The Difference Between My $50K/Day Spenders And Your Brand

If your brand is struggling right now, if your brand is having a hard time growing, I want to tell you a lesson today that I see from the best brands that I'm working with. And when I look and when I see right now, brands that are winning really, really big, there are a couple of paths to getting there. But in the portfolio of IGF clients, when I look at my sort of mid eight figure clients, where it seems like everything is a tailwind, everything they do seems to work. When they have hiccups and bumps on the road, they're pretty small. There's one thing that stands out between all of them. And it's this, they matter to their customers in some way. Now, before you turn this podcast off, because you think that is the dumbest thing you've ever heard, I want to make the case to you that in fact, this is the most important thing that most brands get wrong when they get something wrong. That the reason that brands struggle so much is that they do not know. They do not understand how and why they actually matter to their customers in real ways. And the brands that are winning really big, the brands that win really consistently, very often have figured out some way to matter. I see right now sort of a couple of pathways for brands to be successful. One of them we'll call the supplement funnel builder pathway, something like that. It's really not just supplement, but it's like the hyper tactical funnel builder types of brands that are so common in supplements, but are not limited to supplements, where everything they do is about extremely tactical, super excellence of getting more ads live, getting more files that are testing more offers, just sort of huge amounts of effort towards those things, huge, huge volumes of creators, all of that kind of stuff. And that is a real pathway for some brands. For some brands, you just do that endlessly, and that is kind of the whole game. It's just like this sort of pure volume game where you win by just pushing really, really hard on those things. And this story has been immortalized in the form of the Hudson Comfort story that everybody has heard a million times. Some of the big supplement brand stories, like I said, that you've heard a million times, where the way these brands sort of accomplish with they're trying to accomplish is just by a huge amount of effort. Sometimes there's an arbitrage element of this, there's a recognition of the cost structure in some way of the dynamic of Facebook ads or something like that. It really favors them. And so it's like, well, the actual cost of creative is relatively low relative to the potential impact. And so they go and just generate mass amounts of creative below cost, and they do that. And that calculation often includes with it another calculation on the back end, which is not just the cost of creative, but the value of the customer. And this is why it is applied so often to supplement brands, because if you get subscriptions, even if you run a really, really high-calc, but you're getting subscribers very often, then the long-term value of those customers is really, really high. And this is something I've seen a million times when I've run this math myself, which is that many supplement brands are in fact still under investing in their customers, relative to what their customer reviews are, even when they are at running at very, very high-calc, very, very low-row-ass, because the truth is, it's still really good. Just considered in and of itself, there's still a really good return on your invested capital by making that decision. So they go and they do all of the funnel builder stuff. And basically, the incentive in those businesses is to smash creative, smash funnels endlessly, and just to go over and over and over again, down that route. Now, that is a real and viable pathway to some people, where you can make the math work, where the value of the customer is so high that you can do that, but it is not a real and viable pathway for every brand. And one of the big mistakes I see in e-commerce right now is so many brands trying around that playbook, the pure volume funnel builder playbook, instead of trying to think like an actual brand, because they see the stories of these big brands that make tons and tons of money making doing, running this playbook in these different categories. And they go and say, "I need to go do that same thing." And so you hear the Hudson story, you hear the Groove story, or whatever, and you go and build a brand like that. Except what those brands very often run into is that mass amounts of creative don't actually necessarily win. It doesn't actually work. That there is some limitation to how this actually works, or they start testing funnels, and they run their split tests, and they change their offer, and they change their landing pages, and they test 10 landers, they do it the way that I say to do it, and the Brad Block says to do it on this podcast, and they generate a bunch of creative, and yet they don't get forward. And that is the brand that I want to talk to a little bit, because there is actually another brand besides those two. And I want to hold them up for a second. I've got a couple of these clients right now, and I've seen it over and over, where something about the product has resonated extremely deeply with the customer. And everything they do, everything those brands do, in this category, they're not the supplement brands, they're not the funnel builder brands, but they're growing quickly and growing really well. Everything those brands do, seems to have some kind of tailwind behind it. And so again, like I said, when something goes wrong, and inevitably does, there's no brand that has everything go right all the time, okay? But when something goes wrong, it is a problem that can be overcome, and there's a solution to the problem. But overall, most things go right on the aggregate, and they continue to grow over time, they continue to get more profitable over time. They operate with excellence, they think financially, they do all those things, and it just seems that everything goes. And this basic distinction between these second two types of brands that I'm talking about, like I said, sort of my clients that are spending 50 grand a day on ads, some of them, that's like an average number, you know, it's like 100k per day at holiday, and 20k per day at non-holiday, 'cause they're really seasonal or whatever it is. But brands like this that are like spending really big amounts of money on meta, and still growing, and that number's going up all the time. When I see those brands, okay, that are like that, the thing I see for a lot of them is this feeling of, as I said, tailwind and everything they do. And then I've got other clients where no matter what effort we seem to make, there seems to be headwind. And that distinction between tailwind and headwind, I believe is basically what the word brand, quote unquote, means in e-commerce. When you have a good brand, it doesn't mean you scale endlessly. It doesn't mean everything works all the time. It doesn't mean you have a free money machine. In fact, one thing I want you to be wary of all the time is anybody telling you about a free money machine. Free money machines don't exist, okay? Even the brands that look like free money machines are actually have some level, first of all, they're often not actually performing as well as they say they are. But if they are performing amazingly, they have some incredible level of excellence at every seat in their organization in some way that's just different than whatever. You know, you get the idea, okay? Don't chase free money machines. Get rich quick is almost always a lie and you need to extend the timeline that you have for success. But still, even if that's not true, they have this continued growth where the things they do continue to pile on top of each other and they solve the next problem next and things keep growing, okay? Those brands that have that feeling, that is what brand shows up at. Sometimes people will say something of the effect of, you know, all brand is, quote unquote, brand. All that is is the ability to charge more for your products, okay, or it shows up only as a retention. If you have a good brand, people buy again. And they'll say those are the measures of brand. And that's wrong. That's just definitely wrong. There are lots of brands that are great brands that charge very little for their products. An example they came up, I think I first heard this example from John Frank, but it is suck with me. Is the brand BIC, right? BIC, BIC, BIC, makes incredibly cheap products, right? They make like, you know, huge packs of ballpoint pens or whatever and of lighters and of like single-use razors or not single-use, but of disposable razors, okay? And they make these products that are extremely low price points. I mean, you need to think of Walmart here or something where it's like the whole point of the brand is that things are cheap. Now Walmart is not a manufacturer in the same way as the retailer, but you get the idea, right? They're brands like this where they compete on being low price and they have phenomenal brands. And they have great brands because they deliver value to their customer in some way that really matters, okay? And this is now starting to work back around to the original point that I was making. I simply could not be more grateful for my friends at more staffing who have been transformative in my business and in fact in my life. More staffing is the staffing agency that I have used for a long time to build my team in the Philippines, sister companies with behind the scenes studio and move supply chain. So you've heard me talk about before, all those kind of came from the same group of people. And I work across all of them in this case, more staffing, so I'm talking about because there's a specific lane of help that you probably need in your business, which is hiring great talent. And more staffing gets you access to that talent in the Philippines at a much lower cost than equivalent talent in the US. And that is an awesome setup for you because that allows you to get really, really, really good people into your business without having to pay an arm and a leg in quite the same way as you would in the US. You also get really loyal people without reason 'cause you can pay great rates in the Philippines to keep people in your business who then have a great life and a great salary there. It's a win-win across the board. Go to more staffing.co/af. The thing you need to know about more is that they were built on the back of an e-commerce brand themselves. So the whole vision for the business was because their founder had built a US-based e-commerce business had seen the unlock in that business of contracting an incredible Filipino talent. It was a huge eye-opening thing and they thought we could do this for other people. So they really natively speak the language of e-commerce. If you want help in e-commerce, an operator, if you want help as an agency, if you want help, even in a software company, something like that, you should work with more staffing to get that help in your business. Just get some resumes. Look and see what you can get. They make the whole thing really easy for you. They boil down a giant candidate pool. You know, if it's siphon through hundreds of AI created resumes and Q&A's and that kind of thing, they'll help you do all of it, deliver you the best talent. They've already pre-interviewed for you. They can recommend them to you, get you some interviews, and you can get started. I've built my business with it, you should do the same. More staffing.co/af. And secondly, many of those brands actually don't have [BLANK_AUDIO] incredible retention, even if they have great brands. There are plenty of brands that are basically one time use products that don't have extraordinary retention metrics because of that. I always think of like sofa brands here or something like that. You actually have a really, really good furniture brand and people just don't need to buy that much furniture that often and so they just don't come back and buy that. But you can still have a really good brand that sells basically one off products. Or the retention timeline is so long and so slow that it doesn't fit with what most people's expectation is about because the genetic elements of the brand are just like that. Maybe I would think of another brand here being like, I don't know if this is actually true, but I'm looking right now into my Canon camera. Like you just, I mean, probably some subs out of customers buy lots of stuff from Canon, of course, some super users of Canon products. But like I've bought my Canon camera. It's a really good brand that I trusted, even though I know nothing about cameras. I just did some Googling or, you know, chat GPTing at some point, came up with this camera that did this and that was that. And I just like, it was a brand that I trusted, even though I'm not gonna have a super high LTV, okay? So there are plenty of counter examples where brands have relatively low retention, but have great brands. And so the point is, I don't think either of those is a good measure of what brand is. The thing that I think is the good measure of what brand is is the tailwind or headwind and the things that you do. And in my view, nearly every brand can feel this. When a brand is growing and things are going really well, there is this feeling, like I said, of tailwind. They were every single thing you try and you add seems to just work a little bit better, not every single, but lots and lots of those things. Whereas brands that have weak brands very often have this sense of, like no matter how much creative we put into the account, we just can't move forward, okay? That kind of idea. And that happens for lots and lots of brands. Sometimes that comes down to other factors as well, like economic factors or something, but actually even the economic problem for some brands are in fact brand problems. For example, if you are, I once looked at a brand that was in a male accessories kind of space, they did not have very good retention and they did not have particularly good margins. And so they were kind of stalled in their growth. And if they, and the problem that you could see for that brand was not, in my view, entirely about financial problems. It was also about, it just wasn't totally clear how this brand was really going to matter to their customers. And this brings me back to the thing that I want you to think deeply and seriously about for your brand no matter where you are at. And it is the question, how do you matter to your customer? How do you matter to your customer? If you can define this question clearly, you can get really far with thinking about the kinds of efforts you should make at everything, at every level of what you do. What is the actual value you provide? And I like that question a lot because it actually allows me to think about both BIC and Canon in the same sentence, okay? Because BIC does matter to their customer. Now they don't matter by providing sort of excellence and durability, right? They matter to their customer by being really cheap and really reliable. And then they do the other good things that brands do like they're really visibly recognizable with, you know, if you see a BIC lighter, you basically know it's a BIC lighter with a design and all that stuff. That stuff is really, really good too. But it supports this way in which BIC has a fundamental promise to their customers, which is, we'll get you the thing you want for really cheap and it'll be pretty good. For, given me how cheap it is, it'll be pretty good quality, okay? So you don't want to pay lots and lots of money for a lighter unless you're buying a Zippo lighter, okay? And there you go. There's another brand that has that matters where there's a little status to a Zippo lighter and it's a little more fun and a little more premium and you feel a little more elevated with, you know, smoking a pipe or a cigar or even cigarettes or whatever with a Zippo lighter. Position very differently and they do matter to their customer in some way. There's some way in which they've built some meaning into the value proposition to their customer. So it doesn't have to be about premiumness but it does have to matter in some way or another. Canon can matter to their customer in some different ways with sort of reliability and quality but also about sort of like allowing you to create and to make and to generate beauty in the world via their products. And I don't know this is an incredible example but they I think have established themselves as a reliable good quality camera for people who are trying to create with photos in the world, okay? So there are different ways these brands matter. Now those are sometimes bad examples in the e-commerce space because they are too legacy, right? Bick and Canon, these are brands that have been around for a really long time. And I do think, in fact, there's something to learn from that which is that many brands actually build brand over a longer period of time. I think one thing, one problem that is absolutely endemic to the e-commerce space in which we operate is that many people are chasing success way too fast, particularly when they go this route. If you want really, really, really fast success, if you want to go as fast as you can to being super rich in e-commerce, you probably should go the funnel builder tactician route that I was describing earlier, right? That most of the brands that have had extreme success over a short period of time are just incredible on the tactical arbitrage style approach to e-commerce. And, you know, God bless them for that, right? Like there's a real thing. I'm not decrying at all. I'm just saying it's really hard and it's not the thing that most people are actually going to do. And frankly, many people don't want to do that. They're not trying to create that kind of product. They don't want to sell snake oil and supplements, you know? Which is like this path. They actually want to do something that resonates and means something and they care and they're trying to create some value and meaning and beauty in the world with their products. I've talked to countless e-commerce entrepreneurs that feel that way about their products. And so when brands behave this way, the problem that happens a lot of times is when brands that need to build a brand behave like the funnel builders. And they think like the funnel builders and they want the timeline of the funnel builder. But Canon and Bic weren't built today and a million other brands that you could think of. They weren't built yesterday, right? They're built over a long period of time of investing, instead of the growing and all those things. I mean, I don't know their particular stories, but my guess is I think both brands have been around for a long time to grow steadily over time. And I just think many brands need to consider that if you're going to build brand that's part of what you have to do. But in the midst of that, okay? What I want you to consider now, whether or not you have this sickness of too quick of a timeline to success, I want you to consider how your brand can matter more to your customer. I want you to really seriously think about that. I'm telling you, when I look at the portfolio of brands that AGF growth service is, it is a question that just today, I was talking with my growth strategist about and I'm going to keep reinforcing all the time. In fact, I'm actually trying to build real sort of playbook and service around this question. Like how can we do a better job of looking carefully and closely at the customer of our products for our brands and really understand where they are at, what their desires are at a deep human level and say what can we do and what can the brand do to meet them? And the truth is it is a partnership in this case. If I'm going to do this for a brand that I'm working with, I need to be able to look and say here's what I can do as the agency, as the people working on creative and landers and all the things that we're doing weekend and week out, right? Thinking about financial management along the way, measuring and with our media buying approach, all these things, how can we go and do all these things? Well, that's one part of the picture. But I was actually talking today with growth strategist saying, well, like let's say you wanted to go reach, I was looking at one client and say, you wanted to go reach hierarchy athletes, okay? With your product. Like you need to think about for a second, how do you become authentic to hierarchy athletes? Well, like, or to marathoners or something. Well, there's a lot of things you could do. In fact, the brand I was thinking about with this has done a great job of doing exactly this kind of thing. And steadily, over time, their business is growing. There's some real tailwind, and they've run into some problems along the way. But their business continues to grow and their learning is they do that and they're taking big swings and they're doing giveaways and they're doing all kinds of things that are attempting to really meet those people. But I said to my team, well, could you go look and say, how does this product meet the hierarchy athlete? Where the hierarchy athlete is? Like, and how would you show that visually? How can you find out who that person is? What their average age is? What they care about in that space? Is there anything about the product itself that is important for the mix of like longer, like longer, larger amounts of running mixed with high-intensity functional fitness output, which is what Hierox is, right? Like, how can you go do those things? And what influencers can and should we sign in this brand so that we can go and say, we are authentic to you? Are there charity partners that you can go pursue to do that? Are there giveaways you could do? That could allow you to do this thing. And how can we go and reach all those things? And then how can that show up in the ad account, and in the email, and in social, and in everything you do where you want to reach hierarchy athletes as part of what you're doing, right? And it doesn't just have to be athletics, and it doesn't just have to be all of those things that can be in jewelry and accessories, and thinking about beauty and going like, well, how do you go there? And actually can even be supplements in some ways. Like, some supplements, I've looked at some brands where they just seem stuck. They can't seem to build those funnels the way they are, and they are operators who don't want to make wild, over promising claims about all the things their supplements do, and they don't want to come out and just say, oh my goodness, like, you know, our supplement's going to make you into an absolute whatever. You get the idea, right? You everybody knows supplements, over claim, and over promise, and all those things. If you are trying to generate more ads for your brand, at more scale, with more diversity, and you need an extension of your team that really focuses on creative work, specifically to do that. Designers, editors, people who are native and fluent with AI, to generate more creative assets for your brand at scale, with real variety, and built along the same methodology that we think of at AJF Growth, who are really focused on the message at the center and the core of the ad, while creating a wide range of creative assets, stills videos, everything else. You should consider using behind-the-scenes studio as an extension of your team. Hinesine Studio is a Philippines. meta ads, design and edit studio. It has creative strategies as well. So if you're trying to create more ads and you want creative strategy help behind the scenes will help you with that. Or if you just want them as an extension of your team, we've got ideas and briefs ready to go and you need editors and designers like I said who are native and fluent with AI who can do a great job building creative for you at scale. You should consider working with behind the scenes studio. That's basically, it's basically an extension of my team at AJF Growth. We contract our entire design and edit team through BTS because we love them. They just do an awesome job and because they're reasonably priced. They're based in the Philippines. And as you've heard me say a million times on this show that creates an opportunity for you to get incredible talent in the Philippines working on your business at top of market rates there at the same time. Those rates are much lower than paying the same equivalent talent at the US. The result is that you get really good work delivered at scale at a reasonable cost. You just go to BTSStudio.co and you need more creative for your out of count. You probably do need more creative for your out of count. Go to BTSStudio.co, tell them I sent you. There's some brands who just don't want to do that even if they can sell more stuff. And so they're looking at saying, well, how do I still matter to those people? And I've looked at one brand recently that was just everything they do felt like exactly this feeling that I had. It just felt like headwind, headwind, headwind no matter what they did. And they changed their offer and they changed their land. And these are experienced operators who understood how to think carefully about all these different things. And they were doing this, this, this, this, and this. And they just couldn't seem to get any traction in this brand even though they seem to, you know, they had a good sense of kind of what they were doing. And I just looked at it and thought like it's just not obvious to me that you figured out where your brand really does provide value to the customer and how you go about signaling that in everything you do, your organic social, your email, your paid, your all that stuff, you don't matter. And that's why customers are not buying your products because you don't matter enough. And there's a lot of ways to signal that you matter to customer. There's signals around product quality. There's signals around authenticity. There's signals around creative. There can be offers that can be a value version of this. If you go back and listen to my interview from a long time ago with Sunil Agrawl where Sunil was talking about like they just have been a value based jewelry business for a really, really long time. They built their whole business on discounting and wouldn't you know it. They got to hundreds of millions of dollars a year in revenue doing that because customers care about value and they're happy to provide it to those certain customers. That's the way they matter to their customer. And so they did that and met their customer where they were in all these ways. And so that is the key. In somewhere in the midst of this, there's a great danger that to me that I see right now is sort of the ultimate trap that I see right now, which is this AI trap where brands see AI as a shortcut to producing creative work. And that is to me one of the most likely ways to actually work against the thing that I'm saying right now as a as a current trap. You're struggling. You're not resonating the way you want to. And so you start saying you know what we could do. We can cut costs even further and we can do that by using more AI tools. There's some realities of course using AI tools to cut costs. Obviously there is some truth that if there was no truth in it, nobody would be tempted by it. But what they do is they suddenly move to using AI to sort of be this again sort of hyper tactical approach when the actual problem with the brand is that they don't matter to anybody yet. And because they don't matter. It doesn't really matter how many I I tools use if anything in fact people are going to see your brand and they're going to go like this brand like it just doesn't matter enough like this brand feels fake. It feels AI doesn't feel human. It doesn't feel lived in. And so I'm just like it's going to actually turn off customers even more because the embrace of AI can actually work against that sort of remarkable right because I saw just Bachman say the other day in a in a group chat that I'm in with him. Jeff said something to be effective. You know, I see so many people right now and I should have seen this coming. Maybe he actually put it on Twitter. I don't know. He just from fire team. He said, you know, I see so many people right now using AI to just replicate what they see in these big and well known out accounts, you know, that everybody kind of sees and floats across is like, and I shouldn't know that was coming when in fact what you have with AI is this massive tool for creativity in this way that is sort of unparalleled in the world. Everybody just uses it to copy other things instead, you know, so instead of doing something creative and I can actually matter more and be interesting. What people actually do is they just use it to copy and try to go like chase a trend or whatever it is. And to me, that's a great illustration of exactly kind of how this thing tends to play out. There's this question, if your brand is not selling products to customers at the roast that you want of, how do you actually matter? And here's the opportunity to the AI not just in creative but in everything you do. Could you actually use AI to operationalize more excellence in your brand, more value provision to the customer in your in your brand than what you are currently doing. Could you use it to do better and deeper and more serious research for your customer to do better and deeper and more serious research for what that person cares about what their community cares about to learn to get a better sense and a real lay of the land of who the influencers are that these people are talking to. And could you use it to actually think about product ideation in a way that's really interesting and different and thinking about how that could fit for what your customer is at and solve their problems and could you use the idea to operationalize the kinds of customizations that you otherwise would not have had access to before because it would have cost too much dev time and would have been too expensive on your website but can actually make a better shopping experience for your customer can make things a little easier for them and can do those things. If you do as AI to actually operationalize excellence in your business not to just operationalize slop in your business. If you think about mattering first then that is the great use case for AI and that's where I think more brands ought to go is they ought to be thinking all the time about how they can do those kinds of things if that is where they can go if that is how you're using AI then that I think is a great use of it. If you're using it just to work around the hard work of actually generating great quality marketing assets then I think you're probably not getting the most out of it. In the end many of you started your brands or working on brands because you wanted to create something that was really cool. Maybe you saw a financial opportunity but I actually think a lot of people really did want to do something that they thought was really cool and yet they get stuck in the day to day of their businesses because there's so much to do and I fully understand this. This is a loose side of that initial mission and initial vision for what they did when they first created their first product. My suggestion to you is to go back to that basic in some way and to ask the question what can I do not to work around the hard work of mattering to customers but to work into and through the hard work of mattering to customers and to matter more. If you're struggling how can you matter more look at your customer look at the core thing that they want when they are shopping your product or your category or whatever and ask yourself that question how do I show up and matter more what does that customer really care about is it about value is it about a product feature is it about meaning and something squishier you know like brand or whatever is it what is it and how can you use the tools in front of you to do that even more and there's a million examples of how you possibly could. And like I said at age of growth we're trying to actually think of ourselves in this exact way not as gross drivers who are not simply generating the next piece of creative for somebody though I think that's helpful we're not just allocating media dollars in a way that's efficient and it doesn't lose money though I think that's also very helpful what we're doing instead as part of that is trying to say how can we be the leaders of actually thinking more like CMO type people and I'll just I'll just say again when just just to repeat I think especially here. Of one of my brands right now who's CMO just just sort of blows me away because everything this brand does they just find new ways to matter more to their customer and clear and deeper ways and when they do those things wouldn't you know it their business grows and things look really successful and really effective and that is my suggestion to you as well that you go and find more ways all the time to matter to your customers find out where they are meet them where they're at work a little. A little smarter not necessarily harder smarter I think about how your brand positions to do those things sometimes this will look small sometimes this will look like organic social posts that don't reach that many people and don't have an obvious revenue impact but that's slowly over time generate some kind of picture of your brand so that when somebody clicks from your ad over to your Instagram account they see this is a brand that's for me that's lived in sometimes it will mean working with an influencer working with 10 influencers where a few of them don't work out and it look like a loss of cost it'll look like. Co-labs of brands and charities and things like that that look like they are big time sucks and they don't have huge reach but that over time you do enough of those things and if you just keep if you keep efforting those over a long period of time manage with excellence do all the things that you can do on all the channels that you can do them on where it makes sense and where it's financially viable you do those things over time you can create a brand that generates a huge amount of value and that you feel extremely proud to be running. Right after I like pressed stop on this I was just thinking you know I think a lot of this episode for me comes from a place of feeling like some people I think feel almost entitled for their business to work but actually you're not entitled to anything right like your your business is trying to sell products to people for their hard earned money and so that's what I mean when I say you have to matter you know like you have to actually make that worth it to people and that means communicating how you matter you're not entitled to win. And and your business can cannot work if you don't matter people so there you go okay enough enough I've said I've made my made my point if you want to work with us if you want us to help you matter to your customers go to agfgroath.com felt the intake form tell me a little bit about your business I'd love to hear about it understand where coming from what help you need and yeah go to agfgroath.com like I said fill out that intake form and we'll get a conversation started or just email me podcasts at agfgroath.com is an easy way to do it big thanks to more staffing and behind the scene studio and of course as always don't forget to subscribe wherever you're watching listening to this. Content like it to all those things it helps me helps you it's good for everyone thanks. Thanks very much, see you next time.