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As direct-to-consumer startups morph into omnichannel brands, their marketing strategies are evolving.
That was one of the themes expressed by marketers at the Modern Retail Marketing Summit, held last week in Santa Barbara, California. There, executives at brands like Kopari Beauty, Olipop, Béis and more spoke about some of the big challenges they are encountering in their jobs and how they are trying to build modern marketing engines at their respective companies.
Many of these brands find themselves in a similar position: they started out as direct-to-consumer brands with just one hero product. In the early days, they were focused mainly on acquiring customers through Facebook and experimenting with low-lift content formats to go viral on social media. Now, in some cases, they’re on track to grow into $200 million or $500 million businesses, with multiple product lines sold both at retail stores and online.
Many of these companies are focused on building out a marketing operation that’s more befitting of an eight-figure or nine-figure business. In turn, some of the big challenges discussed included evolving brand perception, how to simultaneously promote your hero products as well as new launches and how to take more of an always-on marketing approach.
Becoming a bigger fish
Take Olipop, for example. The company recently hired a new vice president of brand marketing, Meghan Shookman. At the summit, Shookman said her focus is on “leveling up our marketing to start to operate like the billion-dollar brand we have the potential to be.” Bloomberg reported that Olipop is set to it hit $500 million in sales this year.
She described Olipop’s transformation like so: When Olipop launched in 2018, it started out with “more of an in-house creative agency model.” Olipop’s priority was figuring out how to quickly jump on trends on platforms like Instagram and TikTok. This year, however, Olipop started to experiment with city blitzes. It ran multiple activations, from billboards to influencer outings across five marketings, including Minneapolis and Washington, D.C.
“The secret to how do you be always-on when you don’t have the budget,” Shookman said, is to “appear like a bigger fish in a smaller pond.”
But Olipop wants to go even bigger than that. Shookman said she wants to make sure that Olipop is still “pulsing” throughout the year on social while also having a pipeline of TV ads, influencer campaigns and product launches to get people thinking continuously about Olipop. Ensuring “continuity in our brand look and tone and voice” is another focus.
That means tailoring product launches to different key moments. Olipop recently released a Mountain Dew-esque product called Ridge Rush, for example, and did a giveaway to target back-to-school season.
Expanding beyond a hero product
At Kopari Beauty, meanwhile, the big focus has been on evolving the perception of the brand. Kopari launched nearly 10 years ago, with a single SKU: a coconut-based deodorant. Kopari’s vice president of marketing and e-commerce, Toral Patel, said many people still associate the brand with this product.
In 2022, the brand launched sunscreen, which became a runaway hit, selling out seven times within one season. Kopari has responded by launching more products within sun care and incorporating those items more into its marketing.
But Patel said expanding into the sun-care category has also been helpful in positioning Kopari more as a prestige body care brand, not just a deodorant brand. Kopari has reinforced that by doing more influencer activations and spending more on content and redeveloping its website.
“What we found was that the first couple times we did bigger photoshoots with new photographers, it was a little scary writing those checks, but then you see the result and you see how it all comes together, and you realize it is absolutely worth that investment,” Patel said.
Using data to inform bigger marketing plays
Over at AG1, the focus has been on gathering even more insights from customers about their health and wellness habits — beyond the data that AG1 gets through its subscription service — to figure out new ways that the brand can fit into their lives.
Leala Francis, who joined AG1 eight months ago as its svp of customer insights and member experience, said that AG1 has more recently started incorporating data from its customer surveys, as well as insights it gathers from some social listening tools, into its marketing messaging.
For example, AG1 has learned that many people sign up for its daily drink in order to improve their gut health — Francis said the brand has begun running more messaging specifically around that.
It has proven to be “one of our most successful creatives to date,” Francis said, adding that “for a while, I think we had been quite broad [in our messaging].”
The challenge, of course, is that brands can’t do it all. Some marketers said that as their respective companies launch more SKUs and put more marketing spend behind those new products, sometimes those new products naturally don’t perform as well as their hero SKUs. But, if you are leading a startup’s marketing, you are still under pressure to promote all of these products while hitting your number.
Over at luggage brand Béis, the brand’s CEO, Adeela Hussain Johnson, said a big focus is figuring out which items are more of retention versus acquisition products. Historically a customer that was new to Béis would make the brand’s roller or weekender their first purchase and then buy the other one, say, six months later if they came back. But now, she said, more customers are making Béis’ sling their second purchase — so the company is building out different marketing flows to encourage that.
Patel of Kopari said that her brand is trying to build out a more robust content calendar throughout the year and create a segment of it that just focuses on content for hero SKUs. She said that Kopari is also using a platform called Kale to collect evergreen UGC that Kopari can use throughout the year to promote its hero products.
But, she said, “it is a challenge and we need to continue to evolve this and do better at this,” Patel said. “It is easy to divert your resources to what’s working really well and focus on that.”
What I’m reading
- Peloton is now going to start charging customers a $95 fee to activate any equipment they bought secondhand hand on sites like Craigslist.
- Mattress brand Purple is closing two of its factories and laying off an unspecified number of corporate employees.
- Spanx founder Sara Blakely has a new startup, a shoe line called Sneex.
What we’ve covered
- Furniture resale platform Kaiyo has told customers that it’s shutting down by the end of the month.
- ThredUp has been quietly testing a peer-to-peer resale function, similar to what Poshmark offers.
- Duolingo hosted a two-day merch pop-up in New York City last week as it seeks to build more brand affinity around its mascot, Duo.
