The Outsights: January 15, 2024
The power of the brand, marketing and supply chain hiccups, and an app to streamline your product seeding activities.
Hello, and welcome to The Outsights—Nebulab’s bi-weekly collection of the best reads, listens, and products from the world of retail, eCommerce, and DTC.
When I first started writing The Outsights, the idea was to have a newsletter that could act as a catch-all for any interesting pieces we were reading or listening to, even if they were completely unrelated to one another. But every once in a while, we’ll stumble upon a topic that’s particularly hot in the industry, and most of the content will end up being around that topic.
Today’s issue is (mostly) about the dynamics of creating and sustaining a strong brand and its myriad positive effects on a company’s marketing initiatives, financial posture, and investor relations.
Thought provokers
NEBULAB ORIGINAL
The cultural footprint of brands: from ingredients to icons. You might recognize the Nebulab name on this one. Published with our friends at Future Commerce, this guide outlines a modern taxonomy of brand strategy, offering brand builders a linear framework to navigate the different stages of consumer awareness and brand maturity. You can’t miss it!
🔒 Why 2024 will be the year of the brand. A strong, cohesive brand identity allows brands to achieve escape velocity, jump off the hamster wheel of pure-play performance marketing and execute a more holistic, longer-term strategy. The challenge is sustaining brand marketing efforts at a time when budgets are tight and brands desperately need a win to stay afloat.
🔒 How brands make culture. You should know by now: when Ana Andjelic hits publish, the piece almost invariably ends up in this newsletter. A lot of her content is focused on the fashion industry, but there are takeaways here for anyone building consumer brands: “The new brand marketing focuses on the entire funnel, making [the] ‘evaluate’ and ‘advocate’ stages more relevant through content, collaborations, merch, curation and creative partnerships.”
Goings-on
Amika launches Stylist Collective to strengthen its professional sales channel. This one also falls in the ‘power of brand’ bucket. For technical products, education is a fantastic trust-building strategy—and can sometimes be the only sensible strategy to penetrate saturated B2B segments.
A perfect storm of supply chain issues could impact retailers globally. Supply chain might be on a bad streak. Even though disruptions caused by the Houthi attacks will not do as much damage as Covid, an increase in fulfillment costs is the last thing brands and consumers need right now.
TikTok Shop sellers say its AI moderation has gone rogue, doling out 'bogus' violations and freezing products without a clear explanation. TikTok is facing backlash over several technical and content moderation issues plaguing the platform: it not only has a fake products problem, but in trying to overcorrect it, it’s also banning legitimate sellers. That said, we’re still bullish that TikTok can figure out commerce before Amazon figures out social media.
Tool of the week
Sprout. This one’s a shameless plug, but if you’re on Shopify and doing product seeding (i.e., sending free product samples to VIPs, influencers, or retailers), Sprout is the tool you need to step up your game. Trusted by leading brands such as Liquid Death, SkinnyDipped, and Vacation, Sprout allows you to run beautiful seeding campaigns that are fully integrated with your Shopify store. Check out the website for a 14-day free trial!
Does your brand need help with strategy, design or development?
For over a decade, we’ve been shaping, launching, and scaling shopping experiences for category disruptors such as Cometeer, Framework, and Huckberry. No matter where you’re going, we can help you get there.
That’s it for today!
If you’ve come across any interesting articles, podcasts, or tools we should check out, you can email us at [email protected].
See you in two weeks! 👋