How Butterball builds Thanksgiving traditions with customers

Episode transcript, edited for clarity

[00:00:25] Bill Thorne: Welcome to Retail Gets Real, where we hear from retail's most fascinating leaders about the industry that impacts everyone, everywhere, every day. I'm Bill Thorne from the National Retail Federation, and on today's special Thanksgiving episode, we're going to be talking to Al Jansen, Butterball's executive vice president of sales and marketing. We're going to talk to Al about Thanksgiving, Butterball's famous Turkey Talk-Line and how they’re collecting customers' stories and traditions.

Al, thank you so much for taking the time. I really am looking forward to this conversation. When Mary said, " Bill, you're going to be talking with the folks from Butterball," I was like, "The turkey?" and she said, "Indeed." I am thrilled to have you as a guest on Retail Gets Real. This is going to be awesome. And particularly at this time of year.

[00:01:12] Al Jansen: Wow. Thanks. I'm glad to be here. And you're smiling right now, which is a reaction we get a lot. When I travel, obviously I'm wearing Butterball logo gear. And when people say, "Oh, you work at Butterball," it's always met me with a smile.

[00:01:31] Bill Thorne: Pretty awesome reaction to a brand.

[00:01:33] Al Jansen: And what a great company to work for, that you've got that kind of brand that gets that kind of reaction from folks.

[00:01:38] Bill Thorne: Well, Al, if you think about it, Butterball turkeys, it's always associated with holiday, with family, with things that bring a smile to your face, make you feel good. And it must be really fantastic to work for that kind of a brand that elicits that kind of response. You don't have to tell them the story. They have a story.

[00:01:59] Al Jansen: Yes, very much so. You see your brand represented on TV from just human interest kind of stuff. And to know that your brand is connected, most notably with Thanksgiving, which is a gathering of people together, it's arguably America's favorite holiday, it's great. I don't have to tell them what Butterball does. That's for sure.

[00:02:23] Bill Thorne: It is amazing to me when you work somewhere and most people do have to explain what they do, but more importantly what the brand that they work for does. And I was thinking about that, like, if you're on a plane and you turn to somebody and they say, "Well, what do you do?"

"I'm with Butterball." And they're like, "Oh, I know that." Then you get into the conversation. So let's get into a conversation about you having been at Butterball for over 10 years. What do you enjoy most about being a part of that brand?

[00:02:55] Al Jansen: The team. You probably hear this a lot, but you're not going to be doing the kind of stuff that I do in an industry that I do it in if you don't like working with teams, whether you are leading the team, whether you're on a team. There's so many variables in this industry. It's very difficult. You have turkeys walking around right now eating feed. Thankfully, it's a beautiful sunny day, and the weather's really nice, and I'm sure they're really happy. And you have a perishable product.

And also, you're trying to help your customers succeed in their business. You've got a lot of variables in between here. You're not going to do it alone. It takes a team. The word I always use about this business, and it probably applies to almost any business, impermanent. This business isn't permanent. Understand that it's impermanent.

And if you've got a great team, you'll be able to deal with the impermanence. And so I enjoy being on great teams. I get benefited to being able to lead a couple of teams here and there. So it's that piece.

[00:04:01] Bill Thorne: So you are doing some awfully creative things at Butterball. And you partnered with StoryCorps Studios to create the National Thanksgiving Archive. What is that? Tell us about it.

[00:04:14] Al Jansen: Every year we sit down early in the year, thinking about, what are we going to do to drive interest and to tell our story around Thanksgiving? But we do that early in the year, and we do it both with paid and with earned media. And every year we partner with a group of folks to really tell our story, drive interest, and all those sorts of things.

And we knew coming into this year it wasn't a tremendous insight to say the country was divided, and it wasn't a tremendous insight to say we're going to have an election, and by the time we get 12 hours on the backside of that election, the country was probably going to feel a little raw.

Go back to your opening questions around Thanksgiving, we felt like we have a unique place around Thanksgiving. How do we lean into that understanding of folks without being preachy, without being too on the nose, but more so try to reconnect with folks on the good parts of family, friends and being here in America?

So our purpose, let me start there, as a company is, we exist to help people pass love on. Because we believe, connected with our core value of togetherness, that you are around the table together, whether it's on a Tuesday night or it's on Thanksgiving, and sharing a meal, making a meal for each other, passing a plate, these are acts of love.

And what we do is, we help enable that to happen. We make food. That's what Butterball does. We make food. But we also have the Turkey Talk-Line that, if you're daunted by cooking a turkey, call us. If you're daunted by, I don't know how to make the gravy, call us. Real people.

Fifty or so real culinary professionals are sitting there waiting for your call. You can text us. You can email us. The socials, we’re there. And so, bringing people together around that meal is a big part of what we do. And StoryCorps obviously captures two people talking to each other around some aspect of their journey, and then they archive them at the Library of Congress in the archives. And it's a neat thing they do.

A lot of people know about StoryCorps from NPR on Morning Edition. Friday mornings, two people tell their story. Well, what we're doing is partnering with them to tell your stories about Thanksgiving, and capture your Thanksgiving story. You can go to Butterball dot com. It's right there on Butterball dot com.

Just click it, and they will take you through the journey of telling your story. You can also connect with them at StoryCorps dot org. And they're going to collect a National Thanksgiving Archive, is what it's called. They've got 700,000 different stories archived there, and they just keep going, and they keep going. And it's great to have people sit down and start talking just on something easy like the Thanksgivings they enjoyed together.

[00:07:31] Bill Thorne: That is so cool. Everybody's got a story. You have 700,000. There's tens of millions of people that could tell a great Thanksgiving story. When you were talking about that, I was like, what story would I tell? And I don't know that mine would be that positive. It was like when my sister-in-law decided that she wanted to do the dressing. That was a mistake. And I'm very particular about the dressing. But it turned out well. The story ended well. But it was a little difficult there at the beginning. She was new to the family. She needed to get [Inaudible] with the game. My mom does the dressing. That's just it.

[00:08:08] Al Jansen: We do all the stories that the Talk-Line folks could tell you. One of them is, can you tell me how to make this turkey like my wife does? Well, you're going to have to give me a little more than that.

[00:08:25] Bill Thorne: Put her on the phone. I've mentioned the farm, that we allow a club to actually hunt the land. And they bring us a turkey every year, and it's a Butterball turkey. But we put it in the freezer, and then it'd be like, oh, I've got to cook a tur — I remember the very, very first time I cooked a turkey, it was a little bit daunting. It's a big piece of meat. And you can go two ways, really good or not really good.

And so it was a sense of trepidation. But it worked, and I was anxious to get to the next turkey and the next turkey after that and the next turkey after that. You talked about the Talk-Line, so I'm going to raise that. Every year I know the Talk-Line because I see it on at least three of the morning shows. They will do a segment on the Butterball Talk-Line. Tell us when did that first come about, and literally how many calls do you get on Thanksgiving?

[00:09:21] Al Jansen: Yeah. So the Talk-Line, I should say, is 1-800-BUTTERBALL. In case you need help with your dressing, gravy or whatever it is, they'll help you. It started in '81, so it's 43 years old. It's right there in Naperville, where Butterball was housed or homed, in Naperville, for many years when they were part of ConAgra.

We have kept it there. They kept the Talk-Line there in Naperville. All the folks are there. We have folks that are on there that have been there for 30 years, 40 years. They're really an impressive group of folks. And to go up and spend time with them, they love being on the Butterball Turkey Talk-Line. They are really all about what they do.

We get 80 to 100,000 inquiries, whether they're going to be phone calls, text messages, whatever, through the course of the holiday season. It's tough for me to give you a number on the particular day just because there's so many different kinds and ways, and some folks are on hold. They hang up, or they don't — it's tough for me to give you a number there.

But to think that you've got a vehicle that sits out there to help people engage with your brand when they need you, we score really high on love and affinity when you look at imagery scores, but we also score very high on trust. And how do you build trust? Well, I'm there when you need me.

And so you could call us, and we're going to be there to help you. And a lot of what we do when those phone calls come in is less culinary and more psychological. There's a lot of anxiety. There's a lot of stress, and we're there for you. And they do a lot of calming folks down. “Don't worry. I'll walk you through it,” those sorts of things.

[00:11:17] Bill Thorne: That's the trepidation part.

[00:11:19] Al Jansen: Definitely the trepidation part.

[00:11:23] Bill Thorne: I don't know if they do an analysis afterwards. I'm sure that they do. Is it primarily first-timers or men versus women, young versus old, or just throw it at the wall, it's everything?

[00:11:35] Al Jansen: Yeah, all of the above. All of the above is the answer there. Look, the folks that have the most anxiety are the first-timers. We refer to them as hosts. So the first-time host, "I don't know how to cook this turkey," believe it or not, is not the biggest anxiety when people think about coming into Thanksgiving.

Number one is, "Man, I'm going to have to clean this mess up." Number two, not ironically, is, "I got to clean the house before all these people get here." So definitely there's some messaging there on cleaning. But yeah, I've never cooked one before. I don't know how. Look, 86% of people celebrate Thanksgiving. Three-quarters of them are going to have a whole turkey sitting on the table, and they want that to look perfect.

[00:12:29] Bill Thorne: Correct.

[00:12:29] Al Jansen: Stress is making sure that is going to be perfect. So yeah, that stress is real. So this year, knowing that that is a real anxiety that sits out there, we're out in certain test markets with a cook-from-frozen whole turkey. So your typical frozen turkey, you're going to take it out. You're going to put it in the refrigerator, and you're going to give it a week or so to thaw out.

And if you're anxious about thawing it out, you can call the Butterball Turkey Talk-Line. They'll talk you through it. But the cook-from-frozen, literally you just take it out of the bag. There's an inner bag. You put it in your roasting pan, you put it in the oven. All you got to do.

[00:13:13] Bill Thorne: Wow.

[00:13:15] Al Jansen: Yeah. That's all you got to do. And it cooks up phenomenally. We're super proud of this. Like I said, we're testing this in a couple of markets this year. But hopefully the tests all go well, and then we'll be expanding that across the country for sure.

[00:13:30] Bill Thorne: There's going to be a generation coming up that's going to be like, you don't know how good you have it, when it comes to thawing a turkey.

[00:13:37] Al Jansen: Yeah, yeah. For sure. What's always amazing to me is those numbers I quoted to you are pretty static, the number of folks that are going to celebrate Thanksgiving, the number of folks who are going to celebrate Thanksgiving with turkey. And notably, the whole turkey, they don't move around a whole bunch.

Things that do move are the number of people that are going to be at your celebration. COVID was a low ebb on celebrants, five people. This year people are telling us they're going to be back to pre-COVID levels. Nine folks or so at your celebration, man, that's pretty good.

[00:14:16] Bill Thorne: Yeah, it's very nice. It's nice to be back and rebuilding those memories, building new memories. I'm going to ask you just a couple of more questions because I know our time is running short. But what do you enjoy most about working in the marketing space?

We have a lot of students that listen, and a lot of them are marketing students, a lot of them are merchandising. And I'm just curious as to why you chose marketing, and what do you find most challenging in that?

[00:14:45] Al Jansen: So for the students that are listening to this, know that there are professionals with years of experience who are listening right now. When I say this, they're going to be nodding their head up and down that all sales folks think that they can be marketers.

[00:14:59] Bill Thorne: Oh, that's so true.

[00:15:01] Al Jansen: I've always been marketing adjacent through my career. Perdue has a big marketing department. Butterball is Butterball. The thing I've enjoyed, I've enjoyed definitely learning some of the sausage-making of marketing for sure. I've enjoyed working with the team to let them cook. Let them do what they do in that, man, we've got this great brand.

Let's set some strategy. Let's align on some objectives and let you do what you do. I'm not as good at marketing as everybody in the marketing department. I'm not. But I think I'm pretty good at helping bring folks together, get them aligned around a goal, and help celebrate the successes.

And learning this part of the business, as I've told you, I've always been fascinated with how the whole thing comes together. And for it to be a brand like Butterball, I'm tremendously thankful to ownership of our company for giving me the opportunity because there's a lot of responsibility that comes with that.

[00:16:05] Bill Thorne: Yeah. And what you just talked about, I think, is important on a number of levels. What you're talking about is leadership. You're being a leader by giving your people the tools, and the resources, and the knowledge that they need to be successful. And you're there to help them reach that success.

Oftentimes we have interns, and we have the opportunity to talk to them as a group. And I always say that one of the best leadership examples that you have is the worst leader that you've worked with or for, because what you acknowledge is I would never, ever do that to somebody else, and so I'm going to be a different leader.

So I love that leadership style. I think that your leadership style always gets great results. I'm going to ask you this last question, and that is, because I'm sure along the way you've had an opportunity to really think about it, what is your best career advice?

[00:17:02] Al Jansen: The quick answer is, don't take out the blame thrower and start pointing fingers. For the young folks that are listening to this, don't blame other folks for stuff. Figure out what you just learned from all of this. But in maybe broader context, you've already hit on it.

Most of the people I imagine listening to this have aspirational career expectations. You are going to be evaluated on your leadership style by ultimately, can you lead teams that get results? Results could be financial. Results could be a good outcome. Results could be accomplishment of any kind.

But can you lead teams that get results? And if you can, that will buoy your career unbelievably. So along the way, you'll learn as much as you can about team leadership, both experientially as well as formally. No coincidence, I have this old gem of The Five Dysfunctions of a Team.

It's just sitting on my desk because I hand them out like PEZ. Because as long as it's been around, so much of it's still true. And so often we throw people into formal and informal team leadership and don't give them the tools. But boy, if you can learn that, that will benefit you well and benefit your company through the year.

[00:18:24] Bill Thorne: Yeah. I have to note something before we go. I really do appreciate a turkey guy talking about the sausage making process. That's a good way to describe it.

[00:18:34] Al Jansen: There you go.

[00:18:36] Bill Thorne: Al Jansen, it has been such a pleasure talking to you. Thank you for joining us today on Retail Gets Real.

[00:18:42] Al Jansen: Oh, it was great being on. Thank you very much.

[00:18:45] Bill Thorne: For all of you listening to another episode of Retail Gets Real, you can find more information about this episode at retail gets real dot com. I'm Bill Thorne. This is Retail Gets Real, and it's only appropriate to say Happy Thanksgiving. Happy Turkey Day. Thanks again, Al. Talk to you soon.

[00:19:00] Al Jansen: All right. Thanks. Happy Thanksgiving to you too.