This transcript was generated with the help of AI and may contain some errors.

Andrew Heddle [00:00:00]:

Take a brand like Winnebago, it has natural cultural recall. It’s got a great advantage. In the case of Winnebago, they tend to be a pioneer. It’s funny that DNA goes all the way back to 1958. They kind of pioneered the category. So it helps if you’ve really got a distinctive positioning in the market, your existence in the market, especially when there are 50 other brands.

 

Kyler Mason [00:00:25]:

Whether you’re going to market through dealers, distributors or some other partner channel, the mediated sale is complex. We call it B2B2X

 

Jon Goff [00:00:33]:

But the leaders in the industry are the ones who are making it look simple. I’m Jon Goff.

 

Kyler Mason [00:00:38]:

And I’m Kyler Mason. And this is Why You Win, presented by Element Three.

 

Jon Goff [00:00:43]:

Today’s conversation is with Andy Heddle, the director of digital marketing transformation at Winnebago Industries. Andy’s career really has been about digital transformation all the way through from his beginnings at a large e commerce brand in the UK to managing a retail channel at Best Buy and through today, where he’s helping the Winnebago brands level up their digital marketing. Andy’s a great guy. We hope you enjoy the conversation. Andy, welcome to the show today. We’re glad to have you on. Thanks for joining us.

 

Andrew Heddle [00:01:09]:

Thank you for having me.

 

Jon Goff [00:01:10]:

So, Andy, tell us about what’s going on these days.

 

Andrew Heddle [00:01:14]:

Currently working for Winnebago Industries, I’m happily working for Winnebago Industries with absolutely no plan to be working anywhere else. But as you probably tell from my accent, I’m not originally from Minnesota, which is now, which is where I now live. I’m originally from the UK. I moved to the US 17 years ago when I got a job at Best Buy, who I headquartered just down the road here in Richfield, Minnesota. And I was recruited by them to head up bringing an online experience for smartphone sales here to the US. I had quite a lot of experience doing that in the UK in the prior ten years, which is kind of what I think qualified me for that role. And I came with a little project in mind, thinking that it would last maybe two or three years. And as these things do, that kind of turned into a long term deal and then a couple of years, well, I suppose it’s 2019 even.

 

Andrew Heddle [00:02:10]:

I became a us citizen. I’m now here, evidently for the long haul. My career is a little bit of a career of two halves. So I spent a lot of time in retail throughout my career. Initially that was all analog, and then in the early two thousands, it became digital and I transitioned over into digital really, when it was still analog, if that makes sense. So the first websites I worked on and I created had a telephone number on them if you wanted to actually make a transaction and that would route you to a call center. And then progressively over time, it became a little bit more automated and we got to where we are today. The story of my career is predominantly retail sales until the last few years, and then coming over to Winnebago last year.

 

Jon Goff [00:02:55]:

Yeah. One of your earliest roles on LinkedIn is for car phone warehouse. And I think for some of our listeners, the idea of a car phone is sort of an anomaly. Like, why would you have a phone in your car and not a pocket phone?

 

Andrew Heddle [00:03:10]:

Yeah, well, sadly, I remember when that was really a thing. And it’s funny, Carphone became the most successful independent retailer of mobile phones in all of Europe. And they started out calling themselves Carphone warehouse in the very late eighties when they launched. And they became successful pretty quickly to the extent that it became too late to actually change the name. And so they went on and persisted, calling themselves Carphone warehouse right up to now. Carphone Warehouse still a brand in the UK. In Europe, it was always called the phone house. And they launched a little bit later in Europe in the early two thousands, so they had time to change it.

 

Andrew Heddle [00:03:50]:

But, yeah, it definitely dates you. If you work for a company, it’s like working for, I don’t know, a photocopier company or something. If you ever did it, it dates you.

 

Jon Goff [00:03:59]:

Yeah. If you were still working for Carphone warehouse, would it be time for a rebrand?

 

Andrew Heddle [00:04:03]:

That was a live question in 1993 and here we are, what, 30 years later? So it would be. But then it’s certainly in the UK, Carphone warehouse actually meant something to people. It’s in the culture. Zeitgeist. A lot of successful people worked at Carfone Warehouse one way or another. It’s quite interesting when you actually look back, it was one of those businesses that was of its time and of its era and somehow attracted people who went on to form their own businesses and become quite well known in their own right. And so it’s quite an alumni for that brand, and no one’s in the mood to change it, I think. Same as IBM.

 

Andrew Heddle [00:04:39]:

I mean, international business machines is an old name now.

 

Jon Goff [00:04:43]:

I don’t think many people know the acronym.

 

Andrew Heddle [00:04:46]:

True enough.

 

Jon Goff [00:04:47]:

Digital marketing transformation is your role at Winnebago Industries, and I think your background demonstrates why you’re exactly the right fit for that. You’ve been in digital marketing transformation since people were transforming into digital at all. And it sounds like over the course of your career, you’ve had a couple different stops that have taken you or given you opportunity to really lean hard into that, even though that may not have been your role in each one of those stops. Is that fair to say?

 

Andrew Heddle [00:05:15]:

Yeah, it is. It’s funny because it’s a double edged sword, because digital’s always transforming anyway, and then organizations want to transform themselves to become more digitally minded, and you’re somewhat always chasing the wave. I have done roles like this before. In fact, in the early two thousands, the role that I’m currently doing, I was more or less doing for coffee and warehousing all of their european businesses, or at least going through that first wave of trying to stand up e commerce businesses across nine european countries. And I think it made me qualified for the role in terms of how to go about the role. But you’re never qualified for the role in terms of knowing what digital is going to be next. You know, that can be good and it can be bad. I think where it’s good is if someone comes up and they have really deep experience in what currently digital means, that will carry you so far, but things are going to change in the next year or two anyway.

 

Andrew Heddle [00:06:13]:

You have to have an appreciation for the fact that that’s a puck that is going to move and move forever. I mean, classic example right now is what is happening to search, which has been stable more or less for 20 years. You know, I mean, Google, it changes constantly. Thematically, it’s been broadly the same for, you’d say, 20 years, and now all of a sudden, the things that really matter in search, things that you can’t really work around, you know, you have to do the fundamentals really, really well and then provide an incredible level of great content detail and kind of go back to those first principles to really have a chance of showing up. And for a business like ours, 95% of our traffic is organic, indirect, and that means that you have to be a really strong brand and you have to provide really great content. I feel like even if you were really, really onto some of the technical aspects of search even a year or two ago, we have to relearn your trade to a certain extent.

 

Jon Goff [00:07:17]:

I think you’re referring to Genai in that comment. Is that the shift that you’re seeing?

 

Andrew Heddle [00:07:25]:

Yes, exactly. And not only what it is, but what it’s going to be for sure. There’s a phrase that I heard one time around digital is that you’re always moving towards an expected and inevitable future, because it is inevitable and it is expected, but just exactly how it’s going to flush out, that’s the thing that you’re never really certain of. So if the metaphor was you’re sailing across an ocean, you know what the destination’s going to be, you know what the trade winds are, but you don’t know what the storms are going to be.

 

Kyler Mason [00:07:54]:

You’ve seen a lot of seasons of transformation and to be in a role about digital transformation now leading digital transformation, like what do you credit to succeeding through seasons of big change digitally across the steps of your career?

 

Andrew Heddle [00:08:11]:

I think the most important thing is to pick a winner and find a good company to go and work for. For sure that has, I would say, the resources to invest. Number one and number two has a reason to be developing and moving forward. Choosing who to work for is rather like choosing who your life partner is going to be. It’s the number one decision that’s going to affect really almost everything. And if I take Best Buy for example, Coffin Warehouse was literally the number one retailer of mobile phones in Europe. Number one by far. So pretty good place to go and work, because even where you misstep or make mistakes, the visa is going to carry you forward.

 

Andrew Heddle [00:08:55]:

Then I came to Best Buy and I arrived in the US on the 8 July 2007. And on the 9 July 2007, Apple began selling the iPhone in aT and T stores. And I was there to promote and develop sales of smartphones online for Best Buy. So it’s the equivalent of Ringo Starr joining the Beatles just before they released Love me do or whatever it was. It was pretty well timed. And then there was Best Buy. And Best Buy were the first retailer that Apple chose to sell the iPhone through. It was a year later it came into all Best Buy stores in all of America.

 

Andrew Heddle [00:09:33]:

All I did was I rode Steve Jobs Rocket, you know, and just hung on for dear life and was learning quite quickly as I went how to work in a vast american company. If I have one talent, it may be that make sure that you’re able to deliver the right kind of value to the right kind of organization. And that was maybe more related not necessarily to skills, but just to maybe an aptitude for knowing what people needed in the phase that they’re at, which often isn’t some of the technical things necessarily that we might get after. It’s more about bringing things together and trying to weave, trying to thread those needles constantly. I mean, you’re an agency and decent businesses will always have really good agency partners. And I think understanding how to work with those real experts is possibly you bring those two things together. Great organization that’s riding a wave. Well, with good talent surrounding you, you’d probably get on okay.

 

Kyler Mason [00:10:30]:

Do you have any experiences throughout your career that actually were the opposite of riding the wave and making the right bet and hitching yourself to the right company? That cemented your point of view on this?

 

Andrew Heddle [00:10:42]:

You know, it’s funny, we had some people over for dinner the other night, and they were talking about going out on their own and starting their own business. I’ve done that twice. And the observation I gave them once earlier in my career and once a little bit more recently, and the observation I gave them is the problem you have if you start your own business is there’s a good chance you’re going to have the worst boss you’ll ever have in your entire life. That was true in my case. I had a sandwich and coffee bar chain in the UK back in the nineties, which is actually ostensibly very successful. We won some national awards. I won the Retail Entrepreneur of the year for my local chamber of commerce, and in the same year that we nearly went bust, which is quite a classic, how things are looking on the outside to how they are on the inside. And I think where I’ve made those missteps, funnily enough, is I can be quite persuasive raising money and kind of starting businesses off and things like that, but not phenomenally good at working and being the leader.

 

Andrew Heddle [00:11:43]:

I found a niche working with companies where there’s a really solid team around you and that’s kind of inherent in the company rather than necessarily being able to build it. And I think I just regard it maybe as a quirk of mine and I think surprising one, I think if you’d have told the kid who was graduating from university in the 1990s, who wrote in his yearbook he was going to be an entrepreneur, that actually you’ll do pretty well in corporate America. I just couldn’t believe that. I think that’s how it’s turned out to be. So I wouldn’t say my entrepreneurial days are behind me. I have a couple of little other things on the side, but I found I’ve enjoyed the scale of large us businesses. That’s worked quite well for me as.

 

Jon Goff [00:12:25]:

Disheartening, disappointing things as getting to the end of a year as a business owner and looking at your checkbook and realizing, man, that was a lot of hard work for not a whole lot of payout. And I think carrying over the learning from that you can be entrepreneurial inside a large, structured organization and take all of those skills that matter a lot as a startup founder or as a business owner and leverage them in those other places really effectively. That’s a key learning that should not be overlooked.

 

Andrew Heddle [00:12:58]:

Yeah, no, I’d agree. I think it’s funny because I think you’ll experience resistance in every environment. It’s just the nature of the resistance. And I think we have a romantic view of being an entrepreneur that suggests there won’t be resistance. You’ll somehow be free and you’re not. In fact, you’re less free in many ways because you go to bed with the boss and then you wake up with the boss, and the boss isn’t really fair on your annual 360 because you’re just so aware of mistakes. And I think when I’ve seen successful entrepreneurs interviewed, one of the things that always stands out is they’re quite forgiving of themselves. If they make a mistake, they screw up, they get over it really quickly.

 

Andrew Heddle [00:13:38]:

And when my first business ended, I think it took me three years to kind of get my mojo back. And I suspect that really good entrepreneurship, it takes around about three minutes. I recently read the Elon Musk biography by Walter Isaacson. You know, he’s had a number of downtimes in what is otherwise, you know, a pretty stellar career, but they didn’t seem to last that long given the extent of the stress that he was under. I feel like if you’re someone who’s going to punish themselves for making mistakes, you are going to find entrepreneurialism really hard. If you’re not, then it’s probably going to work out quite well for you because you’re going to have to forgive yourself an awful lot of sins along the way.

 

Jon Goff [00:14:22]:

Yeah, I think that’s great advice. We talk about. We’re big fans of Roger Martin around here. He wrote playing to win and several other books. He’s a strategy professor, and he talks about strategy in terms of bets. We’re always talking about what bets are we making? How are you making those effectively and how are you de risking those with the right kinds of tests? But ultimately, you’re going to have to put your money on something. When you do that, you will invariably lose some of them. And I think your point is really well made.

 

Jon Goff [00:14:51]:

If you can’t live in a world where you’re going to win some and lose some, and hopefully you’re winning more than you’re losing, but you have to be able to tolerate losing sometimes, then you’re just never going to be able to reach out as far as you need to have breakout success.

 

Andrew Heddle [00:15:07]:

That’s been my experience. It’s 100% right. It’s funny because I think you either learn that or you cleave to other environments where success can be garnered in other ways. In the end, I think that’s what I’ve done. I’ve tended to try and look for really good companies and good bosses. Some people are definitely better adapted to. I look at the CEO of our company here. He’s very psychologically well adapted to being the CEO.

 

Andrew Heddle [00:15:36]:

Things are not frenetic. They’re thoughtful, they’re planned. I mean, everyone knows exactly what we’re doing and why we’re doing it and where we’re going. It’s easy to work within that environment.

 

Kyler Mason [00:15:47]:

Before we get into your role at Winnebago, you talked about hitching yourself onto a company at a crazy time. Were there bets being made inside of Best Buy that you were helping to shape or that you saw that drove the success that you were talking about a little bit ago?

 

Andrew Heddle [00:16:03]:

Joining the mobile business, believe it or not, was a big bet for Best Buy. So best buy at the time, assorted cellphones, you know, clam cell phones, they actually had it in the home department. Inside of Best Buy, they had them next to home phones, those classic bits of plastic. And there was a two carrier rule in the stores. He could carry Verizon and two other carriers only. And so he missed out on one of the carriers. And you use carrier software for all credit checking, all assortment and everything, and you were very much downstream with the carriers. And then best buy took the decision to try and break out from those limitations, believing that cell phones really were going to replace significantly other devices.

 

Andrew Heddle [00:16:51]:

And if they didn’t move further up the cell phone chain, they’d end up basically being disconnected from consumer electronics. I mean, I came in 2007, they made that decision in around about 2006. Now, this is before Facebook was anything, before the iPhone was even announced. GSM wasn’t even a technology that was present in America which kind of enables all of that. CDMA was the technology here, you know, and Sprint had a push to talk piece of CDMA technology, which is basically a walkie talkie, which was kind of the big new thing. So it really wasn’t obvious that that would be a big better place. The first trip I went to Best Buy when I came here was to buy a gps for the car, because obviously I had a car and I needed to know my way around. It cost me $450 for a gps to slap on the dashboard of the car, you know, which, like the road maps, had to be updated through a little car that you stuck in the side.

 

Andrew Heddle [00:17:54]:

That business went away and became free within three years of me arriving at Best Buy. The intermediate step was you buy the max from your carrier for like $2.99 a month or $4.99 a month or something, and that lasted about five minutes, that intermediate step, and it went straight to free and that category disappeared. It was a category in Best Buy. Imagine that for everything, because that’s more or less what’s happened. Best Buy was the number one seller of music in America when I arrived, the number one seller. And the big day at Best Buy was new release Tuesday. All the new records had come out on a Tuesday, and this is still happening in 2007. People would come into the Best Buy store, check out the music, walk around, see what they might be able to play it on, come back at the weekend and buy it.

 

Andrew Heddle [00:18:41]:

That was the marketing strategy with an insert that went in the weekend paper. And this was only 2007, that’s a blink away. And so best buy saw this. They didn’t see clearly what was going to happen, because no one did. But they knew enough to know that if they didn’t change their game on cell phones, then they were going to see a lot of things just disappear because the products they were selling were going to get taken out of their hands. And so I think that was a big bet that they placed. And the reason they came, they did a joint venture with the company I worked for. So I originally was employed by the joint venture before moving over to Best Buy.

 

Andrew Heddle [00:19:18]:

They did a joint venture with this company in the UK, I think as a means to overcome their own inertia, because I think they felt if we do a joint venture, we’re kind of going to be forced to go fast. We can break the rules and break the template because our team can’t get in our own way. And I’m sure other people who were in best part of time would think that wasn’t the case. But why do a joint venture with a random european company for cell phones unless you’re trying to break a model and actually almost break your own model to break a model? So I’ve always looked at Best Buy. That’s tough for a business to do and I think it’s Harvard Business school did a full case analysis of the best Buy turnaround generally from 2012 onwards. I think they saw clearly enough that, well, Best Buy kicked this mobile division off years before and it was now funneling all the way through what were.

 

Kyler Mason [00:20:11]:

The assets or the cultural components or whatever they may have been that were acquired in the joint venture that created that inertia.

 

Andrew Heddle [00:20:22]:

Twelve people. Twelve, which I was one. Yeah. The key thing you got to negotiate your supply chain. Retail, generally, just thinking about retail is basically a supply chain. And successful retailers manage a supply chain in the way that no one else does. It’s not just that front end, it’s not just where you intersect with the customer. It goes all the way back to the source.

 

Andrew Heddle [00:20:45]:

And the source in mobile in America has always been the carriers. And it’s always been the carriers in certain european countries, like France, for example, and Spain, whereas in other countries it was the OEM was the source. And I think maybe one bit of DNA we bought was understanding the source and making sure you secure the source. The key to succeeding in cell phones, certainly in the 2010s was, could you get enough, could you lay your hands on an off iPhone, okay. At launch and beyond, because you’re going to sell out of those things anyway. So the question is, what’s your allocation? Well, how do you get allocation? You get allocation by managing the supplier relationship really well. And so I think what they brought along with us was people that maybe just knew that instinctively and were good at it and then they allied it to their own strength because Best Buy has however many thousands, like two and a half, 1000, 3000 locations in the US at the time. And that’s a heck of a footprint.

 

Andrew Heddle [00:21:45]:

And people had more reasons than just a cell phone to come to it. The challenge the carriers had was that their stores, of which they have many, they’re kind of customer service locations. You go there to complain about your bill, you go there to send it away to be fixed if it’s broken. And so they weren’t really maintained as retail environments. And with smartphones you actually need it to be really maintained in a retail environment. And so I think Best Buy had that as a core asset and then they brought us in, I think, as people that were maybe just change makers as much as anything else and hadn’t been used to being downstream of at least american carriers.

 

Kyler Mason [00:22:22]:

I would love to hear the point of view you have now. You’re like on the supplier side. What would you suggest that dealers do in the recreational vehicle market? I’d love to hear your opinion on that. Jumping into digital transformation for Winnebago, what does that mean?

 

Jon Goff [00:22:40]:

Can I ask one quick question about Best Buy? Because before we go all the way there, you were on the Ecom side of all of that. And I think some people have the impression that you’re talking about allocation in the brick and mortar retail environment, you have as many units as the store has in the back, right? Or as many as you can get from the warehouse. Yeah, I think most people believe that in the day, in the age of Amazon, there is no such thing as allocation. You have an infinite amount because Amazon exists. Right. And that there must be an infinite supply of all these things that we all want. That’s not true. And so what’s the nuance that you have to understand then being on the e commerce side of that same equation that you’re talking about?

 

Andrew Heddle [00:23:23]:

If you take Costco at one end and then Amazon at the other, you’ve got every type of assortment decision, and Costco essentially prescribes exactly what it’s going to assort in what quantities, in what volumes, what the price pack architecture is, which is basically big. And so they have, they have, you know, they have very unique skus. Those are unique skus. Then at the other end you have Amazon, which also has unique skus, but it doesn’t necessarily prescribe them. So what you tend to find on Amazon is that sellers create unique skus and they’ll often do that by putting different combinations together. And so you have this seeming endless. Well, you do have an endless, you have this seeming endless inventory. That’s partly a.

 

Andrew Heddle [00:24:12]:

A construct and it’s that marketplace construct that Amazon has. And it allows third parties to essentially create that impression. There’s still a finite number of cameras in the world. For example, we competed heavily with Amazon on cameras particularly. And the clever treat that Amazon had on cameras was that they would get people who had licenses to sell canon or Nikon or whatever, and they would put together bundles. If you go onto Amazon and look for camera bundles, you’ll find these 30 piece camera bundles contain the body of the camera, the lens, maybe a second lens, a bunch of filters, a tripod, some lighting, you know, whatever. And there’s a million and one combinations, but it’s one camera body, okay? And the reason they do that is if they put these combinations together, they can get around map, okay? Minimum advertised pricing, because by putting the combination together, it’s now not mapped. Best Buy could never do that because we couldn’t come up with a million and one combinations.

 

Andrew Heddle [00:25:09]:

You don’t have that warehouse, you have this seemingly endless supply, but it’s actually not. There’s something else going on in that environment. And then in the middle you had a best buy that would typically buy inventory and get allocation. The key to the OEM that was selling through us was they wanted us to maintain a price and a margin. So Best Buy wouldn’t participate in anything that was breaking map per se. And sometimes you have to renegotiate on the fly with an OEM. In fact, often you need renegotiating on the fly with an OEM to get space or some sort of back end support because someone out there has broken map. Bestwise, providing the OEM is number one distribution, but number two, a quality of price and margin, which is what they’re looking for.

 

Andrew Heddle [00:26:00]:

They’re maintaining them, their margins at a level, and they’ve got one very large channel that’s selling through what they want you to sell through. And Amazon doesn’t necessarily buy a lot of product, certainly in consumer electronics, they don’t buy a lot of product direct from oems. And that’s partly because oems don’t really want to supply it necessarily to Amazon. So it goes through third party distribution who then sell on Amazon. And I’m getting really technical here, but you have these very, very different nuances. And what saved Best Buy in the end was not the customer but the OEM. It made no sense to LG, Samsung, Apple, Microsoft, Canon or anyone else to see Best Buy go away. There’s absolutely no upside to them for that.

 

Andrew Heddle [00:26:46]:

And that’s really the whole Harvard Business school case study, is that it’s like, who’s the customer? Okay, well, the customer’s the person paying you, which meant for the oems, that was best buy.

 

Jon Goff [00:26:57]:

Yeah. And I think that there’s a very interesting, now, parallel to transfer into this dealer model, we talk about b two b to x. And actually in the model that you just described, best buy is that it’s a retail environment, but it’s the intermediary. It’s that b two b two c. In this case, it’s the one in the middle, the customer of the OEM, in the most meaningful way, maybe not the one that’s creating consumer demand, but certainly the channel for it. And so as you now have shifted over, like fully into the OEM side and you’re servicing that dealer customer, what are the lessons that you’re carrying over?

 

Andrew Heddle [00:27:37]:

There’s absolutely no doubt, especially in our industry, lot share is the number one thing that’s going to define your success. So are you actually well, assorted on the lots with the right price points and the right product? That’s absolutely crucial to our business. And it kind of overlaps into the role that I’ve got. What we’re seeing now in the marketplace is that the customer also assumes a relationship directly with the manufacturer as well. I think that’s particularly the case with vehicles. Funnily enough, I think it pertains for bikes, snowmobiles, boats, rvs, and cars, is that there’s more than it does to tvs, for example. I think if you actually put your backside into a seat and start driving something around, and you put your life in its hands, there’s a relationship developed with the OEM that isn’t the same as a relationship you have with an inanimate object like a tv. It’s actually more akin to the mobile phone relations.

 

Andrew Heddle [00:28:35]:

It’s funny how passionate people were and are about mobile phones, and it’s partly because that thing is with you all the time, and a lot of your life is on that. I mean, it’s kind of. It’s an arbiter of your life. I think these vehicles are as well. So I would even say that the difference is that the relationship with the product as well as the relationship with the distribution chain. And our goal, obviously, is to provide great products that dealers want to carry because customers are asking for them. If someone had come into a best buy in 2011 asking for an iPhone, we would not have been able to flip them to a galaxy. No point in doing it, either.

 

Andrew Heddle [00:29:16]:

I want the iPhone ultimately, or vice versa, because plenty of people wanted an Android device. I think you want to get to that position as best you can with any business that you’re involved with. And so we want our brands, whether it’s Winnebago, Grand Design, Neumar, Chris Craft, or Barletta, to be the one the customer isn’t just asking about, but is demanding. And that’s where roles like mine come in. Because recreational vehicles are a mediated sale, the salesperson’s always mediated it to some extent. But what digital does is it’s hyper personalization, and it shrinks the distance between the customer and whatever the source is. And so it raises expectations from the customer, their ability to communicate with the source. Even if the route back to the purchase is to a dealer, they still want to kind of.

 

Andrew Heddle [00:30:11]:

They want to maybe start out at the OEM, go to the dealer, come back to the OEM, and then certainly maintain the relationship with the OEM through a warranty period. And again, the warranty period for a vehicle is a very different. Number one is much longer, but number two, it matters more maybe than even on a phone if it’s totally broken. You can’t just go and flip for another one really quick. It’s just the cost is there. So it behooves us as oems to maintain those two relationships quite closely as best we can, and move it beyond just a brand experience for the consumer, but also a customer experience as well. That’s the needle that I’m trying to thread in my role. How does an OEM show up so that a customer knows who they buy from a salesforce, but they still have a relationship with the OEM.

 

Andrew Heddle [00:31:05]:

And you do that on both ends of the cycle. So you do it quite early, but you also do it throughout the lifetime of the owning life of the vehicle and then hopefully repurchase as you go. Because most people are going to own two to three, whether it’s a trailer or a boat. If you’re into it, you’re going to own two to three in the course of your adult life. And you want to make sure that all that effort that went into selling the first one doesn’t diminish. You’re maintaining products that people want to buy in the future, but also relationship they want to maintain.

 

Kyler Mason [00:31:38]:

That’s a lot of brand talk for someone that has digital transformation in their title. Connect the dots for me.

 

Andrew Heddle [00:31:46]:

So we used to say, going back to my retail days, we used to say that the operation is the brand. You can present your brand in all kinds of different ways. And as brand marketers, they look at everything from the font, the color, the voice guide and everything else. But ultimately that freight is carried by the operation. And I don’t think it’s any different in what we do. And the thing about digital is digital is a very, very direct communication, but backwards and forwards between a customer. You send a customer an email and they click on a link. Most people are aware that you’re recording that click, you’re recording the behavior and they expect the experience to get better because of it.

 

Andrew Heddle [00:32:26]:

And, you know, more and more we have to present a cookie choice to people when they come onto a website. And to the extent that people either reject or accept or actually go through your list and choose, they are then determining the quality of the experience that they want to have. And people are getting quite sophisticated about what that is. And that’s all brand, because brand is anything emotive in the experience. And if digital is working properly, it’s putting the right amount of heat into the relationship and also giving the right amount of light so that people are getting what they need and what they want, not too much. And certainly not too little. I’m trying to work that out. It’s actually, it’s pretty hard stuff, and it’s pretty hard work, and no one gets it right.

 

Andrew Heddle [00:33:10]:

And the one thing that you know about all your experiences is they’re always broken to some extent. You’re just trying to make sure that you’re meeting an expectation that is a reasonably set expectation. And the challenge in digital especially is those expectations get set by not just your competitors, but by everything that happens on that device.

 

Kyler Mason [00:33:31]:

So we think a lot about winning in the channel with the mediated sale. How do you balance not overreaching into the dealer environment while still trying to maintain the brand experience? Tell me your point of view on that world.

 

Andrew Heddle [00:33:46]:

It’s funny, I feel in this industry and others that are dealer mediated, a lot of those dealer relationships are geographically. Geographically constrained, geographically maintained might be a better way to put it. Items don’t get delivered through the post. So geography ends up being quite important in our arena still. And so it’s quite easy to maintain, if you like, no pun intended, the distance, because geography is an important part of the mix. And when it comes to our industry, the closer someone is to wanting to make a choice around a geographical element. I, you know, grand design, imagine near me, the more clearly that would sit with the dealer versus the brand, because the brand’s already done its work, okay? Its work was getting you to say grand design, imagine. And the dealer’s work is to say near me.

 

Andrew Heddle [00:34:39]:

And so those two things come together quite nicely, I think. And that’s the same across a lot of what we do. One thing we’re working hard on in all of our environments is putting inventory into the digital experiences, like live inventory, in market inventory, and then making sure as best we can that that’s geographically referenced again, because our dealer relationships are built on that. But customers want to see inventory. It’s like you can show them an image of what something looks like. But we also like to just see stuff on the lot. We just do. So you see our inventory pages, where we have them represented on our sites, always the most popular and most traffic pages.

 

Andrew Heddle [00:35:22]:

And the other thing I like about those pages is that it causes people to come back. If you look at RV Trader, which is obviously the biggest marketplace in the rv industry, it has four times more visits per user than any OEM, and about twice than any dealer debts as well. It was a recreational activity. People want to go back, see inventory, see what it’s priced at. It’s kind of window shopping like that is quite fun. So we see ourselves as participating in that, not disaggregating a dealer ever, because that’s just not what customers want and it’s certainly not what we do.

 

Jon Goff [00:36:00]:

No, actually, in some ways that’s empowering the dealer. When the OEM is supporting that inventory play, you’re not only saying we’re going to sell these units to you and help you manage your lot environment, we’re also going to do the digital lot, so to speak, and help you get placed in these other environments, like RV Trader, so that you get visibility. And that will be another way that we, as the OEM, help drive foot traffic to your environment.

 

Kyler Mason [00:36:27]:

You mentioned a consumer could be looking for grand design transcend near me. In that case, the brand has already won. Mostly you’re assuming that the transaction would be for what they’re looking for. What about in the situation where they’re considering the category, like trailers or something like that, and you have the mixed lot environment. From your perspective, at the brand level, what do you still need to do for the brand to win with the dealer and the consumer when they’re still indecision?

 

Andrew Heddle [00:37:00]:

Yes, it’s a good question. The number one thing, especially in an industry where if you take a brand like Winnebago, it has natural cultural recall, it’s got a great advantage. You take a brand like grand design, it doesn’t have the same cultural recall. But funnily enough, in the trailer industry, it has its own meaning and its own cache. And the job for all of us is to try and attach that clearly to the product lineup and have the product lineup make sense. In the case of Winnebago. Winnebago, they tend to be a pioneer. It’s funny that DNA goes all the way back to 1958.

 

Andrew Heddle [00:37:40]:

They kind of pioneered the category, and even recently, products like the Echo and the Revel and others, they pioneered subcategories within the category. And so I feel as a company, Barletta pioneered premium pontoons. It helps if you’ve really got a distinctive positioning in the market, your existence in the market, especially when there are 50 other brands. So you’re not me too, but you are something now that wasn’t necessarily down to you. Ultimate market share, but it does guarantee you typically higher margins and it guarantees you the ability to make a market and be able to make a market in those years where before that’s in filled. It’s a really valuable goal for an Oem. And in our category, the class B van is a market that got made more or less by Winnebago mid 20, 1520, 1617 and on. And the echo now is somewhat making the market in technically a class c, but a slightly bigger, slightly wider, more off roady kind of like you see echoes all over ski resorts, for example.

 

Andrew Heddle [00:38:53]:

So the goal, I think, for an OEM that does come through how you develop products and how you think about where at least the customer is moving to in the market. And the customer has moved certainly in the last ten years into vehicles that are maybe more transitional vehicles than endpoint vehicles. An endpoint vehicle can sometimes be a vehicle that’s just that big that you kind of get there and you stay there in the motorized environment. It’s like the journey is the destination. We will journey and journey and journey and maybe combine ourselves, stay in our rv with a. Stay in an Airbnb or wherever it may be. You look at these other trends around. So Winnebago industry certainly is.

 

Andrew Heddle [00:39:42]:

I think as a leader in our industry, we’re pretty good at picking when we buy a brand and when we invest in a brand, we’re pretty good at picking brands that have found themselves a pioneering niche. It’s funny because even with Winnebago, which is almost obviously our longest lived brand, that’s really what they do really well. Or still today, when you think about.

 

Jon Goff [00:40:08]:

The history at Winnebago of pioneering categories opening up new opportunities or new business lines, and you’re also describing a world where you are listening very carefully to customers demand and their priority and the shifting marketplace, what have you seen be particularly successful in balancing that? Be a leader as well as listen carefully.

 

Andrew Heddle [00:40:36]:

I think about it quite a lot, and I come up with this thought around pioneering versus leading. And what a pioneer generally does is they don’t pick a destination. They already know it’s out there and they know that it’s worth going and grabbing the land. You haven’t really made a speculation, you’ve made an investment because the trend has kind of revealed itself. It just hasn’t necessarily had the ideal match of whatever it is you’re trying to put up against it. And I feel it’s coming back to think about backing a winner. There’s two ways to go in life. One is to try and pick a winner.

 

Andrew Heddle [00:41:11]:

The other one is to back a winner. And the difference is you back a winner when the race is already running. You try and pick a winner in the yard before the race is even run and you get much better odds. Okay, you’ll get odds of 101 in the show ring before the race. And once that race is running and it’s pretty clear that the horse is going to win. He’s probably going to win, or at least it’s got a really good chance of winning. The odds have come down to three to one. Well, that’s fine.

 

Andrew Heddle [00:41:37]:

You just put $1,000 on, whereas before you would only put on ten. You’re now backing a winner, and when you back a winner, you can put an awful lot more behind it. And I think when it comes to product, to take that metaphor forward, the clever game is to really think about what’s already emerging and then match the product to what’s emerged. It’s like back to that expectant, inevitable future, like what’s going on with vans, for example. This emerging sense that Covid obviously multiplied it, but this emerging sense that people could be more mobile. Yeah. And it’s also emerging sense that people had now tens of thousands of places to stay in all kinds of remote locations, which only in, you know, 2010, before Airbnb, if you wanted to stay away from home, you went to a hotel or you slept on a friend’s floor, that was the option. And now you have any.

 

Andrew Heddle [00:42:33]:

I mean, most people now expect to be able to stay basically anywhere in the world in one night rented accommodation. You’d be shocked to discover that you can’t go to whatever, pick your mountain or your jungle, and not be able to stay there overnight. That’s a revolution. So I think for any business, it’s about understanding that broader environment. The customer’s choices aren’t necessarily your competition, and digital technology has totally enabled that in the last 1520 years. Like, whoever you think your competition is probably isn’t.

 

Jon Goff [00:43:07]:

It’s probably much broader than that. Right. I like the jobs to be done framework that says that the product that they’re buying is the solution, that they’re hiring to get their problem solved or their pain taken care of. And you can do that a number of different ways that in your case, are not all rvs.

 

Andrew Heddle [00:43:23]:

Yeah.

 

Jon Goff [00:43:24]:

Here’s a speculative question for you, that I won’t hold you to getting this right or not, but I am interested to hear your opinion in a world where this is all changing and in some cases changing very rapidly. I was looking at a car manufacturer website the other day that is offering their cars as a service which looks really, really close to leasing a car. To me, I think it’s almost more like renting a car from the OEM, that you get some sort of advanced extra service and you get to trade them up more often than you would in a lease environment and a couple of other like perks. But it’s basically a car rental from the OEM and you get a new car. Is that a thing for rv? Is that the trend that they are also going to follow?

 

Andrew Heddle [00:44:09]:

I don’t really have any inside knowledge. I’m not talking from any base of hard knowledge information. It’s funny, the specification I would have. It’s interesting, the hardware as a service model, you’d think that would apply to something like a mobile phone, for example. It’s a black mirror. It’s a dumb device you often would find with mobiles. For some reason, if it broke, people didn’t immediately want to give it up. Even though you can suck all of the data and all of the apps out of it and put them into the next phone, there’s some attachment has been formed which obviously would militate against that as a service model.

 

Andrew Heddle [00:44:51]:

I don’t know how successful the car model will be. I have a sneaking suspicion that in our industry, people will form an attachment to their vehicle and they won’t necessarily all a boat and they won’t want to just be swapping it out habitually. You put some miles on it, people put the destination stickers on the side. They’ve lived their life in it, they’ve entertained in it, they’ve created memories in it. It’s hard to create memories in a vehicle and then think, oh, we’ll just swap it out next year.

 

Jon Goff [00:45:23]:

The object is part of the story.

 

Andrew Heddle [00:45:24]:

Yeah, it is. Now, I don’t know that to be the case, and so that is a speculation. But. But I feel in our category especially, you don’t see it with tvs because you never hold the tv. You could do a service model on tv every day of the week because it’s just a flat object that goes, you never touch it.

 

Jon Goff [00:45:42]:

Nobody names their tv.

 

Andrew Heddle [00:45:44]:

Yeah, but you do touch your phone and you certainly live in the vehicle. And I’m not 100% convinced I can see a service model working in cars for people that don’t drive cars habitually. So if you live in a city and you might drive a car two weekends a month, having a service model will make a lot of sense to you because you’re actually not going to develop a particular personal relationship with it anyway. Especially if you don’t have necessarily family memories or the type of car doesn’t haul poison recreational stuff around.

 

Jon Goff [00:46:19]:

I think it’s like a lease is. The thing I’m looking at is they’re trying to make everything a subscription the financial incentive for the business is I can sell you this on a recurring basis. And now you’re going to pay me every month ad infinitive until we both die, you’re going to be paying me your money.

 

Andrew Heddle [00:46:38]:

I think that’s right. And it’ll definitely work for some people because they see their car as a service and maybe interchangeable with Uber or whatever it may be.

 

Jon Goff [00:46:48]:

Yeah. And so, like, if I value my driving experience to be premium and to have the cutting edge version of that all the time, leasing was always the way to, like, solve that problem. Going back to jobs to be done. I need the newest, freshest thing. I’m going to just do that. And I don’t want to care about maintenance, and I don’t want to tolerate, like, what happens after 30,000 miles. I have a solution for that. This is the new version of that.

 

Jon Goff [00:47:11]:

And maybe to your point, maybe people don’t have that same problem with their boat or with their I don’t need the newest rv every single year. But we do know that some people, they are going to rebuy every year. And in some environments, and especially in sort of the luxury end of this category, there are certain customers that are going to come back and buy the new one every single year. And as oems, we love those customers, but it’s not the majority of the base.

 

Andrew Heddle [00:47:39]:

Yeah. The counter argument or what I said is obviously Spotify. You know, I think back in the day when Best Buy was the number one retailer of music in America, people used to prize their record collection and their cd collection. It was a thing, and you could pull it out, you could open the. Read the sleeve notes. Half the people watching this probably have no idea what I’m talking about, but you’d have been proud of that collection. And that went away. And that’s surprising to some extent.

 

Andrew Heddle [00:48:08]:

I think their service models will be in every part of the economy, but they won’t necessarily be dominant.

 

Kyler Mason [00:48:13]:

As we start to wrap up in the context of how Winnebago is winning, why you’re winning, what are some of the bets that you are making or the companies making that you think are leading to the success criteria for Winnebago?

 

Andrew Heddle [00:48:27]:

Yeah. So I think it does come back to that point of understanding how societal changes affect the industry that we’re in and not necessarily being constrained by the industry itself. The paradigms grow up around every industry, whether it’s the outdoor recreational industry, campsites, campsite availabilities, where campsites are going to be so on and so forth. But the recreational vehicle industry has just a lot of adaptability in it for what that actually means and what it represents and how people make their investments. In that time, I think it was Eugene Schwartz 150 years ago said, the key is not necessary to think about the product, but to think about the desire. You need to tap into mass desire and then create the product around that. And so understanding what is the desire that you’re evoking and you’re fulfilling, it goes beyond even something like the outdoors. The outdoors is just a place where that desire finds itself fulfillment.

 

Andrew Heddle [00:49:33]:

But what’s the desire? I think in America especially, but wherever rvs or boats are sold, the desire is freedom, is to be able to get out there and pick your own path and choose your own, not just your own destination, but how you get there, whether that’s directly or some sort of roundabout route. It’s funny, when Americans tend to travel to unknown parts of the world, like Europe, for example, they almost invariably do it kind of a packaged tour. So the flight, the hotels, the transportation kind of comes as one, and then they’ll hit the ground or cruise or whatever it may be. It’s kind of a package thing. In America that doesn’t happen at all. No one does that. They’re very, very confident in being as free as they can possibly be. So they’re driving down to Florida for three days.

 

Andrew Heddle [00:50:24]:

There’s 21 hours of driving, you know, but it’s kind of a unique. I mean, number one, where I come from, you can’t drive for 21 hours without going around in circles. You certainly can’t go point to point, whereas here, that’s part of the expression. And so I think as long as we’re evoking that, there’s lots of ways to do it. You know, what you’ll see is things will get smaller, they’ll get neater, they’ll get more compact, and then they’ll expand and people will pick their version of that, but it’ll still be evoking the same desire. And if you see products like toy haulers, for example, that’s a relatively new product where people buy an rv with a garage on the back and start putting hevs, motorbikes, mountain bikes, boats, whatever canoes, whatever it may be. So as people are expanding their interests and expanding their access to those interests, the products have changed to meet that expansion. And if you look right the way back into rv history, rvs kind of originally came up because there weren’t that many hotel rooms around.

 

Andrew Heddle [00:51:33]:

And so if you really wanted to be free. And to travel, you kind of had to take your hotel, you had to take your room with you. And then we’ve seen the explosion of availability of rooms, as we’ve seen, and that’s changed the types of vehicles that people buy now. We people tend to buy quite adventurous things now because that’s the next step. So the industry will always find ways to evoke the freedom gene in people, and I don’t think people are ever going to want to be less free. You very rarely find people in any society demanding more constraint.

 

Jon Goff [00:52:05]:

Yeah, I know that overlanding is a thing that’s way more popular in Europe than it has been here. It’s sort of gaining popularity here in the United States. The way that you have described this now as a us citizen is, I think, interesting that it’s so quintessentially american. The idea of driving equals freedom. And my ability to just pick up and go is an expression of that freedom, I think is very interesting. And I just wonder if, as you have looked at the same question internationally, do you think that that same thing holds true or does it manifest itself different ways?

 

Andrew Heddle [00:52:41]:

When I compare to how I maybe used to think about this category when I was in the UK, the way Europeans travel is typically, is to have an adventure which causes them to bump into just a million and one different cultures and have an awful lot of war stories, you know, to tell and not bad war stories, but just like to really feel like you got very close to the world and the people around you in different cultures, it was about knowledge, expanding your knowledge, maybe, of the world. And so you would quite happily rough it and make it quite rough and difficult, because then you have better stories. Okay, so you get some Land Rover, but you want that thing to be as uncomfortable as it’s humanly possible, because if you said you weren’t in comfort, then you really weren’t doing it properly. And so you have this, this emphasis was really on about making the experience something you could be talking about in 20 or 30 years time. I feel in America it’s a little different. I feel like we want to spend time with friends and family more. In Europe you want to have those experiences, probably without friends and family, because you don’t want anyone to see the truth, whereas here in America you really want to. It’s about sharing and bringing people to you.

 

Andrew Heddle [00:53:56]:

So that evokes two different products at the end of the day. Now, I think some of that overlanding stuff is really coming to America, and that’s partly due to social media you can film it and show it and earn distinction because the desire people have is to be distinct.

 

Kyler Mason [00:54:11]:

The motive is similar, which is cool. Connecting what you were talking about, it’s the war story, but told to the screen.

 

Andrew Heddle [00:54:18]:

When it comes to, especially the industry that we’re in, the appetite people have for experiences that are self mediated, somewhat on their own terms, get them to interesting places with the people they love, that’s not going to change. It can only grow, and it can only expand to more and more and more groups of people that want to have them.

 

Jon Goff [00:54:41]:

That’s a great summary, Andy, and I think you’ve given us a lot of gold here. My parting question to you is, looking back on things that you’ve won at and the victories you’ve seen across your career, any advice that you’d give to somebody coming up?

 

Andrew Heddle [00:54:59]:

Well, I think if I could redo anything, and it’s funny because you talk about the things you won at most of your victories are accidental. I tend to plan my failures and lock into my successes in a funny kind of way. I think if most people are honest with themselves, that’s probably not uncommon. I think there’s more freedom now to determine what a little stack of talents and gifts and abilities is and make it pay for you. I just think there’s more, more opportunity for that. Knowing what that is early is very helpful and then planning it. I heard a phrase on a podcast I listened to this morning which I thought was really good, and it was a comedian who had discovered that he was quite good at comedy. He’d started off doing musical comedy, writing funny songs and stuff, and then one day was heckled and came back with a really good one liner.

 

Andrew Heddle [00:55:55]:

And the audience laughed like they’d never laughed before. And he realized that his still was a real zinging. One liners, zingers. And so he would encourage, off the bat, he would encourage. And so then people would participate in the show, and not that it’d be there to entertain, but be there to challenge, and then bang. He would hit them with the zinger. And the shows went really well. And he came up with a phrase that I thought was really good because he said he discovered that early enough that he didn’t have enough of a brand as a comedian to make the change.

 

Andrew Heddle [00:56:30]:

He got to make the change early. He said, I’ve been able to go an awfully long way on a single tank of gas. And that was his tank of gas. It was the zinning one liner. He said, greta Thunberg would love me because I’ve done my bit for the environment, and I feel like, in a funny kind of way, that if you could just discover what your tank of gas is and then go an awfully long way on it, that’s probably going to serve you quite well.

 

Kyler Mason [00:56:54]:

That’s great.

 

Jon Goff [00:56:55]:

Yeah, I love that.

 

Kyler Mason [00:56:57]:

Find your tank of gas.

 

Andrew Heddle [00:56:58]:

It was quite a long way for me to get up to the punchline, but it stuck with me.

 

Kyler Mason [00:57:02]:

Yours isn’t one liners.

 

Jon Goff [00:57:07]:

Why you win is presented by Element three, a marketing firm focused on modernizing go to market strategies for manufacturers that sell through complex distribution channels. We help leaders solve problems across demand generation, sales, channel support, and brand development.

 

Kyler Mason [00:57:23]:

If you’d like more from myself or John, connect with us on LinkedIn. And for more from element three, visit Element Three. That’s elementthree.com.