Build a Brand People Actually Trust with Dr. Anna Persaud, CEO at The Works | Ep. 380

0:00We are back with another episode of The Marketing Millennials podcast and this one's different. We're bringing you a talk from Marketing Millennials Festival 2025. And today you're hearing from Dr Anna Persaud, the founder and CEO of This Works, a British wellness brand that created the pillow spray category. She sold 12 million sleep sprays in 50 plus countries and won 200 plus industry awards. Dr. Anna breaks down how she built a brand that's lasted 22 years. Yes, 22 years through science-backed products, relentless proof-pointing, and staying authentic. You're about to learn how to build a real brand that people trust in a crowded space.

0:44Let's get into the talk. Hope you enjoy it like I did. Welcome to the Marketing Millennials, the No BS Marketing Podcast. I'm Daniel Murray. And join me for unfiltered conversations with the brains behind marketing's coolest companies. The one request I tell our guests, stories or it didn't happen. Get ready to turn the f*** up. Hi, my name is Dr. Anna Pissoud and I'm the CEO of This Works. And I'm very happy to be here with you today at Marketing Land Festival and be part of the marketing brand track. So I know I'm at the end of probably a really interesting, fantastic day. And thank you for staying with us.

1:33And my job today is to talk to you about how I built This Works, which is a science-first wellness brand, and how the journey we've been on, the challenges we face, and some of the key milestones as we've journeyed for what is over 22 years. This Works is a British brand. We are located in Wimbledon. You may have heard of Wimbledon where the tennis takes place. So if you ever come to London, come visit. That's where we are. But we are an international brand in terms of our distribution. So over the last 22 years, it has been really important for me as a CEO and also founder to be very clear about what we are trying to achieve as a brand.

2:19to really identify why we dare show up on what is actually a very competitive stage, a very, very crowded space with very large budgets from some of the players in our market. So why do we deserve to be there? What are we offering the consumer? And actually, for a brand to be still very much fighting and succeeding in the wellness category after 22 years, you've got to have a reason for that. so we are the brand that put sleep on the map I hope that you are all very much taking care of your sleep because I hope by now you are aware of the very fundamental link between sleep and wellness and sleep and skin health but when I first created a sleep range that knowledge was not at all common.

3:12Sleep was very much something people downplayed. It was about the cult of busy, how busy am I, how much time can I devote to work. It was when we started to use devices for emails and people were enjoying the fact that they could take their work home with them. And there was an evolving culture around how much can I do in a day. But because of my background as a scientist, and I'll come on to talk about that more, I knew that actually sleep was fundamental to how we looked. And we are a cosmetics and beauty brand. And it was that insight, that first belief that actually, if we focus on our sleep, we can improve our skin.

3:54That was a white space that at the time, nobody else had identified. So we are very much pioneers. And when you're a pioneer, you've got to have a you've got to have a set of beliefs you've got to be able to believe in something because you you haven't got a playbook to follow and my belief because i'm a phd biochemist is that the way that our biology is governed the the way the body clock you may have heard of the body clock the circadian rhythm the way that that runs affects directly how we how we feel our health how we look everything is governed by this internal body clock and so I wanted to create a brand that was rooted in the fundamentals of biology understanding that link between biology and skin health and how we how we look and how we perform it's fundamental to the building a brand and identifying the purpose so building a brand with purpose I think everyone's very familiar with that concept because that's what consumers identify with and it is what gives the brand resilience in my opinion building something that you know identifies with what people are looking for your core consumer and for us it was about creating solutions solving problems that they maybe didn't even know they had so 20 years ago this the problem that we could see coming down the line was people's inability to sleep well and manage their stress so the purpose is grounding grounded in creating solutions that improved people's lives and so everything we do as a business is very much connected to this core belief and the promise is the name the name above the door this works and as a scientist for me that meant that we had to create a MPD process, a marketing strategy, a common strategy that really lived up to the name.

6:03So if you're going to say a brand is called this, you better evidence that. And so if you look into the brand DNA, if you look into our communication, if you look at what we do, what I talk about, it is very much rooted in the evidence. The pipeline of R &D that we've created, the experts that we work with, the trials that we've conducted. And over the years, this has accumulated in order to build a very, very high level of brand trust. What that looks like today, our impact, is that we are the number one sleep brand in the UK. I built the category of pillow sprays. We were the first to launch and there are now many others in the space.

6:46And that is a challenge that I can address um the need to keep innovating is very much uh you know a priority for a brand that creates a category and wants to continue to lead it um we are considered if you well we do our brand health trackers because you know i can say we we're highly regarded for our for trust and having efficacious products but you have to evidence that right so doing regular studies to help you understand whether that is indeed true and we do that we put our products forward for industry assessment all the time um consumer testing expert testing and we've won over 200 awards so again proof points really important um we've taken our concept into over 80 50 countries excuse me so proof um proof pointing the brand once we identified that sleep and creating sleep products resonated in our own markets we took this into overseas markets a nice little sound bite we sold over 12 million sleep sprays and so we've helped thousands of people and they create stories they create emotional stories about how our products have helped them with their sleep and with their health and with their lifestyles and again that's very powerful when you're trying to create a brand that resonates not just for its trusted products but also because of its emotional resonance and then a point about the brand that i'm very proud of is the number of studies that we've done so even though we are a small brand we have prioritized proof pointing through science the claims behind the brand so just to come back to the pillars that we've built our brand upon and you know back to building a brand that um survive the test of time okay The pillars that we've picked are efficacy and trust.

8:38The priority for us in terms of resources and where I first started was to build products that could really stand up in their own right against the big guys, against the big players. So that meant doing product development studies that ensured that when the products were signed off, they actually could live up to the claims that they were making. So I brought in a protocol which involved using large user studies, testing panels, then moving to clinical studies, measuring skin change, and then clinical studies measuring sleep and sleep architecture, which evolved into neuroscience using the brain and using the nervous system to assess the impact of our products and our fragrances on the brain.

9:27So this commitment to studies and science has really given us, given the brand a very strong pillar that we lean upon. And the other side of that is trust because of the work that we've done in terms of validating the claims and providing people with reasons to believe they trust us. So it's our job then to make this information available, to be able to communicate it effectively. And that's one of the things I've learned over the last 20 years is how people like to assume and consume their information. So science today is delivered in a very different way than it was, say, five years ago. And it's very much a challenge for all of us, isn't it, to keep our communication relevant.

10:09So whether you're putting it in little snackable content on TikTok or you're doing two hour podcasts is making sure that your content is relevant for the different channels and the different consumers. And then also using the industry. So in our industry, Cosmetics Executive Women CEW in the US is very powerful, also in the UK, but also other industry standards where people can find you and think, yes, OK, this is a brand that I trust. so if we go back a little bit into the science and you know rooting the brand in something that gives it resilience that gives you the right to show up and be authentic for us it was around understanding chronobiology which is back to the circadian rhythm understanding the fact that the body runs on this body clock that's anchored in actually part of the brain called the chiasmatic nucleus but actually all of our organs and even our skin cells have a little clock and that clock controls what happens when and for me as a scientist that was very much a opportunity to create a product range that could support circadian rhythm so it was about finding an authentic scientific fact that i could then build my brand upon as opposed to making something up which you know would not stand the test of time and so i'm just going to dial in now to some of the products it um we are best best known for just as part of my case study to explain how the brand has evolved over time you know why have we won all these awards why have we got um you know the sales in over 50 countries and that's to do with these pillar sprays um being known for something is important being the best in class being the gold standard and really anchoring your your your investment at the beginning especially if you're a small brand on something that can really cut through the noise and for us it was the launch of these pillow sprays so we have more than one pillow spray but we started off with the one which is to help people get to sleep so can't get to sleep this is the deep sleep pillow spray this is one that's you know we've got the most recognition for if you like we've got the biggest revenue in sales we know with the number one sleep brands in amazon in the uk you know we do a very significant amount of revenue through this sleep this deep sleep pillars break but we also had to create other products which would help people because if you're an expert in a category you have to be able to create other products that support different needs that people might have because not everybody's sleep problem is the same and so on the left hand side can't stay asleep we created that product for people that wake up in the night and it's a more sophisticated version it's got an end cap delivery system and it's also a more expensive product so just as an example of taking the spray and then building a category out of it so here we can see that in fact we've also got products of babies so if you're somebody that's trying to train a baby train a baby i say that with respect you know babies are going to take their time that's natural but you can use fragrance to help them as a cue so we launched the baby sleep spray we also have one for intimacy now that's that's that um was an example of innovation which didn't work it was a little bit too early so the love of sleep pillar spray is a fragrance that was created using brain imaging in order to understand how we could help people to relax and and be more pro-social right so help to pave the way to intimacy both sexual intimacy and connectivity between, you know, family members.

13:52It's all about just reducing the barriers. People are very socially isolated. So this is an example of a fragrance that's very technical. It's got some really great evidence behind it. But it was a little bit too soon. And our consumer wasn't really ready to be told that this was going to help them to have sex. So we discontinued it. So, but, you know, it's really important not to be frightened about failing as long as you fail fast and you move on. And on the left-hand side, you can see just some evidence, some other proof points to help me sit here in front of you and say, look, I'm the leader in the category because we've got studies with over 1 ,000 people.

14:31These are independent studies conducted by experts, nothing to do with me and my own database. The clinical part and the fMRI part I'm really proud of because these were academic research that was done. And we published off the back of it. So, you know, collaborating with scientific institutions has been part of our success. And that was me leveraging my scientific background. And I would say to you, you know, as marketeers and as business people, use what you've got. Use your own skill, whatever you are particularly good at, whether that's, you know, networking. You may have an artistic background.

15:09You may be brilliant in social media. You might be a scientist like me. Use what you've got. Like, go hard in those areas. it will give you a competitive advantage so yes this works with me as a ceo yes i'm a biochemist uh and yes i'm also an industry you know i've been here a long time but it's also important to surround yourself by other experts and you know you can't know everything i learned that early on make sure you surround yourself with other people that know more stuff than you do and in terms of science and wellness um we are lucky enough to collaborate with obviously our professor of neuroscience Gabby Bader who does the research but also we work with a roster of experts some of them would be high social media kind of people that they bring in their own their own community but others are just normal people that have a purpose and have something to say and I think sometimes it's really important to also include your community that not for reasons of reach but for reasons of authenticity and relevance and so just as I move towards the end of my presentation I think the last thing I want to say is really about the need to continue to be relevant and build your storytelling as the seasons and the years change so I started my career back in the 90s and I was very much in luxury goods and it was very much about you know labels and spending you know large amounts of money of over packaged goods I'm now here today talking about sleep and the evening economy I spend my time listening to and understanding people's concerns about you know how they can't switch off and why they're stressed at night and why their evenings don't feel relaxing anymore so these trends and they're not trends they're becoming big cultural shifts are my business and I think that when you take a brand you need to be really clear about what what its relevance is and how is your brand gonna you know weave itself into people's lives um and here's just you know the the some points I'm sure you'll you'll you'll know them too around how um our lifestyles today are so impacted by our inability to switch off um to put our devices down and so a brand like this place has become even more relevant in sleep and wellness as this as the struggles against technology and an always-on society and the stressors around us have grown my brand has become more and more relevant but it's my challenge to have to tell those stories in a way that they can understand that is relevant and also point to know i'm not the only brand in the space because if we you know we talk about what is called the evening economy and it's big you know the consumers are building rituals they're building um protocols for themselves to help them in the evening and um it's a significant um revenue in fact the um they refer to it's the bedtime economy 585 billion right that's big so i'm sitting in this space now with lots of other brands and it's my job to continue to innovate to tell stories that are relevant so just you know as we as we look into the future for this works I'm calling upon my scientific background my knowledge of sleep listening to my consumers understanding their stressors and it's really important for brands to then you know follow them where are they going and what do they need so for us actually that is a fine fragrance that is based on terpene science based on the research we've been doing with our brain and neuroscience and taking it into a new adjacent category so just to finish this is where i'm going to leave you with just you know just a few stats to support everything i have said you know today we're sitting here with um the number or a sleep brand with lots of proof points here.

19:15But as I said, I think really the journey, the point I want to make is that building a brand based on scientific credibility, based on authority, and then just continuing to show up in a persistent and consistent way is, I think, today, while we're still here doing what we do with so much love and passion. Thank you. Thanks so much for listening. Keep tuning in to hear more great insights from the coolest marketers from around the world. If you haven't already, make sure to subscribe and follow the Marketing Millennials podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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20:11Thank you.