How to Position Your Brand & Products: 5 Ways to Win Against “Better”

Okay. Welcome back to the operators podcast. I got my compatriot Mike from Simple Modern. Today we have Matt Oralic joining us. He's one of the co-founders of Cure. Matt is joining us all the way from Croatia, but we got a banger episode. We are talking positioning today. And when Matt suggested we do this one, I actually love this because so many companies that come out are just trying to win on better. And I have long, long said this. I think you need to be different. And we're going to argue in debate and then hopefully provide you with some framework on how to think about positioning products and brands because I think the brands that do scale, like the really big wins, almost always you can point to something that's quite different about them. And the latest example of this would be grooves, right? Like grooves completely smashed, entered into a very large category, growing category with a totally different way of entering it. And they positioned very much as different. They were not coming out saying, hey, we're better than this. They just came out and said, we're different. Here's a different option for you. So Matt, why don't we start with you? Most brands do lead with better. I think it's like the easiest thing to do. Say like, I have a better mouse trap, better ingredients, better price, better something. Why do you think this doesn't work? Like what, what, how do you think about positioning? Let's start there. Yeah, I think better makes the mind fairly defensive, right? I think better is probably the worst word you could use in marketing because it's like the weakest word. And essentially the way you want to think of it is that consumers already have a ladder in their mind. Per category, they might have three to four different brands. And by using better, it's very hard to replace a run on that ladder. You almost have to create a whole separate ladder altogether. And then the second reason is that if you look at the market specification levels, you know, like we take Winx as an example. Stage one is like, if you're first to market, you just say it fall asleep faster. Stage two is like, you can fall asleep faster in 10 minutes. Stage three, that's when people start like bleeding those claims and they start inventing unique mechanism. And then stage four, people create a better unique mechanism. So maybe, you know, Winx example back in the day, people will be saying, melaton is a new mechanism. That would have worked for a while. Now people use that, thrash that. Now it's like, what's a new mechanism? That's better than melaton. That's what potentially you guys come in with, you know, melaton-free version and different stages to allow people to sleep longer. And then stage five is all about identity. So having claimed that you're just saying you're better literally like, it's just like semantics association in the consumers mind where consumers just numbed that message. And we have to understand that the mind is like a prediction engine. It's filtering out things all the time. And that's why if you're just using better all the time, literally, it just doesn't cover these days. I think there's like an algorithm thing to this too, right? Meta's AI and how it does targeting is very much like mimicking what you're talking about, right? So like if you just come out and you look the same as everybody else, this is why I hate this trend right now of like people just ripping other people's ad formats because it's like, hey, this is working. Just rip it. We're just increasingly making the consumer blind to whatever it is. Like what is it the age old thing, guys? The marketer's ruined everything. I think that's like a solid, solid truth in the industry. Actually, this is one of the reasons why this is a great subject map because the speed did e-commerce moves at any time you find an obvious, just kind of angle or hack that nobody else is using. And one of the classic examples here would be like recently, everybody figured out animated type ads. We're doing really well. And so you just see this deluge of people using animation, some of them being several minutes long and kind of like insane, like the one that went viral on Twitter. But that's going to be the mimetic behavior you're going to see in e-commerce, is that people are going to see something. It's working for somebody and everybody's going to imitate that. I think positioning is one of those things that's more durable because positioning comes down to things like your quality and your pricing and how is your product positioned relative to your other competitors in a way that they cannot or will not try and imitate you. Whereas when you find an ad format that's crushing everybody will. And we know they'll come in and they'll imitate that exact same thing. So we're constantly talking on the show. I mean e-commerce, the reason why it's eats huffest I think industry to operate in is because the speed it moves and how quickly people will copy any kind of inside or alpha that you find. So we've got to be after like durable alpha. We've got to be after things like modes and positioning is one of the few places where I think you can actually do that. Yeah, I think it's an important point like because your positioning does filter down everything else downstream what you do for the brand. And a good positioning can make you almost a worse direct response to advertising and you still get cut through in the market and you can scale honestly. And I think people fail to realize that. They can reposition the whole brand and everything else can work downstream and they can scale like I know within our community we've had two brands go from literally 100 a month to 100 K day within two months. One was in their palace. It's just from positioning. For example, I probably say they're selling shoes. They reposition their whole brand to a specific audience for shoes. 100 K day to 100 a month. And that's that's probably like you're positioning around an identity at that point. Correct. I'd choose shoes as a very mature category. Exactly. So yeah, so like a lot of leverage can be done just from the position itself. And a lot of the brands that are in the markets today already hold this position. Like nothing has to change about what they're currently doing besides some terms of intellectual property. So if you guys heard about the Avis Burst Hertz market example, no. So essentially what I marketed it back in the day is they just owned being second. Then you heard so first and they stopped trying to fight it. And they just literally said, we are second we're going to work harder. And they gained something like 30 to 40% market share within a year just by owning that position. Yeah, I think there's actually a lot of examples of this one of the times that I can think of recently as Burger King. The entire campaign was here's how we need to get better. So they were actually positioning against the way that they had been perceived in the market and the way that they had operated as a business. And like the term counter positioning, I think is one that's worth bringing up here that a lot of times what you're doing is you're coming into a market and you're looking at, hey, who is number one, who is the dominant brand? And we're going to counter position against them because the assumption is not that we can take them down, but that we want to carve out meaningful share beside them. And so you kind of say, hey, they own this positioning, this space. And we're going to come over here and we're going to say, hey, but we're not that thing. And we know there's a bunch of people who don't actually want that specific thing. This isn't a one size fits all type of shoe. In our business, the way that that looked was when we got into drinkware, it was already really obvious that trying to do what Yeti was doing would be a complete suicidal game. They have this built for the wild sportsmen, outdoor persona, with the way they position their products, that's just phenomenal. They're one of the best in consumer branding. I mean, they're one of the few real consumer success stories that have gotten all the way to being public and have kind of continued to do well as a public company. And so we looked at that and said, hey, if we're trying to in any way position similar to that, then we'll just lose. We're just going to be considered to be a worse version of that. So instead we need to position very differently across different kind of value vectors. And that was a lot of how we eventually like found the right product market that started simple water. The way you kind of kicked it off is like there's basically five levers to make something different, right? The first is emotional benefit, which I want to come back to. That's your unique mechanism comment. Then it's experience. This is my favorite. There's materials. There is style. And then there is the value equation, which Mike, you just hit on so well. I have examples around like these five sort of levers when it comes to making something different. And the one I love the most is just experience. Like Mike, you're hitting on one of them, which is the value equation. So like I think simple modern did this well. I think Portland and other goods did this well. Like when we were talking with New York a couple weeks in talking with Curtis in New York a couple weeks ago, they were saying like, look, we just make a very high quality product at a much better price. And that is that's the brand, right? That's like that's how we built it. We crush the value equation is one. The experience one I love is like Nispresso or Solostow or Uni, right? Like Uni and rock was it rock box or whatever that other one is. They both came out with like a new way to make home pizzas. So it's like it's like an existing category. Here's a totally new experience for making pizzas, Solostow, say whatever you want. Like that was brilliant. It's like, hey, here's a new way to have a campfire. Like so freaking good. And then Nispresso was by far the biggest and best consumer business. Like we love to talk about the modern day heroes, grooms and AG1 and IMA and all this stuff and supplements. But like, man, if you look at Nispresso's business and you look, this is a company from the 70s that took coffee and just said, we're going to create a new experience around coffee, right? So like my favorite is definitely experience. If I could just give you the others, like there's good examples. Ridge, right? Sean materials. They came out with that wallet and they're like this big, thick George to stands. you know, Seinfeld looking thing. We made it thinner. It's like lifetime guarantee. The materials are good. Um, style is a big one that I think we don't talk a lot about. Kaden Lane, simple modern Pila. We all lean hard into style, prints, drops, all that stuff. It's very identity driven. Um, and I think Matt, the last one that you kind of hit on is like this emotional benefit. You call it unique mechanism. I'd love for you to unpack this for me because I don't think we as brand owners talk enough about unique mechanism. If I had to start over and scale to nine figures today, Saras IQ would be non-negotiable. That's the only AI that I trust with accuracy. If you want to just hold data out of wherever and drop it in cloth, you are really gambling your business. I get reports every day and I know the data is certified. And that's just me. My entire team is so deep in the weeds in Saras. We have every single data source in our business. Leaked into Saras. Therefore, we can go and grab whatever we want. That way we have so many different avenues of accessing our data. And you're just flying blind without this. Big brands already trusted. Growing brands now have access to the exact same foundation at under two grand a month live in a matter of days. Go to sarasatolitics.com and book your walkthrough today. I think that it's really good for you to list the five out Matt because for a long time, the value equation could almost be the exclusive thing that you would counter position with. The problem with that has been China that nobody can counter position on value better than China. And if that is as a brand that does not have vertical integration in how you're manufacturing products or some kind of special way that you're getting products to customers, then if your positioning is all around value, then you're just going to get beat. And so from my point of view, value is still the most powerful of the levers. I mean, this is what Amazon has shown with all of their data is that people want cheap prices. And that's never going to change. Even for me, it's amazing. I still shop on price, even though price shouldn't really be relevant to me. There's just something psychological that I can't get away from. But I think that what really effective brands today are doing is they're saying, well, value for most brands has to be part of the equation, but it's going to be a part of a package of two or three things that we're positioning together. So the way that I like to think about this is that in any category where people are buying, there are going to be three to four vectors that drive most of the purchasing decisions in some combination for different customers. In drinkware, the ones that we identified were price, quality, style, maybe it's something like the lid type, leak proof nature, something like that. Those, these typically are the four things that really drive the decisions that people make. And so what we found is by combining three of those, our three were style quality value, we can kind of find a unique position in this three-dimensional space of all the different competitors and all of the different value propositions and positions that they're making to customers. And I think that that's what I would encourage brands to do is understand your category and understand what is driving buying decisions, map out, how are all of your other competitors positioned among those buying decisions? And then where is the space that you want to occupy? Number one, it'll make it really obvious who your real competitors are. So for us, Yeti is not really a competitor. They're in the same category, but I would bet that we go head to head within very infrequently. We might go head to head with them and kids more than we do an adult, almost sure that's probably what's happening because of how we're positioned. So if you didn't know anything about our industry, you'd be like, oh, you're in Insulated Drinkware, you probably compete with Yeti. And it's like, well, not really. We're much more likely to compete with somebody like a Walla than Yeti. And then one other thing that you didn't mention is like channel and your channel mix is another part of positioning. And I think that that's becoming more and more relevant. So do you want to be a Walmart as a channel? It's the biggest retailer. How does that impact your positioning? Do you think that's positive or negative? Do you want to be in specialty retail? Are you D to C only? Are you D to C plus Amazon? We get questions on this all of the time. So I think having a clear understanding of your positioning also will help make decisions about what channels are appropriate for your brand easier. Matt, how do you guys do the secure? Like, when you think about positioning, do you do it by product? Do you do it as a brand? So we say like, this is the brand's position in this sort of like whatever your landscape is? Yeah, correct. So we will think about it from a positioning perspective. We have it's a brand and we have an enemy. We go off the clinics to try and bring everything home. So we have a clip positioning in terms of the stuff we're trying to do as a brand. But then her product, we actually assign per channel. So when we go engineer products exactly like a water filter, right? We see it's highly competitive. We see we're going to try and we're on Amazon with the water filter and we're going to try and make unique mechanisms that's going to separate us on Amazon. We're going to price it for Amazon. Then we'll have things like our consumables, which we're going to retail next year. We've priced our consumables that for retail and we position them for retail because they wouldn't work on a D to C level based on the retail price points and the margin profiles. So we're trying to be really intentional about segmenting different product categories, per different channels in order to win. You mentioned this thing to me before about you want to be first to do something. Why is that? There's incremental value every time you put more evidence to first that we see on a marketing level. I'll give you an example. So with our LED face mask, we will do world's first customizable LED face mask. We create a unique mechanism where you could customize a treatment on your face. And when we see that on the post-purchase survey data, probably about 12 to 16% of people buy that mask for that one reason only. So the extra R&D that we spent in developing that one feature, which would cost us actually $500,000 and maybe six months, ends up giving us an extra 15% of people buying because of that one reason alone. So that alone also gives us obviously a marketing edge, but it also gives us a unique selling point when going to retailers, influencers and stuff like that and just adds so much incremental value in terms of positioning for the brand because we are different to everyone else out there. And what we're trying to find is that everyone wants different. I think there's so much made to add in the market. Every time we have something we can position ourselves differently, then that makes everything all downstream a lot easier for us. I want to hit on this because I think the thing that I love about different versus better is that is once once I for me like once I unlocked this with Pila, it was like an aha moment. And it was that the reason that people want different is the current options for them, some part of these some part of your customer, right? The current options are not working for the future version of their life that they're going for, right? So when Pila, when when I, the reason I invested in Pila, the reason I was the first check in that company was no, I had never seen a compostable plastic. I was like, this is interesting, right? And then when we went into phone cases, which everybody's like, you're an idiot. This is so competitive. Don't do that. I was like, yeah, but we were the world's first compostable phone case. And I got excited because about it because when I looked at every other brand at the time, all they did was talk about how drop proof everything was literally they were there was like 50 companies trying to outcompete the other on who was tougher. That was it. It was like the sea of sameness, right? And we came out we're like, no, we're compostable. We're for people who care about the planet. So there was a whole and there was like millions, we got like four million customers. There was a lot of people who said, that is a vector that I like, I like that, right? It still does the job, but it's giving me a future that I wasn't getting out of the current product. My question to you Matt is, is that a unique mechanism? Yes. I mean, it's a unique mechanism in the way you develop the product, right? From a manufacturing perspective, you're doing something fairly unique. I would assume. Yes. Oh, yeah. We had to create a material. We had to, we actually even and Mike, you'll appreciate this. We had to use a different kind of steel in our tools, right? Because of the material. So like there was a level of difficulty in that. And actually, Mike, I want to throw this back to you because you've talked about this before, like when you enter a category, they're sort of like this imitate and deviate thing that you advise people to do. And what I'm describing was like real R&D and real product dev. And that was like a level of risk that I was willing to take on. How, like if somebody's, if you're talking to somebody today, how do you advise a brand on this? Like how, how different does the product need to be? Because I think people are probably hearing that from us right now. Like that, you made a customizable LED mask. I made a completely new material. That's hard. Mike, how would you advise somebody to think about like the product part? Most AI tools and software don't give you direct ROI every month, but post-script does. I run two post-script AI products at Ridge both show up on our PNL. Infinity testing runs continuous AB tests on our SMS automations completely in the background. It's driven $446,000 in incremental revenue, not just attributed incremental. That's a 32X incremental row as with click the rates up 43%. Then there's shopper and AI sales agent that answers every inbound text in under 40 seconds. We're running 23X ROI on messaging cost alone. If you want SMS software that gives a proven ROI, go to postscript.io and book a free demo. the most interesting about consumer is how products are portrayed to the customers being very different and usually they're not. That it really is marketing and positioning. So, for example, one of them will go back to the Eddie example because I respect them as a brand. They're really great brand. Everything they do is positioned around, very tough, very durable. One of their better commercials, if you want to go look it up on YouTube is don't buy them a Yeti, where the whole commercial is basically ideas. Basically, if you're a friend who needs a gift is soft, don't buy a Yeti. If you're a friend who needs a gift, doesn't like being outdoors, doesn't like doing rough things, doesn't need durable things, don't buy a Yeti. It's just a way of driving home that idea of positioning. Guys, if you look at the way that their cups are built, it's really not that different than basically anybody in the industry. It's not like they're using a special type of steel, it's not that the thickness is that different. Now, I'm sure if somebody from Yeti was on here, they'd be like no, no, no, ours are tougher, but like I'm just telling you guys, it's not, you know, the thing that you can buy for $8 off of Amazon coming out of China is more or less the same thing. So, the durability thing is all about the positioning. So, if it's true that products are often not that different that it is just how they're positioned, then you really need to figure out exactly the message that you want to communicate and the thing that's resonating with people before you make major investment. And I've always likened being an entrepreneur to playing poker. That in poker, what you're trying to do is you're trying to get as much information as possible for as inexpensive as possible. You don't want to bet big until you know that you have the winning hand. And I think entrepreneurship is the same way, minimize your investment of time, minimize your investment of capital until you understand the dynamics of the game that you're playing in and what it takes to win. How that practically plays out here is that what gets really expensive is product development and buying lots of inventory. You don't want to do a lot of investment in those areas until you have a lot of clarity that those are winning ways to play the market. So, I'll talk to people that are like I want to go in this category and it's going to cost me you know 500,000 or a million dollars in tooling costs and whatever to bring this product market. And I always advise them can you first find a way to experiment and test if that positioning is something that people want and then lean in. So, what that practically looked like for us was we bought a lot of things off the shelf right out of the gate because we knew that one of the ways we wanted to position was around style style and value. The quality piece like I said is pretty consistent in our industry. So, if you're trying to position across style and value will value price you set that don't have to do any R&D or anything special for that. And style was primarily the color that you're painting bottles and the designs you're putting on bottles. So, what we realized is we didn't have to do a bunch of tooling and a bunch of R&D to get a pretty clear picture of was this positioning as a product line going to work for us. And when we found that it did that's when we started to lean in to paying for the tooling and all the different things. So, going all the way back imitate then deviate how can you as inexpensively as possible use the resources that are already out there use the proven pathways while testing your different positioning. Okay, great. Now that you have that now invest the capital in being able to build unique proprietary things that only you have that's when you're building the tooling that's when you're really leaning into making things that truly are different aren't just being positioned or marketed as different but truly are different that other people can't produce that's IP that's manufacturing sometimes that's things like investing in marketing partnerships where you're putting big dollars on the line but you there's this great thing and good to great where they talk about how in the 1700s when they were doing you know naval warfare cannonballs were really scarce you couldn't keep that many cannonballs on on a ship and the problem was the cannons were just not very accurate. So, you could very easily get into a battle with another ship and blow through all your cannonballs without really sustaining you know the other ship sustaining a bunch of damage. So, the way that they figured out to work around this is that they would take guns and they would lay them on top of the cannon and so the cannon was kind of aimed at the other ship they laid the gun on top of the cannon and then they would shoot a bullet and if they heard the bullet hit the wood of the other ship it's like okay now it's time to load the cannon and to fire the cannon. I think the exact same thing is true in consumer and positioning getting it right tells you it's time to load the cannons what Mike what you're saying is like I agree with everything same but what front of mind for me and I'm not I'm curious to take on this is aren't we just trading where we put the money so like if we don't spend money on better product development upfront we're going to spend that money on fighting the marketing battle right so it's like if I'm a me too product I'm just going to have to spend more money on like how do I win in marketing versus if I spend it up front like Matt what's your take on that give me give me your read on like because I'm basically it's like choose your hard yeah I mean similar to example I gave you with LED masks right it was it was an investment upfront but then we saved money down the track but I think we're going to this loop where we need money to develop something unique and unique mechanism but I don't think that's entirely true I think that is a lot of ways to develop unique mechanisms with zero dollars from a marketing perspective and I'll give you a story like I used to have the license to Umbro it's a fitness apparel company I'm not sure if you guys know I remember yeah yeah and then under and I got the license to Underama in Australia the first company in the world they had the license to manufacture Underama's gear and we had a production meeting and they had a unique fabric that they branded right they unique mechanism now that's to tell us what the makeup of that was and those massive internal battles they didn't want to tell us because all it was it was just a blend of polyester and cotton as certain percentage and there was nothing special about it and they didn't want to tell us this because they kind of reveal that what they had was just purely marketing in terms of their special fabric now there's one way to do and then there's another great example is I think jolly jolly came out and took a filter water filter that was used for tens of years branded as a skincare device and absolutely destroyed the market where they invested zero dollars literally it was the exact same filters everything also Amazon for 30 dollars and they came in repositioned at $150 and they don't know what $40 $50 million you too so I think a lot of the time there is there's ways to position your brand and product intelligently by just from marketing perspective alone to show value to the consumer about what your brands about a perfect example of this from my industry when do you guys think vacuum insulation started to be commercialized in the United States 1960 1800s thermos has been around thermos has been around since the late 1800s and they were using vacuum insulation in order to keep coffee hot so this is not a new thing at all but the positioning change that yeti caught is they were the first one to be like well wait a second what if we used it for cold and not hot that's it that was the entirety of the insight is that vacuum insulation had been used to keep things hot and then somebody said well wait a second what if I took the exact same thing and I positioned it differently that it keeps things cold and that led to a huge boom and the whole industry that I've been able to benefit from but it was it was simply a positioning change of something that already existed which is exactly the point that you're making that a lot of times it's not actually some huge breakthrough it's more somebody being able to say hey this thing that already exists it can also be this other thing or it can be used this different way and that leading to an entire you know growth of industry or an entire other industry altogether I mean take liquid death I mean water and it can't like it doesn't get any more real than that um another amazing example hey hello top ice cream if you guys familiar with that are you ice cream is now so they were they were 280 calories forever weren't doing too well they repositioned it to put 280 calories on the front of the tub and said 280 calories for the whole pint sales went for the roof no kidding yeah right but they were always 280 calories nothing even changed in terms of the product it was just the way they labeled it I mean RX bar is another fantastic example same ingredients no BS ingredients on the front labeled different company different brand if you're scaling any commerce brand today adds alone aren't enough after self focuses on the one moment that every brand already owns after checkout and turns the post purchase moment into more profit monetize every order with post purchase offers and thank you page experiences without disrupting checkout or hurting conversion enterprise grade tech used by gap ticket master macy's and target now driving results for brands like true classic hex clad ridge and jones road I would know this is the reason I ended up buying three pans from hex clad instead of two after sell is already generated over one billion an additional revenue for ecommerce brands revenue that doesn't require more traffic or higher cat so checkout after sell and tell them that the operator sent you if somebody's listening to this and they are they have a brand they have a product but they're like yeah I don't think I'm actually positioned that well what is the process or the exercise Or the steps that they could do with their team to help figure out a new position in the space because like these are all great examples Matt of like somebody who like I suspect it wasn't an aha moment right there must have been work to do this so like Can we maybe talk about that Mike? I don't know if you want to go first and Matt second But like how would you guys go through this process you have to talk to customers and there's no substitute here There are tools that make it easier to talk to lots of customers But you just have to be Talking to customers and understanding how they are processing the market and what they hear and what they see and what is getting through to them And what's not and I'll give to kind of really specific things one thing is you have to be best on whatever positioning you pick That you don't have to be first in your industry to have a really good business But you better be first in your positioning because positioning bifurcates the industry down to smaller groups And if you are second or third in the unique positioning within your industry, you're going to have trouble is basically my experience It's going to be very difficult for you to be profitable So you need to pick a positioning where you can be the best and In order to do that it's a combination of you've got to look at what your competitors are doing and How unassailable they are with their positioning and you got to talk to customers and understand how they're viewing you because You might really want to be positioned a certain way but if customers are like hey, you know brand X yeti is going to be my choice For the you know rugged tough outdoor drink where then you're just an insane person to say I'm also going to position similarly because you're going to be an also ran and you're not going to be able to make any money One of the places that this shows up the most clearly is when you're looking at packaging if you're in physical retail Like in Target and Walmart we're on a shelf and there are literally dozens Sometimes hundreds of other options that the customer is seeing all at once and with your packaging Can you really quickly Communicate between packaging and pricing and the appearance of the product can you communicate your positioning because if you can't It's just white noise. There's just so much stuff going on and the customers just don't even see your product So you have to find a way to cut through all of that and that was both the examples Matt just gave were packaging related Which we haven't really talked about but packaging is got to be where you distill the positioning in a way where it's very Adjustable and it's easy for the younger for the consumer to understand and so one of the tests you can apply to your positioning Is can somebody get it in a sentence? Can somebody tell it to their friend in a sentence because if they can't then it's not good enough, right? It's just it's too complicated It has to be something that you can very quickly help people to understand and that they can very quickly transfer to other people In order to win in a marketplace. It's so competitive and so crowded the best packaging example I have the my favorite is the energy drink the original energy drinks. It was monster energy, right Red Bull and then the shot It was literally like big Medium the five hour. Yeah, and it was like then the guys came out with a shot and all three are massive companies Right like massive and they all do the same damn thing Packaging yeah, and I think I love this topic because I had a whole business selling to mass retailers when I was in my early 20s Because of packaging that's why I had 13 brands in mass retail because I went after every single category every single brand had a category My power banks were called juice up my had headphones. They were called sports beats just for sports headphones I had you know drones called my drone I went so niche in every single brand to communicate this positioning across like you said when you're going to retail to try and stand out And I think a lot of people will get this concept confused They won't have a big business, but I think at the start you always want to be like a big fish in a puddle And you want to be the most valuable to a small audience at the spa especially the star when you're a little resources, right? And I think you want to do that by trying to like list all your competitors like Mike said I list all the claims In the category and I list all the unique mechanisms that they have and I'd be just trying to find the hole I'd be trying to find the hole in that to a specific avatar to a specific customer And if I can develop a unique mechanism Certain claims that fits a small avatar and be that big fish in a puddle for that avatar I think that's how you can win in any comment, you know, you'll be able to do at least a million dollars a month I think just doing that or how do you respond then to like How many supplement Companies there are at massive scale that all sell the same damn thing in the same damn format I'd argue that they probably don't market it all the same Right, you know, I mean, I think that this is the beauty of e-commerce, right? You can almost position your whole brand and product through a funnel And the consumer would even know yeah, I mean, it's a common common advice right now and it's probably it is very true Is like you take one product any product and you simply find all of the paths to that product And that is typically if the exercise is simply like Okay, I'm gonna look at this customer. I'm gonna say why would they want it? I'm gonna say why do they want it now? Right, and I'm gonna build funnels around that's like messaging creative creators Like I'm just gonna go super deep in that one customer same product and I'm just gonna move that product around In customer segments, right? So the brand itself in e-commerce may not actually have a strong position in the market But they're funnels and they're marketing do we give the advice all the time That you want to pick a big market and this is actually another reason why picking a big market I think is wise the bigger the market the more different positioning Stances that will work and will win and so what we've seen is there are some market verticals where hey There's room for one or two and those are gonna be the winners and there's not really room for any more than that And then there's other things like creatine where it's like hey you might have 30 different companies that can position themselves in a unique way and when because the market is just so dang big Drinkware is one of those also like there's billions of pieces of drinkware sold every year And I could say there's at least seven or eight different positions that can really do well You can have a lot of successful firms. So I think that when you pick a big market Positioning becomes even more important because you can't just say I'm gonna go after everybody It's not gonna work. You're gonna get murdered But also like when you pick a big market It gives you a lot of room to navigate and to find your particular place where you can stand out And you can be the best at a particular combination of things. So Matt what I'm hearing from you is And fraction when I'm hearing from both of you is like you pick a narrower segment of a large market Right So I'm gonna serve a customer in a way that I believe that customer is not currently being served. So like let's say that step one When you're doing that work are you also thinking ahead to how I might expand Out the brand so how am I gonna ladder up into the larger market? I think the biggest problem that brands make when they're trying to grow is that they try to go wider instead of deeper And I have made it Many times in the last 11 years and it's taken me kind of getting burned by the stove several times To learn this lesson that when something is really working Positioning is really crushing it and you're really Becoming known as like the definitive answer to this type of positioning in this market the answer is almost always Okay, how do we do more within that? How do we go deeper within that then like okay now? Let's branch out into these secondary or third kind of positioning places brand is all about You communicating clearly to the customer here is who we're for and here is who we're not for the problem with thinking like this kind of go Wide mentality is that it really starts to neuter your ability to say here. So we're not for because you're like We don't want to say that we're not for hunters because you know, maybe we want to expand into hunters You know, we don't want to say that we're not for people over 55 because you know they buy water bottles too We don't want to say you know and you you just start to go down this path where you become very afraid of saying who you're not for Because you're like, well, I don't want to close up close up any doors But what you see the best brands do is they pretty unapologetically are like yeah, we're not for all these people But if you're this and this we're exactly for you and then with that tribe of people They try to find how to sell them more stuff and that that's what and and like so in my particular case Where we had simple modern and we launched trevy We originally thought that there would be a lot of synergy for trevy from simple modern And that's just not been the case trevy's been successful, but not because of simple modern And one of the big decision points that we had to figure out was are these the same brand like are we going to do electrolytes by simple modern or are they going to be different? incidentally another of our great competitors Trove brands who owns Blender bottle they own a wala and they own oath They got into a consumable space and made the exact same decision with oath, which is like a clear protein That they wanted it to be under a different brand most people probably don't know the association with a wala But they had an ability to launch a consumable bio wala But instead they decided to launch it as a separate brand just like we did And here's the advantage of launching things as a separate brand it pushes against that desire to kind of always be expanding and going wider and who you're for and who you're trying to appeal to. If I'm trying to cram in and shoehorn in an electrolyte brand with simple modern, then my value proposition and my positioning just gets murkier in my mind. Whereas it's a lot easier to be like simple modern. This is the positioning trevy. This is the positioning. I do think there's overlap, but there's not one to one overlap and there doesn't need to be, right? Because I've positioned them as separate brands. So I think that there is opportunity when you're an experienced operator to create other kind of complimentary brands. Certainly that's what we're doing. But I think within your brand, it's all about focus. Steve Jobs once said that focus is about saying no. And as a brand owner, part of being really good at positioning and part of being really good at brand is saying no a lot to the temptation in the urge to just go wider instead of going deeper. Most AI tools right now are all promise and no delivery. You know exactly what I am talking about. Super fancy launch videos. This is why I'm in loving what rich panel is doing. They have AI and support smashed together, made a practical, made it useful, made it valuable to brands today, not on some future promise. And instead of asking you to spend weeks writing prompts and uploading help docs and babysitting, they flipped the whole script. There AI builds your support team for you and everything it needs. I've watched it. It works. It's freaking amazing. Rich panel even guarantees 50% of your support volume will be automated by AI within 30 days or your money back. I call that a no brainer offer. The pricing is also kind of wild about 20 cents per conversation instead of most other vendors being like $1 to $3, which is a little nuts. If you are interested, go to richpanel.com/demo not for some generic demo, but to actually book a call and watch them build your actual support team. Your example Mike of simple modern Trevi is making me think of with Pila and Lomi like we launched Lomi. It was like it was a product we were developing as Pila. So there was no intention on it being its own brand. It was like we just think this product should exist. So we saw the compostable phone case. We wanted to make a machine that could compost your food waste. That was like the okay let's just do that. Let's like lean into this customer that we have. We clearly understand their values. Yada yada yada. Okay. Those two brands have about a 10% customer overlap at this point years in. They are if you go to Pila case.com and you go to Lomi.com, the brands are literally just tabs in the top left corner. You can flip between them. The relationship is obvious. Still just about a 10% customer overlap between the two. This has come up in several conversations with people in apparel where if you sell people jeans it would be like well obviously you can sell the same people t-shirts and it's like no not necessarily. Like even though it seems like it's such a close comparison and such a small jump to get people to buy other pieces of apparel. That's not actually how the customer's mind works. And so we definitely overestimate brand halo. Okay so Matt why is this why does why can a customer not make the jump like if I sell jeans why wouldn't they buy t-shirts for me like what is it is there literally like a wall in their mind like psychologically that is just keeping them from saying like sure of all by that from you because some brands do it. Yeah I mean that all then depends on their kind of letter in their mind about that category of t-shirts and already what's already earned. And that's what I'm saying like it's very hard to replace that run on that ladder based on what the mental real estate they have those existing brands especially the ones have been dropped drilled home for so many years are so much marketing budget very few brands. Are able to have multiple hero products it is very difficult to do and it's very difficult to sustain. Even if you've proven hey I am awesome at making toothpaste that doesn't mean I want to buy floss from you. I mean right like do you buy cold gate floss no nobody does do you buy crest floss no nobody does well that doesn't make any sense they're so close they're so adjacent and yet the market has spoken that's just not how things tend to work. It's like I want the best solution for every use case I have and you might totally convince me that you are the best solution for the toothpaste that keeps my teeth in great shape. But that means nothing necessarily in my mind about your ability to be the best solution for getting things out from in between my teeth. Now I think that you have the ability to kind of it's plausible it's it's like if Coca Cola wanted to sell me a floss or a toothpaste I'm that's going to be tough right. Colgate has a better chance than Coca Cola but it's still tough it's a lot easier for like one brand one job to be hired for. And once you say well I'm hiring this brand to do multiple jobs for me it is it's much more difficult you can see it in software it's more common. Then it is in other areas but it's still it's still really difficult because people tend to once they once they initially experience a brand and there's like I hire this brand to do X. It's it's very difficult to convince them oh and also I hire them to do Y&Z yeah it's people would point to Apple as like the ultimate example of like lots of heroes but then. The thing that you have to realize about Apple is like their products work as an ecosystem it's like they all work together and that's actually why you buy all of those categories from Apple. But the truth is that is brand owners for some reason we also forget that we're consumers like I'm listening to you talk Mike and I'm like I'm looking around my office and I'm thinking of my own closet my own house. I don't own a lot of things from one brand like one brand is not command multiple places in my home it's very rare that that's true. I totally agree because even with Cuba we found this multiple times over you know our hero product of the moment is my confusion we are the leading category in the world for that product. L.E.D. Mask can be and is better than most if not all the competitors out there we have the influences the doctors celebrity doctors but I can't out L.E.D a company that just focused on L.E.D. like Omni likes I just can't do it. What what what what are filters our filters are better than jollies in terms of filtration design technology we're patents on it I can't out shower head jolly because we had the position that brand like it's almost it's it's an almost impossible for me to do. And people often forget that like you mentioned it's actually so hard to our position someone who is just so much better position from a brand level because the consumers look at those brands as industry leading because they just focus on that one thing. And that's why folks in the one thing is so valuable you get so much more cut through so in terms of the mental real estate the consumers having the mind. It's such a good point Matt that it's really difficult to be anybody who's trying to do one thing really well when you're trying to do three. I mean you just you have to be like even if you're a bigger brand even if you have more money you're still splitting your mind share of the organization to trying to do three different things and somebody's going to be able to say hey look they're trying to do six things they can't do this thing as well as we can this is all we think about every day and the consumer is that is like yeah that makes sense. Fulfill is the ERP built specifically for D to see any commerce brands inventory purchasing warehousing financials all in one system built for the way your operation actually runs. There is not an ERP on this planet not one that has more direct three PL integrations and Fulfill they integrate with over 400 three PL locations globally and most you listen this right now either running your own three PL relationship or you're about to. And the second you're three PL your ERP aren't talking to you trip on real time your flying blind you don't know your true landed costs you don't know your real margin you're reconciling spreadsheet to 11 PM trying to figure it or $40,000 what I know because I am on Fulfill the visibility have now versus what we had before it's not a marginal improvement it's a different game. Fulfill is the only ERP I've seen that was actually built from the ground up for D to see and it's not some bivocated piece of crap believe me those exist fulfill isn't one of them go check out Fulfill tell me. I think that the main thing for me with all this to is like positioning is a relative exercise like Mike you called it out Matt you said like you list them all out. We forget this I think we honestly like as as brand operators we forget that there are lots of options for people algorithms are literally designed like Facebook if you go to a jolly site you're going to have 10 companies trying to sell you another version in your feed right away. Right so like you're always positioning literally requires there to be other things to position against so it is it's such a good call out and I think the point on the the sort of like organizational dilution Mike which is what you're hitting on is so. Important and the other way to look at that for founders is like and this is kind of what I said about phone cases initially like you know what I'm happy to go in this category because I think I'm competing against a bunch of mid-level managers in most of these businesses like they're so distracted on so many things at these large companies that like me as a founder and that person is like a director of marketing who now owns this product category I'm going to whip there. I know I am right because I'm obsessing over it and they're not this is like another category in that companies long list of things to sell. We had a perfect example of this recently where we released a kids tumbler and 2023 and it did really well at first it was it was kind of a smaller version of a handled tumbler and did great. But the category continued to evolve, and we had a a very leak resistant tumbler, but people have gravitated towards wanting these like fold up, fold down straws, and we just didn't adjust in our kids' tumblers. And so we just lost market share basically in 24, 25, 26. And I brought this up with my team recently, and I'm like, why did we not respond here? There's some fairly obvious ways we could respond. And you know what the answer is? It's just not existential to the business. It's a single digit percentage part of the business, probably a low single digits. And so it's just like, yeah, market share is down 35%. But like, you know, it's the difference between 2% and 3% of the total business. And so just nobody's focused on that. It's not that big of a deal. And this is exactly what we're talking about. If we're competing with somebody that's like, all we're trying to do is make the best tumbler for kids that are 10 to 18 or whatever, like that's tough to compete with. And the broader you get, the more there will be categories where you could even objectively look at them inside of your organization and be like, we're not doing our best there. And everybody's like, yeah, well, what do you want me to prioritize? You know, what do you want me to deprioritize so that I can go focus on that? You want me to deprioritize these three really important things. And you're like, well, okay, I see what you're saying. And so like broader and bigger, this is the challenge. And I deal with it more because of the scale we're at and because we're operating across adults and kids. And then we also have electrolytes. We have all the other stuff. But, and I can just tell you firsthand, there are just many times where we're not executing at the level that I would want us to, not because of the team, but because of the choices I've made of how broad we are. Yeah, the wider you go, the more trade-offs you make organizationally. As you say, it's like the trade-offs become like you're every day. It's like, if I do this, one of my losing. If I do this, one of my, that's literally your job. Matt, can I ask you a question? Is there a time where like niching down becomes bad advice? Is it bad advice? Is there a point where it's like, niching down is bad? Yeah, like when does it start being good advice to niche down? Is there, is there something? I can't think of one. I'm just curious if you guys have a take here. Yeah, I think the moment you stop inferring added value to the consumer, that's probably when you stop niching down. That's probably a good way to think about it. There's no incremental value of may niching down. Then there's probably no point in it. Because I think the point of nashing down is to provide incremental value to that customer. That's the way we kind of think about it. Okay, then my follow up to this guys is how married to a position should a brand be? Because like one of my theories with, I mean, like what we're talking about too is like product market fit, right? One of my theories with consumer is markets move. So like you can have PMF one day and you can absolutely not have it another day because markets move. So I think that it's fair for founders to be afraid of taking a brand and saying, I'm positioned here just because in consumer you see markets move so much. How would you respond to that? I'm like, I don't know if you have a take on this, but I know this is a thing. If you pick a good market positioning, guess what's gonna happen? People are going to come and try and get in on that market position. Like it's, people are gonna see that and be like, that's super smart. I wanna do that. And you're gonna be challenged. So there's really two phases to market positioning. Phase one is mostly about identifying where can we be best? And then phase two is once you establish yourself as best in a market positioning, it's like, now get ready. Here they come. And do you have modes? Do you have the ability to defend it? Because if you don't, then the competitors will come and they will chip away at you or somebody else will and see you in that positioning. And so it's both Matt. It's being able to identify where you wanna be. And I think in our category of drinkware right now, interestingly, this kind of, I would say the quality and style duopoly or whatever, that is like where everybody's gravitating. Is like, that's where so much of the market lives. And for us, we're like, well, price point gives us a little bit of flexibility compared to some of our competitors because they want to be higher and we wanna be lower and there's trade-offs that come with where you're positioned. It's not like one's better than the other. It's just like, there's good and bad that come with both. And there's channel choices that brings with it. But we identified pretty early on. Like you wanna focus on Amazon, you wanna focus on target, you wanna be really taking a stand for style. And not surprisingly, like we've had a ton of people move their positioning over time kind of more towards that and people that have launched into the market. And that's what you should expect. Like, listen, I don't begrudge that. That's like game-breakingizes game. This is what I would do if I was an entrepreneur. I would certainly launch into that kind of vector because that's where all the money's being spent. But it's also like really, really pushing us to make it clear what is the way that we can hold on to our position without somebody else coming in and being like, "Hey, that's super attractive. I think I'm gonna move into your house and kick you out." And that's what the market will try to do to you. So you have to not only be able to identify it, but you have to be able to lock it down. - And you have to be willing to move too. So like you might be the first to own a niche subcategory and you own that positioning. But if that market moves to something else as being the major lever, like you as a brand need to be ready to also move. That should be something to be said about even like trend surfing, you know, going with the trends and having your brand be able to pivot and reposition at certain times when it makes sense. You know, I think obviously Paral's an obvious one, even like what new balance is done recently. But I think that shows a lot of strength. I think within a company and a brand that can ride different trends as well and not be so stringent just because where they hold once doesn't mean forever. - Black Friday's cyber money are coming. Are you ready? - Not in the normal marketing calendar and offers prep sense. I am talking measurement and attribution. Are you even going to know what winning and losing looks like when the big Q4 season hits? Reality is the businesses that win set up their measurement solution when the times are slow not the night before the big weekend. There's a reason for this. You see with North Beam, you're getting a totally independent, completely new set of ad performance numbers with infinite look back windows. That means that the longer that the data grows, the more valuable it becomes. So when CPMs are spiking in November, you will know precisely where every dollar is coming from while your competitors are guessing. This is important. Black Friday is one in the summer, not the day before. Book a demo with North Beam today. The link is in the description. Go check it out. Matt, when the tariffs hit in 25, right? Like Pila's brand position at that point was like eco-friendly, sustainable, like all those things. Like we were very much like that's our customer. Tera showed up and instantly the local manufacturing value of our product shot right to the top of the list. It's like if it was a two out of 10 on people's importance, it was like now a 10 out of 10. And in both the US and Canada, so like we basically repositioned. Like if you came to our site, it went from like most sustainable, first composable phone case to Made in America. It was like instant market moved. This is super important. Let's go hit it. And then we did it again when the whole like microplastic health things started. People saw people all of a sudden that care a lot about like what they're wearing and what are they putting on their body and what are they ingesting. And like there was all these like medical things that came out of our micro plastics. I'm like, oh, I have one that doesn't have those. So like we just repositioned there. I've a perfect example here, Matt, that's exactly what we were just talking about. Stanley, I went to New York City with you and some other people we were there for Beanstalk. We recorded several episodes. It was the 25th anniversary of 9/11. And so we went to the memorial with my team. And if you go through the memorial, one of the things they have there is they have actually part where it talks about the construction of the World Trade Centers, which is actually pretty amazing, like with the Hudson River and different things, like what they had to do, just even build the buildings. I had to build these huge dams. And anyway, so they have this whole exhibit that's like how they built them originally. And then they have some artifacts from the original build. You know one of the things they have? They have a Stanley thermos. They have a Stanley thermos from the construction of the World Trade Centers. And that was the positioning. It's like this is like put on your hard hat, grab your green Stanley thermos. It's time to go to work. And then just think about how the positioning has been radically different in the last five or six years. It's just a great example of they moved the positioning of the brand. It's maybe one of the better examples in all of consumer I can think of because it was just much more lucrative to be positioned really differently. Now the fact that they were able to pull that off is an interesting conversation in itself. Like how were they able to pull it off? Why were they able to pull it off? And maybe that says that consumers are much more open to you changing the positioning of your brand than you might think. But it clearly can be done and it was really fascinating to see that in our industry. - The easiest way that I think about all the positioning is like how can it be different? You know what is nobody else saying? Because like what's true about you and not them? And then unlike who you're up against and what's the enemy? And that's kind of the three things that I think through how to position myself. And you should almost be able to say your brand in one sentence that depicts all those three things. - I was just gonna say, another one it makes me think of is the, I'm a PC and I'm a Mac. What you're saying, Matt. Like just the positioning really clearly, like you're not this guy, you wanna be this guy. - I actually, again, I tried that ad on Pila. Almost got canceled because of it. This was definitely during like the cancel culture years. And it wasn't even my idea. It was my VP of marketing, Kate at the time, who had this like, hey, we should remake that I'm a Mac, I'm a PC ad. And I'm like, that's brilliant. Like I'm a Pila case. I'm like, I care about the planet, and I'm a plastic case. I don't give, that was basically the idea, right? So I'm like, okay, run with it. And I think Mike, I've told you this, but like they made the ad. So they cast two people, one for Pila is this guy, I think his name was like Kai. He was like this like super good looking, hippie looking mountain dude, you know, rock climber, whatever. And then the plastic case, which we were going up against, was like, one of Kate's friends. And we, she basically is like, looks like a Barbie, right? So dresser up in this like plastic pink dress, and she was like, the plastic case, I don't give, and then we published this video. So we shoot the ad, we publish it. And inside of like an hour, this thing goes like mega viral, which you think like K winner. No, not great. It turned into a man hating on women hate, like just comment fast. Like my marketing team, which is all women are like literally in tears, because people are just piling in on like this guy is beating up on this girl in his video and I'm like, hold on. Like how could, how the hell is that, what you're taking from this? So I don't know, I'm just telling the story because I think you got it. That kind of ad is brilliant, but you've really got to nail it. Cause we tried, I think we're pretty good marketers. And that one was a fail through and through. Well, I think it's tough because when you counter position against somebody, you're trying to kind of clown on them and that you have to be really, I mean, this is why counter positioning does not work. If you're the big dog, because it really just gets viewed as punching down, right? If Coca Cola tries to counter position against Poppy and make Poppy look like a clown, like it'd be like, what are you doing? You're Coca Cola. And so like when you're near the top, like you have to rise above that and counter positioning is not a lever you can use. It's really more of like a challenger brand way of saying, yeah, we're not, you know, we're not the incumbent because the incumbent, you know, kind of. And actually another really interesting moment, Apple, is when Samsung was really trying to go after Apple, they tried to use counter positioning and kind of frame Apple and the iPhone as like the thing your parents used. They just weren't able to make it stick because then Apple's counter punch was all of their positioning was we're for young people because they realized if you position this as like, this is for artists and this is for young people, that you'll still get the people that are in their 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s. But you can't lose the younger generation and you can't allow somebody to counter position against that. And so again, like it's super dynamic because you have to kind of pay attention to what your competitors are doing and then thinking about how that impacts the way that you're positioning your product. - One of the things that I think is important when you think about brands, is that your brand is actually what customers say about you. It's not what you think. And I do think that there's a gap often with founders and just call it brands, right? Like what we think our brand is and then what the customer thinks it is, like there's definitely a gap, like a delusion gap. And the way I like to think about brands and this goes back to your packaging comment from both of you guys is like, it's brands are basically just a collection of little portable stories and that you need these to be very simple in order for them to be portable, right? So like if you can't on a package, just like say like this is the portable story, this is what you're gonna tell people about, I think that that's a good signal that you just don't have. You have not nailed a strong position in the market that you're in. - Yeah, stories of the operating system of the mind. So I think you nailed it there. And I think that's why having the enemy is so critical because that story, that narrative sticks a lot more. I mean, I think there's only three moves that you have. If you can be first in a category, you can be first in a smaller category or you can take on the leader essentially, right? The three ways you can position yourself. You wanna have an enemy to go up against. You wanna have a unique mechanism that you can clearly solve a problem that no one else can. What else can we say? - Okay, to summarize what we talked about today, I think here's three big takeaways. The first is your positioning needs to be able to be communicated in one sentence. It's gotta be clear, easy, concise, breaks through the noise, customers hear it, and not only do they hear it, but then when they become a friend of your brand, they can quickly communicate it to others. You could do it in 15 seconds or less. You can tell somebody why this is the brand you need to buy. Number two, learn from your customers. It's nice to have ideas about how you think customers should view your brand, but what really matters is how they view your brand. How do they see your position in the market? Is your messaging breaking through? And if not, how do you change your packaging? How do you change your marketing? How do you change the words that you use in order for them to clearly understand why your brand, your product is different? And then finally, none of this happens in a vacuum. The way that your competitors are positioning themselves, the way that they are marketing their product, these things matter a lot because you're being mindful of them when you're making your decisions. You need to be distinct and different and you can't do that unless you know what everybody else is doing and you're keeping an eye on that. - All right, that's the pod. Mike, great way to wrap it up. Matt, thanks for being here. Always fun to jam. We'll see you on the next step.