Raindrop

I don't mind being sandwiched between Liquid Death and Oura! 😊 Congrats to our friends at Suavecito, Inc. on the launch of their national campaign for their retail rollout. It's been an incredible 4 year partnership with them. Thank you Kenneth Lyerly for always being an incredible creative partner and being willing to push things and have fun with the brand. https://xmrrwallet.com/cmx.plnkd.in/gEEi7Gw9 More coverage on the campaign rollout here: https://xmrrwallet.com/cmx.plnkd.in/guEQapng Special shout out to Jayla Harnwell and the PLTFRM team on the retail support on Wal-mart and Target

“The campaign didn’t work” I had multiple conversations this week with brands who sent me commercials they made that were lovely but didn’t move the needle for them at all. They all had a common flaw that I see a lot in advertising… they were selling the wrong outcome with the wrong context that on the surface makes sense but it’s bound to fail. Let me give you an example of advertising that you will see companies who even do billions in sales make over and over… How many ads have you seen for deodorant where someone is working out super hard and they feel fresh and confident? On the surface it makes sense… look at the efficacy of the product, it works so well that you will feel confident! But here’s the problem… The only place in the world I could care less about sweating is at the gym. I’m supposed to sweat there. So my mind immediately glosses over the commercial because it’s not fixing a pain point that is high enough to ever get me to consider making a switch. The metaphor I use to help people is… are you selling a shirt to a guy shirtless at the beach or shirtless man in a boardroom? And to take it further, if you were a viewer, would you remember seeing a man shirtless at the beach? No. What about if you walked into a boardroom tomorrow to a guy without a shirt? You’d never forget it. True insights are based in these high pain points that cause a need to consider a change with your next purchase… and sometimes what makes sense, like showing people working out with your deodorant… will never make you dollars.

It’s GOLD for Grüns 🏆 One of my favorite campaigns of the year, this spot helped launch the kids line in style with an incredible performance from a kid actor as the drama unfolds and mommy gets called to the stand. Congrats to the Raindrop team and the talented team at Grüns who were part of this Telly award winning campaign Claire Yi , Chad Janis , Anthony Rodriguez, Katie Cirulli , Janna Neinken

We keep hearing "Brand World" on the podcast and we're determined to find out what that really means. Jacques Spitzer, CEO and CCO of Raindrop, joins the podcast! You’ve probably seen their work or even bought their clients’ products. Raindrop is the agency behind some of the most effective ads in the game, helping Dr. Squatch grow from $3 million to over $100 million, turning Native into a leading clean deodorant brand, and creating YouTube’s top ad of 2020. Podcast link in the comments! cc Geno Schellenberger Jack Westerkamp Ad Age ADWEEK Morning Brew Digiday The Drum The Wall Street Journal Anthony McClain Aidan Whitney Buchun Jiang

How did Dr. Squatch Soap teach us the value of switching your audience to unlock growth? Competitive positioning statements generally focus on near-in category competition (e.g. soap bars). The problem is the audience assumption the positioning makes. It eliminates the folks who do not even consider your category (or a new segment like cold processed soap bars) on a specific usage occasion (i.e. shower cleaning). The key is to shake up the audience portion of your positioning to include a large excluded group (who are unaware of your genius). This allows your communications strategy to focus on a larger, unreached audience by using super-broad emotional outcomes that audience will react to in storytelling media. Hint: the emotional outcome sits right on top of any functional design outcomes you offer. Emotion is the final causal effect. Story-driven emotion accelerates innovative brands really well, but you can't get stuck talking to current category aware consumers. That's what everyone else is doing. Let's look at how Squatch pulled this off and got unstuck. Dr. Squatch’s competitive positioning involved a product design that combined exfoliating grit with uniquely masculine natural scent combinations (i.e. the product attributes). At the time of its acceleration online in 2019, most natural cold processed soap had no grit and offered feminine scents. And the innovation was trapped in low foot-traffic retailers or unknown DTC websites. But trying to sell a manly clean to people who already care about natural bar soap (or natural soap more broadly) is too narrow a positioning for scaling a brand to $500M, even at $6.99 a bar. Dr. Squatch’s winning communications strategy broadened the audience and focused not on immediate soap function but on male insecurity around proper grooming in a more feminized modern world. Is my soap ‘sh*t’? And what does that say about me? This message (with all its humor) reached multiple male audiences that large brands do not communicate with - middle-school and teenage boys as well as blue collar men who do get really dirty and want modern manly scents. The original cold pressed soap segment had no male audience at all, really. So, adding grit and manly scents drove growth but not exponential or even hyperbolic growth. The right people for the innovation did not even know about the cold processed soap segment. Oops. The solution is not to re-design the product or lower the price. The solution was a wild communications strategy that seemed absurd at first. Until it wasn’t. PS - I should clarify that the brand specifics above were not ‘my idea’ - I got involved later… #business #marketing #startups