Lessons learned from Victoria’s Secret

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podcast, where every week, your hosts, Mark LaCour and Matt Bertram share proven strategies and real-world tactics to help you connect with customers and close more deals. Let's do this. Welcome back, everybody. Matt, we're in person today. Why? Are you knocking on me because of my, uh, my Wi-Fi connection was a little slow. I actually looked at it. I had over a hundred and something windows open on my desktop. You should learn your lesson. And we have a guest today. We actually have Bella Khalid Kahl.

Kalata Khalil. Yes, from Midnight Marketing. Yes, sir. Down here, Houston doing some business development work. You and I connected on LinkedIn, farmed a relationship, see people at LinkedIn Works. And when I found out you were flying down here, I invite you to come on the show. So thank you for joining us on the show today. Thank you guys for having me. And why didn't you bring the alien? I'm so sorry. I didn't know that he was invited as well. Bless us. He should be on the podcast too. Honestly, he's a little shy. Doesn't like to say very much, but I'll definitely bring

him next time. Sounds good. I understand. So Bella literally flew down here from Canada with an alien sitting next to her. And I saw the picture, I think it was on LinkedIn. I saw the picture, but people had to like be staring, right, Bella? Oh, they were staring. They were hooting and hollering. I had people stopped on the actual flight attendants. They were pushing their little buggies with coffee and tea. Do you want it? What is that? And they would look down at my feet and they would just see this alien dummy sitting with me. What in God's name is that? I said,

be it's me, it's for work. You know what would be even better if you like intentionally had this whole social media campaign, you got him a seat. You know what I mean? Like the seat, like he needs his tea, like you start to read. Oh, he needs his tea. Yeah. I mean, bless him. Next step is getting him a passport first. Because you said he's got an Instagram, right? So Shmi does have an Instagram. His name is Shmi's, S-C-H-M-E-E-Z. He has an Instagram and he has a LinkedIn. He is currently an intern at Midnight Marketing, so it's very, very exciting. Nice. I might have to ask Tim what

quality of talent he's hiring. He has an alien dummy on payroll. Listen, we're very diverse, okay? We don't judge. We're very inclusive at work and that does expand over to the alien side. That is a great lead-in. Perfect segue, Bella. So what we're going to talk about is basically diversity, equity, inclusion. And if you pay any attention to oil and gas industry, you know that's become a huge hot topic right after the pandemics, right? 21, 2022. And now I'm starting to see it fade away. It was actually to the point that investor money was tied to DEI metrics and those

investors that tied their money or their capital to DEI metrics actually lost out to those that didn't. The industry as a whole is starting to back away a little bit and we're going to have a really interesting conversation. Now, Bella does business developments for Midnight Marketing. So if you're an oil and gas company out there and you need help marketing your products or service, you need to reach out to them. But before Midnight Marketing, you worked at Victoria's Secret and we were having this conversation about the rise and fall

of Victoria's Secret. And Matt, you had some great observations. Bella, why don't you tee it off on the kind of background and we'll get back into this conversation. Yeah. Absolutely. So I used to be a brand operation supervisor. I got a huge overview on all departments. That was lingerie. That was the pink department. That was beauty. So I really got to see everything from a higher aspect. And I started right around the turn of the exposure on their branding and diversity, trying to really rebrand. And I think I left

right before the whole mayhem started around they're trying to be more inclusive in their sizings and the colors and everything. And I think we had spoken about this earlier. They just dropped off a little bit. I think subsequently they ended up losing a billion dollars in sales, which was absolutely nuts. Yeah. They got away from their core business. So remember, you know, Victoria's Secret has always been the sexy lingerie for certain body types. And in the process, before they went down the diversity route, they introduced a new product

line called pink, which I thought was genius for the TH women. And they knocked it out of the park with that. Then they started changing their clothing for different sized bodies, not the typical Victoria's Secret buyer. And then I thought when that was happening, that was a really good move because there's a lot of like social depression that's happening with what's going on with Instagram and this is not real or this is not normal. There's supermodels, right? I mean, there's supermodels. This is not common. But it started to move away from the core market. It was a different kind of

targeting a different kind of messaging. And we saw that with by light, you got to understand who you're marketing to and maybe you're selling fantasy, maybe you're selling idealism. I don't know. Tell us a little bit about the target persona for something like this. With Victoria's Secret, you're aiming towards people in the now. So people that are going to be using that lingerie and those leggings and so on and so forth, they were also targeting the younger generation, the generation that will eventually start wearing their products, hence

pink, to segue them into their brand. Having people from that generation, they're trying to get into their mind, okay, you need to be this thin, you need to be this tall. Let me showcase this with a Victoria's Secret fashion show. That in itself, it blew up and people would look forward to it. But then something like cancel culture comes around and they're like, okay, but that's not what I want my child to think they need to look like. That's not what I want to look like. There are so many people that, and this is a tricky discussion, but there's so many people that have

developed eating disorders because of this, to see it affect people in that way just because of a picture or because of a model that has potentially been retouched in Photoshop. So much makeup. So much makeup. Perhaps I haven't even eaten very much in the day. The other thing is they're professional models. So they're paid to work out, watch what they eat. They don't have the responsibilities that normal nine to five people have. Now, let me throw something that we haven't even talked about yet until this.

So you're absolutely right in the fact that it caused eating disorders, depression, trying to live up this ideal, which is very, very hard to do. Is it like Barbie? Would you say Barbie kind of falls into that? In a sense, yes. I mean, before we received all the new marketing and all the new branding for the new rebrand, you know, with the bigger sizes and the more colors that we would receive, before that, yeah, it was very much Barbie. Again, teeny tiny model like, and not everyone has that

body size. However, let me tell you a stat that I ran across just about two weeks ago in that young women in the U.S. right now actually have a better sense of what a normal body looks like because of all things sexting. So all their friends are sharing nudes. And please, if you have kids, tell them never to do this. This podcast is rated R already. But because they're actually seeing what their friends look like, now they have a better feeling for what a real woman's body should look like versus the fantasy or the elite,

I should say, the Victoria's Secret. But this is the sales and marketing podcast. So I kind of want to talk about the mistake Victoria's Secret made that I saw, which is the fact that they got away from their core audience. Well, what I think, and I would love to hear what you think, Bella, is I agree with you 100%. They wanted to expand it. Now, what I'm seeing actually in the candy lines, okay, you're in the grocery store, the gas station, all those different kinds of candies, they started changing up the

combinations and the number one sugar can't my sister works, use work for Nestle. So essentially, it's like a nerd's rope, I think that's what it's called. Okay, that is the number one selling sugar line today. They were about to retire the nerd's brand. So they mixed and matched stuff to change it up. So I think that you could have marked the core message. And this has been working for us for a long time. And this is our core. They could have done another pink line. They didn't need to change everything like when you run an ads campaign, you don't

switch it this one off and this one on that is a recipe for disaster because you don't know why it's working, what it's doing, you scale them over time, you kind of turn one up, turn one down on the volume level. Well, if you're going to go this out there, they need to do a lot more testing, they shouldn't have jumped into it, they could have come up with a pink, whatever line, and still had everything else and started that conversation and kept their core focus, in my opinion. No, I agree with you. And if they would have just started another line, it would have been

an experiment that would have not brought the entire brand. Yes, crash, saying they had with Bud Light, they got away from their core buyers. So I have to ask you, in oil and gas, who are the core buyers? Oil rig guys, right? Or you got executives, you got procurement people, and then you got the people that are in the field, right? Yeah. Well, what I'm thinking is in our industry, the core buyers are people that are getting work done, they need help. Yeah, I have a problem. Yeah. And they don't know what those help options are. On the other side of the fence, if you're a vendor

trying to sell to oil and gas, if you can be one of those help options. So I'll give you an example. I was talking to our DEI host, and I was talking about diversity and quality inclusion, she has a certain agenda that she's going after. I said, have you ever thought about web accessibility? Okay, web accessibility, there's 13% across the United States that have some kind of visual or audio impairment. I said, this needs to be inclusive, the web needs to be inclusive, people need to be able to go online, people need to buy. And I said, a lot of these websites were

built a long time ago more ago. I said, that's pretty bad. And your digital storefront, especially since COVID is increasingly important. And I said, to get that conversation to qualify, I was saying, let's talk about that. Do you feel like this is something in DEI? I said, this is something that solves the need. Because DEI, if it just created out of nowhere, you need to do these things, that's why it has no legs in my opinion, because it's not tacked to something. And maybe it is, I think it's tacked to financing, executive compensation,

it's going to get driven then. But how is it moving everything forward? And is it moving everything forward in the right way? And I think that there's a place for it, but it's positioning. Yeah, if you look at the whole diversity, equity inclusion movement, and its core, the way they implemented it in the oil and gas industry I think was flawed, you don't want to give somebody a position because they meet a DEI checkbox, you want the best person for that position. And if that best person doesn't help you have your diverse workforce, then maybe you

need to look at the root cause, like where are you recruiting from maybe? All right, that's sort of, so I think the oil and gas industry looked at DEI, I think it was pushed on them really hard, especially by the investment community. And I think I'm seeing where companies are backing away from it, because it doesn't help their core business. I mean, going back to Victoria's Secret, because I know that that's what everybody that's listening wants to hear about, we started this conversation pre podcast,

I mean, I saw a headline, Victoria's Secret bringing sexy back, like that was the headline. And that certainly got me interested. And I knew that they had kind of gone a different direction. I said, because I love marketing, I love what's going to love that you created a character I actually have in my office at home, cellis from animations, okay, and the serial from the 1930s, from Hannah Barbera, the transition with fruity pebbles and all that into mascots. I think mascots, you can go so many different directions with it.

To the personal, you're making it personal towards your own brand, but to go off of what you were just saying about Victoria's Secret, if you're going to correlate somehow, Victoria's Secret and the oil and gas industry is people at the end of the day. I'm a very firm believer in the fact that people want people. And I think that's something that everyone can learn from is that they want to see who you are. They want to see that, oh, okay, the people behind the scenes aren't robots. They're not just these people trying to sell me something. It's actual people

who either, A, wear the clothes, they wear the products or B, they're behind the scenes doing my marketing or they're on the rigs or they're doing the impossible for me to be able to acquire oil and gas or in this case, they're doing the impossible to make lingerie seem attainable to me. Someone who has body issues, I can also look this good in these products. So at the end of the day, people want people. Yeah. And as you go through your sales career, you're going to learn that in this industry, the real big dollar, huge sales always start with an introduction of a person

to another person in this industry, even though it's enormous and global is still an industry of people doing business, people, because they need to know they can trust you. Keep them out of the ditch. That's what people are buying first and foremost and especially people in oil and gas. If I spend this budget, is it going to make me look bad? Is it going to accomplish that goal? And is this person going to do what it takes to keep me out of this ditch? Because that's what I think people are buying more than anything else. You're the expert and you're going to keep me

out of this ditch because guess what? I don't trust that in the middle of the night when the website goes down or you could tie it to anything in sales for this. Like I can call you and I know you're going to care enough to fix it. 100% you nailed it. In this industry, we need to know that if something bad happens, I can pick up the phone and call Bella, not her company, Bella. And Bella will get up and help me with whatever my problem is and that's you start forming those high trust relationships. High trust, I like that high trust relationship.

Sales naturally follows. The tie into Victoria's secret is also good because I see a lot of, especially post pandemic last couple of years, I see a lot of oil and gas companies marketing groups to me looks like they're missing their core customers. Segmentation issues and that's kind of where I was going with some of this is the target persona of what you're going after can be absolutely different and the same under a flagship brand to your point mark. And I think what I'm seeing personally, a lot of people have

done traditional marketing and they're actually doing it off of bad data. I've started with a lot of companies doing some analytics, running some different listening analytics software to understand who is actually responding to this ad. And I think a lot of people when you're talking about go to market strategy, right, Mark? I mean, and modal point and you're trying to understand, okay, we're going to launch this new product. Who are we marketing to? How are existing customers going to respond to it? How are new customers going to respond to it? What should

the messaging be like? You need to get that data and you can do it in focus groups. But guess what? You can do it on Twitter too. And you can do it real fast, real cheap, and you can get really high quality data at scale. We need to quit mentioning modal points. I sold it. This is for the new odors. Give them a free plug. And that doesn't know modal points. My original market research company focused on oil and gas. Come on. Okay, I've seen some of your videos from like eight years ago, your oil and gas market

research. I saw your old videos from work out. I didn't think that was so cringy, but it's good content. So I can't get down. So from a sales and marketing point of view, if we have a chief marketing officer listening to us, a chief revenue officer listening to us, the lesson that they probably should walk away from this is understand who your core buyers are, understand what they want and do everything you can not to alienate them. It's okay to experiment with stuff. Oh my gosh. So many campaigns. Oh my God. That was really good.

My wheels are already gone right now. That was done intentionally. I thought of it before we turned the microphone. Well, I just had to figure out where to work it in the conversation. But when you're looking at your budget and you're looking at what events you're going to, where you can spend money on paper, click, where you can spend money on print, where you can spend money on content marketing, you need to make sure you understand who your core buyers are and you need to focus on your core buyers and you want to nurture them. Actually,

you want to make them feel special, not fake it. You actually really do. And if you don't, you're going to have the same consequences that's happened to Bud Light's, Victoria's Secret where they lose huge amount of market share and then it just opens the door for competitor to come in and pick up all those people. So it's all about really understand who your buyers are and understand why they buy from you. Yeah. I think that that's a great spot to end this unless we want to keep going. We could do two podcasts right now. I think you can keep this conversation going. No,

because you and I have to leave here to go do another podcast. Oh, okay. That's right. But I do want to stop there. So we had a great conversation showing things about brand loyalty and your core customers, your buyers. But Bella, what does Midnight Marketing do? Here's your chance to shine. All right. You know your entire company is going to be listening to this. You better get it right. Okay. So I am sweating just a little bit. Hi, everybody. So Midnight Marketing is a digital marketing agency where we focus on branding websites and of course marketing.

And we have a very big knowledge base in oil and gas energy. And we are a huge team out in Montreal with a headquarters in Houston. We've been in the space for maybe three years now and we can literally only go up from here. I've been here for only a few months and I have learned so much about oil and gas from someone who has never been in oil and gas before. So if anyone is interested in learning about oil and gas, start working for a marketing company that does it because that's the best way to learn about frack plugs and well bores and just upstream,

downstream, midstream. Thank you for that, Mark, by the way. I remember our conversation. There we go. The other thing that your company does, which is unique is you almost do zero contracts. Y'all are so confident in the quality of your work that you just do the work and you get paid for it. Absolutely. And you're not trying to lock somebody up into the long-term contract. Exactly. I mean, we're very transparent on our website. Our website has all of our packages with the pricing and everything that we do in it because we want to establish that transparency

and that trust from the get-go so that you know, okay, if they're telling me the price now, I can only imagine what they're going to be telling me further on down the line during our meetings, during our monthly workshops as well. And when it comes to the contracts, they're unlimited and there is no contract for the sole reason that that allows us to work for our customer's trust each and every single month. If people have stayed on for a year, it's because each and every single month, they've said, you know what? I really like the work you guys have done. Y'all know who I am.

I want to stick on. Love it. So what I would say to kind of in this, to your point, Mark, is if you're a company out there and you're trying to position your brand, this is really what it's about. Who are your target market? Are you have it segmented in your ads? But you need to understand your positioning strategy. You need to really understand who you are and what makes you different and how you're going to use that to go to market. And I think a lot of companies in oil and gas that are trying to reach the operators or what have you, haven't thought about online as much as

they need to be, especially since COVID, especially how stuffs change. And you need to make sure that your brand reflects what you're doing in real life. And I would end on that. You just got to really understand your digital storefront, your digital presence, and your positioning in the market to understand how to go to market. Marketing is an investment at the end of the day. It's a long-term investment. Whether that's outsourcing a whole marketing agency, you're getting everybody with their knowledge. You're getting a free creative cloud at this point, if you think about it.

And if you are a solo marketer for a company, there's no shame in reaching out to a company to help you guys out with just a little bit extra. Yeah. Integrated marketing. And we'll have a link to both Bella's LinkedIn profile and to Midnight Marketing and the links. So if you need some help, reach out to her. She's just a joy to talk with and will not steer you wrong. All right. Now we got to pay the bills. Two newsletters sign up for both. We have our Sunday update, which our marketing team has grown from zero subscribers to 26,000 subscribers in seven

weeks. Is that crazy? Is that crazy? Also, All In Gas Events newsletter. I think Bella, you signed up for that. Yes, sir. It's all the All In Gas Events. Put it in your inbox once a month for free. Matt and I's LinkedIn and other social channels are in the show notes as well. If you want to follow us anywhere there, Matt and I are fiercely working on our insider's group. So stay tuned for that. We'll have that website up December. We'll have it up by the end of December. The one thing that we didn't discuss before we turn on the microphone is always at the end of the show,

we do a LinkedIn fail or tip of the week. Yes. Bella, do you have a LinkedIn tip that you want to share with the audience? Oh gosh. Oh my goodness. Sorry. I'm going to have to scan the brain or fail. Or a fail. I think it might just be a tip. It's something that I posted recently. If you guys are interested in getting more impressions and more engagement, don't put links outside of LinkedIn in your captions. LinkedIn is very, very jealous and they will literally look at your posts and say, you're trying to direct me to Instagram. No thanks. You get less impressions. I like to think of those

like the no soup for you kind of. No soup for you. No soup for you, but LinkedIn version. So don't put external links in your captions. Put it in the description. Great tip. All right, Bella, thank you so much for joining us today. This has been great. Thank you guys for having me. Matt, you and I need to get out of here. So let's close this thing out. Remember, make a difference, not a sale. Check us out next week for another enriching and cheeky episode of oil and gas sales and marketing podcast, a production of the oil and gas global network.

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