May 3, 2024 • 27 mins
We poke the potential bursting bubble of Logan Paul’s Prime drink brand to see if it pops and share a couple other products that consumers guzzled down in mass quantities then tossed aside.
Get show notes for this episode and check out past episodes of the Speaking Human podcast by visiting speakinghuman.com.
#Podcast #SpeakingHuman #VO #Branding #Marketing #Advertising #Business #Prime #Brands #Ads #simplify #popculture #LoganPaul #Snapple #PrimeEnergy #PrimeHydration
Get show notes for this episode and check out past episodes of the Speaking Human podcast by visiting speakinghuman.com.
#Podcast #SpeakingHuman #VO #Branding #Marketing #Advertising #Business #Prime #Brands #Ads #simplify #popculture #LoganPaul #Snapple #PrimeEnergy #PrimeHydration
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Episode Transcript
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(00:00):
Speeding Human. Today on Speaking Human, we poke the potential bursting bubble of
Logan Paul's Prime drink brand to seeif it pops, and share a couple
of other products that consumers guzzled downin mass quantities then tossed aside. Speaking
(00:25):
Human. Welcome to Speaking Human,where we simplify the world of marketing for
humans. I'm Shad Calmly and withme is my co host Patrick Jebber.
Patrick on today's What the hell arethe kids saying today? Corner? I
(00:48):
have a term for you. Areyou familiar with the word giat? I
am, yes, you know thisone. You say this one a lot.
You use it every day. Inever say it, never use it,
but I am familiar with it.Yeah. This is another one that's
floating around these days. Gen Zgen Alpha. Throwing this around the TikTok,
(01:11):
I think has largely brought this toour children. So I'll give you
you know the definition as it's sharedon the internet, you know, and
then I'll tell you how I commonlyknow it or hear it. So gillat
slang term that expresses excitement, surprise, or admiration, and is often used
(01:34):
as an exclamation to describe a largebutt. It can also be used as
a noun to mean a large butt. The term is based on God Damn,
and it is said to have evolvedinto guiat. Giacht became popular among
Gen Alpha classmates after being learned onTikTok. Now, my familiarity with this
(01:56):
term is my kids are saying itall the time now, and they basically
just say it to mean, butnot necessarily a large butt. They don't
use it in that way to expressexcitement or be like giacht. They just
basically say it to me butt ofany kind. But you know, I
know these different versions are out there. I know that there are definitions out
there that say that it also isused to express that admiration for the butt,
(02:21):
right or whatever the curves if youwant to call it that admiration for
the butt. Also, yeah,maybe your biography right, it would be
just giacht giacht the Patrick Chrebber's story. Yeah, he's using words he shouldn't,
just like he's telling the story heshouldn't. I did have a couple
(02:42):
examples of gillat both usages. Sowe've got she really ate that cake in
one bite, giacht. That wouldbe the excitement you know, surprise.
Yeah, and then we've got thebutt the other version sticking out your giacht
for the rhys. Hmmm, that'ssome real, uh real slang for you
(03:04):
there, But yeah, it's it'sit's kind of the same. And anytime
you ask someone if adults should beusing these words, usually they'll say,
no, don't use it. Justthe fact that we are bringing attention to
the words on the show will getus a lot of mass criticism. We're
accepting that because we're being you know, educational in nature, but you know,
(03:25):
as adults, really not great forus to use them. Exposing you
to the words as a marketer isgood because if you hear them as a
marketer, you know, or asa person in business, whether you're a
parent or not, you know,you'll know what those words mean. Here's
the other thing, you know,we're sharing this information so you're in the
(03:47):
know. By the time we allknow this information, it's essentially probably killing
these terms because yeah, once enoughof the people that the younger generations don't
want to know this, it's essentiallydead in the water. Right. Yeah,
as soon as adults pick up theterm, use it, or at
least even acknowledge that they know,they're like, yeah, I'm sorry,
(04:10):
we don't use that word anymore.Why because you're using it? Because you
just set it out loud to me, it's done. Giacht. It's not
like one that you would ever usein business. Probably some might say the
drink brand Prime has recently experienced someserious pain in the giacht from their decreasing
sales. Would you say that?They might say giacht? Damn? What
(04:32):
happened to Prime sales? So thebig topic for today, obviously our new
segment about words the kids are usingor whatever we call that isn't really the
main focus of today's episode. Themain focus is Prime. If you're not
familiar Prime Hydration, you and Iwere talking about this. We thought it
(04:55):
was a pretty interesting topic to coverbecause Prime is one of those like a
lot of the like we were talkingabout with social media and words. Right.
Prime had this just crazy, crazylift a surge if you will,
Yeah, something so drastic that it'swhat every product or every brand dreams of.
(05:15):
Do you remember the FedEx commercial orwas it ups commercial where they're like
use ups and then they show thepeople and they're like, all right,
we're going to launch this product andthey hit the button and it's like one
sale, two sale, and thenthey're like, oh, then all of
a sudden, it's like one zillionsales and they're like oh god. You
know, because they realize what's goingto happen. They have to be able
(05:36):
to support that, right, thesales. So Prime surge, Prime push
that button. Yeah, they pushthat button, and you want to lead
in with what happened. So Primestarts out in twenty twenty two, Bloomberg
reports in the first year brought intwo hundred and fifty million in sales.
Pretty good. Twenty twenty three,it's their past one billion. So what
(06:00):
you're talking about, you know,pushing the button and just like surging,
I mean, that's unheard of you. It just doesn't usually happen like that.
According to I for Retail Twitter account, here's how they stated the recent
situation with Prime. Recent reports suggestthat Prime Hydration sales are down more than
fifty percent year over year in theUK photos everywhere showed on clearance in Tesco
(06:26):
and other major retailers. Sales inthe US are down two negative six point
five percent for Prime Hydration and fiftypercent for Prime Energy year over year.
The last four weeks ending March twentyfourth, leaving Prime Energy aside. Is
this the beginning of the end forPrime hydration or just a predictable bump in
the road cycling huge numbers from twentytwenty three and dealing with overstocks. So
(06:49):
that's kind of where Prime stands.As you mentioned, this brand which had
a huge, you know, surge, rising popularity, very much a brand
built off of social media, nowkind of coming to this turning point where
the chart was going all the wayup and now things are kind of pointing
down and maybe you know, goingway down. Sorry to say, what's
(07:10):
going to happen in the coming future. So that's kind of what we're talking
about today. But before we couldget into some of these bigger questions around
Prime, let's start with the branditself. Patrick, what's your awareness and
perception of Prime? Is this abrand that was on your radar before these
news stories? Yeah, to anextent, you know, for our listeners
out there. I was telling Shadoff Air that my son and a lot
(07:32):
of the athletes he knows, theylove Prime. And these are teens,
right, yeah, teens. He'seighteen, he's gonna be graduating, so
he's played high school sports, andthey were drinking it like water for most
of this past fall season, Iwould say, and even now to some
degree, they're still drinking it,to a point where we were stocking this
(07:55):
in our house because they were justlike, you know, a couple of
his buddies would come over and theymean, they would just drink it all
the time. I didn't even realizethis at the time. We were getting
the prime hydration, But there isa prime energy as well, and I
think we have gotten that from timeto time. But the prime energy and
the prime hydration. They've been inthe news lately a lot with the Prime
(08:15):
energy because kids don't differentiate they're drinkingthese. They don't differentiate between the hydration
and the energy, and the energyhas this caffeine, and the caffeine levels
are so high that it can reallybe problematic if you're having young people,
let alone adults, drinking lots ofthis. It's not gatorade, and gatorade
isn't great for you if you drinktons of it. But if you imagine,
(08:39):
you know, drinking a bunch ofMonster Energy drinks and you hear about
those people having heart attacks or somethinglike that, because it's a lot of
caffeine. That's where I come intoit is I know the high school athletes
who were drinking it like crazy.I'm kind of the same with you.
I know the Prime brand primarily becauseof my kids, though I think it
was about I don't know, sixmonths ago when my son, who's younger,
(09:00):
you know, he's like ten yearsold, was like, we need
to get Prime. Everybody at school'sgot Prime, and I'm like, what
is Prime? I don't know whatthat is. But it was one of
those things, you know, it'sgoing around the grade school. All the
kids were drinking it, and soit became like a hot, a big
thing. You know, I wantto do what everybody else is doing.
This is the thing. And wetried it and he thought it was disgusting.
(09:20):
But that's kind of where I comeinto it. The other reason is,
you know, since that time,all the publicity around the brand and
Logan Paul, who's the co founderof the brand, is kind of hard
to miss if you follow any sortof you know, news and social media.
For those that don't know who,Logan Paul is popular influencers. Started
out on YouTube. He was ahuge YouTuber with a ton of followers since
(09:43):
has become a professional wrestler. I'mthe WWE. Prime is also a co
partnership with a UK social influencer namedKsi, who I'm not really familiar with,
but they kind of made this brandtogether, but Logan Paul primarily one
of these social influencers that people loveto hate. Minor side note on Prime,
(10:05):
I will say the brand name hasmore than once confused me where I
did feel like it's a bad choice, like they were stepping on Amazon's toes.
I thought it was a weird move, especially from like an SEO perspective,
to choose that as a name.I guess it's worked out fine for
them, but from my I wasalways like, ah, Prime, that
(10:26):
was a weird thing to go forwhen there's already such a prominent Prime that
everybody knows. Yeah, I guessyou could look at it as potentially gonna
work out in your favor because there'sa lot of searches for that, and
if you can optimize, you couldshow up in those. Maybe if Jeff
Bezos lets you you know, becausethere's like three search results for Prime.
(10:46):
It's Amazon, this Prime, Drink, and then Optimists. So yeah,
it's really it's a really interesting thing, and the brand itself, obviously it
has its problems, but it's stillpopular, you know, it's it's weird,
it's hanging on. So I don'tknow if some of that is just
media coverage and them talking about itand then falsely it's starting to like lose
(11:09):
interest, or maybe it's doing theopposite. I don't really understand what's happening.
Well, you know, if weknow anything, people love to love
something and then they love to watchit like fall down and crash again.
I don't know if that's if weare in media reporting on that, if
we're like over selling that a littlebit. But let's explore that a little
bit. Do you think Prime isreally in trouble or is it more likely
(11:31):
they're just they're going to have tocome down? You know, you can
only go so high, right,Yeah, not unless everybody's drinking it.
You know, if you get sevenbillion people drinking it and they're drinking it
like water, you might be fine. But yeah, I mean, I
think if you go from two hundredand fifty to over a billion in one
year, maybe you're just leveling backout to where you should be, which
(11:54):
is a couple hundred million dollars ayear, which is nothing to sneeze at.
I think if they were that level, which they would clearly probably be
a little bit higher than that.Anyway, I think you're doing great.
I don't think that's an indication offailure necessarily. It's just whatever that surge
was isn't sustainable. Yeah, Ialmost think it's more of a curse than
(12:16):
it is a blessing in some ways, rather than like building up, building
the infrastructure you need, building theteam you need. It's kind of like
happens all at once. You gotto catch you up. In most cases,
you're like kind of planning, Okay, well, here's where we're at,
here's where we want to be.We're in phase one, here's how
we get to phase two than phasethree. In this case, you're moving
so quickly you probably don't have anyof that planned out. Nothing is probably
(12:39):
in place or prepared for any ofthis. As a result, you know
you're probably not going to be ableto sustain that, and then when it
comes back down here you are.Now you're trying to deal with the fact
that you have declining sales and acapitalist market that's always like you need to
be growing. You need to begrowing, why are you declining? So
then you're just dealing with this wholeother thing. I feel like you're almost
(13:01):
like accelerated the life of your brandin a negative way, even though you're
breaking in tons of dough in alot of ways. I would say the
Prime brand is a lot like whatprobably he dealt with as an influencer,
right, because you get this viralnature, everybody knows who you are,
you're you're shooting through the stratosphere,and then you sort of hit this like
plateau or whatever, and you startto come back down a little bit,
(13:24):
and maybe they're going to have toreinvent themselves a little bit because that life
cycle has gone so quick. Andthat's the thing too. When I look
at the you know, I lookat the Prime brand, I go onto
like drink Prime dot com. There'sno like core message. I see a
lot of it. It's about coolpeople are drinking Prime, you know,
influencers already ast athletes. And maybethat's enough to sustain if they keep kind
(13:46):
of like cycling that famous people keepdrinking it and talking about it. But
it seems to me hard if youdon't have a message. You know,
when I look at their about pageand I read, we created Prime to
showcase what happens when rivals come togetheras brothers and business partners to fill the
void where great tastes meets function.That says virtually nothing about the product,
you know what I mean. Andthen I go to Gatorade, and Gatorade
(14:07):
tells you Gatorade provides scientifically formulated productto meet the sports fueling needs of athletes
in all phases of athletic activity.There's a solid idea there that you can
build on, you know, andthey obviously have for decades, and essentially
Prime wants to be that. Andthey're doing the same thing I mean,
because that's what Gatorade did. Putthe product in the hands of athletes and
(14:30):
famous people and you know all that. But their statement sounds very young.
It just doesn't sound like a grownup product like Gatorades. Right, this
is what it is, and itis scientifically or whatever. You know.
Pull any of those keywords out ofthat statement and you go, hmm,
that sounds like an adult wrote that. As oppose the other one's like,
(14:54):
we're bros, and we're together andwe're gonna do this awesome thing, and
you're gonna love this. And bythe way, it tastes like a popsicle.
Okay, it's functional though that's myadult word. It's functional. I'm
not crapping on it. I'm justsaying it just sounds like a brand that's
very young versus a brand that's verymature in the Gatorade side, you know,
(15:18):
and it knows what it is,it knows what it's supposed to be,
whereas the Prime hasn't really had achance. It hasn't a chance to
grow up yet. I'd yeah,if you're talking, that's something that's two
years old. Yeah, so doyou think Prime, you know, if
we're looking at do you think it'llbe around in ten years? You think
it? You know, there's thisa boom and bus kind of thing going
on. Well, let's step intothe time machine. Just kidding. That's
(15:41):
a different it's a different show wedo. Short answer, Yeah, I
think it'll be around in ten years, but not I don't think it'll be
a major player if you look atyou know, we go back to Ie
for Retail, which I was talkingabout that Twitter account they wrote, you
know, the demand was built onawareness plus curiosity plus scarcity. Those second
(16:06):
and third elements curiosity and scarcity nolonger exists, but the awareness, like
you mentioned, still very strong andthat can keep a brand going for a
pretty long time. It could changehands, you know, Logan Paul could
egsit the pitcher. Who knows whatcould happen there. But I think the
name could stick around just based onthat awareness. For I think it could
(16:27):
make it ten years just based onbrand equity, based on this surging trend.
Unless they do some major innovating,it's hard to see it sticking around
as it a top seller like itis now ten years from now. What
do you think? Yeah, No, I think that's a pretty accurate trajectory.
I feel like this happens a lotin the drink space, or maybe
(16:48):
even like food market, where youknow you've got something that does really well
for a short period of time andthen they kind of just drag it along
and it just becomes one of thosestaples. It's like power aid or vitamin
water I was thinking of. Vitaminwater was super popular for a while and
that's still I think it's still fairlypopular and it's still around, but it's
not like it was. Yeah,I don't know. When I think Coca
(17:11):
Cola or one of those companies boughtit like ten years ago for a lot
of money. Yeah, and it'snot like it was at that time when
it was really trending. So thatbrings us to our last small segment,
which we thought would be a goodfollow up, a good closure to today's
(17:32):
episode. Boom and bust. Brandssurging in popularity and then crashing down is
not a new phenomenon, as itshed. It's not. We've seen this
happen repeatedly over the decades, alot of times with toys, Cabbage Patch
kids, beanie babies. You rememberthose guys. Patrick, You have a
couple probably in your lap right now. Oh yeah, garbage pail kids.
(17:55):
I love garbage pail kids. Butyeah, So we wanted to share a
couple examples of other product that kindof exploded in popularity, flew a little
too close to the sun and thencame, you know, falling back down.
Patrick, Do you want to shareyour product first? Yeah? So,
I mean I'm just going to sharethe product. We could talk a
little bit about it. The productI thought I would touch on because it
(18:18):
was kind of apropos to today becausewe were talking about prime Snapple Love Snapple.
Yeah, when we were younger,right, Snapple became the big drink.
I think of our time period ofprobably like maybe five to ten years,
it was pretty popular. Snapple wasintroduced in nineteen seventy two, though,
(18:40):
really Yeah, it didn't have therise to fame that Prime did,
clearly, But like we said earlier, the trajectory that brands had back then,
they had much longer tail. Youknow. It was just it was
like social media. It just wedidn't have that to create that. So
getting a distributor and all that stuffand getting people behind it, it took
(19:00):
a lot longer. And I waskind of surprised when I saw that it
was introduced in seventy two, becausethat's fifty two years ago. I'm surprised
by that too. And the surgein the nineties was a real thing.
I wasn't around in the eighties earlyeighties, you know, to be buying
drinks or anything like that. ButI can't imagine that it was commonly available
in store, you know, everystore everywhere. Yeah, the brand slogan
(19:23):
was made from the best stuff onearth. That was their slogan. That's
where you'd see in him in thecommercials and It was known for a popular
TV commercial advertisements in the early ninetieswhere they had a Snapple lady and she
would answer letters from Snapple fans today. You know, like if you were
(19:44):
to compare it, it's like thehealthy drink alternatives. That's what it was
trying to be. Then it wastrying to be the juice, the stuff
that's not coke, that's not pepsi, that's not you know, SODA's,
but it was juice. I thoughtthis one was a really good example because
it spiked. And then you knowwhere a Snapple today, it still exists,
(20:06):
like we were talking about Prime,It's it still exists, but it's
not nearly as pop. You don'tever hear anyone talking about Snapple that might
be the thing you find in thegas station, like you said, right,
yeah, it hasn't even really hadlike a you know, a lot
of this ninety stuff has kind ofhad a comeback. Snapple hasn't really had
that. I'll tell you a coupleof things I remember about Snapple was one,
(20:27):
I remember it being mentioned on Seinfelda couple times, which I think
added to its popularity, which Seinfeldwas huge in pop culture in the nineties
and we used to when I waslike in seventh or eighth grade, this
was a big trending thing to likeride your bike to a gas station and
get a Snapple. I had likea shelf in my room where I would
(20:48):
try different kinds of Snapple and keepdifferent Snapple bottles that I kept on there,
and probably had like twenty different kindsof Snapple that I tried. So
that was like a thing when wewere like that age. It was like
a huge item. It did justkind of like had a big moment I
would say, like around like ninetythree ninety four, and then you know,
just kind of tailed off and togive some perspective with sales numbers and
(21:14):
stuff of this of this company,in ninety one, it had one hundred
million in sales and sold for onehundred and forty million eight months after buying
the company. They took Snapple Beveragespublic in ninety four, and two years
after the original acquisition, they soldthe company to the Quaker Oats Company for
(21:37):
one point seven billion, which youknow, Prime just made one point two
billion in a year, so Imean that's probably nothing at this point.
But yeah, So the Snapple brandwas very big for that time period,
because I think the nineties, youknow, it's like how we do movies
with inflation. That was actually prettygood back then, right, yeah,
(21:59):
and who knows more about making fruitdrinks than the oatmeal people. Yeah,
well that's a good one though.It's a good choice. Yeah, it's
appropriate. I like thinking about Snapple, so thank you for that. So
I went with something a little morecurrent, you know, a decade ahead,
(22:21):
came on a little faster and burnedout a little quicker. So I
recently watched the movie BlackBerry, andit was probably the first time I thought
of a BlackBerry in a decade.A great movie, by the way,
the best of the movies and showsabout you know, what went wrong with
tech companies in the early aughts.So before the iPhone, the BlackBerry was
(22:42):
at the top of the smartphone pyramid. It had a full keyboard. That
was a big deal, right,physical physical keyboard figure. Yeah, nut,
it was an actual keyboard like youwould have on a computer, but
on your phone. That was abig deal at the time. If you
worked in business of any and theygave you a phone, it was probably
a BlackBerry. You know. Mywife had one of these. Obama had
(23:04):
one of these when he took theWhite House. It was very, very
popular, so popular, in fact, it earned the nickname Crackberry case owners
were so addicted to their Blackberries.At its peak, there were eighty five
million BlackBerry users worldwide. This isin September twenty eleven. Now, as
(23:26):
we know, the iPhone came outin two thousand and seven. By two
thousand and nine, it was overtakingthe BlackBerry for the lead in the space.
By twenty sixteen, BlackBerry, whichI mentioned had eighty five million users,
was down to twenty three million users. Meanwhile the iPhone was up to
seven hundred and ten million users.Oh, they're gonna say twenty three users.
(23:48):
It had twenty three users. Itprobably has twenty three users now.
So at the end of the BlackBerrymovie, they share this stat on the
screen. At its height, BlackBerrycontrolled forty five percent of the cell phone
market. Today that number is zeropercent, which is pretty insane. You
know, they were up, theywere there, They were there at the
(24:10):
beginning. Now they're not there atall. Twenty twenty two, BlackBerry finally
shut down its remaining services, sorip it's gone. Obviously. You know,
in this case, comparison to Primethe company had some they had some
internal issues. They didn't really innovate, or at least not as fast as
(24:30):
they needed to. They didn't takethe iPhone or Apple as seriously as they
needed to. But you know,it's an example of what we seen time
and time again with brands and companies. They kind of sitting at the top
of the mountain and they're not reallylooking down at what's what's coming for them.
They were they were really there,they were really up at the top
when this whole thing was about toblow up, and now they are nowhere
(24:52):
to be seen. That's probably thetoughest position to be in. That would
be like today Apple giving up allit's market share, not even like some
of it, but all of it, all of it, right, Yeah,
Like even if you mess up reallyreally bad, you would think you
would still have a sliver of peopleusing it. But you know, you
(25:12):
make enough mistakes and you make themsequentially or you know, compound them over
time, and suddenly you're where theyare. And I know they hobbled along
for a while. You know,they really tried to make it work.
They tried to evolve or adapt insome way, and that didn't work out.
(25:33):
It's a case study of what notto do. You saw the movie,
though I did not. Yeah.Yeah, there were a lot of
things going on that went wrong forthem, both in how the company was
run and some business deals they weredoing, and then what they were doing
to try to make their phones andchange their phones, and what they were
willing to change and not willing tochange. But they just weren't moving forward
(25:55):
fast enough. Once the iPhone wasthere, they really needed to step it
up, and they did not.I remember the days with BlackBerry users and
they were like, I'll never getrid of my BlackBerry. You'll pry it
from my cold dead hands. Right. That is a brand loyalty. It
is really hard to strip. Andthe fact that they let that go,
(26:15):
it's hard to imagine. Yeah,they blew it, you know, they
were there. Ears definitely crashed andburned mine. You know, Snapple still
exists, you know, which isgood. You more like surged and then
you know, just came back downprobably to where it is feasible for prime
at some point. I'm not goingto say they're there yet. They could
probably ride this wave a little bitlonger for sure. Yeah, but searches,
(26:40):
you know, are they really natural. Like I said in the beginning,
not necessarily a good thing always unlessyou're talking about waves. You know,
the ocean so beautiful. You seethat the wave, the swell comes
up cress and then it falls backdown. In nature, that's a natural
occurrence. Learn about language on thisshow. You learn about the ocean.
While you tuned in and you thoughtyou were getting Speaking Human, you actually
(27:03):
got nat geo and whatever. Thisother thing is that we were teaching you
words you know that the kids aresaying today. So we hope you enjoyed
anyway. So that's it for today'sepisode. You can find current and past
episodes of this podcast and other podcastson our website. Go to it it's
Speaking Human dot com. We'll beback in two weeks with another episode of
(27:26):
Speaking Human. Catch it in HumansSpeaking Human
Speeding Human. Today on Speaking Human, we poke the potential bursting bubble of
Logan Paul's Prime drink brand to seeif it pops, and share a couple
of other products that consumers guzzled downin mass quantities then tossed aside. Speaking
(00:25):
Human. Welcome to Speaking Human,where we simplify the world of marketing for
humans. I'm Shad Calmly and withme is my co host Patrick Jebber.
Patrick on today's What the hell arethe kids saying today? Corner? I
(00:48):
have a term for you. Areyou familiar with the word giat? I
am, yes, you know thisone. You say this one a lot.
You use it every day. Inever say it, never use it,
but I am familiar with it.Yeah. This is another one that's
floating around these days. Gen Zgen Alpha. Throwing this around the TikTok,
(01:11):
I think has largely brought this toour children. So I'll give you
you know the definition as it's sharedon the internet, you know, and
then I'll tell you how I commonlyknow it or hear it. So gillat
slang term that expresses excitement, surprise, or admiration, and is often used
(01:34):
as an exclamation to describe a largebutt. It can also be used as
a noun to mean a large butt. The term is based on God Damn,
and it is said to have evolvedinto guiat. Giacht became popular among
Gen Alpha classmates after being learned onTikTok. Now, my familiarity with this
(01:56):
term is my kids are saying itall the time now, and they basically
just say it to mean, butnot necessarily a large butt. They don't
use it in that way to expressexcitement or be like giacht. They just
basically say it to me butt ofany kind. But you know, I
know these different versions are out there. I know that there are definitions out
there that say that it also isused to express that admiration for the butt,
(02:21):
right or whatever the curves if youwant to call it that admiration for
the butt. Also, yeah,maybe your biography right, it would be
just giacht giacht the Patrick Chrebber's story. Yeah, he's using words he shouldn't,
just like he's telling the story heshouldn't. I did have a couple
(02:42):
examples of gillat both usages. Sowe've got she really ate that cake in
one bite, giacht. That wouldbe the excitement you know, surprise.
Yeah, and then we've got thebutt the other version sticking out your giacht
for the rhys. Hmmm, that'ssome real, uh real slang for you
(03:04):
there, But yeah, it's it'sit's kind of the same. And anytime
you ask someone if adults should beusing these words, usually they'll say,
no, don't use it. Justthe fact that we are bringing attention to
the words on the show will getus a lot of mass criticism. We're
accepting that because we're being you know, educational in nature, but you know,
(03:25):
as adults, really not great forus to use them. Exposing you
to the words as a marketer isgood because if you hear them as a
marketer, you know, or asa person in business, whether you're a
parent or not, you know,you'll know what those words mean. Here's
the other thing, you know,we're sharing this information so you're in the
(03:47):
know. By the time we allknow this information, it's essentially probably killing
these terms because yeah, once enoughof the people that the younger generations don't
want to know this, it's essentiallydead in the water. Right. Yeah,
as soon as adults pick up theterm, use it, or at
least even acknowledge that they know,they're like, yeah, I'm sorry,
(04:10):
we don't use that word anymore.Why because you're using it? Because you
just set it out loud to me, it's done. Giacht. It's not
like one that you would ever usein business. Probably some might say the
drink brand Prime has recently experienced someserious pain in the giacht from their decreasing
sales. Would you say that?They might say giacht? Damn? What
(04:32):
happened to Prime sales? So thebig topic for today, obviously our new
segment about words the kids are usingor whatever we call that isn't really the
main focus of today's episode. Themain focus is Prime. If you're not
familiar Prime Hydration, you and Iwere talking about this. We thought it
(04:55):
was a pretty interesting topic to coverbecause Prime is one of those like a
lot of the like we were talkingabout with social media and words. Right.
Prime had this just crazy, crazylift a surge if you will,
Yeah, something so drastic that it'swhat every product or every brand dreams of.
(05:15):
Do you remember the FedEx commercial orwas it ups commercial where they're like
use ups and then they show thepeople and they're like, all right,
we're going to launch this product andthey hit the button and it's like one
sale, two sale, and thenthey're like, oh, then all of
a sudden, it's like one zillionsales and they're like oh god. You
know, because they realize what's goingto happen. They have to be able
(05:36):
to support that, right, thesales. So Prime surge, Prime push
that button. Yeah, they pushthat button, and you want to lead
in with what happened. So Primestarts out in twenty twenty two, Bloomberg
reports in the first year brought intwo hundred and fifty million in sales.
Pretty good. Twenty twenty three,it's their past one billion. So what
(06:00):
you're talking about, you know,pushing the button and just like surging,
I mean, that's unheard of you. It just doesn't usually happen like that.
According to I for Retail Twitter account, here's how they stated the recent
situation with Prime. Recent reports suggestthat Prime Hydration sales are down more than
fifty percent year over year in theUK photos everywhere showed on clearance in Tesco
(06:26):
and other major retailers. Sales inthe US are down two negative six point
five percent for Prime Hydration and fiftypercent for Prime Energy year over year.
The last four weeks ending March twentyfourth, leaving Prime Energy aside. Is
this the beginning of the end forPrime hydration or just a predictable bump in
the road cycling huge numbers from twentytwenty three and dealing with overstocks. So
(06:49):
that's kind of where Prime stands.As you mentioned, this brand which had
a huge, you know, surge, rising popularity, very much a brand
built off of social media, nowkind of coming to this turning point where
the chart was going all the wayup and now things are kind of pointing
down and maybe you know, goingway down. Sorry to say, what's
(07:10):
going to happen in the coming future. So that's kind of what we're talking
about today. But before we couldget into some of these bigger questions around
Prime, let's start with the branditself. Patrick, what's your awareness and
perception of Prime? Is this abrand that was on your radar before these
news stories? Yeah, to anextent, you know, for our listeners
out there. I was telling Shadoff Air that my son and a lot
(07:32):
of the athletes he knows, theylove Prime. And these are teens,
right, yeah, teens. He'seighteen, he's gonna be graduating, so
he's played high school sports, andthey were drinking it like water for most
of this past fall season, Iwould say, and even now to some
degree, they're still drinking it,to a point where we were stocking this
(07:55):
in our house because they were justlike, you know, a couple of
his buddies would come over and theymean, they would just drink it all
the time. I didn't even realizethis at the time. We were getting
the prime hydration, But there isa prime energy as well, and I
think we have gotten that from timeto time. But the prime energy and
the prime hydration. They've been inthe news lately a lot with the Prime
(08:15):
energy because kids don't differentiate they're drinkingthese. They don't differentiate between the hydration
and the energy, and the energyhas this caffeine, and the caffeine levels
are so high that it can reallybe problematic if you're having young people,
let alone adults, drinking lots ofthis. It's not gatorade, and gatorade
isn't great for you if you drinktons of it. But if you imagine,
(08:39):
you know, drinking a bunch ofMonster Energy drinks and you hear about
those people having heart attacks or somethinglike that, because it's a lot of
caffeine. That's where I come intoit is I know the high school athletes
who were drinking it like crazy.I'm kind of the same with you.
I know the Prime brand primarily becauseof my kids, though I think it
was about I don't know, sixmonths ago when my son, who's younger,
(09:00):
you know, he's like ten yearsold, was like, we need
to get Prime. Everybody at school'sgot Prime, and I'm like, what
is Prime? I don't know whatthat is. But it was one of
those things, you know, it'sgoing around the grade school. All the
kids were drinking it, and soit became like a hot, a big
thing. You know, I wantto do what everybody else is doing.
This is the thing. And wetried it and he thought it was disgusting.
(09:20):
But that's kind of where I comeinto it. The other reason is,
you know, since that time,all the publicity around the brand and
Logan Paul, who's the co founderof the brand, is kind of hard
to miss if you follow any sortof you know, news and social media.
For those that don't know who,Logan Paul is popular influencers. Started
out on YouTube. He was ahuge YouTuber with a ton of followers since
(09:43):
has become a professional wrestler. I'mthe WWE. Prime is also a co
partnership with a UK social influencer namedKsi, who I'm not really familiar with,
but they kind of made this brandtogether, but Logan Paul primarily one
of these social influencers that people loveto hate. Minor side note on Prime,
(10:05):
I will say the brand name hasmore than once confused me where I
did feel like it's a bad choice, like they were stepping on Amazon's toes.
I thought it was a weird move, especially from like an SEO perspective,
to choose that as a name.I guess it's worked out fine for
them, but from my I wasalways like, ah, Prime, that
(10:26):
was a weird thing to go forwhen there's already such a prominent Prime that
everybody knows. Yeah, I guessyou could look at it as potentially gonna
work out in your favor because there'sa lot of searches for that, and
if you can optimize, you couldshow up in those. Maybe if Jeff
Bezos lets you you know, becausethere's like three search results for Prime.
(10:46):
It's Amazon, this Prime, Drink, and then Optimists. So yeah,
it's really it's a really interesting thing, and the brand itself, obviously it
has its problems, but it's stillpopular, you know, it's it's weird,
it's hanging on. So I don'tknow if some of that is just
media coverage and them talking about itand then falsely it's starting to like lose
(11:09):
interest, or maybe it's doing theopposite. I don't really understand what's happening.
Well, you know, if weknow anything, people love to love
something and then they love to watchit like fall down and crash again.
I don't know if that's if weare in media reporting on that, if
we're like over selling that a littlebit. But let's explore that a little
bit. Do you think Prime isreally in trouble or is it more likely
(11:31):
they're just they're going to have tocome down? You know, you can
only go so high, right,Yeah, not unless everybody's drinking it.
You know, if you get sevenbillion people drinking it and they're drinking it
like water, you might be fine. But yeah, I mean, I
think if you go from two hundredand fifty to over a billion in one
year, maybe you're just leveling backout to where you should be, which
(11:54):
is a couple hundred million dollars ayear, which is nothing to sneeze at.
I think if they were that level, which they would clearly probably be
a little bit higher than that.Anyway, I think you're doing great.
I don't think that's an indication offailure necessarily. It's just whatever that surge
was isn't sustainable. Yeah, Ialmost think it's more of a curse than
(12:16):
it is a blessing in some ways, rather than like building up, building
the infrastructure you need, building theteam you need. It's kind of like
happens all at once. You gotto catch you up. In most cases,
you're like kind of planning, Okay, well, here's where we're at,
here's where we want to be.We're in phase one, here's how
we get to phase two than phasethree. In this case, you're moving
so quickly you probably don't have anyof that planned out. Nothing is probably
(12:39):
in place or prepared for any ofthis. As a result, you know
you're probably not going to be ableto sustain that, and then when it
comes back down here you are.Now you're trying to deal with the fact
that you have declining sales and acapitalist market that's always like you need to
be growing. You need to begrowing, why are you declining? So
then you're just dealing with this wholeother thing. I feel like you're almost
(13:01):
like accelerated the life of your brandin a negative way, even though you're
breaking in tons of dough in alot of ways. I would say the
Prime brand is a lot like whatprobably he dealt with as an influencer,
right, because you get this viralnature, everybody knows who you are,
you're you're shooting through the stratosphere,and then you sort of hit this like
plateau or whatever, and you startto come back down a little bit,
(13:24):
and maybe they're going to have toreinvent themselves a little bit because that life
cycle has gone so quick. Andthat's the thing too. When I look
at the you know, I lookat the Prime brand, I go onto
like drink Prime dot com. There'sno like core message. I see a
lot of it. It's about coolpeople are drinking Prime, you know,
influencers already ast athletes. And maybethat's enough to sustain if they keep kind
(13:46):
of like cycling that famous people keepdrinking it and talking about it. But
it seems to me hard if youdon't have a message. You know,
when I look at their about pageand I read, we created Prime to
showcase what happens when rivals come togetheras brothers and business partners to fill the
void where great tastes meets function.That says virtually nothing about the product,
you know what I mean. Andthen I go to Gatorade, and Gatorade
(14:07):
tells you Gatorade provides scientifically formulated productto meet the sports fueling needs of athletes
in all phases of athletic activity.There's a solid idea there that you can
build on, you know, andthey obviously have for decades, and essentially
Prime wants to be that. Andthey're doing the same thing I mean,
because that's what Gatorade did. Putthe product in the hands of athletes and
(14:30):
famous people and you know all that. But their statement sounds very young.
It just doesn't sound like a grownup product like Gatorades. Right, this
is what it is, and itis scientifically or whatever. You know.
Pull any of those keywords out ofthat statement and you go, hmm,
that sounds like an adult wrote that. As oppose the other one's like,
(14:54):
we're bros, and we're together andwe're gonna do this awesome thing, and
you're gonna love this. And bythe way, it tastes like a popsicle.
Okay, it's functional though that's myadult word. It's functional. I'm
not crapping on it. I'm justsaying it just sounds like a brand that's
very young versus a brand that's verymature in the Gatorade side, you know,
(15:18):
and it knows what it is,it knows what it's supposed to be,
whereas the Prime hasn't really had achance. It hasn't a chance to
grow up yet. I'd yeah,if you're talking, that's something that's two
years old. Yeah, so doyou think Prime, you know, if
we're looking at do you think it'llbe around in ten years? You think
it? You know, there's thisa boom and bus kind of thing going
on. Well, let's step intothe time machine. Just kidding. That's
(15:41):
a different it's a different show wedo. Short answer, Yeah, I
think it'll be around in ten years, but not I don't think it'll be
a major player if you look atyou know, we go back to Ie
for Retail, which I was talkingabout that Twitter account they wrote, you
know, the demand was built onawareness plus curiosity plus scarcity. Those second
(16:06):
and third elements curiosity and scarcity nolonger exists, but the awareness, like
you mentioned, still very strong andthat can keep a brand going for a
pretty long time. It could changehands, you know, Logan Paul could
egsit the pitcher. Who knows whatcould happen there. But I think the
name could stick around just based onthat awareness. For I think it could
(16:27):
make it ten years just based onbrand equity, based on this surging trend.
Unless they do some major innovating,it's hard to see it sticking around
as it a top seller like itis now ten years from now. What
do you think? Yeah, No, I think that's a pretty accurate trajectory.
I feel like this happens a lotin the drink space, or maybe
(16:48):
even like food market, where youknow you've got something that does really well
for a short period of time andthen they kind of just drag it along
and it just becomes one of thosestaples. It's like power aid or vitamin
water I was thinking of. Vitaminwater was super popular for a while and
that's still I think it's still fairlypopular and it's still around, but it's
not like it was. Yeah,I don't know. When I think Coca
(17:11):
Cola or one of those companies boughtit like ten years ago for a lot
of money. Yeah, and it'snot like it was at that time when
it was really trending. So thatbrings us to our last small segment,
which we thought would be a goodfollow up, a good closure to today's
(17:32):
episode. Boom and bust. Brandssurging in popularity and then crashing down is
not a new phenomenon, as itshed. It's not. We've seen this
happen repeatedly over the decades, alot of times with toys, Cabbage Patch
kids, beanie babies. You rememberthose guys. Patrick, You have a
couple probably in your lap right now. Oh yeah, garbage pail kids.
(17:55):
I love garbage pail kids. Butyeah, So we wanted to share a
couple examples of other product that kindof exploded in popularity, flew a little
too close to the sun and thencame, you know, falling back down.
Patrick, Do you want to shareyour product first? Yeah? So,
I mean I'm just going to sharethe product. We could talk a
little bit about it. The productI thought I would touch on because it
(18:18):
was kind of apropos to today becausewe were talking about prime Snapple Love Snapple.
Yeah, when we were younger,right, Snapple became the big drink.
I think of our time period ofprobably like maybe five to ten years,
it was pretty popular. Snapple wasintroduced in nineteen seventy two, though,
(18:40):
really Yeah, it didn't have therise to fame that Prime did,
clearly, But like we said earlier, the trajectory that brands had back then,
they had much longer tail. Youknow. It was just it was
like social media. It just wedidn't have that to create that. So
getting a distributor and all that stuffand getting people behind it, it took
(19:00):
a lot longer. And I waskind of surprised when I saw that it
was introduced in seventy two, becausethat's fifty two years ago. I'm surprised
by that too. And the surgein the nineties was a real thing.
I wasn't around in the eighties earlyeighties, you know, to be buying
drinks or anything like that. ButI can't imagine that it was commonly available
in store, you know, everystore everywhere. Yeah, the brand slogan
(19:23):
was made from the best stuff onearth. That was their slogan. That's
where you'd see in him in thecommercials and It was known for a popular
TV commercial advertisements in the early ninetieswhere they had a Snapple lady and she
would answer letters from Snapple fans today. You know, like if you were
(19:44):
to compare it, it's like thehealthy drink alternatives. That's what it was
trying to be. Then it wastrying to be the juice, the stuff
that's not coke, that's not pepsi, that's not you know, SODA's,
but it was juice. I thoughtthis one was a really good example because
it spiked. And then you knowwhere a Snapple today, it still exists,
(20:06):
like we were talking about Prime,It's it still exists, but it's
not nearly as pop. You don'tever hear anyone talking about Snapple that might
be the thing you find in thegas station, like you said, right,
yeah, it hasn't even really hadlike a you know, a lot
of this ninety stuff has kind ofhad a comeback. Snapple hasn't really had
that. I'll tell you a coupleof things I remember about Snapple was one,
(20:27):
I remember it being mentioned on Seinfelda couple times, which I think
added to its popularity, which Seinfeldwas huge in pop culture in the nineties
and we used to when I waslike in seventh or eighth grade, this
was a big trending thing to likeride your bike to a gas station and
get a Snapple. I had likea shelf in my room where I would
(20:48):
try different kinds of Snapple and keepdifferent Snapple bottles that I kept on there,
and probably had like twenty different kindsof Snapple that I tried. So
that was like a thing when wewere like that age. It was like
a huge item. It did justkind of like had a big moment I
would say, like around like ninetythree ninety four, and then you know,
just kind of tailed off and togive some perspective with sales numbers and
(21:14):
stuff of this of this company,in ninety one, it had one hundred
million in sales and sold for onehundred and forty million eight months after buying
the company. They took Snapple Beveragespublic in ninety four, and two years
after the original acquisition, they soldthe company to the Quaker Oats Company for
(21:37):
one point seven billion, which youknow, Prime just made one point two
billion in a year, so Imean that's probably nothing at this point.
But yeah, So the Snapple brandwas very big for that time period,
because I think the nineties, youknow, it's like how we do movies
with inflation. That was actually prettygood back then, right, yeah,
(21:59):
and who knows more about making fruitdrinks than the oatmeal people. Yeah,
well that's a good one though.It's a good choice. Yeah, it's
appropriate. I like thinking about Snapple, so thank you for that. So
I went with something a little morecurrent, you know, a decade ahead,
(22:21):
came on a little faster and burnedout a little quicker. So I
recently watched the movie BlackBerry, andit was probably the first time I thought
of a BlackBerry in a decade.A great movie, by the way,
the best of the movies and showsabout you know, what went wrong with
tech companies in the early aughts.So before the iPhone, the BlackBerry was
(22:42):
at the top of the smartphone pyramid. It had a full keyboard. That
was a big deal, right,physical physical keyboard figure. Yeah, nut,
it was an actual keyboard like youwould have on a computer, but
on your phone. That was abig deal at the time. If you
worked in business of any and theygave you a phone, it was probably
a BlackBerry. You know. Mywife had one of these. Obama had
(23:04):
one of these when he took theWhite House. It was very, very
popular, so popular, in fact, it earned the nickname Crackberry case owners
were so addicted to their Blackberries.At its peak, there were eighty five
million BlackBerry users worldwide. This isin September twenty eleven. Now, as
(23:26):
we know, the iPhone came outin two thousand and seven. By two
thousand and nine, it was overtakingthe BlackBerry for the lead in the space.
By twenty sixteen, BlackBerry, whichI mentioned had eighty five million users,
was down to twenty three million users. Meanwhile the iPhone was up to
seven hundred and ten million users.Oh, they're gonna say twenty three users.
(23:48):
It had twenty three users. Itprobably has twenty three users now.
So at the end of the BlackBerrymovie, they share this stat on the
screen. At its height, BlackBerrycontrolled forty five percent of the cell phone
market. Today that number is zeropercent, which is pretty insane. You
know, they were up, theywere there, They were there at the
(24:10):
beginning. Now they're not there atall. Twenty twenty two, BlackBerry finally
shut down its remaining services, sorip it's gone. Obviously. You know,
in this case, comparison to Primethe company had some they had some
internal issues. They didn't really innovate, or at least not as fast as
(24:30):
they needed to. They didn't takethe iPhone or Apple as seriously as they
needed to. But you know,it's an example of what we seen time
and time again with brands and companies. They kind of sitting at the top
of the mountain and they're not reallylooking down at what's what's coming for them.
They were they were really there,they were really up at the top
when this whole thing was about toblow up, and now they are nowhere
(24:52):
to be seen. That's probably thetoughest position to be in. That would
be like today Apple giving up allit's market share, not even like some
of it, but all of it, all of it, right, Yeah,
Like even if you mess up reallyreally bad, you would think you
would still have a sliver of peopleusing it. But you know, you
(25:12):
make enough mistakes and you make themsequentially or you know, compound them over
time, and suddenly you're where theyare. And I know they hobbled along
for a while. You know,they really tried to make it work.
They tried to evolve or adapt insome way, and that didn't work out.
(25:33):
It's a case study of what notto do. You saw the movie,
though I did not. Yeah.Yeah, there were a lot of
things going on that went wrong forthem, both in how the company was
run and some business deals they weredoing, and then what they were doing
to try to make their phones andchange their phones, and what they were
willing to change and not willing tochange. But they just weren't moving forward
(25:55):
fast enough. Once the iPhone wasthere, they really needed to step it
up, and they did not.I remember the days with BlackBerry users and
they were like, I'll never getrid of my BlackBerry. You'll pry it
from my cold dead hands. Right. That is a brand loyalty. It
is really hard to strip. Andthe fact that they let that go,
(26:15):
it's hard to imagine. Yeah,they blew it, you know, they
were there. Ears definitely crashed andburned mine. You know, Snapple still
exists, you know, which isgood. You more like surged and then
you know, just came back downprobably to where it is feasible for prime
at some point. I'm not goingto say they're there yet. They could
probably ride this wave a little bitlonger for sure. Yeah, but searches,
(26:40):
you know, are they really natural. Like I said in the beginning,
not necessarily a good thing always unlessyou're talking about waves. You know,
the ocean so beautiful. You seethat the wave, the swell comes
up cress and then it falls backdown. In nature, that's a natural
occurrence. Learn about language on thisshow. You learn about the ocean.
While you tuned in and you thoughtyou were getting Speaking Human, you actually
(27:03):
got nat geo and whatever. Thisother thing is that we were teaching you
words you know that the kids aresaying today. So we hope you enjoyed
anyway. So that's it for today'sepisode. You can find current and past
episodes of this podcast and other podcastson our website. Go to it it's
Speaking Human dot com. We'll beback in two weeks with another episode of
(27:26):
Speaking Human. Catch it in HumansSpeaking Human
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