Espresso: Alex Smith, No Bullshit Strategy: MOJU and Oatly Strategy Secrets (shhhh keep quiet)

0:07I'll talk about Moju. I mean, it's a very clean example. um you know in that situation with moju so obviously everyone knows them as like the juice shots and all of that the it's a good example of how that it is a tidying job and a lot of the information is already there and you don't really need to take a huge leap because with moju at the time in the early days you know moju's first product people forget or maybe don't even realize it wasn't a juice shot. It was a regular 330 mil, 250 mil, whatever juice. And, you know, that didn't do particularly well for the obvious reason that the world didn't need another juice because there was a million other juices already.

0:47It did have some, to your point, USPs, some little points of difference like being cold pressed. I think at the time there weren't really any cold pressed juices, but, you know, fundamentally it wasn't enough to really move the needle in the market. Then they launched the shots as a kind of secondary product. And of course, the shots then start to get traction because they're a bit more unique, a bit more unusual. And they got up to a certain size based on the strength of, you know, some people just sort of intuitively got the idea and they were just kind of into, you know, they understood, oh, ginger shot, I get it.

1:19They could just buy into that. But then to move that to the next level and to make shots a household name concept or something which is mainstream that everybody got, that was the hard bit of their challenge. And what it took really was just looking at what was already observably true, which was recognizing that actually, although the product is made of juice, the product is not actually a juice product. It's not bought in the same way of juice. It's not bought in the same mindset for consumers as when they want a juice. It's actually something much more like Barocca or even Lemsip or maybe even like an energy drink, you know, things that people have when they're basically feeling a bit run down and a bit crap.

2:12These sort of semi-medicinal products like that. And when we understood that it had this more sort of like performance related nature, which is not really anything like what Juice is. And then we could shift the whole business in terms of the way we talked about it, the way that the branding looked, the way that it was merchandised, the way that it was sold into retailers, et cetera, et cetera, on this sort of more performance-oriented angle. Then everything just started to click and people started to understand it. And then, you know, now fast forward and everyone really understands the concept of what Moju is doing.

2:50Now, that was really just an example of doubling down principle and of recognizing what it was that was already working for the business and then just pushing harder on that. I wouldn't say it was really a tidying up of the founders' thinking. But just what I always find interesting with that is how Innocent and stuff and some of the bigger incumbents with more financial muscle came in or tried to go in, and I think they do have, I think Innocent did try a juice. Yeah, they did, yeah. A shot. What on this point of disagreement or point of, yeah, point of disagreement is get the doubling down point, but then what I respect what Charlie and Rich have done so well is that they've had the sort of, and the nuance of it's not a juice, actually.

3:41It's almost like, as you say, a shot. The occasion's different and the whole boom, shake, what the fuck it is. Yeah, wake shake boom. Wake shake boom, there we go. Is kind of that, we've talked about this point of disagreement here. The disagreement is we're not a juice. Would you say that's the disagreement? And then the wake bake wake boom shake thing comes further up the chain. Quick one guys, Espresso's got a brand new sponsor, Unleashed. Unleashed's inventory management software that talks directly to your finance and econ software we use unleashed daily islands i bloody love it we've got our admin time in half saving approximately 30k a year why use it save money save headaches save stress get granular clarity on your margins no way your stock is don't miss availability look your favorite brands literally use unleashed as their backbone candy kittens tiny rebel trick always religiously look there's a link in the show notes please feel free to book a call with Josh and his wonderful sales team at Unleashed.

4:48They're amazing. Even nothing comes of it. And even better news, you'll get your first month free if you reference Hungary. Thank you. Well, the, the innocent, the fact that innocent didn't manage to nail it is a really good example of how all this works, because the fact of the matter is, is that the, the concept of juice shots it does not sit comfortably with the concept of a juice brand which is what Innocent is so it isn't actually a natural thing for Innocent to put across for I would suggest the basic reason that Moju is a very kind of sort of aggressive punchy performance related brand but the world of juice is quite sort of soft and natural and kind of it doesn't have the same sort of in-your-face vibes that you would need in order to put across something like the Wake Shake Boom campaign and everything that Moju stands for.

5:48So a lot of what we did in that case was, although you don't necessarily see it explicitly, we wanted to position Moju much closer to brands like Lucozade and sort of sports drink brands. So it's actually much more accurate, in my view to think about Moju as existing, as being as much closer competitor to Lucozade than it is to Innocent. So the point of disagreement you're talking about is not really with Innocent at all, because Innocent are complete red herring, complete like whatever, they're just nothing, you know, you might as well compare to shredded wheat or something like that. It's just a different thing.

6:25The point of comparison is actually to some of these more performance-oriented brands like Lucozade and that kind of thing. And in that situation, it actually comes down to this idea of, okay, well, in order for a product to be truly functional and to truly deliver strong benefits, can you do that with all natural ingredients? So whether it's Lucozade or Barocca or any of these kind of products that I would say are the true competitors of Moju, they all, because they're trying to deliver a result, they aren't about being natural and, you know, made of like purely natural ingredients. They all have to have some hard stuff in there to get the job done.

7:10The question with Moju is, well, actually, can you have natural ingredients that have that same power? And they would obviously argue that if you make it very intense, very high doses of ginger and all these other kind of um hero ingredients that that they can so that so i would actually say that you're looking in the wrong place that's almost the point of disagreement there's also something interesting i'm teasing out here is perceived competitors versus true competitors so like what i perceived as moji's competitors is innocent yep well actually and i think that's where another thing brands can get mubbled mubbled mubbled jubbled whatever the fuck in terms of oh these are competitors when it's not actually i think i can't remember who told me but it's like um with with with uh snacking or with snacking built on for example built on are not actually competing with other built-on brands necessarily they're competing with a bag of crisps or they're competing with a healthy poppadoms that so so i think that could be a really interesting framing of like okay well what's our perceived competitors versus what are our actual true competitors how can because even then if you're focusing again a lot of your competition are focusing here with the perceived competitors well actually we we position it here i think it's what you've talked about before is oatly weren't competing with other oat milk brands they're competing with milk yeah and then when you follow the thread on that it results in very very different behaviors than what other oat milk brands do and go looping all the way back to your first question about questions that you can ask to break out of the rails that you find yourself on so one question was how do you disagree with your nominal competitors the obvious competitors question number two you say nominal what does that mean that the ones that are like um that the the obvious ones like moju to innocent or like Biltong to other Biltong or Oatly to other oat milks, the obvious competitors that your mind reverts to.

9:11So one question is, how do you disagree with them? Fine. So you can find some interesting answers there that maybe have some leverage. Next question might be, as you say, who are our true competitors? So you break away from all category thinking and you simply ask the question, what might somebody buy or do instead of buying from us? And any answer that you can come up with to that is a competitor. And so in the case of Oatly, the answer, what might someone buy instead of Oatly? Well, it might be normal milk. That's a possibility. Then when you've got these non-obvious competitors, the true competitors, you then ask, okay, well, when we think about ourselves in relation to them, what is our point of leverage?

10:03And how can we beat those things? And that's going to come up with some very different angles and avenues for you to explore than if you focus on the more obviously similar brands. So that's another really good question that you can begin with, just shifting that competitive set. There companies who have built their strategies off that one single question. Thank you so, so much for listening. It honestly means the world to me. I hope you enjoyed your morning coffee and go and have an amazing day. Let's be having you. If you want the full episode, it will be in the show notes. A link will be in the show notes, the full episode.

10:43Thank you so much. Please leave friends as well. It means the world to me.