Samir Balwani 0:03
Hi, I'm Samir Balwani, host of Chief Advertiser and founder of QRY, join me as I talk to industry leaders about their strategies, challenges and successes in managing their advertising and marketing. On our episode today I have Jerel Blades, the head of growth at TUSHY. He's super smart done so much by himself. I don't understand how he is still surviving, but I'm so excited for him to dig into all the things that they're doing and how they're growing so quickly. So thank you so much for joining us.
Jerel Blades 0:37
Yeah, thanks for having me. Samir, great things about and the agency. So really excited to be on Oh,
Samir Balwani 0:44
I appreciate that. Yeah, I know I love this, because I get to learn so much from people like you who are like in it every day and are just doing such a great job at it. So why don't we get started with just giving context to people? So what's your background? How did you get to where you are today? Because I do think it's really unique and kind of set you up for success into the world that you're at.
Jerel Blades 1:06
Yeah. So I consider myself, well, Jerel, first of all, head of growth, as TUSHY, as Samir mentioned, I consider myself a growth marketer and operator through and through. But what many people don't know is I actually started off, like, way, way back, like, even down to, like, high school internships in brand management. So I started doing that at like, really small boutique fashion brands, like three, one limb, and they're pretty big now. And then moved into doing that at Calvin Klein, which was really, really fun, huge corporation, and then, yeah, as I came out of college, I somehow ended up in performance marketing, but never kind of looked back. I think there's something really exhilarating about performance marketing and seeing a dashboard light up and figuring out ways to grow brands.
Samir Balwani 1:57
So, dopamine rush, right? Charles the dopamine rush.
Jerel Blades 2:00
Really a dopamine rush. So I ended up at a small boutique firm in New York City called Maison MRKT, mostly focused on higher AOV clients, mostly men's and women's ready to wear, but has expanded beyond that over almost, I think, 10 years in business, which has been really impressive. But yeah, it was classic agency experience. I ran a team there. I had like seven of my own clients, and then I had a couple people on my team with seven of their own clients. And it was really like the traditional agency experience. But the best part about it was just being able to look under the hood of many different businesses at various levels of scale, various levels of media, spend, various leadership team structures, and then, you know, just being able to, like, see the whole gamut of different verticals, from eyewear to fashion to Kids Toys, grown diamonds, which is really awesome, but yeah, pivoted out of that and then went into an in house situation with goat foods, and was a VP of growth. There go. Foods is a portfolio brand of they never used to like the word snack, but for lack of better words right now, snack brands, licorice.com, pretzels.com, caramels.com, and chocolate.com. Since then, it's six minutes
Samir Balwani 3:23
of, I mean, those domain names, those are like such quality domain names,
Jerel Blades 3:27
yeah. But it was really interesting to be in house, in a situation with like that, where there were, you know, multiple brands going at once, all in hyper growth phases. The leadership team there, like serial entrepreneurs, to learn a lot from them as well. That's when I learned to fail fast, so to test quickly and and to learn things that work and things that don't work and qualify those things and move with speed but also precision. So that was also super helpful. Learned go to market strategy there as well with, you know, rolling out new brands every month, and yeah, and then ended up at TUSHY, which is so different than all the things that I mentioned, but has been the biggest and most, I think, rewarding challenge for me, where we are, I'm able to finally hyper focus on one brand, which is when, but also just like taking on, like a huge market challenge, like taking on a taboo head on, 7% of homes in the US have bidets in them. That's vastly different from like 70% in places in Europe and East Asia. So really trying to, like, tell a really interesting brand story and keep it humorous and lighthearted, but also help save trees along the way, clean butts better the whole thing. So that's been really exciting.
Samir Balwani 4:42
I love that. I mean, I think that your fashion background and brand background, plus performance marketing is kind of the holy grail that everyone is looking for these days, right? It's this concept of really understanding how far to push performance until it starts to hurt brand, and making sure that pendulum doesn't swing too far. One way or the other, and I think that's a really unique thought process. And I honestly, I don't think it's something that can just be learned through like you have to experience it, and I think that's the difference, right? So I love that. And you know, we talked about, kind of your all the things that you've kind of touched, and the brands that you've worked on, and then even the agencies that you've been at. And so you have this, like, really interesting perspective around what makes a good growth marketer. Like, what do you look for when you're looking at a good growth marketer and you're kind of building a team out?
Jerel Blades 5:33
Yeah, I like to say number one is curiosity. And I mean that in a couple different ways. It's can be as small as you know, seeing a post from the many thought leaders out there on LinkedIn and just taking it at face value, like or curious, and asking questions and testing for yourself so you know, lead to you know, you're seeing a certain outcome in your account. How can you make that 1% better? How do you test that? Whether it's a definition, an AB test, you see numbers light up in your dashboard. Looks good in meta, how do you question that to make sure it's leading into actual business outcomes? So I think there's so many different places where Curiosity, and also, even on personal level, like you can think you're really smart, but there's also so many things you don't know so much. How do you go about getting additional information? So I think that goes like all the way through the personal part of a growth marketer, all the way through to what it means to operate in a business as a growth marketer. But beyond that, I mean, I think in the teams that I'm building nowadays, business acumen has probably been more part of my need to have more recently, just because there is oftentimes misalignment at times between like the growth marketer of five to seven years ago, that would you know, show you a Meta row as having a conversation with, uh, finance leaders and being like, well, the business isn't growing. Like, where is that? 345, X. Like, how is it actually, you know, impact business. So I think more so than now it's like a growth marketer, for me is transitioning into, at least on my team, these growth operators, and that requires business acumen, that requires attention to detail and unit economics, how to read a P and L, how to quantify your impact of channels, how to validate new channel testing. So that's definitely like a must have, I think in this age when there's so much out there, there's so much task, there's so many tools, there's so many voices, so being able to have those fundamentals are good. And I think perspective is also a large part for me. I think it's like big wins are oftentimes the sum of, like, 100 small 1% win about it. And it's like there's so many unicorn stories of brands that have scaled 100 million plus, and it just didn't happen, like overnight. And there's probably a lot of things that went into that, or you just may not have that, like magic out of the bottle situation, and you actually have to grind it out by stacking a lot of small wins. And I think, you know, the growth marketer in this day and age needs to understand that it's like the sum of all those little fundamental things that is, like the most important thing. So I can go on and on those I think are in things look for, at least on my team.
Samir Balwani 8:29
Yeah, Jerel you and I talked about this too, like the Curiosity part, part is just so key. And, you know, one of the things that I found is people aren't curious, uniquely curious, meaning, if some somebody is not just curious about marketing, curiosity either takes up their entire life or none of their life. And it's like, it's very binary. So when we're interviewing a query, one of the questions, I'm, I'm always the last person to interview, right? Like I am the final round, it is always fun. And I'm, I'm saying this here, which kind of is like the thing that I surprise people with. But so if you if someone is not surprised by this, that means they were listening to my podcast before they interviewed. And that is a good thing, but I will always ask them to teach me something new. It can be anything. Just teach me something new, because on the agency side, I want to know that you can actually communicate like, complex you can take complex ideas and make it simple and teach it to me. But I also just want to know you're passionate about things. And like, I've learned everything from, like, how to start a saltwater fish tank to someone was like, I really like makeup. Let me teach you how to do your eye makeup. And I'm like, I'm never gonna do this, but thanks for like, I'm just, like, so curious to learn about all this stuff, right? And so I love like, if you are passionate about certain parts of your life, you will end up being passionate about everything. And I think that that's that is, like, key for growth marketer. And then I love what you said about the idea of business acumen, because I do think that that is a piece that has been. Pricing for a long time, and it is this, like, next step in brand Performance plus financial outcomes equals because, like, performance for performance sake doesn't matter, right? Like, I still remember early on, before tracking was good, it was like, Oh, my CPCs are fantastic. And you're like, who cares? So it's things like that. So I love your perspective around all that, and just let you have a framework for it. So I know you know, we're talking about hiring and this concept of growth and bringing on people, but you also have to work internally with a lot of other people, and you have that brand marketing background, when you are talking to brand marketers, how do you help them? Think about, how do you help them go past engagement and brand health and brand equity into okay, how does this actually drive performance, and what's the impact on my performance campaigns?
Jerel Blades 10:59
Yeah, that's a great question. I have a very unique situation at tushi, where I'm the head of growth, and I also have a head of brand to jam out with. I'll give him a quick shout out. He mixed Proctor and Gamble. Super smart. I learned from him on a daily basis, and hoping he'd say the same about me. But it's really just again, like curiosity in that relationship, right asking the right questions, asking what KPIs are important to him and vice versa, trying to meet in the middle on figuring out, like a measurement framework for a top of funnel campaign, for example, what his brand KPIs are, versus my growth KPIs. So really, just trying to crack that that challenge of, like, for example, a classic situation is like, you run a super top campaign, whether it's like a huge TV campaign or it's like an even more difficult out of home campaign, it's like, how do you actually quantify that as a success? What's the payback period on that investment? You know, what are we looking for on the brand side to check off as a win, re looking off on the on the growth side as a win. And I think that is like an ongoing thing that I think a lot of brands are trying to solve. I don't think it's ever perfect. I'd be really surprised if anyone who's cracked the the perfect you know equation, or, you know, you know, brand and growth, or brand performance, or, you know, as as some may call it, but I think it begins with that, and asking right questions, having, you know, good collaborators, being curious on both sides. But it also comes down to, even on a more granular level, the certain tools that you use to kind of speak the same language. So a good example of that on our team is another plug. We love motion, and the reason we love motion creative analytics is because I'm sure that I'm not trying to make a blanket statement. I'm sure most creatives can read a spreadsheet and like spreadsheets, but like, probably not. What they want to see is some like raw spreadsheet of data and ad performance on a random day of the week, right? So figuring out, like platforms that allow all of our teams to plug in both the brand and creative side alongside with the growth side to create, you know, a uniform place where we are all like looking at KPIs that we care about. It's, you know, visualizing it in a way that that makes most sense for the business doing, you know, a lot of taking a lot of the manual work out of spreadsheets and pivot tables and sending, you know, quick snapshots. And, you know, the keys are fun. There's emojis in there. There's, you know, brand Intel stuff. So I think, you know, sometimes, like having the right tools as well can lead to a better relationship between brand and growth, and that's just like an isolated example with creative strategy. But obviously there are other tools for other, you know, activations and things that you know, those two teams collab on
Samir Balwani 13:52
That's awesome. Yeah, I think it's, it's really interesting to hear your perspective on, just like, because you're right, it's what's training and what's engaging, right? So for a creative person, looking at a spreadsheet is absolutely draining, and it's, you know, going to take them four times as long as if you just consolidated it and made it easy for them, right? So why not make it simple? Kind of going back and forth on that one, there's, it's two separate kinds of people too, right? Like your growth marketer is excited about numbers and wants to see that and and how do you translate that into something that then gets you good creative back? And I think that that's important too. There's also context that's lost, right? Because you guys are setting up audience targeting and platform targeting, you've got an expectation around things that may not be in that spreadsheet and it may not trickle through all the way through, so that collaboration becomes key. And then I guess, on the flip side, how does a brand marketer work with your growth team to make sure that you guys aren't kind of going off the rails on the performance side, and, you know, hitting the wrong target or saying the wrong thing and hurting the brand in the long run? Yeah.
Jerel Blades 15:01
Yeah, I think I am, like, more sympathetic to the brand side because of my background. So like anyone who's been on my team throughout the years knows that I do have a soft spot for brand and I also always recommend, like, how brands grow by by Byron. Yes, great part, classic. And I think that it's it's about making sure that growth marketers understand, like why brand matters. And I think that when you understand why brand matters as a growth marketer, that relationship becomes a lot easier with the brand team. So, for example, in any business really like, there's this concept of, like the brand as the moat, right, your brand equity that you built, actually your defense shield in the competitive market, that also, you know, protects, like, how you're positioned in the market, but that also protects, ultimately, your P and L and your profitability and your ability to drive sales within that market. So in that same breath, like what I just described, are two things that are important to both brand and performance, right? So like having your positioning in market and having a strong foothold and being meaningful your market matters to the brand team, right? Protecting profitability and driving strong down funnel conversions is really important to the growth team. So boom, right there, right yeah. Brand solves for both of the things in a really in a really cool way. And what that really breaks down into is mental availability and pricing power, in my opinion, are the two things. So do you come to mind when someone is looking for something to solve a problem, and a lot of that comes with the brand equity that you build. And then it also goes straight to gross margin. It's like the gross margin points that you're able to stretch on the top end are really can be a function of how strong your brand is, right, and how you can price your to make sure you have the most margin possible to be profitable. So I think once you understand that relationship, you start having, like, really good conversations, or you're scratching the back, and you're scratching the back of growth, then it's kind of like a win, win situation,
Samir Balwani 17:12
100% I mean, and it the idea of the moat is so valuable, right? Like enterprise value with a good brand goes such a long way. And, you know, to your point, it shows up in the financials, you know, on the media side. The thing that we look at is we can control CPM. CPM is going to continue to rise. It's going to grow. And that's just the reality of it. The things that we can control is, you know, click through rate and conversion rate. And what does brand do? It increases your click through rate. It increases your conversion rate because there's trust all around, right? So, you know, that's the missing piece that I think people keep forgetting, is if you invest in brands, you are insulating yourself against the rising CPMs and allow your media to continue to scale and be successful, you know. So, you know, trying to remind people of that when it's it is hard to measure, but you can kind of see it, I'm sure. Like, you know, we've seen it for clients of ours, where they run a giant catalog or a big TV ad, and we see performance these click through rates and conversion rates, even when we're not changing creative change, right? So there's this lagging effect. So
Jerel Blades 18:15
yeah, I love this. Yeah. And there's also just, like this, it's a constant push and pull. It's almost like holding accountability back and forth. I actually spoke at one of the DTC conferences a couple months ago on how, like, how brand it can work with performance, creative and like, what are the challenges and the things to look out for in that relationship, and how you can not, you know, sacrifice brand in exchange for like, better, you know, performance, creative performance. So in that, I kind of describe this like idea that is very close to home for TUSHY, where it's like, you know, we have many ads out there, some of our best scaling ads, actually, over the last couple years have this like, almost like a fruit that replicates a but wellness already, it'll get washed off. Looks really good, and that looks really good in triple whale from a measurement perspective, you know, even on like one day, click conversions like seems to really like, be very sellable and be like the thing that gets people over the line. And even from an education standpoint, I think demonstration is really key. So we love that ad on the performance team because it allowed us to grow the business, and was a winner for a really long time, right? And we, you know, don't hold me to it. I think we still have a couple ads like, that's the account, but the flag from the brand team, and I think it's correct, is that you know when someone is finally going through the funnel. And we know that, like, 40% of people take almost a year to kind of come all the way through the funnel, which is a really long time. We know that through post purchase survey data, um. Um, if, like, when they finally get to the point that they decide that they want to get a bidet and, like, the first thing that they think about is, like, within their memory structure is like a peach with, like, fake chocolate on it, like getting washed off, or fake poop, rather getting washed off. Like, you know, going back to the brand, is mode and how you're perceived, especially as we kind of transition our portfolio to a more luxury look and feel, it's almost like incongruent. And so we had some really internal conversations about what it means to position ourselves as a premium brand now that has products that range all the way up to $800 now we want to represent ourselves as a luxury product within that space. And there's always a happy medium between performance, and there's always a different way to put your brand out there. And one winning ad isn't going to be your winning ad for like, 10 years, right? So it's just about continually, you know, holding you know, each other, accountable across the brand and the Grow team, figuring out new ways to win, figuring out how to evolve with both the space and our brand as our brand launches more products. So it's some of the most fun conversations that I have, at least in my role, is like just trying to kind of push the envelope forward on like balancing our brand equity and our performance program.
Samir Balwani 21:18
That's such a great perfect example of that, right? Like, having to make a sacrifice for something that you know will, long term, be better for the business. And it's like, okay, yeah, this ads category building, but it's not brand building. And so how do we kind of change the conversation, or to make, how do we get a winning ad that builds our brand also? And so that's really cool. You know, you said it really well that, you know, TUSHY is a highly considered purchase. And, you know, I'd love to close kind of on this concept around, how do you even think about education and the consideration cycle for you guys, like, how do you engage with someone for a year before they purchase? Right?
Jerel Blades 22:00
Yeah, for sure, there's a million ways. But to keep it succinct, it goes back to like, you know, even traditional marketing, the five stages of awareness. We don't usually operate in all five, but And correct me, if I'm wrong, I probably will botch the exact part of the phase. But we we pretty much operate in problem unaware, problem aware and solution unaware. So problem unaware is like you are using toilet paper. You don't know that it has all these toxins and PFA in it. You also know, don't really understand that the reason your butt may be itching is because you're not like, you're not washing you you're not wiping it all off. And you're, you know, there's a bunch of, you know, things coming out with colorectal cancer, etc, and you don't, like, understand, like, the medical benefit, or just like, the thorough cleanliness benefit of of a product like ours, then there's problem aware, which is, like, you know that you either, you either have a problem, you have hemorrhoids, or you have irritation when you're wiping, or you realize that you're not being thorough enough, and you're looking for that solution. You don't know what it is yet, then there's a solution aware which is like, you understand the problem, you know the solution, but how do you then sell through to that person and make sure that TUSHY is what comes to mind as that solution, which is ultimately, like, closer to the end of that awareness period? So we typically try to operate within a couple of those frames, so we agitate the problem often. Yeah, you know, that's very top of funnel. Like, if you don't know there's a problem, probably can't sell you potentially right now, right? But we can start telling you what the problem is, right? So picture that, like, within the one year frame, like, very, very towards the beginning of that life cycle, or rather, that consideration process, whereas you know, by the time you're made aware of the problem, then you know, we're pitching the right solution, and we're validating that, if you know, hey, you can save money on toilet paper, 99% of users feel clean. We're the number one rated per day attachment according to CNN underscore. So then it's like, really, like presenting yourself as the best option. And then as you go down super low funnel, when you're aware of bidet is pretty much it's like product benefits, product features that are really, really TUSHY. That's where you'll get the more branded statics. That's where you'll get more salesy copy. That's also where other sales channels come into the mix for us, because we talked a lot about mental availability, yeah, but there's also physical availability. Like, where can I get this product? You've done all the other education, like, how do I then sell you this product? Is you got to be physically available in many different places. So I'll stop there. But there, those are the couple ways that we try to massage the funnel and make sure that you know that year oftentimes isn't Sameer sees the same exact messaging, same ad for a year, because that's not going to move you through right? It's really kind of meeting those people in the different phases of where they're at. In that, you know, customer journey,
Samir Balwani 25:01
yeah, and especially with a customer journey that's a year long, the assumption is not, I'm journeying for a year. I'm in and out of this customer journey. And it's like my friend had every day, so I saw it, so I got curious about it. And then I'm like, in and like, and it's not even like, linear, right? Like, I may be solution aware, but not problem aware, and I have to go back to problem in order to get back to the bottom right. So I think that there's, I love that you guys think about it in this very amorphous, fluid way. Because I think so many marketers are trained on the funnel, and then only like, think the world works in this very clean funnel, and the reality of it is, it's it's a circle, and people are popping in and out regardless of where they are and and then there's this like element of loyalty, right? Like, how do you activate people that have purchased to tell their friends about it, to then kind of get them in so, so there is this, like, very complex model doesn't need to be complex, but tends to be, but helps people framework it through. So, yeah,
Jerel Blades 26:04
everything is complex. Everything is complex with the days people don't even understand the product, and that's what I when I have, like these conversations with other growth marketers. It's like I went from selling licorice and chocolate, where I don't need to explain to you what licorice and chocolate is or are to I know, many people who are just don't even understand or have an idea about how bidets work and how easy it is to install and how it has all these health benefits. So what I would like to add to, you know, what I mentioned about consideration is also a lot of what we do in our paid media program, from the creative standpoint, is also a lot of defense around the category, yeah, demystifying or debunking myths about the days like that. They're unsanitary, that, like, you know, that they leak all the time, that the spray is too cold, like, and, you know, one thing I forgot to mention is that we, you know, part of being growth marketer as well as a customer obsession. And that's like, one thing I'd add to the question you asked me about, you know, a growth marketer and what, what kind of person I'm looking for, is like, you got to be obsessed with the customer about, like, what makes the customer tick? What are customers connecting with? If they're not connecting with something? Why is that the case? Right? So we actually have, you know, a post purchase question that's at the end of our survey. Not everyone will answer it, but I think every brand, and any brand who's listening in that should literally go from this episode and put it in your post purchase. If you have it, is what almost stopped you from purchasing today. You'd be surprised. Like, first of all, when I purchase something, I'm done, like, I don't even want to fill out anything up, but like, you'd be surprised how many customers write us so many paragraphs about, hey, this was, like, a pain point. This is something I was thinking, but you guys actually cleaned it up, like, on the site, and we're just, like, allowing people the space to tell us about our marketing, which I think is a very remarkable thing, because we're oftentimes playing in these platforms, and you're getting, like, numbers that are super anonymous, and it's like, you get to a point where, you know, I know that Samir B in the post purchase, said, Hey, man, like, I was really skeptical about this. I read this review. You know, you guys actually have warm water too. And, like, now I'm interested, you know, so it's so remarkable to kind of hear from those customers, and then once you hear from customers, the chances are that other people also feel like that. So you can then actually reverse engineer a creative program or a media program to address those things, even before people get to the website, which I think is really cool. So yeah,
Samir Balwani 28:38
I think post purchase survey is literally one of the most valuable things a brand could put in place to, just like, answer so many key questions, and just like having a program against it around, like, what are we answering and why? And it's funny, because at query, whenever we onboard a new client, the team that is working on it, as well as the leadership team, is required to purchase from that brand. We will only work with brands where we can be customers of because if we can't be your customer, then we don't understand the purchase cycle. We don't understand the product. How can we possibly help you sell it? And so I think this customer obsession idea needs to kind of go across, not only your team, but even your partners. Like, I would hold all your partners accountable to that, to be like, Hey, how do you actually be a part of kind of what we're doing as well? So, yeah, I love we could go on forever. So thank you so much for joining us today. Jarrell, if someone wants to find you online, where can people are more where can they ask you more questions because you got so much more share?
Jerel Blades 29:30
Yeah, LinkedIn. I'm at some conferences. Sometimes some of the best conversations I have where people pull me over and just, you know, like, either try to sell me stuff, which is cool, but also just chatting shop. So I would say recommend to any vendor that sees me at a conference or wants just just chat shop. I have so much to say about this. I love what I and really appreciate the time here to continue to chat about what I most. And, you know, convince everyone, hopefully, to grab a bidet from HelloTUSHY.com
Samir Balwani 30:00
Absolutely. Thank you so much. Man, thanks. Man,
Outro 30:07
Thank you for tuning in to this episode of Chief Advertiser. If you enjoyed today's conversation, please subscribe at chiefadvertiser.com, share the episode with others who might find it valuable and consider leaving us a review. Your support helps us bring more insights with each episode. See you next time.
