Kevin O'Leary, investor and television personality best known from “Shark Tank,” had a sharp message for CEOs recently: stay focused on your customers or risk losing everything.
Focus On What The Customer Wants
In a recent post on X, O’Leary wrote, “Customers want product, price, and availability, nothing else.” He expanded on the idea in a video, emphasizing that 99% of customers just want a great product at a fair price that they can actually buy, either online or in-store.
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“If you take care of that,” he said, “you solve 99% of your problems. That’s your mandate.”
O’Leary warned that CEOs run into trouble when they stray from this focus. “The minute a CEO drifts into politics or social lecturing, they’re out of mandate,” he wrote. Instead, leaders should ask themselves one question every morning: “How does this help my customer? If it doesn’t, don’t do it.”
He also criticized executives who believe they have a responsibility to educate the public. “You’re not an educator. You’re a retailer. You sell stuff.”
“Every CEO should understand every day they go into work could be their last day,” he added. “Don’t do stupid stuff. It’s that simple.”
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Cracker Barrel’s Rebrand Sparks Viral Attention
O’Leary also weighed in on the recent Cracker Barrel (NASDAQ:CBRL) logo rebrand, which triggered major online backlash. But instead of viewing it as a disaster, he called it a case study in how bad press can sometimes work in a brand’s favor.
“Cracker Barrel rebranded and caught fire online, suddenly everyone’s talking about them,” he also posted recently. “Sometimes bad news is good news. A screw-up can create more buzz than a billion-dollar ad spend. In branding, attention is currency.”
In the attached clip, he noted that many brands have survived marketing mistakes over the decades. “Sometimes it’s just stupid management,” he said. “There’s always idiot managers, and the system cleans them out after they make their mistakes.”
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What stood out to him about Cracker Barrel was the scale of attention: “They’ve never been able to generate this kind of press in 100 years.”
O’Leary predicted the brand will recover. “If they made a mistake, and they end up getting more press than they have in decades, maybe it’s not such a bad thing," he said. "Good for them.”
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Image: Imagn Images
