Need your opinion — is this how you think about brand and performance marketing?

Happy Sunday! Don't you LOVE when it's a Sunday, but it's kind of like a Saturday since tomorrow is really your "Sunday?" It's like finding $5 in your pants after they come from the dryer.

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Now, let's get into today's email: 

Performance Branding

Today, since it's the 4th of July, I wanted to do something different. Next week I'm giving a talk at an event called GeekOut, and it's on the topic of Performance Branding. So for this email, I'm gonna just riff on thoughts and hope that it's valuable. PLEASE, PLEASE reply with what nugget you found to be most useful. Transparently, this is an exercise so I can then turn this into slides with only the best of the best stuff. I’ll send the deck to you if you respond :)

Get ready for this rant… 

Over the last 2 years, we've been lucky to work with a variety of brands, large and small. Companies that had just started (eg. JUDY, Barcode, Snif, Caraway), companies that were disrupting their categories (eg. Juneshine, Cuyana, DUDE Wipes), and companies that were American household brand names (eg. Orgain, Poo~Pourri, Pill Club). Now, we're in talks with some of the largest companies in the world — multi-billion dollar brands. In every conversation there are two questions that are constantly pulling at each other:

1. "What is this going to DO for us?" (performance)
2. "How is our brand being PERCEIVED?" (brand)

When I was at Hint Water, one of the ways we scaled the business so quickly was by constantly building brand at every touchpoint of the consumer journey. In every video creative, every sponsored article, every whitelisted-influencer video, and every box insert, we had 3 objectives:

• Let the customer know WHO we are (even if they already know).
• Let the customer know WHY we exist (not just what they're buying).
• Let the customer know HOW important the product can be for them in their life.

The end result for us was not just a fast-growing business, but also people coming in from the street to say "Hey, I just learned about this brand from Facebook and love the whole story! Can I buy a bottle?" It was almost as if we tricked customers into a hyper-optimized performance marketing funnel they weren't even aware of, because we layered the brand story on top, so well.

Scott Swanson, who was my co-pilot at Hint, and I decided to call this concept: Performance Branding — synchronously building brand equity on the back of your working performance media dollars.

Some of our content was so good, it had a 13% click-through rate, and got our account shut down for falsely tripping the system from being too high!

The unlock with Performance Branding is you can use the insights from performance marketing to elevate the brand marketing. Your ads can be more "invisible" as ads, because your content is so relevant that someone wouldn't view it as a digital billboard in the feed — it's just really f*cking good content.

When speaking to these large corporations, they all want to know what is that magic solution that is going to help a $15B holding company leverage their advantages (capital, resources, supply chain, distribution) in a DTC world, where they don't fall behind among smarter entrepreneurs. The answer is: Performance Branding.

You could argue that once a brand is "well known" it's good to go, right? But then it wouldn't make sense how companies like Haus end up being a focal point for some of the largest alcohol companies, or how Hint ends up on the watchlist for Coke and Pepsi. Even the best brands cannot JUST live on their own, today. They need strategic and tactical marketing execution to keep growing and retain their market share. 

Brand compounds over time and allows your performance/DR efforts to work HARDER for you, but you need to still add that layer of direct-response on top, for the full cycle to work. 

We spoke with a company last week that ran a global TV campaign. The creative was great for TV, but their next step was to blast that across paid social for more reach and awareness. The brand here — incredible. The performance side (with the goal of awareness) — not so great.

If the video wasn't properly optimized for sound off, it won't work. If the video didn't have overlays to hit the punchlines — it won't work. If the video wasn't formatted for your iPhone screen — it won't work. It's not JUST about brand OR performance, the combination of both allow you to be contextually native in the platform you're distributing in. It's the same reason you would never put a TikTok on a billboard, or use a Snapchat which got lots of replies as your TV campaign.

An example that worked well with new brand: Having a web page that highlights your founder (brand) but also offers his/her/their favorite SKUs sold on the site near the bottom (performance). 

One of the reasons Performance Branding is such a great concept for digitally-native brands, or brands that launch digital first, and then go into retail, is it allows you to not just silo your marketing budget to one side of the table. You're not JUST focused on beautiful campaigns and you're not JUST focused on running ads to a landing page. The prospective customer gets a proper introduction to the brand while being on the most optimized conversion funnel — which also likely will answer their questions, give them the confidence they're making a good decision with the purchase, and if it's a consumable, they might be reminded at the right time to reorder.

Another great example of a company that did this well is Native Deodorant. Moiz has gone on record many times saying he built that business with Facebook ads, and Facebook ads only. Some might interpret that as JUST performance, direct-response, scummy, offer-focused marketing, but it was the opposite. Instead, every customer understood WHY they were buying from Native, AND they knew what was inside the product, they knew what made the product superior.

Until brands recognize and implement the concept of "Performance Branding", their brand marketing will be all about science & art, while the performance team sits on the data. The right move, for most, is to combine science, art, and data. If you're running a billboard campaign in LA, be smarter about your message when you follow up digitally to someone who viewed the billboard. If you're running an offer on your site, be intentional with incorporating the story like it's done here (https://www.poopourri.com/pages/build-your-own-bundle). You still get 20% off, but you get to know the brand.

/end rant. Let me know what you liked best. I'm going to share the deck with everyone here in next Sunday's email.

Software/App of the Week:

Shopify — Prepare for some updates!

This past week Shopify held their equivalent of Apple's WWDC-style keynote. It was pre-recorded, beautifully edited, and had lots of exciting updates. I wrote a quick thread on Twitter, but you can find the entirety of the updates here: Shopify.com/blog/unite-2021

Update 1: Online Store 2.0

Shopify had so many updates into their new CMS they are now just calling it Online Store 2.0. Some of the highlights are:

• metafields directly built-into Shopify
• more customization opportunities
• every page is now broken into sections
• theme app extensions (take the best from diff themes)
• a new main theme: Dawn (which is 35% faster than their last free theme)

Netflix launched their merch store on Online Store 2.0, and you can see how much more custom the store became out of the box: Netflix.Shop

Update 2: Headless Commerce

Shopify announced 2 products that will help stores leverage headless commerce on the front-end and still use Shopify for order/product/checkout/customer management on the back end:

1. Hydrogen: a new React framework for custom storefronts
2. Oxygen: The future hosting platform for Hydrogen

With the amount of stores that have opted to go headless recently, this is an exciting announcement. My assumption would be that similar to Facebook, when updates get announced, their core products (Hydrogen & Oxygen) are going to get the updates BEFORE other headless sites that leverage the Shopify API. Moral of the story: wait to launch on Hydrogen if you can.

Update 3: Checkout

The Shopify checkout experience is getting much faster. Their goal with Online Store 2.0's checkout is to process about 300,000 orders in just 8 minutes. Why is it 300k in 8 minutes, instead of 37,500 per minute? I don't know. But damn, that's FAST.

The checkout will also be enabled with Checkout Extensions, so you can now leverage post-purchase cross-sell/up-sell tools like co-op Commerce to increase AOV.

Previously, you had to use apps like CartHook where you would use a separate checkout flow, because Shopify wouldn't share the payment token (which allowed these apps to then add products after an order was placed). With Online Store 2.0, Shopify has allowed third-party apps to tap into the checkout flow allowing you to do more with a customer at that stage.

Update 4: You KEEP the first $1M in "Drevenue"

What's "drevenue?" I just made it up. It's the revenue that developers earn from the apps they list, or the new Theme Store (which launches soon).

Whereas Shopify previously took 20% of the earnings as their fee, they will now only take 15% of annual revenue as a fee AFTER you've earned $1,000,000. It resets each year too, which means you could've just increased your revenue by up to $200k.

PSA:

This is also a great time to call out that more companies need to do a better job supporting the people who build these companies, indirectly. If you're Shopify, that's the developers. If you're a CPG company, that might be influencers.  Incentivize them and treat them right and you'll be headed to the moon.

After all these updates, I'm gonna build a fake brand on Dawn and see if it has potential to be something real.

Brand of the Week:

Western Rise — the best performance clothing.

Staying on the topic of "Performance" today, one brand I recently discovered out of Telluride, Colorado is called Western Rise. After trying every black t-shirt on the market, I wholeheartedly believe their StrongCore Merino Tee is the best t-shirt I've ever put on. It's pretty much all I wear now.

They use TryNow at checkout, so you can see how you like it before you commit to paying for it.

Check it out here: StrongCore Merino Tee

That's all for today. I know today's email wasn't the normal Sunday email where you can take notes and immediately apply it over this next week, but next Sunday's email WILL be. In fact, I'm pretty sure many people aren't going to read the email this week, due to the 4th of July. 

I hope you get those 9 hours of sleep tonight! Have an incredible upcoming week and thank you so much for making it all the way to the end of this email. It means the world to know this stuff can be helpful for you.

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