Happy holidays you S.O.B.s! Vivian and I elected to spend even more time with each other and the rest of our family this year, so we did not record a new episode for this week. Instead, weโre sharing last yearโs holiday episode again.
Itโs a holiday special on the S.O.B. (Small Owned Business) Marketing podcast! We invited our parents to join the show for a hilarious trip down marketing memory lane.
We shared some of our funniest, most cringe-worthy marketing stories from over the yearsโbut we didnโt reveal who lived through them. Instead, our parents had to guess which of us was behind each story! Who knows us better? Whoโs totally stumped? Tune in to find out!
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Chapters:
00:00 Thank You For Listening & Please Leave a Review
05:00 Family Game: Guess the Story
06:43 Market Research at the Sonic Drive Thru
08:58 Networking Gone Wrong
16:45 Recording Mishap - No Audio
20:53 Sign Twirling for an Urgent Care Center
24:07 To Show or Not to Show Controversial Imagery
29:39 Wrap-Up and Reflections
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Vivian: Oh Chels!
Chelsea: That was pretty good. I know.
Vivian: I mean, you should have your own choir. I would pay money to go see that.
Chelsea: Okay, perfect. So starting next year, we're going to have the Vivian-Chelsea choir. Okay. So practice your singing Vivian.
Vivian: Iโm more of a tambourine girl.
Chelsea: You're a tambourine girl, weโre going to have the Chelsea-Vivian show with Vivian on the tambourine. Perfect. Top seller. Hey everybody. In case you didn't realize, it's the holidays and I'm pretty sure it's Christmas. In case you didn't realize, Vivian and I are sisters and so we decided that we wanted to spend even more time with each other and the rest of our family.
Vivian: Shocking.
Chelsea: So we did not have a chance to record this week's episode. We decided to prioritize family instead. So we are sharing a rerun this week. Vivian, do you want to talk about it?
Vivian: No regrets, okay, on spending more time with family and not doing a Christmas specific episode. But what we're going to play you guys today is from last holiday season. Mom and dad were invited on the podcast as our guests. Chelsea and I always say we won the parent lottery just because we do love our parents. They're delightful and fun and they're mischievous. All the things we love about a human in those two peas in a pod. So anyways, the game we were playing with them at the time, because we wanted to mix it up, Chelsea, remind me it was.
Chelsea: So we had stories from our marketing experiences, so funny stories of things we've gone through, but we didn't tell them who experienced it. So they had to guess whose experience it was. Pretty funny stuff.
Vivian: Perfect. We hope you guys will enjoy that conversation. Listen, we are so excited to go into 2026 with you. We hope that you find this podcast valuable. If you do, a small gift that you could give us this Christmas is to leave us a review or to subscribe or share the podcast. That helps us in a big way. I did want to mention, hey, hey, we don't like bragging around here. We eat a slice of humble pie every time, y'all, okay? We don't let our britches get too big.
Chelsea: Sure we do.
Vivian: I eat humble pie all the time. But Spotify does the wrapped thing every year. One of the things they said about our podcast was that it was a 2025 most shared show. That meant we received more shares than 76% of other shows. We were a 2025 marathon show. So our fans listened to us longer than 81% of other shows and we were a 2025 rising star. So this means our show outpaced 86% of other podcasts. So thank you. You guys are a big part of that. We would definitely not be doing this if it wasn't for you SOBs, small owned businesses out there.
Chelsea: Thank you. We hope you guys enjoy this episode. Go listen to past episodes, other past episodes as well. Happy holidays and go be the best SOB you can be.
Chelsea:โจHey everybody and welcome back to the SOB Marketing Podcast. SOB as in small owned business, I promise we are not calling you guys names. Before we get started, a little bit of housekeeping. Thank you so much for listening. We would really appreciate it if you left us a five star review. It helps us get in front of other small business owners and we are here to help you guys feel comfortable with your marketing. Vivian, what are we talking about today?
Vivian:โจAlright, well if you guys have not noticed we are in a very different location, not our typical studio, but we are here at our parents house. Chelsea, you're already in trouble. Grounded right off the rim, and we figure for Christmas we're going to do a little bit of a different episode. We're going to play a game with mom and dad, so mom introduce yourself. What is your name?
Mom:โจI'm Mom. I'm the mother of these two beautiful girls.
Vivian:โจDad?
Dad:โจI'm the dad. Enough said.
Vivian:โจDad doesn't have a name. His name's just Dad.
Dad:โจHector.
Vivian:โจAs you guys can probably tell, Chelsea and I have been doing this a long time. We've been doing marketing, boots on the ground for some time. We've seen quite a bit. Some of the stories are great, some of them are a little embarrassing. We're going to see how well mom and dad know us. We're going to tell them a very generic story. We're not going to tell them who lived the experience, but we're hoping they can guess correctly which one of us lived through it, and also tell us maybe a little bit of what they think we did. What was our response in that particular situation? Okay. So mom, do you understand the rules?
Chelsea:โจI'll tell the first story. Okay, so the first story is one of us, myself or Vivian, had to stand in front of a sonic drive-thru to do market research. Who do you think that was? Who do you think had to do that?
Mom:โจChelsea?
Dad:โจOne of you is stood in Sonic. When you say stood, do you mean in the drive thru? "Hi, I would like a number one with cheese." You talking about that? What kind of research?
Vivian:โจChelsea already told you it was me.
Chelsea:โจVivian and I did not prep well enough for this.
Vivian:โจI had to ask them because companies would hire us. So basically, I was just standing there asking them what their burger preferences were, what do you prefer? What do you like about this or that? The worst thing is though, I don't know about you guys, but when you're in a drive-through, you're mostly hungry. Having some annoying college age kid come up to you and say, can I ask you a quick question? - is not exactly, people would roll up the window. They didn't want to engage. So then I had to stand there for hours doing this. It was not fun.
Chelsea:โจOkay, I'm going to get better at doing this. I'm sorry. I gave it away too early.
Vivian:โจAll right, the next story is: as you both know Chelsea and I came from healthcare background. So in this instance, there was a particular doctor who wanted to do postcards, but he did not want to pay for colored postcards so he requested that the postcards be printed in black and white. First of all let me ask you before you guys try to guess whose experience that was, when is the last time you guys got a postcard in the mail that was only black and white? We never got any. You don't get any postcards?
Dad:โจWe never got any.
Vivian:โจYou don't get any postcards?
Dad:โจNo, no postcards. By the way, think it was you, Vivian.
Vivian:โจIt was me, yes, correct. If you guys are wondering the difference between printing postcards in color and printing them in black and white - it is not a whole lot. So please, please, please, if you are listening and you're a small business owner and you're deciding on what to cut cost on, do not let it be the color on your postcards. Okay. It all depends on what you're sending.
Dad:โจIf you're sending a ransom note you could do black and white by all means. Just make sure that the ransom note is cut out with newspapers and all of that.
Vivian:โจDon't put the dates on the newspaper either, and don't add the headliner either because they can track that, right? They'll know what city it's from.
Chelsea:โจOkay. So here's the next story. Again, Vivian and I have both worked in healthcare marketing. So this particular story is about doing a physician site visit and hosting a lunch. But the provider that the person went to see didn't talk to anyone the entire time that they were there.
Dad:โจI'm guessing it was you, Chelsea.
Vivian:โจWhy do you think it was Chelsea?
Dad:โจBecause I remember you mentioned something about, I hate doing lunches. I never heard anything about Vivian doing lunches.
Chelsea:โจIt was me.
Vivian:โจChelsea, I do have follow-up questions in regard to that. Did the doctor eat? Yes. So he enjoyed the lunch. He just didn't enjoy the networking.
Chelsea:โจYes, he did eat. It gets even better. This specific provider, again we're not going to give any names, but this specific provider, because he had a very small practice, there was probably only four people in the office, he requested a very specific lunch from a very specific restaurant. So I went to that specific restaurant to get everyone the exact meal that they wanted. Then no one talked to myself or the nurse practitioner that I brought with me, because the whole point of these lunches was to have our nurse practitioner or our doctors, our physicians connect with other physicians in the area. So not only did he not talk to me, which honestly, I don't care if you talk to me or not, because it's not about me. It's about the nurse practitioner. He didn't talk to her either. He just grabbed his food and started eating and sat there. We tried to talk to him. He would maybe nod his head. That was it.
Vivian:โจWhat's the food that good? Also, what was the conversation? How weird was it in the car when you guys were driving back or did you ride separately?
Chelsea:โจNo, the food was not that good. We rode together. Both of us got the impression that we were both women and that was the problem. It was a learning experience. That was a new nurse practitioner. This was her first job out of college. So she was kind of discovering how to talk to other physicians as well. So it was a learning experience.
Vivian:โจMom, what would you have done? If you're talking to someone and they don't want to talk.
Mom:โจWell, just don't give up. You start talking. And probably not about the job, but something different. So like small talk.
Vivian:โจYes. okay, pro tip. Thank you so much for bringing this up, Mom, because do you guys know who everybody loves themselves? Themselves. I'm glad you brought that up mom, is because if you are having trouble when you're trying to network and some people are just super uncomfortable doing it. Some people, they're wallflowers, they just don't want anything to do with it. On top of that, let's be real, sometimes physicians don't have the best bedside manner, they have different personalities. So you're having to accommodate for that. If you find that someone's not opening up, they love talking about kids, they love talking about pets, they love talking about their past, they love talking about where they're from, they love talking about what kind of foods they like to eat. So any of those are really great ways to open a conversation. If you see a picture of him with the family you can ask, are your children still teenagers? How old are they? yeah, angsty teen. Those are ways to maybe make it personal first so then they can lower their guard and you can get some good business talk in between there. Like mom said, don't give up. Keep trying. Keep talking.
Chelsea:โจWell, I'm gonna be honest, I gave up. It wasn't worth it to me.
Vivian:โจOkay, so my turn now? For this one, there was an instance where somebody, one of us, had to record something for social media, right? And potentially for a commercial, something that can be used in that way. They recorded the entire video without any audio. So then the person had to go back to the doctor and say, excuse me, I know you just did all that, but can you redo it? Because I forgot to record the audio. So basically they just had a video, but nobody was talking in the video. Well, they were talking. They were moving their mouth, there was no recording.
Dad:โจThat sounds something that you might do, Vivian.
Vivian:โจIt was not me! No! It was Chelsea!
Dad:โจNo, but I still believe that it was something that you might do. Actually, it would be something that you both might do.
Chelsea:โจThe thing was the mics that I had at the time...The new mics that I have, have a green light and if they die the green light goes out, but the ones that I have before didn't have a light. So I had no way of knowing whether it died or not. So I did the entire recording and maybe 10 seconds into this six minute long video, the audio went out. So then I had to go, this was a doctor. It was a doctor who had a very busy schedule and I had to go to him and I had to say I am so sorry. We have to record that entire video again because I can't use any of it because there is no audio. That was that was the nicest doctor I have ever worked with. He was upset, rightfully so but he was like okay let's re-record it, it's fine.
Mom:โจI know what doctor it is.
Chelsea:โจYes, we're not going to say names but yes it's the doctor you think it is.
Vivian:โจMom was about to spill the beans. She was going to tell us. How much did you go in the bathroom and cry before you went to go talk to the doctor?
Chelsea:โจI didn't cry, but I was sitting there like, how am I going to explain this? Because there was no way to explain it. It was me. I didn't notice that it died. I hadn't charged the microphones beforehand and you think I would learn my lesson but I still don't charge my microphones beforehand so.
Vivian:โจMom, do you ever watch our Instagram? Do you know Chelsea sometimes on the stories she'll post a story and she'll say I just recorded this whole thing and the microphone was not on. I think your next tattoo needs to go right here and it's going to say turn your microphone on.
Chelsea:โจSo the next story we have. One of us had to do a round of interviews and find someone who could dance and twirl signs. Who do you think that was?
Dad:โจOne of you was looking for someone to what?
Vivian:โจYes, one of us was looking for professional twirlers. Who do you think that person is?
Chelsea:โจMom, who do you think did that?
Mom:โจI think Chelsea.
Vivian:โจIt was actually me. And let me tell you how this came about. When I used to work at the urgent care center, the doctors, if you have never worked with emergency room doctors, you are missing a real treat. Okay. They will teach you patience. They are very fabulous at what they do because they have to be good in high risk, like making decisions quickly. That also means that every decision they make, they want you to act on it very, very quickly. So one of them went to California and he came back and he said, my gosh, I saw this great idea. There was a sandwich shop and outside the sandwich shop was a man that was flipping a sign. Back in the day, y'all, that was a big deal. Not as prevalent in 2024, however, they still use them during tax season. I thought he was joking. So when he first asked me, I started laughing and I was like, yeah, we won't be doing that. And he goes, no I want you to hire a sign flipper and I said for our urgent care center? And he said yes. I said, so you want me to put a man outside to flip a sign that says come get your health care and he said yes great idea. He was serious because he bugged me about it for two weeks so finally I was like I gotta do it. I went to Craigslist, I posted a job posting and I had people show up. I had never done an interview like this. I sat there and I'm like, do you know how to dance? Yes. Can you show me some moves? Pretend like you're holding a sign, because I didn't even have the sign made yet. I hired somebody and we had him there for a couple of weeks. Every day he would come in at a certain time. I'd give him his sign, and he'd go outside. The stuff you never think you have to do for marketing. All right. I guess I'm next. Last one. This one's funny. Okay, so in the world of marketing, some of the stuff you never think you would have to think about, this person was putting together some marketing photos and materials for a particular business. The discussion came up with the business owner as to what type of photos you want to use, such as, do you want to include photos of people's nether regions in there?
Dad:โจExcuse me? What kind of photos are these?
Vivian:โจWho was it, mom? Do you think it was Chelsea or Vivian that had to talk to a small business owner and ask them, do you want to include pictures of the downstairs area of your body on social media?
Mom:โจI think you, Vivian.
Dad:โจI'm going to the opposite with Chelsea. Only because I can see Chelsea now talking with doctors about this.
Chelsea:โจIt was me. This wasn't in healthcare. This is when I did the Brazilian wax salon marketing. So we had the discussion, we were talking about social media, the kind of branding we wanted, the kind of imagery we wanted to use. There are some salons out there that do share photos of the bikini area because they like to show before and afters. So we had to have a conversation of are we going to be the type of salon that shows those kind of images or not? We ended up going with not just because the owner felt like it didn't align with her branding. But that was a discussion I had to have and it was a very interesting one because also we had to discuss, okay, well, how do you want to show them if you do want to show them? Because there's different ways of doing it. You could blur out certain areas. You could put like a pretty picture covering certain areas...
Dad:โจLike a flower?
Chelsea:โจActually, there are a lot of salons who do the flowers.
Vivian:โจCall Dad for all of your Brazilian wax studio marketing needs.
Dad:โจNo, do not. Chelsea:โจYeah, that was a very interesting conversation.
Vivian:โจI can only imagine because like you said, the conversation is not just a simple yes or no. If you are giving serious consideration to it, how far is it acceptable to you? When you're selling a service like that and y'all, this is the one thing where with marketing, we always tell you that having before and afters are really great, especially when it comes to skincare or a lot of hair salons do this now, right? Before and after. That's wonderful because people are very visual. However, sometimes if you are struggling and don't want to go that route, you need to sit down with your marketing person or whoever's handling your social media and say, let's come up with a consistency game plan of how we can visually portray the same thing without actually using that imagery.
Chelsea:โจIt was a surprisingly very serious conversation because like you were just saying, how are we going to make up for not showing this? What we did is we showed other before and afters, legs and arms and eyebrows and stuff like that. We're just not showing that specific area. A lot of client testimonials in place of showing the bikini area.
Vivian:โจIf you're listening, leave it in the comments. Tell us, does that type of imagery even matter when it comes to Brazilian waxing? At this point, everybody and their mama knows what a Brazilian wax is. I don't think you have to get too specific, but I could be wrong. They could be the one thing that people are like, I want to see. Let's not have that conversation. Well, I think that was it. You guys actually fared pretty well. You did better than what I thought. Mom, was there any one that surprised you? What was your favorite story out of all of them? The weirdest one, do you think?
Mom:โจI think for me it is the one that Chelsea didn't turn the microphone on. Yes, I think that was the funny one.
Vivian:โจIs it funny because you knew the doctor she was in hot water with and she had to go beg for forgiveness and say I'm so sorry? He won extra brownie points with that one Chelsea because he did redo the video, right?
Chelsea:โจYeah, he did redo the video. He didn't fire me. That was great too.
Vivian:โจYeah. We were sitting there just talking about the random stuff that happens and I will say I am surprisingly shocked that sometimes my reaction to things...I don't think I reacted to that very well. Thank goodness we all kept our jobs.
Chelsea:โจI was thinking because when we sat down trying to come up with these stories originally I was like, I don't have any stories. I don't have anything weird that happened to me and Vivian was prodding me, "come on you have to have something. Let's talk about lunches." I'm like, well one time some guy just didn't talk to me.
Vivian:โจI mean, that's pretty impressive to sit in front of somebody for 40 minutes and not talk to them. That's pretty hard to do. Most people are going to be nice at the very least, right? You brought me a free lunch. Now I feel like I have to talk to you for at least five minutes. Alright, well Chelsea, I think that's the episode. Friendly reminder you guys, if you have not already hit subscribe, please do so. If you did not get us a Christmas present this year, Chelsea and I are both a size 5 stars on the review page. So go ahead and leave us a review because that helps to, as Chelsea mentioned earlier, get our information in front of others.
Mom:โจAnd go be the best SOB...
Chelsea:โจYou can be!