S15 E8: The Brand Revamp Playbook

0:00Welcome back to Limited Supply, the podcast where we get deep into the tactical and strategic side of e-commerce, digital marketing, and building consumer brands. I'm your host, Nik Sharma. I've spent the last nine years building, scaling, and investing in brands. And through this show and my weekly newsletter at nik.co slash email, I'm here to share everything I've learned. The wins, the losses, the experiments, the tactics, and the insights, all so you can unlock your next$100 ,000 in revenue. Today's episode is a good one, but before we dive in, let me tell you about our chosen sponsor for this week's episode.

0:34If you're a Shopify brand, pay attention. Roku Ads Manager is built for growth marketers and makes connected TV way easier to test. Go to advertising.roku.com slash limited supply. Welcome back to another episode of Limited Supply. I'm your host, Nick, and today we've got kind of a different episode. So normally I have these episodes where I come in with a really baked in plan of what to talk about. And it's usually somewhat connected to something I'm doing or a project I've worked on recently. But today's is going to be a little bit different because it's essentially taking something I've seen as a huge pattern over the last probably at least two months.

1:17Definitely like this year, I've come across at least one, maybe one brand a day in this position. and I've started working with a couple of them to get them out of this position. So because I've seen so many of these, my hope is that today's episode is super valuable and very tactical and will help you create a checklist of things. You might have, there might be 60 things on this checklist today and you might have 16 of them done, but there may be another 44 things that you could do that would really help your brand. And so I'm going to just describe the starting case of these brands where basically when I talk to them, I feel like they are or where they're stuck and why they're stuck.

2:04And then I'm going to go over a list of probably eight category things that I advise focusing on. Um, now, okay. So let's talk about this. So, so this specifically, this episode outline I made just now is actually based off a brand, um, which looked very similar in terms of why they're stuck, where they're stuck to a number of the others, like I mentioned, but this brand specifically is a, you could call it a health and wellness product. You would find it in a CVS, you know, near the pharmacy aisles. Um, it has amazing social proof, meaning the product works really well. In fact, it over delivers on its promise.

2:45They spent four or five years so far existing as a business, probably two or so years on actual product development with chemists, with professional athletes, figuring out how do we do this in the best way, especially when there's giants in the market right now being sold at places like CVS, Walgreens, Target, Walmart, that are pretty much owning the aisle space for this. Now the brand is used by professional athletes. Some professional athletes even swear that they can't do practice. They can't do games without this. And I'm talking the top 1 % of professional athletes in the world. Okay. So social means the product delivers a lot.

3:30Social proof is there. These athletes are on the record even talking about how amazing the product is. It's way better than its competitive set of competitors and brands. And they just can't get past figuring out how do we actually drive sales here. And when you look at it and you pull up the website, which I can't share, but I'll just describe it to you. It's basically, it's got a brand name that doesn't make a ton of sense. It's got weird packaging, very lazy packaging, you could say, like you could tell it feels like the, and you know, I don't mean any offense to the brand by this, but it feels like there was basically a designer, you know, on Fiverr who was brought in to do kind of version one of the packaging.

4:14And, you know, a lot of times to not to the brand's team's fault, there is just usually like if somebody starting a brand, a lot of times their expertise is in the actual product.

4:24Nik:So product development, making sure it works, knowing how to get it to the right people it's intended for, which this brand again, checks all those boxes. They just didn't have anybody on their internal team who actually understands what is brand, what is good design, what is good packaging, what does a good name look like, what do good colors look like? How do we make sure the font evokes emotion when you see it or that the packaging stands out on a shelf or even on an online shelf, right? Just basically on a website still should look good and pop out. And so let's see, on the website, what else?

4:56It's just a very plain website. There's a basic hero. It's got value props in the hero, not benefits or outcomes, emotional ties.

5:04Nik:You get to the product page, it's got a picture on the left side of the screen, on the right side of the screen, one time or subscribe. Very basic. No sort of stylizing, no customization, no product description, no checkboxes of benefits and outcomes, no understanding of how it works. If you take this product, how long does it take till you feel the effects and what can you expect, you know, two weeks, four weeks, six weeks, eight weeks down the line. None of that was there. It was basically just product with the ability to hit the buy button at the top. And then, you know, very basic reviews widget, which didn't really have many reviews, maybe, um, you know, call it 20 to a hundred reviews.

5:42So you're not talking, and there's three different SKUs. So all three PDPs are kind of like that. There's no bundling here, even though there's a very clear opportunity for bundling.

5:51Nik:And, you know, as I'm saying this, you can probably start to picture what type of brand you may have seen that's in the same spot. And so I was kind of brought into a conversation with them around how can we work with these guys and basically help turn this around. We've got a product that works immensely well. It over delivers. We have social proof with people whose names we could use that are massive names. And I'll get to the social proof piece in a second towards the end here. And so I kind of put this plan together. And basically the plan was, all right, we need to think about somewhat of a revamp when it comes to shipping and logistics, brand strategy, positioning, website design, and the build of it, email, SMS, subscription, churn reduction, retention, upsells, cross-sells, basically extending LTV across the board, paid media, how are we getting people in the door, directly tied to paid media, social proof as well.

6:50Nik:Affiliate, performance PR, and external media, which I'll get to in a second. Product sourcing and innovation. And then lastly, your content creative pipeline. You'll notice that's a lot of things. It's probably pretty much the whole kit and caboodle of a brand. But the thing I didn't include here is the actual product because the product is good. It has good social proof. And really, when I see stuff like this, I think of this as a golden platter of opportunity. It's like literally getting a tray made out of gold with a bunch of money on it. And all you have to do is the product is done. The product is always the hardest part, right?

7:25Nik:If you think about going and building a product or sourcing product from the right place, creating something that actually competes in the market better than something like your conglomerate giant has been dominating, that's probably the hardest part is the product. The second hardest part is distribution and basically everything else I just mentioned. So I'm going to go through all of these one by one and just rant a little bit about where I think, what I'm planning to do with this company or what I would propose rather. And then hopefully you can take one, two or three nuggets out of each one and potentially apply it to your own brand.

8:04So let's start with shipping and logistics. So when I think of shipping and logistics, I think of the entire kind of logistics package. So that is your production line. You know,

8:14Nik:who's producing your product? Are you getting good rates there? Do you have good MOQs? Do you have good payment terms? Are you basically doing, you know, are you getting, I call it like the white person tax where you're basically paying everything up front. You're not splitting it or you're not waiting until it's arrived or you're not able to get good terms with the supplier. From there, how are you trucking it or shipping it, air or sea, or if you're producing in the US, you're just trucking it to a 3PL. Then once it gets to your 3PL, are you getting good rates on storage, on pick and pack? And then of course, actual shipping rates.

8:49Nik:Most people don't realize shipping rates is a goldmine of opportunity. And especially when you think about adding dollars to your bottom line. Most 3PLs might use FedEx, USPS, UPS, DHL, basically all the shipping companies that we grew up with, you could say, and you remember receiving or getting packages from. But there is a ton of shipping companies, delivery companies, routes companies that now exist that all work with your 3PLs. And there's a very good chance that your 3PL is arbitraging you as a client where you're paying those old FedEx rates still. You're still getting your package delivered in two days because they have those carriers, but they're using a cheaper carrier to actually get it through.

9:40Nik:You might be getting some savings, but you're probably not getting as much as you can. So that's something worth checking. And again, remember, Moyes used to always mention those kind of stupid fees that 3PLs add on. So you want to audit your 3PL bill and make sure that you're not getting charged. That's another thing that I would say part of any of these kind of like brand turnaround projects I work on or coming in and advising on a turnaround is you want to make sure that you are auditing every single contract, every single bill from a standpoint of payment terms, out clause. Are you getting the best rate?

10:13Nik:A lot of don't chat with each other, you know, brand to brand about what kind of rates are you getting for this attribution tool or for this incrementality partner or for Klaviyo or for Postscript, whatever it may be. And, you know, you don't want to be paying rate card for anything. That's not how this world works. You can negotiate and you should always negotiate. So back to the shipping carriers. You should definitely make sure you understand what kind of shipping carrier you're using. And depending on your product, you know, the size of it, the weight of it, how far it's going, how often you're shipping to these people, you might realize that you should actually, instead of just using like, let's say you're Jolie, right?

10:49Nik:Instead of just using UPS or FedEx for everything, you might have your net new customer showerhead units here in the States at a 3PL. And you might use a carrier where you get great rates for two-day shipping here. And then because your shower filters come and they arrive on a subscription timing, you can actually ship those direct from China using Portless because you know exactly what day they have to land and you can plan for that ahead of time. And now you're buying fractional air freight. You're skipping any cost of US-based 3PLs and you're able to get that product to the customer at the right date.

11:25Nik:So it may be that, you know, there's the names of these shipping carriers are escaping my mind, but you know, my friend Jimmy at Tondo, he always tells me about all the new shipping carriers that he's able to plug in. And for him, he passes on a lot of the discount on, but I think you can hit him up if you want to see those different carriers. Anyways, after the shipping, then you have the actual packaging of the box. So that's another place where I know brands overspend because a lot of times when you're starting out, you're paying low, you're paying a tax for having a low order volume. Meaning if you're only ordering a thousand, 5 ,000, 10 ,000 boxes, you're going to be paying a tax versus if you're ordering 20 ,000 or 50 ,000 boxes.

12:09Nik:So again, another place to negotiate and also just pin vendors against each other and see who can give you the best price for the product. And then the last piece there I would say is inserts. So little insert cards, which if you're just starting those, or even if you're at a smaller quantity, I recommend using Uprint and then branded tape. Now you might be wondering, well, well, why does it matter if I have good packaging or branded tape or inserts? People are just going to get this thing and throw it away. Well, it makes a huge difference when you think about the brand. And one thing you'll find consistent in this whole podcast that I'm going to keep coming back to and touching on is the actual look and feel and emotion and presentation of your brand across any touchpoint, whether it's a packaging insert, whether it's the tape, whether it's the email pop-up, whether it's the landing page, the website, the Facebook ad, the follow-up email, at any point that the subscription reminder that, hey, your next subscription is about to hit, at any point or touch point, your brand needs to feel like a $500 million brand.

13:15Nik:Whether it's from the visual identity, the consistency in the copy, the positioning, the messaging, the custom iconography, which is so easy to make, you should have no excuse to not have custom icons for your brand, right? You can literally go to flaticon.com, download the icon SVG, put it into Figma and slightly alter something. And that's now your custom icon. The animations you use, the infographics, you know, any sort of badges, all of that stuff creates brand cohesiveness and consistency across the board. And that is how you make something feel like a quarter billion dollar, half a billion dollar, even a billion dollar feeling brand, right?

13:55Nik:If you go and look at the best brands that you love, Apple, Parachute Home, Feastables, whatever it may be, you'll notice that every piece of that consumer journey, it doesn't look like anybody cheapened out on the emails or the packaging or whatever it may be. And that's how you build brands that your grandchildren are going to know about versus ones that pop for a little bit, maybe six months to two years, and then die because you were chasing a trend, you weren't building a brand, and you were just selling a product versus selling a feeling and emotion or really that brand lifestyle and experience.

14:33Nik:So that's what I've got on shipping and logistics. Packaging, branded tape, inserts, 3PL with good shipping rates, good place that you're producing the product. And I'll get to product innovation in a minute. You want to make sure you have two-day everywhere. You may have to combine different shipping carriers together to get the most optimal shipping rates and and margin profile for you in this category, shipping and logistics. And yeah, so let's move on to the next one. Shopify brands, this is the one. Roku Ads Manager lets you connect directly to your Shopify store and run streaming TV campaigns that can drive action, not just awareness.

15:12Roku's positioned this as a big differentiator, shoppable TV through action ads and their Shopify integration. If you want top of funnel on the big screen with a proper path to purchase at advertising.roku.com slash limited supply.

15:29Nik:The next one is kind of the biggest one, in my opinion, which is brand strategy and positioning. So brand strategy and positioning is something that is so much of an afterthought for a lot of companies. And I'm not just talking brands that are starting. I'm even talking about brands that are doing 30 million, 50 million, 100 million, sometimes 200 million. A lot of times, if you've got a product that is really comfortable, it's good, it over delivers, it fulfills its promise, it gets people to tell other people about it. Or maybe you have a bigger celebrity attached to it. So it's like you've kind of been able to ride off that person's coattails and the brand that that person has spent years or a decade building.

16:11Nik:For all those reasons, brand strategy and positioning is usually an overthought. And there's usually some attention paid to it. we feel like this is our customer or this is our tagline. This is the visual identity we're going for. This is our style guide. But a lot of times it's not super, super snapped in. And again, that goes back to the same reason I mentioned before. It's not that the brand is intentionally trying to be lazy or not have this kind of brand strategy put together. But it can usually just be because they just don't have somebody internally who understands this. And so they've never gotten to it.

16:46Nik:There's so many brands that I find in this spot where they've got all the pieces, but if they just had tighter brand strategy, positioning, cohesiveness, consistency across the board would be in a completely different position. Maybe even annihilating competitors, but because they don't have this, this stops them. Usually because when they don't have this, they're almost solely relying on performance marketing to get them to the next level. Brand strategy and positioning, you got to think of it kind of like SEO or how people think about SEO, which is it's not going to have an immediate effect tomorrow or next week or, you know, the following Monday or next month.

17:23Nik:It's something that over time, you know, adds 0.1 % of, you know, you could call it like, um, it just helps 1 % every time. Meaning it's not going to be like, it's not, you're not going to be able to do something and overnight, you know, just because the brand looks good, it's going to be converting well and everybody's going to love it. Brand is something that's built with consistency over time by doing the right thing over and over again across every touchpoint to every customer and making every customer feel like the brand is doing something for them versus just buying a product and feeling super transactional.

17:57Nik:So when I think about brand strategy, I think about, yes, the visual identity and the taglines and the icons and all the things that make a website feel good or an email feel good and separate from just the standard Shopify theme. But I'm also thinking about, okay, who are our customer personas and why are they buying and what problem are we solving for them? And for those individual personas, what are the things that they feel the other brands aren't delivering on? Because each persona is going to have a reason they buy and a thing that gets them over the fence and a thing that makes them nervous to actually buy and try our product.

18:37Nik:They have a different thing that's going to get them excited about posting the brand or talking about the brand or sharing it with a friend of theirs. And so in this, I like to create different personas and really just understand who these people are. Are we finding them in the right way? Are we maybe just going after the wrong people? That's why our LTV is super low. People aren't coming back. And then the second piece to this is positioning. So basically, when I think about positioning, it's a fancy word for basically just what's your wedge in the market, right? Like if you sell a sleep supplement, right?

19:16Nik:Now I'm thinking beam sleep or let me sleep, right? If you sell a sleep supplement, what is the reason that your sleep supplement is actually worth trying and better than the other 367 sleep supplements in the market? And that's where positioning comes in. It's kind of like if you were to go up in a comparison chart next to a competitor, what are you saying, doing, showing to sort of get a wedge up on the person who's next to you? That might be a certain ingredient that you use. It might be, you know, there's a drink called Update that I'm an advisor to. They launched today and announced Kim Kardashian as a founder.

19:54Nik:For them, the wedge is an ingredient called paroxanthine, which is extracted from caffeine. and basically because it's extracted from that, it doesn't have the crash. So this ingredient, it's innovation, right? This innovation of an ingredient is their wedge. And so that's their positioning. So positioning is sort of like your wedge in. Brand strategy is your persona, your identity, your taglines, your copy, your tone of voice, all these things kind of put together. Now, the reason that that is so... I should have probably started with that one before shipping and logistics because the brand strategy and positioning plays itself into every other part of everything I'm mentioning here.

20:33Nik:It plays into what your packaging looks like, what's written on your packaging, what's on the insert, the icons that are on the insert, and all of that. So that's brand strategy and positioning. Now I'm going to get to website design and build. Now, if you're a limited supply listener, you know that I'm obsessed with good websites. Personally, I think I make some of the best websites in e-commerce. I always try to find that intersection of conversion rate, performance marketing, and direct response, but also really beautiful brand positioning, creative site design, UX. I love to add upsell widgets, but I never want it to feel like I'm trying to push somebody to buy the next thing.

21:18And because of that, the sites turn out really nice.

21:22Nik:they convert well, they make people feel like they're coming into a$500 million brand. I'm never a fan of launching a Shopify-themed website, meaning that you just buy a free theme or grab a paid theme, change a couple of things, and boom, you're live selling your product. That feels like a product business versus creating a brand. I always think about it as if... Think about the fancy road that's near you, whether it's in Miami, whether it's Rodeo Drive in California, where all the fancy stores are, whether it's Fifth Ave in New York, when you walk into that store and you feel that brand and what they stand for or their luxuriousness or whatever they're trying to convey with their design of the brand and how everything is set up in store, that's how your website should feel to people who come on their iPhone or their laptop.

22:16Nik:Everybody should feel like they just entered a new world when they come to your site. And that's why if you look at brands like, you know, tastesalude.com or parachuthome.com or I am eight health or David Barr, um, you know, these are just a couple of the sites I've worked on. You'll see and kind of feel what I mean when you get to the site and that brand is just coming into you compared to, you know, a generic regular Shopify themed website where you can feel that it's got all the components of kind of a general Shopify theme, nothing against that. You know, I'm still using Shopify for all of this, but the design and the UX and the customer journey that you create, the funnel, that whole experience, that should be heavily prioritized because you're driving all your traffic there.

23:06Nik:You're trying to extract as many people who hit that website to give you their email or phone number. You're trying to get as many dollars or units per transaction in when somebody's on there. You should definitely invest in building one of the best websites you possibly can. Because otherwise, what's the point of spending so much money driving all these people to your website if they're just going to get there and feel like, oh, this isn't really super trustworthy. Or I clicked the ad, which promised all these things. Now I get to the website and there's no mention of the thing that the ad promised or the color is mismatched or it's a different style.

23:43Nik:Or I clicked for a product, Now I'm on the homepage or a collections page. If you're not using landing pages, for example, these are all things that count toward the website design and build, but then have huge dividends when it comes to email, SMS, paid media. You get an influencer shout out, you get randomly selected, and your product is featured on a podcast, a huge podcast. They talk about your product, now people come to your site, and now you've just wasted all that traffic. It's priceless traffic. So you always want to have a website that's built properly. Another thing that I would say is becoming even more important now with just how much more SEO is becoming important because it feeds right into GEO, which is generative engine optimization.