When was the first time you heard about Honest Tea, Method soaps of Lululemon? Chances are it wasn’t from a media campaign. These companies are part of a growing group of smaller brands that succeed despite relative low media spend.
Speakers representing such brands are staples at marketing conferences. Yet their messages might best be served with a boilerplate warning for big, traditional players: “Don’t try this at home.” Because as easy as it sounds from the dais, it’s still far easier said than done.
One reason is that these success stories are often built on factors that don’t usually fit with big, established brands. For example, some are built on substantial investments in branded retail stores and the store experience, rather than media. Others are built on the brand’s affinity with political and social movements that can be tough for big brands to embrace. And some have been based on big investments in wages, benefits and fun cultures that keep employees happy—not the usual storyline for huge corporations.
The common thread through all these no-cost, low-cost marketing success stories is a good story, one that bears repeating and fares well both in social and PR-fueled traditional media. Almost by definition, such stories are easier for bootstrap entrepreneurs to come by than, say, 65-year-old detergent brands.
Many of the brands, from Terracycle to Method, Seventh Generation, Honest Tea and Stonyfield Farms, all have taken on the air of social movement.
Method – whose media budget was smaller than the toilet-paper outlays of its big rivals, co-founder Eric Ryan told the Association of National Advertisers conference in 2010 – has linked its brand proposition to superior design, an early alignment with the similarly design-minded retailer Target, using pop-up stores to help it grow, and using an anti-chemical green movement appeal buttressed by a “People Against Dirty” tagline. Operating on its “Keep Method Weird” platform, the company once rejected an entire round of CEO candidates in the late stages when none could satisfactorily explain how they would do so.
Orabrush’s story was how its tongue cleaners made their way onto Walmart shelves nationally via quirky unpaid YouTube videos and a smattering of Facebook ads aimed at Walmart buyers.
Terracycle has both a great story and a social movement at its core, founded as it was by a Princeton University dropout who launched a business selling worm-poop compost in refurbished Coke bottles. It has built an eight-figure brand largely by leveraging the marketing power of far bigger brands, either through a bit of PR jujitsu or marketing partnerships with such big marketers as Coca-Cola, Kraft Foods, Walmart and Target, VP Global Media Albe Zakes told the ANA in October.
The jujitsu part came when Terracycle used a trademark-infringement suit by Scotts Miracle-Gro to unleash a wave of publicity. The partnership element involved enlisting major brands in its school-based recycle and reuse programs where the brand turns such things as old CapriSun pouches into new products. Terracycle also has gotten top retailers such as Walmart and Target involved in merchandising and advertising events around its compost products in recycled containers around Earth Month in April.
For brands ranging from Starbucks in its early days to Lululemon more recently, investment in a strong retail presence is key. The expense may not show up on the advertising line, but the stores cost plenty.
Hence, when former Procter & Gamble Co. Chairman-CEO Durk Jager in 1999 mused publicly about how he admired the Starbucks model of building a brand without big media outlays, Scott Bedbury, a former Starbucks marketer turned consultant, responded that P&G would be advised to open a couple thousand really nice retail outlets before turning off the gross rating points.
His retort turned prophetic in a way. When P&G in 2008 launched a new-age version of Tide called Swash, aimed at millennials and based on the concept of freshening clothes between uses rather than washing them, it backed the launch not so much with ads but with a store near the Ohio State University in Columbus. There it had lounges where students could watch DVDs, play video games and hopefully buy Swash fabric refreshers or lint rollers on the way out.
There’s more! To read the full article in Advertising Age, click here.
