In this fascinating episode, beauty industry veteran Carey Grange shares invaluable insights from her journey building major brands like Proactiv, Murad, and numerous other successful beauty and wellness companies. From the early days of infomercials to today's digital landscape, Carey reveals how the fundamental principles of effective performance marketing remain unchanged—and how modern brands can leverage these principles to drive growth across multiple channels while building lasting brand value.
Key Topics Covered:
- The essential elements of successful performance marketing campaigns, including authentic founder stories, compelling transformation narratives, and the critical role of social proof—and why these elements are more relevant than ever in today's digital landscape.
- Why channel strategy matters: How Murad used infomercials to become the #1 clinical skincare brand in Sephora and Ulta, and what this teaches us about modern omnichannel growth.
- The truth about value creation: Why discounting isn't necessary and how to build real value propositions that resonate with customers and protect your brand.
- The importance of constant testing and innovation: Why successful brands allocate 10-20% of their budget to experimental marketing, and how this "slush fund" approach drives long-term growth.
This episode is packed with actionable insights for any brand looking to scale through performance marketing while building lasting brand value in today's competitive landscape.
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Chapters:
(00:00) Introduction
(08:59) Lessons From Carey’s Time At Murad
(20:41) Elements Of A Good Ad
(42:11) Always Be Testing
(45:20) Conclusion
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Show Notes:
- Carey Grange
- Growth Envy Marketing
- Guthy-Renker
- Nestle
- Proactiv
- Meaningful Beauty
- Crepe Erase
- WEN by Chad Dean
- IT Cosmetics
- Murad
- Sephora
- Ulta
- Bare Minerals
- Boom By Cindy Joesph
- Ezra Firestone
- Flex Seal
- Ozempic
- How OMG Commerce Throttled BOOM! Cosmetics to a $5m Per Year Brand on Amazon
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Connect With Brett:
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thebrettcurry/
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@omgcommerce
- Website: https://www.omgcommerce.com/
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Past guests on eCommerce Evolution include Ezra Firestone, Steve Chou, Drew Sanocki, Jacques Spitzer, Jeremy Horowitz, Ryan Moran, Sean Frank, Andrew Youderian, Ryan McKenzie, Joseph Wilkins, Cody Wittick, Miki Agrawal, Justin Brooke, Nish Samantray, Kurt Elster, John Parkes, Chris Mercer, Rabah Rahil, Bear Handlon, Trevor Crump, Frederick Vallaeys, Preston Rutherford, Anthony Mink, Bill D’Allessandro, Bryan Porter and more.
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Transcript:
Carey:
You might need to be on Amazon as much as you don't want to because your competitors are going to draft off your awareness and be there anyway. B, it's where customers are going to get reviews, and C, it's a built-in trust element.
Brett:
Well, hello and welcome to another edition of the E-Commerce Evolution podcast. I'm your host, Brett Curry, CEO of OMG Commerce. And today we are talking about literally one of my favorite topics in all of marketing. We're talking about brand building through performance marketing. So I think historically people view those as two separate buckets, two separate worlds, two separate mind spaces. Am I building a brand and creating awareness or am I doing something that's performance driven, measurable, tangible, roas, CPA, things like that. But here's the deal. I think the two are not at odds with each other. I think they go hand in hand. And so if we think about what is building a brand other than driving demand for your product, allowing you to maintain prices, to build a following brand building allows you to expand your product line. It creates so many opportunities for you.
And performance marketing is really just marketing that gets people to take action and take action relatively quickly. And so my guest today is a pro in this space. She comes from the infomercial world, the direct response TV world, and she's really connected with so many great brands, CPG and other categories, and really few people understand brand building the way she does. And so my guest today is Carey Grange and she is the chief brand strategist for growth in the marketing. And we're going to get to hear some war stories, some good stories of brand building and performance marketing and really some lessons and some things that have always been true in marketing, how those apply to today's landscape. It's going to be a ton of fun. And so with that intro, Carey Grange, how's it going? And welcome to the show.
Carey:
Hi. Hi Brett. Well thanks first of all for having me here. I'm super excited to be here. And I also love talking about building brands through performance marketing. And that's kind of been my background since the beginning of my career. Pretty niche to the beauty space and the wellness space almost exclusively for CPG. But yeah, really working with brands that are tasked with driving omnichannel growth and finding new ways to intersect technology and media with where audiences are consuming content and find the financial utility in that. And that's actually how I see performance marketing as just a delivery vehicle for your brand message and one that generates an ROI be quite
Brett:
Efficient. And that allows it to be scalable, right? If it delivers a measurable, it delivers an ROI allows it to be scalable and yeah, love that framing. So I want people to get your background just a little bit, and then we're going to talk about some strategies and some tactics here that are very applicable for today. So you guys started in the infomercial space. What was that like and why did you get into that space?
Carey:
Yeah, well, it's great. I totally accidentally got into the infomercial space. I actually started my career at Guthy Ranker as a marketing coordinator, and it was the nineties and it was shortly after the deregulation of commercial advertising. And so people were able to do direct to consumer marketing and build that long form infomercial format. And it was the wild wild west, and it was the wild wild west, I think similar to the wild wild west that we're living in today as media continues to change. And so with that, it can be really overwhelming and intimidating and messy, but there's also a lot of opportunities. And so I think for those people who are naturally curious and can figure out how to find the utility in that media to reach audiences and build brand and generate revenue, they're the winners. And so Guthy Ranker, they were pioneers in using long form marketing to build brands.
And I like to say, in fact, I started, I was on the inaugural proactive team, which is like a mega brand, and it sold for a significant multiple to Nestle ultimately. But it didn't start that way. It started as a scrappy brand that was just on infomercial. There wasn't even an e-commerce component to it in the beginning. And so I like to say that became really an accidental brand because we had spent so much TV media on it with the sole intent of driving revenue, of acquiring customers and pulling them down an acquisition funnel and getting them to subscribe and to stick for as long as possible, and that was the objective. And then to find other brands that you could plug into that model.
Brett:
Yeah, it's super interesting because I think the proactive story where it was just strictly A-D-R-T-V play in the beginning, very similar to strictly D two C brands today. So your Shopify e-commerce brands that are just driving sales through Meta and Google and other places now expanding to other channels and then eventually wanting a big exit. I mean, that's really what Proactive did, but back in the day, pre Shopify and all that. So just as a bit of a frame of reference, so Gut the Ranker, if anybody's been in the director of marketing space, they know that name. They're the best of the best in the infomercial space. So you mentioned Proactive, that's one of their best known brands. What are the other brands that were part of the Guthy Riner family that will give people context?
Carey:
Yeah, I mean, the ones that I think people will know the best today would be Proactive Meaningful Beauty, which is Cindy Crawford's haircare Line Crepe Erase, which is a body line of products that deals with crepey skin for the aging woman when Haircare by Chaz Dean was another one. They had a partnership with IT cosmetics, they were part of that brand and had the exclusive direct to consumer distribution rights for that brand. Those are some pretty big ones that they're well known for. Yeah, it's such a good point. First of all, it was an incredible foundation to start there and to learn the industry from the ground up and to understand tracking and analytics and to even be like boots on the ground when you're adding a URL to a TV commercial for the very first time and gasping in fear over how are you going to do the attribution modeling? But we didn't even call
Brett:
It attribution
Carey:
Modeling. We didn't know what to call it yet. Will
Brett:
Anybody buy online? What are we going to do if they don't call in?
Carey:
Yeah, or no. The scarier part was will they buy online and how are we going to know the impact of our TV commercial? And it's exactly the dilemma that brands have today, which is what is the impact of our spend If we're spending over here, but we're getting the revenue over there, how do we know its impact? And so of course, again, that was before attribution modeling, but even today, attribution modeling is only so intelligent. Totally. And it becomes, you and I have talked about it before, it becomes increasingly complicated because the more fragmented media is, the more specialized each one of those channels are, the harder it is to keep all of those entities talking to each other and then to know how to look at those activities on a granular level, but then to understand how they're rolling up to your p and l ultimately, which is the objective of the brand owner, is to drive a healthy p and l. Totally.
Brett:
And it is one of those things that just the age old marketing question, how do we understand what's working? How much is it working? What's really driving growth? So what's driving incremental sales? What's more of a support medium? How does all this tie together? And I do think it's easier now than maybe it was in the early days, but I don't know, there's a lot of confusion. So we'll dive into attribution and some of those topics here just a little bit. One thing I would love to know, because you nailed it when you said, Hey, all of this has to feed into the p and l. And I think that's been one of the big resets in the D two C and e-commerce space is that pre pandemic, and certainly during the hypergrowth stage of the pandemic, when everybody was ordering online, it was like grow, grow, grow. We'll figure out profits later. It's going to happen, whatever to now, e-commerce brands know we have to be a real business. This all has to feed into a healthy p and l. And so marketing must drive business objectives. What are some of the things you learned in the infomercial space? I know those infomercial marketers or DR brands, they are dialed in. What are some of the principles you learned or some of the fundamentals you learned from a finance side p and l side
Carey:
And
Brett:
Make for a healthy DR business?
Carey:
Yeah. Well, I mean, I'd love to just step back a little bit and kind of frame it up in the context of where I probably spent the largest chunk of my career, which was actually at Murad. And the reason I bring that up is that was a true omnichannel business model. And I think that's what we're finding these pure play brands, like you were saying, that were launched during the pandemic. And really it was such an exciting time of entrepreneurialism. And as much as we see these unicorn moments of fast rise brands on TikTok and fast rise brands through Shopify and all these other areas, we've also seen a lot of brand failures because they don't understand how to run the business side of things. They don't know how to scale, and they reach that point of diminishing return. And so in fact, I read
Brett:
There's single channel, single source of new customer acquisition.
Carey:
When
Brett:
Something fundamentally shifts there, then they're in real trouble. And so there's also dangers to expanding channels and expanding customer acquisition channels. But
Carey:
Most of the successful brands
Brett:
We see are totally, most of the brands we see though are going multichannel or omnichannel. I do believe that's where you maximize value. And whether that's just to have a long sustaining profitable business or to have a successful exit, you got to be got to be more than just D two C. So probably D two C marketplace and retail or some combination thereof, hundred percent omnichannel brand. Go ahead.
Carey:
It's perfect because what you're trying to do is go, where is my customer? And so you're always looking for market
Brett:
Fit and how do they want to buy,
Carey:
Right? If you're building a brand, what's the market fit? So how do they want to buy? So if you're really being customer centric, then that will drive your media strategy, that will drive your distribution strategy. And so often you're right that singular channel is not enough, and that's actually not how customers are buying. And so one of the risks then is you are spending money and creating category awareness and brand awareness that you're not actually picking up then where your customers are making purchase decisions and actually making that purchase. And your competition will draft off of that and pick that up, those clever marketers. So if your objective is, Hey, I just want to sell some stuff through this channel that I'm really good at, cool. But if you want to build a brand and really grow something and scale it as much as you can, which is usually the name of the game of the people that I deal with, and I imagine the clients that you bring into OMG commerce, then you really are looking at an omnichannel strategy.
And then you want to go, okay, what are my channels of distribution and how is the media that I'm spending a being spent as efficiently as possible? But by efficient, I mean it's returning an investment on that direct spend, but it's also pushing the sell through in all of our other channels because it's an all ships rise. And so that's why I'd like to kind of joke about the accidental brand build of proactive, the brand building at as accidental. It was actually quite strategic. And so I often like to talk about brands are really good at knowing their what, this is my product. And a lot of innovators are so great at that, and they're great at knowing why I wanted to develop this, but what's missing is how am I now going to build this business? And that's where strategy comes in. And I have noticed that in today's marketplace, a lot of brands are playing in tactics.
I need to be on YouTube, I need to be on Amazon, I need to be in meta, I need to have social organic, I need, and there's all of these activities happening on, and it gives the illusion of growth, but the reality is it can lead to bloated infrastructures, a bunch of cross channel conflict, and ultimately an impotent marketing spend that isn't having impact, that isn't realizing the growth that you need. So at mrad, we went into infomercial as a strategy. And in fact, I was recruited specifically to launch an infomercial for the business, and it was kind of revolutionary at the time. And having come from Guthy Ranker, I was super excited because I had only worked on beauty brands at Guthy Ranker, and I thought, oh my God, I'm going to go work for a real beauty company in rad. They're in spas and salons, they're going into retail. Well, my counterparts were not as excited about me being there. I did not get a warm reception because the only people that wanted me there were the Mirad family members were Dr. Mrad and our CEO, Richard, his nephew. And so they hired me. So the rest of the
Brett:
Team see you as competition, or they just saw you as some kind of alien. What are you doing? We've got our stuff together.
Carey:
They saw me as the person who was going to denigrate the brand. How can you bring in this lowbrow cheesy format into our business? And so our
Brett:
Buyers are more sophisticated.
Carey:
Our
Brett:
Buyers will not respond to this low brow, low class, dr. Direct response type that
Carey:
Exactly, exactly. But the RADS were figure it out. I think what I did right in that situation and is a learning to apply to today's landscape too, is to then get really curious and understand why. So how could this potentially be an obstacle to your retail growth? And then how do we overcome that? And so in those days, production values for example, was a big part of it. So we had to be really careful not to have the cheesy bells and the whistles and the dings and the dot wacky stuff like the sound effects. It needed to be elegant and high end, but it also needed to do what an infomercial does. And what an infomercial does is or did, there're not as many. They're still out there. There's not as many of them anymore.
Brett:
Still out there.
Carey:
Still out there. They're still out there. But what they do is what we need today's performance media to do, which is to get your audience to stop. It's the thumb stop, it's the stop the scroll. It's to take action. If the TV's on in the background, it's to, Ooh, I'm listening to that headline. How do I stop, turn around, take notice and create need and then pull them down an acquisition funnel. So it's really, there's a lot of skill involved actually with getting an audience who's bombarded with information and a lot of external inputs to stop and say, oh, I'm curious about this. I want to learn more. I might need this. And then to actually get them to make a transaction is pretty powerful. So we needed to do creatives that did that, but that also were aligned with the brand message now in our omnichannel environment. So we had an infomercial, we had a website which was not optimized at all. And that's a whole nother story about how you build a D two C business from a technology and an infrastructure standpoint within a brand. It's a monstrous task, although much less expensive and easier to execute in today's landscape with
Brett:
So many open
Carey:
Source solutions. Easier for sure, for sure.
Brett:
I'm curious though, just real quick, why did the mirad want to do DR tv? So why did they want to do an infomercial? So I mean, their omnichannel, they're growing. Things are good, and their team didn't want it. Why did they want to do
Carey:
Infomercial? They had had an early experience with infomercial where the sales were just explosive, and so they really wanted to drive the growth of the brand period. They knew the value of it. So then what we were tasked with is going, well, what channels of distribution are we in? How do we support those channels of distribution while also making sure that this channel of distribution, which was the infomercial, which we looked at as a sales channel in that organization in addition to a marketing function. So it had a cross functionality. How do we make sure that it has all of the sales promotion and the elements that it needs to perform? And so that's what we set out to do, and we launched an infomercial and it was multifunctional in its benefits. It created brand awareness, it educated the customer. And actually, I am circling back to answer your initial question, which was, what did you learn that's relevant today? And that is what are those elements, right? It communicated on authentic founder story, which I'd say to this day is
Brett:
Still
Carey:
Powerful
Brett:
Today. Yeah,
Carey:
It's still powerful today, and it's a really powerful trust element, and that's what customers are looking for. It showed that we solved a problem. And in today's marketplace, again, people are looking to have their problems solved. So in our case, it was we were clearing acne, we were addressing hyperpigmentation on the skin, we were addressing fine lines and wrinkles. We were able to communicate a transformation benefit, which is if you use this, you'll get this result. So again, that could be shown through a problem solution, but transformation can also be shown through emotion, and that's the value of testimonials. So we were able to use testimonials, which in today's day and age is influencers and reviews.
Brett:
Yeah, UGC, totally.
Carey:
It's UGC, and it's your reviews. It's the social proof. So again, the infomercials have that social proof as part of it, but that again, is a really powerful trust element for customers. Oh, it worked for them, maybe it'll work for me. And that also had the function of that person then being able to communicate, here's how this changed my life. So it's one thing to just show a person with clear skin and you're like, okay, that looks efficacious. Maybe it'll work for me. But if you have a testimonial who now with great emotion is like, I feel beautiful. Again, I can go out with confidence. I went on a date. There's a transformation message that's quite powerful and is still powerful in today's media landscape. We were able to show the proof scientific claims, and I can kind of break down further what that formula is. But ultimately, it became a self-sustaining advertising vehicle that drove the overall growth of the mrad brand. And it drove significant sales for Sephora and Ulta placing us as the number one clinical skincare brand in both of those channels. And at the same time, it was in its own channel, quite profitable. And we were able to acquire customers. And it was great from a cashflow standpoint for us because, well, I should say from a margin standpoint, it was a tricky cashflow model because we would deficit finance the acquisition of our customers.
Brett:
Got
Carey:
It. But it's also a realtime collectible when you're selling direct to consumer, and it had better margin. We weren't
Brett:
Selling a wholesale cash right away, at least that initial sale.
So I do want to break down that form. I that'd be super valuable. I think it totally applies to today, but I think what's really important to point out here is that, yeah, you were running this infomercial. It was driving direct sales either on the phone or someone ordering online, which was kind of new-ish at that time, but then it was also driving tons of sales in Sephora and Ulta making you a top seller there. We see the same thing here, right? If you've got a killer YouTube campaign, meta campaign, you're doing something OTT or whatever, it's going to drive direct sales on your.com, but it's also going to create great lift on Amazon. If you're selling on Amazon, it's going to drive retail sales if you're doing that. And so yeah, these principles apply, but what are some of those elements? What's that formula look like?
Carey:
Yeah, well, so from rad, I actually went and ended up launching a beauty brands incubator, and Guthy Ranker ended up being mine and my partner's investment partners in the brand. So it was a Guthy Ranker beauty brand incubator. And when we would look at brands that we could acquire and do various different JV and licensing deal structures with, and we had a very specific, I guess, lens of what we would look for from these brands to be like, these are going to be powerful performance marketing brands. And it's what worked for us in the proactive days. It's what worked in murat. And it's what I see when we evaluate brands today. And I imagine the ones that you're seeing so effective with your business model of that YouTube top of funnel, and that you can then pull down that kind of acquisition funnel pushed to Amazon.
I imagine they have similar attributes. What I would say is they just happen at different times now, so it might be parsed out a little bit differently. So whereas an infomercial or a longer format might have all of these elements now, I would say, does the brand have these elements? And at what point in the customer journey do you bring these elements to the table? So I have my notes here. So the first one I already mentioned, which is that authentic founder story. And if you don't have a founder, can you have a sounding story? This product exists for these reasons. Are you able to communicate that? Because customers will resonate with that. It's a powerful trust element. It has to solve
Brett:
The problem. I want to give you a quick example here too. I think this illustrates the point nicely. We were just evaluating a pet brand. It's pet brand, actually quite a few people have heard of that are listening and they had some killer, funny, engaging multiple actors. You're laughing, you're watching, you see Kaz in the thing, and you're like, that's a great ad. They also had a very, very simple founder, just founder direct to camera, but this founder is passionate about cats and passionate about this product and how it helps cats. Very simple production quality. But I'm telling you, the CPA was very similar between that brand, that founder's story, simple low cost video, and some really high production value ads as well.
Carey:
I love that.
Brett:
I think the high production value price is a greater upside. It's probably more scalable, but man founder stories, they still work. Do not overlook them.
Carey:
I love the product so much. I bought the company message, right?
Brett:
Remember those from the
Carey:
Seventies and the eighties growing
Brett:
Up? I'm not just a hair club for men president,
Carey:
I'm also the
Brett:
Customer, whatever.
Carey:
Yeah. Yeah, that's exactly it. There's just such credibility behind it. I give this to my own children. I made this out of this need. And because of that, we believe you. It's a strong trust element. We think you've got our back. There's a real life person or a real life message behind it. Totally. We also know that purpose is really important for people. So again, in the absence of a founder story, if you can have a founding story, a reason for being, I think that's really important that, and if you don't have it, come up with one. And I'll say, we brought in brands that had really great technologies and we actually created a founding story behind it. We saw this need, we took our backgrounds, we've created it, and we're bringing it to you. So have that founding story. So smart, 100% smart, love it. And it gives you great storytelling about your brand. And that's ultimately what you're trying to do is that you want there to be a reason
Brett:
That's commercial is right. That's what a good ad is. It's a good story. It's storytelling for sure.
Carey:
It's what a good YouTube ad is. Actually, I was watching one of your YouTube trainings that it broke for commercial and it went to Chuck Norris's wife talking about this product that they developed that came out of her needs and his advocacy for her and staying by her fed. It was a great story. And now you're like, Ooh, what is it? I want to know more. Maybe it's great for me. Totally. So yeah,
Brett:
Love that.
Carey:
So
Brett:
Founder story, that's one element
Carey:
Solves a problem. It addresses a pain point. And the pain point could be something like, I have acne. I want to lose weight, I want to grow hair, I want to lose hair, I want to remove hair. Whatever it may be. What's that pain point? The other thing is it needs to be transformational, and that's either visual or emotionally, but it needs to be something you can communicate through your media. And maybe that's through users, maybe that's through celebrity endorsement. Maybe that's through your reviews, but ultimately, are you seeing lives transformed? I feel more confident. I feel more beautiful. I have more time with my children. I'm achieving financial freedom, whatever it may be. People aren't buying stuff. They're buying an outcome to make their life better. And so transformation is a really important emotional hook,
Brett:
And it's really transformation that you can see and feel, right? It's transformation that the buyer, the consumer can see and feel. And then it also has to be a transformation that you can convey in a way where people watching can see and feel it.
Carey:
Yeah, it's engaging and it's emotional. And I do think there's this subconscious attachment to your brand that forms as well, and a real positive brand affinity that comes with the transformation. It's inspiring. Proof is really important. Proof can come in a lot of different ways. Obviously befores and afters are really powerful scientific claims. Did we study? Is there a study behind an ingredient? Is there research? Is there, we put X amount of people on, this is a subjective claim, a hundred percent agree that they experienced X with this, but that proof, and again, you're probably not going to lead with proof and a thumb scroll, but if you're starting to pull them down a funnel funnel, make sure that you have that proof. Because again, these are all really powerful trust elements in your creatives. And then social proof. And we see now it's the old school infomercial, but it's the user generated content. It's the influencer, it's the reviews where people genuinely believe it's going to work for them. And so I don't think I need to beat the drum of social proof to this crowd. I think we all actually really understand the value of social proof in today's day and age. I think if anything, it's more how do we use that social proof now as part of our whole campaign. So
I like talking about those
Brett:
Stories. One thing I'll double click on there, which I think is important, is I remember when I was getting started in TV in the early two thousands, I would hear people say, oh, testimonials don't work. And now there's a little bit of a trend towards people saying, UGC doesn't work. And I think the only principle I would underscore there, or the only nuance there is that bad testimonials don't work and boring U GC doesn't work, but the real stuff, the stuff from real customers where they're conveying their story and their emotions, and you can feel the authenticity that works. Now, it worked 20 years ago, 50 years ago, and I think it will always work, right? It's just the lame,
Carey:
Boring system. It'll work. I would wager my house on it that it's important. And I think you raised a really good point. It's the quality of it. And I'll give you an example. We have in infomercials, we would test removing or on a website and other forms of creative, we would test moving different testimonials in and out. And sometimes a testimonial in and of itself, it can be a lever mover, a dial mover for a campaign, adding them or removing them. So I think you're right. And I think we're also living in a day and age again, where we put so much pressure on the immediate performance of our ads that if something doesn't work, we kind of make this sweeping judgment. This does not work.
Brett:
Exactly,
Carey:
Exactly.
Brett:
GC mashup, it didn't work. And you're like, well, yeah, but the
Carey:
SOC doesn't work
Brett:
Properly. Didn't run it. Yeah. Right?
Carey:
Yeah. And so strategically, the value and the value of working with agencies is you have to test not everything is going to work. And that's what traditional performance marketers do, is they're always testing and you never let rest on your laurels. Totally. You keep testing every
Brett:
Ad, every angle, everything you test eventually will stop working. So you always got to be finding the next thing. So you talked about social proof, other elements that you're looking for. Yep,
Carey:
Value, you just brought it up your offer a value proposition and value and offer too. Sometimes they're not necessarily mutually exclusive.
Having a good offer is very important, and an offer can and will make or break your campaign. And I do believe offers need to be refreshed, but oftentimes withstanding between you and success is a really compelling offer. But a value proposition and value can come in a lot of different ways. And value is not synonymous with discounting. So I think, again, when you're in a world of offers and sales promotion, the first thing that a lot of rams do is they discount. And that's another fear of being in the performance marketing space, is they don't want to discount because again, they're afraid it's going to denigrate their retail brand, but discount and value are not the same. So how do you build up and create that value for your customer? And so that value,
Brett:
That's just really where the perceived benefit, the perceived benefit of the product outweighs the monetary cost. Right. What else would you say about value? How do we create value apart from discounting?
Carey:
Yeah. Well, value can come in different ways. So among them being, are you giving me more time in my day? There's value to that. Are you replacing multiple products that I'm already using with this single step? There's value to that. Is it highly concentrated? And I'm not, I can add water at home and I'm not paying these big heavy shipping fees, which is negatively impacting the environment. There's value to that. Do you have a give back program to someone else? Oh, that's really important to me. That makes me feel good about being part of the brand. Tom's Shoes one for one. There's value to that. So there's lots of ways to create value without discounting.
Brett:
Yeah, I wanted the shoes anyway, but now that I know I've got a little bit of philanthropy or I'm helping kids in need or something now that allows me to justify the purchase. So love that discussion on value. And I'm really glad you framed it, that it does not have to be a discount. It does not have to be coupons. You do not have to cheapen your brand, but you do have to create
Carey:
Value. You have to create value and then demo. And of course that's so great about a place like YouTube where you can show how the product works and just for whatever reason, what's coming to mind is, and some of your older viewers might remember Bare Essentials or Bare Minerals. It was color cosmetic brand, and it was a loose powder format, which was kind of different at the time. And they were experiencing high returns because customers didn't know how to use it and it was messy. And so in their ads, they would do the you swirl, tap buff Swirl, tap Buff. Well, by the time it got to the retail shelf, or even when they shift it to the customer, they understood how to use the product. And so demonstration is a really, I know how to use it, which means my compliance is going to be higher, which means my satisfaction in the product is going to be greater, which means I'm going to achieve better results, and I'm less likely to make a return or leave a negative review. So is there demonstration? And then of course, education and those can often be one and the same. So again, you might see maybe that's not necessarily on your leading media, but if you pull them down like a long scroll landing page, you might see some demonstration in there about here's how you use it. And that's really valuable.
Brett:
And we think that's a key component. If you're designing YouTube ad creatives, the demonstration piece is absolutely critical. I would say the same is true for Meta and TikTok as well. So yeah, to your point, if someone sees an action, I swirl Tap Buff, if that was
Carey:
Buff,
Brett:
That right?
Carey:
I can't believe that came. I was so old. But yeah,
Brett:
That was great. It was effective, but I remembered it. And that's not even my product type of thing. And so one, I think it makes it easier to say yes to the purchase because now I see, oh, this was pretty easy when we were running a boom by Cindy Joseph, when Ezra Firestone's brands, they had
Brett:
Boom
Brett:
Stick, which is kind of like a makeup stick that that could replace your whole makeup back. And so when they would do the demo, it's like, Hey, you choose one of these three sticks, you just apply it here, then you put it on your lips and the demo's super easy. You're like, that's it. That's all I have to do. And now I don't have to wear any other makeup if I don't want to. And so seeing that demonstration I think removes or reduces the buyer hesitation, helps you overcome objections, but then to your point, it ensures you use it properly. You're more satisfied with it. So more likely to leave a good review, less likely to return the product. And so demonstration is really valuable. And one thing I've heard, I'm curious your perspective on this, because I don't know that this fully applies to the beauty. I think it kind of doesn't, but I've heard Flex Seal, that's another example of start as an infomercial. Now it's become a bit of a brand like the spray on stuff that you can use to seal your pots around your house, your gutters or whatever. There's this concept of a magic demo where he
Brett:
Sprays
Brett:
Flex Seal on the bottom of his truck and then he drives it into water and it floats or whatever.
Carey:
I love a magic solo. Yeah, a visual hammer. We call those visual hammers. How are you showing visual hammers? Yeah, this is how it works.
Brett:
So you'll never use it in this capacity, but if it's good enough to do this, think what it will do for you just as you're sealing your pots or whatever.
Carey:
Oh my gosh, Oz. So how do you apply that is, yeah, I was going to say, Ozempic, what is $130 too much to spend on a weight loss product if you don't have five or 10 or more pounds to lose? So then you're like, oh my gosh, if Ozempic was the biggest audience for it was people who had more like five to 10 pounds to lose. Because if it's going to help someone lose 80 pounds, then it's going to help me get my last five off. So those extremes can be really, really powerful. But the Boone Stick is the perfect example. You guys did so many things right with that because there was a compelling, and I watched it, there was a compelling founder story, but then you did the other thing that's really important was they filled a white space, they weren't look, it was makeup and a stick.
Brett:
Brilliant.
Carey:
That doesn't exist already. So it was taking something that already exists. It's applying it in a way that, because the other piece is it needs to fit into someone's regular routine. Women apply makeup already. It hits an emotional pain point, which is I'm an older demographic, I have these concerns. I'm feeling older. I am looking older. No one's making anything for me. Traditional makeup is going to sit in my fine lines and wrinkles. No one's making anything for me.
Boom, stick to the rescue. It's simple. It fits into your routine. It's specifically formulated four fine lines and wrinkles, so it's not going to sit in there. Here's how you use it. Less is more. It's going to make you not look as age. Now you've hit my pain points. I have a founder story. You've demonstrated it. It's inclusive. You have a real broad demographic of users. And that's the other thing that's mission critical in today's day and age. So first of all, it was older women. You had, in addition to the founder who is Caucasian, you had an African American, you had an Asian, right? It was showing the range of skin tones that it worked for, and it was really representative of that customer. And then there was value because this is replacing all of those other things. You didn't have to discount it.
So I would say with that campaign, you crushed all of these things and through your channels of distribution, and it caught my attention 100%. And then the other thing that you brought up, so does it fill that white space for us? We were always looking for something that was replenishable. Can you get people into a continuity? And that might fit into the offer component and then the trust are there easy returns? So in addition to the founder story, which is a powerful trust element, and all of the things that we know to do about EasyPay, all of those things, a money back guarantee, are there easy returns? I think that's why channel strategy
Brett:
Is you're removing the risk, right? You're taking away the risk that a customer may perceive about making the purchase and just lowering the barrier to say yes.
Carey:
And my feeling is back in the olden days, that might come through easy returns and money back guarantee today that might determine your channel strategy, which is you might need to be on Amazon as much as you don't want to because your competitors are going to draft off your awareness and be there anyway. B, it's where customers are going to get reviews. And C, it's a built in trust element. I know I can return here. So there's the value and there's the convenience. So again, that's where channel strategy rolls into all of these attributes that I talked about.
Brett:
Yeah, really good point. And just to put a bow on the boom, my Cindy Joseph story there, or Boom, beauty is the brand now, but we helped them launch on Amazon a few years ago, and they were leaning heavy into Meta. We were running YouTube and Google. And so the new customer acquisition channels were on fire, but they were not on Amazon. Well, some other brands had kind of built up, launched on Amazon and were kind of squatting on the brand name of Boom.
Brett:
They were
Brett:
Just selling products capitalizing on that. So when we launched them on Boom, and there were headwinds and there were difficulties, and we did some ad strategies on Amazon. And so there was pretty comprehensive what we did there, but they went from zero to almost 6 million in sales on Amazon the first year. And
Brett:
That's incredible.
Carey:
It
Brett:
Did not cannibalize their core business. Now, I think a lot of that was just pent up demand. A lot of it was we opened up a new channel and we were able to grow that as a standalone as well. But yeah, you got to be thinking about these other channels. I know there are still some cases where it makes sense to not be on Amazon, but you've got to really think that through. For most brands. You got to be there.
Carey:
I think for most brands, you have to be there. It's a necessary evil for all of those reasons. And to your point, you're otherwise creating demand for your competition. And yeah, it's a bummer. And I feel the same way about paid search. You can put all of this effort into your meta advertising, into your YouTube advertising, and customers are still going to go to search. And if you're not buying your branded term, which is just frustrating, someone else will. So how do you keep owning that? And so again, that kind of goes back to the brand side of things is like, and you and I talked about this too, why I really value agency partnerships.
You need to really understand all of those variables, and you need to lean into the wisdom and the guidance and the experience in these respective channels that your agencies have, but also listen in terms of the education, in terms of what type of repetition do you need, where should you be taking risks, like going into an Amazon versus not fine tuning your marketing messaging, your offer, you're never going to hit it out of the gate ever. And then once you do fine tune it and nail it, you're going to have to keep updating that anyway. And so build into your budget and into your strategy and into your planning, that kind of slush fund and that time to always be learning and refining and testing. Because every time you do land on that magic mix, you kind of want to hit the gas and optimize that as much as possible while you're running that parallel path of getting the next thing going. It's a unicorn experience to nail it all at once. It's very rare. And so I think where a lot of brands miss is, again, this didn't work in this configuration, I'm out. It doesn't work. And the reality is, if you're in the ballpark, you can fine tune it and you can get it there, and you'll be able to scale your brand and drive total channel growth. 100%.
Brett:
Yeah. Yeah, it's really good. And so kind of those elements, if you've got them all, and you're still not quite there, it's not quite hitting your goals or your targets and you need to refine and maybe that the thumbs stop or the scroll stopper wasn't quite on point, or it's maybe you're telling the founder story, but it's missing an element, it's missing some emotion to it. Or maybe you've got UGC, but it's not the right UGC, or maybe you're showing some value, but it's not landing. And so I think that's where you got to test, you got to iterate, you got to get feedback from other people that are in your market.
Carey:
Totally.
Brett:
Elements are there. It should work. You just got to keep iterating. And so one thing I'll say, and we're bad out of time when it comes to having this slush fund or this test fund, I've heard different brands have different philosophies. Google called it for their employees, they call it the 20% time, Hey, do your core job, but then take 20% of your time and explore, do wild stuff, invent the next Gmail or the next other billion user product or whatever. I know some brands will say, Hey, we're going to take 10% of every channel's budget and we're going to try wild stuff. We're going to try just experimental. So because we're going to land on something, most of that will not work. We're going to occasionally land on something that will be a moonshot. And if you're not always testing something, eventually your core stuff's going to die, and then you're not going to have anything left. But any perspective on that slush fund or test budget or however you look at that?
Carey:
Yeah, I mean, it's interesting. So I've looked at Slush fund a couple different ways. So one of them is when you have a working campaign, let's say at Rad,
We're humming, we've got all the channels going, there was always 10% of slush that was going toward newness. What else can we be testing, iterating, whatever in different environments? For example, when I was doing consulting work for Guthy Ranker, prior to us launching the incubator together, there was a resource allocation to innovation. And I got to be a part of that, which is we can't be competing for resources. We have these 100, 200, $400 million a year brand. We have a function-based organization. So good luck if you're trying to innovate and create new. And ultimately, that's how we ended up investing in the incubator they invested in. The incubator that I ended up running with my business partner was because they realized it's a very different budget, skillset, mindset, resource allocation, than what's required to run your core brand. And so some brands will do it within their company, and I've seen a lot of companies actually just create full on incubator environments. If you can create an incubator environment within your company, cool. But I like that 20% idea, which is just always facilitating that new creativity. And what's great about that is what you're learning there, you then apply to the core business. And so I like that. Always,
Brett:
Always be learning, even so it doesn't totally hit. You'll almost always learn something. There'll be some happy accidents. There'll be the accidental brand or the accidental strategy that, Hey, we were testing this, we learned something else. And so you think you've always got to be
Carey:
Testing 20% somewhere.
That's it. And I know we have to go, but that's the thing. If you're not always learning, you're missing the next thing that's happening and things are moving so quickly. And so again, that's where your agency partnership is mission critical, because when you're busy running your brand, you just can't have your finger on the pulse of how technology is evolving. What you do know is what your business objectives are and who your customer is, and what your brand is and what you stand for. And then you can partner with your agency on those strategies and what levers you're going to pull to roll up to that p and l objective.
Brett:
And for the record, I did not pay Carey to throw in those plugs for working with your agency, but we both just believe it's true, right? For the right brand. Some brands do well with in-house teams. I think that requires another skillset, and it's really hard, and it probably fits for a certain large size brand, but man, lean on your agencies, lean on your agencies because they do bring a wealth of knowledge.
Carey:
I credit some of my agencies over the tenure of my career with the success of some pretty big campaigns, it would be arrogant to suggest that I did it all by myself. I made it's 100% of team effort. And so lean into the skills, the expertise, the passion of those outsourced solutions. And from a p and l management standpoint, oftentimes those costs then can be variable to your fixed expense. So that's
Brett:
A plus
Carey:
Too.
Brett:
Awesome. Carey Grange, ladies and gentlemen, chief Brand Strateg, growth Envy Marketing. So if you're listening to this and you're like, dang, I need some strategic help, some brand growth help, I need someone like Carey to help tie things together for me. How can people get in touch with you, Carey, and what's the best way for them to start that dialogue?
Carey:
Oh my gosh, thank you. I mean, first of all, I'm on LinkedIn like everyone else, so my name is probably spelled on here somewhere, C-A-R-E-Y, Carey Grange, and growth envy marketing.com is our website. And yeah, we love working with founder brands. We love working with startups. I love working with legacy brands who are looking to inject newness and life and growth into an existing brand without losing the essence of who they are. So what's that evolution and how can you use performance marketing to drive brand growth? And that's typically to position you for some type of an exit or event. And so I love working with brands too, on then how are we driving sales and getting that healthy EBITDA and building that right, the right brand strategies, but also the right infrastructure strategies and business strategies around that. So come to our website. We'd love to talk with you,
Brett:
And I'll link to in the show notes, but it's Carey Grange, C-A-R-E-Y-G-R-A-N-G-E. So check her out. I feel like Carey, we're just getting started. I could talk to you for another several hours about this. And so we'll have to schedule round two in the near future. But thank you so much for your time. Tons of fun.
Carey:
Would love it. Thanks for including me.
Brett:
Absolutely. And as always, thank you for tuning in. We'd love to hear from you. Leave us that review on iTunes. If you've not done so, share this episode with a friend who might find it valuable. And with that, until next time, thank you for listening.
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