• How Richard joined Advanced and why

• Nootropic supplements, bio-hacking, and other key trends in the energy and supplement spaces

• How Advanced leverages its unique selling points (USPs) and data to stand out from the competition

• How Advanced worked with Upsiide to find a winning package design for their new RTD product and the key insights they discovered

• Richard’s predictions for the future of Advanced and where he sees the company go next

Ian: You did some work with us to test your packaging design ideas. What was the process like?

Richard: Here’s a great example: we did some cans that were supposed to be themed after like, you know, craft beers or canned waters. And we were actually pretty sure we were like, “I think that a work that looks like a craft beer” and boy, did I get cut off of those ideas really fast. They were at the base. And I’m like, “Okay, you know what? That’s good to know, because that was going to be a top five.” I got a top tier design for us. We were thinking this could really work. So step one was about rattling the cage and really, you know, clearing up what our internal biases were. So it came across the overall layout and structuring color use and geometries and placements. That’s how we typically structure things.

Second stage. Okay, let’s take what we learn and try this one more time because we don’t want to go right into a competitive market deep dive without knowing that we have internalized the learning, because that’s always the challenge, right?

You know, we are blessed with a brilliant creative director who I think is the first creative director I’ve run into who loves research, like he loves research because he knows that taste is very subjective. So we did the second round test and this was to confirm we could actually improve. And that was very, very critical for us because it’s one thing to say we know what’s better or what’s worse and how to tear things on ranks like an ordinal ranking.

But the bigger issue here was that you know, we always say what the “so what” is you know. Now here’s the thing. So everyone thinks “so what” is the insight no. Knowing something isn’t the same as being able to do it and being able to do something isn’t the same as being able to do it well. So we had to know that we could apply the learnings into a relative improvement in terms of scoring. Otherwise, it means that we didn’t understand the essence of the lesson. So that’s what the second stage was for, to clean that up.

Find the rest of the episode here.

If you want to connect with Richard, feel free to reach out to him on LinkedIn.

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