– You have to be able to do something ridiculous, like buy $50,000 worth of bananas and send them to dentists, just ’cause it’s so ludicrous that they’re like, What the fuck? – [Man] I’m putting pressure on the team to say we need to go where the attention is, but there’s this balance between brand and selling, which is, hey I’ve got two objectives.
Really for the long run, it’s about brand, – of course. value, but we also need to hit sales objectives, so– – So let’s talk about the Army versus Navy SEALs. The reason it works is because we do not send the Army in to kill Osama bin Laden. That is sales and branding. Sales and marketing under one thing all the way to the top or wherever it goes above you, is a tricky game. Because inevitably, he’s held accountable.
Again, I don’t know the full story but you know where I’m going with this. Everybody fucks up marketing because they’re gonna always lean into sales because they need to hit short term objectives. The end. That’s where leadership has to come in and create rules for engagement. It’s why I love 80/20, it’s why I love Army and Navy SEALs, it’s why I win. I create businesses like Vayner that is my foundation of 80 and then I taste with 20% around it. That’s how VaynerX got built, and then even outside the Vayner universe, that’s how to the K-Swiss and the Empathy Wines, this is how it all works.
That’s marketing. ’cause everybody’s a sales… you’re a sales organization so let’s put a little fund on the side or a little team on the side and that’s marketing and if it goes to dead zero, you’ve decided at the macro level that $800,000 to dead zero is super fine by me, ’cause you know it’s not gonna be dead zero but now you’ve created autonomy and lack of confusion to actually make that happen. Same thing I told him, in the macro it’s what I want you to do. That’s why I’ve created VaynerX. – [Man] Awesome. – Same reason, okay? Here are the things, we try to do everything under Vayner, here are the things we learned, 4d, Sasha, now it’s Sasha and fucken (mumbles) and you know it will keep going. Commerce is gonna kick out too.
Because kicked out, right now Robbie has to navigate, it’s organs within bodies. Create a separate body. Sales and marketing is mixed and that means you’re actually doing sales. And if marketing is put into a place where it’s all upside, because marketing is gray, it is intuitive right? So if the rule is 500,000, I’m just making shit up, and at the end of the day it’s like, if you were the head of it for me I’d be like, it’s 500,000, and my team will tell you this, James will definitely tell you this, it’s like I don’t give a fuck we’ll talk at the end of the year, explain yourself.
But I have no fucken judgment. I’m not booing or cheering along the game. Just tell me when it’s triple zero and explain to me why we lost 112 to 88 or why we won 112 to 88 and you just hold that person accountable. That’s how marketing needs to work. ’cause that’s marketing. You have to be able to do something ridiculous like buy $50,000 worth of bananas and send them to dentist just ’cause it’s so ludicrous that they’re like, what the fuck? You see where I’m going though? As silly as what I just said to you, you would be shocked how smart what I just said actually is based on how silly it sounds.
The world is busy, the way you break through is by breaking patterns. If you’re a fucking dentist and you get a banana sent to you in the mail and you wrote a note on it in pen, that’s just weird. Weird enough to give you awareness. (group chattering and agreeing) – [Man] So we’re signing bananas. – But what’s really fun is when you know your industry. So when you know your industry and let’s say fluoride’s getting demonized or the emergence of like, you know I don’t fucken know, you know. But like under something funny it’s like an inside joke, and then that is your banana, now you’ve really got something. Right? – [Man] Yep. – [Man] A question for you. – I’ll give you a wine comp. Rose’s so hot that what I would do is do an anti-Rose movement. I would send everybody a bottle if I was trying to get the wine retailers I would send them like, you know, a sparkling wine named Fuck Rose.
That would get everybody’s attention because you would be playing to what’s happening. – [Group] Right..