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 Ankur Goyal, the SVP of growth at Coterie. He's super smart. We got a chance to talk learned all things brand. Thank you so much for joining us today. Yeah, happy to be here. Well, I am really excited to even just get started, because I love this market. It's such a fascinating market. So tell us a bit about your background, what your role is and who you are, yeah, for sure.
Ankur Goyal 0:43
So I'm the SVP of growth at Coterie. What I'm focusing on at Coterie, predominantly is DTC revenue. And for us, the way we structure our business, DTC is the vast majority. And the main focus of revenue, we do have wholesale which is very exciting, and we've structured that to again, support DTC, but when you're when you're owning DC revenue, it's those big levers of acquisition, be it paid acquisition or organic acquisition retention, and even the creative needed to power both of those. It's really important to me that that is part of the equation, and we're going to talk a lot about that, I think in the next 2030, minutes, my background has always been in consumer brands and scaling consumer brands. I did it in big CPG contexts briefly at the start of my career, to understand, hey, how do the people have done it before? How do they approach it? Got to learn a lot about some of that traditional brand building and how they approach that, but I think also saw a lot of the opportunities then things that they weren't doing, and it made me really emboldened to we'll figure out what what excellent and what the modern version of excellent and great could look like, and maybe create what that looks like. And so for the past seven, eight years, have been in in digitally native, largely to see subscription brands, and kind of made an edge in subscription and what I call like single SKU or few SKU, kind of brands where you have in a propped innovation and launches every week as your main lever, which is a valid model, which is not, you know This model, and been doing that for past eight years. Been at Coterie for four years, and it's been amazing. We've gotten to scale the business 15x and we're now, you know, we hit the 100 million mark two years ago and have grown and and been profitable since. And so we're really excited about that.
Samir Balwani 2:36
I know I'm so jealous of the have been profitable since part two, right? Like not having to go back and keep raising money, sounds fantastic, and is a testament to the brand itself. So I just for context, can you talk a little bit about Coterie? What is it? What makes it special?
Ankur Goyal 2:49
Yeah, so Coterie, and actually, I'm in my nursery. If you guys could not tell, if you're only on audio, but in video, you can very much tell. So we got a little bit of what the what this looks like. In case no one's seen it before, but yeah, it's just very high performing diapers, some of the highest performing diapers on the market. And the real aha moment from when we'll talk more about this, but a lot of parents say, Well, when you have better absorption, you can wick away moisture really, really quickly in seconds. That means that your baby doesn't feel cold when they pee at night, so they might not wake up, or they don't have water sitting through their skin. So that kind of rash issue becomes a lot more manageable. And so those are the kind of things that we do for our parents. Oh, my
Samir Balwani 3:31
God, as a parent to two, diaper rash is our nightmare, so I appreciate this all the way through. But Ankur, let's talk about brand positioning and messaging, because this is the stuff that I got really excited when we excited when we first talked one of the things that we one of the perspectives we have at query is that performance marketing only goes so far, and you really need good messaging, and you really need good brand positioning to help you escalate through that part. So when we're talking about messaging pillars and messaging, how do you guys think about it? What do you how do you actually define that? What does that mean to you guys?
Ankur Goyal 4:06
Yeah, and then I might be, might be gearing on the edge of pedantic here, but I think it's really, really important, because even what you just said, performance marketing only gets you so far. You have to think about messaging and like my response to that is, if you're any kind of marketer, and you're not thinking about what you're saying to convince somebody, convince somebody, then, like, what are you doing? You're not going to drive performance. And so, like, I I'm a performance marketer. I would I'm a performance person, through and through and through. And the number one thing that I think about is our messaging angles, or the number one of the top things I think about your message I mean, I kind of told you earlier on, like our growth creative function is a really, really important structural advantage that I think we have. And I think that's it kind of speaks to. Is how important. It's one of your biggest tools in your arsenal. So I just want to, like, create, or at least state that POV. I think we share the POV and it just this. I'm kind of like semantics, but I think from an industry perspective, and maybe from an audience perspective, how we define what's performance, what is brand, was always like, it just drives me crazy. And it's like, What are you saying to persuade people? Performance marketing is the art of persuasion. In my mind, I think all marketing is the art of persuasion. And so when we when we talk about that, then I can answer your question, which is,
Samir Balwani 5:32
yeah, please. No. I think it's really funny, because I think that a lot of people think performance marketing is, how did I set up my meta ad structure? What was my Google ads campaign looking like? And and to me, that is so far from performance marketing that's like the smallest piece of it. And in fact, I would say that if you are focused on that, it's because you're afraid to talk to your own customer and, like, just get out, like, walk away from your computer, go talk to your customers, find out what actually matters to them. Your meta ad structure is going to make a 2% increase. Getting the right messaging is going to make a step change or increase. And so that's the part that I think you and I are 100% aligned on
Ankur Goyal 6:11
100% 100% so back to your original question, which is like, well, so then, how do you think about messaging and how you think about messaging pillars? Yeah, I think about it as the foundation of what you're doing. I think about what will persuade somebody, and I think the word persuade is so important to me versus the word inspire. I think marketing talks about both, and there's a there's a time and a place for both. But I think what's going to drive I think one big thing that drives sustainable business performance is the art of persuasion. And so, well, messaging pillar is, Hey, what is a kind of a pitch? You have your elevator pitch to your investors. You have your elevator pitch to a lot of people. When you're talking to your friends about your company, what's your what's your pitch to your consumer? Because they need, they need that pitch too. And so we've developed a lot of different messaging pillars, uh, at Coterie. And it's not this, it's not always this big top down driven thing. You kind of bottoms up, figure it out, and you figure out one, and that will take you for a long time, and then a year later you can layer in the next one and like, expand that, and then you can keep on layering and more and more. And that, for me, is how I think about growth and
Samir Balwani 7:27
expanding the pie. I mean, just a tactical example of that is the way you spoke about Coterie and the absorbency of the diaper, and how it means that the baby doesn't get cold at night, which means that you can sleep longer through the night, the idea of sleeping longer through the night because of a diaper, I will absolutely buy that diaper and try it and like, that's the messaging pillar that then becomes this step change versus, you know, figuring out what is the right structure or where I'm going to put my next dollar. I guess the question I would ask you is for someone who's just starting down this route, who's just, you know, going, Okay, I'm on board, like, I recognize that these, like, these angles or these thought process are important. Where do you even get started? How did you guys even start thinking about these benefits or these, you know, values? Yeah,
Ankur Goyal 8:16
so, um, I'll talk about, well, in general. So there's a lot of different ways this happens, for this, for this particular sleep one, it happened from reading reviews our Yeah, so I, when I kind of came to Coterie four years ago, I didn't know anything about diapers, and I read all of The documents that like are we have really, really amazing product innovation in house. So I read what the diaper scientists and experts were telling and to figure out what this diaper does, and I learned a lot about it. And I also, yeah, but then I also wrote what consumers were saying, and that was an aha moment for me. I'm like that. Well, that feels pretty powerful. Are we talking about this. And I didn't come on the scene with nothing right, like coder had still been on, had been on sale for about, like, 12 or 18 months at that point, so I could look at some old data, and I'm like, Hey, there we talked about this once or twice, and there was something there. We can keep pulling this thread like, uh, stars are aligning here. So that was a big push earlier on to be like, well, let's, let's, let's test into this and expand this. And so I think that speaks to a couple of things, and you kind of said it yourself, which is, like, talk to your customer. You can talk to them. Or, luckily, in this digital environment, there's a lot of ways to see what what value you're bringing to your customer's life, CX tickets, reviews, all that kind of stuff. Cx tickets helped us figure out some other stuff to further scale. But I think the other structural piece that I do think we need to mention is the fact that I don't think any of this would have been possible if my. The ads were competing against the ads that were testing messaging were competing against, like, 50% off discount ads. So I will, I will never run any advertising that has a sale offer, by any offer or any sale. And that's hard to do. Well, it's probably hard to hard to do for a lot of the people listening. And I think again, if you're a multi SKU, if you're in clothing or beauty, I can't say this is the optimal, I think, for subscription. What the heck is the point of a sale like you're gonna like you're subscribing, you're gonna lose those customers in the second the next renewal. Anyway. So renewal anyway. So, like, it's really, for me, it's really easy to resist that temptation, but the whole point of this is, sorry, not to get too far into discount strategy, but it's like, part of the reason why I think there's bifurcation exists in the industry is like, what's brand, what's performance, what's this? When you take away the sale as a lever that you have, everything kind of makes sense, in my opinion, because if you cannot just as a sale now, you have to make the most compelling ad that you can possibly do to drive performance. Well, that is forcing you to figure out and really hone in on messaging and the ads that are doing that can finally get spend, because you're not going to get all your spend on your 50 off offers, and then nothing's
Samir Balwani 11:21
gonna work. Yeah. I mean, it's interesting sort of this the sale part, and even just like this conversation that we're having right now, there's a few things. So the first one is just, I love that your customer angles and your messaging angles didn't come from your product team, and they may start from your product development team, but they were refined and confirmed by, you know, customer testimonials and reviews and feedback, right? So I think that that is really important, because the product team is still making an assumption when they build the product, the it's not build it, and they will come it's build it, and let's make sure that it aligns with them and that it works. So I think that that's an important piece. The other thing that I will say is, for when we look at brands, and we see brands that are constantly running discounts, the first thing that comes to mind for me is one of two things, either they don't know what their marketing is, and they're having a really hard time with messaging, or they don't believe in their product and they the only way they can sell it is if it were cheaper than the competitive set. And I think that, like when you start to push back on brands and say, Hey, if you actually believe in your product, then we should get paid what you think it's worth, and let's figure out how to actually promote it to that it changes the perspective. And then, you know, the thick thing I will say is, there's a lot of people that are going to probably say, Well, of course, you don't, you know, you don't have to discount your your market doesn't discount a lot. And I would be, I would say, please go take a look at diapers and see how often they are discounted and and the rate at which they're discounted. So competitive pressure on discount, I'm sure, is huge for you guys, too,
Ankur Goyal 12:56
100% Exactly. And I think the third thing that you hear is, like, a little your Coterie, like, you guys have a brand, you don't discount it's like, well, we weren't one four years ago. Yeah, there's a reason why we were able to build one. Yeah, we're doing it from a, you know, the there is a team at Coterie, like a brand marketing team, and like me, respect each other immensely, but at the end of the day, like, what they're thinking about is a lot of levers that focus on deepening relationship with the brand post acquisition as well. Like organic social community, there's some upper funnel brand building that we punctuate, like, you know, have some tadpole moments with. But a lot of what built awareness of Coterie is the millions of dollars that we've pumped into meta and TV. If it didn't, that would be a really big waste of money. And so we have to think about building the brand with these dollars too, and just like, explain to people why this thing's
Samir Balwani 13:55
amazing. Yeah, it's funny, because I think that that's why I also hate this brand versus performance, like perspective, because your performance, the worst part about it, too, is the majority of your money is going to performance ads, therefore that has the most brand impact overall. So, like, it is brand all said and done. And so I love that, that you guys don't take that kind of perspective also. So I guess, you know, we talked about messaging. We're talking about it. One of the biggest questions that people always ask is, well, how do I know I've got the right messaging? Like, how do I know it's working? So what KPIs, what signals? How do you define like, this message is working, this wasn't working. We're going to continue down this
Ankur Goyal 14:39
route. Yeah. So I think that's where, you know, the performance marketer mindset, like, like I said, this is all coming from a performance based place. It's it's going to, it should kick in. You will, like, the same way that you figure out if your other ads are working. So I'm thinking about purchases, if purchases are not coming in. Of this message, then this message might not be might not be it. Now, I think if you're just embarking on your journey, and you're like just figuring out your messaging angles and all that stuff, I think if you see a really big if a message can scale in, in face, sorry, I say Facebook meta, I just, yeah, I grew up with Facebook, Facebook, so that's why we're calling it Facebook. But Instagram, Facebook, meta, if it can scale, if it has a high click through rate, that's a good signal that, okay, you've tapped into a vein of interest. If it's not converting right now, that's not a, oh, just wait, it'll eventually convert. No, I think that's the that's the part where it probably frustrates people when they hear about brand building, messaging, it's like, I can't just wait. I don't have that kind of of the financials for that payback period. And frankly, you can't, like, just waiting doesn't magically change stuff. You have to change stuff. So if you're like, Okay, I got interest, but it's not yet converting, then what I would do is be like, understand if it's too good to be true and there's a false promise, or that promise is being carried through and the customer is going to be nervous, or if that message is just a little too is not going to appeal to someone that actually wants your product. Like, I could put a parenting meme up, and that would drive huge scale convert and click through rate. That's not really like finding someone that's in the market to find diapers. So think about those couple of things. There might be a you've just done clickbait, or you've promised something, and I got you're on something, we got to carry through. But in general, you should be seeing this is otherwise you haven't. You haven't nailed it.
Samir Balwani 16:39
I love the I love the perspective of maybe you've just done click bait, because I, I imagine that that happens more often than people realize where you you make a promise in the ad, you don't follow through on it, or maybe you have followed through on the landing page, but then your CX tickets are like, Guys, this isn't what I expected, or like what happened. So you know, there is definitely nuance all the way around in terms of, like, how you message it and see it perform well. You know, it's really interesting, though, because you spoke about creative really well. And you know, when we spoke there, you guys do have this, like, unfair advantage in your creative process internally. Can you talk a little bit about that, about how you guys do creative testing, how it works with your marketing processes, just what is your perspective around that, and how you've kind of built,
Ankur Goyal 17:30
yeah, so I think what I'm about to say is like not going to be revolutionary or new, but you have to create your creative sprint cycle. And so what that looks like is whoever is owning this. In our case, it is a senior creative person who understands creative strategy and execution and, like, can source new raw assets in other orgs. This might be someone that's more in, like, the head of growth seat, because they're but that's fine, just like whoever it is, the jobs that have to be done are, you have to understand your next three to four weeks of creative production, what messaging angles are you trying, or what proven messaging angles you already have that you're just expanding or trying new things within Those are just iterating on, and you have to have that roadmap. Ideally, it's balanced between some safe bets and some big bets. And then every week you are briefing stuff in and getting it produced. And then I think it's important. I think a lot of brands I've spoken to are like, yeah, I could do that. But like, well, that's hard enough. But then how do I actually get this through? And so again, this was this part of the stuff, the groundwork that we laid four years ago, it's important to me, my the brand and creative team that we have, while they're not the ones that you know, are producing this, the growth creative our creative director needs to know what her brand also looks like in the market. We will understand so, like, yeah, I want them to see it, and I want them to their feedback is really good, you know, like, they're, they're designers too. But we have to figure out the rules of the game so that this is not a like, everything has to be perfect. It's like, if there's something really, really bad, yes, please tell us and give us feedback. But we had to kind of create that flexibility, and if you have that in place, then you can your flywheel can go, Yeah, it's amazing.
Samir Balwani 19:33
Because I think one of the things that people don't realize is the partnership between a growth team and a brand team is such a valuable one, in which one, especially with mutual respect, where it's like, Hey, I trust you that you're not going to go so off the rails, that you're going to hurt the brand. And then, you know other way around. You're not going to be so secure around the brand that you don't let us try new things. And so being able to have that partnership and relationship, I think, is actually like. One of the secrets to some of the best marketing, for
Ankur Goyal 20:02
sure, I think, I think people, I think part of that's enabled by defining your brand as the value you bring to customers lives and the way you improve it. So we we know the value that we bring to customers lives, and we've defined our brand on those tenants and pillars and surprise surprise, they map really nicely to what the messaging networks in market. But I think if you define your brand on an esthetic, solely which a lot of people do, or an execution, you've now handcuffed yourself and are going to just create, create this friction that doesn't need to exist.
Samir Balwani 20:40
Oh my god, the execution is every time we get a brand book and it's just a billboard or a TV ad, and I'm like, That's not, that's not a Brand Book, that's that's a campaign. But that happens so often, and I think you lose the ethos of the brand and like, why it exists. You don't exist to be a marketing asset. You exist to do something in the world. And I think that that's like, a key piece of
Ankur Goyal 21:04
it, yeah, and like, I don't, you know, I don't, I don't want to. I'm not jealous of those people at all, like, who, who can't, who, who aren't, who don't, can't see the brand as the value that they bring in the world. And I'll say our, our team, is excellent at that, um, but in not in an era where now AI agents are talking about your brand, and all you can all you can do is you use your language talk about the brand like an esthetically driven brain can never, not driven and esthetically solely defined by esthetics can't exist in that context.
Samir Balwani 21:37
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's really interesting. It's a it's such a fascinating thing. My question for you on the creative side, and I am truly curious around this, around when you guys are doing testing on creative how structured is your creative testing? Or is it fairly broad, and you're saying, Hey, we're going to run these things and we're going to see what happens, or I'm going to specifically do an AB test in a holdout group, because we're trying to really have a great structure around this. There is this balance between moving fast and being very accurate, right?
Ankur Goyal 22:11
I would say it's probably looser than you would imagine. And the reason so what tight looks like, in my mind, is like, Okay, we have this, we have this static asset that's like, doing really well. This photography is clearly working. And we have this positioning and messaging that we're going to try around, like a and now we want to try this new message, so we're gonna, like, put it on this image, because we know this image works. That's not bad, that's pretty that's pretty good. And actually an easy way to get, like, test some do some messaging testing, and for do some messaging testing. And frankly, if you don't know where to start, it's not a bad place to start. I think there's a couple of things where there's some messaging that you quite literally just need a different execution to actually land the message. So, so, for example, like one, one big part of Coterie is that we, you know, parents, have better experiences with us than other brands, and being able to talk about that actually means amplifying influencer voices that have that experience and can talk about their experience directly. Because, like no one should trust an ad from a Coterie handle talking about their experience with other brands. And that's that's kind of messed up. So like, you need that execute, and that's okay, because it's like, as long as this message could not exist as execution, you're kind of AB testing message one versus message two. And also, sometimes is just the reality of it, like the same image will fatigue. And so if you just have this one image and, like, that's what you're just doing every just doing everything on then, like, after a while, it seemed like a new test won't work, even though you just need to, like, switch some things up. So it's why it's a little bit looser. Just like, throw some stuff in. And you know, if, after a big concept, you're like, I have a lot of faith in this. We've tried four different approaches at this. Did this suite of messages do anything versus our sorry, did this suite of executions on this new message versus our cord do anything? If not, we'll put it to bed for a little bit. Yeah,
Samir Balwani 24:11
I think that that's like a really important thing, because I think a lot of people are afraid of testing because they feel like it needs to be this very scientific perspective on testing. And I think that there is some science around it, but you just getting getting started with testing is better than no testing at all. And so I'd say just even being broad and having a perspective on your campaigns is really important. And so I know we're coming up on time. So my last question for you is, is there anything you or your team are experimenting with right now that you're really excited about?
Ankur Goyal 24:47
Um, I'm excited about a lot of stuff. We're experimenting with a lot of things, and so, um, this will hear a little different messaging, but I'll talk about it. I think so. I kind of hit at this thing where we have, like, a paid act with. Acquisition team and an organic acquisition team all on growth. I think what the kind of stuff that the organic team is cooking up right now is really, really cool. So thinking through like, we have a really, really amazing ambassador program that really relies on Instagram and a little bit of Tiktok, but they're doing a lot of innovation and testing right now for, like, YouTube influencers, because that's, like, it's a different incentive structure that you need. But when they hit, they hit for months because they're just ranking or being recommended. So we made some progress there, and I'm excited about that. Ditto for, like, figuring out how to think about parent groups, because that's just a very different way to tap into that than just, like, Ambassador, influencer based muscles. And I think that's just new to the market. Like, no one's cracked that. And so I think the kind of stuff we're doing there is, like, truly net new. And that makes really exciting.
Samir Balwani 25:56
That's really interesting. I love that. Well, Ankur, thank you so much for joining us. If someone wants to find you online, where can people learn more about you?
Ankur Goyal 26:05
Yeah, if they want to learn more about me, they can go LinkedIn. I look just like this, and it's Ankur Goyal. If they want to learn more about Coterie, which you really should, then it's Coterie.com or Google Coterie Diapers,
Samir Balwani 26:17
amazing. Thank you so much. Thank you so much, Ankur for joining us. I really, really enjoyed this conversation.
Ankur Goyal 26:24
Yeah, thanks for having me.
Samir Balwani 26:28
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