How to Create a Category-Leading Brand

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Welcome to today's episode.

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Today we are talking about how to create category leading brands, and we have a great guest to help us talk about this, who specializes in this and growth marketing Jason, welcome to the show.

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Thanks for having me.

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Maybe we can take a minute for you to explain a little bit about who you are and what you do.

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Yeah, absolutely.

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My name is Jason Shafton and I lead a growth consultancy called Winston-Francois.

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We help technology companies scale into category leading brands.

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My background includes working at companies like Google, headspace, paramount and Vita, and over the course of the five years that I've been leading this team, we've helped dozens of high growth startups get on the right path.

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Awesome, we're ready to be inspired.

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The five years that I've been leading this team, we've helped dozens of high growth startups get on the right path.

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Awesome.

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We're ready to be inspired.

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Why don't you tell us a story about some of the best marketing you've done, that you're the most proud of, perhaps helping one of your clients create a category leading brand.

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Yeah, we're very fortunate.

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We worked with a lot of companies.

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I think probably my most proud accomplishment is a company we worked with a little bit about a year and a half ago now that is based in Europe and they are in the kind of website and e-commerce space and they were in trouble.

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They were losing a lot of money every month seven figures and we came in and assessed the issues going on with the business, identified some kind of opportunities to turn things around and, over the course of six months, took the number that they were losing every month and broke that back, pulled that back, broke even and caused the business to stop losing money.

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And broke that back, pulled that back, broke even and caused the business to stop losing money.

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And then a few months after that, they were actually returning that same figure that they had been losing to the balance sheet.

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And that was the result of the team coming in and assessing the way that they were operating across performance, marketing, lifecycle marketing, growth, experimentation, conversion rate optimization and even building kind of creative campaigns and programs and new systems and process and helping them develop a high performance team to achieve those goals.

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So I'm really proud of that work.

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And then I'll add one more thing, and this was a formative experience in my career, which is I was at Google.

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I was 26 years old and somehow sitting in a warehouse on the second floor Mr Brainwash if you ever saw Exit Through the Gift Shop Banksy's, this guy, mr Brainwash in LA, we were throwing the Google Music launch party in this warehouse and downstairs Maroon 5, busta Rhymes were playing.

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All these celebrities were there.

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It was this wild party.

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And upstairs, on the second floor, I was sitting with a small group of Google employees and we were pushing the button to turn Google Music on for the world and make it live.

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And it was a surreal moment because I'm this kid and what am I doing here?

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How did I get here?

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And I felt really lucky and grateful to be a part of something special like that that lots and lots of people were going to use and ultimately have.

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That's a cool vibe launching Google Music for sure.

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Tell me the story about helping the company in Europe turn things around.

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What was the learning from the pivot there, from losing money to making money every month?

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What was the efficiency key or the unlock there that really turned it around for them?

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It was a couple things.

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One we can't take all the credit.

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There was a strong leadership team that kind of got brought together at that time that helped make that happen, including a new chief financial officer and strong operating partners at the kind of board and investor level.

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But ultimately what we identified when we came in was a lot of the spending they were doing across marketing channels was inefficient, and so what we did was identify those inefficiencies, call them out, put together a set of recommendations of here's things we should change.

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For example, your affiliate program that you're running.

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You're spending hundreds of dollars to acquire a customer that might only net you a couple hundred dollars in revenue over their entire lifetime.

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So let's change the economics of that program to unwind those losses and stop losing money.

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Every new customer we acquire and we found those kinds of efficiencies across their Google ads campaigns, their meta ads campaigns and even in the way that they were sending lifecycle emails and running experiments on their site to drive conversion.

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In each of those cases there was very discreet oh, this is not the best practice.

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Here's the right way to do this.

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From decades of experience across our team, having done this many times with lots of companies, let's implement those best practices and let's change the way that you're doing this stuff so that we can do it the right way.

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And I think a lot of companies get into this thing where they're like I have to invent the answer.

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I have to come up with a new, innovative, novel solution to a to an known and already solved problem, and what we try to do is come in and say you don't need to spend all that time and fumble in the dark.

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Let us help you solve the problem with what we know is a solution that already exists.

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So one of the things you specialize in is growth marketing, and that's a buzzword that a lot of people will throw around.

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But where does the rubber meet the road with growth marketing, in your opinion?

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the rubber meets the road.

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When you have an awesome product, you've found product market fit and then you can put together a really effective growth experimentation program to identify a bunch of things you want to try and test and prioritize those based on what you think they will have in terms of impact, and then execute those experiments, document what you learn, measure everything that you do and feed that back into the process.

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I like to think about growth marketing.

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As you know, growth is the kind of intersection of product and marketing and growth marketing is that bend towards marketing.

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It's the things that we do to try to spread the word and tell the story of the brand, the product, the services, and in doing so, we want to be data driven, we want to be thoughtful and we want to take what we've learned and feed that back into a system so that we're thinking about things in terms of the scientific method.

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What is my hypothesis?

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What do I want to learn, what do I want to test and how do we learn those things quickly, efficiently and then improve the results of the business as a result?

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I think the difference for a lot of folks is traditional marketing is a lot of spray and pray.

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Let's advertise here and here and hope that it works.

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And there's an old adage 50% of my marketing works.

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I just don't know which 50%.

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And growth marketing is about understanding exactly which parts of your marketing and growth strategy are working and only focusing there.

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I think the focus on testing and the analytics of the testing is really the key unlock there.

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And I also agree that you're going nowhere fast if you don't have the right product.

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That's not a problem that marketing can solve.

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If you don't have the right product, market fit, you just can't market your way out of that.

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That's exactly right, yeah, product market fit is where you start, and then you grow from there.

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So let's talk about category leading brands.

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I think I've talked to a lot of companies over the years that want to create their own category and then they want to be a category leader in that category.

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No one wants to be number two or number three, definitely no one wants to be number nine.

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So how does one create a category leading brand?

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Brands are empty vessels that we fill with meaning and the first thing that people often experience of your brand is the product itself, like how good is the product?

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So think about something that you recently tried or did or experienced that was really great and how that made you feel about that brand right.

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For example, the first time you used an Apple, iphone or iPad or any iPod, there was something really magical about it, and Steve Jobs was a genius and a pioneer and one of the greatest inventors of our time and probably the best marketer of our time, and he would create this reality distortion field around everything he toucheder of our time, and he would create this reality distortion field around everything he touched and everything he created.

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And as a result of that, you have this magical experience.

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I briefly worked when I was finishing up college at an Apple store in Chicago this is pre-iPhone days selling lots of iPods and Macs, and I would internalize the mantra, which is that we were supposed to surprise and delight our customers and users.

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And so when you think about great brands, they do that.

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The first time you used Uber or Airbnb or, like I said, the first time you used an Apple product, first time I used Google search in like the early 2000s right, like it was just like holy crap.

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I've been using Lycos and AltaVista and this is way better and I think that's how you start with it's with great product again.

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But then where you can win as a brand is telling really amazing stories, and people don't really care about hearing stories of brands or companies.

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They care about stories that are about people.

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So how is your product, your service, your brand, helping people, making their lives better, making the world better, doing interesting things?

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You think about some of the best and most successful brands ever, like Nike and if you're, if you have a body, you're an athlete right and all the campaigns that they have done and the incredible athletes that they use as people to create a halo effect around their brand and make people have a ton of affinity for those brands.

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That's how you create a beautiful brand, and a category leading brand is that you tell stories that touch people's hearts and make people give a shit about your brand.

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I love that definition.

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Your example of Uber is great because the building I live in I can sit in my apartment on the 15th floor and I can say I need a ride and I can tap a few things on my phone and before I can get in the elevator down to the lobby, there's a car there waiting for me to take me wherever I need to go.

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That's pretty crazy when I think about the history of things.

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That's where we're at.

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Similarly, with Uber Eats, I can just tap some things on my phone and cold beer shows up at my door.

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What kind of magic are we conjuring?

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It is magical, Absolutely.

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That's the thing, and at Google they taught us know the user, know the magic, connect the two, and that is as a marketer.

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That's what you have to do is tell a story that connects the magic of your product and your brand with the user and what they care about.

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And one more example is I was using the predecessor to chat GPT.

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I was using GPT 2.0 and 2021.

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Some people had introduced me to it.

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There was some tools that were trying to integrate it, like grammarly, and I was using it.

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I was like what is this?

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This is terrible, like it doesn't even work right.

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And then when chat GPT came out, version 3.0, I was like, wow, this works now, like they got it right in this version and they're still not perfect.

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A lot of people would argue, even at version 4.0, it's not perfect, but it was able to delight people.

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At chat gpt version 3, I could say things like rewrite eric eden's linkedin profile and the voice of Homer's, iliad and the Odyssey, and it came back with something amazing.

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You could do things like that and it was like, wow, this will delight me.

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And so I think that these examples are just popping into.

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My mind is how do you become the leader is, yes, you have to have the right product, but then also the user stories, like the ones I just shared, of what value does it bring to people?

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How does it delight people?

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That's how you become a category leader, right.

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I totally agree.

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So what advice do you have for companies and marketers who want to execute on this?

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What would you tell them to do to go in this direction?

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Start by talking to your customers and your users Really get to know their problems intimately and deeply.

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And you've got to get to know them and really understand their needs, their wants, what their challenges are.

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I think Steve Jobs used to say they're hiring you to do a job, so what is the job to be done for them and how does your product, how does your brand, do that better than than anybody else?

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What makes you different and special?

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What is your magic?

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And once you figure that out and once you get to that point of product market fit and get the necessary customer feedback to build a great product experience, then tell that story and show don't tell, show folks how they can use your product to do what they're trying to do in a compelling way.

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We're in the world of the explosion of social media and TikTok and Instagram, so tell compelling video stories, let other people tell your story for you.

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Leverage nano and micro influencers and get a halo effect on your brand and do things that are creative, unique and different, that set you apart from your competitors.

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Great advice.

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Thank you very much for being with us today, sharing these stories and your insights.

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I'm going to link to your website so if people want to get in touch and learn more about how to create a category leading brand, they can do so.

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We really appreciate you being on the show today.

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Thanks so much for having me, Eric.