Chris Ruder wanted Spikeball to be known as the beach game when he founded the company in 2008—so much so that he made it the product’s tagline.

It turns out that playing on the beach isn’t necessarily representative of the game’s clientele. “When sales started coming in, I realized that most of our customers didn’t live within 100 miles of a beach,” Ruder said. He ended up scrapping the original tagline and going with “Find Your Circle” instead.

Regardless, it’s not appearing in any massive ad campaigns: The company has, for the most part, forgone more traditional types of advertising, instead taking cues from sports like Formula 1, which have relied on storytelling and community to build the brand and the sport.

Story time: Summer’s an important time of year for a sport like Spikeball (which is actually called roundnet, but that’s a whole different story). Frequency of play is 100x higher in the summer than in January, Ruder said, and mid-April through early August marks the time when sales tend to, well, spike.

• As a result, it’s also when players are creating the most content around the game.
• And for better or worse, 99% of that video content is of “what happens on the field,” Ruder said.

While it’s fun to watch, videos of players diving to make sure the ball doesn’t hit the ground don’t exactly provide viewers with much background on the sport and its players. So, in addition to that type of content, Ruder said he wants to follow the Netflix documentary formula, like the F1 series Drive to Survive, which helped boost the sport’s popularity among viewers and advertisers in the US.

“We are trying to get better at storytelling,” Ruder said. “That’s what I think really makes people invested.”

Read more of our conversation with Ruder about growing the Spikeball brand.—AM

Despite what the internet may tell you, building a successful DTC empire doesn’t happen overnight. Once you’ve established a customer base, success can often boil down to two things: customer engagement and loyalty, two of the hardest things to earn as a new brand.

Retail Brew connected with top retailers—Mejuri, Casper, and Peloton—to talk about the marketing strategies they use to keep customers coming back and spreading the word. If you work in retail, this guide is for you. Download it now.

Nostalgia. It influences everything from the latest clothing trends to the shows we watch to the food we eat.

Kate Christensen, assistant professor of marketing at Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business, has studied the impact of “heritage goods”—objects tied to someone’s past—on consumer behavior.

We chatted with her to discuss her research on heritage connection, her career, and what it’s like to teach marketing.

Could you talk about how you ended up becoming a professor of marketing?

I was working in the entertainment industry. I was working in the Internet Group at the Walt Disney Company, and I thought it would be fun to do an MBA. I had some friends there who had done one, and the company wanted to fund part of that. I ended up doing an MBA at UCLA Anderson while I was working at Disney. While I was doing that MBA, I moved to Sony Pictures Television. Then, by the end of it, I decided I really had loved my experience and I wanted to do this forever.

What brand do you think is approaching marketing well right now?

Ukraine. I think [President] Zelensky has been able to galvanize international support for his country by working directly with marketers and ad agencies. He was at Cannes Lions. He’s been able to connect his people’s story to the history of Europe in a way that has driven support for his country in a very difficult time.

Read more from our interview with Christensen here.—JS

As anyone on BeautyTok knows, Gen Z likes to mix it up when it comes to their ~aesthetics~, whether it be cold girl or crying girl or mermaid core…it can be hard to keep up.

And while these often bold looks may seem a little, uh, out there, Gen Z’s interest in the beauty category is nothing to scroll past. The increasingly powerful demographic—which has a penchant to “treat themselves” with beauty products more than any other generation, per Mintel—has started to have a notable impact on a number of beauty and personal care categories.

“These are shoppers that are setting their purchasing habits for their life,” Anna Mayo, VP of Nielsen IQ’s beauty vertical, said. “So I think it’s extremely important to focus on them.”

From nails to lashes to fragrances, Gen Zers are changing long-standing beauty category dynamics, and establishing new subcategories, impacting CPG sales and innovation strategies along the way.

Faking it: One of the most notable categories seeing a Gen Z boost is artificial nails. NielsenIQ found that sales of artificial nails are set to outpace nail polish sales this year after artificial nails, aka press-ons, have seen four years of consistent growth, thanks in large part to Gen Z shoppers.

• Quarterly in-store sales for artificial nails hit $160 million in Q4 of 2022, beating nail polish’s $154 million in sales. While Gen Z buyers are driving growth in both nail categories, the Gen Z artificial nail buyers grew by 39% YoY in 2022, compared to 9% for millennials.

Gen Z has also given rise to a similar “fake” product: false eyelashes. Per a 2022 Mintel report, 33% of Gen Z women use false eyelashes, compared to 17% overall. Dollar volume was up 7.8% for the total US and 36.4% among Gen Z customers YoY as of May 2023.

Read more about Gen Z consumer trends on Retail Brew.—EC

There are a lot of bad marketing tips out there. These aren’t those.

Pairing up: Insider Intelligence examined how advertising’s major holding companies are investing in AI.

Like and subscribe: Tips for using the YouTube algorithm to your advantage.

Explain: Digiday broke down the IAB Tech Lab’s Open Private Join and Activation.

Connection starts here: Is your relationship marketing strategy falling flat? Get Marigold’s ebook and be inspired by real brands’ approaches to interacting with their customers—from initial impressions to final conversions. Get your copy.*

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