Winning Marketing Strategies for Consumer Companies
By: Marguerite De Tavernost
Tags: Marketing, Startup, Growth, Consumer, VC

From a daily routine makeup blog to a daily routine makeup product line: Emily Weiss’s blog fed Glossier’s the brand and revenue growth (600% year-on-year)

→ I would therefore recommend you consider spending time on producing content and building a narrative around your story, values, and mission. The network effects of such strategy can be very beneficial to your business — both in terms of repeat purchase and community building — particularly if you are attacking a complex and over-regulated space, like Alan is doing with health insurance in France.

3.3. Hire passionate people

Hiring people who are absolutely passionate about your product or the problem that you are trying to solve can also be a huge asset in trying to radically revisit marketing standards. This is why Andrew Dudum deliberately decided to staff his company with a majority of female executives. “If you are going to build a brand from day zero that’s about destigmatising issues for men, relying on men who are stigmatised to help create that is quite difficult. Having the sisters and the wives and the aunts and the nieces and the family members and the partners of those men help craft a loving and yet direct message is the only way you are going to build a brand that embodies diversity of thought and diversity of opinion in its tone”. This is also why 60% of Glossier’s employees are women.

3.4. The Scarcity Principle: People attach more values to things that feel “cool” and exclusive

One possible way to create organic appetite for your product is to imply scarcity, which comes down to keeping your supply lower than your demand.

E.g. When Spotify (the music streaming platform that went public last year) first launched in the UK, the new user inflows were so high that Spotify came up with a system where anyone could sign up for a paid account and free accounts were on invitation-only. Spotify therefore managed to create high demand and maximise the monetisation route. Today, 46% of Spotify’s 191M monthly active users are paid subscribers.

Giving consumers the feeling of being privileged enough to be on your waiting list and ultimately get exclusive access to your product is a great way to appeal to a society more and more sensible to novelty and subject to FOMO.

E.g. Superhuman perfectly executed on that observation and, as of today, 130k people are on the waiting list! (very smart as well to go after VCs; who else is more subject to FOMO than VCs?! ;). Monzo also only removed their waiting list back in May 2018, but kept their golden tickets referral tool.

Monzo’s golden tickets to refer people and make them jump the queue.

One-click referral programs can be very powerful. E.g. Harry’s (another razor subscription business that raised $375M in funding) attracted 100,000 people on their waiting list within a week (!). Once the consumer signed up to the waiting list, they were incentivised to share it with their friends in return for various prizes (e.g. free shave cream). Referrals accounted for over 65,000 sign ups, or 77% of the campaign total. More than 1,300 people shared Harry’s with 5 of their friends. Almost 1,000 shared it with 10 of their friends.

→ Scarcity can easily backfire if you get it wrong though, as illustrated by the Mailbox case. You don’t want to be perceived as being disorganised or having an incomplete product. Make sure you get the message right, and that you convey the feeling that the consumer would be joining an exclusive club that does not necessarily have the aspiration to appeal to the masses in the long-run (e.g. the early days of Facebook).

3.5. Online to Offline to Online: If you manage to create exceptional user experiences offline, the chances are that your customers will relay the message online and this will create a virtuous organic cycle for your brand

The real-world represent a fantastic playground for native brands to connect with their customers and create an emotional bond with their community. E.g. Brands can use pop-up solutions like Appear Here to easily and quickly combine offline with their native online.

As Eddy Lu (CEO and co-founder of GOAT) explains: “As an eCommerce business, it’s exciting to move the other direction and interact with our customers firsthand while still leveraging more advanced / personalized technology that standard brick-and-mortar stores have yet to incorporate”.

E.g. Alan’s tube campaign in Paris really helped on brand awareness and contributed to making health insurance more sexy in the consumer eyes. Similarly, Glossier’s international expansion to Europe heavily relies on organizing small size event with local influencers while the overall message remains the same.

The product itself can also be used as a mean to trigger offline virality. The neobanks managed to differentiate themselves that way and pique people’s curiosity. In a consumer’s mind, a metal or flashy pink card has rarely been associated with a bank! Same goes with electric scooters; seeing adults using them with a big smile on their face naturally intrigue the people surrounding them who will end up trying it out as well. Who has never been tempted to put a photo on Instagram of their mum or dad on a Bird scooter?!

Several DTC brands also end up opening physical locations, e.g. Glossier, Warby Parker, Casper, Everlane. Some of the points you might want to understand in assessing whether or not open a store make sense include calculating the CAC associated with opening that store, where your customers are and whether they would want a store, are you talking to particularly passionate people, would it considerably increase brand awareness, etc.