Shadowing Practice: How to Stand Out in a Saturated Market (Brand Playbook) - Learn English Speaking with Video

This is how to win in a saturated market, a playbook for challenger brands.

We see it again and again, no category is safe.

There's perpetually room for new, exciting brands to carve out their own place in the world.

They do it through positioning, improving product, aesthetics, and leveraging marketing and distribution techniques that big brands simply won't move fast enough to take advantage of.

We are here in sunny London, talking to challenger brands throughout various phases of their journey.

Clayton and I are going We're going to visit mud in the pet category.

We're going to visit salt in health and wellness, and tala in lighting and interiors.

In this video, Clayton's going to give some examples.

We're actually going to go visit all these brands.

Then we're going to end up with a tactical playbook of how you can implement this inside your own strategy.

You can download the Hyper and Air Creative Ops Guide

that comes with this with all kinds of tactics and strategy free in the description below.

We're super excited to roll around London and talk to some of these brands.

Let's lock in.

So Clayton, you want to give us some examples of what's happening in the challenger brand world today?

Yeah, one of the most common themes that we're seeing right now is this idea of disrupting the disruptor.

And a brand like Graza has had the olive oil industry in a complete chokehold.

They've made olive oil feel fun and playful and beautifully designed, but now we're seeing the script flip.

Brands like Syke are going right after them and they're not doing it by trying to out-Graza Graza with product.

Instead, they're flipping the script with this guerrilla-style marketing that no one would really expect.

Whether it's their wheat pasting campaigns in New York City, or their collabs with Scar's Pizza and Copenhagen for Fashion Week,

they're using their marketing and content to send a clear message that Graza is the old guard, and that Syke is the new cool kid.

I think the lesson here is that it's showing us just how quickly the cultural wheel turns, and how even the disruptors can be disrupted.

And it's a good example of where the opportunity lies, because big industry has barely begun to respond to Graza.

This new generation of brands understands what's happening, is already beginning to see areas in the market where they can grow into.

But this isn't just happening in consumer goods.

This is across all kinds of categories, right?

Yeah, 100%.

Brand like Fellow Products is another great example in the coffee industry.

They make scales, they make kettles, they make coffee tumblers and mugs, and they're doing it in this sleek,

minimally designed way, but they're upending a massive industry like coffee machines by doing so.

What's interesting about their strategy?

I mean, Fellow is a masterclass in taking something so ordinary like a kitchen staple and turning it into an obsession.

They didn't just stop at making a kettle or singular hero product.

They're building an entire collection suite that you as the consumer would want to complete in your own home.

And I think that's something that not a lot of legacy or old guard brands are doing right now.

So you might start with the kettle, but you'll come back for the grinder or the scale or the travel mugs and tumblers.

And I think it's a huge gap in the market

that some of these older brands are missing out on and fellows rightfully taking their place in that space.

They're putting intention into every one of those products so

that you know you're getting this modern experience that you can't get elsewhere 100%.

And that's true brand building.

It's what sets them apart in a largely uninspired market right now.

It's great to think about these all these examples and show them on screen, but talking to some of these brands and seeing actually how they do it is really where the magic happens.

Let's go out in London and meet some in real life.

Yeah.

We are here in the reality of building a challenger brand.

This is our friends at Mudd.

You want to give us a little background on you and how you started the business?

Myself and my co-founder Angelina, we are both from the creative field.

And we used to work in branding, in art direction, in photography.

Almost three years ago, Angelina got Chester.

Chester is the dog, the mascot for the brand.

Dogs have 300 million receptors, and any scent is completely hell for them.

We would like to find something that actually Chester would like to have.

So here we actually have some of the packaging, have some of your baby live in the flesh.

We understand that if you want to stand out from the competitors on the market, you need to find the solutions that will look differently.

Our aim was to make the less stressful experience for a dog.

So we decided to make this push and pull cap.

And actually we tested lots of bottles and we really understand

that this position is pretty convenient for a dog

when you need to handle a dog with one hand and put a shimper with a head.

Yeah, when the dog's squirming, trying to get away, covered in water, and you're able to spray.

And it's always stress for the dog to...

And it doesn't quite come across when you just look at it, but yeah, it's a soft bottle, and so it's like, it looks matte, and it feels soft, so it's not like you're squeezing something cheap, it really feels premium.

This is a funny scene that we made a thermochromatic print, which is disappear under hot water.

You're seeing hundreds of products lined up next to each other.

Having something that stands out just a little bit, even if it's a few degrees of difference, makes a huge difference to the consumer.

There's some other things too.

So this is a card, individualized to the dog.

And Janina actually, as a dog owner, she said that when you have something with the name of your dog on it, you will never throw it away.

And this was some kind of strategic marketing move.

We decided to have really different types of dogs in our campaign.

So we shoot three-legged dogs, mixed breed dogs.

Have quite a lot of response from people that say that actually, finally, someone shooting the dogs like we own,

not the most beautiful one pure breed you know yeah there's

not enough talk about what are the raw realities of being a founder

and building a brand quite literally out of your flat

if everything can go wrong it goes wrong for example we need to delay our launch

because our first batch of product it came with a scent of tree oil yeah

and tree oil as you know it's toxic for dogs

and we need to delay our launch which were additional expenses of course

but we decided to be strict to our beliefs lots of people People send us messages

and say really kind words about the brand and it gives us power to continue.

It doesn't bother his eyes.

You can wash it out really easily.

It smells nice even though it's scent free.

He just smells like a puppy afterwards.

He's going for the product right now.

He's going and got one of your samples.

Oh, there we go.

No, no, no, I'm keeping this for myself.

Henry, good to be with you.

Thank you for joining us in the lovely Rose Gardens Regions Park.

The first most important place for us to start with this conversation is understanding the brand lore of Salt.

So Salt is a hydration brand, electrolytes, the whole sort of area and market in general is so polarizing.

Very sort of male dominated, very like performance focused, whereas actually hydration goes much deeper.

We basically try to democratize it to the everyday market, so people who like to go out and enjoy themselves, but also like to keep it healthy.

We have numerous group chats on WhatsApp, everyone's welcome at any stage.

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So they chose actually like the slogan, the trademarks, the boxes, they basically chose things to bring them on a journey to.

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We think that consumers like to understand who's behind the brand, why they're behind it, what's behind it.

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And how we sort of did that was basically show everything.

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So the good, the bad, that's across Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok.

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We look at LinkedIn as being really underrated for building brands, especially have you used it and what's What's the strategy there?

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Honestly, I think it's the most untapped channel.

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There is so much leverage on LinkedIn because I think the way I look at it is, LinkedIn is Instagram five years ago.

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If you put any effort into LinkedIn, your content will pump.

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I use LinkedIn like Instagram, like a friend's, where I just say, I actually just say how it is.

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I don't try and be fancy.

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I'm not an eloquent bloke.

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I just say how it is.

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And I think people will find that quite refreshing.

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What goes into actually making content for the brand?

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It's not really a process at all.

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It's very much back and forth on WhatsApp.

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Should we do this?

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Are you free tomorrow?

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We like to take sort of inspiration from like old films, stuff like that.

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So we did one of Millie in the Bath, which was like the big short, Margot Robbie in the Bath.

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That's for like the high-end stuff.

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And then for the day-to-day content, honestly, it sounds a bit arrogant, but we don't take inspo.

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We just do what we think's right.

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That's what's made it unique.

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You've done multiple drops, both have sold out.

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What led to the sellouts on each one?

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We had like a really strong like funnel of basically always trying to direct people to the email list.

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and we did it in a way that wasn't obvious or like selling.

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So it drove like a lot of signups.

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I mean, day one, we had over 10,000 signups with like zero ad spend or anything.

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So I think people just buying into us and backing us as like the underdog.

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The drop method stopped very early on because we want to become a brand, not sort of a sellout product.

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You want a subscription model.

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You want to bring in recurring revenue.

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We'd love to go retail.

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We really would.

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What's that one thing in the back of your head where you're like, I really wish I could put time into this.

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We haven't been able to yet.

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All things influencer marketing.

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Influencers get basically mass exposure of the brand and I suppose actually some credibility too.

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Mindsets are shifting a little bit and you don't just look at the sort of what is cheaper, what's this, you look deeper into products and brands.

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What are things that you have learned over the past 12 to 18 months on this journey?

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The back and forth you have, the endless mood boards.

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Just honestly, the first thing to do is just fucking try and launch the product.

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We launched and then you iterate a million times faster because you have to, you've got another option.

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And then the second thing is, is just be a sponge.

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Adapt and learn at all opportunities.

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You can't ever assume that you're the expert in space.

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We're here in the beautiful Tala showroom.

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We're going to talk a little bit about their brand, their history.

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So we're a British designer lighting brand.

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At the core of it, we bring three things together.

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So it's design, technology, and sustainability.

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The consumer problem at the time was just how ugly the energy efficient designs were like,

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they were just, we all probably remember the first iterations of those.

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They were like really bulky, plasticky, like metals.

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Like people didn't want them in their spaces the kind of

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harsh light they would give off was this big pain point in the market.

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And that's kind of how we formed.

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Josh, super curious about the upcoming launch you have, Wake.

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Maybe we'll describe a little bit about the launch itself.

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Wake was designed in collaboration with Thomas Heatherwick.

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They're working with us on producing a designer sleep lamp.

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We're inside the space now as you guys are prepping.

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You have a whole experience coming together downstairs.

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We have this really interesting newsletter that's a big part of the launch.

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How's something that this come together?

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The idea for it was we wanted someone to be kind of reading about the launch in bed.

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We're in the sleep world and...

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Off your phone.

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Yeah, off your phone with something in your hands.

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We've tried to be more education led with it.

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You're getting people interested in the product, in the brand as a byproduct of being educated on why they should care about this product in the first place.

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Definitely.

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We try and bring that into lots of our product launches, but this one, it's amplified because we're really in the science of sleep space.

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So we've got like a screening room downstairs

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and we just kind of wanted to be a bit more film-led on this launch because there's

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so much story behind the development we like to think what are brands doing in a completely different vertical

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but we try

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and look at what's going on in the fashion world what

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might be going on in like you know a really cool fragrance brand

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or something what's the relationship like to be able to say

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like hey here's how we want you to present the product

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when we work with uh influencers

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or interior designers we're trying to break out into like what their aesthetic locally is looking

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And then you've got 10 years in building this brand.

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Any of the things that have come up that you're like, if I was starting this again, I would totally want to make sure I know this or avoid this thing that happened?

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God, so much.

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I think getting the spine of the organization really set up.

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All the semi-boring stuff that's so important.

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Hiring slowly is a big one.

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So you end up building a really strong team.

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What's that vision for the future look like?

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Our goal really is to be the definitive zero carbon lighting brand.

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And with those kind of restrictions on sustainability, they can be quite useful thresholds to push against.

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Appreciate you showing us around the showroom, talking through all this.

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I think we'll walk around and take a look at some of the actual amazing products we have in here.

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Let's do it.

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All right, so now that we've actually heard from all these brands, we're going to help you turn this into a tactical playbook of what you can do, whether you're launching a new product,

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launching a new brand, or just working inside an existing org to help think like a challenger brand in a saturated market.

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And it starts with this concept of USPs, or unique selling propositions.

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You'll note that all the companies we talked to here started with what we call an insight, something about consumer behavior or something consumers want that they can base their brand around.

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Mudd noticed that dogs actually don't like fragrances, but brands still include fragrances in them.

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So they found that unique selling point in giving pet owners something that actually works for their dog.

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Salt said, hey, electrolytes aren't just for performance athletes.

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They're for the every person too.

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And we can build a story around that.

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And then Tala asked, why does sustainable lighting have to look bad?

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But getting one of these core concepts, these core insights and finding it in a way that's easily articulable to the end consumer,

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you can describe it simply to know why you stand out is the foundation of a of a challenger brand, it gives you something to sell on.

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Next comes form factor.

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Once you actually have your selling proposition, how do you stand it out versus the people around you?

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And this is ultra important because everyone thinks about online, how do you sell on websites?

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But the reality is these brands are really forged direct head to head in retail against other brands in their category, whether that's a drugstore, an electronics store,

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or even side-by-side in the catalog on Amazon.

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We talked about Graza at the beginning of this episode, and they're the quintessential example of using form factor to stand out in the market.

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Even little decisions make a huge difference.

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Can you apply some ergonomic changes to actually improve the user experience?

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But most importantly, when someone goes to a shelf, how can you look different?

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How can you really stand out?

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One of the things I liked most about Mudd when I first saw them, and why we chose them to include in this episode, is that I've been in the pet store.

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I've seen what's actually there on the shelf.

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There's nothing that looks like that.

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And then one day they end up in PetSmart next to all the existing products out there.

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There'll be a magnetic pull for their consumer to be like, this is a different thing, something I should look at and try.

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And that form factor and position makes a huge difference.

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Then we need to talk about price.

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For a long time, new brands would focus on value or use value to position against larger brands.

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But that era is largely done.

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Let me explain a bit of why.

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When Alibaba got so huge, and when Chinese manufacturing opened up to the world, all of a sudden, there was no gate between people who used to have to travel

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and hunt down factories across the world to build products, to now anyone being able to do that on the internet.

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And after a decade of this, and you add on Amazon, you add on the ability for those foreign sellers to learn new markets and come into it, cheap is completely antiquated.

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There's already the cheapest products on the market in every category.

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Timu, Shein, Amazon brands, even people who've chosen to go make the value choice for anything in a category.

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So if you're positioning based on cost, you're not going to stand out.

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But this is a huge opportunity for challenger brands because with a higher price point, you actually have the ability to add in things that matter to consumers.

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This enters the category of what I like to call little luxuries, status symbols, subtle flexes.

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There's a lot of little terms for all these products that are cost a little bit more than what you normally have.

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They look aesthetically better or they have higher quality or they have a unique value proposition.

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I like to call out Goodland for this.

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They make a variety of home objects, but one of them is a garden hose made in Canada.

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It costs a lot more than your average Amazon hose, but I felt this pain personally as a homeowner when I was trying to buy a great hose for my home.

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I kept buying on Amazon and Home Depot.

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Everything was cheap and everything was crap, honestly.

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I was able to find a brand online that not only made it in North America, but would stand up to a warranty, and even though I was paying a little more, I knew I was getting a quality product.

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there's room for this kind of higher cost, longer lasting, better aesthetic in every category we have consumer products in.

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Does it have the huge TAM or total available market of the cheapest product?

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No. But does it have enough room for you to build a sustainable business

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and then see where you want to take your brand from there?

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Completely.

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And then last, I want to talk about positioning, and in particular, this idea of position against, otherwise known as enemy marketing, where you take an existing incumbent in the category and you call out what they do bad.

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Tala, for instance, saying, hey, guess what?

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Sustainable light bulbs don't look good.

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Mud leaned into fragrances being bad for dogs, but yet brands still including them everywhere and said, let's actually create a better experience for the pet you care so much about.

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Another example being Grunz and AG1, where AG1 isn't a good experience for anybody.

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No one wants to have a bad tasting vegetable packet, but they still want the value.

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But if you get that same thing inside a gummy that tastes good, not only are you able to participate in it and be more likely to do it, but you can even get your kids to do it as well.

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This idea of positioning, this idea of finding that big problem people are complaining about, you can do this by searching through Reddit threads, going through reviews, asking ChatGPT,

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and most importantly, go to TikTok and search worst, bad, inside your category.

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You're going to see hundreds of people passionately talking about why they don't like this camera

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or that lipstick or whatever category you want to go into.

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That can be the position for you to create something new.

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Down below in the description, we have a complete creative ops guide.

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You can put in your email

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and download where we break down a lot of these concepts and then the strategies that brands actually use to create content, think creatively through their product launches and build these modern entities

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that we've learned a lot from here and that we all see every day disrupting new spaces.

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We've got more episodes in this series where we're going to go and talking to more brands.

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Thank you so much for coming along on the journey.

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Clayton and I are super excited to spend more time with you talking through these concepts.

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Any challenger brands or key markets you think might be opportunities you want to talk about, Please drop in the comments below and make sure to hop on all of those.

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And thank you so much for joining us on Creative Ops.

What is the Shadowing Technique?

Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.

Shadowing Practice: How to Stand Out in a Saturated Market (Brand Playbook) - Learn English Speaking with Video

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Grammar & Expressions in Context

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What is the Shadowing Technique?