INTRO:
You're listening to CX Confessions, brought to you by Khoros. In each episode, we’ll share the customer experience stories and insights you need — straight from the sharpest minds in CX — to better connect with your customers and create customers for life. Let's start the show.
KATHERINE CALVERT:
Hello, hello. How's everybody doing? Welcome back to CX Confessions. I am Katherine Calvert, CMO of Khoros, one of your favorite hosts. I’m joined, as always, by my inimitable partner, Mr. Spike Jones. Hi, Spike.
SPIKE JONES:
Hello. That's a great word. I'll have to look that one up, but thanks, good to be here. Thanks for, you know, letting me come back each time.
KATHERINE CALVERT:
Well, thanks for being the GM of our Strat Services team and being my partner in crime.
We have another great conversation lined up today. I am very excited to introduce our special guest. We've talked to CMOs. We've talked to CCOs. We've talked to heads of digital experience.
Today our guest has worn all of those hats and more. It is my pleasure to introduce Mr. Jonathan Becker. Jonathan is president of Sharks Sports and Entertainment. So that's the parent organization for the San Jose Sharks, the Barracudas, the Sharks ice facility, and the Shark Foundation. He came to the Sharks from a long career in technology.
So Jonathan was, he spent a decade, I should say, at SAP in a variety of roles, including Chief Marketing Officer and Chief Digital Officer. He's also been a CEO three times over. He's on the board of multiple companies. He is a blogger and then a frequent podcast guest. So it is a privilege to have Mr. Jonathan Becker join us today. Hey!
JONATHAN BECHER:
Hey Katherine, good to see you, listen to you. Hey Spike as well, and thanks for the over-the-top introduction. You should give me a lower bar, because then I could meet the standards of that introduction.
KATHERINE CALVERT:
I'm just angling for tickets, just angling for tickets. I mean that has got to be hard, right. You're probably always wondering that. And so I'm going to dive right in. Like, when you signed on as president it was about three years ago. San Jose Sharks — I'm from California, that is a massive presence. You don't always think about ice hockey in California, and the Sharks have been a transformative piece of our Bay Area culture here. They have such a fervent community, a real like brand ethos, right.
And so you know these conversations we have on CX confessions are around creating customer experiences, creating connection and authenticity. Nowhere is that more critical than in the sports industry.
So when you joined, what was most important for you to think about and learn about your fan base?
JONATHAN BECHER:
Together I spent most of my career as a B2B person and focused on marking. I was really excited to join a consumer brand. Frankly, even a passion brand. Look, you know, I've been a tech marketer a lot and no one has ever tattooed the logo of my brand on their skin or spends much time dressing up and stuff like that, and so you know, joining an organization with that kind of passionate following, I knew it was going to be different, something I was very excited about, and in fact, the brand ethos when I joined, and so the touchstone behind all the marketing we did in the activation literally was Sharks for Life. I mean that was the phrase, which resonates with us, because we always talk about “customers for life” as marketers, right.
And in fact maybe the highlight of my first couple of months is we made the playoffs, as we almost always do, although not this year, and we gave out three hundred, well we announced we were going to give out three hundred free, real tattoos at local Tattoo shop, parlor, in San Jose to fans who showed up.
KATHERINE CALVERT:
Real tattoos?
JONATHAN BECHER:
Real tattoos.
KATHERINE CALVERT:
Not like fun, rub-ons?
JONATHAN BECHER:
No. Or not henna ink tattoos that wear off in a week. Actual customers for life, Sharks for Life, real tattoos. And I thought, what a nice little idea right, and three hundred, right, we announced. More than a thousand people showed up to get these tattoos, some of them camping out overnight, so that they could say that they were first in line and put on their social media account they were doing this, and we were like, wow, overwhelmed.
We ultimately ended up, I think, putting out five hundred and fifty or so tattoos, but I was like, see, look at this brand! Look how passionate. This is a wonderful thing.
KATHERINE CALVERT:
Exactly. That's your five hundred and fifty die-hards. And then you're sort of getting into the job, and you start thinking about the rest of the opportunity for the Sharks.
JONATHAN BECHER:
Well, that was my wake up moment, I think, about, uh oh, maybe this passion and customer for life isn’t the best thing necessarily, which is a funny thing for a marketer to think about, particularly one that comes from tech, because that summer we do what I've often done, and I'm assuming most of us have done, which is we started surveying our customers and asking questions, and one of the things that came up is some of our more casual fans said, you know, that was too over-the-top. Seeing all those images of tattoos — I'm not ready to tattoo my body. I'm not ready to even say I'm a customer for life. I like you guys.
KATHERINE CALVERT:
Maybe those aren't my people.
JONATHAN BECHER:
Exactly right. Maybe that's not my people. Maybe I'm not in that tribe. Maybe you don't want me around. And that was a really branding wake up call for us, and so we pivoted, even though this has been really successful.
You mentioned, Katherine, almost transformative. I mean we live in a land with no ice, so we actually shut down Sharks for Life and we switched our brand to be Teal Together to inclusively say, there's room for everyone in the Sharks universe. We want to unify everybody that cares about us, regardless of who they are, under teal. I mean teal is not a regular color. You don't see many brands use teal, right. They're almost always red or blue. Maybe a few people throw in yellow to be a little bit different, but teal is unusual, so we'll mark that as the thing that unifies us and gives room for people.
In fact, what we said is we'll even make that the hallmark of our diversity, inclusion, and belonging, which we actually call Teal for Change, and say, we love you no matter who you are. Come and join and do this. And there are lots of stories I can tell you, but three years after we made that change, brand affinity, which we thought was as high as it could get, has actually grown by about thirty percent. Revenue is up as well. So it's clear by being more inclusive we actually increased the size of the Sharks territory.
SPIKE JONES:
That's great. Like throwing the doors open and saying, all are welcome. Fantastic. But I know you never want to alienate those die-hard fans. So you know I almost, when I was prepping for this, I almost, like oh, I should talk about like the EF Hutton commercial. I was like no, no one's not going to know what I'm talking about, but talking to that core, and then other people are going to want to listen in because like those are those fervent fans. So what do you do with those die-hard folks?
JONATHAN BECHER:
You know, Spike, that was probably the heart of the discussion we had before we looked to the new brand and frankly, if you rename a company like you guys did, that's one of the things you worry about is leaving people behind that have supported you for a long time.
So I think we did what everyone says they want to do, but doesn't actually do is we recruited the most die-hard people. We brought them in and said, you know, we love you. You supported us for a long time, but we want the world to grow. We want more, don't you want that as well? They would say yes, but we need special treatment because we've been here before anybody else, and we said okay, but Teal Together doesn't mean special treatment. What do you really want? And they’re like, we want to be first. Allow us to be the first group that embraces this new strategy, because we want, if we're there before anybody else.
In fact, many of the clubs renamed the name of their clubs to something “teal.” So now a lot of them have teal in the name, whereas they had Sharks in the name before that as well. And we actually let one of our clubs pre-announce that we were making this switch so that they really felt like they were in the know.
And then I must admit, I'm a little bit of what I sometimes call a ditch to ditch guy. I did something really controversial, which is we announced also that we were abolishing our own official fan club. We said we are going to no longer be in control of our own destiny. We're going to let you guys, because Teal Together, so if they're really going to be community-driven, we’ll let you guys do it.
And what happened, thank goodness it worked out. Okay, but you never know. Was a bit chaos at first, which is, people started self-segmenting. There were some people who cared more about stats, and you know my guess is they’re more analytical and maybe more of the tech guys or gals, and some of their more culture and some are based on player trivia and background, etcetera.
Three years later, there's sort of three larger fan clubs, rather than the one we sponsor. There's probably twenty-some of them out there. But by giving up control, which was scary for us to do, Teal Together felt much more authentic. It felt community-driven rather than the brand just saying “we're about the community” and then still want to control everything.
SPIKE JONES:
Absolutely. I mean there is, brands have this illusion of control right, and so it's this thing like we're, so you know it's ours and if we give it away, what are people going to say about us? And of course you know with the rise of social, we’ve seen that that that truly is an illusion, but especially for a sports ball team — that's, I'm not, I'm a casual fan of the sports balls, so I say the sports balls — but it's something that, like you, you never see. I mean I grew up in Dallas, so of course they brainwashed us to be Cowboys fans and, like that, you don't you, don't you don't give up any control about their reputation to brand what people saying about the brand so that I'm sure it was controversial to abolish the fan club and hand it over, hand the keys over to those customers and let them run with it.
JONATHAN BECHER:
So, Spike, you're absolutely right and if you measure the success of a community by the number of engaged people, that's increased by more than fifty percent since we gave up control.
SPIKE JONES:
Yeah and I love that too and so I'll shut up, because this this is what gets me excited because a lot of people are like no, but we ,look at all the members we have and like no no no no no no, I don't care if you have five million members, it is how many of them are truly deeply engaged.
So you know in other lives we could build these gated communities, and you know we also like, you have to jump over a hurdle to get in and the brands would ultimately go, well, but we just want lots and lots of people to join the community, like what does it matter? And if we even gate it and say hey, you have to do this little thing, we would see those engagement numbers rise and rise and rise to thirty, forty percent, which is amazing so good for, good on you for the right metrics, right.
KATHERINE CALVERT:
It makes me think, and Jonathan you and I have worked together a little bit here and there, of conversations you and I have had, about as brand people as marketers. It can be really exciting to think about awareness, right, and just getting lots of eyeballs, and I know you're a passionate advocate for “awareness is cool, but it's a distraction.” Like what are, what really matters is, are you in the consideration set? Are you the person when actually, they might know the name, but when it goes to buy a ticket, when they're thinking about how they want to spend the weekend in your world, like are they actually committing to your brand?
Now that has a level of complexity, right, all of a sudden it's not just control, but you've got all of these conversations happening. You know when we're talking to some of our B2B conversations, those are a little more focused, even some of the brands, now, even some of the consumer businesses, you know, there's proliferation, but when you add the passion and ferocity of feeling that you attach to a sports team, those conversations can be prolific and passionate. How do you manage that conversation? How do you stay in? How do you think about keeping everyone quote-unquote happy?
JONATHAN BECHER:
Well, maybe two things, Katherine. First is remember they’re conversations, and conversations are by definition in two ways, and I think too often we as marketers and we as brands are still focused on the outbound communication and getting our message out. I mean the old joke about you know two ears, one mouth, listen twice as much as you do or measure twice cut once, whatever metaphor you want to use, make sure that you really are having conversations.
The other thing that I've learned, maybe the hard way from my change for my B2B world to now is there's zero chance you are going to make everyone happy. That just, there's too many individuals with too many different opinions. But I would say the main theme is to figure out what your center is, and our center point is we're in the business of delivering experiences, right. We're not in the business of putting on events, we're not in the business of running ice hockey games, we’re not in the business of concerts. Each of those are experiences. So we deliver experiences, so our clients can have memories. And since we're in the business of delivering experiences to create memories, if that's our main core, then the experiences are defined not by us but by the consumer themselves. By our customers.
It's a funny way to say English, but customers experience “experience,” not brand, and so therefore you have to have the feedback from them to understand what they experienced. Not what you thought you delivered, but what they actually consumed, if you will allow me to use that word.
And so frankly, the constructive feedback, even if it's negative — and even if it's hard to see and hear and frankly, if every week I'm not going, “But but but but but,” then you're not authentically trying to get better and there's no chance you can do exceptional experience.
So silly little example. If you look at my Twitter account you'll see that I routinely get hounded during games by people that say there’s no salt and pepper shakers, there's not enough ketchup and all that and you might think, why is Jonathan bothering responding to people about these little things? Because those little tiny details are the things that people remember, right. In fact, I used to joke, in a sporting event, the secret to success was: Did the home team win and maybe is the beer cold, but now these little micro moments are the things that people remember and if salt shakers are the things that gets under your skin, that's what you'll tell people and the negative word of mouth.
So that you gotta sweat the small stuff.
KATHERINE CALVERT:
Well I'm curious thinking back on the last, you know the last year, when I think of a sports experience, our sporting event as being a thing, right, that community of being in person. How did you start thinking about the customer experience when it was either an empty arena, or how do you keep, how did you keep people connected when they couldn't be in the stadium to complain about the salt and pepper.
JONATHAN BECHER:
If the Sharks customer who complains about salt and pepper is actually listening, this podcast, my apology, thank you for helping us get better by the way. So that's a compliment. I think Katherine’s —
KATHERINE CALVERT:
Feedback’s a gift. Feedback’s, a gift.
JONATHAN BECHER:
That's exactly right. I think the center point was because our mental shift from, we’re an event business, which is what we thought three years ago, to we’re an experience business. If we’re an event business, that demands that we’re in person. We have to have eighteen thousand screaming fans. If we're an experience business, we can deliver experiences another way.
So as an example, we'd never done streaming hockey ever before. We didn't have a Twitch account. We didn't use NHL20, and so when the lockdown happened we’re like, well, can we deliver experiences digitally? And we did. In fact, we did some really cool things rather than other brands that just did computer simulation Team A versus Team B. We allow fans to digitize themselves by telling us their height, whether they shoot left or right, what their Jersey number would be, what they wanted, their name, etc. And then we simulated into the game alongside their favorite player.
So we created these sort of fantasy lineups. What one quick story, because I have way too many of them. So many cool things happened. During one of these experiments, a fan got injured. Of course he got digitally injured, not injured in real life. In EA, there's a switch, which we didn't know about ahead of time, that you can say prevent injuries or allow injuries. By default that’s on so we allowed injuries —
SPIKE JONES:
I mean it is hockey, so.
JONATHAN BECHER:
Right. You can get injured in hockey, and so this fan gets injured in the first period right and starts screaming on Discord, which is the way you tend to communicate in Twitch and stuff. Like not fair, not fair. I want my money back. So some things don't change between in-person experiences and digital right, but then their favorite person, who was their favorite professional athlete who was playing on a line with them, literally carried them into the locker room right and then we got our trainer in real life to call this person and tell them how to recover from their digital injuries – here's the training. And so you see, you can see a stream goes back onto Twitch later on that changed from unfair no way want my money back to, this is my favorite experience of my entire life.
So my point, Katherine, is you can create memories, which is the business we’re in, by crossing the physical and digital boundary. You don't have to be just anchored into your in-person.
SPIKE JONES:
That's super cool. Really great story. And so look, there are a lot of tried and true marketing tactics that a lot of teams do, there's a lot of expectations that are met or aren't met. What is a commonly held belief in your industry that you just don't agree with?
JONATHAN BECHER:
So, Spike, one of my personal mantras is: words matter. I'm probably overly-focused on words, because I think words have signal actions to what you think is important. What you think is important to an organization. What you think is important to your partners, what you think is important to your customers. And so you know I didn't like, for example, during the pandemic, the word “socially distance.” The phrase, I guess, socially distance, because actually we wanted to be socially close but physically distant. So I refused to ever say the phrase socially distant. I said physically distant socially and let's find ways to say socially close.
It seems like a small thing, but it's a signal action. And maybe I'll also say that I don't really like the phrase “customer experience.” That’s, maybe it's tough to say to you, Spike, and you, Katherine, I apologize for that since CX is like the heart of what you guys talk about. But the reason I don't like the phrase often is because when people hear it, they intellectually spell it all caps “customer” and little letters “experience” and which is exactly backwards. And the focus in all the language we use is okay, what's the customer lifetime value, how much revenue are we making about this customer? Let's put the customer in the middle and all that and so much of the conversation is customer-oriented as opposed to experience-oriented.
In fact, I've heard many tech companies, maybe you guys do it as well, talk about how do you turn customers into fans? So it immediately means you thought about revenue because they were a customer, a transactional relationship already, and now you want to make them happy. And the nice thing that we, about the freemium model, when we all had freemium models, although they are not nearly as popular anymore, is it forced us to make them fans first before they parted with their dollars and only after they parted with their dollar, they were, I’m sorry, after they became fans, and said this software works pretty nicely. Then we turn them into customers. That's the business I'm in the business of creating fans. Some of them will give me money later on, but frankly, the two million or so fans I have, only eighteen thousand can fit in the building every night. So it makes me fan-focused as opposed to revenue-focused.
And one more thing: here, when I'm on a sort of a tirade — and I apologize for it — what makes it even worse is people say, end-to-end customer experience, which again, the signal is, unless you can solve every problem, end-to-end, this gigantic thing, then it's not worth doing it at all. And I'm just, all or nothing just sounds too big for most people, right. Can you solve a salt shaker problem? Yes, we can solve the salt shaker problem, right. Can you figure out —
KATHERINE CALVERT:
Those micro moments that matter the most.
JONATHAN BECHER:
So we tend to talk about XM, which is moments of experience and focusing on the little things that you can change rapidly rather than the end-to-end customer experience. So that’s my passion, I guess.
SPIKE JONES:
And I would, you can take it one step further: in fandom, there is no end. Like it is a continuous, there's a beginning, but there's no end. I used to work for this one company, we talked about campaigns versus movements and a campaign has a beginning and end, but a movement starts, and it just keeps going as long as the people want to keep it alive.
So that's what you're doing sounds like.
JONATHAN BECHER:
Well said, Spike. I might borrow that language, if you don't mind.
SPIKE JONES:
It's all yours.
KATHERINE CALVERT:
Thinking about those two million fans, and I don't know if that's a fixed number, do you like, do you have a sense of what that should be? How do you know them? What's the data that, we're all in a, we're in a world of so much data. What's the data that matters most or is most helpful to you as you try to really understand those moments that matter for your fans?
JONATHAN BECHER:
You know it's funny, Katherine. I probably blew one of my own things. I immediately throw out a number like two million, which is an ego metric, and the size of that is less important, right. We do tend to more segment those customers and we talk about those that are in the Bay Area, northern California, versus those that are within several hundred miles of us, versus those that are in North America, versus international. And we treat the international segment much different, because the odds of the international fan coming to a game ever is very low, although occasionally it does happen and when it happens, we make a big deal of it, right, we put them on TV, or we do a behind the scenes, because it's so rare, and those rare things spread like wildfire during the international fan base.
But what we tend to do is we ask fans to share with them the most important thing about them, rather than saying, here are the ten fields that we need to put in our customer database and say that's important, we flip it around and say what do you think we need to know about you? Because fans have a better idea of what they care about. And so I guess in the heart of it, I'll start with is we care the most about feedback, and sometimes people tell us the strangest stuff. I was trying to think if I could give an example. So I'll start with the obvious stuff. Fans typically, when you don't ask them specifically, say this person is my favorite player. Well, that's good to know that already tells you a little bit about the content and how to engage. But the most often thing you hear is how they became a fan.
I actually watched something on TV and I got intrigued by the teal color. We have a very unusual logo of a shark biting through a hockey stick which has been voted the best logo in all of hockey for many years. That attracted a lot of people as well. The community-based thing that we've been doubling down on, diversity inclusion, attracts a lot of people because that's unusual in hockey, which frankly started out as a Canadian sport, primarily for white males, and so each person tells us what attracts us to them, or how they get it.
Some of it is unexpected stuff, that tells us how we need to communicate them and we're not frankly, we're not always good at, we're still learning how to personalize content. You know I used to say eventually we get to the segment of one. I'm not sure that'll ever happen, but you know we still operate, probably in twelve or fourteen big segments. I'd love to get to thirty or forty, and I think we’d be a lot better off.
SPIKE JONES:
So, okay, it is called CX Confessions, even though after this we might be XC Confessions. So we ask this of every one of our illustrious guests: over, take a look back over your career, over your long and distinguished career, and share, if you will, a hard lesson that you have learned along the way. Maybe something that didn't work so well, but you made it better the next time, or just something that you've always kept in mind after it didn't go so great.
JONATHAN BECHER:
Spike, I've made so many mistakes over my career that we'd have to have a thirty-hour podcast for me to highlight just the interesting ones, but I think the enduring one that I say, but I relearn probably every year of my life, is that culture eats strategy, no matter what. Lots of people have been attributed to that quote. It's unclear. I've done some research on who really came up with it first, but the best way of saying that is no matter how much you plan, nothing works out unless everyone's bought into it and the everyone bought into it is your employees, your partners, your customer, etcetera.
I said earlier in this podcast, you know, measure twice cut once, but I think the key learning I have and as, it doesn't matter what we're in, is that we spend all this time building up strategy, and I'm sure you've all read strategy documents that are ten, twenty, thirty, forty pages. You've all been involved in planning exercises and budgeting exercises that take hours, days, and weeks, and I'm not trying to make fun of them, but they're very complicated and hard to understand for the people that didn't develop them. And then, when they're done, you go almost immediately into execution mode, but nobody other than the core team that designed them really understands the nuances of them, and so what I've learned the hard way is, flip that on its head. However much time you spend developing it, spend at least that much time communicating it. Spend at least that much time socializing it. Take your strategy, take your planning, take your budgeting, and frankly create a community-based version of that well.
Bring people in earlier, get there that and because that cultural aspect is much more likely to be successful. And so I'm at the point that a pretty good plan communicated and socialized really well tends to beat an excellent plan with poor communication and socialization. I think that's the thing I learn over and over again.
KATHERINE CALVERT:
That is so great. I think, there's, we've all, it's a very familiar feeling, right. You finally bake the document. It's ready. You're done, right. Now let's go do, and if it's not, if you don't pull through two months later, you're looking at it like, why was that important, right, or if you weren't the author of it, that ownership piece, that connection to: how does this impact my life, my work, my meaning, when that gets lost, the execution just isn't there at the right level
All Right. Well, thank you for that. So much goodness in here. We do, you talked about personalization and what people want to share. We love to let our audience get to know our guests a little bit as a person as well, so we always wrap up with what we call our quick fire confession questions. So, if you are ready, I will launch into the five questions to get to know Jonathan Becker a little bit better. So, number one: What was your first concert?
JONATHAN BECHER:
First one that I went by myself without having to be chaperoned by my parents? I think I'll answer that one, because the other is, the answer might be even more embarrassing, was The Cars farewell tour. So I might be dating myself if you go look that up, which means the song Just What I Needed is sort of a mantra, because I think that's how they open the concert.
So there you go. Ric Ocasek and the Cars.
KATHERINE CALVERT:
Where was it? Yeah, Ric Ocasek. Where were you?
JONATHAN BECHER:
In a small little town in North Carolina called Greensboro. Greensboro. North Carolina.
KATHERINE CALVERT:
We both know Greensboro.
SPIKE JONES:
Yeah.I lived in Greenville, South Carolina a little bit so Greensburg’s just up the road, just up the road. But that's great. I'm super jealous. I would love to have seen The Cars. That's super cool. So what was your first job?
JONATHAN BECHER:
Well, the first way I got any money was when I took over a friend's paper route for a while, and I can't remember, I think he went on vacation. I delivered papers for a week or so, and I made, I don't know, a few bucks kind of thing.
But my first real summer job because my parents encouraged me to work from the age of like thirteen or fourteen is I painted fences. Not Huckleberry Finn style.
KATHERINE CALVERT:
Okay, Tom Sawyer.
SPIKE JONES:
You got other people to paint it. Yes.
JONATHAN BECHER:
I did. And I was not very good at it. I will tell you many years later, I'm still not very good, so I don't paint my own house or any of that kind of stuff. So I have no artistic capability when it comes to paint.
SPIKE JONES:
Fair enough.
KATHERINE CALVERT:
Got It. Okay. Well, so we know painter’s not on the list, but the next question is: If you couldn't do what you're doing now, what profession would you attempt?
JONATHAN BECHER:
If I couldn’t? I love my job. I have a passion job, so I don't want to give this up.
KATHERINE CALVERT:
I know I know, but if I say: can't do that anymore, what would you do?
JONATHAN BECHER:
Well, you know, I used to say my secret passion is, but I told so many people over so many years, you can't call it my secret passion anymore, so I love to write and I’m not a great sailor, but I can imagine writing the Great American Novel and then sailing around the South Pacific or the Mediterranean, or something like that. So I've written, it’s funny, I'm better at short stories than I am at novels. So I should give up writing the Great American Novel and stick to short stories.
KATHERINE CALVERT:
That is awesome.
SPIKE JONES:
Wow, that's really cool. Your favorite app on your phone?
JONATHAN BECHER:
You know, I don't know if any of you ever look at, the phone keeps track of what you use the most. So if I'm, if this really is confession, I say what app am I using the most of my phone? The answer is Twitter. But I'm not sure if that's my favorite app —
KATHERINE CALVERT:
Mixed feelings. I can see, yeah.
JONATHAN BECHER:
I will say, the app I'm playing with the most right now is an app that most people haven't heard of called Reface which allows you to take images of people and inject them into like famous paintings and in videos and stuff like that, and it's surprisingly realistic, so for people's birthdays, I'm like injecting their face in the Mona Lisa or I actually took a friend of mine whose birthday was yesterday and I pretended he was Bruce Willis Die Hard and Yippee ki-yay, and all that. So it's kind of fun for that.
SPIKE JONES:
Nice, I'm definitely going to check that out.
KATHERINE CALVERT:
Reface. Okay. Last question: What is Jonathan Becher's biggest indulgence?
JONATHAN BECHER:
Well I hear indulgence, I probably the answer is ice cream. I'm maybe even a bit of an ice cream snob. I do not go down to the corner store and just buy the store brand stuff. I'm a huge fan of micro ice creams. There's a bunch of them around here. I've been known to buy artisanal ice cream from states outside here. Yeah, I like to say I'd probably weigh fifty pounds less if it was not for ice cream and cheese.
So there we go.
KATHERINE CALVERT:
We had a great episode with the CMO of Wisconsin Cheese, so we'll have to connect you to her. But what's, what kind of flavor? Like when you, do you like weird artisanal flavor ice cream? Or do you have a go-to that you test out across?
JONATHAN BECHER:
Okay, so I'm going to give you a slightly complicated answer to this.I've hardly met a flavor I don’t like. That isn't well done. I'm I'm more of a creamy ice cream than an icy ice cream and there's a whole sub culture of the difference between the two which I won’t bore listeners with, and it has to do a lot with flavor profile and the ingredients and stuff like that, but left to my own devices, the way I will test an ice cream is just by regular vanilla.
Because, just by regular vanilla, you can figure out what kind of a vanilla flavor, what kind of creams they're using. How, do they freeze it quickly or freeze it slowly? Do they allow it to come up slightly on — there's a lot you can tell just by regular vanilla. It's not what I would choose to eat if I already know an ice cream flavor, but that's my test to see how authentic it is. If you want to be slightly beyond that, then pick a fruit flavor like strawberry or boysenberry or something like that and see how the berries interact with the cream, and that will tell you a lot as well.
KATHERINE CALVERT:
You are a student.
SPIKE JONES:
Man. That's, you just described everything that I do with gin. So you know it's the same but different.
JONATHAN BECHER:
Like, we're a family show here. So I figured I couldn't tell too many gin stories —
SPIKE JONES:
My bad, my bad, but I do have one more question: who's your pick to win the cup?
JONATHAN BECHER:
When people ask me about non-Sharks, I almost always say it's a little bit asking, like, who's your favorite kid or who's your favorite pet or stuff like that — you're not supposed to pick one. I will say it's hard not to get caught up in the Habs. It's a Montreal, Canadian sort of emotional run and you know Carey Price is just their goalie and has been out of this world. So I can't pick a favorite, but I think they have destiny on their side right now.
SPIKE JONES:
Fair enough.
KATHERINE CALVERT:
Oh, I love it. All right. Well, that was so fun. Thank you so much for joining us, for being a fantastic guest, for giving us things to think about. I am so grateful for your time. Spike, thanks, as always, for being my trusty partner on CX Confessions. Thanks everybody for tuning in, and we hope you join us next time. See you later.
SPIKE JONES:
And remember: you can find us anywhere podcasts are out there in the wild — the Spotifys, the Apples of the world. You name it. If there's podcasts, we are there. Be sure to subscribe, be sure to rate us, and please give us feedback. We want to hear it all. Thanks again.
KHOROS:
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