🎤Get ready to be hungry in “The one with the Happiness of King’s Hawaiian” with Troy Figgins, Director of Consumer Insights at King’s Hawaiian Bakery🎧 What’s in the show?...
😎From a beach side store to a nationally loved brand - The Spirit of Aloha
🍔SLIDER SUNDAYS!!!
🔍Growth of brand through a maniacal focus on needs of the customer and consumer
😍The audacity of Happiness as a Brand Promise
🏃♀️Going from esoteric brand goals to real actions
🎵A hidden karaoke bar in Tokyo
👂Creating, listening to and learning from a consumer community...and then acting on it
💭“As a brand, we just, we feel like the world would be a better place, if you will, if more people got together more often with the people they care about, because there's just so much human benefit in getting together with the people you love over food. And we're like, Man, that's a great place for a brand to be like, why not?” - Troy
Episode resources:
Troy Figgins: www.linkedin.com/in/troyfiggins
Troy Figgins Twitter: @troyfiggins
King’s Hawaiian: kingshawaiian.com
TRANSCRIPT
Rick Denton: 0:05
You're listening to CX Passport, the show about creating great customer experiences with a dash of travel talk. Each episode we’ll talk with our guests about great CX, travel...and just like the best journeys, explore new directions we never anticipated. I'm your host Rick Denton. I believe the best meals are served outside and require a passport. Let's get going. There is nothing quite like the smell of fresh bread. Something about that stirs up memories of home and family. It just makes me smile. And if you happen to be from Austin, Texas, where I grew up in the 80s, you may even remember elementary class field trips to the Butter Krust Bakery on Airport Boulevard. I still remember barely paying any attention to the tour, only desperately hoping for the end when we were finally given a piece of that glorious bread coming right off the line. I imagine some of you right now feel like you can taste great bread just by me mentioning it here. It's hard for a brand to create that same sensation. But there's just something about kings a wine that creates that same brand love with customers. It's why I'm so excited today to talk with Troy Figgins Head of Consumer Insights for King's Hawaiian. Now listeners I know some of you will say Rick, customer consumer insights. That's not customer experience, perhaps true and pure definition. But it's those consumer insights that help understand, inform and create the insights that help a company know how to create a great customer experience. When there's as much love for a brand as there is with King's Hawaiian. Clearly they've got a pulse on their customers and are delivering delight in the experience. And yes, I am throwing some love to the brand today. But full disclosure, there's no promotion here. Just excited to hear a story from a great person at a great brand. What I also know about Troy's and King's Hawaiian story is this is a story about how a brand can really grow customer understandings from the basics into a mature insights approach. And folks. It's got Hawaii built right into the brand of course we'll talk travel Troy Welcome to CX passport.
Troy Figgins: 2:14
Rick, thanks for having me. I know this kind of bounced around a little I'm glad we were able to find some time to get
Rick Denton: 2:20
No kidding. I'm glad that it is finally here. I'm also glad full disclosure that I've already eaten lunch, because I would be so hungry having this conversation. So thankfully, you will not hear stomach growling, grumbling noises during the recording here. But let's start with that journey that we were talking about it kings a wine is a brand that evokes these images of mom and pop bakery in view of these crashing waves on a Hawaiian beach with consumer insights simply limited to the conversations that they have at the sales counter. I know that's clearly not where you are today. So tell me about that journey.
Troy Figgins: 2:51
Actually, that's a pretty accurate description of how the company got started. Excellent. Seven year old Bakery started in, in in Hilo, Hawaii on the Big Island by our current CEO, Mark Tyrus dad, Robert Tyra, and Robert Tyra was a baker by trade. And, you know, besides just making great bread, his kind of overarching goal for why he started this business was to give people a place to gather you know, give him give him a place where they can come in and kind of talk story is you would describe it. And, you know, one of his sort of guiding principles was treating everybody that came in with aloha. And that sort of attitude is sort of permeated everything that comes when it's done. And it is truly a family affair. Like I said, Robert was the founder, kind of the patriarch of the company, Mark, his son is our CEO, Mark actually grew up in the original bakery, you really jokes about taking naps on bags of flour and stuff like that. So it it definitely comes from humble roots. But, but it's come a long way since then
Rick Denton: 4:09
And that's just amazing to think that it started there, though. You said something in there. That triggered a thought it was a place that folks can gather. So it was almost as if they had the customer at the forefront probably before they weren't thinking about oh customer who's just hey, let's let's gather around here. Have you felt that sort of heritage of focused on the customer, even if they didn't know the labels sort of weave throughout the brand and its history?
Troy Figgins: 4:32
Definitely. I mean, we were a CPG brands, which is consumer packaged goods. So you know, our customers are actually the grocery stores of the worlds the Walmarts and the Kroger's. We refer to the end user, if you will, as a consumer. So they are the people who actually buy it from Kroger and bring it home to their families. But that focus on both customer service and being You know, good, good partners for our consumers to it sort of weaves through through both of those. And I mentioned that like the, you know, the company started to humble, but it is grown. And it's become a big sort of national brand. Hopefully a lot of people are familiar with King's wine. And I've enjoyed King's wine, but it's just experienced incredible growth over the last, let's say, 10 years. And a lot of that is due to this just, you know, maniacal focus on delivering both the needs of our of our customers, the grocery stores, the world and the needs of our consumers before actually making a delicious sandwich or a hamburger bun or, or a slider from our products.
Rick Denton: 5:44
Well, let's, let's actually talk about that, that idea of the promise. And what's making me smile a little bit as my current client has nothing to do with CPG, right. It's in the insurance and even the reinsurance industry. And I was telling someone there that I was going to be able to talk to you and talk to someone from King's Hawaiian, and the biggest grin showed up on their face just by saying that so clearly, and she said she could no longer talk about anything, she just wanted to talk about bread from there on out. So I at least know that there'll be somebody very excited about this episode coming out. But it's clear, there's a brand promise there, there's something that King's Hawaiian has said, This is who our brand is, this is what we are. And we hear a ton about that inside that customer or consumer experience world and outside of it, it's vital, right? That's the brand promise is vital that delivery, how did you discover your brand promise? How did that come about?
Troy Figgins: 6:38
That's a great, great question. And, and that experience is not a unique experience. I mean, we hear that from just about everybody, there's a there's a ton of you know, passion for the brand, it's a it's a powerful brand, people feel very passionate about the brand, it's there's a lot of love around the brands, we're very fortunate and that people either love King's wine, or they like kings wine, there's very few people who dislike we're on the good end of the scale there. And it's not surprising, right? Because if you think about, I mean, first world food, so like we are in part of food related occasions, which are just generally nice occasions, to be part of, and then we generally are part of bigger occasions like Thanksgivings, or, you know, people getting together for dinner, or things where you're gathered around with the people you care about. So there's a lot of just wonderful kind of emotion that are that's tied into those experiences. When it comes to like the brand promise. You know, for us, really, we did a lot of work on figuring out our kind of brand pyramid and you know, what we deliver both in terms of functional and emotional benefits. And really, our, our brand promise is, is Delivering Happiness, and that's sort of big, that's that is sort of a big, rejected way and right it's, it's pretty huge. But when we've actually measured ourselves against other brands, especially other bread brands, consumers consistently deliver us 10 points over the competition in terms of delivering happiness, there is some magic to this brand in terms of delivering that happiness and when we drill down to our kind of corner of happiness, because happiness is very broad. It was more about getting together about belonging. Definitely about togetherness occasions, that we helped foster these sort of togetherness occasions and a lot of the sounds like a lot to deliver for, you know, a humble bread brand but the fact that we are sort of universally beloved by everyone we are we are a crowd pleasing product and brand and that sort of universal love it just makes it makes people feel very confident that when they roll out the Kings one no pun intended, but they bring it out it's going to make everybody happy. And so you know, we're again we're just in a very fortunate place that like we want to make you know, we want to foster more togetherness occasions, we want to make people happy, and people feel very confident that we are the brand that can deliver that happiness.
Your CX Passport Captain: 9:28
This is your captain speaking. I want to thank you for listening to CX Passport today. We’ve now reached our cruising altitude so I’ll turn that seatbelt sign off. While you’re getting comfortable, hit that Follow or Subscribe button in your favorite podcast app so you never miss an episode. I’d love it if you’d tell a friend about CX Passport and leave a review so that others can discover the show as well. Now, sit back and enjoy the rest of the episode.
Rick Denton: 9:54
And imagine so happiness being such a central theme to that brand promise. It's it's almost, you can see, you can see me I know it'll be an audio podcast, but it's almost kind of this esoteric happiness. So how does that go from that? Kind of imagining these thought bubbles and clouds and visions into actual tactical decisions? And the consumer insights that you create how to how do you go from insight to ultimately Delivering Happiness? What does that look? Like?
Troy Figgins: 10:29
That's a great question, right? The just us knowing us being able to identify the happiness and you know, our corner of happiness, this togetherness, sort of superpower, if you will, was really eye opening for us. We all kind of knew it. And I mean, the family has kind of known it for a long time. You mentioned like somebody telling you when you mentioned King's wine, that they've just loved the brand. And we have tons of anecdotal sort of, you know, observations of people, you know, people stop me in the airport when I'm wearing a king Swan backpack, and they're like, I love kings white. So is there anything in there? Right. So we knew there was like something special there, but really doing the work, to do the research and find out and verify sort of validate what it is about kings line and what it is about our functional benefits that ladder to kind of those, you know, functional, or functional attributes. So added to this functional benefits that then sort of ladder to those emotional benefits, when we really sort of like drill down on that. And, you know, quite frankly, validated, so not like it showed us something new, it was more sort of validating what we already knew that we do play a clear role in people's lives and delivering that. That was, like I said, that was just very eye opening for us, right? We were like, Okay, great. Now we sort of know, almost like what our, you know, mission is a little bit. And so we kind of even talked about, like, gosh, you know, as a brand, we just, we feel like the world would be a better place, if you will, if more people got to get there more often that the people they care about, because there's just so much, you know, human benefit and getting together with the people you love over food. And we're like, Man, that's a great place for a brand to be like, why not? Why not be the brand that stands for getting together with the people you love. And it's not just a, you know, a timeless thing where obviously people have been getting together since then people but it seems very timely now. Yeah, both, you've got sort of the aftermath of sort of COVID of being very separate. And then there's a bit of sort of polarization going on in the world. Just in general, we find that families tell us they're just so busy, they don't have a chance to get together with the people they care about on a regular basis, even their sort of immediate family. And so we were like, boy, this just feels like a great place for the brand to be to just continuously try and remind people at, at a at a smallest. Why like that. It's good to get together the people you love. But even more like can we give them the tools and the help and you know, the things they need to sort of help get together with the people they care about. So, you know, we have a campaign going on right now where we were sort of inventing a new occasion, if you will, okay, on slider Sundays, it's a, it's a little bit of art, our quarter turn off of Taco Tuesdays, or kings wine is like it's a, it's a practice sort of perfect for making sliders. And again, sort of going back to consumer needs. When we talk to our consumers, they told us, you know, the idea of getting together with their family having a reason to get together with your family, a super easy, convenient, simple way to gather the family before the busyness of the week starts on a Sunday was super appealing. So we thought, Alright, let's see if we can turn slider Sunday into something. So we started with that insight of like togetherness and the need for people to be close, you know, be together with the people they care about. And it's sort of turned into this very sort of tactical marketing program that
Rick Denton: 14:18
you hear i'm saying. Oh, yeah. I'm visualized. I told you I had lunch and but now you're actually somehow finding a way to make me hungry with the description of slider Sunday. And I love how that ties into so many of the other things. You're talking about the togetherness, it's getting recharged before the week. It's your last little moment kind of of respite before and then well, you know, here in the US and also in other parts of the world. There's quite a sports influence in the afternoons of Sunday as well. So slider Sunday certainly fits well with some good sports going on as well. I liked that. I liked that a lot. You know, I had no intention of asking you about anything pandemic related because we're all kind of sick of hearing about that. But I'm curious if togetherness was such an important part of the brand and the brand promise what happened and how did y'all address that. And that absence of togetherness during that period?
Troy Figgins: 15:07
It was it was tough, right? So COVID was sort of a, a plus and a minus for us as a business, it was a plus. And that people were looking to the brands, they felt comfortable with the a lot of sort of nostalgic brands, brands that brought them kind of more comfort, if you will. And so we got to, we got a little bit of a lift out of that. So a lot of people who maybe had not bought King's wine in the past few years, decided it was a good time to sort of get the brand again. And so we get we, we, I wouldn't say we got a lot of new households, but we sort of got a lot of, we brought back a lot of households who might have been gone for a little while. Um, so that was that was super helpful, because it gave us a bit of a bigger kind of audience to talk to. From, from a downside perspective, yeah, man. I mean, we had like, tons of marketing around getting together in your backyard, neighborhood about, you know, having a barbecue and stuff like that. And that, that just was not we actually, we did some ad testing, because we had some ads teed up that were ready to go that sort of showcase that and people were like, this was, you know, summer of like, 2020 people. Yeah, that's, that does not feel like my life right now. And so we ended up quickly pivoting and moving towards, you know, more showing more people sort of at home with their immediate family. And, and stuff like that. So it did kind of like make us have to sort of pause for a little while. And what I would say is, I don't know more of sort of our traditional big gathering, marketing and kind of focus in on just like people, the people that are at home. But yeah, it's nice to come out of that now. Because I feel like holy, no kidding, with so much. There was so much pent up sort of demand for getting together that now, since we are a brand that is about getting together, it's just a message that people are really, really happy to hear.
Rick Denton: 17:10
I have to imagine that now coming out of it. But what a smart pivot, they're in the middle of it, it just Yeah, I had no intent of even talking about that. But it just made me think about that absence of togetherness, and what do you do during that period? But now, finally, right, we're seeing the increasing and increasing and increasing signs of that. Let's go back to our happy place here. It's built into the brand's name, Hawaiian, but I know they're not located there anymore. And I imagine though the islands though, have still been somewhat influential to you. Have you had the chance to travel there? What are some of the experiences you've had in Hawaiian Islands?
Troy Figgins: 17:43
Yeah, so Well, first, I can talk about Hawaii with the brands. So obviously, the brand is from Hawaii. Like I said, it started in Hilo. It's, it's, it's not just the fact that it was started in Hawaii, but the Tyra family has been very clear about wanting to sort of adopt Hawaiian culture and sort of, you know, principles into the way we do stuff. So there is there is this spirit of aloha that is sort of woven through kind of everything we do and, and that Hawaiian heritage is really it's sort of a nice place to be because it's all about courtesy and respect and caring and treating each other well. It's about family, you know, we call our family the Ohana. And it is like what we talked about before getting together and feeling welcomed. It's also a lot of Hawaii is a place where a lot of different cultures blend together. So there's a lot of blending together, which again, kind of comes back to this spirit of togetherness. So even you know, whether it's food or people or culture or whatever, it's very sort of, like, blended together for me. Yeah, I was. I've been lucky enough to have lived in Hawaii. I lived in Hawaii for years right out of college. I graduated from West Point, so I had an army commitment. Yeah.
Rick Denton: 19:06
Oh I got it. Okay, that's how you got there. Okay. Yeah. So
Troy Figgins: 19:09
I was I was lucky enough to get my first duty assignment duty. I guess we say that in in Hawaii. I don't I don't watch over the beaches of why but I was happy to do it.
Rick Denton: 19:20
Yeah, sure. You serve. Well, thank you, sir
Troy Figgins: 19:22
Well, but yeah, Hawaii, it's a it's a truly just amazing, magical place. I mean, most people I think kind of know that if they even if they haven't visited and I would highly recommend everybody go visit but it's obviously beautiful place weather's great. People are just incredibly welcoming, and, and thoughtful that aloha spirit is real. And then the food is I mean, it's pretty, it's pretty amazing. We talked about like, you know, cultural sort of blending. Hawaii, food is sort of a, you know, mash up of A whole bunch of different cuisines. Roy Yamaguchi is probably the best example. You know, that guy sort of pioneered fusion in cuisine mix together sort of French and California and and Asian flavors altogether. So yeah, I'm a huge fan of Hawaii
Rick Denton: 20:20
Troy I know it can be a long flight even even from the west coast, but certainly if you're coming further along flight into Hawaii, and so sometimes it'd be nice to stop down in the first class lounge. So let's have a little change of pace here. Join me here in the first class lounge we will move quickly here and hopefully have some fun. Now, I don't know if this answer to this question is going to be Hawaii or not. It's okay. If it is but what is a dream travel location from your past?
Troy Figgins: 20:43
Of my past, okay. It's nice to be in the first class times it's right sort of reminds me of your, your baller suite in Hoboken.
Rick Denton: 20:53
That's right!We were talking about that weren't we? of all things. The words baller suite and Hoboken have not been uttered together all that often. But it really did exist a couple of weeks ago, but yesterday,
Troy Figgins: 21:04
favorites. Travel occasionally from the past, I would say to have to be in Japan, I was lucky enough to go to Japan with a Japanese coworker that I worked with at the time Dr. Mitsunari Ono, and I went to Japan to meet with some some vendors we were working with and he kind of took me around and showed me the Trude sort of the behind the scenes Japan if we if we if you will, we went to a couple of sort of just amazing classic. Behind the Scenes Japanese places we went to a restaurant that only specialized in Mooney so yeah. And so had Guney from all over the different islands, Japan just incredibly interesting and weird and delicious. And then, at night, we of course went to and did karaoke. And so we went to a karaoke place that I could not get back to in a million years. It was like down a few alleyways up into what looks like a nondescript sort of office building down the hallway to unmark your
Rick Denton: 22:14
doctor, are you planning to leave my body somewhere back in the back of this? Yeah. Wow.
Troy Figgins: 22:19
Yes, very fun.
Rick Denton: 22:20
What a spectacular experience. Yeah, so I don't know how you're gonna top that. But what is a dream travel location? You've not been to yet?
Troy Figgins: 22:27
Yeah, so my shortlist I kind of want to go to Corsica. So yes, the South of France, part of France. Islands. But it's got to be a speaking of mashups of cultures and fusion of Corsica, sort of this blending of French and Italian but it's got its they've got their own sort of culture as well. They were sort of, you know, they've been conquered by a whole bunch of different countries over the years, but they maintain sort of this weird, independent, rebellious nature, even though they're part of France. And so I think that sort of, you know, weaves through again, the food and the attitudes and everything. from a, from a topographical standpoint. It's got like amazing, huge mountains and incredible beaches, though. It's not super populated. So the roads are all these little two lane roads, sort of, you know, circumvent the islands, I think it'd be really fun to go there.
Rick Denton: 23:26
That would be fun. I always love it. When it gets there was something new. I've not had anyone say Corsica before. So that's fun. Oh, good. Now it's got, you've got me googling after this to have more information about it. That's right. Like, we've talked about food a lot. And so I'm going to tell you that King's Hawaiian is not allowed to be an answer to this question. But what is a favorite thing to eat?
Troy Figgins: 23:48
Other than kings hawaiian?
Rick Denton: 23:49
That's right. I know that would be the answer. I understand. So what is your second favorite thing to eat?
Troy Figgins: 23:54
It's so hard to pick one thing. I mean, we're coming off the Fourth of July weekend. I'm not sure when this is airing, but we are. We're, you know, this this week is just post for dress. So I gotta go with the burger. I mean, it's like Quinta sent to the American, right? It's, for me, I think it's like this perfect combination of opposites, right, you've got sort of the warm side and the cold side, you've got that you know, saltiness of sort of the need and maybe bitterness of sort of onions and the sweet and maybe some ketchup biscuit it just has a sort of grace or combination stuff. I mean, gosh, it's like can be very, super simple all the way to incredibly complicated gourmet. So it's got a lot of range. And I don't know it just never gets old. It's just an amazing sort of combination of
Rick Denton: 24:45
I can tell I'm interviewing you because it's for listeners. I'm in the central USA timezone. Troy's out west, and so I've caught him before lunch. So the way he describes that just is so beautiful. And so but I'm wondering how much of that is hunger Inspired? It certainly makes me want to go get a burger right now. How dare you? Well, let's, let's let's try to counteract that. What is the thing your parents forced you to eat what you hated as a kid?
Troy Figgins: 25:09
Oh gosh. My parents were great. I mean, they really, for me and my sister, they, they had us try a lot of different things. But we were we were pretty adventurous eaters, you know, right off the bat, so we weren't picky at all. We got to try a lot of things. That's the one thing that I don't I don't hate but I just have I don't know maybe bad memories of you know, when when we would go out to eat as a family. If the place this is going to date myself a little bit, but if the place we went to at a salad bar, you know how on salad bars, they always have those pickled jalapenos. Dad would always challenge me to a conical jalapeno eating contest. And so man, I even smell those things. Now. It just makes me sweat. I just
Rick Denton: 26:02
Oh, that's awesome. You're talking to a Texan here. So I kind of like my jalapenos didn't like my spices but but I love Oh my gosh, I love the story. I love the visual of of young Troy being challenged by dad Troy.
Troy Figgins: 26:15
It was it was like that scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark we're just sitting across from you. Oh, right, right or going toe to toe and meeting him. Gosh.
Rick Denton: 26:25
Well, let's close out the first class lounge. What is one travel item not including your phone that you will not leave home without?
Troy Figgins: 26:34
Well, I mean, I traveled pretty late, I like to like to just bring minimal amount of stuff. In fact, I just brought a travel backpack, which is very small. I did this so that I can fly on some of the discount airlines that don't allow you to have it carry on. So it's gonna just be my backpack. And so the one thing that I that I always packed nonstop, is a jacket that I have from Patagonia that I love Patagonia is a brand and this jacket is just from a functionality standpoint is amazing. I mean, it's good in cold weather, it's good and warm weather. So no matter where I'm going, it feels like I'm always going to need that at some point. And then it just rolls up to this tiny fraction. That's, you know, it's unrolled size that for someone like me who was trying to pack everything into a backpack, it's it's pretty great.
Rick Denton: 27:33
Mine's not Patagonia. But I've got a jacket similar to that from REI that It amazes me how it can be compacted from this wonderful warm, I went skiing in this jacket to something the size of a, you know, less than a burrito from Chipotle type thing. So it is amazing how these things can condense down. Let's get back into talking about consumer insights. So I know part of where you're getting insights now is listening to the customer, your digital community, you've even alluded to some insights that you've gathered from them. But I'm curious about that journey. Right? When the brand started the quote, digital community was the people that walked into the store with the crashing waves on the beach. But from that to where you are today, I'm curious, how did you build that community? How did you How do you listen to that community? And then how do you translate what you hear into business actions?
Troy Figgins: 28:20
Yeah, the art or digital online research community is one of the things we're most proud of building last couple of years, we did mention that people are very passionate about things once we didn't, it was actually pretty easy to sort of recruit people who were interested in helping out the brand. We find that when we talk to our community, they feel they feel very passionate, but they feel sort of a connection to the brand. They want to help shape where the brand is going and help the brand make a decision. So we get a lot of engagement, a lot of participation from our community. The way we built it, we actually we partnered with a technology vendor to build the platform itself. And then we we have a pretty sizable email list. So that was sort of our first you know, our first pool of people that we went to, to try and build up the community but but like I said, it was it was fairly, fairly easy. We got to I'd say we started with maybe 1500 people who wanted to be part of it. And it was not easy to join to you had to go through a pretty rigorous sort of onboarding process of, we wanted to know all about you and you know how to use the products and stuff like that. So it wasn't something you could just just sort of sign up for you had to go jump over some hurdles to be part of it. We had about 1500 to start. We've been doing recruiting events since then. So it's now about 4000 people. It tends to be a little biased, right? I mean, these are brand enthusiast and you don't get a lot of, you know, just like buyers, they tend to be sort of, you know, brand low versus, if you will. But like I said, they're very engaged there, they really want to do right by the brand. And so we feel very competent in the research that we get out of this group. Because if we're not making this group happy, then probably probably off the mark.
Rick Denton: 30:16
And so how do you then translate that? I know, I hit you with three questions in the beginning, but it's so important to take what you heard, and then go into action. So how do you what are you doing with that, that volume of insights that are coming in? How do you then convert that to an actual business action or set of actions?
Troy Figgins: 30:34
Sure, yeah, that's, uh, you know, my boss is always saying, like, make sure that this is actionable and can't just be sort of facts for facts sake. So I think a perfect example is for our TV ad testing. And when we do spend a lot of media dollars on TV, we need our TV to work as hard as it can for us. We actually had our community over the course of about a year, review all of our existing TV ads, everything we've ever made, we just took the entire library, we built a sort of a questionnaire module, and had them review all these ads. And then we crunched all that data, to look at correlations of things, elements in the ads that drive things like sales and drive things like brand equity. Amazingly, there were a few things that bubbled up to the top and the biggest one was around relevance, like, are we is this ad relevant to people in their lives? And we were like, Okay, that's interesting. Let's dig deeper. So we went back to the community had a lot of discussions about relevance, and what drives relevance in TV ads to get to the sort of actionable once we knew the elements that drive relevance, and it's all the stuff that you it's not super surprising, but it's the stuff you would expect, it's like, you know, showcases a true sort of need that I have in my life, the food that you're showing, is a solution to that. It's in a an occasion, I can relate to something that I do all the time. So we've taken that and package that up. And now when we briefed our ad agencies on making new ads, we're like, look, obviously, we want the ad to be entertaining and funny, and all these other things, but it has to deliver on these elements, or it's not going to it's not going to work. And so that's been just really super helpful in getting the best kind of TV graded, we can out of our, our agencies.
Rick Denton: 32:27
That's awesome. Oh, and I liked that. I liked that direct tie. And I also liked the circle back, excuse me, there's a circle back that comes from that to have, we heard something. Now we want to check it again, with the community that go back. And now you can use it ongoing. That drive to action is something that I talked a lot about voice of the customer. And so here you aren't consumer insights. But that drive to action is something that's missing in a lot of companies, not in what you're describing. But so often okay, we listened. Great. So what that does nothing for your business. So it's good to hear how that is directly tying to these business actions. Alright, we are way over time. But I don't care. I'm gonna go a little bit longer. But this is the last question Troy that I'm going to ask you here. And we've been pouring a ton of praise into the brand. But there's a danger of being at the top right, you talked about people are either really love us or just love us. Right? So there's a risk of, dare I say it becoming stale? Yes, I'm a dad, I can make bad dad jokes. And you made a joke about roles earlier. So I feel I'm in good company here. But in all seriousness, how do you understand your customers to be able to continue to delight them and keep that brand promise so strong in their minds?
Troy Figgins: 33:36
Yes, so we talked a lot about togetherness, right? And that the brand, the brand sort of mission is to foster more of these togetherness occasions out there. And one thing that we've realized is there are a lot of togetherness, occasionally, there are many, many, they it seems that they're kind of shrinking a little bit. So it's sort of going in the wrong direction. And we have an opportunity to sort of help push that in in the right direction, what we've realized is, there's so much work to be done, we have not even begun to scratch the surface in the ways that the brand can help, you know, foster more of these togetherness moments. So there's, it doesn't feel like we're at the end of this journey. It feels like we're at the beginning of this journey. And there's so many things we can go do. And every time we've talked to our consumers, whether it's through our online panel or otherwise, consumers are very they like we said they're very passionate about the brand. They're excited to see the brand stretch into new things, whether that's more occasions. It could be additional products. We are you know we have a small portfolio of bread products, but it is small, I mean the amount of areas that are the number of areas we could go into are almost sort of unlimited. Consumers have given us a lot of permission to go into other types of food, other types of occasion. So, like I said, it doesn't, it definitely doesn't feel like we're at the end, it feels like we are truly at the beginning of this important mission for the brand,
Rick Denton: 35:20
man, what an energized place to be. That's awesome. That's awesome. Troy, Troy. We are, as I said, way over time. That's great, though. That's the beauty of podcasts and go as much time as we want, right. But how if folks wanted to know a little bit more about you a little bit more about kings? Why and what's the best way to get in touch with you?
Troy Figgins: 35:35
Yeah, for kings hawaiian. You know, our website's probably the best place to learn a little bit more about the brand or follow us on social media for me. Same thing at Troy Fagan's on Twitter's probably the easiest way to get a hold of me. Yeah, if ya have any questions about bread, Aloha, togetherness, anything online research communities
Rick Denton: 35:55
Or the craziest karaoke bar in all of Tokyo that we can never ever find in Troy. It's been a wonderful conversation. Thank you so much. I'll get all of that in the show notes, folks, you just scroll down and see it don't even have to hit stop. I've enjoyed talking with you. You've made me hungry, even post lunch. Great to hear. And it was so fun to talk to a brand and just a person who's focused on happiness and togetherness what a great place to be. And so Troy, thank you for today's conversation. I enjoyed the heck out of it.
Troy Figgins: 36:22
Thanks. Appreciate it.
Rick Denton: 36:28
Thanks for joining us this week on CX Passport. Make sure to visit our website cxpassport.com where you can hit subscribe so you'll never miss a show. While you're at it, you can check out the rest of the EX4CX website. If you're looking to get real about customer experience, EX4CX is available to help you increase revenue by starting to listen to your customers and create great experiences for every customer every time. Thanks for listening to CX Passport and be sure to tune in for our next episode. Until next time, I'm Rick Denton, and I believe the best meals are served outside and require a passport.
Host - Rick Denton
Rick believes the best meals are served outside and require a passport.
A sought after keynote speaker and CX leader, Rick transforms CX and VOC programs from Survey & Score to Listen and Act.
After a successful corporate career, Rick launched EX4CX - Execution for Customer Experience to bring CX victories to a wide client base.
Rick combines these loves by hosting the CX Passport podcast, a weekly talk with guests about customer experience and travel.