YouSaid · the spoken record

Michael Duda

lines on the record
63
first
2019-01-15
most recent
2019-01-15
sittings or episodes
1
sources
podcast

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  1. “Short, the first process would be an immersion. The good Lord gave us two years in one mouth for a reason, and it's funny as investors that we don't always use that correlation. We sometimes overly on the computers and things, but we do a lot of listening and ask a lot of questions. Who's the target audience? What's the competitive set? What are other people doing? What are the objectives? And that was, so we asked a litany of questions. Then we take a look at the category landscape and say what players are out there, what does it look like, how's it sold? Who are the consumers for this? And is there a different kind of consumer for, say, Mercedes versus Alexis and unpack that? And really try and dig into who we're for is not millennials. It's not adults to 18 to 34. I've never met an adult 18 to 34. We try and come up with a persona. A great one is Trader Joe's. Trader Joe's has a great center of gravity in terms of what they do. Trader Joe's designs all the proxies and services around a substitute teacher who drives a late model Volvo.”

    2019-01-15 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Duda – Investing In Brands - [Invest Like the Best, EP.117] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “Priced through the gills, and at the time Gillette had, I think Gillette was 9% of P&G's revenues, but 34% of profit. And the fact he had to buy them behind the glass case was a little bit weird. And they didn't want to just like, we're going to do something cheaper and sell more stuff and take market share. It's like they were building something soulful. It's like, we want to give a guy a better shave and be more empathetic to that. And they literally, there was a big ethos behind the brands. I mean, the name of the company is called Harry's. And it's a shaving company that says something. The mascot was a woolly mammoth. Before they launched, we helped them with this campaign that you had to figure stuff out and we acquired 120,000 users before launch. And we just had a certain kind of tone and attitude that was much more empathetic and endearing. And at the day, whether you look at politics or the brands we choose, whether it's a car, a gum, we all make irrational choices more than we'd like to think. One of the things that we look for is that in a founder, and then there's a”

    2019-01-15 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Duda – Investing In Brands - [Invest Like the Best, EP.117] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “Focus with the early stage as we look at the asset class of upstarts looking to upset the strong brands like a P&G of the world. A lot of this stuff starts with a founder. The great thing now, and especially CPG, Legacy CPG, it's like CPG companies as great as they are have never had direct relationships with their consumers. Their customers are Walmart and Kroger and Wegman's and Amazon. With new direct-to-consumer companies, which isn't totally the question you ask, it just, the soul of a brand can come through a lot more because you can have direct relationships. And often in young companies, you have to look at the ethos of a founder. For instance, we were meeting with Jeff Rader and Andy Katz Mayfield of Harry's before Harry's launch. We were assessing them, their smarts. They were both Warton grads and in private equity. But also like, what did they want to accomplish? And it said, they want to give people a more fair shave because there wasn't one. You know, the main competitor at the time is this Voltron-like character, 1980s, Five Blades, Seven Blades, the Quatro.”

    2019-01-15 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Duda – Investing In Brands - [Invest Like the Best, EP.117] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “Section, and this kid went up to this red sweat. Mom, I really want this one. And she was looking at sort of named brands, Russell Athletic, which was like half the price. And she's like, well, dear, how about this one? Like, no, I really want this one. Why do you want that one so much more? And he literally said, Mom, because in underarmor, I can do anything. So, what do you do? Tell your kid no, buy this one because it's the same cotton or whatever. It's just, no, that's the power of like the underarmor brand to that kid, but to people in general, it's hard to say over here, there's strong brands and how that's done, but to different people, there's more meaningful ones. And it comes out based on the category, the use case, so many different dynamics come to play.”

    2019-01-15 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Duda – Investing In Brands - [Invest Like the Best, EP.117] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “With certain elements, it made me matters less. But I'll say this when I say I Googled that versus, oh, I'll go to Yahoo or I'll go to Bing on that. Who does that? In the case of Tide, Tide's interesting. I mean, Tide only started losing market share really in the 2008 crash because of price and that. But who's come up from behind to steal share from him? Not really too many people. So if there's any entrepreneurs in a detergent business, we'd love to speak to. We've looked at a few. But there's a certain point in time where you go, like, I love Tide as a brand, but you know what? My paycheck's gone down a little bit, so I have to make some sacrifices. Where do those sacrifices come in will come into like baby tylenol or will come in my laundry detergent? Will it come into like a Pepsi? That's the thing. Like when people look at trade-offs, what will people absolutely not trade off? I remember walking dating myself to 2010 walking the floor of a dick sporting goods in Jacksonville, Florida with Kevin Plank, founder of Under Armor. And we watched this mother and her child looking at stuff in the underarmor section.”

    2019-01-15 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Duda – Investing In Brands - [Invest Like the Best, EP.117] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “1999, go 99.99. So there's always going to be rational elements to go. It's a sign of trust, whether it's Johnson's baby oil, to drift, which if any of you listening have had kids, you wash all your stuff in draft and it just, you don't want your kid versus private label on that side. So different people put different emphasis on brand of what that might mean, but it's a fun topic for us, but something that leaves a lot of people, especially quant people, I imagine like, what am I talking about?”

    2019-01-15 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Duda – Investing In Brands - [Invest Like the Best, EP.117] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “Then another person, Sam Adams Beer, Visa Vulvo L Bean. In your head you probably got two different looking people altogether. You picture like maybe for the first one a suburban New Jersey dude. And then for the second one, someone in Vermont or something in Plaid and at a bar, right? And it's just like, I didn't describe any people given topics, speeches before, whatever. And there's some of the audience is like, well, the best brand is the best product. So really? You think Microsoft was that much worse of a product than Apple when Apple started catching gear or when is Sony, PlayStation, Leafflog, and Nintendo or a Coke versus Pepsi? We laugh about it. It's like attributes are one thing. In this world where the democratization of information is more information now than there was 20 years ago, like we've quadrupled in the past six or seven years with what the data says, there's something that has to be better, faster, cheaper, longer, smarter on that side of it. The phone wars back in the day. All the minutes you can eat.”

    2019-01-15 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Duda – Investing In Brands - [Invest Like the Best, EP.117] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “Depends on Karen. I mean, I think Goldman Sachs Highline there's 553 consumer categories out there, so I don't know if people are going to love their toilet paper versus like a basketball, like a Nike versus Under Armor in that set. But it's like, I'll describe two people only by brands. Heineken, Mercedes, American Express.”

    2019-01-15 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Duda – Investing In Brands - [Invest Like the Best, EP.117] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “It's pretty good. Out there, you could say the colors, the logo. Those are elements of a brand identity, but it's like great brands have a soul. Great brands are polarizing. Use sports as an example. The New York Yankees are the most loved and most hated team in baseball. The Dale's Cowboys most loved, hated team in football. Politics get into that. Then you get into something like wine. Why do people choose what wine? It's like they'll go to the stores, okay, that's a cool label. The price is all right, but there's just a lot of unknowns to it. So great brands are polarizing and they have their fans and their advocates, which done well. Those advocates can be the best marketing done. And then you have your detractors, which can help brands too. It's squishy, but we practice both the strategic and the ethos side, and that we put into practice.”

    2019-01-15 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Duda – Investing In Brands - [Invest Like the Best, EP.117] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “Most simplest terms the way we look at it is brand is the net result of what a brand does and how people feel. And so a case in point, it's like take a Coca-Cola. I'm going to guess they're $45 billion, $46 billion revenue. The market cap's $170, $180 billion. I don't know what it is, something like that. What's the difference to that? What's the value of that Coca-Cola recipe versus like the actual Coca-Cola sales? One of the things we use in our decks is there was a quote from the chairman of Quaker Oaks in 1900 saying that if you gave me the brand and I gave you the bricks and mortar, I will fare much better than you. And it's just the power of what the Coca-Cola label says. And it's just, it's a hard thing for a lot of people to truly get because in a world of Excel sheets, it's like, well, you want very rational answers. It's a logo. It's this, but it's more than that. I'd be curious, since you represent the quant people listening, what is your definition of brand?”

    2019-01-15 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Duda – Investing In Brands - [Invest Like the Best, EP.117] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “Invested such early stages, series A rounds, and now pre seed, which has become a thing. But as I often say, money is the least valuable thing we bring to the table. We bring a school of really accomplished marketers and strategists to tell you about the makeup of our team. We know how to build brands. We could do marketing campaigns. We can do strategies. So it's not just the cute ads you might see on TV or on Instagram, but it's also the strategic rationale in terms of why you're targeting that person at that moment with that message. And that's what we do.”

    2019-01-15 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Duda – Investing In Brands - [Invest Like the Best, EP.117] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “That kind of appetite to do it. And we decided to start helping entrepreneurs who had a chip on the shoulder and brand mattered and putting in some money.”

    2019-01-15 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Duda – Investing In Brands - [Invest Like the Best, EP.117] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “Bullishes and early stage consumer investment firm who really focuses on the consumer and the power of the brand to create superior returns. And probably the most telling thing I could say while exist is we're a bunch of ad guys for the most part. I spent many years at Deutsch and most people listening think like Deutsche, no, Donnie Deutsch and Deutsch advertising. I just remember seeing a lot of Wall Street people and reading their reports saying like, well, and he kept getting the sense that marketing is an expense. I was like, why is that? That's wrong. That's ridiculous. And as I'm huffing and puffing about it, then I look at our business model. It's wait, they're right. Agencies like law firms get paid for the time that it takes to create ads or outputs, but no correlations to the outcomes. And I said, why isn't there a more premium marketing company that believes in its recommendations and implementations that literally put its money behind where its marketing is? So we created this because in a publicly traded company, there was an”

    2019-01-15 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Duda – Investing In Brands - [Invest Like the Best, EP.117] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source