Luke Thorkildsen (00:00):

Our average customer age is 65 to dead, and that's not a healthy spot. So it was a perfect recipe. It had all the foundational pieces. It's not like we had to go do a brand repair. That wasn't it. It was held as a prestigious brand, but we just had to make it more relevant to a younger group. And we did that both through the product mix as well as through the associated stories that told those product stories.

Cole Heilborn (00:25):

Welcome to the Backcountry Marketing Podcast. I'm your host Cole Heilborn. On this podcast, you'll hear from leaders in the outdoor marketing industry discuss the gritty details of their work, as well as the latest challenges and lessons that are learning along the way. If you want to hone your craft and become a stronger marketer, then this podcast is for you. This podcast is produced by Portside Productions, an outdoor film production company based in the Pacific Northwest. If you work at a brand or agency in the outdoor industry that needs help bringing in video project to life, head over to portside pro.com and send us an email we'd love to help.

Cole Heilborn (00:58):

Welcome to the Backcountry Marketing podcast from Portside Productions. Today I'm sitting down with Luke Thorkildsen. He is the COO at Weatherby. Luke, welcome to the show.

Luke Thorkildsen (01:07):

Hey Cole, thanks for having me, man. I'm excited.

Cole Heilborn (01:09):

Yeah, thanks for joining. We're going to be diving into a fun conversation today. We're going to be diving into the Weatherbee brand and dissecting, you guys have been telling stories since 1945, ever since the inception of the company, and as of lately, we've been having a lot of conversations with folks all about the world of storytelling and media and brand, and what a better person to talk to than you, Luke representing the Weatherby Company. So welcome to the show.

Luke Thorkildsen (01:41):

Yeah, thanks, Cole. I'm excited and we're proud of our 80 years of heritage and telling stories, and it's a big part of how we got to where we are, so I'm pumped to share it.

Cole Heilborn (01:54):

So if I had to generalize, I feel like there's, if someone says the word story, I get two reactions. Either one, people are excited and ecstatic, other people cringe slightly, and I have yet to really figure out exactly why. If you, out of those two options that I'm giving you, when I talk about the word storytelling, what are you?

Luke Thorkildsen (02:17):

Oh man, I get excited. I think we live in still a storytelling generation as far as marketing goes, and I think some of the best storytellers win

Cole Heilborn (02:29):

Do you have any idea why people might cringe? Have you ever experienced that yourself? If you're talking to people in the marketing department?

Luke Thorkildsen (02:35):

Yeah, I mean, this is an overused, probably cliche term at this point from Gary V, but marketers ruin everything. We find something that works and then we just do it until it doesn't work anymore. But I think the story medium has changed over the years from TV to social, to blogs to whatever. But I think at the core, people still want to belong to a story they want to associate with, and I think certain mediums might get played out, but at the end of the day, for as go back as far in history as you want to go, a story that you can associate with is just powerful.

Cole Heilborn (03:26):

Well, I want to dive deeper there, but let's pause really quick. Lu, I'd love if you could kind of give a quick background on how you ended up as a CEO at COO at Weatherby, and I guess share some of your job responsibilities. You also oversee a lot of the marketing work that gets done, which seems slightly odd for a COO title.

Luke Thorkildsen (03:46):

Yeah, it's kind of a unique role, I would say. It's not your typical COO role. My background's not really your typical COO background. That's usually more production, manufacturing, or finance. My background has been in product development almost primarily early part of my career. I was in building materials and tools, and then one to find a way however I could to get into the outdoor industry and came to Weatherby as VP of sales, marketing and product development. And I guess I did a good or bad enough job that Adam Weatherby decided it'd be a good idea for me to tackle manufacturing production and supply chain here as well. So I do wear a lot of hats and it's really fun because it's not a typical COO role, but to be able to see how everything meshes together has been really fun.

Cole Heilborn (04:48):

Yeah, tell me more about that. What does that role look like and how are you able to see all of these pieces fitting together? Because you're right, I think a lot of times the storytelling or the campaign that gets created once the product has been developed is one of almost the very last things to happen, and you get to see all of that coming together. What's unique? What do you see that's unique that maybe isn't noticed?

Luke Thorkildsen (05:17):

There's a lot of reasons to launch or make a new product. Most of the time it's because that product is the right product for the market. That's the goal. But having a little bit more of an operations focus on some of those new products, it's a unique lens where we look at what our core competencies are, and it's different at every single company. What are you truly good at? I kind of use that lens to filter through what we could do and then ultimately what we end up doing. And so you'll see since 2019, basically as we completed our move out of California and into Wyoming, our product line has changed substantially, really focused on ultra lightweight products, a lot more new and innovative products, and we've just been building products that our team here is good at making. With some exceptions. Sometimes we'll try to stretch ourselves like, Hey, we don't do this, but we would like to do it.

(06:30):

So let's build that core competency in the background with engineering and manufacturing, know-how, and then we'll launch a product. The story part actually comes pretty natural because we're in Wyoming. We're a place we make hunting products and a place where a lot of people long to hunt. So the story part goes pretty darn easy, and at the end of the day, it's products that we want to see come to life and just get to see the whole thing come. Full circle has been, it's the hardest I've ever worked, but it's the most fun I've ever had working.

Cole Heilborn (07:07):

So when you came to Weatherby with your previous roles and experience, was the perception of storytelling or what Weatherby was doing at the time, was that unique? Was that a fresh idea for you, or have you always been kind of acclimated to this type of storytelling?

Luke Thorkildsen (07:24):

I was familiar with stories in the past, big fan of storytelling in marketing. I kind of labeled myself a marketer, and as a marketer, you look for unique opportunities. For example, if somebody today was going to go and be the head of marketing at Yeti, that's tough job. They have told that story. They're on a good path. Your ability to impact that brand and that story is going to be a huge challenge, right, more so than what they've already done. Well, if you rewind to when I joined Weatherbee back in 2018, our product mix was completely different than it is today. And admittedly Weatherby said, Hey, our product has kind of become your grandpa's product. They wanted to get to a point where they knew they had this rich heritage, but they hadn't made it relevant necessarily to this younger crowd of hunters. So I came to a company that I saw had tremendous brand prestige that existed, like people held Weatherby High, but had maybe lost their way just a little bit as far as who their target customer was.

(08:46):

And so many people disassociated, whether it be with a specific Mark v Deluxe like your grandpa's gun. And we joked for a while, our average customer age is 65 to dead, and that's not a healthy spot. So it was a perfect recipe. It had all the foundational pieces. It's not like we had to go do a brand repair, like, oh, people just think that Weatherby is a terrible brand that wasn't, it was held as a prestigious brand, but we just had to make it more relevant to a younger group. And we did that both through the product mix as well as through the associated stories that told those product stories.

Cole Heilborn (09:29):

Interesting. So I mean, storytelling is a tool and we can kind of get wrapped up in all of the fun elements and being out in the woods and finding great stories and figuring out creative ways to tell them. But at the end of the day, in the Marketer's Toolbox, it is just another tool. As you're talking about this problem that Weatherby was facing of taking the brand from being an older demographic to making it more relevant, why was storytelling the tool that you landed on out of all the things you could have chosen?

Luke Thorkildsen (10:03):

Well, part of it's because we have a great story to tell. We're a unique spot in the industry where we are still family owned, family operated. Adam Weatherby is third generation owner operator, and that's a little bit unique in our space. And as people, everybody has a different story to tell, but this is our story, so I don't want to sound negative towards anybody else's story. That's not what I mean. This is just what our story is. So there has been an influx over the years for American manufacturing. People are passionate about that. We do that for family owned small businesses. We joke, are we a big small business or a small big business? We still don't know. But the one thing that's unique is Adam Weatherby, our owner operator who's out on a hunt right now, DIY. He is passionate about it and he's a fantastic communicator. Not to belittle him in any way, but he's kind of like our mascot. He's a whole lot more than that, but in a lot of ways he's our mascot and he himself is a good storyteller, and we're like, okay, we've got this story. You're good at storytelling.

(11:28):

Let's put stories out there and formats that people will like to digest in this modern time and throw it out there. And the response overall has been fantastic.

Cole Heilborn (11:42):

Yeah. Can you shed light into what stories are you sharing? You guys have a YouTube channel, you've got a podcast. What are the other things that you're producing?

Luke Thorkildsen (11:52):

So social as well, and we do a little storytelling through our email, but usually email marketing is just to push you to go to one of the other mediums. But for instance, in our YouTube channel, we try to do more than just hunt videos. Anybody could put a hunt video on, that's true. But we try to do stuff that's just maybe a level deeper. I was really fortunate to go with Adam and Brenda to Africa earlier this year, and it was a really interesting trip. Typically what you'd see from a gun company would just be an African safari where you shoot a bunch of stuff, and that was cool. The story we attempted to tell was Adam was a full-time pastor for 14 years before coming back to the family business. So our trip was half hunt, half mission trip, and so we told that story.

(12:48):

We showed the hunt aspect, we processed meat, we took that meat, gave it to a local village. Adam and Brenda did some training with some local pastors and missionaries, and that's the story that we told. There's not really another firearms company out there that's going to be that vulnerable. And the response that you see on comments, these are not exactly verbatim, but just comments like, man, I liked Weatherby before, but now I love Weatherby. I'll never buy another gun because of what you guys are doing. It's not just a product for you guys, and that's apparent in the video. You're passionate about it, but there's a whole nother side to the story that goes beyond just pure firearms and giving people a peek behind the curtain, if you will. I mean, that's a bigger part of our story than just guns.

Cole Heilborn (13:46):

So yeah, continue to elaborate. How many films have you produced? You're on your hundredth episode of the podcast. I mean, you've been doing this for quite some time

Luke Thorkildsen (13:55):

Now. Yeah, we have. I would say that on any given year, we probably put out five-ish more major films. That's 30 to 40 minutes. That's usually a pretty major hunt, a sheep hunt, a big elk hunt, a big deer hunt, whatever. And then on top of that, we'll do a ton of smaller things that sometimes we call 'em Weatherby hunts, that they're a little more lighthearted, but we put out, I would venture to say we put out more content than any other company that's in our space, and again, that's just trying to give people a good feel for our story and just humble brag on our team here. But that's a hundred percent done. We do it all right here. That Africa film, I actually shot and edited the whole thing as COO, which is a terrible use of a C'S time. It's just the way it worked out.

Cole Heilborn (14:56):

Well, you're a multi-talented person. Fun. You also host the podcast, right?

Luke Thorkildsen (14:59):

I do, I do, and it's a lot of fun. Tyler, our marketing manager does a lot on the podcast as well, but yeah, I'm the primary host. It's a lot of fun.

Cole Heilborn (15:10):

So you joined the company in 2018, and you were saying that was kind of when you joined, you identified this problem you guys were trying to solve, making the brand more relevant.

Luke Thorkildsen (15:19):

That wasn't just me that identified it, but it was part of a known problem that needed to be addressed. Yeah.

Cole Heilborn (15:25):

So since 2018, is there a correlation between the amount of content that you're producing and that date? Has that graph just grown exponentially?

Luke Thorkildsen (15:37):

Oh, for sure it has. Yeah. So in 2018, there was a move out of California. Basically it was announced at Shot Show or January of 2018. Hey, this California company's been there for, at the time, 74 years is moving to Wyoming. That was kind of our story for that time period as we tried to set up shop, we have in California, there's 75 employees, 18 made the move to Wyoming, so

(16:11):

2,500 applicants for 60 some odd jobs. At the time, that was kind of the story we were telling like, Hey, we're changing. We're getting out of California, we're going to Wyoming, and things are about to look different. So in the midst of that move, we realized, hey, we got to change some things. We need a more relevant product mix. And we launched our back country rifle. So in basically fall of 2019, with the launch of that, we launched a new cartridge because cartridge for cartridge Weatherby is known for the superior ballistics we're typically the fastest traveling projectile cartridge for cartridge. And so we took that opportunity to, that was a big shift in our story. It was, okay, the move's done, but now we're making this western focused, mountain hunting focused ultra lightweight. So we've launched a new cartridge with a new lightweight rifle, and we started telling some hunting stories that went along with that new rifle and cartridge, and right away sales just skyrocketed and we had people reaching out to us.

(17:25):

That's the combination that hasn't existed, and it helped to springboard us. We started to partner with some different companies or different influencers, if you will, that help to give us a younger demographic. The hush guys that we started working with prior to me joining, that was the first attempt to get to a younger demo, but shortly after I joined, we partnered with Meat Eater. They're huge in this space, and that was probably the best, most efficient and single largest marketing deal I have ever been a part of. And that combined with having the right product, the right internal story, and now we have external people helping to tell our story was just this perfect storm to really turn the needle around for us. And so we went from 2018 was just basically the move 2019 new product and then 2020 was the world fell apart and it was a good time for the firearms business, but luckily, we're already on a really good trajectory and now fast forward to 2024, we're over double the size of the company that we were when we made the move, which is a lot for 80-year-old business. We have more than double the amount of people. We're about 140 where we moved with 70, 75, and it's been a lot of fun. And so we've continued down that path of the products that support the story that we're not just trying to tell, but the story that we live,

Cole Heilborn (19:05):

Was that missing before?

Luke Thorkildsen (19:08):

No. I mean, yes, but not from a missing authenticity. It was, I think missing from geography. You can't run a gun business in California today. It's just not possible from political factors, mostly political factors, but there was so much against it there. It was hard to retain employees. Real estate was colossally expensive. Taxes were really expensive. So there was a lot of strikes against there. Then the move to Wyoming was just kind of an authentic thing, but you rewind to when Roy Weatherby started the company, he was like, insurance guy out of Kansas. He moved to California in the golden age of California where you went for opportunity. That was the wild West, right? That's where there wasn't this stigma around guns back then. So he moved there for opportunity. Our move to Wyoming was synonymous with his move to California back then, and it's been the one of the best things that's ever happened to Weatherby.

Cole Heilborn (20:19):

So in that time, what's changed with your demographic? Have you seen that sliding towards a much younger audience?

Luke Thorkildsen (20:25):

Oh yeah. Yeah. I mean with Google Analytics and other things, you have a pretty good pulse. Our demos substantially. It's much, much, much healthier. We don't ignore those classic guns that your grandpa would've loved, but we do that at the same time as having some of newer products, carbon fiber, titanium, newer, lighter, better materials, and the demographics come way down.

Cole Heilborn (21:02):

So as I'm listening to you chat, there's a couple of things I'm making note of that are kind of contributing to this change that you've seen. So getting the right product in place, having the right internal story, having the right external partners. In this case it was meat eater and then maybe last, but it's like it's actually telling the story and getting these stories out there into the wild. Out of those four things, is there one, are they all equally pulling the same amount of weight in terms of bringing your audience demographic younger in age, or was there one that was kind of the

Luke Thorkildsen (21:36):

Standout? I think getting the product mixed right was probably paramount because if we had done everything else without the right products, it wouldn't have been as authentic after that, probably somewhat equal waiting. It's really powerful to have somebody else help tell your story. It's potentially, it's validating, right? If I tell you that I'm awesome, well you'll think maybe I'm awesome, but maybe a little conceited, but if somebody else tells you that I'm awesome, then you'll be like, oh man, maybe he's awesome.

Cole Heilborn (22:16):

Yeah. Tell me more about both, right? Tell me more about that partnership with Meat Eater. What did that look like? I'm curious if you can speak to, I dunno, some of the deliverables or how you guys went about working together to

Luke Thorkildsen (22:31):

Work towards this goal. Yeah, they went through a phenomenal growth period while we were working with them and at the time they had a podcast and a Netflix show, and that was pretty much it. There wasn't a ton of other things like they have today. Today they've got multiple shows, tons of personalities, but back then it was Steve and Giannis and a podcast and a Netflix series. So that's really what it encompassed was product integration into the Netflix series as well as integration into the podcast. And basically they would help tell the story in conjunction. We did a meat eater version of our Weatherby Vanguard. They helped to promote that, and that was probably the most successful Vanguard rifle maybe ever, because they got behind it and they told that story. And so it was really cool. Another thing that was interesting about that rifle and that partnership, instead of making that rifle available everywhere, which you want to do, but then it creates challenges for a partner like me Eater that has a really wide audience, if they'd say, Hey, go find that gun at your local gun shop. Well, there's no way to ensure that that local gun shop's going to have that rifle. So we went to Sportsman's Warehouse and just said, Hey, exclusive partner, we want me Eater to be able to say, go to Sportsman's Warehouse and you can find it there. And that's the story they told. Sportsman's got on board, it simplified things and it was very effective. It's very effective. It worked great.

Cole Heilborn (24:28):

So along the way though, you guys decided that, hey, we need to start producing more of our own content and building out more of our own media. What's the word I'm looking for? Options. I guess where did that inspiration come from and can you kind of walk me through how that got started and then I guess how you made it happen? Because talking about running all this internally, what was the process to do that?

Luke Thorkildsen (24:56):

Well, part of it, I wish I could say that was a fresh novel idea, but Roy Wetherby started doing that. He would take back when he was testing cartridges, he would take a Dictaphone, a camera and he would document everything he did in Africa, and he would just go to a game rich environment and he would make some outlandish claims. Back then in marketing that was okay that we probably wouldn't do today. You hit an animal anywhere with this cartridge is going to die, you hit 'em in the foot kind of thing. It's like that might not be a hundred percent true, but it was a bold statement and people got behind it. Different era. But in this more modern era, we wanted to continue to tell our stories and we do so. But yeah, we went from using an agency basically to just the personality of our business and agencies are phenomenal.

(25:53):

We wanted to be able to keep everything if possible, just the way we're a tight family. And if I was worried about, if we went outside of that, then we would lose a little in the translation. And I think it takes big shoulders to be able to do that. I think a lot of people go to an agency and if something doesn't work out the way that exactly they want it to, then they can blame. Somebody else can't do that. If you make it yourself, you got to own it. You got to own it fully. So you had to find people that were good with that. And not everybody is, there's a level of responsibility that even on that Africa film that I filmed in editor, I was nervous when you go to upload that thing like, man, it's vulnerable. You can't hide behind anything. So anyway,

Cole Heilborn (26:44):

It does take courage to put your work out there into the world.

Luke Thorkildsen (26:46):

It does, yeah. Anyway, so we just found a phenomenal team of kind of can do multi-talented. We have a lot of Swiss Army knives or our video guy can do more than video. Our social media guy can do more than social media, so on and so forth. So we support each other. We're a small team. Effectively. I built an agency that just works for us and it, it's been an absolute blast. It's been an absolute blast. How many people are on the team? Six for just pure marketing is six.

Cole Heilborn (27:24):

Gotcha. And what have been some of the biggest lessons you've learned bringing content creation in house?

Luke Thorkildsen (27:32):

Oh man, that is a great question. There's a ton. The biggest one really is that you don't get it right every time. You're like, man, this one is going to be a home run. You feel so good about it and it might just fall flat and maybe the content was great, but maybe you didn't put it out in the right space, or maybe you didn't put it out at the right time. We've learned a lot over the years that timing is probably as important as anything else, if not more important. If you launch a film about elk in February, it's not going to do great. But if you launch the exact same time or exact same film in September, as people get pumped for elk hunting, it'll do a million times better, a million times better. So sometimes it's hard to bank that content, which is essentially what we do now. We film this time of the year of this fall and then launch next fall, which takes a ton of planning because it's hard to know exactly what products we're going to launch next year, but that's what we're trying to get content with this year.

Cole Heilborn (28:47):

I see. So you guys are out right now out in the field shooting while it's hunting season, and then are you just working on post-production for spring and summer?

Luke Thorkildsen (28:56):

So we capture as much as possible this time of year, and then in the slower hunting time of year, that's when everything's going through post. And then we'll do some fill in type stuff like a New Zealand or Africa or something that is less time sensitive to fill in some of those slower months. But if you play your cards, we do shotguns in addition to rifles. So there's kind of a season for everything every month of the year, and you just got to get in the right cadence of it.

Cole Heilborn (29:28):

Maybe travel a little bit too.

Luke Thorkildsen (29:30):

Yeah, Southern hemisphere's not so bad.

Cole Heilborn (29:35):

So I want to talk a little more about YouTube in particular, because browsing your YouTube channel, it's quite impressive the amount of effort that's represented there. Thanks. Podcasts and films. You've shared a little bit about them. YouTube always, it seems like a channel with immense opportunity at the same time. It's really difficult for brands to figure out how to do it well. What have you learned about YouTube specifically, and also what sort of impact have you seen on the business, if any, purely from the YouTube

Luke Thorkildsen (30:08):

Platform? Yeah. Well, one thing's unique as a gun company and the eyes of Google, we're ad people, so we have to be careful what we put out there. You'll never see a full call to action like, Hey, go buy this gun on YouTube. We don't do it. That used to be really frustrating. In hindsight now, it's very freeing. We don't try to monetize, we can't monetize our YouTube channel, our YouTube subscribers. So for us, it's purely an informational and story outlet medium. So that's kind of like number one is instead of a full, Hey, go check this thing out, go buy it. That video will get yanked quick or flagged, whatever. So what a lot of people do on YouTube is exactly that, and it's hard to build followers that way because as soon as you ask for something, people's like, oh man, it's tough.

(31:15):

If you look at what the content most people like to ingest, it's more entertainment. So we do ride the line, we'll do product feature videos and whatnot. I mean, kind of necessary as a company in 2024, but most of our content we try to make very intriguing with no call to action, it's informational, but we try to make it entertaining. And yeah, that's really our strategic focus, which is almost what we're pigeonholed into. And like I said, we had to get okay with that, and it's one of the most powerful things. I am not a big deal by any stretch of the imagination, but sometimes I'm in the airport now, Hey, you're the Weatherby podcast guy. I'm like, yeah. I'm like, man, I love that thing. We watch it all the time. I'm like, cool. That's awesome.

Cole Heilborn (32:12):

It's pretty neat,

Luke Thorkildsen (32:13):

Pretty neat.

Cole Heilborn (32:14):

So you mentioned that it was freeing to have restrictions placed on your company. Is that because you felt like you needed to try and sell something with every video, and then when you realized you couldn't do that, it forced you to get creative or redefine what success meant?

Luke Thorkildsen (32:33):

Yeah, I mean, if you think about it, at the end of the day, marketing or marketers, an expense on a line item, a budget somewhere. So we as marketers do our best to tie an ROI to something, right? There's a ton of guys that make a living off of YouTube monetization. There's a ton of companies that put out content to drive traffic back to somewhere else so that they can convert a customer and monetize. We effectively cannot do that, and so it forced us to look at it under a different lens. Okay, do we want to keep telling our story? Yes. Do we want to tell a big portion of our story of our story ourself? Yes. Where is most people consuming that content? It's YouTube. There's other places, there's outdoor tv. We're not going to go produce a full on TV show. That would be harder. So for us, YouTube was the right medium. We still get great metrics, but yeah, it was freeing and that okay, we're, we're not promoting our business, we're not promoting our products. We are, but kind of in a covert way, not an overt way. And yeah, it is been freeing in that way. Yeah.

Cole Heilborn (34:08):

I don't want to imply by this question that promoting your business or having a call to action is a bad thing, but do you feel like the lack of promotion or the lack of call to actions, has that increased the integrity of the brand on these platforms?

Luke Thorkildsen (34:25):

Oh man, I haven't thought about that directly. I've given away some of my marketing inspirations, but Gary Vayner truck said that jab jab, right? Hook or jab, jab, jab,

Cole Heilborn (34:39):

Right hook. I think it's three jabs.

Luke Thorkildsen (34:40):

Yeah. Yeah, three jabs. Well, we don't really ever get to do a right hook. So it's all jabs. Most people don't like directly being marketed to, which is a challenge. And that's why I said earlier, marketers ruin everything. And as soon as people pick up on, oh, they're trying to hook me, the shield goes up, we do want people to know about our products. We want to tell 'em the story that we're telling, but that's it. It's a story. And it's easier to digest that story than if at the very end it was like, Hey, go buy this now. I think you lose some of the authenticity there.

Cole Heilborn (35:22):

So you also bring up an interesting point though, the expense sheet and justifying the investment and the cost of, I mean, you've got six people on a team, let's say. If they're only doing this sort of content creation, that's a lot of overhead. I'm sure they do other to contribute in many other ways. But for the sake of this question, if you can't deliver those right hooks, which often justify the expense of the storytelling pieces or the fun videos that brands put on YouTube, how do you justify it? How does that work internally?

Luke Thorkildsen (35:58):

Excellent question. We can't justify or we can't prove the right hooks on YouTube and we can't do it on social media, but there's a lot of other places where you can still do a more definitive ask. So a lot of our marketing team does support the day-to-Day, whether that's from a packaging or product manual perspective. Our website, we don't outsource anything on our marketing team. So it is a hundred percent done and not everything in marketing is an expense. Most things are, but we do a ton of work for shows. We do a lot of shows every year from Shot Show to, we don't actually exhibit at Shot Show, but we still attend from SCI to Ducks Unlimited. Every NGO pretty much has their own show, which we activate at and are supporters of. So that's a pretty heavy lift on the marketing team and expense with little ROI as shows.

(37:03):

But really the way we justify it is that we understand the importance of getting our story out there, and I think at the end of the day, nobody's going to tell it as well as we're going to tell it. We want other people to tell our story as well. But if we are not telling our story, if you can't win in your own backyard, you can't win anywhere. If we don't believe our own story, nobody else is going to. So we're believers in our story. We think we've got a unique thing we want to tell people about it, and although we can't tie an immediate ROI to it, the proof's in the pudding and it's kind of been working. So that's a hard question to answer. I'm not sure I did anything but Dodge, but it's a great question.

Cole Heilborn (37:45):

Well, I think that's the problem, though. It is such a hard thing to quantify, and I don't know that anyone can directly correlate, I did this and this equals this sort of an outcome.

Cole Heilborn (37:59):

Yeah,

Cole Heilborn (38:00):

I mean, I hear from people they can, you can do brand studies and look year over year and see based on research how the brand is growing or changing, but beyond that, it's very difficult.

Luke Thorkildsen (38:13):

It is difficult. I will say one of the things that I have learned is even with bigger marketing partnerships, if at all possible, find a way to build in even a backdoor, ROI with meat eater, it was the rifle that we did together. So it wasn't just them telling the story, they were incentivized essentially to move that product. So the more they talked about it and the more they sold, the more money they made. I can't tie my side hustle. I'm wearing a hat is Moto Coffee. I know how much it costs me to acquire a customer. I can run a certain amount of Facebook ad dollars and I'm going to get a percentage of a customer based on every dollar spent. We can't do any of that with Weatherby. So tying an immediate ROI back creates the situation where you just have to get creative with almost every program that you put together. And if you boil it down, usually there's a way you can tie, maybe it's not a monetary ROI, but it could be just a measurable efficacy on at least exposure. I try to do that with everything that we do. And like I said, it might not be a dollar for dollar thing that we can measure, but at least we can measure the reach in some way when we're kind of blinded by metrics.

Cole Heilborn (39:53):

So

Luke Thorkildsen (39:54):

Yeah.

Cole Heilborn (39:58):

If storytelling is a tool, as we've been kind of talking about it, what problems can storytelling solve? If you just had to lay out any problems or any problems that businesses face, what are appropriate problems that storytelling might be a solution for?

Luke Thorkildsen (40:15):

That's another great question. I think I could talk in circles about this, but I think if I had to boil it down to one word, it's probably authenticity, which isn't necessarily a problem, but a lack of authenticity is a problem. So at least for Weatherby, I think that the authenticity that we have that Adam Weatherby has as a passionate user owner operator, that our whole team hold that is portrayed through our stories and through our content in a way that you don't get that connection to a lot of our competitors brands, like they have some great products, but not as a whole. Most of our competitors don't tell us the kind of stories that we tell, and there's not that emotional connection to the brand that we have. And yeah, I think that's really special about what we do. And yeah, authenticity.

Cole Heilborn (41:29):

Why is that something that's unique to Weatherbee amidst all the other hunting or other rifle firearm companies out there?

Luke Thorkildsen (41:38):

Well, if you rewind again, back to Roy Wether Bee's Time, there was a handful of rifle companies, not a ton of consumer options today, man, there's a lot of options. There's a sea of options, and it does not just guns pickup. How many different brands of cheddar cheese are there? I mean, even in commodities now, the market has gotten so big. You got to give people a reason to connect, and not everybody does. Some people are just going to buy on price, and that's okay. We compete on price in some ways too, but really we want people to believe in what we believe in. And we do that by sharing our story. And I think that when you make that emotional connection, if everything else is even somewhat close to equal, I think we'll win in the end.

Cole Heilborn (42:35):

Tell me a little bit about the podcast. You're in your podcast studio right now. I see the name of the show Hanging Behind You on our Mark. You're on your hundredth episode, or you've published your hundredth episode. And again, podcasting seems like it's such a great opportunity for brands, but similar to YouTube, it's full of a lot of pitfalls and problems along the way to make it successful. I'm assuming it's been a success if you're still going at it. What has led to that success?

Luke Thorkildsen (43:07):

I think it's been a similar take to how we've tackled YouTube. We will do a new products announcement, but that's 20% at max of our overall podcast. Like, Hey, there's a new thing we're pumped to tell you about, and we just break it down. Adam Weatherby is on frequently. We will give general business updates on there. Occasionally. It's a peek behind the curtain that you don't get from most manufacturers to have a feel for what's actually happening there. We feature some employees, our gunsmiths, our engineers sales team. We do a lot of hunt features where if somebody in the office goes on a cool hunt or we know somebody or want to know somebody that did a really cool thing, we have a lot of guests come in. We do a lot of informational things as well. That's not weather be related at all. Did a podcast about invasive grasses has really, at the end of the day, it does tie in because we're stewards, we're stewards of conservation, and invasive grasses is one of the biggest threats to the landscape and basically deer and mule deer habitat.

(44:20):

So we want to make sure that generations down the road, there's a market for hunting and opportunity for hunting. That's a market for our product. So it's all, we're not going to go do a podcast on how to change your oil. That wouldn't relate necessarily, but we try to keep it relevant stuff that people are interested in. And when we're in a cool place in shared in Wyoming, we get a lot of guests that come through town and like, Hey, you want to record a quick podcast? We try to target 30 to 45 minutes for our pod. They're a little shorter, a little more digestible. Some of 'em are 20 minutes. I think our longest one's probably close to two hours, just depends on what the content is. But we try to keep 'em short and digestible, and that's been the recipe we've gone after. It's worked. It's worked really well.

Cole Heilborn (45:09):

Do you feel like podcasts are a missed opportunity that many brands are sleeping on? Or would you encourage brands to dive into the podcast Rabbit Hole?

Luke Thorkildsen (45:21):

That's a great question. You probably could speak well to this. I think just on YouTube, it takes some courage to do it. I think most of our podcast episodes are good. Some probably aren't good. Early on, we had some production quality issues. Getting good audio is hard. That matters more than anything else if you can't get good audio. We had some levels issue where one guest would be higher than another. We just didn't mix them. We fixed all that now. But it's hard. But I think it depends on the company. If a company has the competence in a person or a group of people to host a podcast, not every company is going to even be able to get to that point in the conversation. But if you look in our space, like Vortex has done a phenomenal job with their podcast. Mark Boardman did a really good job. He's funny, he's relatable, they talk about a variety of things, but the company gave him freedom to kind of just own it. I think a lot of companies are afraid to do that, and if you're remotely afraid, you should not do a podcast.

Cole Heilborn (46:43):

It seems like one of the best benefits from a branded podcast is that it gives the brand, the films and content and ambassadors and athletes that brands work with all contribute to the personality of a brand and making it feel more human. But it seems like a podcast is one of the most intimate, deepest ways to It's vulnerable.

Luke Thorkildsen (47:08):

Yeah.

Cole Heilborn (47:08):

Yeah.

Luke Thorkildsen (47:09):

I mean, they're not scripted. We leave stories alone. Adam Weatherby will go on this epic hunt. I will, it kills me. I won't talk to him about the hunt at all because I want to be finding out about it for the first time when we do a podcast about it. And it's hard. It's hard. There's, there's probably companies that don't have people that are necessarily willing and able to do it, but it is a challenge. But the reward is, as you said, you get this peek behind the curtain, a personality of an employee or of a group of employees that you're not going to get in any other way. You can edit a podcast, but at the end of the day, you can't edit a conversation like somebody might goof up and say something, oh, we got to cut that out. But the conversation's really unmolested,

Cole Heilborn (48:08):

And it seems like, I feel like the foundation that a podcast can give a brand, gives it the potential to really become a media company, become an entertainment company. It gives them the position, it gives them the trust with their audience to do that down the road. I feel like that's one of its greatest strengths, and I don't know. I haven't seen that done a whole lot. I'm curious to hear your thoughts on that idea.

Luke Thorkildsen (48:35):

Yeah, we've talked about is there a way you can monetize your podcast or our podcast, and at the end of the day, we were like, we don't really want to do that. I don't want to go look for sponsors compared to Rogan and others. Like a manufacturer's podcast at the end of the day is small potatoes, but you get your super fans and you make sure you keep them. You give 'em a reason to stay. I think. I can't put a dollar figure on that, but it's really valuable.

Cole Heilborn (49:15):

Interesting. Well, Luke, it's been fun to get a little peek behind the scenes. I guess we're kind of running out of time, but one of my last questions for you would be, if you had to look beyond just the hunt world and look at the general outdoor industry, what's your prediction for where this world of media and storytelling is going in the outdoors?

Luke Thorkildsen (49:42):

Wow, that's a great question. I think there's some social media questions that we still don't know the answer to. It's still a little bit the wild west, right? I think we're going to see continued growth in the overall outdoor industry and people figuring out how to more monetize social media. If you look at your feed today from what it was five, six years ago, you got so many more ads. I think that stories are still going to work for a long time. I think people are probably going to need to figure out how to tell their story.

Cole Heilborn (50:20):

Well, Luke, thank you for taking the time to chat and share some of your insights with us. Folks want to follow along with you or with Weatherby, where can they find you?

Luke Thorkildsen (50:29):

Yeah, Weatherby, you can find our YouTube channel. Weatherby Inc. On social media is the same for me personally. I'm just at Luke Torque on Instagram and love to have you follow along. And Cole, I appreciate the opportunity to talk and share a little of what I've learned over the last couple of months.

Cole Heilborn (50:53):

And it's all going to change in the next few months too, I'm sure.

Luke Thorkildsen (50:55):

That's right. That's right.

Cole Heilborn (50:58):

Alright, Luke, have a great rest of your day. Thanks man. Bye.

Cole Heilborn (51:01):

Thank you for listening to this episode of the Backcountry Marketing Podcast. Please share it with a friend or leave us a review on Apple.

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