SEO is the one thing that many brands don't focus on in their early days. An outstanding SEO agency will help you rank for questions where your brand is the answer, not just your brand name.
Think about some of the best brands — they mostly had incredible organic marketing, content, and awareness before turning their ads on.
Tell 5 of your friends why they should buy your product. Record it. Understand what you're selling — it's likely different than the value props on the packaging.
Jolie Skin's pre-launch conversion event was a custom water report to see what's actually in your water. I signed up immediately, and whatever product they launch, I will probably buy after seeing how disgusting my local water is. That's a brilliant conversion event.
When I was at Hint Water, one of the ways we scaled the business so quickly was by constantly building brand at every touchpoint. In every video creative, every sponsored article, every whitelisted-influencer video, and every box insert, we had 3 objectives: Let the customer know WHO we are, WHY we exist, and HOW important the product can be for them.
Performance Branding: synchronously building brand equity on the back of your working performance media dollars. Your ads become more 'invisible' as ads, because your content is so relevant that someone wouldn't view it as a digital billboard in the feed — it's just really f*cking good content.
Brand compounds over time and allows your performance/DR efforts to work HARDER for you, but you need to still add that layer of direct-response on top, for the full cycle to work.
Native Deodorant was built with Facebook ads only. But it wasn't scummy, offer-focused marketing — every customer understood WHY they were buying from Native AND they knew what was inside the product and what made it superior. That's Performance Branding.
While performance marketing becomes the crack that we love — instant gratification with purchases and attributable actions — the long game lies in the depth of the brand.
If you look at 'brand' holistically, it's the equivalent of a firm handshake. Before really doing much, you establish a level of trust, confidence, intention, and respect.
Today's consumer is smart, in terms of smelling the BS of a brand built with intention versus one just being built by a VC firm or drop-shipped from Alibaba.
When you think of a dog, what do you think of? I think of a yellow lab. You might think of a spotted puppy or a pit bull. That's the brand of 'dog' in your head. Go make that happen for your category, product, and brand.
4 easy and cheap ways to build brand: high NPS and word-of-mouth, good packaging (box, inserts, notes, tape), good content across social, email, and website, and good brand education with email flows that build up the need for the product.
PR does a great job telling the story about your brand, but they usually suck when it comes to promoting it, especially nowadays when the majority of the content we consume comes from what algorithms decide, not what we pre-selected to read.
Google 'American Crew campaign' in Google Images. The last 10 years of photos are all consistent. 10 years of consistency adds brand equity, value, trust, and validation. Be consistent in your messaging across every channel.
I see so many new DTC brands where people get bored, find a product to sell, find a way to message it differently, raise a million dollars, and then light up a store. They don't build a full brand foundation and assume the power of Facebook ads will take them to the moon.
When someone buys a bottle of water before going into the gym or crowds her bathroom shelf with one brand's vitamin C serum versus another, they make those choices because they represent who they are. If you're just selling products vs building a brand, you'll never be positioned in a way where people want to represent you.
Building a good brand personality happens when you get hyper-specific and personify your identity. Ask yourself defining questions: What's their coffee order? What podcasts would they listen to? What would their home look like? The key is to have fun with this and make it as detailed as possible.
One reason The Pill Club does so well is they are very native to the way its customers communicate. Their DMs on Instagram route straight to customer service, they have an SMS line with quick response times, and even their website 'reviews' are in the format of Instagram posts. Everything feels like it should for a brand reaching its audience today.
When you launch a separate publication — like Hint's The Quench, AWAY's Here Magazine, or Dollar Shave Club's Mel Magazine — you can focus on the consumer persona, not the product. It flips the script entirely.
This is how Glossier nailed their product launches — leveraging IntoTheGloss to learn what products to create next based on content engagement signals and white space in the market.
The last decade of DTC has relied SO heavy on software and apps, many new companies forgot they need to build the brand piece. You can add QR codes or send text reminders with coupons, but technology is just the equivalent of leading the horse to water. The horse still needs to want to drink it.
Think about Peloton's home bike versus the Nordic Track at-home bike — which one would you grab if both were free? That's brand.
A brand without a clear purpose is like that person who lingers around your friend group but brings no jokes or interesting conversation. You're never excited to invite them back.
Consistency across consumer touchpoints matters. Cuyana does an exquisite job — you could compare their 2021 creative to their 2019 creative, and you'd think they were shot on the same day.
Performance branding is building brand equity on the back of your hard-working performance dollars. Your ad creative, landing pages, sponsored editorial content, email creative — all should reiterate the WHY. Even super lower-funnel content should push the WHY.
Getting earned media coverage isn't as easy as hiring a PR agency. You still have to create moments internally. Are you going to break a world record? Throw an event? Give back to the community? You need to create moments for PR to work.
Take advantage of unused real estate: boxes, packaging tape, the note inside. Haus did it so well that people constantly posted about it, and their packaging became a customer acquisition channel.
If someone saw your ad and didn't go to your site, would they understand why you exist as a brand? If someone went to your site without seeing an ad, would they understand why you exist without clicking around much? Both need to be yes.
Liquid Death generates 7-figure revenues with merchandise and all their website and social content is user-generated. No fancy photoshoots or campaigns — they just keep pushing what their customers say about the product.
Haus didn't spend a dollar on paid marketing for the first year. They spent all their efforts on building FOMO so you'd want to try it, then creating a world-class experience so you'd post or talk about it — a flywheel with a ripple effect from each customer.
The word-of-mouth community can't be built by any software or agency. You have to invest in your customers, just like they made a decision to invest in you by buying your product.
If we were spending between $80K and $250K on a brand's visual identity, we validate everything with small but effective tests. The branding lasts longer, and the customer feels connected from the beginning.
If the brand wasn't designed with data, and just 'vibes' inside a conference room by people who don't actively see the market, then you should absolutely not be romantic about what is in your brand book.
Among the most iconic brands, they all clearly solve a problem in some sort of routine — which creates stickiness and retention. Nike pushes the elite athlete. Apple pushes an elevated consumer. Native pushes someone who cares about what goes on their body.
These brands aren't focused on selling today — they're focused on making sure today's buyer's great-granddaughter is still using the product. Why do I go to Trader Joe's? Because my mom did when I was a kid.
Brand marketing drives sell-through in retail. Performance marketing drives sell-through online. Push for education across all your performance marketing — lead with value, not 'BUY THIS RIGHT NOW AND GET 20% OFF!'
Brand partnerships are incredibly underrated. Nike & Sharpie, Doritos & Taco Bell, Cheetos & Forever 21 — they leverage each other's brand equity to drive trial. It's easy to set up and usually costs nothing when you bring equal value.
The Jolie Water Report is a prime example of where marketing is going — creating content or building experiences useful to people, whether or not they ever become paying customers.
When you put a picture in Microsoft Word and stretch it from the corner, it gets blurry. Think of the image's resolution as your brand equity, and the stretching as your advertising. As you stretch, you need higher resolution. Otherwise you get a big image, but it's completely blurry.
I call it the Pitbull Strategy. As Pitbull was growing, he collaborated with top-charting artists to quickly get audience share — and it worked. Same with brand partnerships: Brightland created olive oil variations with Lavo, Sweetgreen, and Food52, turning each into a sales channel.
Setting up brand partnerships starts with sending an email with an idea to someone at the other brand. Send 10 of these and you'll see at least a couple of opportunities move closer to happening.
The more brand equity you have, the further your ad dollars go when you run campaigns.
About 50% of one celebrity brand's orders shipped with merch in the cart. Merchandise can massively boost AOV and offset the cost of paid advertising.
About 40-60% of Gen Z brands that offer merch, ship with merch in the orders. Merch is great margin and keeps brand loyalty high.
Good top-of-funnel awareness sets up a clear problem and solution. It's not just about running a TV commercial or video view campaigns — it's about answering 'Why should I care about this brand?' in a way that's easily understandable by someone who's never heard of you.
Naval Ravikant said it best: the closer you are to your authentic self, the harder it becomes to be associated with your competition. TOF storytelling sets you apart.
For a brand we just bought, we sent an extensive survey to learn WHO the customer is, WHY they buy, their FREQUENCY, WHAT they want in the future, and HOW we set ourselves apart. From this, we put together 18 TOF ideas and test everything on TikTok first.
If SoulCycle carries your product, they are saying it fits their ethos. Think about trying to find everyone paying $38 for a workout class through digital ads — those would be insanely high CPMs. Partnerships put you in front of them for cheap.
Hello Fresh has made an entire business out of putting postcards in shipper boxes. Put postcards in each other's boxes — it's one of the simplest brand partnership plays.
Why did you start your company? What do you want people to be more educated on? Create content around that. It doesn't have to be sales focused — it should educate someone to the point where they think, 'Damn, maybe I should be showering with a filter in my water.'
Bringing people together for something where the punchline isn't your brand, but your brand gets the privilege to be there, is a great way to build community. Ty Haney was one of the OGs with Outdoor Voices running clubs across the country.
Think about cross-brand bundles: Jolie Shower, Long Wknd, and Jambys bundled together. Split the acquisition cost, everyone gets a sale and a new customer.
If you can make the same shoe Nike does in China for $10, why do you still buy Nike's? Because you're buying into the uniqueness, the lifestyle, and the brand. If you just rely on a good product without the support of a brand, you'll always be fighting for a repeat purchase — it's a race to the bottom.
When I took Shaan's Power Writing course, my favorite lesson was: at the top of the page, write down the SINGLE person you are writing for, and the emotion you want them to feel. With your brand, do the same. Know WHO your customers are and HOW you want them to feel.
If you're not 'cool' to your target consumer, you're not going to convert customers, no matter what site or ad creative optimizations you make.
Your customer should always leave an experience in a peak state of mind. Apply Peak & Pit psychology to customer onboarding — elevation, pride, insight, connection.
When someone's first full usage cycle with a Lomi went perfectly, they became a super-fan and evangelist. When it didn't, usage and satisfaction were both much lower. It's all tied to emotions and willingness to experience those emotions again.
For low-NPS must-have services like cell service, internet, and insurance, consumers go where they feel two things: priority customer service, and the brand that appears the most innovative and 'cool' among competitors.
If you're a brand that sells physical goods, partner with companies that sell digital goods. The perceived value is immensely higher than the cost, and they make for awesome partnerships.
Ridge Wallet bought Everyday Carry, which gets 600k+ monthly visitors. While their CMO built an internal content machine, an additional owned audience makes both sides even more powerful together.
Become a content machine. As a brand, be vulnerable and open. Express your brand to exactly the customer you're going after. Be loud and proud of what you're selling.
At the end of the day, you just need to prove efficacy and sell efficacy. If you have the efficacy, you can charge whatever you want and people will pay for it — just look at luxury and spirits brands, or any celebrity skincare brand.
Nothing makes a brand cooler than nailing a collaboration. North Face is quite boring, but someone on the fence that sees their Supreme collab is now way more excited about a North Face jacket — even if they're not buying the collab, the brand just got way cooler.
Run a partnership with another brand to launch a product and test demand. Chamberlain Coffee did a matcha can collab — through the reaction and sales, they could see what demand would look like for a ready-to-drink product.
Run polls on Instagram Stories to ask your followers directly. Also use Okendo: after someone rates your product, ask them what they want to see next. For Long Wknd, we got all our product innovation from what customers said they wanted.
Do a limited edition run of a new product. Position it as something that will sell out. If it sticks, bring it back repeatedly or make it permanent. Peach Raspberry Hint Water was an example of this strategy.
If you have a younger audience, use publications that relate: Insider, Bustle, BuzzFeed, Refinery29, PopSugar. If you have an older audience: Town & Country, New York Times, MSNBC, Good Morning America. Match your social proof to your demo.
Make events experiential. If you have a tent, tasting, photo booth, or fitting room, people will create their own content. You just have to set up the environment — good lighting, good props, good story. You set that up, everyone else will naturally create content.
Hims did above-the-bathroom-stall ads at sports stadiums to drive early viral growth. Eight Sleep put a billboard on a boat during Miami Tech Week. Skims ran provocative billboards across NYC. Nike's '3D' digital billboards use optical illusions. OOH is about memorable moments that stop people in their tracks.
Word of mouth is the most trusted source of information — it's someone you have a long-standing relationship with giving you the tip. The 'scalable' versions of word of mouth are customer reviews and editorial articles from publishers like PopSugar or WireCutter.
Today's equivalent of owning store/shelf space in the 'global mall' is owning relevant distribution channels on the internet. Instead of signing 5-year contracts with mall developers, you're investing in content and ad networks to build your own DTC distribution.
Juicy Couture made a simple tracksuit into a status symbol and a lifestyle. Having one killer product that truly penetrates culture at a mass scale means you'll always have a chance to revive it as a multi-generational brand.
If your brand can reach scale and be relevant for just one 5-year period in its history, it will be able to be re-traded over and over again. The secret to this is time, trust, quality, and good customer experience.
Performance branding is a term I coined that means you build brand equity on the back of your working performance dollars.
We named Long Wknd's scents after places — Palm Springs, St. Barths, Amalfi Coast. When you hear Amalfi Coast, you think of moisturizing, blue paradise. When you hear Palm Springs, you think dry, hot cactus. We used the 'brand' these places have already built to shortcut customer perception.
With Long Wknd, my goal was to get to a $75-80 AOV. To do that, we moved up-market to more premium products, cut low sell-through SKUs, introduced higher price point products, and rebranded the visual identity entirely.
The first area where you can win is on real product innovation. Jolie took on a new category with filtered shower heads. Eight Sleep reinvented the mattress with their pod system. Both were category creators. Product is often the hardest place to innovate, but if you can do it, you build a really strong foundation.
In True Classic's post-purchase survey, many respondents heard about the brand 6-12 months before making their first purchase. Attribution is much more nuanced — there were likely many other touch points over months or years before someone converts.
Top-of-funnel marketing is like creatine. You take creatine, you get 5-10% stronger. You add partnerships or smart top-of-funnel, and you make your performance ads so much more efficient.
Jolie's entire business revolves around ONE hero product with only 4 color options — not a logistical nightmare. High AOV ($148-165), lightweight, easy to ship, with a subscription for quarterly filter refills. Massive TAM: anyone with a shower.
Jolie wraps trucks with messages like 'Did you know that your shower water is dirtier than this truck?' as the truck appears covered in mud. This gets people's attention immediately and makes them pull out their phone and research the brand.
The reason those ads worked so quickly was because the founder was a master at building the brand's foundation. There was something that existed past just efficient ads. Without brand, your ads are a house of cards.
During Black Friday, Vuori ran no sale and still had an incredible day. They've built an amazing brand and community around high-quality products. That's what longevity looks like.
A big part of what makes a site look phenomenal is photography. Cadence benefits from this — high-quality photos make your entire brand feel like a billion-dollar company.
The whole point of brand collabs is to cross-pollinate audiences. American Express and Equinox. Vacation sunscreen and Prince tennis. TRUFF and Hidden Valley Ranch. Win-win for both brands and the customer.
Limited product drops spur fence-sitters into action. If you have a sizable customer list, drops are a fantastic way to drive engagement, increase LTV, and create buzz.
Nood is a bootstrapped brand doing $50M/year in revenue, achieved in just two years. Their advertising strategy is some of the best in the industry.
One of the main variables separating brands getting $40 CPMs from the ones getting $17 CPMs is the investment in press and earned media. Press helps with your MER and leads to lower CPMs and CACs due to the halo effect.
You need to build a brand, not just products that sell on Meta. When you have 'Brand,' you have the leverage to turn on other channels quickly.
Caraway was very strategic about getting PR — featured in dozens of publications, newsletters, and blogger sites. They used press to build a halo around their brand, then supercharged it with ads.
Send cease and desist letters early and often. If you're a fast-growing brand, protect your IP. Be willing to fight copycats if they take it too far.
Once you reach hundreds of millions in sales, it's no longer about purely direct response performance marketing. HexClad's next chapter is building cultural relevance — more lifestyle content, creative partnerships, and brand building versus direct KPIs.
HexClad is completely bootstrapped — never raised outside capital — and grew from $30M/year to a $500M+ run rate. When lockdowns hit, they lost 90% of in-store sales but pivoted hard to DTC.
It sounds cool in a brand book but it doesn't make sense to a consumer? Cut it.
When The Skinny Confidential's mouth tape sold out in 2 hours, and then again within hours, that wasn't by accident. We strategically build product launches and GTM plans for any new product we can treat like a big brand moment. It's an omni-channel play and a non-invasive way to make noise, get attention, and let more people know who you are.
Good copy will make someone fall in love with your brand, not just want to buy your product. My favorite copy is when Apple launches new products. The MacBook Air copy was 'Light. Years ahead.' They always give you 2+ ways to read something, making it 10x more enjoyable.
85% of shoppers aged 35-44 have strong, established brand preferences. This group stops experimenting. If you can build brand loyalty at this age, they will likely become lifelong customers. Add that to your calculation of LTV.
HexClad built their brand by becoming synonymous with a concept — 'badass cookware.' It only takes one big partnership to change the trajectory of your brand. That's what HexClad did with Gordon Ramsay.
Brands should consider returning to analog methods — local events and IRL experiences — to create unique, memorable brand moments that stand out in an online-heavy world.
The goal of any brand should be to create something that customers want to associate with publicly. The goal is for them to become ambassadors not because you ask them to, but because they believe in your brand's product and values.
No matter how good your ads are, if you aren't showing up positively on Reddit, TikTok, and YouTube, people won't get over the fence. You will inspire them to buy that cookware set, and then they'll buy from the one with a better Reddit or TikTok presence.
Have you seen Woobles and Minecraft, or Little Words Project and Disney? Licensing collaborations bring a whole new audience and let you run ads more effectively. Your nCPA goes down with collabs, and in most cases, you're only paying an affiliate-like percentage per sale.
The fastest-scaling new brands — Vuori, Skims, ARMRA, HexClad, Caraway, Lemme — all follow the same playbook: launch amazing products, generate noise with calculated top-of-funnel bets, perfect the buying journey, continue launching products with compounding brand effect, and master retention and content.
The two easiest ways to drive upper-funnel awareness with a small brand marketing budget are advertorials and short-form content platforms. Building a brand by leveraging Reels, TikTok, and YouTube Shorts is THE cheapest way to scale a business.
The Jolie Water Report brought millions of people to Jolie's website to understand their local water. Make your site an attraction — determine what you can create that's beneficial or valuable to your customer and put that on your website.
Press articles have no relevance anymore — people know they're all affiliate pieces. But Reddit posts can't be bought, TikTok unboxings can't all be paid for, and you can't censor those platforms. Show up in more places people are searching, not just where you can serve them ads.
The reason Skims does campaigns with Sabrina Carpenter and Spritz Society launched a flavor with Craig Conover is to stay cool, relevant, and ahead of trends. Having a known brand is one thing, but you have to keep people saying 'Wow!'
Everything in the upper funnel needs to educate customers about who you are, what you do, why you exist, and why you are 'cool' — or be loud enough as a brand so consumers care about what you're about.
Jolie isn't hard-selling their shower head. They're just telling you how bad the water you use on your largest organ is. That's problem awareness done right.
With a high AOV product, you can't force someone down the customer journey; you have to be the best omnipresent option.
As Ryan, the founder of Jolie, says, 'Ads make people aware. Word of mouth gets people to buy.' I don't disagree, especially for more expensive items.
I've probably sold 15-20 Eight Sleeps myself just by the way I speak about them. Word of mouth is the best form of advertising for high AOV products. Turn your existing customers into evangelists.
Describe your brand as a person. You can use this persona to know how to write copy and design marketing collateral and landing pages.
The soundbite strategy: make something easy for someone to read, understand, and then repeat later when asked why they are participating.
Use at least two easy stories on your site — the founding story and a successful customer's story with your product.
'PR' as it has been historically is most likely a waste of money if you're just paying a 5-figure retainer to 'pitch' articles. The point of those articles is logos for your website. Once you get those, the only thing worth pursuing is listicles where publishers earn affiliate commission.
If a flavor doesn't perform but you think it has potential, rename it and launch again. Hint first launched 'Tropical' and it flopped. Rebranded to 'Pineapple' — now a top 5 flavor.
When launching a new product, treat it like a brand launch all over again. Lemme does this best with their social, email, OOH content, and site every time they have a new launch.
No one cares what you have to say about your own product. A testimonial from someone other than yourself is what makes people purchase. That's why influencers work, partnerships do well, and more social proof means higher conversion.
Celebrity makeup brand (AOV $50): $3-10 CPA. Non-celebrity (AOV $35): $30-50 CPA. Well-known activewear (AOV $120): $12 CPA. One-year-old activewear (AOV $130): $85 CPA. Brand recognition immediately changes your unit economics.
Performance Branding: build brand equity off working performance dollars. Run advertorials, whitelist creator content, launch affiliate programs, seed product. Can't send to many people free? Pay one celebrity to gift all their friends.
Any good brand only caters to 20% of the population, MAX. When you try to be inclusive to everyone, you're not exclusive to anyone. Think about who your 20% is. Obsess over them.
When brands hit headwinds, the first roles cut are brand marketing, community, organic social, and events. But the brands doing best this year are the ones who deliberately invested in brand marketing last year and the years prior.
The less positive things people associate with your brand, the higher your CPM and the worse your CTR. Brand equity directly impacts paid media efficiency.
Back then, the message found you; today, you find the message. That's why brand and reputation are more critical than ever. The middle of the funnel — Amazon reviews, Reddit, TikTok, friends' opinions — is a playing field you're only on the sidelines for.
Jolie's real customer journey: truck in NYC → ChatGPT search → Google (all third-party reviews) → TikTok search → creator mention in GRWM → email with EPA water report by zip code → retargeting ad → friend says 'get it at Ulta' → buys at Ulta. That's the modern funnel.
AEO and GEO is about to be something people will talk about, then sit and do nothing for 12 months. Imagine how much money you can make being ranked #1 in ChatGPT for 'What's the best coffee for someone with a bad stomach?'
Male beauty spending is up 77%, but not in the categories you might expect. We're moving away from hyper-masculine branding toward gender-neutral, inclusive approaches. The Ordinary is capitalizing on this.
There are multiple paths to building top of funnel: creator-seeding (like Jolie), building your own creator network (like Comfrt), earning PR through product excellence (like Cadence), running paid media (like Hims, HexClad), having a celebrity founder (like Lemme, Feastables), smart clipping at $3 CPM (like Zagged), or top-tier retail distribution (like Swishables).
You might think you don't need to invest in a nice brand book. But that brand book flows through every part of your brand — website, emails, texts, ad creative, packaging, collaborations. A weak visual identity looks lazy and not something people want to be a part of.
Brands will spend $700k/month in ads but won't run a clinical trial. If you sell a product where you can run clinical trials — skincare, haircare, supplements — do it. It makes an overnight difference in your ad performance.
Upper funnel doesn't immediately mean you have to PAY to fill that funnel. Smaller brands do it thinking it will help, but it just lights money on fire. If you don't have distribution, small bets and random one-off awareness media buys will never be strong enough to push people down the funnel.
The middle funnel is where most brands doing $10M to $30M get lost. This is the consumer's own research on YouTube, Reddit, TikTok, ChatGPT. 'Does Eight Sleep actually help sleep?' as a ChatGPT question or TikTok search term is what you need to solve for your brand in every channel your consumer would look.
It's worth spending 45 minutes brainstorming with your team about how your brand can immerse itself in the culture of your customer demographic. For some brands, this has been clipping; for others it's been producing their own high-fidelity vertical video content series.
The beauty of testing positioning angles is you can test as many as you want, all with individual funnels — creative, landing pages, offers — without attaching your brand to something before it's proven. It's the brilliance of short feedback loops and leveraging performance marketing for brand building.
Comfrt founder Hudson didn't appear in a single ad for three and a half years. Nobody knew he was the founder until he did a podcast. His line: 'I didn't care about being famous. I cared about being wealthy.'
Create products that bring non-market buyers INTO the market. Comfrt's Airplane Mode Hoodie with the built-in eye mask made people who weren't shopping for hoodies suddenly want one. That's the unlock — creating net new demand where you're not competing against competitors.
Who are we for? Not 'women 25-45.' What does she care about? What's her day look like? What do we solve? Not features — the actual problem in her life. Why are we different? Not 'premium quality' or 'clean ingredients.' What do we sound like? Three adjectives. That's your voice. Apply it everywhere.
Digital experiential marketing is the next evolution of social: digital products like checklists or guides, lives with celebrity guests, interactive content on TikTok and Stories. It becomes a huge source for introducing new customers to your brand.
Create something on your homepage that benefits the visitor whether or not they buy. At JUDY, we pushed emergency preparedness guides so consumers knew the bare minimum of what to do in emergencies. It increases time on site and creates something they'll remember your brand for.
Haus's unboxing experience became their biggest driver of customer acquisition for their entire first year — and they didn't do anything special beyond going above and beyond with standard packaging. Think through everything from packing tape to what the box says when you open it.
When Kyle Kuzma was in the NBA bubble during the playoffs drinking exclusively Barcode, his vitamin levels were in the 99th percentile according to team doctors. That's the kind of real proof point that sells a performance beverage — not ingredient lists.
When consumers are shopping, they assume you are guilty until proven innocent. You need to give your target audience all the validation that they are not making a stupid decision. You don't want your customer to be embarrassed when the box arrives or their friend asks for a recommendation. That's why reviews, UGC, and press quotes matter more than anything you say about yourself.
Performance Branding means synchronously building brand equity on the back of your working performance media dollars. Every video creative, sponsored article, whitelisted-influencer video, and box insert should accomplish 3 things: let the customer know WHO you are, WHY you exist, and HOW important the product can be in their life.
A founder who does 6-figures in revenue per day with 99.9% from 1 product can't get other products to sell more than 2% per day — because without brand, your other SKUs have no gravity. Brand is the unlock for portfolio expansion.
The 'UVM' (Unique Visitors per Month) metric that PR agencies send in press roundups is BS. It's like saying an influencer campaign's success depends on how many followers they have. Most PR pieces don't see more than 5,000 to 30,000 eyeballs organically.
Cultivate a 'Ride or Die' group of initial fans early. Immi did this with a community of ramen lovers. These fans become your 'Marines' in the comments — first to answer questions and defend your brand in ads and social posts without being asked.
We tore down the first two versions of a brand we were building internally because they didn't have a real purpose to exist. The products were fantastic and quite different in the market, but without a story or positioning that makes someone want to join the tribe, the brand won't last no matter how great the product is.
NUGGS describes their product updates like software iterations — versioning their nuggets. If you make product improvements, frame them this way. It creates a narrative of constant improvement and gives customers a reason to keep coming back.
The modern brand ingredient list: 1) A reason to exist and the problem you solve, 2) A relatable story — the 'why,' 3) An amazing product (good isn't enough — good is like 1-week shipping vs 2-day), 4) A content engine for owned, paid, and earned, 5) A deep understanding of your customer beyond demographics.
The highest level of community is the 'head nod' — when a Jeep owner sees another Jeep owner, or when two Vuori wearers connect at the gym. You can't build that with software. It takes four ingredients: time, consistency, quality, and good intentions.
Levels Health spent 2 years putting out the highest quality content around metabolic fitness before monetizing. Whether or not you become a paying customer, they don't care — the intent is to educate. The sales cycle is longer, but it distributes a much higher lifetime value back to the company.
Brand strategy (origin story, mission, tone, customer profile, mantras) shouldn't change. Visual identity can and should evolve. Sticking to visual guidelines simply because 'that's what's in the brand book' is as supported as 'because I said so.' Test new visual elements, double down on what works.
When spending $80k-$250k on a brand's visual identity, validate everything with small paid traffic tests first. Build landing pages, drive traffic, validate demographics on the ad platform, then re-validate with Quantcast Measure. The branding lasts longer and customers feel connected from the beginning.
Find the top 20-30 websites in your niche and get your brand reviewed there. When potential customers Google for reviews, you need legitimate third-party content showing up — not just your own reviews widget.
Every iconic brand portrays an ideal persona in their marketing. Pre-purchase, the persona creates aspiration — you want to BE that person. Post-purchase, it works as a badge of who you are to others. Nike pushes the elite athlete. Apple pushes the elevated consumer. Native pushes someone who cares about what goes on their body.
Think about building a brand like building a YouTube channel. You can't buy your way to 500K subscribers even if you spend money on advertising. You have to earn them through consistently providing value, using growth levers smartly, and giving people a reason to come back.
The best marketing changes behavior, whether or not someone buys from you. When Jolie's Water Report got people to buy shower filters on Amazon instead, that wasn't a failure — that was proof the education was working. The customers eventually come back to whoever educated them.
The Canopy x Skinny Confidential collab sold out within 72 hours, and again when restocked. Lauryn Evarts Bosstick has about 1.5M followers. It was likely a rev-share model — Canopy only profited while getting in front of a new audience, versus spending on ads to do the same.
Brightland Oil creates new olive oil variations specifically for brand partners with large audiences — Lavo, Sweetgreen, Food52. Each collab becomes a sales channel you couldn't normally tap into. It all starts with sending 10 emails with ideas to people at other brands.
Viral stunts and FOMO-inducing drops work. Last Crumb Cookies built its business off FOMO-inducing drops of their $150 cookies with no pre-existing following. NUGGS, MadHappy, and CoinBase all used this same tactic to drive enormous traffic and engagement.
If I were to buy a brand today, I would grow it mainly through collaborations with other brands. When JUDY and Poo~Pourri do a JUDY for your Booty kit, both brands tap into new audiences. The cost of the partnership is just the effort to make it happen.
Every TOF campaign that works leaves you with a punchline. Furbo? My dog will be safe. Skims? The most comfortable shapewear, celebrity-approved. HexClad? Nonstick and good enough for Gordon Ramsay. If your TOF doesn't leave someone with a punchline, you have eyeballs with no downstream effects.
For a brand we just bought, we put together 18 TOF ideas and tested everything on TikTok first. The organic reach on TikTok is incredible — if you can understand what the market wants, just pump what you see working. TOF doesn't need to be a 4-word sentence campaign like Coke's 'Sign of good taste' anymore.
Third-party review sites are mid-funnel gold. When someone is interested, they Google your brand name. You want bloggers, review sites, and publications covering you — and they'll describe use cases your own website never would. A cancer blogger wrote about how Hint's flavoring made it easier to drink water during chemotherapy. You can't buy that angle.
Mission-based content isn't reverse-engineering SEO — it's answering the question 'What do you want your company to change in the world?' and pushing content behind that. It educates someone to the point where they think, 'Damn, maybe I should be showering with a filter in my water.'
SoulCycle carries Hydrant packets and Curie deodorant in their studios — for free. The products are placed where their use case is highlighted and necessary. Getting your product into places where it solves a problem in real-time is the best sampling strategy. Attribute it back with a specific coupon code, URL, or post-purchase survey.
Peak & Pit Experiences applied to DTC: design your customer journey so the customer always leaves at a peak. People don't remember the pits, but they definitely remember the peaks. In customer service, research shows higher LTV and propensity to spend after having an issue resolved — that's the 'ultra peak.'
Peak experiences have 4 characteristics: Elevation (happiness through sensory pleasures and surprises), Pride (moments of achievement or courage), Insight (eureka moments that change understanding), and Connection (social moments like events or community). Engineer these into your post-purchase experience.
T-Mobile's churn is 1.01%, the lowest among all carriers. For must-have services with low NPS — cell service, internet, insurance — consumers go where they feel a combination of high customer service standards and the brand that appears most innovative and 'cool' among competitors.
The 3 things every successful celebrity brand has in common: death, taxes, and the brand would likely be successful on its own even without the celebrity. The audience part is great for the first 72 hours, maybe a week with smart gifting and press. Real staying power comes from being a content machine and constantly pushing boundaries.
You're not actually a 'brand' until people buy your product and love it when they experience it. So many founders obsess over the About Us page, the mission statement, and font-weight instead of margins, AOV goals, and acquisition channels. Without customers, you have no brand.
Outdoor Voices hosted low-cost, often weekly, in-person events — dog walks, pick-up basketball, running clubs — to cultivate community. New customers visited their 800 sqft Austin store asking about last week's basketball score. They replicated this playbook in every major city they expanded to.
Ty Haney calls big brand activations 'Major Moments' — spend big to create an unforgettable experience for your community. OV's 1,600-person dog jog in Austin partnered with Bark Box and Chewy. They often spent $20-40K on these events.
The 'Red Carpet document' is what I fill out when evaluating brands before they're a client or investment. Key questions: founding story, who's the buyer in the household, describe the product simply, what's the brand's punchline in 1-2 sentences, tone of voice, competitors, and unique differentiators.
Great marketing is the story of how products help us transform into who we want to be. Owning Nike makes us an athlete. Owning Supreme makes us cool. Owning a Rolex makes us successful. Your ads should paint the picture of life after purchase, not list materials and features.
Outdoor Voices essentially created the trend of matte fabrics for activewear instead of spandex or polyester blends. They were extremely early to the 'standard DTC color palette' — moss green, charcoal gray, mocha brown, strawberry red — setting aesthetic standards the industry followed.
You need to explain your product in 1-2 sentences max. The shorter, the better. The more flawless your one-liner is, the better everything else — ads, labels, landing pages — will sound. If you can't nail the punchline, nothing downstream converts.
The TRI framework for evaluating word-of-mouth channels: judge referrals, reviews, and publisher coverage by Trust, Reach, and Impact. Word of mouth scores highest on trust, lowest on reach. Publisher coverage scores highest on reach but lower on trust.
Products with a single benefit or angle don't perform as well with customer acquisition as those with multiple angles. Jolie isn't just a shower head — it's a haircare tool, skincare tool, home design upgrade, acne-fighting device, and anti-aging device. Multiple angles lower the barrier to entry in a consumer's mind.
The 5 traits of generational, re-tradable brands: cultural tie-in, convenience to the customer, omnipresent distribution, the 'cool kids' repped it, and innovative product or formulation. Think Kate Spade, Juicy Couture, Starter Jackets — brands with DNA strong enough to be resurrected.
The 4 key ingredients of building brand perception that pays off during BFCM: unique content, brand/media collaborations, good customer experience, and a product that does what it says.
Snif's first round of funding was entirely built on a Try Before You Buy model for fragrance — a category where smell-testing online is impossible. TBYB can be the foundation of your entire business model, not just a conversion tactic.
Strong brand recognition drastically reduces your CAC. Jolie has a much more efficient cost to acquire a new customer than any of their competitors — not because of better ads, but because their brand is well known. It's also the gateway to not being held hostage to a single ads platform.
HexClad grew from $30M/year to a $500M+ run rate, completely bootstrapped, with zero outside capital. Jason Panzer joined as CFO in April 2020 and became President in 2021 — overseeing about 80% of their sales including all of DTC.
Eight Sleep could say 'a temperature controlled mattress' or 'The Tesla of Mattresses.' That single positioning choice immediately creates a brand perception in the consumer's mind that changes everything about how they evaluate the product.
After Cadence realized Taylor Hill was a fan, they co-created 'The Supermodel Set' together. When a celebrity loves your product organically, the play isn't just to amplify — it's to bring them inside and build something together.
Get your brand to $500K-1M/yr in revenue first, before you start spending on a branding agency. Think about having a world-class site, packaging, and ads as the reward for achieving initial success — not a prerequisite.
Crown Affair raised only $6.7M and is on track to do $15-18M in revenue this year without running any Facebook ads. It's all from retail (Sephora) and their own DTC site. Because their model isn't reliant on ads, they're not donating 30-40% of raised capital to Meta.
Cadence lets the whole world know when there's a new color variant and it's a huge revenue driver. Launching additional variants — a new flavor, color, scent, or size — can be just as big of a deal as launching a new product if you treat it like one.
Harley Finkelstein, President of Shopify, shared a compelling insight at the Q4 Summit: Novelty is 'better than any ad, promotion or discount.' Google's research found that holiday shoppers who feel confident about recent purchases search for prices, availability, and reviews online before visiting a store much more than shoppers who don't.
Think of Uber and Lyft: exact same product, same drivers even — but the creative that surrounds the product is what makes you decide which one you use and support. That's the power of creative and brand.
The brands that made a real investment into building their brand during the year had the best Q4s, with multiple record-breaking days. It's so obvious in hindsight — brand equity compounds and pays off when it matters most.
When asking customers to donate, set the expectation at $2, not $50 or $100. If 15,000 people donate $2, that's much better than a handful donating $100 — which is usually what happens when you ask for large amounts.
The 'Awareness' objective in Meta ads manager is a phony term. Real top-of-funnel awareness isn't a campaign setting — it's answering: Has someone heard of your brand? Do they understand the benefits? Is there trust? Are people using and talking about the product?
If you're creating a new category, the brand needs to focus on problem awareness first. The louder the problem gets, the more ears perk up. Tactically, push this content through founders, spokespeople, PR agencies, or creators — think poor sleep, aging, seed oils, chemicals in food.
Hand-drawn, digitized icons for search, account, and cart bring a creator's brand to life and infuse realness throughout the customer journey. Small touches of authenticity make a brand feel human, not templated.
9 times out of 10, when a brand says 'Our CPA is too high,' it's because they have zero brand name. They think decent Meta ads and a Shopify site entitle them to generate sales. Lock in on building your brand — when you sell the company, the strength of the brand is the main thing that matters.
BRĒZ is 18 months in and on pace to do $70M in revenue this year. Aaron built it because alcohol sucked and smoking was unpredictable — he wanted the feeling without the hangover, in a form factor for social settings. The sensation hits within 5 minutes and wears off in 90 to 120 minutes. When your product is genuinely different, your CACs are lower, your referral rate is higher, and it takes less to convince people.
Aaron from BRĒZ follows the Apple Model over the Coca-Cola Model — fewer SKUs, higher quality, launched with intention rather than flooding the market with options. Product innovation is a real moat. Eight Sleep, HexClad, and SKIMS all led with real product innovation first, then layered on great marketing — not the other way around.
Sponsoring an NBA team inside the arena as a beverage brand with no retail distribution is lighting money on fire. If you don't have distribution, small bets and random one-off awareness media buys will never be strong enough to push people down the funnel properly.
The Cohesion Tax: When your ad says 'premium,' your site says 'affordable,' and your welcome email sounds like a TJ Maxx clearance sale, every touchpoint starts from zero. Nothing compounds. You're paying to acquire the same customer multiple times because you never built the infrastructure for your brand to compound.
Your tone needs to be specific enough that someone could read a piece of copy with the logo removed and know it's you. Liquid Death doesn't have a tone problem. Neither does Glossier. Neither does Duolingo. 'Premium and elevated' is not a tone — that describes 90% of DTC brands.
The cohesion test: Take your packaging, one of your emails, an influencer post, and your homepage hero. Put them next to each other. Does it feel like one company with one point of view? Or does it feel like four different companies that happen to sell the same product?
Every brand needs a villain and a promised land. The villain is the status quo your customer is escaping. The promised land is life after your product. Both should be referenced consistently across channels as a through-line.