Chubbies has one of the strongest men’s brands out there. However, for the better part of a decade, I had no idea what Brand meant.
Once we found out what it meant, and how to quantify it, our business fundamentally changed for the better in the form of material profit generation.
Here’s what we learned and what you can do to get your company thinking about Brand from the business performance perspective.
*what I learned*
Brand ≠ logo, font, color scheme
Brand = the revenue you have when you turn off ads, new product launches, and promotions.
it generally manifests in owned and organic new customer acquisition.
when that’s growing, the Brand is strengthening.
things like logo, font, color schemes, taglines, jingles, etc, are great tactics to help drive changes in the ways people think about your Brand.
this is brandING
however, the output of branding is your Brand.
the problem with focusing only on brandING is that you can’t measure it. and because of that, you can’t invest in it. and, most importantly, you can’t connect it to profits.
not saying branding is not important.
it is.
however, it is not the most important thing.
the most important thing for a consumer brand is to strengthen their Brand so that, over time, the % of new customer revenue coming through owned and organic channels (across all sales channels where you get that data) increases over time.
very simply, it boils down to building and strengthening your free money machine.
this is more important than your return on ad spend, your customer acquisition cost, or your marketing efficiency ratio.
as an example: Coke can turn off ads, new product launches and promotions and they’ll still have a massive business.
on the other end of the spectrum, the dropshipper who just started selling whatever is trending on Tiktok turns off ads and they have zero dollars coming in the door.
one business can be handed to future generations and will generate predictable profits for long periods of time. the other will likely go out of business (nothing against dropshippers. just a different game.)
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*what can you do about it as you prep for H2 2024*
Make sure everyone in the company knows the answers to the following 3 questions:
1) What is the % of new customer revenue coming through owned and organic channels?
2) is it higher than same time last year?
3) what are we doing to increase that percentage?
when the answer to 2 is yes, keep going.
if no, it is so important to get everyone together to get an understanding of why and what we’re going to do about it.
unlike vanity metrics like revenue or return on ad spend, the metrics around your owned and organic new customer acquisition engine are core fundamentals of business performance that should be maniacally tracked, thought about, talked about, brainstormed about improving, etc.
we’re here to build and strengthen the free money machine; not to get good at buying transactions.
let’s gooooo