Bigger Than This
Page 4
The startup sock companies Happy Socks and Stance shook up an industry by delighting their customers with fun designs and, later, technological advances (for more on delight, see page 116). Sock startup Bombas instead saw a need for socks that play a different role far from innovation and design: helping the homeless.
Bombas comes off at first glance as a typical startup on many fronts: viral videos, marketing full of phrases such as “game-changing socks that have to be felt to be believed” and “mind-blowing socks,” a hip logo in an even hipper bright pink color and, yes, a one-for-one “giving machine.” But Bombas has one thing that eludes many brands: a real social need for giving one pair of socks away for every purchase. Bombas realized that “socks are the number one most requested clothing item at homeless shelters” because one is not allowed to donate used socks, for obvious hygienic reasons. As of August 2017, Bombas had donated 4+ million socks based on a congratulatory ad placed by “the people’s shark” Daymond John in Inc. magazine.
The story of why Bombas is donating socks catches most of us by surprise. It is very logical, yet we never thought of it. It catches our attention and captures our emotions. Since we all want a good pair of new socks, perhaps even a “game-changing” pair if we trust the sales pitch, we are inclined to make that purchase. Why? We can support that cause – and not because we drool for amazing socks. Perhaps, hopefully, they will be truly game-changing socks, and that, to us, would be a nice added benefit, but in the end, the purchase is triggered by the cause. If you opt to go the BOGO or OFO (“one-for-one”) route with your venture, be fully aware of the fact that you need to have a very good story that directly relates to your product, as in Bombas’ case, and one that deeply resonates with customers so you don’t fall into the bucket of all of the other companies that sell anything and give anything. A few of those are listed on the next two pages.
THE ONE FOR ONE FOR MANY
an incomplete and ever-expanding list of BOGO startups.
ALPHA POOCH: Buy a dog bed; they donate a dog bed to a shelter. | BABY TERESA (yes, really!): Buy a baby outfit; give a baby outfit to a little one in need (not to be mistaken for a needy baby). | BIXBEE/STATE (similar product/ cause): Buy a schoolbag; donate a schoolbag with supplies to a child in need. | BLANKET STATEMENT: Buy a blanket; give a blanket to a women’s shelter. | BOGO BOWL: Buy pet food; give pet food to animal shelters. | BOGO BRUSH/SMILE SQUARED/SYNCED SMILES (similar products/cause): Buy a toothbrush; they donate a toothbrush (or more) to someone in need. | EVERYTHING HAPPY: Buy a product; give a product to a child in need. | GOODSPREAD: Buy peanut butter; donate a packet of therapeutic food to a malnourished child. | JUGGLE THE WORLD/ONE WORLD FUTBOL (similar products/cause): Buy a soccer ball, and an inner city youth receives one. | LSTN: Donates hearing aids for every set of high-end headphones sold. | MAISON MANO: Buy a pillow, and one will be donated to a homeless individual. | PEOPLE WATER/ETHOS WATER: Buy water; give water to someone in need. | ROMA BOOTS: Buy rain boots; give rain boots to a child in need. | RUBY CUP: Buy a menstrual cup; give a girl in Africa one, thereby keeping her in school during her period. | RUNWAY BABY ORGANICS: Purchase a blanket or book; give one to a child in need. | SOAPBOX/HAND IN HAND/PACHA SOAP (same products/cause): Buy soap; give soap to a child in need. | THE COMPANY STORE: Buy a comforter; give a comforter to a child in need. | TOO APPAREL: Buy a pair of women’s underwear, and the brand donates a pair to a women and children’s shelter. | WAKAWAKA: Buy a portable solar-powered lamp; they give a solar light to a family without electricity. | WARBY PARKER/ SOLO EYEWEAR/WEAR PANDA (similar products/ cause): Buy eyewear; provide eye care for people in need. | WEWOOD: Buy a wooden watch; they plant a tree. | YOOBI: Buy school supplies; give supplies to children in need. | YOU AND WHO: Buy a T-shirt; give a T-shirt.
What if you are driven enough to create a true nonprofit that is less about product and profit and more about true impact? Take Chad Houser, founder of Dallas-based Café Momentum, a nonprofit restaurant staffed by post-release juvenile offenders, as a living case study. At the end of any shift, 30 or so young team members give him a hug, often saying, “I love you,” on their way out. “I really don’t know how to put that feeling into words,” he told Conscious Company magazine. The young people partake in one-year paid internships that further provide life and social skills.xv
Regardless of how far you are willing to go, here is what you can take with you as you launch a brand built on the foundation of cause:
THE CAUSE
COMMANDMENTS
Base the cause on a logical proposition that creates an immediate emotional connection with your target audience.
Ensure your cause can only be seen as truthful.
Be certain your cause is extendable enough to expand with you as your product offering diversifies.
Consider whether the cause directly touches your (current or future) staff’s hearts in order to foster a strong company culture based on purpose.
Hold yourself accountable and issue progress reports on a yearly basis to ensure you are meeting your own expectations and to spread awareness of the cause (and subsequently your brand).
Start by giving, then move on to fully embodying the cause in all other aspects of your business, including hiring, location, sourcing and production.
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HERITAGE
When a sense of location is
bigger than the product
We love to connect with places we’ve been to, call our home or dream of visiting one day. We sense an immediate feeling of connection and sometimes belonging. Marketing has always taken full advantage of our cravings, from Evian water proudly showcasing the beauty of its place of origin (Évian-les-Bains on the south shore of Lake Geneva in Switzerland – where I was once lucky to live across the lake, taking in the view daily) on its labels to the Danish-sounding Häagen-Dazs, which actually hails from the Bronx. That’s right – the brand association we make with a location sometimes can be a bursting bubble. The next time you use Irish Spring soap, dream of Germany instead of Celtic landscapes because that is where the “Irish” soap actually originates from.
Fast-forward to today’s commodity brands. Formulating a brand story based on heritage can be an extremely rewarding proposition if you can connect your product with the desire of consumers to formulate a deeper connection with the place your brand will be known for. This is establishing its “brand aura.”
Just a metaphoric exit
down the freeway from
Heritage lies a place
called Nostalgia.
Nostalgia in branding has always worked, even back in the day. That is why Coca-Cola shows us the old Santa Claus drawing year after year while a new singer monetizes our memories of “Last Christmas.” It’s a new year, a new interpretation, the same feeling of nostalgia – and after 2016’s death of George Michael even more so. Brands have always known that we have an affinity for the good old times, for the days that we can now verify were great. In pop culture, we see trends come back in near-predictable ways. Currently we are watching the eighties flashback slowly give way to the nineties flashback, with the best places to witness this being in pop music, fashion and graphic design. We do so while reading books, listening to vinyl records, playing Pokémon (OK, Pokémon GO) and snapping mini-Polaroids.
It would be foolish not to showcase the Detroit-born startup watch brand Shinola as today’s ultimate heritage-based commodity brand. I have been a big fan of the company’s story and have happily ordered pricey items from its online shop to support and own a piece of it. Sadly, Shinola stores today look, feel and sound like any other retailer, which is killing the heritage brand’s magic a bit for me. When they lure me with limited edition boxes to “own a piece of Detroit,” showing me star photographer Bruce Weber-shot locals as they pose with supermodels while expanding their products into anything that can be seen as hip, from record players to bikes, backpacks, planners and everything in between, I have officially had my brand heritage
bubble burst. This is a big danger to any fast-growing brand that relies on the heritage factor. Sure, they will expand on their success, but how sustainable will that expansion be with a brand built on the authenticity of a city? Tom Kartsotis, founder of Shinola, as well as the Fossil watch brand, seems to be fully aware of the risk. “I might bite off more than I can chew and create categories that aren’t authentic,” he told Inc.xvi in April 2016. “I could still fuck it up.” Indeed that may be the case, but not until Shinola runs its highly successful course. Until then, let us slice off a big piece of Shinola’s pie as it relates to launching a commodity product by way of heritage.
CASE STUDY
SHINOLA
COMMODITY PRODUCT: Watches
Stacy Perman’s article in Inc. entitled “The Real History of America’s Most Authentic Fake Brand” sums up Shinola’s handcrafted heritage twist beautifully. The article’s subhead: “A mogul from Texas is using the country’s least aspirational city as the backdrop for his next global lifestyle company – a $225 million experiment in manufactured authenticity.”
Shinola took Detroit, a city that used to be known for quality American manufacturing but became a deserted ghost town in the aftermath of the financial meltdown when the auto industry collapsed, and said, “We’ll flip this city around together through providing jobs and creating top-quality American products.” Or, as a Shinola advertising headline put it, “To those who’ve written off Detroit, we give you the birdy.” “The Birdy” happens to be the name of one of Shinola’s watches, which appears in the ad. Clever. And smart. That perfect blend of heritage and nostalgia is the beginning and the end of it. In all subsequent stories on the Detroit factory workers’ lives being changed and the amazing attention to detail given to the onsite handmade nostalgia-evoking products (“A watch so smart that it can tell you the time just by looking at it,” poking fun at the tech industry’s push for smart watches), it is evident that the Shinola marketing factory has enough fodder to keep expanding into a powerhouse brand that reaches far beyond its origins and that can be found at your local Costco warehouse as much as at jaw-dropping flagship stores in the hippest urban meccas from Tribeca to DTLA (yes, this is how we spell downtown here in DTLA) and on the wrists of former presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton.
It all started with a brilliant story about handcrafted products made in Detroit. “Detroit may be bankrupt, but if Shinola is any indication – and I think it is – the story of America’s great city’s revival has already begun,” PAPER Magazine founder David Hershkovits wrote in his publication,xvii fully underlining how the vision and mission successfully turned into a brand reality.
THE HERITAGE
COMMANDMENTS
Connect with (your) heritage and let it speak. It will create conversations that will have your brand as the centerpiece.
Just like attaching your brand to a personality, a location can make for bad headlines. Know the risks, and be prepared to partake in flipping it around as you are now an unofficial spokesperson for that location.
Expanding a heritage brand needs to be well planned to keep a brand aura of authenticity.
If heritage becomes your brand, “buy/support local” may turn into an obvious and sometimes immediate added benefit to your brand.
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DELIGHT
When the small delight is
bigger than the product
Surprise and delight” has been a catch-phrase for marketers over the past years. In practice, I feel my clients have not fully understood it most of the time. It is rather vague and tough to implement without ample instructions, which often include drastic changes to existing processes and budgets. As a startup brand, though, consistently providing small but thoughtful delights can be the one thing to set your brand apart from your competitors’ offering of the same product or service. Delight must be fully embodied in your customer service and the overall friendly tonality of your brand voice, inside and out.
The next time you make a sale, think about what you can give in return (besides the product). If the customer isn’t expecting anything additional,
a small
unexpected gesture
will lead to them seeing
you as a friend,
and that’s the basis of any relationship. When you repeat that step and that thinking, you move from a friendship to the creation of a whole community.
Chewy, a pet supply startup founded in 2011, is a great example of taking delight very, very seriously, one would think to its own detriment. It reportedly was on track for $880 million in annual revenue yet had not turned a profit as of late November 2016, according to Bloomberg Businessweek.xviii From handwritten holiday and thank-you cards that spell out a customer’s pet’s name to providing a 24-hour hotline to ask any pet-food-related question, Chewy sees each customer as unique and, thanks to a customer profile, treats him or her as such. Chewy has artists on staff crank out 700 oil portraits of customers’ pets each week; these paintings are mailed out as surprise gifts (read more on “Individuality” in trait #8 on page 156).
Now we are talking true
surprise and
delight,
combined with
authenticity and
empathy.
It’s a winning brand strategy
if the numbers can support the positioning. And as a good proof point that building a strong brand is most often worth more than turning big profits quickly, Chewy was acquired by PetSmart.com for a whopping $3.4 billion in April 2017, which Bloomberg Businessweek called a record for an e-commerce company.xix
“A millennial walked into a bar” could be the beginning of Punch Bowl Social, which took it upon itself to turn the most commoditized of commoditized places, in bare terms “drinking holes,” into a nine-location “fun center” for “hipster parents and their heirs apparent,” as Inc. put it.xx The simple mix of multiple entertainment areas – from bowling, bocce, pool, arcade games and ping-pong all the way to karaoke – coupled with craft cocktails and diner food, creates a delight for 20- and 30-year-olds that is comparable only to what Chuck E. Cheese does to screaming kids: it creates full-blown delight without a touch of innovation.
Poppin, a startup that has very quickly made it into many households – actually, offices – is a true delight of a case study. Just yesterday I spotted its fun line of otherwise mundane office supplies at U.S. market dominator (and poster child for boring office supplies) Staples:
CASE STUDY
POPPIN
COMMODITY PRODUCT:
Inexpensive Office Supplies
When it comes to office supplies, you either go with the mundane norm or you invest in seriously expensive design pieces for the corner office. Hence, most office desks around the world lack that certain kind of...how shall I say?...pop. Along came Poppin, a New York–based startup providing us with inexpensive, fun-colored, and customizable (more on that in the discussion of trait #8, Individuality) staplers, calculators, notebooks and anything and everything in between (as of recently that also includes full sets of office furniture) that an office may wish for in order to provide a splash of fun in an often undelightful environment filled with mundane tasks. And a mundane industry it was too, ready to be disrupted, but not by design innovation, which it gets plenty of thanks to product design darlings such as Philippe Starck. No, mainstream office supplies got disrupted by simple delight.
The communication chain of Poppin is as delightful and surprising as the actual products, turning an e-mail order confirmation into a fun read and opening a package that contains a plastic stapler into a full-on engaging brand experience in midst of your 9–5 workday.
What is most stunning is that Poppin’s products truly are commodity products. No design innovation is being attempted. The sole reason for its success is a delightful visual and verbal delivery. It’s still a stapler, just one that is orange and happens to make you happy – as happy as a cheap stapler can possibly ever make you.
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THE DELIGHT
COMMANDMENTS
Entering or expanding into a visually mundane segment with a literal or figurative splash of color works with any commodity product.
Which part of your audience is not having fun? Catch them when and where they least expect it, and shake them up through delightful surprises. These small gestures go a long way in your personal life as much as in a person’s shopping preferences.
What is the most mundane piece of communication your brand releases regularly? Turn it around and make it into a delightful experience. Working with brands of all sizes, I see hands-on how little attention and talent gets put toward small tasks such as e-mail notifications,* yet those are the very touchpoints your customers end up seeing the most. It’s not always the highly produced ad campaigns that leave the lasting impressions.
Simplifying complex tasks for your customers is at the root of brand delight in the digital age. Map your user journey and start making it easier for them. Don’t think only of them; think for them.
*Interesting statistic to consider when popping out those e-mails: e-mail has a median return on investment (ROI) of 122% – more than four times higher than other marketing formats, including social media, direct mail and paid search.xxi
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TRANSPARENCY
When trust is
bigger than the product
Some of us, especially seasoned marketers of a certain age, might recall when car rental company Avis launched its famous campaign stating to the public that it clearly wasn’t number one. Hertz was. The campaign simply read, “Avis. We try harder,” which successfully turned being second place into an empathetic advantage driven by sheer brand transparency, a move unheard of in the 1960s.