Jess Gaedeke (00:13)
Hi everybody. Welcome to the Dig In podcast. I have been very excited for this conversation. I am lucky to be joined today by Tina Lambert. She's chief marketing officer and author of the first time I'll flash it, Innovation is Ugly. You're going to see this book a lot during this conversation. Tina, thank you so much for joining us today. I truly have been looking forward to it.

Tina Lambert (00:31)
Thank you, Jess. I'm happy to be here.

Jess Gaedeke (00:33)
So I'm gonna throw an impromptu question at you to get things going here.

Tina Lambert (00:36)
Great.

Jess Gaedeke (00:37)
you were to be on a cooking show, what would be your signature dish?

Tina Lambert (00:41)
signature dish definitely would be some kind of seafood Risotto is one of those things that I love to make when people come over because it seems fancier than it is. It's really just rice that takes a long time to cook. But people are always very impressed by it. So that would be my go-to.

Jess Gaedeke (00:57)
and they mess it up on cooking shows all the time, right? Isn't that like a thing? Yeah. And stir constantly.

Tina Lambert (01:00)
You have to watch it. have to carefully watch it.

Jess Gaedeke (01:04)
So I'd love, Tina, for you to introduce yourself a little bit about your background. It be great.

Tina Lambert (01:09)
Yeah, absolutely. So I've spent 26 years working in CPG or consumer packaged goods, all of it in the food and beverage industry. ⁓ I've worked at Fortune 500s. I'm very lucky to work at companies like P &G, Kellogg's, Kraft, Tyson Foods. And then more recently, I've worked at what I'm going to call some smaller companies and I'm calling them smaller in air quotes because they're all over a billion dollars. So people tell me all the time that's not small.

But more recently, I had the chance to run marketing for Hostess brands, which was really fun, trying to bring some energy back to classic American snacks like Twinkies. And then last year, I took on the exciting role of Chief Marketing Officer at Tropicana, helping try to do the same thing with some classic American juice brands like Tropicana and Naked Smoothies.

Jess Gaedeke (01:54)
Man, so it is the diversity of that background that is going to really feed into the lessons you're going to share today. So I am excited to dig

Tina, as you know, our listeners really do crave inspiration from other leaders. And I think one of the best ways to inspire is to share a story and your book is chock full.

of lessons across so many different innovations, some that went really well and some that really didn't. So I'd love for you to tell one of those stories. And along the way, it probably will give us some good inspiration to share why you got into innovation in the first place.

Tina Lambert (02:25)
Yeah, that's a great question. I always describe my career as an innovation sandwich, right? So I spent the first five years of my career working in traditional brand marketing at Procter & Gamble. And then I spent the last five years working in, again, traditional kind of brand marketing ⁓ as a broad manager. But in the middle, I spent 16 years dedicated to innovation. And what's interesting about that is I had no intention of becoming an innovation specialist. It sort of happened to me. And the reason that it happened to me was

I watched a spectacular innovation failure really, really early in my career, and it made me determined to stop that from happening again. so because of that, I took that first dedicated innovation role to try to see if I could apply the lessons I had learned. And then I ended up working there for 16 years. So it was absolutely amazing how my career sort of evolved in that way.

Jess Gaedeke (03:00)
you

Tina Lambert (03:20)
I'll tell you that story because it's an interesting one and I have props.

So this is a story about Torengo's tortilla chips. This is the failure that inspired me to want to work on innovation projects.

It launched in 2002. So this package is 23 years

in the glory years of Procter & Gamble's big new brand innovation launches. So Crest White Strips had launched the year before Torengo's.

Swiffer had launched three years before.

had launched four years before. So P &G at the time had this track record of big new brands that were super exciting and they were always looking for what's the next billion dollar brand. And Torengos was created by the same team that at the time within P &G was running the Pringles business. And so it was designed very similar, as you'll notice, to Pringles in terms of it was a can, but instead of a round can,

It's a triangular can. And so it was designed to be the perfect curved tortilla chip

dip in this triangular can

was designed to protect those chips.

at the time, that was a huge unmet consumer

if you think about what was really the tortilla chip business, was mostly Tostitos restaurant style was the top brand. And most chips were either those little round ones or the restaurant style.

And salsa just rolls right off those.

and that's the most popular dip that people eat. And so we heard this consumer dissatisfaction with it's so hard to eat salsa, right? Either rolls right off or I get to the bottom of the bag of chips and they're these little tiny triangular pieces. And now I'm trying to like dip this tiny piece into the salsa. And if we're honest, I'm just eating salsa off my fingers. Right. So it was a true unmet consumer needs. We designed a chip that

was curved to hold salsa so it wouldn't run off and was protected by the can so that you would get whole chips all the way down. by making that, we had designed the perfect dipping chip. And in concept testing, this product, Torengo, scored higher than our supplier had ever seen from any concept they had ever tested in the category. So people got over the moon excited. The purchase intent was off the charts.

Consumers loved the product. It tasted delicious. Post-use purchase intent was even higher. And P &G got so excited, they spent $6 million building not one, but two shiny brand new lines to run this product. And in year one alone, we had a plan to spend $25 million in advertising, which in today's dollars would be the equivalent of spending $44 million on an innovation, just in advertising. And that advertising plan was like,

Jess Gaedeke (05:48)
It's fine.

Tina Lambert (05:55)
robust. was television. was PR, including a teaser campaign before we even launched. It was a full Hispanic plan with Hispanic television ads and dedicated Hispanic creative. had sampling. I mean, it was a robust plan behind it. And then it failed.

Yeah, and

in

year one ended up coming in just over about a third of the forecast. And I mean, when I tell you we had tested the heck out of that forecast, we had tested every variable multiple times to get to like dialing in exactly what we thought the forecast was going to be. We were so confident and it came in at about a third of the number. So it was a really bad failure.

Jess Gaedeke (06:37)
Yeah, well what what went wrong? mean where where did things go off a plan?

Tina Lambert (06:42)
Yeah. Well, it's interesting because it really comes down to two things we did execution wise. And then one thing competition did that we couldn't have stopped, but we probably should have seen coming. And the execution things are really, really came down to the two main drivers of trial. So if you think about something you're selling in retail, what are the two things that drive trial? Your in-store presence. Can people find you in the store? Can they spot you on the shelf? When they see you on the shelf, do they understand what you're for? Number one.

And then number two, the advertising you do, right? Whatever type of advertising that is, whether that's shop or marketing or whether that's more traditional. And those are the two things that drive trial the most. And we screwed up both. So in terms of in-store presence, we launched just original flavor in two sizes. And if you looked at the market data,

that made sense because almost all tortilla chips were just sold in original salted flavor. There weren't a ton of flavors of them. But if you thought about the Pringles business that this was being shelved with, the Pringles business was this giant at the time, like four foot wide, top to bottom, you five or six shelves of all these different flavor varieties in this huge colorful array. And so now you're launching this one variety into the middle of

very colorful shelf and it just didn't pop off and there wasn't enough SKUs for it to even have like a brand block and start to stand out on shelf. So that was a huge problem for us. Even if people knew about it, they couldn't find it. And then the second thing was the launch advertising. And this is something that I see all the time happen. We had talked to this idea to death within the team and within the agency team.

And when you get really close to an idea, sometimes you forget that you know it better than the consumer. And we had talked ourselves into this idea of it was so obvious that this was a chip designed for dipping because of the shape of it, because of the can, that you didn't have to explain it to consumers. So the creative idea was it's visually obvious. We don't need to tell you. And so the launch advertising on television included things like babbling teenagers.

holding up the chip and saying,

Jess Gaedeke (09:02)
You're doing a good job.

Tina Lambert (09:16)
And so it didn't work to drive clear understanding of the main message. So those were supposed to be the two big drivers of trial and they weren't working for us. Now, of course, we scrambled to fix them. We launched two more flavor varieties nine months later. I created a whole new television campaign, but it ended up being too little too late. And then I mentioned that there was also a competitive threat and we should have known that was going to come. You

I was working on the Pringles business, we were

Very competitive with Frito-Lay. They are such a good competitor and very, very smart. And at the time, the standard at P &G was that you did a lot of testing before you launched something this big, especially with the kind of spending we had. So we had all kinds of test marketing and things that had happened that had given an inkling to anybody paying attention of what we were working on. And so Frito-Lay beat us to market with our same idea.

but maybe arguably even executed better than us. And while probably most of the listeners have never heard of Torango's tortilla chips, I bet you've heard of Tostitos Scoops, right? And that's the story of why Tostitos Scoops came to be. They launched it to preempt the Torengos launch so that we no longer had a meaningful,

Jess Gaedeke (10:22)
Yeah. Yeah.

Tina Lambert (10:32)
point of difference with consumers. We were just the second chip launched for dipping.

And honestly, theirs was more like a bowl, you know, like it like held so much salsa and ours was much more of a like, you know, a gentle curve. And so then the only advantage we really had was the whole chips protected by the can.

Jess Gaedeke (10:43)
I'm

Tina Lambert (10:53)
that hurt us in a really big way, no longer having that point of difference.

Jess Gaedeke (10:57)
I just want to comment on you said that they're a good competitor and I love that because to me that exudes that you know the good competitors sort of keep you on your toes they constantly challenge you to do bigger and better things and so you could have said some other words to describe Frito in that that instance so just wanted to give you a little shout out there. So okay a lot of learnings within that that launch story.

would you say are some of your bigger takeaways from that experience?

Tina Lambert (11:23)
Yeah, I walked away with really two lessons. One was listen to your cross-functional team. I will tell you that in retrospect, our sales leader who was assigned to the project brought up that we weren't going to have enough shelf breakthrough and she wasn't listened And so I think about that all the time, that you have to make sure you're hearing all the voices and considering them and understanding the concerns. And if we would have listened to her, we might have had a different result.

And the second one

one I talk about a lot in my book, which is this idea of execution at the end of the day matters more than the idea. And in innovation, a lot of times we focus so much on good ideas and that gets so much attention. But I have seen bad ideas perform very well because of the execution being so strong. And this is an example of a really good idea and a really good product with weak execution that faded into obscurity.

Jess Gaedeke (12:16)
Yeah. What a great lesson and something that we feel in the market research world every day because the results can say one thing, but it really, when the rubber meets the road, that's where, you know, innovation succeed or fail. So

story. Thank you so much for sharing that.

that is a tremendous segue to the next part of our conversation, which is really about your book, because so many of the lessons come to life

book. And I'd love to talk about some of the more controversial chapters. And as I said, I've read it and you see how many Post-it notes there are. I have so many thoughts and feelings on this book in a really good way. So in chapter 12, you really kind of take issue with something that's been a...

pretty standard part of the innovation process for quite some time, and that is the concept of the funnel. So talk to me about your feelings on the funnel. Why do you have such deeply developed feelings on it?

Tina Lambert (13:08)
well, thank you. So first of all, I didn't necessarily set out to write a book that would be, you know, super provocative, but I did set out to write a non-traditional business book for sure.

I talk about how I find normal business books terribly boring. So I wanted to write something that where I just laid out what I've seen in my career. And funnels are something that are widely accepted, like you said, as just the right way to do things from an innovation perspective. And I hate them.

I hate them and I find them impractical. And I lay that out clearly in the book. And what's so funny is I had a couple of friends who are innovation experts that I've met throughout the years be early readers for my book. And this chapter is the one that consistently they got tripped up on. And in fact, one of my friends wrote me a note and said something along the lines of,

Jess Gaedeke (13:52)
Yeah.

Tina Lambert (13:55)
I'm having trouble because the other concepts in the book don't seem to line up with this idea that you don't believe in funnels. And can you help me understand why you feel so strongly about that? So I ended up having a lot of banter even with my early readers about this.

So if you don't know what a funnel is, maybe just to start there, it's this idea that you have to work on more innovation projects than what you actually want to launch. So the idea is,

As you go along, you'll slowly narrow in to the most feasible projects and the other things will fall out of the funnel along the way.

it's a weirdly named idea because funnels are actually designed to keep things from falling out, right? If you think about those you use for oil or for wine or I don't know, cows, right? They're designed to make sure everything ends up where it's supposed to. What you're describing is more like a sieve.

Jess Gaedeke (14:40)
Right.

Tina Lambert (14:49)
where things fall out and not everything makes it through. And the phrase we hear all the time when people talk about funnels as a best practice is this idea of funnel versus tunnel. And I have never really understood that phrase because there's nothing inherently bad about tunnels, right? Like tunnels are a straight line to get you where you're trying to go in an expedited way. I mean, when I think about tunnels, only...

Jess Gaedeke (14:50)
Yeah.

Tina Lambert (15:17)
bad thing I can think of is maybe they usually have spiders. other than that, I don't know. What's so bad about tunnels? Why are we making them the enemy? And I think that this idea has to be driven mostly by innovation consultants. And they've just really pushed that this is kind of a best practice. And I do like to rant about consultants sometimes because I find that...

Too many of them have never worked anywhere other than consulting. And so they don't have that reality check of what it's like in a real business environment where you have very constrained resources, both people and money. And you can't always do the theoretical best thing. You have to do what you can actually afford to do. And so this idea of a funnel that you would start, I don't know, maybe three projects in order to launch one.

means that you're saying you're going to put three times the amount of people and money on upfront development compared to what you actually will get out. So your return on that investment is not going to be great if you've invested for three times what you're actually getting. And

that doesn't feel smart from a business perspective. And then secondly, and maybe even more of where my passion comes from, when people know that you're working on three things and you're only going to launch one,

It creates this environment of, we don't have to figure this out. And innovation is hard. It's hard every day. You're constantly running into barriers, and you have to have the fortitude to push through them and keep trying, not give up. But if everybody knows, ⁓ there's two backups, maybe this one doesn't have to work, then you'll have that knee-jerk reaction of, let's cancel this every time something goes wrong.

and just go to one of those backups. And I have seen that in my career where people started multiple projects to get to one where it ends up where some of the best ones get killed way too early. And so,

talk about how in my family, one of the really bad jokes that we tell, because I'm one of seven kids, is that growing up we had spares. So my parents would let us do things like take the train to the city as children.

Why would they do that? Because they're spares. And it's a bad joke because obviously you'd never just be like, I have lots of kids. It's okay if I lose one or two. ⁓ But it should be the same way with innovation. mean, the way I have always felt as an innovator when I'm working on a project is it's my baby. I don't want anything to kill my baby. I want to protect it. So I don't understand this mentality of, you know, ⁓ it's fine if some of them die along the way.

Jess Gaedeke (17:21)
you

Yeah. Okay. So you've made a very fair case against the funnel. So what is the alternative to the funnel? How do you make sure at the end of this, you actually do have something that's launch ready?

Tina Lambert (17:56)
know, what I would say is pretty simple. It's about having a three year calendar. And I talk about a three year calendar in the book because I've spent most of my career in food and beverage and there's not a lot of food and beverage that takes longer than three years to get to market. But what I will say is if you work in aerospace engineering or pharma, it might be a six or 10 year calendar. But you need to have a calendar that's as long as however it takes you to get your biggest ideas to market.

When I talk about that calendar, I mean, you actually have three years worth of ideas tested and identified and all those projects started. So there's actually a cross-functional team working on them. And I mean, those cross-functional teams will, of course, be spending more time working on the things about to launch. But there should be prototyping, consumer research, all of that work happening on the things that are the furthest out, whether that's three years or 10 years out in your calendar, if it's going to be really effective.

And what I love about the three-year calendar and how it answers this question of not having a funnel is if you've got things staged out, it gives you more flexibility. Because let's say one of the projects does hit an immovable wall and it can't move on. Well, you're already working on something for a year later or two years later that you have some understanding about how realistic it is and what the challenges on it are. And so you can just move that thing up and you've got that flexibility within your calendar.

I think of it like, if I go back to my tunnels aren't bad, right? You are pacing your projects, sending them through the tunnel in a paced way. And if one hits the wall, there's one right behind it that you just have walk a little faster, right? And then you're ready to go. And I just find that to be a better use of company resources because the intention is meant to be that all these things launch that sometimes they might have to change places or get replaced.

Jess Gaedeke (19:33)
Yeah.

Yeah,

Okay, my biggest takeaways from this section then, funnels are bad, tunnels are good, we need to beware of spiders, but have lots of irons in the fire and you should be good.

Okay, another chapter that really resonated with me and also you have mentioned has been also a little controversial, chapter three, which is all about prioritization. And you talk about the idea

should not be afraid to kill the middle. Tell me about that.

Tina Lambert (20:13)
Yeah, there's really two controversial things I say in chapter three that I've gotten some feedback on. One is, I hate complicated prioritization tools and I think they're a waste of time and money. And the second is, I don't think you should kill small stuff. And so I would like paraphrase that as make a list and kill the middle is sort of my advice. so let me explain.

tools.

Right now in the industry, you can find through all these project management software systems that are for sale and these companies that are experts in this, tools that will make you complicated tables, charts, graphs, scatter plots, pictures, right? That lay out all the innovation projects that you're working on and how you should prioritize them. And of course, the reason this comes up so much is because if you start working on innovation within your company, at some point you will have more ideas than you have people.

work on them. And that just always at some point becomes a problem. And so then you're trying to figure out, why can we stop? And someone will try

tell you one of these complicated analysis tools. And what I find is that number one, doing this analysis is going to put more strain on the people who are right now telling you they are too busy and need you to prioritize for them. Because now you're going to ask them to fill in all this data to help you prioritize. And two,

it's going to spit something out that still isn't going to help the executive that needs to make the decision actually make a decision. Because we're all pretending that if we put in the data inputs, something really clear and really objective is going to come out. But the reality is it's never that simple. There's always going to be people who feel passionately about every project on that list and who will tell you, I know this falls in the bad part of the scatter plot, but here's why it's so important. ⁓

Jess Gaedeke (21:58)
Let me make it, yeah.

Tina Lambert (22:00)
And

so you still end up in the same place in terms of the discussion after doing all that analysis. And so what I find is best is skip that. Don't procrastinate. Just make a simple list. List all the projects you have in order of biggest to smallest in terms of revenue. And honestly, a good innovation person can do this without even going and looking up all the forecasts. You can eyeball your projects and put them in rough order really fast. So do that. And then you're going to stare at the list.

and everyone's gonna think, oh, we should stop the small stuff. Let's kill the bottom of the list. But I am here to tell you that you won't. You won't do that, even if you set out to do that. And the reason you won't is because we are not bad business people, right? Like none of us are going around starting small, stupid projects that don't need to happen. We know they're small, right? If we're starting a small project, there's a reason. It's probably important. There's a channel that...

that is small but really incremental that needs this. There's a customer that's asking for this that we really need to provide it. There's a competitive threat that we need to respond to. There's

issue with a product that we need to renovate it. There's a reason you do those small things. And so you almost never can kill them. There's very few. And even if you do, if we're honest, the small things are easy. So they don't save a lot of resource time.

So you have to kill all the small things probably to free up enough time and you won't.

So

you can't kill the small stuff on your list that you've made. But you also of course can't kill the big things, right? Those are the big things. Those are the things that are gonna drive growth on your business. And usually the biggest things are also the most incremental to the business. And so what happens practically at the end of the day after having done this for a long, long time is that you end up having to kill the middle. And the middle projects,

are sneaky. They're sneaky because they're big enough that no one's going to be like, well, that's too small. Right. But a lot of times they're not very incremental, really. The things that end up in the middle are like your line extension kinds of projects. They're usually projects that you do every year that you think of as just, ⁓ we need another variety. Right. We need to have another we need news on the business.

and so you always do them. And they're the things that sort of churn.

and end up replacing other things that you already have

in your product portfolio. So those are the things that I would say, slow the pacing of those down. Don't do them every year, every other year, or stop them altogether until it becomes a more important need. Because those are the things that will free up enough resources for you to be able to get all your work done.

Jess Gaedeke (24:37)
gosh, that's so interesting because I'm just reflecting on, again, being on the research provider side of things, how much time and effort and investment is put into those middle initiatives and how often those are on the market for one to two years and then just turn out for the next thing. just such a vast amount of organizational effort that could be returned to the business.

The other thing I'll just say as you're talking Tina, I'm like, God, I'm thinking about my to-do list and like what's on my list of priorities. What if I killed the middle? Like that could really change my productivity and my impact. So anyway, I just wanted you to know, you just got me to think of it in a new way as well outside of Just Innovation.

Tina Lambert (25:09)
Right?

Jess Gaedeke (25:18)
so know.

Tina Lambert (25:18)
I think that you're right.

think that you're right about personal to-do lists too. I never thought of it that way, but you're right. Those are projects that you probably shouldn't be doing.

Jess Gaedeke (25:24)
in the little town. ⁓

Yeah, and those little ones are the quick hits that like kind of get stuff going and they're easy to cross off. Those are super

Okay, so another one chapter nine, you talk about a really strong point of view about isolating innovation teams, it just doesn't work.

And so I'd love to hear you talk about how you think innovation teams should be structured so that there's not this sort of isolated on an island feeling for innovation.

Tina Lambert (25:52)
Yeah, I call isolated innovation teams innovation islands. And I chose that phrase on purpose. But what I see is that companies consistently do this pendulum swing. They go back and forth between two basic innovation structures. The first is, okay, we're not getting enough innovation or we're not getting enough big innovation. So we need to pull innovation out and have dedicated people, whether we're talking about marketers or, you

product developers or engineers, right? Like we need dedicated people who are just thinking about innovation all day long to get us bigger, more ideas. So you'll do that. And then what happens is at some point that island starts drifting from the mainland and the things they're working on get a little weirder and a little more out there and a little more disruptive and a little less aligned with what the business strategy is. That's just what always happens. And then at some point someone goes,

This isn't working. We're completely disconnected between innovation and the business. And they swing all the way back and put innovation back into the business so that we can get it back under control. And then eventually the ideas start getting small and there starts being fewer of them again. And so companies just go back and forth and back and forth between the two extremes. And that just doesn't work. So you have to find a matrix solution. And that's what I talk about.

I say you have to create a dedicated team of innovators. You do need people who all they think about all day is innovation or else you won't get it done. But those people should report into the business. And so you might have a mid-level manager that they report into, but you should never have a super senior leader leading innovation. And the reason why is because super senior leaders are very strategic and love to set visions. And so they will inherently create their own vision different from what the business is working on.

So you need to tuck those innovation teams within the business so that they stay very tightly aligned with the strategy and their innovation is super strategic. I will say there's a sad part about this. Like even when I wrote this chapter and even recently I was getting a hard time at work that did I create an innovation

in my current role? And I was like,

Jess Gaedeke (28:02)
We're getting called on it, right? Yeah, no. I'm just, you're right, don't.

Tina Lambert (28:05)
well, the thing about innovation islands is that they are a lot of fun.

And fun is a word, if you read my book, you will know I do not like to use very often when I talk about innovation, because people from the outside who have never worked in innovation think it's all fun. But the reality is innovation is very hard, which is why I wrote a book called Innovation is Ugly. But innovation islands are fun. And I have more show and tell that is proof of this.

Jess Gaedeke (28:30)
Yeah, please.

Tina Lambert (28:31)
this is

a shot ski from an innovation island at Kellogg's and everyone who worked on our island signed it at one point. And it was one of the most fun teams I have ever been part of. We had a great, great time. But I guess it's sort of proof also that sometimes they're fun for the wrong reasons. But you do have a great time when you're alone on an island just thinking big thoughts.

Jess Gaedeke (28:35)
⁓ yeah!

Very cool.

Yeah, a little unsupervised party out there on that island. yeah, I love the idea of injecting that intellect, that energy into the business and making sure that those folks

dispersed, if you will. But I hadn't thought about the point, and now I'm recalling in the book, about you can't have too senior a strategic over that group because it can create that disparity. That's a really interesting dichotomy that is an important watch out for sure.

Tina Lambert (29:23)
Yeah. Yeah.

Jess Gaedeke (29:26)
Awesome. Okay, well, we're going to go to the final dig. This is all about you as a person, Tina. mean, I don't think you're separating professional you and you, but let's just let's do it. So what's the last product or service that you bought on impulse?

Tina Lambert (29:38)
Okay, my answer is kind of weird. My answer is a monocle, which I ordered. Monocle like a small glass circle you tuck in your eye to see through. So the reason this happened is I was recently at a sales meeting and we were at dinner afterwards and we were having a conversation about technology we wished would come back.

Jess Gaedeke (29:43)
a monocle, okay, like actual, like this.

Tina Lambert (30:02)
And it was a funny conversation, people going around the room. And I was saying how I missed when all the things you would keep in your pockets that you might lose were attached to chains. Not that I ever lived in that time, but I was like, I need like, you know, a pocket watch on a chain. And then I was saying, I mean, I guess you can still buy like chains for wallets, but they sort of have like a certain like punk rock aesthetic. That's not really my current aesthetic. And so then I started talking about monocles because when you get to a certain age,

Jess Gaedeke (30:02)
Yeah.

Tina Lambert (30:31)
It starts to become hard to sometimes read research results and finance spreadsheets. And so I have to carry a pair of reading glasses with me. was saying, I just want a monocle on a chain that I can... Someone said, that's an achievable dream. And so I went on Amazon and sure enough it is and I bought one and it came and it's just so ridiculous that I cannot bring myself to use it.

Jess Gaedeke (30:44)
That's amazing.

Thank

Where is the show and tell on the monocle? feel like you okay, okay, I Love this though because I struggle with my eyesight and reading menus and restaurants Especially if it's like a swanky place that's trying to be all like, you know low-lit I can't do it I have to hand it to someone younger than me and just say get me an old-fashioned or something, you know

Tina Lambert (31:01)
I could not. It's so ridiculous.

Yeah, exactly.

Jess Gaedeke (31:20)
I have not heard monocle. Thank you for breaking the record on diggin with that that impulse

What is a category or a brand that you could rationalize any price point for? You just have to have it in your life.

Tina Lambert (31:31)
My first thought is cilantro, which is ridiculous. And like right on the heels of that would be hot sauce. I always have, I have not just one bunch of cilantro in my fridge at all times. I have like a rotation of three, one that's about to go completely bad, one that's brand new and one that's in between. I have like a fear of running out of cilantro.

Jess Gaedeke (31:35)
Thank

Thank

Tina Lambert (31:55)
⁓ And then I carry hot sauce with me everywhere I go. So I have the little mini packets. I have little mini Tabasco containers. I keep hot sauce at my desk. I have hot sauce in my backpack. I have to have hot sauce all the time.

Jess Gaedeke (31:58)
See you.

Yeah, sounds like it. That's my

daughter's boyfriend. He was a hot sauce guy. And I think that was like my sign of actually like letting him into the family when I bought him his own little hot sauce that that's what on the table for him each time because I get it. I understand that preference for sure. So gosh, you've worked on so many brands. So you understand they have distinct personalities. What's a brand that you date and a brand that you would marry?

Tina Lambert (32:36)
A brand that I would date. ⁓ I have it on my desk. I'm obsessed with Hippeas I'm obsessed with Hippeas as a brand, but also as a product. But what I like about them as a brand is they're so consistent in their messaging, right? Like everything they do is about kind of this hippie, fun, adventurous, like, and you know, the bright yellow that...

that reinforces that message. So I just love how consistent their branding is. They always use the same clever tone. ⁓ And I love their products as well. I love that they're made of chickpeas. But I would date Hippeas because I wish that I was more adventurous and cool. But I think I would probably like Mary Dots pretzels. Because like in reality, I'm just a little bit more straight-laced and basic, probably.

Jess Gaedeke (33:23)
know that dots is straight, least and basic, it's, ⁓ it's just it, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Tina Lambert (33:26)
They are delicious pretzels. Yeah, they are absolutely

delicious. I really like the traditional one with the spicy spices.

Jess Gaedeke (33:34)
Yeah, yeah, very cool.

an industry leader that you'd love to hear from on this podcast?

Tina Lambert (33:40)
Yeah, the first person that comes to mind that I really admire is Gail Hollander, who's the chief marketing officer at Jam Smucker. And I had a chance to meet her

Jam Smucker acquired Hostess and we were integrating and I got to spend a lot of time with Gail. And she is an absolutely just brilliant creative strategist. And the work that she's done for Jam Smucker of just bringing life back to brands like Jif and

and Milk Bone is really admirable. So I think she would be fantastic.

Jess Gaedeke (34:12)
That's awesome. I would love to pick her brain used to support the Big Heart Pet business way back in the day that then became JM Smucker. So lots of experience with some of those pet brands. yeah, it's so fun to see leaders that can reinvent legacy, longstanding brands and how can they appeal to a new generation. I mean, it's just so

So finally, Tina, what keeps you inspired? You've been in this industry a minute and have so many great lessons. What keeps you doing it every day?

Tina Lambert (34:41)
It's going to sound cliche, but it comes down to my people. when people ask me, hey, what's your brand archetype or what's your brand personality if you were a brand? I always say the big sister. I'm the oldest of seven kids. I've been a big sister my entire life. And it's so much of a part of who I am. And I'm all about helping my people succeed, making sure that they're happy.

And I get so demotivated when they're frustrated or when they aren't succeeding. And it makes me feel like a bad leader or a bad big sister. So that really is what motivates me at the end of the day, like helping others succeed. You know, at this point in my career, it's so much about serving others and helping bring other people along. I've been so amazingly lucky to be able to achieve my dream of getting to this point of Chief Marketing Officer with my career.

you know, helping others along is what I'm motivated by.

Jess Gaedeke (35:40)
Well, that's fantastic. And you can tell I'm going to do one last flash of the book. I'm feeling very Oprah right now. But the book is a great testament to that because I feel like you are paying it forward. When I read the book, I said to myself, I want to meet this person. I want to talk to this person because not only does she seem really smart, but really fun. So that's exactly what this conversation was today. So thank you for letting me have it with you, Tina. It's been really, a ⁓ pleasure.

Tina Lambert (36:04)
All right, thank you so much, Jess. I enjoyed it.