Morning!
A typical person buys Coca Cola only once or twice a year.
And these typical people make half of all Coke buyers!
The rest of us grab a can a few more times a year. And only a tiny handful buy it more than once a week.
Coke spends billion on ads like this one to be present and memorable.
Because Coke faces the same challenge as the rest of us: grabbing a tiny window of people’s attention and reminding them that Coke is fun. That they’ve had it before and they liked it.
And that’s why so many digital-native brands can’t stay exclusively online.
There are two ingredients to brand growth:
Salience
Persuasion
You need to be present, stand out, and persuade people to spend their money on you over everything else on their mental shopping list.
An excellent example of salience and persuasion in action is BlendJet.
It started as an online-online brand in 2017. Like any upstanding digital-native brand, they’ve been focused on growing their social presence with 645 000 followers on IG and 100 000 followers on Facebook.
They launched their first retail partnership in 2020 with an exclusive bundle and a display customised for the retailer with Walmarts. Since then, they’ve scaled that model across other major retailers in the US.
Their co-founder and CEO, Ryan Pamplin, explained in an interview, "Our goal with all of these custom displays is to optimise our retail merchandising and maximise sell-through,”
Pamplin also revealed that “stores that feature a curated BlendJet see a 50% to 100% sales lift compared to stores that carry Blendjet products but don’t have a curated display.”
And they’re not the only DTC brand planning to send more offline.
BelliWelli is another example of a DTC brand spending up to 30% of its marketing budget offline.
After marketing through Facebook groups, the brand spends between 20% - 30% of its ad spend on OOH.
In an interview with Digiday, co-founder Katie Wilson explained that “Based on what I know right now, I would still opt to spend $5,000 in the billboard, out-of-home industry all day, every day than I would on Facebook.”
She also said that “OOH billboards have proven a measurable and cost-effective way to boost brand awareness in comparison to the digital marketing landscape, where users are “inundated all the time.”
With just a year in business, the DTC brand is expected to spend more on OOH after a video showing their hot-pink signage in Portland racked up 2 million views on TikTok.
To attract new customers, digital-native brands need to reach people offline.
Just as traditional retail brands such as Levi’s are improving their DTC game, simply getting on retail shelves will not drive growth for digital-native brands.
Creating an online buzz is a must, but it’s not enough.
To grow, digital-native brands need to persuade people beyond their heavy and digital-savvy customers.
And they need to build salience by getting more people used to seeing their brand when they're out and about, whether it’s through an eye-catching display or a head-turning OOH Display.
💎 In case you missed:
How 3 DTC brands use retail channels as a discovery platform. /ModernRetail
What’s the Deal With Synesthesia TikTok? /Wired
Think you have a great idea? Ask these 6 questions to gain perspective. /HBR
Siegel+Gale’s Ben Osborne on what it means to be a consumer-led brand today. /Econsultancy
Marketers set their sights on brand awareness. /MarketingCharts
Stay curious!
Aliyar