[Top Agency Series] Unlocking Product Success Secrets With Laurier Mandin of Graphos Product

Laurier Mandin is the CEO and Founder of Graphos Product, a marketing agency specializing in launching and branding successful products worldwide. With over 30 years of industry experience, he has helped hundreds of businesses achieve product success. Laurier is the host of the Product Knowledge Podcast and author of I Need That: Creating and Marketing Products People are Compelled to Buy, showcasing his expertise in neuromarketing and consumer behavior. His work is marked by a deep understanding of the intricacies of product marketing, from conception to consumer.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

• [04:06] Laurier Mandin shares his journey from journalism to founding Graphos Product
• [09:01] The phases of growth of Graphos Product
• [11:19] How visual storytelling can drive compelling product marketing
• [20:42] Innovative product go-to-market roadmap
• [25:52] The criteria Laurier uses to determine if a client is the right fit for Graphos Product
• [28:48] The successful launch of Parallel Sleep and how targeted messaging can create impact
• [36:17] Why Laurier decided to downsize for a more fulfilling agency experience that focuses on core talents
• [40:21] The keys to long-term staff retention and nurturing a reliable, collaborative team

In this episode…

In today’s fiercely competitive market, the success of a product launch hinges on a combination of strategic planning and innovative execution. Transforming a groundbreaking idea into a widely recognized product requires navigating various challenges, from market research to effective branding. So, how can businesses turn concepts into consumer-ready offerings?

Laurier Mandin, a seasoned marketing agency owner, shares his insights on navigating these challenges effectively. He recounts the fascinating story of SearBQ, a unique cooking product, highlighting the exhilaration and pitfalls of product scaling. Laurier explores how understanding consumer psychology and crafting compelling narratives are key to capturing the consumer’s imagination. He shares the importance of aligning marketing strategies with the product’s core appeal. His experiences underscore the necessity of adaptability in responding to unforeseen challenges like supply chain issues and shifting consumer habits, offering invaluable lessons for entrepreneurs and marketers alike.

In this episode of Inspired Insider Podcast, Dr. Jeremy Weisz interviews Laurier Mandin, Founder and CEO of Graphos Product, about launching and marketing compelling products. Laurier shares his journey from writing and journalism to founding Graphos Product, its customer success stories launching their products, how he determines if a client is the right fit for Graphos Product, and the keys to long-term staff retention.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

• Laurier Mandin on LinkedIn | Website
• Graphos Product
• Product Knowledge Podcast
• I Need That: Creating and Marketing Products People Are Compelled to Buy by Laurier Mandin

Special Mention(s):

• 2Bobs
• Ditching Hourly

Related episode(s):

• “[Top Agency Series] Most Valuable Advice When Selling Your Agency With Todd Taskey of Potomac Business Capital” on the Inspired Insider Podcast
• “[Top Agency Series] Navigating a Merger and Becoming an End-to-End Digital Partner With Kevin Hourigan of Spinutech” on the Inspired Insider Podcast
• ““But wait, there’s more!” – with Infomercial King Ron Popeil, Founder of Ronco.com” on the Inspired Insider Podcast
• “From Maxwell Street to Infomercials with Ron Popeil” on the Inspired Insider Podcast
• “Leading with the Customer Education Approach and more with Rick Cesari Founder of Cesari Media” on the Inspired Insider Podcast

Quotable Moments:

• “Running an agency isn’t about designing cool things; it’s about making my clients successful.”
• “Scaling a product means scaling its issues as well.”
• “The success and retention of staff are about matching personalities and genuinely valuing each team member.”
• “In product launches, you’re not just selling an item; you’re selling a transformative experience.”
• “Authenticity and genuine connection with my team are the roots of lasting success.”

Action Steps:

1. Embrace creative problem solving: Address unforeseen challenges with innovative strategies that differentiate them in competitive markets.
2. Prioritize relationship building: This can lead to sustained partnerships and collaborations, offering long-term benefits and trust within professional networks.
3. Understand and leverage unique selling points: Leaders can apply this to their skill set by understanding their strengths and effectively communicating these to inspire teams and drive organizational success.
4. Focus on long-term vision and outcomes: By focusing on sustained outcomes, leaders can ensure their projects align with strategic goals and deliver lasting value.
5. Encourage and recognize team contributions: By fostering an environment of recognition and respect, leaders can enhance team motivation and loyalty, leading to greater collaboration and productivity.

Episode Transcript

Intro 0:01 

You are listening to Inspired Insider with your host, Dr Jeremy Weisz.

Jeremy Weisz 0:22 

Dr Jeremy Weisz here, founder of inspiredinsider.com where I talk with inspirational entrepreneurs and leaders today, is no different. I have Laurier Mandin of Graphos Product. You can check them out at graphosproduct.com. And Laurier, before I formally introduce you, I always like to point out other episodes of the podcast people should check out. This is part of the top agency series. Another good one was Kevin Hourigan of Spinutech. You may pre-date him, which is Laurier, he talked about starting his agency in 1995 and it was interesting to hear the landscape of the internet, business and agency world during that time. So maybe you’ll go through some of the phases in evolution on your end. But that was a really good one.

Another one was Todd Taskey. Todd Taskey talked about kind of the agency space as far as valuations go. He actually helps pair private equity with agencies. Helps sell agencies. He has a Second Bite Podcast, which is really good, because sometimes when they sell to private equity, private equity sells again, and sometimes those founders make more on the second bite than they did on the first. So it was interesting to see his perspective on the whole agency landscape, that and many more on inspiredinsider.com. This episode is brought to you by Rise25. At Rise25 we help businesses give to and connect to their dream relationships and partnerships. How do we do that? We do that by helping you run your podcast, or an easy button for a company to launch and run a podcast. We do the strategy, the accountability and the full execution. So kind of Laurier, we call ourselves the magic elves that run in the background and make it look easy for the host, so they can create amazing content, create amazing relationships, but most importantly, run their business.

For me, the number one thing in my life is relationships. I’m always looking at ways to give to my best relationships, and I found no better way, over the past decade, to profile the people and companies I most admire and share with the world what they’re working on. So if you’ve thought about podcasting, you should if you have questions, you can go to rise25.com or email us at [email protected], we also have a lot of free resources on the podcast to answer all of your most pressing questions, like, what software do I use? What is this or that? So all good stuff.

I’m excited to introduce Laurier Mandin. He’s a seasoned marketing agency owner. When I say seasoned, he founded Graphos Product in 1993. He also has a Product Knowledge Podcast. He also just published a book. Well, if you listen to this in a couple years, it’s been out for a while, but it’s I Need That. I recommend people check it out. I’m looking forward to listening on Audible. There it is. If you’re looking at the video, the cover is beautiful, and we’ll talk about the inspiration behind the cover, but I need that Creating and Marketing Products People are Compelled to Buy, so I can’t wait to hear some of your favorite stories from that book. And over his career, spending over 30 years, he’s launched and branded and marketed hundreds of successful products for businesses worldwide and Laurier, thanks for joining me.

Laurier Mandin 3:44 

Thank you, Jeremy, it’s great to be here. And even in our little pre-discussion, I found myself just getting more excited about all the things we could talk about, because there’s just so much, so much great material. Have to narrow it down a lot, but yeah, I pre date most agency owners, I think.

Jeremy Weisz 4:02 

What was agency life like in 1993?

Laurier Mandin 4:06 

Well, let me go back, like just a little bit further back. I’ll kind of tell you how I got into running an agency. And it started with writing. I loved to write as even a junior high school student, and I remember coming home and just being so pleased to tell my parents that one of my teachers said I should be a writer for a living. And they looked horrified. They thought, oh my God, what did your parents do? She’s ruining this guy’s life. And they encouraged me. They said, you do like to write, and you’re good at it, but that’s not really a good way to make a living for most people. So you should continue to round yourself out and work on other things. And I knew my dream was being shot down right there. And so I kind of, I kept on writing and doing things like that, and I liked art. I liked all that other creative things, but it was when I was just towards the end of my high school that one of my friends, who also like to write, said, well, I’m going to be a journalist.

And I thought, well, that that sounds cool. And I imagine just, TV news guys or something. So I thought, well, I don’t think I want to be a journalist. And he started telling me about what that involved, and I decided, wow, I want to be a journalist too. So I went to journalism college and did really well there and enjoyed what I was doing, except I didn’t really like the idea of being a reporter, being a reporter, and asking people questions after they’ve been traumatized. And there were all these things that were just kind of unappealing to me and the kinds of things especially a junior reporter had to do. But on my second practicum, my first one was at the cities, right where I lived in one of the big daily newspaper and that was quite a lot of fun, and it kind of made me think maybe I do want to do this. But I also discovered they had an art department there.

And in this art department, they did all kinds of things, all kinds of page layouts and news graphics and stuff like that that was, to me, way more exciting. I got to do these called paste up projects, because everything was done and printed out and stuck with wax onto these big sheets, and you created newspaper layouts. That was kind of neat. So for my next practicum, I went to the Art Department, and nobody had ever done that in my program before. Is actually, you’re all here to be reporters. And there I was doing this practicum in the art department and making ads and stuff like that. And I realized this is kind of the fun part. You get to not be going outside in the cold and asking people questions they don’t want to answer. You’re just doing stuff that’s fun.

So I took that and that newspaper is the Edmonton Journal, told me they were going to hire me back in their art department as soon as I got out of college. So I thought, this is great. I have this thing lined up, and a couple of friends wanted to start a publication, so we started this humor and satire magazine. And my job, in addition to doing photo shoots and all the other things, wearing all those other hats, was doing all the advertising. And so I’d sell ads, and I’d put together ads, and create these ads for the publication, and I kind of went a step further and realizing this is now, this is what I like to do. So eventually, when that publication ran its course, it was a recession. It was 1993 I found some office space downtown, in downtown high rise.

It was a pretty large office. I had way more room than I needed, but it was like $600 bucks a month for this office space, and the landlord had worked for me to do so that was my first client, and my office space, and I was off to the races, so that for me, with my little computer that I had from this, it was a Mac computer, Mac quadra, 700 that I had from laying out this publication became my tool. I set up a photo studio in there and started designing ads and creating artwork and brochures and pamphlets for clients. So that was the start of Graphos, and it wasn’t long into that that I started doing, launching little products.

Jeremy Weisz 8:28 

Take us through the phases a little bit. I just want to point out it’s funny, because if you’re looking at my screen here, you can see I need that, it does have, like a kind of a mad men ask type of feel to me. And I don’t know what the inspiration behind the cover is, but it almost started. It morphed into you basically producing ads. And this one looks like a beautiful ad, but this is the cover of your book.

Laurier Mandin 9:01 

It’s funny you say that because that wasn’t even because the book has kind of a neuro marketing component, and it’s really about the brain science of what makes us need things. And I can talk a bit more about that later, but that cover design was very far from what I’d first envisioned. I was imagining something that was more directly related to how we as humans decide that we need something, and how need is this construct of our mind that anything other than a physiological need. We decide that we need something, and we place that above all the other wants and desires that we have in our mind. So the cover that I had in mind was more around kind of, someone clicking a buy button or the direct response to deciding that we need something when it’s a product, but I asked, I have a really great cover designer. His name is Alexander von Ness, and he does nothing but cover designs.

As I mentioned to you before we started recording things. And he suggested, well, what if we tried some other ideas? And he started doing visuals that were kind of along this line. And I really like this one here, just as soon as I saw it, the earliest iteration of it. I really, really loved it. We did a whole bunch of other things. And I kept coming back to this one because I just, I loved the excitement of it. I like the kind of the bygone era that you said has evoked. And it kind of reminded me of a younger version of myself as well, just that the enthusiasm about and it captured the essence of launching a product that you know there’s some kind of magic behind.

Jeremy Weisz 10:41 

What are some favorite stories or examples from the book, we can see, obviously, creating and marketing products people are compelled to buy, and I geek out actually on direct response. I remember I had Ron Popeil. I don’t if you remember his infomercials. I had him on the podcast. But he kind of, I don’t know if he came up with the phrase, but wait, there’s more. And just creating this copy and this, an infomercial that makes people feel compelled to buy. What are some examples from the book that are your favorites?

Laurier Mandin 11:19 

Well, the infomercial one is, is really great, and that’s something that I don’t have any experience in, in doing is, the direct response and just getting into people’s heads right in that moment. But direct response has such an important part of the history of launching and marketing products and getting into people’s head space so that you’re where they are right at that moment. And so most of the stories that I have in the book are about taking a product to market that is something that’s innovative, that people don’t even know about yet. That’s almost the new category thing. I think a good example of a product like that would be SearBQ, which is a product that you’ll see on the Graphos Product website, and it’s this double it’s a two piece skillet and griddle, kind of and press. And the cool thing about this product is that you take this thing outside, if you have a gas barbecue, you heat it up to 400 degrees, and you sandwich whatever it is you’re cooking between these two ultra-hot plates. And the art effect that it creates is just phenomenal. So it would just create these amazingly delicious vegetables and steaks and burgers, smash burgers, just about anything else. And when I tried the product from…

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