Go-To-Market Shenanigans (#005)
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Today, we are going to discuss the following:
Marketing 😳: The Simplicity of Selling (What made Apple, “Apple 🍎”)
Advertising 🎥: No Words In Your Ad – Why It Works
Product ⚙️: Brand Collaboration (Kith X Columbia)
Links For The Week 🛜: Tunes & Go-To Reads
Marketing 📈
Could a 5th Grader Understand This?
Let’s be honest: there are millions of products out there that we don’t need. But I sure as hell could find a way to convince myself that I need 1,000 songs in my pocket and more than 256 megabytes of storage.
Think about it this way. If you rolled into a party and showed your friends a new device you purchased and said, “It’s 256 MBs of Storage!” the convo would probably go like this:
You: *hands starting to sweat awkwardly holding an MP3 Player
Richie: “What’s 256 MBs of Storage?”
You: “It’s storing 256MBs of music?”
Richie: “Wait, how many songs can you fit on there?”
You: “Like 256 MBs worth of songs…”
Ok, well, maybe you’re smarter than the average Joe, or in this case, Richie, and you can calculate 256 MBs in your head, but let’s be honest, who even wants to go there with their thought process? Time is ever so fleeting, and we are now asking consumers to calculate a value for us; that kind of feels backward, doesn’t it?
Here’s the thing: communicating the end result is not easy. It takes a level of social interest in a topic, a deep understanding of the value proposition of your product, and the ability to forecast the conversation individuals will have about your product. If you are a product or business owner and have spent marketing dollars communicating your offering, I challenge you to pool a random number of your customers and ask them why they bought your product. More often than not, you find customers repeating back the verbiage you used to sell them on your product offering in the first place.
Communicate value. If your product offers numerical benefits, find a way to communicate the quantitative benefits with the qualitative description.
Steve Jobs said, “As companies, we need to be really clear about what we want people to know about us.”
Don’t get caught trying to sound smart. If you’re not careful, you might become a master of none.
Advertising 💰
Faramond Travel (Influencer Ad)
Here’s the link to watch the ad…
The world is noisy, and advertising definitely adds to the noise. So, what happens when we make an advertisement that’s not so noisy? Weirdly enough, it cuts through it.
How would I define noise? (in 5th grade terms):
Fast beat cuts
In-your-face music
Sexualizing non-sexual situations
Bright and glowing imagery
What makes this ad stand out?
Custom sound is engaging and adds some nostalgia for travel, with airport intercoms coming in and out to add some context to an in-direct use-case scenario
Lighting is contrasting but emphasizes the product
The design of the apparel matches a certain lifestyle activity and is paired with a matching bag (this personifies the bags and adds an unspoken functionality to each item)
Well-designed apparel accessorized the bag.
Product ⚙️
Kith X Columbia – Just a Cool Collab.
Takeaways from this collab:
Own a color scheme.
Utilize collaborations to tap into a new market.
Leverage branded drops as a reason to do live activations.
If there’s a way to collect emails or merge some form of qualified contact lists for digital advertising efforts, it’s a win-win.
Links For The Week 🛜
Tunes:
Favorite Book: Green Lights by Matthew McConaughey
PS – I’m building a Notion document outlining book recs, good tunes, and other resources I’ve used to build my businesses over the years. Stay tuned. 🤟🏽
Teddy Giard 🦦
Me.
In case you don’t already know, my name is Teddy, and I operate a firm that specializes in marketing strategies for outdoor brands. Our approach is simple: align your product development timeline with your marketing production timeline; by doing so, we can own the distribution of our message and products.
If you’d like to explore working together, feel free to fill out this form. If we’re a good fit, we can schedule a discovery call. We ask this because we keep a fairly narrow target for whom we work, and we like to be as open about that on the front end as possible. After all, time is life’s most valuable resource.