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Brought to you by the founders of Chubbies (9 figure exit and 10-figure IPO) and Loop Returns, Tom Montgomery and Preston Rutherford have a single goal with this podcast: Give you new information, lessons and learnings, translated into specific tactics you can employ TODAY at your brand to help you build the strongest brand possible, which if you build that strong emotional connection, ALWAYS translates into more profit, if done well. It's our job to help you do brand building well.
You can expect 3 things from the podcast episodes:
1) share the best brand building knowledge from the best books on brand building,
2) talk with the founders and operators building the best brands today and
3) share share all our mistakes, lessons we've learned along the way.
After ever episode, you'll leave with 1-3 actions you can apply today, as informed by the best brand builders in the world (not us), our mistakes in building a brand that had an IPO, and founders of the world's best brands.
Tom (00:00)
Welcome everyone to the Brand Builders podcast. It is me, Biff Reynolds. No, sorry. Sorry, that's my W -W -E alter ego, Biff Reynolds. It is me, Tom Montgomery. And I'm here with my most illustrious co -host slash host, Preston, Preston.
Preston Rutherford (00:10)
What's up?
Mmm, yes.
Tom (00:30)
Rangsniferd?
Preston Rutherford (00:32)
They call me Shredder in the ring.
Tom (00:34)
Ooh, shredder. I like it. Shredded lettuce coming down the back. Little bit of shredded lettuce for yourself. It is a pleasure to see everyone here on the internet today. And first off, how is everybody doing? Okay, nice. Yeah.
Preston Rutherford (00:40)
Lechuga! Senor Lechuga!
Tom (00:57)
Tough week? Yeah, okay. Got it. Got it. Well, hopefully we can help with that. So today Preston and I have the genius idea to talk about something that's kind of been top of mind for us for the last couple of months. And we'll see how the conversation goes. But particularly the prompt here was, hey, let's rethink how we might have gone about building chubbies.
Preston Rutherford (00:57)
to hear.
Tom (01:27)
Were we back at the kind of few million dollar run rate scale in terms of top line revenue? We were growing, but we were still wet behind the ears and had a lot of pain to come.
the subsequent years that followed our first couple of years in business, how might we have approached that time period differently knowing what we know now? And particularly in light of kind of a modern toolkit and some of the things that are happening in the world of automation and artificial intelligence, machine learning and things like that. How might we go about building a brand today? Because, you know, our most recent experiences at Chubby's and at
solo were managing businesses on the scale of hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue and thinking through kind of more scale problems. And it's fun to kind of think through, hey, what about at the much, much smaller scale, but still on the rise and still kind of very fast growth rates. So that's the topic is.
what we know now with the world as it is today, how might we approach building a brand and building a really highly profitable long -term growth story we're rebuilding today. So with that, I will open it up to you Preston with the first question.
How do you think about, what's a framework that comes to mind for you? Or what are the things that come to mind for you when I introduce that topic of, hey, imagine we are running Chubbies. We've just started it last year. We're on a run rate of about a few million bucks. We've got the world ahead of us. We're growing. We're investing in meta. We're investing in kind of the modern channels, finding success.
How might you rethink the way we would be building?
Preston Rutherford (03:35)
Great question. And I think my answer from a framework perspective would be do whatever I can to become a star on the WWE. And if that doesn't pan out, then we can actually talk about strategies and tactics. But that would probably be my first approach.
Tom (03:58)
Maybe another episode that is basically cracking WWE. We can go through that. And what are the, what are the minor league circuits that are the best feeders into WWE? What's the workout routine that most promotes the wrestler body?
Preston Rutherford (04:02)
Exactly. Exactly. Yes.
Exactly. There's a great Netflix special on that actually. Yeah, I think it's called the West Valley Wrestling. Anyways, some good stuff there and I've already got it mapped out. So when we talk about it, I'll have a lot to say. Outside of that, however, there are a few things that we might do. And what we might say is just that this is...
somewhat of a fun thought exercise to because when we were at numbers like this goodness it was nearly a decade ago or more obviously a lot has changed but as we went through this experience we do think that a lot of the learnings and mistakes that we made can still be applicable to today's brand builder and
So I think the hope is that that we can provide some info on what given that we made effectively every mistake in the book, some things that you might apply on a go forward basis. So from a framework perspective, a couple of the things that that stood out to us were the. A few things, one sort of like the power of let's isolate the things that are critically important.
so that we can allocate our time, energy, resources, dollars to these things, particularly around what is the wheel that we do need to reinvent and what are the things that we just simply do not. And the four things that we sort of isolated and wanted to discuss were on this idea of sort of like what matters. And we sort of thought,
Some of them are related, of course, but just this notion of creative, one, two, storytelling, three, content, and four, product. Obviously, the first three, somewhat related, but there are some specific things that we can talk about there, particularly as it relates to distribution of content, et cetera, et cetera, how best, how we think we might approach it if we were doing it again.
So yeah, that's sort of like the framework that we're using within, as you said, the context of Holy smokes, the possibility for scale and leverage, whether it be from AI machine learning, et cetera, or just basic tools that have been created that aren't necessarily technically AI, pretty powerful. And the idea that...
there's, as in everything, a balance. There are some ways that the use of these sorts of tools can kind of be difficult. Difficult being sort of like a euphemism for maybe less productive. Maybe there are some things that where automation can maybe take you in the wrong direction or things like that that I think can become...
relatively obvious when you try some of these things, but I think sort of along the veins of some of the things that we have learned that are just a part of growing a business, figuring out how to grow, how best to grow, maybe even trying to ignore what other people are doing as a definition of success.
fighting the shiny object, the grass is greener, all of these sorts of things. I think that'll sort of guide a little bit of what we talk about today. But I think, Thomas, maybe to kick it off, I'm just sort of curious to get your thoughts on, as you think about these ideas of content, creative, storytelling, product, particularly in the range of, let's say, your three to 15 million in annual revenue.
Like how would you think about it? How would you approach it? What are some of the things that you might do differently from what our previous experience was? And let's just walk through some of those thoughts. Take a walk.
You might be on mute.
Tom (08:44)
Let's take a little walk, let's take a little meander. Let's see here. I think the way that I, so the way I thought about this is clarify what you need to be excellent at and then invest your resources there and outside of that,
Preston Rutherford (08:45)
Let's go on a little meander through the park.
Tom (09:08)
minimize your resource investment. Now it doesn't mean don't invest in these things, because a lot of these things are kind of blocking and tackling, but it's like, what are the things you need to be best in the world at in building a brand? And what are the things that you could be like everybody else and win because what you're infusing into that being like everybody else is best, best in class.
Um, and so yeah, the first element of that to me is this like, is, um, storytelling brand slash creatives slash content. It's all wrapped into one bucket for me. Um, that's like that DNA of being creative, that spark of thinking about everything and everything, every touch point as co as a content opportunity, as a content experience, um, which, you know, what is content, but, um,
to delight someone, leave them with a lasting emotional impression, and that's kind of what we're all about when we talk about which is like quote unquote brand. And then the flip side of that, also a very creative endeavor, is product and making sure that your product is differentiated, satisfies a white space. And a lot of times we talk about this as...
kind of creatively you're hitting an emotional white space, product wise you're hitting kind of market white space or jobs to be done white space. Both wildly important and those are the things that we need to be like best in class at from a like creativity perspective. And the way I think about the best teams is they're like, you know, kind of on one hand incredible artists, incredible creatives and on the other hand also incredible scientists, hypothesis havers, but who then are guided by experiments.
And so that's the DNA to really, really populate the business with and in every position have a shading of that in one way or the other. And then I think the other piece is at the leadership level, having a wild amount of discipline, a wild amount of focus is critical.
And so those are kind of the DNA things. And then a more strategic, like, what am I trying to do with this business? I think we also had that a little bit wrong, where at Chubby's, we implicitly thought that, like, hey, when you're building a business, you have two outcomes. You get acquired or you IPO. Those are the two. And I think when you look at the world of brands,
That's not super common. And so there was a third option that I didn't realize was on the table is build a kick -ass profitable business that you own a massive chunk of.
and you have control of that spits out a lot of cash that you dividend out to shareholders and you create an awesome existence for your employees and for your company. Like the idea, I don't know why, but the idea of just staying an awesome, excellent private company didn't occur to me when we were starting Chuppies, when we were at this stage. Like as we got farther and farther along and saw, whoa, like we're generating a lot of profit here, that became like a really interesting opportunity.
Preston Rutherford (12:18)
not even close.
Tom (12:26)
that I wish we would have in the early days understood more about. And so to me, what's foundational there is profit is really important and not just momentary profit, but then building the engine that drives growing and growing and growing and growing profits, right? Like that's our role. And that wasn't obvious to me when we started and when we were at the kind of $5 million stage. I think -
We're still very much in this exit mindset. Back then, exits were very thought of as a revenue optimization sort of game. I don't know to which that's changed or not. I think, obviously, the public markets are rewarding much more profitability. But I still think there's this intrinsic motivator to grow revenue.
And I would kind of looking back, fully stop that. And so then it's like, okay, how can I, how can I use that to build an engine that creates long -term profit growth? Um, and so that was like the basis with which, um, I thought about it. And then, um, and then it is, okay, what are the fundamental elements of that engine that I have to get right? And so we talked about kind of brain and creative, um,
And I think there's a bit of like DNA and then there's a wild amount of experiment, experiment, experiment. And one of the things that I think is an interesting lens to think through the kind of content like brand creative problem is pick the things you want to be the best in the world at. Um,
even within that domain, right? It's not that you're always gonna be, you're gonna be the best at running billboards and TV ads and social and packaging and on -product content experiences and in inbox content experiences.
and direct mail and everything else. It's like, where do you, at five million, or at five million scale, you don't have a hundred people working at the business, right? So how do you focus on those things you're choosing to be excellent at? And how do you know what the right thing is? But I think it's useful to think through what are those elements? And so when we think about what are these opportunities you have to infuse the customer experience with quote unquote brand or storytelling, there's that thing that leaves a lasting impression and optimally creates sharing.
a shareable experience for a customer. So they have an awesome customer support experience. That oftentimes can turn into a shared content experience where they say they tweet or they go post on Instagram, hey, just had the most interesting, awesome, cool experience with the Chumby's customer support crew. Also, your inbox experience is something, the kind of unboxing, the opening experience is something that can be shared. A lot of like YouTubers will do unbox
experiences of interesting and cool brands. That's something you can invest time and attention into. Social content, building content to go to grow on Instagram, TikTok, etc. You can invest there. Big budget, like TV oriented content. You can invest there. It's typically harder for smaller brands, but you can do that and you get excellent at that. And how to do that on a budget. Direct mail, print experiences.
Preston Rutherford (15:39)
Yep. Would you to that point though, I'm vibing with this a bunch and I want to get your thoughts here on these topics of picking the things that you're going to be the best in the world at. Would you, how would that approach have been different from the Chubby's experience if at all?
Tom (15:59)
I think that at the kind of $5 million stage, I think there was an element of that that like we were naturally pretty focused on social. I think we were also naturally pretty focused on inbox. Like I think those are the two that we were probably the most focused on. And if it was outside of that, we probably weren't.
Preston Rutherford (16:17)
Mm -hmm.
Tom (16:24)
gonna be the best at it. But we did a lot of work on how can we make this kind of unboxing experience really interesting and shareable and magical, and how can we make social content that is shared and powerful. Now, that may be because those are like the cheapest ones. And so I think there's an element of that that like we...
we scrapped into and that made, like I wonder if that's indicative of like where a lot of brands should kind of look to start is like how to innovate on those content experiences in their specific category.
I think what we, what we could have done differently in terms of like creative focus is just been way more structured with that. Like, I don't think we were like, Hey, everybody in the company, you know, here are the things we're going to, we're going to really nail. And I also think that particularly when it came to like the unboxing experience, we didn't have great KPIs there. We didn't have a great understanding of like, what was that doing for us? Um, and so we went through, we used to, uh, drop a free like,
Preston Rutherford (17:16)
Mm -hmm.
Right. Right.
Tom (17:37)
surprise gift with purchase inbox. In the early days, we didn't have a great way to keep that and maintain that even though there's like an intuitive notion that like, hey, that's cool. And we see content getting shared. We see that we didn't have an intrinsic understanding of the value of that. Why is that important? And so I think when it comes to some of these more, less like...
Preston Rutherford (17:56)
Right.
Tom (18:03)
kind of you have these direct attribute, like when you're posting on social, you can see shares, you can see likes, you can see views, things like that. That's very immediate feedback where you're like, oh, I'm doing well or I'm not. With an inbox insert, you're not getting that so much. Like you try a new one and it's not so obvious. You have to do holdouts, you have to do all TV testing. And while we did those things, we probably weren't excellent at that, like from a data perspective at that scale.
And so that's probably the one that like, um, I would have audited a bit harder. I mean, invested probably more in.
Preston Rutherford (18:37)
Yep. How would you think about, so okay, I'm doing five this year and I'm trying to figure out a couple things. One, how much should I be leaning on agencies from the perspective of creative and media buying? How much should I be?
spending on allocating dollars to time people focus to creating.
video content, social content that might not necessarily be the exact asset that you throw in your ASC campaign. From a capital allocation, resource allocation perspective, knowing what you know now, how would you give thoughts or approach the idea of sort of like agency versus in -house allocation of resources on creating this video content versus just iterating the heck out of these static assets.
Maybe yes to all, but yeah, how would you think about that if you were to do it again now?
Tom (19:46)
Yeah, I think my take is more nuanced because I think that different brands and founders and leadership teams have different superpowers.
But I think there is a non -negotiable element of that that is you still have to create awesome product, one, and two, you still have to create these shareable content experiences. But the degree to which I'm excellent at creating video content doesn't have to be the currency of my brand.
I can be excellent at creating like that unboxing experience of designing that. I can be excellent at designing print and using that as the area where I really stand out and setting out catalogs and mailers and things like that. I think it's choosing what your superpower is and making sure that you own that. You have a team in -house to own that because that enables you to be iterative. A lot of times when you're working with an agency, you tend to be a little bit less iterative. There are some great agencies out there who are.
But just the costs are double, right? Like they have to make their margin on the creative and then you pay the raw cost of the creative. And so just by that math, effectively you cut the shots on goal you can take in half. And I don't think you can afford that in the areas where you want to be super powered. So it's like pick your superpower, own that. If video is not your superpower that you've chosen,
Preston Rutherford (20:51)
Yeah.
Tom (21:18)
then you have two options. One is enlist an agency. I might suggest that you're looking for, you're not necessarily looking for an agent, you're looking for an agency that produces the content themselves, right? That's what I would suggest so that they're not marking up costs. You're paying directly to the team that's actually gonna produce content. And...
And so as opposed to a team that comes up with a creative idea and then goes and hires the whole other team that otherwise you'd be using to produce the content, if only you had the idea sort of thing. Instead, I would find a team that can do all of that together and make sure that they can translate your superpower into.
the great video creative or vice versa, right? The great packaging. If you have great video creative, but you're not excellent, like kind of the package design stuff, or you don't want to be excellent at that sort of thing. So that's one option is hire the agency. I would just acknowledge that the trade -off is you're going to be less efficient, right? From a capital perspective, but the advantage of an agency is one resource.
Preston Rutherford (22:11)
Mm -hmm.
Yep.
Tom (22:33)
growth and diminishment, right? They've got a team that they can quickly add bodies to. And if it's not working, you can cut it without needing to go through a performance improvement plan or whatever else.
Preston Rutherford (22:45)
Right.
Tom (22:46)
So the kind of managerial effort, managerial overhead is a lot and that ends up taking a lot of your time. With an agency you get to be very direct, you get to be very concrete, concise, and if they're not hitting the marks you move on to the next one. Typically that's not the way we think about hiring people onto the team. But the alternative is hire the team in -house and allocate, you know,
fewer dollars than you otherwise would have to an agency. The other thing about an agency is that you can start small. So you can start with a portion of some creative person's time as opposed to needing to hire them fully. So those are kind of the trade -offs. I think if I were rethinking it, I probably would have, again, outside of our superpowers, started with small -scale agency work. I think that's the creative angle.
Preston Rutherford (23:19)
Right.
Mm -hmm.
Tom (23:39)
In the world of media buying, I don't, that's a good question. I think there are some really talented people out there, but I've also seen some agencies that do, that charge you for doing a not very good job of managing your media.
And so you get burned on both ends because you're spending really inefficiently and they're taking a cut of that spend. Um, the modern toolkit with like Facebook and methods advantage plus campaigns, Google's perform P max campaigns. Um, they're, they're trying to have used more and more and more automation machine learning into this to frankly, like help marketers not make major mistakes. Now there are guardrails.
you have to put on those campaigns because you can't just blind trust in those. But there are toolkits that are getting better and better and better such that like the minutia of kind of keyword optimization, keyword targeting, and exact match phrase match, etc. long tail keyword, things like that in SEM is starting to become not quite as much the kind of power law.
as it used to be. And then similarly on meta, like all the optimization and lookalikes and lookalike plus and lookalikes one through 20, all that stuff is starting to get mushed into just let Facebook figure it out. They've got great signal. They're working on this. And then how do you give them the right information and the right guardrails to make the best decisions for your business? That's important. But that oftentimes comes from the team, like the internal team. Now.
That is work, that is experience that you have to have. And so there are agencies out there that understand this dynamic. But typically those are agencies that can walk the walk in terms of showing you the contribution margin that they're growing for your business. I think the other piece to this is most agencies are good at...
direct response marketing. Media buying agencies tend to be really good at direct response marketing that we would have worked with at this stage. And it's just a note when you think about how to build brand that probably aren't many agencies out there that really understand the dynamics of building brand digitally in addition to.
building high ROAS campaigns and things like that, which I think you need both of at this stage to really, really find long -term profit growth.
Preston Rutherford (26:05)
Right.
When you say you need both, you need both the brand building components and the DR direct response performance marketing components. Yep. How would you think about, yeah, how would you think about approaching that, whether it be strategically or tactically from focus dollars time people perspective and would there be any differences from the same time in the Chubbys experience?
Tom (26:16)
Yep. Yeah, exactly. Those are the two things that need to go.
Yeah. Um, yeah. So, so I was kind of rethinking this and were I kind of building again today, I think that I would have engines of growth for both the brand side and the direct response monetization side. Right. So brand is how do I build more and more people who know who I am, what I.
do what products they offer and have an emotional affect towards me that's positive. So all of this like mental state and memory structure and all these sorts of things. And then that's half of the equation. And then the other half is making sure I'm there when they are ready to buy and I'm giving them really powerful, compelling opportunities to buy in ways that is in ways that are brand creative as opposed to brand depleted. So not heavy relying on
promotions and things like that.
Um, and so when I was thinking about kind of these engines, okay, there's this like content brand engine and depending on what you're trying to do, there are probably going to be different KPIs, but you want to understand how does this manifest in a way that I can track it every day or every week. So you have fast feedback mechanisms on that aspect. And so let's take social content. It's basically what are all of the engagements digitally that I'm hoping to revoke? What's their value? What is my efficient frontier and how can I invest to build those?
Use organic social as the guidepost. And so start posting a lot of interesting differentiated content, organic social, find those things that drive your KPIs, get those posts, boost them, promote them, um, understand your cost per's and let that be kind of one of your engines. Right. And then again, you're throwing in this like really differentiated content if that's what you've chosen, because that's what you're choosing to be best in the world at. And again, we've discussed it's non -negotiable and then the framework is relatively simple.
It's find what works, put money behind it, understand your costs, you understand your values, and treat it as a sales and trading desk, right? You're trying to pay under the kind of value of these things from a long -term and contribution perspective.
and spend as much as you can until you hit your efficient frontier marginally and then stop, keep your spending. So that's on the kind of brand front and specifically for social and that paradigm exists across all of these different vehicles. So there's this kind of a brand engine sort of thing. And so if I'm focused on packaging, it's okay, how many shares am I expecting on this content? How am I expecting this to come back in terms of growth in post -production?
purchase surveys, whatever it is, as I start to put more investment in this, I have to have some way to track it on a week to week basis. And that's when you're probably tracking on a weekly basis. So maybe it's searches, maybe it's mentions, it's shares, it's post purchase surveys that you're targeting. And as I try something new in the packaging and inbox, I want to see those things affected.
probably also doing some holdouts on LTV and things like that. So just kind of brand component. Then the direct response component is kind of composed of two ways of causing a response. One is paid and one is kind of organic direct response sort of stuff. So paid is ads. We don't need to dig too far into that because there's a lot of people who talk about that.
And then on the organic direct response, that's your kind of email SMS. And I think one of the things that I probably would have done differently is at Chubby's we were very heavily focused on batch and blast. And I think that was great, but it also got to a point where like, if you're going to do anything, you have to write a full, a brand new, fresh piece of excellent creative every time. And it has to hit every time and you're sending it to the whole list every time. But meanwhile, particularly like nine years in, 10 years in, whatever.
The people you're acquiring have never seen any of the last nine years of content that you've created and that paradigm exists in every single business. And so how can you use batch and blast to create T up excellent content, but then you send automated flows through right and get customers automated messaging to that. Then you can fine tune and dial for every segment for how much volume and frequency they need as opposed to the inverse where batch and blast is everything that
Preston Rutherford (30:43)
Right.
Tom (31:08)
requires a massive team, massive structure.
And it basically wastes a lot of that creative that you've created just sitting in the history books of great fashion advice campaigns that you sent out. And so I would nail my paid direct response engine, understand the unit economics. I would nail kind of the organic direct response engine and understand the unit economics there. And that's kind of growth, right? Gross margin is another kind of major lever. I would make sure that I have a path to 70 plus percent gross margins through my direct business.
margins and then work to keep headcount minimized as a percentage of total, which the way we were thinking about it is how much can you bring automation to bear to basically have your team composed of all freaking...
excellent heavy hitters in their relative domains, people who like, you want to have equity value in the business, who have pointer mindsets, all that stuff. And then once you're in this like tactical execution realm, using contractors, agencies, automation as much as you possibly can, it's kind of a framework to kind of think about it. And like rethinking the business that way, I think gives you a lot of leverage, gives you a lot of this capability of this becoming a great growing cashflow stream and having high bar.
are whoever you bring into the fold, you have to have, you have to have an owner mindset, you have to have an owner stake sort of thing. So anyway, that's like a smattering of thoughts.
Preston Rutherford (32:37)
Yep.
The final thing I would ask, go ahead.
Tom (32:44)
Well, you go ahead, we got four minutes.
Preston Rutherford (32:47)
I was just gonna say, final thing I would ask is, is folks who...
might just sort of say, hey, this organic thing, posting on my socials, yeah, you know, I'll just take pictures that I've got from photo shoots or whatever and just, you know, I'll get my one post out a day and maybe I'll try a witty caption or something like that, but really I'm gonna focus 95 % of my time energy money on just, you know, just like nailing my...
ASC creative and because that's like the most obvious thing that is driving business for me. Not implying that any of that's bad, but just are there some things that you might offer from a note perspective in terms of, you know, how to think about maybe just short versus long term, just things we've learned on that front or maybe just that's the path.
Tom (33:47)
Yeah.
Yeah, I think one of the things that we saw was...
you can grow through short -term revenue.
One of the beautiful things about platforms like Facebook and Google is anybody can start advertising there. Historically TV, you're required to invest a 50k budget at least and usually they will try to push you to spend 100k because you don't see any result from it unless you're spending lots of money. So these platforms like Google, Facebook, etc. they allowed...
companies with an idea, a product to get going and get moving and buy revenue. Because there are people who are searching for those products that want to find the most interesting or best one. And new brands have one, they have novelty, right? They have a look and feel just inherently, even if it's just a fashion item that no one's seen before. And then two, they have this unique insight of being able to have a completely fresh take on this market. And so usually they're solving a new problem.
And so when they're bottom of funnel, a lot of times new brands are some of the most compelling opportunities and thus you start to buy.
revenue. The hard part is maintaining that over time, right? So you can grow and a of brands will see short -term pop or like, and this is like varying degrees of life cycle because sometimes they'll figure out the kind of the short -term revenue optimization and that's when they'll see their pop. But you'll see pops based on short -term. Great. You're getting better at monetizing. You're getting better at that value prop when somebody's ready to buy a bottom of funnel. But what we realize is you have to be balancing that out.
with more and more people understanding your brand, who you are, what you do, what products you sell, when they're not ready to buy, or when they don't buy from you. Because in any given, the best ads in the world are clicking at one, two percent, maybe, and two percent click through rates. And so 98 % of people aren't clicking, 98, 99 % of people aren't clicking, right? So they're seeing the ad, and if the ad was just another among them.
of products that they've seen, then that's not a lasting brand impression. Um, and then two, um, once they've clicked through the vast majority are not buying, right? So maybe the best case scenario is you've got a 5 % conversion rate or something like that on, on like ad clicks, uh, which would be incredible. And so 95 % of those people aren't buying. So effectively 99 .9 % of these people are not buying from you. Um, and it may be the case that you're creative is already leaving them with excellent brand impressions, even though it's.
not converting, but a lot of times the sort of creative that works to convert people is very product heavy. It's very offer focused. It tells you the price. It's like the stuff that works to sell your product on like the Nordstrom shopping page, right? It's the product, it's the price, it's the features, it's photography that shows people wearing it, things like that. But it's usually not storytelling. It's usually not an emotionally evocative thing that embeds itself in long.
memory and that's why these disciplines have kind of found different kind of homes over the years where like in TV the classic world of direct response marketing was like late night dial the number sort of thing product pitches and the world of brand was more emotional 30 second spots you know big moments etc and I think there's a lot that both disciplines can learn from each other but I one of the notes is like the content is just different and so or it tends to be different sometimes you can have a win that goes
both ways, but it's important to understand that it's not about top of funnel, it's not about bottom of funnel. Your customers don't know that this is a DR adverse or a brand ad, but it's are you provoking a balance of actions? Are you provoking the actions that show you that you're building long -term brand and building those memory structures? And are you also provoking those actions that are driving revenue today, shopping experiences today? And it's the balance of those that grow over time. And so back to your question of, hey, I'll just take my ads and post them on organic social.
If your ads are excellent at doing both of those things, sweet, you freaking nailed it. I will say that's very hard to do and very atypical. And so then it's, yeah, maybe you do half and half. Maybe you do some of your storytelling that drives these more brand actions and then you take your DR things to go shopping and you figure out your brand's own balance. But I will say that extremism tends to not be super productive.
only going to do top of funnel tends to not be productive. I'm only going to do bottom of funnel tends to not be productive. The most deceptive of those two is only doing bottom of funnel because you can grow. But what you'll find is profitability evades you and then you see that come down as competitors catch up. They match your value prop, they beat your price, they're willing to take lower margins, whatever.
Preston Rutherford (38:42)
Yep. Gold, gold Thomas, thank you. This was awesome. I think we've got, we're gonna get a lot of folks when they see this, their minds are gonna get blown, their faces are gonna melt, and they are going to tell their friends, hopefully. So, please call at 911.
Tom (39:01)
This sounds like a medical emergency. So, if you experienced that, please, yes. Please stop listening to the podcast and let us know after you return from your hospital visit so we can take down the episode.
Preston Rutherford (39:09)
Sick medical professional medical help.
Keep us keep us posted. Yes. Well This was fun. I think very useful and well, I hope let us know people who listen and We'll try to we're just gonna try to keep mixing it up dabble with
Tom (39:33)
Mix it up.
Preston Rutherford (39:35)
with some of the most important foundational works on brand and brand building, talk about some current events, things that are happening in the world of brands and brand building today, do these things where we talk a little bit about maybe how we would do differently, things differently, reflecting on the experience, and then maybe even mix them all together, who knows? But four, my good friend.
Best man at my wedding, Thomas Montgomery. This is Preston Shredder, WWE star in 2026 and beyond, Rutherford, signing off, thanking you for your time today, joining us on the Brand Builders podcast. Goodbye.
Tom (40:21)
Goodbye.