"Does this seem reasonable?" Dave asks apologetically near the end of the call. "I mean, I feel bad. You did all this great stuff and I sort of hear a silence--you're not pleased."
"I think we totally understand," says Sovonick. "It's 70 percent of your business. You're wise to be cautious. Yeah, we're all here rooting for you to take a big risk because we think it will pay off, but we understand why you'd be cautious. It's your business. It's your livelihood."
Deskey offers to connect Dave with a local polling company and paves the way for a very good rate for a Web-based survey capturing the reactions of some 200 consumers to the existing label versus the proposed white label. But when Dave requests additional questions, the added costs put the survey beyond his means.
And that, essentially, is where it ends between Deskey and Dave.
Dave does conduct a survey of his own, tapping into his online database of more than 6,000 customers. With question-writing help from a retired uncle who used to do a lot of work for P&G and technical support from an online research firm, SurveyMonkey.com, he asks a number of demographic questions and tests his current Insanity label against a transitional label he had drawn up in-house.
"We didn't test the existing brand versus the final label that Deskey suggested because we would never make that switch. We would go through a transition first," he says. Given his doubts about changing the Insanity label, he continues, "people would have really had to say it's no big deal for us to do that." The more than 1,400 customers who responded provided no such landslide. "About 57 percent thought the white label was high quality. And 68 percent thought the original Insanity was high quality. And there were numerous comments that a white label doesn't convey the heat and feel of very hot sauces."
But what about adopting Deskey's white label concept for his many non-Insanity brands? This way, Dave could function as a branded house with an outbuilding for his Insanity products--a room over the garage for the crazy relative, if you will. No matter that initially, the outbuilding would be bigger than the main house. Says Dave: "I hope, eventually, if we don't bring them together under one brand, that one is our country estate and one is our downtown loft."
Clearly, Deskey's branding tutorial has colored his thinking. "Having that onion and going through this process has made us think more about branding issues that we had not previously spent much time on. Rather than saying, 'This strikes my fancy. Let's do this today, and next month let's do that,' we need to have a long-term compelling vision and theme. Which is what the onion was doing. How can we do the things we want to do and at the same time achieve the goals we want to achieve? These are not simple questions to answer."
It's one thing, Dave elaborates, for a third party to chart a logical course from point A to the stated destination of point B. "But there's an emotional side, especially for a small business like mine," he says. Even now, 13 years in, Dave still has the hots for his initial offering. Insanity, as Reilly-Howe noted, is rather like his difficult-to-control child. And make no mistake, it is his favorite. "Insanity," he says, "gets you in the game."
It does. In September, a photographer for GQ magazine's U.K. edition comes by to snap his picture. In November, along with executives and food scientists from companies such as Unilever (NYSE:UN), General Mills (NYSE:GIS), and Hershey Foods (NYSE:HSY), Dave speaks at a forum on Food Technology and Innovation in Ireland. His topic: "Driving growth through premium and luxury products." Such recognition is good for business--also personally validating, a kind of hot sauce high.
Back in Cincinnati, there is, of course, a sense of deflation at Deskey. Yes, it would have been exciting and gratifying to see their crazy brandnapping hit the jackpot and to watch, with a kind of foster parent pride, as Dave scurried to market with their ideas. Still, the passion project has served Deskey in many ways. It let everyone involved stretch in new directions--Brent Naughton, especially. He believes, he says, that "a few eyes were opened" to his untapped early-stage creative talents. "In the long run," Naughton says, "I think this will help me and the company."
Deskey's Scoville Protocol, Stallard maintains, proved both a tonic and a reaffirmation: "We developed a project that's clearly illustrative of who we are. We're experts in the field of branding. We love to have fun. We're mavericks. We're risk takers. And I think we rediscovered that the medicine we've been prescribing--that successful companies and brands are the ones who stay truest to who they are--is also good for ourselves."
And let's not forget one other dividend--the foot massager. In the dog days of summer a box arrives at Deskey's reception desk. Inside, there's no note, only a heavy-duty electric foot massager--previously owned. That's it. No paperwork, no note inside. The return address is from a woman in Las Vegas. Figuring it must have been sent to the wrong address, Stallard tracks down the woman's phone number and calls her. It turns out she does a booming business with eBay. She looks up the shipment and finds the name on the order.
"Somebody named Dave Hir…Hir…" She stumbles on the last name.
"Don't worry," says Stallard. "I know who he is."
