Brands That Win in 2025 Will Do THIS (Are You Ready?)

[00:00:00] Richard Gaffin: Hey folks. Welcome to the Ecommerce Playbook Podcast. I'm your host, Richard Gaffin, Director of Digital Product Strategy here at Common Thread Collective, and joining me today… it's a new year, 2025 Taylor Holiday. He's going green. The jacket, the headphones, everything.

Taylor, our CEO has joined us. Taylor, what's going on, man?

[00:01:03] Taylor Holiday: You know, there's a story behind that. This is the this is the leftover effects of my intrusion where there was a break-in in our office and some electronics were stolen, including my headphones and my microphone. So now I have a new microphone and this corresponds as I accidentally muted it corresponds so nicely. 

I've got my green shoe up here that also ties into a thematic color scheme. Also shout out to my guy, Jeremy Allen White, winning the gold globe last night, golden globe last night for best actor in a television comedy series. So, you know, just trying to just keep it interesting.

[00:01:44] Richard Gaffin: And there you go. Cool, man. Well, so, actually I was going to ask this. What did you, what'd you do for the holidays? Oh,

[00:01:49] Taylor Holiday: I was in bed for 11 days of the 14. It was brutal, man. My whole family, we got super sick. My wife didn't get out of bed on Christmas. It was just, we got, it was just sucked. So we're here now.

[00:02:04] Richard Gaffin: Wow. Sorry to hear that, man. All right. Well, hopefully 2025 will be better. Maybe a fewer days of sickness. I don't know. But what we wanted to talk about today was I think last year around this time, we sort of did New Year's resolutions. But I think what we want to talk specifically is about kind of like one resolution for us about a way that we're shifting our focus here at CTC.

Not necessarily completely away from finance, but towards New Year's resolutions. thinking more about marketing and storytelling as kind of the unlock for 2025 and particularly for Q1. So, Taylor, why don't you give us a little bit of background on, on what you've been thinking about as it pertains to brand and story and how that kind of relates to marketing this year.

[00:02:39] Taylor Holiday: The last 12 months. Have been an extreme focus on one half of our system at CTC. I think really we think about the profit system as bringing together marketing and finance. And I really believe that the last 12 months was I think we've led the way on that. I'm really proud of the work that we've done there, and it's going to continue to be a part of our system. But in many ways, I think that. It's sort of a solved problem in some ways in that we have established clear ways to think about that part of the business that we can bring to life. Great financial forecasting, clear media, planning, marketing, measurement, all these items that allow you to be clear on how your PNL should look, where the issues are, and how to plan for the future financially. And for many of our customers, that's come with cutting costs, Increasing financial discipline, focus on contribution margin, all the sort of standard practices that CTC has been preaching for a while now. But the thing about just that side of the equation is that it doesn't actually. In focus, produce growth, right? It's a mechanism for management of expense, primarily an elimination of waste and focus. So the other side of that equation, the marketing piece, I've really tried to look hard at the kinds of brands that are winning in this moment. And this is really, Not necessarily novel to this period of time, but I think it's disproportionately true because so much of the behavior has been sucked into what I think is a really negative marketing behavioral set in our industry.

I think that in the same way that there was negative financial behavior that sort of had woven its way into our industry, I think now the problem lies more on negative marketing behavior. And it really, to me, spawns out of a lack of marketing leadership. In our industry where someone can build together and take a cohesive brand narrative and translate it into the practical execution across all the mediums of DTC into a way that builds something compelling and interesting. And brings it to life for customers in a way that connects to product, it drives demand and creates. Actual demand for a product and growth. And so I think the question to ask is we think about Q1 for your businesses, absent the financial plan, the existence of that, what is the story that your business is going to tell this year and how, and what, and is that story awesome? Like genuinely, do you get excited about the thought of telling it? Imagine you were to sit a stranger down across from you and tell them about the story your business is going to tell this year. Would it be an interesting story? Would it be one worth listening to? And could you communicate it in a narrative structure?

Could you actually tell people what the story is going to be for the business this year? And that to me at the highest level connected to the financial goal is actually something that I think should exist side by side to each other. What is the story? And then how does that show up in a business measurement impact? And that, when I think about the profit system and it's like deepest, ambitious level of where we want to take it, it's the unification of those things to bring together the marketing narrative that the business is going to tell that can show up in a spreadsheet and then it can get translated into all sorts of mediums for the consumer.

[00:06:14] Richard Gaffin: Okay. So let's, let's talk examples then, because I think this is really, this is an interesting direction to take in that you and I, and all of us at CTC are kind of numbers people thinking about sort of the measurement of impact and that type of thing. But of course the idea of brand story is a very difficult thing to quantify.

So what we're saying is like success comes from this sort of more quality rather than quantity based metric, let's say. So, let's maybe talk first about sort of the negative Case or rather like what does it look like when this is going poorly and why is it going so poorly right now?

[00:06:46] Taylor Holiday: yeah, what I see is that most brands marketing direction is Sort of a reaction to a bunch of different random inputs into the ad account and whatever seems to be working Drives the brand so it's sort of a tail wagging the dog kind of idea Which is that you're testing all these random creative ideas UGC, creator content, statics, video from this agency, video from that agency, memes. You're just trying all of it and whatever works, you try again. And that just becomes this process of just kind of just moving around without any cohesive story across every point of distribution, across all the product development planning cycle across the broader brand. Story for your customer in a way that creates something very fragmented and shallow. There's no depth of the story in a way that allows people to connect to it with a little bit deeper meaning. And I think what happens is that in categories where there's sort of problem solution, this can be like highly effective in the short term, right? Like you are just very quickly satiating an existing market problem. And a lot of e commerce does that really well. Oh, I have a An issue with X, Y, and Z. My shoes cause a problem in my arch and here's the solution to that problem. And off you go. But eventually as categories become more commoditized and in our space, I think we're watching this happen where there's a maturity of these categories, whether it's t shirts or makeup or whatever it is. The influx of competition, the amount of available cheap options on Amazon for every category has just sort of exploded. So the question of why does your specific brand matter to people is a more important question than ever before. And most people, when you're just playing this sort of like bottoms up game of like which ad worked best, it doesn't actually allow for any Narrative development for the customer around your thing.

[00:08:52] Richard Gaffin: Yeah, so my next question was gonna be it's like so what are what are the negative consequences of this type of behavior and It sounds like essentially what it is is that As the marketplace continues to be saturated. There's no longer the ultimate sort of like unique value proposition is your brand in a sense.

And so this is really the next phase of this has to be an exercise in building brand story as the core differentiator, as opposed to simply, I don't know, this product does X and Y better. 

[00:09:18] Taylor Holiday: It's to recognize the complexity of getting a story or idea embedded into your customer base and how many times you have to repeat it to build something, Meaningful and connected. And if every ad is constantly changing, because what I see is like, you see this very short life of every ad, like they fatigue very quickly and it's just try it again, try it again, try it again, try it again, and in each time it could be slightly different. In terms of the message, the hook, the angle, the characters in the story, they all change so much that you've got to imagine it in some ways like a TV show. I love this metaphor. Orange on he uses this metaphor to talk about brands. Sometimes to think about your business like a TV show, where does it take place? Who are the characters? Why do people care? And if you think about that, how can you build connection to it? So that people want to hear the next episode,

they want to read your next email, they want to see your next ad because there's a through line of something that they are connected to and care about. And so I think this. Requires a different thought about how we build creative. It actually begins with a commitment to an idea that is going to then be translated and distributed. And it's not that the idea can't be refined or that you can't iterate on it, but you don't abandon it. Right. You actually have to work to make it work and you're committed to that idea.

And it's usually because it's connected to a product that's been ordered with a set of inventory that's committed to it. And a customer that you have in mind that you're connecting to and building surrounding connections with, whether that's through influencers or live events or other marketing efforts that actually.

So till up the soil for the story to grow in and not just constantly be so shallow with it

over and over again. I think this is really where we get to this idea that this is like a bigger marketing effort where the brand, whether everything that you do, your point of sale displays in retail to the live events that you have, to the emails that you do, to the podcasts that you sponsor, to the influencers you work with, they all have a cohesive connection to it.

For some way, there's an idea, a campaign that makes it so that it's all pulling on the same end of the rope. So the story is being reinforced at all these touch points by the business for the consumer.

And that really requires this, like, again, this connected plan that begins and doesn't just abandon itself for the next ad idea instantaneously on a one negative feedback cycle of ad performance. 

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Okay. So I think it'd be helpful at this point then to talk about some examples of brands that are doing this well. Particularly because I think that there's, I'm sure everybody is asking the question right now of like, well, so how does creative volume and enablement work within this? And then how is something that's so abstract measured, all that type of thing.

But let's talk example wise about like somebody 

[00:12:51] Taylor Holiday: and I think I'm excited this week we're going to be recording an episode with I think the brand that did it as well as anyone that we work with in porn primitive. And what I think I'm watching them do is sort of discover themselves. With this real commitment to a customer base that overlaps deeply and intimately with bear the founder, former Navy SEAL, they've developed a new line of product that was this tactical line. And so in a connection, what's beautiful about that product category is it has such an obvious customer persona, right? And this is often, I think the, the. The key to this is that people actually have an idea of who they're telling stories to, so they can think about where they are, what they care about, what matters to them, in ways that they, in your, like you like to talk about Richard, this idea that it creates a creative constraint for the brand to think about how to communicate itself. And it's not the only place that Born Primitive exists, it still has a very robust fitness line targeted at women and, but there, there are these overlaps in these communities, but more recently, I think the real development has been around this idea of, okay, we have this military history in, in our story.

As the founders for bear, and we want to create product to serve that community with the unique understanding we have of their needs and experiences. So there's still problem and solution in there, but we're going to do it by also connecting ourselves to the stories that that community cares about and the culture such that you can't wait to see what we do next, because every time we do something in this space, it's interesting and compelling and worth following. So two examples of that are one, this where they connected themselves to them. The anniversary of the invasion of Normandy and D Day and created this special shoe that celebrates that the Operation Overlord 0630, there, there's a whole episode we did talking about that and then they followed that up by on Veterans Day in November. Building out a campaign to pay off all I think over 5 million of veteran medical debt by taking the proceeds of a promotion that they ran in November and giving them back to use to that community and that got them onto Fox and Friends and a bunch of additional engagement. And so. What you see is, okay, we have this product roadmap that includes shoes and tactical gear and alignment. That gives us a clear audience that we want to tell stories to. And we said, okay, what are the cultural moments that we could tap into? Okay. There's the anniversary of DJ there's veterans day. And then what could our story be? Alongside these things in a way that would make the community feel like we're serving them and we're connecting to them and we're caring about the same things they care about. And then we're going to introduce product to it and promotion and ways that incentivize purchase and demand in that moment. And all of a sudden what you get is now we have the same ads that we're running in the meta account. Matches what's being told on the homepage matches. What's happening in a live event in person, massive matches.

What's happening on a PR basis on Fox news. And all of a sudden across the whole brand emails, the organic social, what the influencers are talking about, who the influencers are, they're pulling on the same story, they're telling the same story. And so it's re it's depth. It's roots. Great. Go deeper. They, they affect the customer more and that, that very practically shows up in like improved performance of the media.

And it's not to say that once we get to the ad level, now we have all of that raw material that's connected to the same story that we can't iterate the hooks on it and change the, try different images, but it's all bound. Within the story, right? It's, it's iteration within the construct of a similar idea. And that's sort of planned ahead of time in a way that allows you to drive disproportionate effect. And so that idea, what's the story. That's an example of what I mean.

[00:16:50] Richard Gaffin: yeah, that's interesting. I was thinking too, as you were talking that like part of what we're talking about here with the expansion of story is just really on a practical level. Like sort of the way to build organic revenue streams kind of, right. And cause, cause when you mentioned like. A lot of the times the way it paid ad shows up, the audience for that ad would not necessarily be interested in any way if it was an organic post in somebody's grid or whatever, right?

So there's this like real transactional. Here's our thing. We paid for this space. You buy it. That's let's move on. But, but I think maybe another thing you're talking about here is that that's an important thing to point out is that brand goes beyond and story goes beyond just how it shows up in, in terms of like design, like fonts or whatever, really what we're talking about is a series of behaviors that bring the story to life.

Would you bring. Obviously what Born Primitive has done with the D Day promotion and with paying off the veterans. Like those are sets of actions that then drive a story that come, maybe comes out of that set of actions. 

[00:17:51] Taylor Holiday: And what what happens is that story is essentially a thing we're all constructing about ourselves all the time. That's what social media really is. It's a, it's a constructed story about my life. Okay. At a very base level, my feed, what I post on stories, IG stories, literally the name of it is just me telling a story about myself to the world. Okay. And so a lot of times I think what you have to do is you have to give people a reason to spread your story. Okay. And the way you do that is by giving them. A tool that allows them to expand their own story. So this is goes back to this idea that I've always been fascinated with about creating for your audience's audience. What kind of thing could you give them that they would want to share with their audience to show off to the world to say, look how cool this is. Look how cool my leggings company is versus your leggings company. Right. And to not really think about trying to speak in this way that I'm speaking to you, my customer about myself. I want to give you something. That makes sharing about me make you a hero.

[00:18:58] Richard Gaffin: yeah,

[00:18:59] Taylor Holiday: And I think that's really where brands I think so often are missing is they think I'm just trying to communicate like this transactional idea to get you to come take something from me, where there's something deeper here about a story. Another great example. And we're going to, I'm going to do a lot more on this because it's a really interesting experiment that's happening with our partner True Classic is they have some of this content that It's really this incredible feel good story of helping an individual sort of reshape their look, maybe he's a little down on their luck and it's this sort of like expression of care through clothing in a way that like allows someone to feel better about themselves.

That's and when you read the comments on this content What you see is people that are connecting to the brand. You see these phrases that are like, well, I guess we're all buying true classic now.

It's just this idea that like, Oh, this is something so good that I would want to be a part of it, that whatever it is that you're selling, I'm in

right. And then when you find out that it's also an amazing product and fits perfectly and like, okay, cool. But the point is, is that this, this brand. Identity expresses something that I want to be a part of. And not only do I want to be a part of, I want to tell other people about it. And that I think is really the, the root of it.

[00:20:13] Richard Gaffin: yeah. So I want to go into, you had a set of questions that you've dropped here in the chat that will maybe can also share in the the show notes, but these are a set of questions for, for brand owners, owners to think about CMOS to think about when they think about telling these stories. So I'll read them out and then I have a couple I want to highlight.

Cause I think it'd be interesting to get the answers here or, or to flesh them out a little bit. So first is what is the growth story to, is the story awesome? Three. Who is the story for four? How does my marketing calendar reflect that story? Five. How am I distributing that story? Six. Where am I realizing the demand?

Seven. Does my measurement, a system appropriately allow for the impact of that story to be considered? So there's a few different questions that come out here. First off is what if your story is not awesome? How do you make it awesome? I think that's an interesting thing to think about. But then also.

What does it look like to build a measurement system that allows you to consider the impact of something that is so sort of in the ether as, as a story. So maybe let's start with the first one is the story. Awesome. What if it's not?

[00:21:15] Taylor Holiday: This at the very root level, I think is the core job of every entrepreneur founder leader in the world, like period, full stop, this is it, this is the job. Make the story awesome. And it is an immense challenge. There are lots of stories and most of them are not awesome. The good news is though, it doesn't have to, like, you don't get to try once, right?

You can constantly refine your story. I'd say there's been various moments where like CTC story has been more or less awesome at various points and your job is to constantly re imagine. But the key is like, to subject yourselves to the scrutiny that Of sharing the story with people and to gauge the response. And one of the things about social as a medium is that it's a pretty real ruthless feedback engine is that you will see very quickly whether or not people resonate with the material. And that has to be your guide. You have to allow that engagement and this corresponding sentiment to be part of it.

And I think this idea, I think that's going to come back in vogue. Okay. More and more is this idea of sentiment is how are people feeling and responding to the material that you're sharing? I would love, there's a, one of the research projects that's like sort of a dream of mine is to try to tie together these ideas of brand sentiment and media performance. There's a, there's a cool company called track suit. I've wanted to do this project with, and we've, we've talked about it briefly is to they, they do a lot of research for brands to create a real time, like brand score and a brand sentiment score. And I would love to be able to tie together the relationship between brand sentiment and efficacy of their media. Even on like a standardized basis, like if you took. Let's say a brand's DPA catalog. It's just basic product feed that you could sort of compare apples to apples across a bunch of different brands than you were to look at and say, okay, how effective can a brand's product feed by itself as an ad unit be? And how does that relate to their unaided brand awareness and as well as the brand sentiment? I think those kinds of ideas are really interesting to validate sort of this premise that How people feel about you has a relationship with how effective the ROAS will be on the ad content that you create.

[00:23:41] Richard Gaffin: No. I guess maybe let's talk through the sort of middle couple of questions here, which is about. So we talked, we talked about creating an awesome story, then kind of jumped to connecting story to data, but how about the, the idea of connecting story to behavior, I guess, which is, which is what the questions around marketing calendar and distribution are, are getting at.

So can you maybe unpack those a little bit?

[00:24:02] Taylor Holiday: Yeah. So you have to operationalize the story and then you have to ask yourself like, is it showing up everywhere I need it to? So let's just take, you know, an example. We used to do this every time I would create a Kalo ad. Marketing campaign where the first thing we do is like write the story. We would literally write it like a story. What's the theme? What do we want to communicate? Then we ask ourselves, okay, what is the form factor the story is going to take? Okay, we're going to make a brand video. We're going to make 17 shorts. We're going to do like, what is the actual structural we're going to have these images. We're going to have these sets of influencers.

We're going to have this live event. We're going to have, okay. These are all the places that we're going to exist in the actual assets that we're going to develop. Then the question is, okay, where am I going to distribute that? Okay. I'm going to have this many posts on my organic social account. We are going to have this many posts on influencers, social accounts on these days. Okay. We're going to have. These ads on these channels, we're going to have this media by on these podcasts. We're going to do this event in this person at this time. And you're going to look at it and you're going to go, okay. If I put my customer at the center of this map, this media map. Am I saturating them with this story?

Are they going to encounter it from lots of different places in a way that's going to build its authority over time with them? And what are the quality of those touch points in the consumer's mind? Do, do my customers see those podcasts or media publications or live events as high quality that if they see me there, I actually get a reinforced value off of my presence in those places. So this is like literally just marketing planning. And it's why we talk so much about the marketing calendar is that the story. Okay. In the month of January, we're telling this story

and it's going to show up in all of these different places. And again, that doesn't mean that we don't need a bunch of ad assets. But they all have a boundary. They

have to reinforce this story and they have to, they can't run off and tell a different one. They

don't get to abandon it. This is our story for this moment that we're going to persist through for a period of time. And we're actually going to be committed to telling it, retelling it, refining it, and improving it as we go.

And then at the, at the bottom of that, so like, so that's like distribution of the story. It's literally like a map of all the places we're going to tell the story as a business. And then we should ask ourselves, is there anything missing? Is there any place digital or physical that people would love to see this story show up?

Or if it showed up there, it would be really powerful. It would make the story more effective. And could we, could we get it told there? Could we, could we get it to show up there somehow? And I think there's definitely ways to do that.

[00:26:44] Richard Gaffin: Okay. So I want to, I really, I want to get into defining what a story is, because I think that this can become very, very quickly become our story is me and my wife started this company and we're just regular folks like you and you're trying to, and the thought of figuring out how to distribute that and across a bunch of different mediums and to create sort of advertising and marketing material out of that becomes really, really difficult.

What, what does it look like practically? To have a story and develop it in this way that it becomes useful for you across all of these different platforms.

[00:27:21] Taylor Holiday: Another substitute for this is to think of it like a theme that for a moment in time, your brand is going to communicate through this theme. Okay. And out of that theme are going to come stories. So I'll give you a very practical example. I know I've shared this before, but I think it's worth, cause it makes this idea practical.

In marketing, we also just call these campaigns, right? They're

just stories we tell for a moment in time. And that can be a long moment. It can be. Four weeks. It could be six weeks. It could be a quarter. It could be a year. So at Kalo and usually I would say in our world, it's connected to a product, like the story should drive to a product.

It doesn't have to, it could drive to the overall line of things that you do. If you're AG one athletic greens, you have one product, then maybe it's not a novel product. Maybe it's about a novel way to position that product for a period of time. It's still connected to some product. So I'll give you an example. At Calo we wanted to create a campaign that would allow us to access a very specific audience. The audience was sort of blue collar workers. Okay, people who worked with their hands, and so therefore a metal writing ring was unsafe. So this would literally be carpenters, or, you know, there was Like chefs can't wear a ring. These are makers, right? Where the sort of persona that we wanted to embody and reach. And so we came up with this campaign theme that we called the mark of a maker. Okay. That was the, it was like a headline, a single line that the, that encapsulated everything we were going to go do from here forward. And the idea was that if you've ever bought like a custom piece of furniture or something, there's always like a signature. Like whether it's like a little brand, it's called the maker's mark. That's the idea, right? It's the maker's signature on an object. And so the idea was we were going to tie the idea that if you were wearing this specific silicone wedding ring, that would actually be a signal to the world that you were a maker.

So the ring would actually become the mark of a maker. And that was the story is that we were going to tie together this idea that wearing this ring would be a signal to the world that you worked with your hands.

Okay. That's what we wanted to sort of bring to life. And so literally when I, when I sat down to do this, I would write this in narrative form.

I wrote the Kalo ring is a symbol for those that hand make. They build, create, craft, and shape the world around us. The world bends to their hands, it has no bounds in their minds. A maker's mark is stamped onto his or her creation, while the mark of a maker is carried in his hands. The calluses, dirty nails, worn palms, and calo ring are a symbol to the world that these are hands that make.

[00:30:03] Richard Gaffin: mm hmm, 

[00:30:03] Taylor Holiday: Okay, so now, now I have The fabric of a story that I can now begin to bring to life. And I'm going to drop in the show notes here. You can see the actual brand video that we made for this campaign. We can share this so you can see, okay, how does that now turn into an asset that highlights the kind of people in our story?

Remember we're building a TV show here, right? Who are the characters? What is the product? What is the setting that we're, where is it exist? Where are we bringing it to life? So we had a product focus for the campaign. It was our newly designed Kalo 2. 0. It had flatter edges. It was made from a new gas resistant material.

It was anti microbial. And it was made from a different, higher price point. So the product was actually built to suit these people. We created a flatter edge cause it was less likely to catch on things. Gasoline actually broke down our old silicone ring. So if you were somebody who had to work and encountered gasoline, it would actually dissolve the ring.

That was a complaint that we got. So we found this specific silicone material that didn't dissolve in gasoline. And we created it out of that. So what did we do along the way? Okay. So our, we had a target demo, married aspirational makers. Okay. Who are the makers? Anyone who sees their job as building or creating, you could narrow that down to blue collar workers or the DIY crowd. We thought about distribution. If we could sell the product into this community, where would they be? Uniform supply, safety distribution, large B2B corporate HR reps who are buying things for a bunch of laborers, Home Depot and Lowe's. Okay. So we thought like, all right, if we could sell the product anywhere, where would we sell to these people?

Where would it show up in their world? Okay. We thought about we had a tagline, Kalo, the mark of a maker. We thought about influencers. There was a guy by the name of probably butchers saying this, but Tokuhiko Kisei and Hiromori Kuratsu. They were like these really cool furniture makers whose story we wanted to tell. We thought about doing a partnership with Chip and Joanna Gaines and Nick Offerman. We wanted to do a licensed product specifically for, for, for. The factory workers at John Deere and Ford, we identified the hot 100 online influencers are all people who had maker accounts and YouTube accounts. We created custom bottles of maker marks, maker, mark, whiskey, co branded with custom labels and a set of rings that we would send out to them. And this was like all the pieces of the story. We found podcasts that were DIY homemaker podcasts and. You know, people who created the kind of content into this audience and we would sponsor those. And then we made ads and like, you can see the whole trickle down. And this is going to run for six to eight weeks where we're not abandoning the story.

Like this is going to be, if you go on our organic social, if you go on our website, if you receive an email from us, you're going to get this story and it's going to show up in lots and lots of places. And so we would try and do four of these campaigns a year. For Kayla, we would build them around. We broke Kayla into an acronym, quality athletics, love and outdoors.

And so in the summer, we'd have an athletics campaign that would focus on that part of the community. And then in the fall, we would do this. We would do the outdoors community. And then the so we would break it into these rhythms of deeper storytelling that matched to sort of a four peaks idea of the calendar.

Right. And so that was how we broke it up. That was how we built into these stories, but I'm watching born primitive, do the same thing. And a lot of our partners, Skullcandy is really great at this, where it's usually built around a calendar. Igloo's amazing at this, like these brands that they have the calendar, they have the places they exist within it and they build and tell continuity of story throughout that calendar.

[00:33:36] Richard Gaffin: Yeah, I think what's, what's so great about the Kayla example is like how clearly it extends from the practical value proposition of the product, which is that basically allows you to wear a wedding ring in a more physical environment. It's more comfortable. Also, it's safer. And so that then, so that idea about sort of the mark of the maker extends from a deeper theme within the product itself, which is, it allows you to show your commitment to your spouse and your commitment to your craft at the same time.

And so wearing the ring allows you to represent both of those things. And I think what, another thing that's interesting about it is that. This is a really good example of why this story needs to be told because a silicone wedding ring that is safer than your regular wedding ring is what every single silicone wedding ring company does.

The Enso's, all of the other sort of competitors, that's actually a pretty glutted space or was at least when we were still with Kalo. And so, I think like, it's a great example of how, like the story being told is, becomes the value proposition of that type of product. It's like, this represents something I feel safer with this.

I understand the story. I understand who's telling it to me, who's selling it to me. Those things all kind of like coincide to make it very powerful, like sales tool, I guess, if that makes sense.

[00:34:49] Taylor Holiday: Yeah. And I think one of the things that brands. Too often are afraid to do is to narrow their story.

So I could imagine if I was selling sure microphones. Right. There are probably like infinity different segments. That they could tell their story for and about and the danger is, I think that they actually create something that appeals to nobody really versus being willing for a period of time to make it really means something to someone and that to understand that you can't actually. In doing that, like, you're not actually going to be so impactful in that process that you're going to build a story that can't be malleably widened later. I think that this idea, it's sort of like, you know, it's sort of the classic, like, A joke of like, ah, I don't want to work out. Cause I don't want to get too bulky.

You know, it's like, this is a, this, it sort of fits in that same vein for me of like these made up ideas of problems that are not going to actually happen. Cause you're not actually going to be that effective at this. Is that like the idea that you're going to make the campaign is going to be so effective that everybody in the world is going to go, Oh, Kalo. That's for carpenters, you know, like, could you imagine how you, how effective you would have to be as a marketer to make non carpenters know that there's a product that's for carpenters, like, and so it just doesn't work that way. And in fact, you can actually go segment by segment and make the product mean something unique to them in some way. Loop earplugs is the other example I give of this all the time. They can be both simultaneously. For motorcyclists and parents of small Children and rave goers all at the same time, but it can't be it with the same message, right? Or the same creative. It's got to be a story that matters to that community in some way.

You've got to give it to them in the way that they are. Not just in the way that you are. And so I think that's where I think brands need to really get deeper connected to who am I trying to build this for? And then does the story matter to them?

[00:36:48] Richard Gaffin: And to your point around, like, the getting too bulky thing, I think, like, if you were to get to a point, let's say, where Kalo became known as the ring for carpenters, that's, like, probably a pretty great problem to have, because generally speaking, only, like, massive cultural institutions are that, like, associated with a specific craft, by the way.

[00:37:04] Taylor Holiday: that's right. Cause cause in order to actually drive into that mainstream of adoption, you would have to be so big. At that point, that's like sort of the joke, right? It's like, if it became so obvious to the entire world that you were the carpenters ring, like, how big would you have had to have gotten to become that, you know?

And so I really do think that narrowing is the pathway to, to It's just something we talk about. It's like creative requires constraint to build great stories, just narrowing in on a person to see them, to see their world, to understand where they, what they care about is so critical to do to really think about, okay, I have this person in mind that I want to, like, I don't want to them to just buy my product.

I want them to be obsessed with my brand. Okay, who is that person that's obsessed with your brand and what would need to be true in order for them to be obsessed with it? And if that begins to come out, I just promise, like it doesn't, you don't get there through this, like bottoms up, try every different ad angle.

Oh, what are those four brands doing? Oh, they're doing post it note ads. So if I do post it note ads, my ads are going to work. Like it's just the worst form of brand building is to try and work that direction.

[00:38:13] Richard Gaffin: Okay, before we wrap up, I wanted to hit on real quick the way that you think that this relates with creative volume enablement. So we mentioned that a little bit up top. And so obviously I can sort of foresee a scenario right now. We like these conversations are really like fun. They're really exciting.

But then when, you know, the rubber hits the road and you have to produce a thousand ads in four days or whatever, all of a sudden, all of those things seem like they're going to go out the window. So how do you see the future of volume enablement and how that coincides with this type of like deep, kind of profound creative restriction?

[00:38:46] Taylor Holiday: Yeah, so it just goes back to the counterintuitive idea that constraint is the mechanism for this, right? Is that if we go back to this idea of offer angle audience if you give me all three wheels to spin, I actually get spun out. It actually becomes a harder exercise than if you lock two of them. So if we go back to the Kalo example, if you tell me that the audience is chefs. And the ring is the Kalo Silicone Q2X. The angles I can come up with now are actually much easier to generate at scale than if you gave me all three options to do. I know that sounds weird, but it really is easier to start to think deeply about what a chef's reality is and why a silicone ring would matter to them, and then to think about different visuals and hooks and examples where you could go from, okay, even within chefs, there's. There's bakers versus there's people who work on like, that are just general everyday chefs at a giant restaurant. That's like sort of an assembly line and what their realities are like and the difference between grease and dough and like these different ways that you could think about the product benefits and the constructs of that. And so I think that this is why I really think that for volume enablement to occur, marketing leaders have to build these constraints. And that's, that's what I think great campaign planning does is it's a marketing leader defining for their creative strategy team, the constraints that they can operate within to allow them to move fast.

With clarity and specificity to build things that are meaningful and compelling.

[00:40:13] Richard Gaffin: Cool. So I think I think that kind of covers it. Is there anything else that you want to sort of hit on this before we go?

[00:40:18] Taylor Holiday: Yeah. So I think the original question we got to, and what I'm getting after with is how do you win Q1 and

at CDC, the profit system is this idea of marrying marketing and finance is to ask ourselves, what is the marketing plan? How does it connect to the financial plan of the business? And now I want to, we're going to go deeper.

We've got some really cool creative strategy products coming out in Q1, but the, the marketing calendar and how that's built and the stories that it contains still to me are the core of this process that I watch just get abandoned. It's not done. This is, this is the missing art of marketing leadership is somebody who can build a story across all of the mediums of the brand and operationalize it to bring to life into the tactical execution and that process of connecting that to the financial goal, that's what, that's what I'm challenging myself to go over.

Is that like, I was talking to one of our girl strategists the other day. And, and we were having this conversation about how, as CDC is going to grow in this next year, if you want to personally move up the organization, you actually have to personally outpace the growth of the organization. And so he hit me up and he's like, okay, I want to do this.

What, what does it entail? And so we started talking about this idea of being valuable to our customers and being valuable to the organization. And I just sort of asked, like, think about your best brands. He works with some really cool brands. He gets to oversee them. It's like, what, what makes them work? Why, like if they grew this last year, why did they grow? And his answer was like brand and product. And at the time it felt for him, like I'm furthest from actually being able to affect those things, right. Is that our we're we're on, we're media buying allocators and building the finance plan and these different things.

But I really pushed back to say, okay. We have to continue to think about our job as being the most valuable partner we can for a brand for them to continue to want to invest more and more money with us. And if that's what we believe is the most important part of the organization, then we have to think about how we're going to affect those things. So that's, that's what I'm thinking about as we go into new years. How is our creative strategy going to press brands to answer these questions more often and support them with the kind of information they would need to do it. Because without them, you're like, you're playing a shallow game that will have shallow returns.

[00:42:33] Richard Gaffin: So if you want to come alongside us this year, go deeper on that particular aspect, bringing marketing back to e commerce, you know, where to find us commentary, co. com, hit that hire us button and drop us a line. We'd love to chat further. But of course, a lot more stuff on the creative front is going to be upcoming over the next few weeks, both on the pod and elsewhere.

So keep an eye out for that. We're going to have more conversations about it. There's some really cool tools and things coming up as well. So, all right, folks. Well, Here it is 2025. Happy new year, everybody. Hope 2025 is a great one and take care. We'll see you all next week.