focus

Could you please shed some light on the demographic information? For instance, what was the actual set of audiences which the numbers were coming from?

It was a combination of the Australian Bureau of Statistics and Roy Morgan’s research, which is a sample of the whole of Australia. So it was quite a few data sources there but the intent of the report is to represent a common thread across the whole of Australia. But what we can do is focus on very specific niches. Hence we’re able to apply filters that indicate the Indian demographic by geolocation. Also, there’s so much data out there that we can sort through by applying the source and the filters to really target exactly what audience you want.

Have you got some case studies where you had a real ‘’aha’’ moment where a client actually listened to those things and said, Hey, I want to try this have you had some sort of wins, especially after the pandemic as the things restarted?

Yeah, we had a big ‘’aha’’ moment in the presentation today; there were the plant-based meat pies for Pie society. So the company behind that owns 80 bakeries around Victoria- it is a fourth-generation family business. The factory bakes to supply the bakeries that they franchise and their growth was slow and costly because growing a footprint meant stores, finding new franchises was difficult and problematic. We had been doing a lot of research regarding the potential growth of plant-based meat.

One of the heads of operations of the company had some food intolerances and he had been developing a meat-free product. He happened to be present in the meeting and he asked us to taste his products, which were really good. So I suggested him to develop the product and go through Coles and Woolies. I said how much can you scale the business and they said we can double in size easily we can get the vector when that’s often the big trouble you can tap into Coles and Woolies get rich distribution, but you can’t scale fast enough to deliver that.

 You’ve got the product. All you need now is something packaged up to go to market so we develop high society packaging. They took it into Coles and Woolies while he loved it gave him guaranteed shelf space and sales.

Have you had any research on Tik Tok-related marketing yet?

With most businesses, every business has limited funds, and you want to get the highest return on investment for every dollar spent. It just doesn’t stack up because it’s still in the early stages and targets a young market who cant be consumers. Moreover, businesses would be seen as intrusive. It’s like Hey, get out. This is our entertainment platform’’. Are you trying to sell me? so it’ll take a little while and won’t take long before it becomes a good channel for businesses to go through.

But again, it needs to be the right products for the right audience and the message has to be relevant and appropriate for that platform. Also, I think most businesses would have seen that to reach their audience other platforms have a much higher ROI.

What would be your advice to people who are just sort of now starting to become a real company?

One of the key factors is discipline and consistency, and in some ways, you’re better off always being there. But consistency is key. That’s the hardest thing to do because it requires investment requires a focus. I often say the only way for it to work is for the person running the marketing to be out of the operational mouse wheel so no matter how quiet or busy, operations and delivery is, marketing will never be effective.

The bottom line is there should be different teams or individuals responsible for carrying out different tasks related to operations and marketing.

Could you give an example wherein influencer marketing took your brand to the next level?

There was the Chobani Yogurt. So they had an idea to create a dog yoga because somebody started posting that their dog was licking their yoghurt spoon and the online engagement was crazy. The product itself was not entirely dissimilar from an average yoghurt; only this one was less sweet. So, they got influencers involved and we created these great media kits, sent out to influencers who then opened it off because it was cute. Yoga for your dog. So they kept posting online and it went absolutely crazy on social media.

Can you predict the output of the influencer’s campaign for a product?

What influencers can do for you, is understand your reach. Say for example if an influencer has 5 million followers. Our audience and our reach for promoting through them are going to be 5 million. So then you can do a numbers game saying well, of 5 million people, if we got a 1% conversion rate, and the average product sale is x, you can calculate the two and get my return on investment and the calculations are relatively accurate if you know your audience.

What’s your company’s process to onboard a client or like how do you sort of engage with them?

We always respond within 24 hours.  The prospective client gets a personal email for me as a response and then we’ll follow up. But the key thing is just to set up what we call a discovery, conversation, call or meeting if you are local best thing is face to face meeting. Tell me your vision. Tell me about your product. What do you want to achieve and then we can then help with okay, what’s the plan? To achieve what you want to achieve? And that can be done by a phone call or via zoom? Most people at that stage usually say, well, great, but what’s that gonna cost? So we can say, Well, based on what you’ve told us, and our experience, we think this is what we’ve been involved in terms of the stages the scope and his indicative pricing. If that’s okay, for the businesses, then we say right now let’s sit down and plan it out and map it out.

What’s your minimum commitment going to be like with a company- Is it a year or a few months? Or does it depend on the budget?

Depends on the project. So sometimes, there are mature businesses that might have lots of resources, but they just need a fresh perspective to bounce things off, they require us to do the heavy lifting of a plan and point in the right direction. That might take a week, a month, or two months. Others require us to take care of the insights, the strategy, the direction, but then we’ll take it on board now and roll with it over the next whatever. And others just say, we don’t have the resources we don’t have the capability and we don’t have the expertise, so they require our services for a longer time.