The Art (and Science) of Building a Customer-Centric E-Commerce Brand
Today’s e-commerce companies, faced with tightening advertising budgets and increased competition, are finding creative solutions to help personalize and gamify the customer experience. In this rapidly evolving landscape, having an intimate knowledge of your customer and leaning into lifestyle branding is more crucial for e-commerce brands than ever before.
Lifestyle branding certainly isn’t a new tactic, but it is an increasingly important — and challenging — differentiator. Growth Strategist, MARKOO, has a great primer on lifestyle branding for the unfamiliar. In essence, the idea is to connect your brand to a deeper, often aspirational set of values.
One of my favorite examples of successful lifestyle brand-building is Lululemon. They’ve evaded the graveyard of activewear brands and, more impressively, of DTC brands, by yes, selling very cute clothing — but mostly by creating a brand that embodies activity and wellness. Other classic examples of brands that embody a deeper identity: Apple, which has come to reflect innovation and simplicity; Nike, athleticism and empowerment; and Red Bull, adventure and adrenaline.
So, how do you create a brand and products that reflect an ethos? A few strategies I’m bullish on below.
Align and engage with existing, highly engaged communities.
- New mothers, pet parents, gamers, developers — these are all groups of people that naturally unite around a shared interest/goal. And there are so many more to tap into, from the hyper-niche to the more mainstream. Etsy aligned itself with the craft community; Nike focused on premiere athletes; Airbnb engaged travelers. Yes, they also had differentiated product offerings, among other factors that contributed to their success, but positioning themselves within specific communities at the earliest stages was instrumental to their growth.
- Creating a brand that resonates with these close-knit communities is difficult, but rewarding, resulting in greater customer engagement and organic distribution channels. Why? These customers are highly engaged in the problem you’re solving for, and, in turn, constantly referring products and sharing information with their communities.
- It’s for these reasons, in part, that our portfolio company Mad Rabbit has made community building central to their GTM strategy. The digitally native tattoo skincare brand has focused on tapping into and connecting a fragmented community of tattoo enthusiasts across the country on social channels, Discord, and through its brand ambassador program. In turn, Mad Rabbit has become a go-to resource for artists and enthusiasts seeking and sharing aftercare best practices, artist recommendations, and new ink. The result: loyal customers and an army of brand advocates.
Employ a data-driven approach to product creation and customer engagement.
- This has become more challenging with new “Do Not Track” policies and rising competition vying for customers’ attention. However, it’s highly needed. Brand building requires intimately understanding the needs and aspirations of customers — in terms of who they want to be and how they want to be perceived — and then building products and creating messaging that reinforces this image again and again. For these reasons, companies that give brands unique insights into their customers, which in turn directly inform product creation and brand building, are exciting to me.
- Two companies in our portfolio, Starday and Knit, are addressing this at two different junctures in the product lifecycle:
- Starday is building a portfolio of CPG food brands using data science to predict product-market fit and compress product innovation cycles. Through testing, insights, and machine learning models, the company tracks shifts in consumer behavior to detect pent-up demand and build better-for-you brands and products that meet consumers’ needs
- Knit is enabling existing brands — from NASCAR to Sweetgreen — to conduct robust consumer research quickly through its generative AI market research platform. Focus groups, 1–1 interviews, and surveys typically take marketers weeks, require expert professionals, and cost five to six figures to execute and properly synthesize, making it nearly impossible for a company to keep up in a rapidly evolving digital world. Knit, on the other hand, can gather and analyze thousands of quantitative, qualitative, and video responses in just 24–72 hours.
Bake a means of gleaning customer preferences into the product.
- By nature of how they’re structured, some businesses have unique access to data that they can then leverage for brand building.
- One company I came across recently, Nibbles, gives customers free pet insurance via the company’s credit card, however, they’re not technically an insurtech. Because of this, they can leverage data to inform affiliate partnerships and offerings that are in line with their brand and customer interests.
- Another company, Rock Paper Coin, is developing a wedding and hospitality-focused invoice and contract management platform for vendors, planners, and couples. Their mission is to bring trust and simplicity to what’s traditionally been a confusing and stressful process by becoming a centralized platform for all wedding-related tasks. The company plans to become this integrated hub by leveraging the insights it collects through wedding-related financial transactions.
Some may assume that the majority of brand building comes later on, post-product, when testing and deploying the product’s marketing strategy. I disagree.
Lifestyle e-commerce brands exist in practically every sector — from tech to athleisure — and the best, most authentic examples prove that deep brand building and audience alignment should start at inception. Because the groundwork for developing a product that reflects the voice of the customer is having a genuine understanding of their needs.
