Ep 595: Where Will Your Growth Come From This Year? The 5-Message Creative System for Scaling DTC Strategically

0:00You can't just growth hack your way to success anymore. In the performance marketing industry, I think people are waking up to the fact that they need to consciously design this thing. For the brands that we have the growth system or the growth engine built for, we don't need to make hundreds of ads because we all know what customers need to hear. Inspiration, not iteration. If you're doing iterations and small tweaks and tests and things like that, your mindset is that you can't invest in anything because you don't know if it's going to work. If you can figure out what are the five things a customer needs to hear to go from never hearing about you to purchase and get really good at those five things, guess what?

0:43You don't have to reinvent the wheel every single time.

1:11Thank you. overtime. No stress, no limits, only possibilities. Get the feels at contentful.com. It's all killer, no filler. Welcome to the D2Z podcast, strategy lead at Pilot House Duncan. How are you doing? Great. How are you doing? We're both hanging in there. We're triumphing on through adversity here to talk about the brand growth system. What is a brand growth system and why does every brand need to have one? Oh, you know, that's a really funny question. And I think, you know, there's a lot of terms for it. There's a growth engine, there's a growth system. There's like, you know, acquisition systems and engines.

1:57Those are usually the interchangeable terms. But that is essentially the governing system that directs all of your activities. And it's kind of interesting because right now in the performance marketing industry, I think people are waking up to the fact that they need to consciously design this thing because you can't just growth hack your way to success anymore. You need to have a growth system that can scale, that you understand, that has a theory on how to grow your business to actually succeed. It seems obvious, but at the same time, we did come from this era where you could kind of cheat it a bit, where you could just run more meta ads in a lot of ways, and it would kind of pave over problems in the business.

2:43But it's like a lot of the room for error has been eaten up by tariffs and increased ad costs and everything. Yeah, 100%. And think about it this way. You know, you've got your meta specialists, you've got your Google specialists, you've got your creative person, you've got your email and you're like, you've got your CRO person and all these people are just sort of trying to do all these hacks to squeeze out a little bit more growth. But unless they're directed by some theory on how to win, then they're just going to be toiling away in their own little spaces, pulling their hair out. And when you're in an industry that has tons of people in market and tons of growth, that worked before.

3:21But it's kind of funny. I just had a conversation today. We were trying to describe what this thing is. And the end of it was just like, oh, you actually have to do marketing. This is what's happening right now. So give me an example of, I know we're building brand growth systems with a lot of our top brands right now. Can you describe, I don't know if we can give direct examples, but can you talk to me about an example where a brand didn't have this, we built one, what it looked like and what we were able to achieve with it? Yeah, 100%. And we've done it a few times. First of all, it forces you to step out of your area of specialization and look at the whole map of your activities.

4:04And so you identify who your ideal customer is, not necessarily the customer you're talking to right now, but where's the biggest opportunity customer. And then you figure out what's the journey that they need to go on in order to become a customer from like never hearing about you to becoming a customer. And then you figure out, you know, what are the three to five things that person needs to hear in order to believe in your brand and buy your product? And then you got to map out those messages across all the different media you think you can use to reach them until they become a customer. And that becomes a growth engine.

4:45So you need to have a media plan or a media strategy and a creative strategy mapped out across the customer journey. And once you know how those things all work together, you can just repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat. It scales out across customer segments. It scales out across channels. It scales out across collections. It scales out across creative. And we've done that. It's great. It's, you know, the brands that have one of these growth engines or growth systems, every time they want to add another tier of expansion, either a new customer or a new collection or a new channel, it's not like we have to reinvent the wheel.

5:20We just take the same playbook and apply it. New campaign, new theme, same playbook, same playbook, same playbook. And that's what makes it scalable. And it fits with, I know we're not just talking about a meta here, but it fits with the changes that Andromeda has made, where it needs to be fueled by these unique, discrete angles that it then knows how to put into market at the right time. Yeah, and guess what? Those unique, discrete angles are just the things that your customer needs to hear in order to become a customer. And so you don't need to have, you know, 200 or 500 different ads to test and sort of like, oh, we don't really know why it works.

5:57We just made a little tweak and we iterate. I heard recently Taylor Holiday, he said the industry is having a reckoning because it was built on the worst creative strategy of all time, which is iteration. And so when you're guided by iteration, usually what that means is we make ads that look like this. We don't know why it works, but it does. And we do small tweaks every week and see if we can improve. Versus knowing exactly who your customer is and what they need to hear, crafting that message into an ad, and then delivering it across your customer journey. That's a very different thing. It's helped me come up with an excellent mnemonic device, which is inspiration, not iteration.

6:40That's right. And like iteration is great once you've got that foundation built. But for the brands that we have the growth system or the growth engine built for, we don't need to make hundreds of ads because we already know what customers need to hear. So we're just making less and less content. So if you think about the motion people who are like, oh, motion is going to pull out like, oh, this hook or that hook or these small adjustments. And then you're just pulling your hair out, sort of flailing, making hundreds and hundreds of ads. But if you understand what is winning and why, then you can put a lot more resources into doing one or five ads instead of 300.

7:25That's funny. While we're dropping names, I just saw David Herman, another competitive agency, who just said this exact point was that this idea of spamming accounts with ads really isn't the way. What he's talking about specifically was how important, especially once you have all these discrete, unique angles that are out in market and working, it's about then creating the landing page or the post-click experience that really references or that speaks to the congruency of that original angle as well. Are landing pages a part of the brand growth system? Sure. But the great thing about having a growth system is that it becomes channel agnostic.

8:02It doesn't really matter. It's like your channel or your medium becomes a choice over like, oh, it's got to be this or it's got to be that. I've seen this a lot where there's a brand that we've had tons of these come through that we've worked with at Pilot House. There's a brand that's got a really great brand identity and people really like the vibe of the brand. And then they just kind of get stuck and people are following, people are paying attention, people know about it, but not a lot of people actually buy. And that's because a lot of the time, there's just like some point that people get caught on that prevents them from purchase.

8:41And there's something that needs to be addressed. And I've sort of built all of my time at Pilot House looking for this sort of objection part in the customer journey. Now, not all brands have this problem. Some of them have even harder problems. People have never even heard of them. They have an awareness problem. But when people really like the brand, but they can't bring themselves to purchase, there's a message that they need to be delivered that gets them over that hurdle and then into becoming a customer. But the brand growth system helps you articulate and find those particular reasons.

9:17Yeah. So we'll build like an artifact that says, this is how you get people over this hurdle. Here is the objection that most customers run into that stops them from buying. and here's a playbook on how to get past an objection. And it just like, it just like unplugs the whole thing. And then all of a sudden, your customer's just rolling in. And then results wise, this is what we're seeing. We're seeing when we have this holistic system, A, it's easier to manage and B, it's easier to scale in a way that actually scales and not just has a lot of sound and fury signifying nothing. Yes, yeah. Like think about all the people on a team who are just doing, not only trying to optimize their own little corner of the marketing activities, but all those optimizations might not be working together.

10:00And sometimes, you know, if you think about a very simplistic way of thinking about it is a lot of the time, meta success is measured by ROAS. And so if you don't have a, you know, quote unquote, good ROAS, then you might be in trouble. But if you think about meta's role, meta is very good at getting in front of people who've never heard of you and then getting them to do something. You know, YouTube is good at getting in front of people who never heard of you, but it's hard to get them to do something because they're watching TV. They're not going to click through your ad because they're watching TV on YouTube.

10:33So meta, you can get in front of someone who's never heard of you and then get them to click through, but you can't expect them to purchase if they've never heard of you right away. So what do you do? You move them over to an owned channel. If you've got a really good Instagram organic, get them to follow you on Instagram organic. Or if you've got a really good email program, get them to follow you on email. and then you can reach out to them with great content for free in perpetuity. Then, okay, great. They've heard of you. They follow you on an own channel. It's free to reach them. And you have all the time in the world to tell them about why your product is awesome if you know what they need to hear.

11:10And then boom, you're a customer. Like you say, it's real marketing. Because I think back to all the ads and the way we've talked about ads for so long. it's with this purchase objective all the time, everywhere, all the time. You're always building around driving to the purchase. You're always asking for the sale kind of thing. Does this soften your approach? Are you less focused on ruthless conversion all the time and you're more storytelling about the brand? Or is everything still very focused on buying? I would say it depends on the stage of the customer journey, which is a very like, you know, just got out of marketing school 101 thing to say.

11:48But you can change what you're trying to accomplish at different stages of that journey. So one thing that's very powerful is social media is really good for creating entertainment for people. You can entertain someone and then also make them aware that your product is there. It's just classic marketing, right? And so that's just enough to, you know, we call that brand response, where someone is seeing someone in their community who they like, who they follow, and then they're seeing your product and then there's an association there and maybe they're just going to like check you out. That is a whole stage in a customer journey that you can design.

12:28And also you can change the requirement of what your ad is trying to do and make it less expensive to get in front of a lot of people. That's easier, planting the seed, getting someone to visit your site or follow you or whatever. You might be looking for a cost per follow or something like that. And then you do the selling once they've actually shown real interest in your brand. And that's a lot less expensive. In some of the pre-notes, you mentioned that there's probably a lot of agencies out there who are selling optimization as growth. The tactical spin cycle, as we've kind of dubbed it, right?

13:10A lot of brands with their agencies trapped in this tactical spin cycle. What are some questions that either a founder can ask a CMO or ask their agency to determine whether a brand actually has a viable sort of growth system or is kind of just in the tactical spin cycle? My favorite question that tells you whether or not you're in the tactical spin cycle is where will growth come from this year? if you can't answer that then you are in the tactical spin cycle right now and that's from that's dave dave's question it's really good because like it kind of cuts through a whole bunch of bullshit and if if the answer is if the answer is attribution fixing it's like oh you don't know where your next dollar should go or like your your tracking is off and we don't really know how much meta or google is actually contributing like if that's the answer or if you're going to optimize your channels you're going to test a bunch of creative or you're going to add a bunch of channels then those are all signs that you're in the tactical spin cycle because that's just like that is just table stakes baseline stuff that performance agencies will do and then they'll call that growth it's not growth it's just like optimization and sort of knob fiddling is what i call it.

14:32That question, if you can't answer very clearly where will growth come from this year, then you are inside the tactical spin cycle right now. And can you give me an example of an answer to that question from someone who has been successfully piloted in a growth system? Like what did the answer, did the answer became just doing more of everything but in lockstep so it all worked better? Or what's the answer to that question successfully when it works? The switch is going from platform-centric to customer-centric. That's where the switch is. If you're talking platform-centric, all of a sudden, your strategy is just a fragmentation across a whole bunch of different endeavors that are sort of fiddling around in their own little area.

15:19But if you switch to customer-centric, all of a sudden, that fragmentation is just around one person. Who is that person and how are you going to turn them into a customer? And then all of a sudden you can measure how many of those people there are, what the opportunity is. And then they move through a journey and the channels show up along that journey. The messaging shows up along that journey. The tactics, actions show up across that journey. But you're able to say the answer to where will growth come from this year is we know who our ideal customer is. And we think that we can acquire a certain percentage of them.

15:57And that's going to grow our business by a certain amount. And we're going to acquire them with these channels, with this messaging across this journey. And then the rest is like, it's all very, this is the deceiving thing about performance marketing is it's all very technical and it's all very complicated. And all of that confuses the actual hard simplicity of the marketing part that has been kind of lost on us for a little bit. And so when we talk about having all these, you know, discrete, unique angles live, I always think I always apply that to the meta world. Are those applying to Google?

16:32Like, are you then, are the angles that work best here, are you then, are those drifting into your Google account so that the ads get framed in specific ways? Like how does that kind of ad intelligence move across platforms and out of, or is it just, I guess you were saying it's just also just more about understanding what each platform is for in a way, right? Like app loving is a similar thing. They're going to have to be exposed to your brand because it's content locked, so they're going to have to watch the video. But again, the chances of them converting there are low because they're in the middle of Candy Crush or whatever.

17:00But still really good for that first awareness phase. Exactly. And so when you talk about Google, what are we talking about? Are we talking about YouTube or are we talking about shopping or search, right? And so if we're talking about YouTube, we're probably just trying to – like getting people – this is a hot take. But it's hard to get people to purchase from YouTube. It's much better for just getting it in front of people and getting a bunch of impressions. And so I'm sure there's a lot of people that would challenge me on that. But that's how we've been thinking about it. And then Google search is like, you know, generic search is like people are looking for, you know, they're looking for a frying pan.

17:41It's like, you know, best frying pan or best stainless steel thing. thing they're like okay they're already thinking about buying and then they need to be persuaded to buy you so you want to get in front of them then and then uh shopping is maybe a little bit more specific or they're like actually i want to buy this thing and so those messages that you're telling those people probably have more to do with where they are in their journey which is further on and so um yes you would want to have some alignment but there's not really for google specifically, it's kind of like people are just looking for the thing and they might be looking for, they might have some queries about specialization, like specific things they're looking for.

18:23But a lot of that stuff happens earlier in the funnel because those people are already pretty much ready to purchase. All right. Well, if you're a brand out there and you don't, you don't think you have a, first of all, figure out where's your growth coming in 2026. I think a lot of people would just say like spend better more efficiently you know find efficiencies like but again that's all just optimization right that's like yeah like you can all these all these uh optimizations what you'll do and you know we've done this for a long time where we're like okay people come in and we acquire customers efficiently was how we worked for a long time and people uh we we would find a lot of growth with a lot of people but uh like also if you're just doing the optimization thing it a lot of the time you see some growth but then your costs come down and so you're acquiring people more uh more efficiently and then you can take that budget and put it back into your span and then you get more customers but that's kind of limited and so instead of saying okay i know who i want to acquire i know they've got x amount of dollars in their pocket And so we believe that we can acquire X amount of these people.

19:36We think it's worth this much money. Let's invest in doing this properly. Let's invest in some assets. All of a sudden it makes it, because I'm just going to back this out for a sec. If you're doing iterations and small tweaks and tests and things like that, your mindset is that you can't invest in anything because you don't know if it's going to work. You're just trying to duplicate the success and exceed it slightly of something that's already working. Yeah, but if you don't understand why it's working, then you can't really invest in it because you just don't really know what's going on. Whereas if you have a really strong thesis on why something would work and how much money it can get you, all of a sudden it becomes an investment.

20:20And you can invest in much more expensive, many more assets, bigger campaigns, things like that. all of a sudden there's a complete flip of the switch. Instead of thinking about, we're going to do a little bit of work on 700 ads, we're going to do a lot of work on 10 ads or five ads. So that's sort of the direction that things are going now, which is great. That are really thought out based on real use cases of your product, real avatars of people. What sort of system do we have for gathering all that data when it comes to, like when we onboard a client, we're like, okay, these guys are in the tactical spin cycle.

20:57we want to move towards, like, where are we harvesting the best, you know, discrete, unique angles, essentially? Well, the way it works is we do a multi-step process to identify what the biggest growth constraint is for our partners so we know where to focus. And then we figure out what is the change that we need to make? How are we going to win based on this challenge? so you got the challenge you figure out how you're going to win by overcoming that challenge and then and then you figure out who your ideal customer is to make that change in and there's a lot of different ways for us to do that uh we do quote-unquote research i know we should give away everything that we do um but it's certainly not just looking back at who your previous customer biggest customer was because that can be your biggest mistake because you're essentially just feeding in past mistakes back into the top of your strategy.

22:00Or past limitations as well, right? Like if you're looking to break out with your growth, if you're plateaued by mining what's worked in the past, it's not going to get you over the hump, right? Yeah. Like I'll take a perfect example. It doesn't take like crazy research techniques to find out that, you know, millennials have more spending power than seniors. and there may be a bigger group on, you know, something like Instagram than seniors might be. But if you're selling a product that might appeal to seniors and they're, you know, addicted to Facebook or something like that, Instagram or Facebook might think that's it.

22:39That's your ideal customer. And then you just throw your ads out there and all of a sudden your biggest customer is seniors, but there's a limited pool of them that are online. And so this is the mistake that like your previous customer might be the best. And so then you look out into the world and you say, okay, what is the biggest demographic that would find our products appealing? That's a bigger pool of people. And then you might find, oh, it's millennials. And then we're gonna change all of our messaging and targeting to reach these millennials. We know it's worth the investment because there's a way bigger pool of cash out there for us to acquire.

23:16And so that's not something that would happen if you're in this sort of like iterative creative strategy. You would never pull your head up long enough to look around for that sort of thing. And so that's, I don't know. I feel like we're wandering around at this altitude of the strategy part. And there's kind of like, it goes strategy and then it goes to sort of like media and creative strategy. And then you get to sort of tactics and execution. And I think a lot of the time, and this is not just my opinion, and this is other people's opinion that have been shared with me that I really like, that sort of like execution part has been where so much of our industry has been stuck for so long.

24:00And now that that layer is no longer an easy win, a lot of people who are thinking deeply about this are having to step up to a higher altitude and bring up much more thoughtful, harder, deeper work into their marketing efforts. And it's working. It's working. So you talked about this growth system, but how do we systematize creative? You're mentioning a creative system. What does that mean within the growth system? Well, okay. So a creative system, you've probably heard about Andromeda and how you have different concepts. And then people make concepts with different ads and things like that, which is great.

24:39But it's kind of like a never-ending concepting thing where every ad is a huge lift. And so what we do is we create a creative system which maps along your customer journey. So you have, let's just say in very basic terms, you have stages of potential customers unaware of you, then they're aware of you, and then they're considering purchasing you, and then they purchase, and then maybe they go for a second purchase. is that that's the customer journey, right? And then you have different messages that that customer needs to hear along that journey. And then those messages become concepts. If you develop those concepts that tell you how to deliver that message to each customer, it doesn't matter what collection, it doesn't matter what channel, it's a formula.

25:32You know, it's like, okay, hey, first concept is show them how cool our brand is. That's a dumb way of saying it, but like show them how cool the brand is and then show them that other people like them care about the brand and then show them the like major differentiator of the brand and then get them over their biggest objection about buying it. A lot of the time with good brands, it's like has to do with value and then give them some reason to have urgency now. And so that's like a five-step process of getting someone to convert through your creative system. And so you'd know how to make creative for each one of those messages.

26:12It doesn't matter what channel. It doesn't matter what collection. It's always the same journey for each person. And that becomes your creative system. And so I want to map this on top of Andromeda because a lot of people out there are talking about Andromeda. It's like you need all these different concepts. and it becomes a never ending sort of, and you were like, oh, okay, I need 10 concepts. And like, you're just sort of stuck. Talk about the tactical spin cycle Andromeda version. But like, you don't need unlimited concepts. Sure, you can win that way. But if you can figure out what are the five things a customer needs to hear to go from never hearing about you to purchase and get really good at those five things, guess what?

26:56You don't have to reinvent the wheel every single time. You can map those five concepts across channels, across campaigns, across different collections, and then that becomes your creative system. Do you find yourself just figuring out what the high level messages across all five of those customer journey touch points for the like, because you could do that for multiple customers, you could do it for your male customer, your female customer, you could do it for different, you know, you could like, it just has you ended up and end up thinking about in creatives in terms of like in in a thread, rather as like individual points that you're like, Oh, this creative might be clever, this might be clever.

27:31It's like, think about who your avatars are, and then create a thread of creatives for each of them. All of a sudden, there's a logic for you to rely on instead of just being like, oh, it's like this atomized, totally fractured way of operating, which is just requires a bottomless pit of grinding versus like, OK, I have a theory on how to win here. And it's going to be this customer journey with, you know, these five messages. That's our creative system. Hit that over and over and over again. And then just that's where your investment goes over and over and over again. You can win. It becomes predictable, becomes reliable, becomes repeatable.