Hello! I apologize for being MIA but like has been particularly crazy. Between two young kids, CEO, getting ready for holidays, the podcast, etc I haven't had much extra time. But I'll do my best to get back on track a little bit. The good news is I have been doing a lot of testing and thiking, so this should be a good one. This topic has been one I've been thinking about a bunch and it's made a big difference for us. Hope you enjoy it.
I was thinking about how marketing needs to shift for different stages of brands, as well as how culture and platforms are changing. I’ve always been someone who tries to understand things by putting them into frameworks. Now I know there are actual, legitimate types of marketing and frameworks and none of this stuff is new. But I didn’t study marketing in school (nor did any good marketers I know), so I created this just for my own thinking.
Here are what I perceive the 4 types of marketing are for DTC brands with some color on each of them. Reply if you think this is helpful or have any feedback on it. Lmk if you think I should talk about this on Marketing Operators. If you like what I'm saying below, you're gonna need creative to make this work. But building UGC at scale? That’s where most teams break. Insense is the fastest way to get fully licensed, on-brief UGC without burning team bandwidth. They run the whole play for you — from creator matching and briefing to edited footage, content usage rights, and more. No ghosting. No revisions loop. Just ad-ready content you can drop into your creative testing sprint. Brands like Quip, Fling, Kilo Health, and Victoria Beckham Beauty trust them to keep creative pipelines full. Book a discovery call and get up to 10% off their managed services. Sponsored.
Product Marketing
1. This is simple, and every single business needs this whether you have an established product marketing function or not. This is when you talk about your product and what it does. Sounds simple but it is. You’re highlighting the features and benefits of your product and what it does, how it compares to competitors, what’s in it and what’s not in it, etc. At smaller brands, it can be as simple as emails, ads, and social posts highlighting products. And even at large brands, a certain % of your marketing will be product marketing. True product marketing functions at large brands entails consumer research to identify trends, marketing positioning research to understand competitors' offerings and white spaces, product development based on the research, and go-to-market strategy and execution for new product launches.
Pros:
2. You have to do it because you are selling products
3. Done properly, it’s the driving force behind your business and ties together marketing and product in lockstep 4.
Cons: 1. Only really speaks to a bottom-of-funnel or product-aware audience
2. Doesn’t create “brand” affinity”
3. Not great at helping your brand reach new audiences
Brand Marketing
Also simple. This is when you talk about who you are, what you stand for, etc. This is probably the most misunderstood type of marketing, especially amongst more performance-focused advertisers. Like any type of marketing, there is good brand marketing and there is bad. But it’s been around for centuries, and can be incredibly effective if done correctly.
It does become more important over time as your business grows and matures beyond what you can achieve with performance marketing alone. My advice is to always do it with a small % of your budget, get good at it, and do more of it over time. You won’t grow just from this, and you will need performance marketing to grow at smaller scale. The activities here can be any number of things; so i’d bucket them as anything aimed at growing awareness, consideration of new audiences, and influencing how people think about you.
Under that can be non-conversion oriented digital media, TV ads, out of home, events, influencer seeding, brand partnerships and collaborations. My two main hot takes on brand are: 1. It can come across as selfish or arrogant. Most brand marketing is about “US” and not the customer; but not all. You have to have the awareness and humility to know if people care about your brand or not.
Obviously, the goal is to make them; but I think if you’re a new or unknown brand, or just best in the world at this type of marketing, you should make your brand efforts much more about “them” than you. A brand like Luis Vuitton or Kith can talk about themselves and make you feel some type of way; but if you’re unknown no one will likely care. 2. Brand today is not about what the brand says about the brand; or how it looks. That is only one part; and it’s a small part that influences how people feel about your brand. This might have been the playbook when people could only get their information from brands and large legacy media.
But in the world of social today, brand is really about what people are saying about you on social. You’ll get far more impressions on other people’s posts talking about you than you ever will on your own. 3. Pros: Necessary to grow beyond a certain size when growth becomes less about directly attributable conversions to in-market audiences.
1. Easier to differentiate in crowded markets
2. Reaching people who may not be in market yet, so there are more of them and it’s cheaper to reach them.
3. Creates an emotional connection if done correctly
Cons
1. Hard to measure or know the impact on financial outcomes
2. Takes longer to see the value
3. Does not always translate to revenue growth without accompanying performance marketing. I know some really strong brands people love that are much smaller in revenue than people would realize.
4. Easy to waste money because it’s not always tied to
Direct Response Marketing
This could also be called problem solution marketing. Think of your typical UGC from agencies, info product funnels, and if you’re famailiar, classic DR advertising from people like Dan Kennedy, Gary Halbert, etc. The goal here is to be able to get people to buy right away and be able to immediately measure it. There is a lot of value here; but there are some notable downsides. There is a bit of a difference betwee DR and performance marketing, but for the pruposes here that can be lumped together. If you’re a bootstrapped DTC brand, you need this style of marketing.
Brand marketing alone won’t get you to $100m. But DR alone will not get you beyond $100M, and probably won’t even get you to it unless you’re best in the world at it. Problem, agitate, solution is probably the best example of this. I also think that there is a ton to learn from the OGs of direct response and then learn how to apply itto DTC brands and water it down. Actually, a lot of what is very common practice in DTC today is watered down versions of classic DR strategies like funnels/landing pages, post purchase upsells, order bumps, and of course DR scripts.
We had a podcast recently with Ezra Firestone and talked about this; and he is responsible for bringing over a lot of them to DTC.
1. Pros: Necessary unless you have large amounts of funding
1. You can easily tie marketing to financial outcomes
2. Quick to see impact
3. It works. No question about it.
4. Great for cash flow.
Cons
1. It can be offputting and “harm your brand” if done incorrectly or aggressively
2. It can be overly short-term focused
3. Last click attribution is limiting and can lead you to put money into less incremental activities and stunt your growht if not careful
4. Easy to measure; which I believe can also have serious downsides and make it easier to overinvest here.
Persona Marketing
1. Ezra called this Who and Why marketing on his episode. I’ve been calling it persona marketing; or been talking about creating persona funnels. This is when you are speaking to a very specific audience and making content specifically about this. This is very important in the era of AI feeds like TikTok and now Meta that delivers contextual targeting based on context relevance and engagement. These platforms now deliver hyper-personalization at scale. There is no such thing as monoculture anymore. If you want to reach new people, you need to create content that is very relevant to them. I can personally attest that this can have a massive impact, and I think is the game to be layed right now.
Pros
- Works extremely well, and helps find new audiences you may not have thought about when originally starting your brand
- Can combine brand building and direct response/performance marketing
- Is the "new" way to play paid social in my opinion
Cons
- Takes a lot of time researching and testing new personas and audiences
- Takes a ton of creative volume
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I'm off to speak at GRow NY for a bit and then to Meta. Hope you have a great day and BFCM gear up is going well.