In this episode of Revenue Boost: A Marketing Podcast, host Kerry Curran engages in a dynamic discussion with Joe Anhult, a seasoned DTC marketing expert and Fractional CMO. Titled "From DTC to Legacy Brands: Evolving Marketing Playbooks," the episode delves into the transformative strategies required for modern marketing success.

Anhult shares his extensive experience with early-stage consumer startups, detailing how omnichannel approaches and the fusion of brand and performance marketing can propel businesses forward.

Listeners will gain insights into leveraging organic social media, fine-tuning brand positioning, and the critical role of creative storytelling. Anhult emphasizes the shift from growth hacking to community building, illustrating the importance of consistent messaging and immersive brand experiences. Whether you're a startup or an established brand, this episode provides actionable advice to refine your marketing approach and drive growth in a competitive landscape.

Podcast transcript

Kerry Curran, RBMA (00:01.792)

And welcome, Joe Anhult. Please introduce yourself and tell us a bit about your background and experience.

Joe Anhult (00:08.398)

Absolutely. Thank you, Kerry, so much for having me. So my entire career, I've been with early stage consumer startups, very traditional DTC. For about three and a half, four years, I was with the furniture retailer, Interior Define, leading marketing, and then moved over to Coyo, which is a luxury footwear business based in New York, where I was leading marketing, e -commerce, and also helping on the brand and creative side of things as well. So, yeah, all. D2C, e -commerce, consumer brands. That's been the name of the game for me.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (00:42.72)

Yeah, no, you definitely have an impressive experience. So great. So I know you're talking to a lot of brands today and you have across your experience. So what are you hearing in the industry today? How are brands kind of thinking about where marketing and sales are in this environment?

Joe Anhult (01:01.774)

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, so the two big conversations that I've seen happening for months now and continuing to happen today are around Omnichannel. So how can we diversify away from just a hard direct consumer e-commerce play into retail, into wholesale, into pop-ups, into affiliates, partnerships, you name it, how can we just improve distribution, the short of it? And then the second big thing is how can we think about brand and in relation to performance and growth? 

For so long, a lot of DTC brands have been following this growth and growth hack playbook that's been primarily driven by the efficiency of Facebook and Metta, right? That no longer exists. So we're trying to learn this new playbook, this new recipe that still has the fundamentals of early stage DTC, let's just call it 1.0 but this 2 .0. What does it look like with a brand in partnership with performance? And that's the big challenge that I like to solve with my current clients because it's a hard one to solve for. The growth and performance playbook, in my opinion, is not 100 % baked, but I think 80%, 90 % of the way there, whereas the brand, the creative...

Kerry Curran, RBMA (02:14.496)

Mm-hmm.

Joe Anhult (02:26.286)

That's always changing, it's always morphing. It's more of an art than a science versus the other side of the coin. So that's the other big conversation that's happening. And I love being a part of that because again, I think it's a more creative and challenging problem to solve these days.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (02:31.2)

Mm-hmm.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (02:43.552)

Yeah, definitely. And I think we've seen the pendulum swing a bit where the big kinds of legacy brands were quickly trying to copy the D2C brands or acquiring them instead of trying to compete with them. Because the D2C brands, to your point, they had the social platforms and they had a much more nimble way of connecting and engaging to their target audience.

Joe Anhult (03:08.686)

Mm-hmm.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (03:08.864)

Now it's more the D2C brands need to take a few tips from the more legacy brand playbooks to get that upper funnel branding. So talk a bit about where you see the traditional growth marketing playbook and kind of where it's going.

Joe Anhult (03:28.942)

Yeah, so I think let's start with kind of like the small upstart DTC brand, right? Who knows, maybe they don't have deep pockets to do big out of home campaigns or, you know, streaming TV or linear TV for that matter, right? And what I like to coach my clients on is …

Kerry Curran, RBMA (03:34.112)

Mm-hmm.

Joe Anhult (03:45.454)

… start with your own channels, right? So your website, your social media following, and work those muscles of clearly defining your creative positioning and your brand positioning through those channels, leading with social media, because it's just such a fun platform to tell your story. It's led by creators and creative people, and it's very forgiving, right? If you mess up consumers and ...

Kerry Curran, RBMA (04:05.664)

Yep.

Joe Anhult (04:11.598)

People who are digesting this content have a very short memory, so you live to see another day, right? Versus the flip side of that, the deeper the pockets, usually the larger the production, more is at stake. And it's just more challenging to execute in a short manner. So it really is back to kind of the fundamentals of organic social, of refining your story, refining your pitch, understanding what people are responding to, and double down on that, and iterate on that. Similar to the way a lot of people are … 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (04:15.136)

I'm sorry.

Joe Anhult (04:41.422)

… approaching the, you know, meta channel right now, it's a lot of creative testing, right? So it's a lot of creative testing, again, on the organic side as well to, again, I like to call it like dialing in. If you're a coffee fan or coffee fan listening, they know that dialing in the espresso is a delicate kind of art form, right? And so dialing in your brand, dialing in your story is delicate and it takes time. But the best practice for this is through … 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (04:45.568)

I don't know.

Joe Anhult (05:11.502)

… organic social. So that's where I tell people to start. If you do have deeper pockets, then you can get a bit more creative with going after TV, going after streaming. YouTube is a great place to kind of start a little bit smaller bets, right, are needed to be taken there. But a lot, it's all visual mediums. It's all video mediums as well. TikTok has been a dominant player in this space because of that, because they've been video for first.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (05:19.36)

Mm-hmm.

Joe Anhult (05:41.134)

And I think we're all just following that lead across whatever platform is available.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (05:46.016)

And how are you seeing brands kind of respond to the increased competition or the more fickle consumer behavior in engaging with these platforms?

Joe Anhult (05:59.726)

So I think there's higher stakes to be more creative and stick out. And I think the brands that go after the shock in awe are winning in the short term, but I don't think that's a winning long-term play. So I think the brands that are just much more creative in the short term will be a long-term win as well.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (06:05.344)

Mm-hmm.

Joe Anhult (06:28.782)

I'm trying to think of the big ones off the top of my head. I mean, obviously the one that a lot of people are continuing to talk about are like the liquid deaths of the world. Right. So that, like shock and awe, I think to go back to what I just said, you know, is still winning in the short term, obviously to be determined if it wins in the long term. But we will wait and see. But obviously, you know, they made a conscious choice to lead with brand, to lead with more traditional marketing. Traditional marketing to me is … 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (06:42.4)

Hehehe. Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Joe Anhult (06:58.382)

… kind of the four Pisa marketing and kind of almost like Madison Avenue, Don Draper-esque. And it's working for them. And I see a lot of other people trying to play with this shock and awe. And again, we'll see if it has a long shelf life.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (07:09.92)

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, no, you bring up a good point about liquid death because it's definitely the disruptor in the category and great marketing case study where it's really brand, the product's not that different from your bottled water, right? But, you know, yeah.

Joe Anhult (07:26.542)

Water, right?

The can too, I guess like the vessel, it looks like a tall boy beer can. So it's two-fold. It's not just the name, but it's also, yeah, yeah, yeah, totally.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (07:35.232)

Yeah. Right. You can look cool. Yeah. But to your point, like, is that going to be a long-term strategy? Like maybe consumers are going to be like, okay, this was fun, but I don't want to pay that extra $2 for my water. Or, you know what, I actually don't like the taste of water out of a can. I don't know, but I'm saying it's interesting. It's, it's a good, interesting.

Call out that this is still new and disruptive. What happens when it's no longer new and disruptive? Are there other examples of brands you've been seeing, have you seen do well?

Joe Anhult (08:17.806)

On the branding and kind of traditional marketing side of things.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (08:22.592)

Yeah, or just engaging through social platforms.

Joe Anhult (08:26.03)

Totally. So the first one that came to mind was a really big brand in the luxury space. Jock Moose is making waves to compete against the Louis Vuitton and the Gucci's of the world. And what I love about him is he's really done a few things well. Well, first and foremost, his product is fantastic, but he's really carved out a niche within the marketing world, I would say, of experiential marketing. And with his fashion shows, the locations he's chosen are just immaculate. And they speak to the perceived value of the brand, right? And they're beautiful, right? So I like, you know, everyone knows within real estate, like location, location, location is the number one through 10 in terms of priorities. And with his ...

Kerry Curran, RBMA (09:13.536)

Mm-hmm.

Joe Anhult (09:15.886)

… on location shoots and experiences, it's the same, right? So location, location, location, also when you're picking retail locations, that's key as well. So I love what he's done. You can almost think about it as like practical effects, right? He's not using AI to an intense degree, although he is starting to pick up augmented reality experiences, which I think is really interesting. But again, just the practical effects of finding a really … 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (09:30.528)

Mm-hmm.

Joe Anhult (09:45.102)

… beautiful distinct location and using that as your backdrop for your creative that you can capture on set, but then also push that out to social media on your website for PR and press and things like that. I think that's really, really impressive. On more of the upstart play, I mean, Liquid Death again, I think is important to think about. There's a few seltzer drinks that are doing well. In the apparel space, …

Kerry Curran, RBMA (10:00.768)

Home.

Joe Anhult (10:14.446)

You know, I think Viori again, not again, but to be mentioned because they're just having a really big moment right now, kind of off of the tailwinds of Lululemon and just offering another price point and another kind of positioning for Lululemon who has fallen off a bit. And then even, I guess, like early, early days, there's this really cool brand out of Scandinavia called Tekla that I think is doing really well. And again, they're just very …

Kerry Curran, RBMA (10:17.664)

Mm-hmm.

Joe Anhult (10:43.918)

… visually led, more so with still images. And again, similar to Jock Moose, it's the locations they choose, the models they choose, the scenery, the use of practical effects. I think they do really well. And they're a brand that I've been following for some months now that I think will become a household name in the textile, vertical, bedding sheets, nightwear, bathware, things like that. That's another cool brand that I've had on my radar for some time now.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (11:13.056)

That's, those are great examples. And it sounds like it's, you know, the brands that are standing out and kind of breaking through the clutter are the ones that are, are leaning more into branding and storytelling and get that more like customer engagement from, from that perspective.

Joe Anhult (11:31.566)

Yeah, I think so. I'm biased because I've been a marketer my entire career and I love the old school advertising agencies that used to be so popular. And I think we're seeing a resurgence from that. And I think the consumer wants a story. They want to be a part of a world that they can identify with. And I think consumers have always wanted that. And there are clear winners and losers who can communicate the world that they're wanting to build.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (11:33.952)

I don't know. Mm-hmm.

Joe Anhult (11:59.534)

And it's not as much growth hacking anymore as it is community hacking. And at least in New York City, there's been a huge rise of, you know, social member networks and run clubs even, right? And I think they're all taking a page out of what Outdoor Voices did so well in the early days of their brand. They were masters of building community and finding like -minded people who wanted to come together in person and galvanize and be … 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (12:13.728)

Mm-hmm.

Joe Anhult (12:29.038)

… early adapters to this brand and really literally wear it on their chest and rep it. And the brands that are doing that well, I think are winning. But it's not easy again. It's more of an art than science. But I tell all my clients, you know, if you're a consumer brand in a highly competitive market, this, I believe, is part of the new playbook. How can you galvanize a community? How can you tell a story that people want to buy into?

Kerry Curran, RBMA (12:43.296)

Mm-hmm.

Joe Anhult (12:55.758)

And that's really hard to do. And it takes a lot of reps and it takes a lot of time and it takes a lot of effort. But if you do believe in that, then you need to start sooner rather than later and start small again, back to my social media example. Even before that, you know, fine tune your elevator pitch, make sure you have a clear differentiator, make sure you understand who is that core customer and how can you continuously provide for them? How can you continuously provide that brand promise for them?

Kerry Curran, RBMA (13:07.712)

Mm-hmm.

Joe Anhult (13:24.846)

And really every day coming in with that approach and just getting a little bit better each and every day is what I tell my clients.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (13:32.864)

Yeah, no, and that's, it sounds like really good advice for them to benefit from. Are there other recommendations or kind of examples for those brands that are still kind of starting up and don't have the big budgets, other examples of what they should be looking at?

Joe Anhult (13:55.214)

Yeah. So let me just talk a little bit more of one of the things that I just spoke to was elevator pitch. And so I do think it's important to have a more fully flesh brand book, more so for your internal team. So you understand what the priorities are and what not to do. Right. So if you have an elevator pitch, that's internal facing, that clearly defines who you are. That also is clearly defining who you are not. Right. So.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (14:00.192)

Yeah. Yes. Mm-hmm.

Joe Anhult (14:25.422)

A good example in terms of utilizing this would be if you want to partner with a certain creator or influencer, you know, do they align with that internal elevator pitch? And you should know right away like, this is going to work or this is not going to work. The problem, if you don't have that clearly defined, if you don't have the sandbox, if you don't have these rules, then you just open yourself up to everything. And it's really hard to be everything to everybody, right?

Because then you really have no differentiation. You don't have a moat around your business. And with little to no resources, it's really hard to be everything to everybody. Right. So it really comes down to picking a lane and sticking with it from day one. Right. And okay, if it doesn't work, okay, then pivot and change a little bit. Right. But trying to be everything to everybody from day one is, in my experience, really challenging to do. Right.

And so I coach my clients, teach my clients, recommend to my clients with that elevator pitch at the very least define what your product is, how it's different from the competitors in the market and who your core customer is. So those three things right there clear up a lot of what not to do, whether it's a marketing initiative or your product team or your operations team, your customer service team.

That tells you a lot of who you are, but more importantly, who you are not. So starting with the elevator pitch, that morphs into what's our mission, what's our values, what's our core product offering, where do we fit in the white space of the market, right? Make that matrix and show your team internally this is where we fit, right? And that will bleed into anything and everything you do. What's the voice and tone we use in our copy? What's the voice and tone we use with our customer service? What are the visuals? What's the world that we're building?

A really fun exercise that I like to lead with my clients again, dialing in what your brand and story and your positioning is. If you were to have a retail store, what would that look and feel like? Because the best way in my opinion, to build a brand is to invite them into your 3d world, which is often a retail store. So, okay. You're bootstrapping your business. You're not going to have a retail store for a long time, but you know, it's, it's, it's almost like a dream board. What does that look and feel like? So it's easier for your team …

Kerry Curran, RBMA (16:30.816)

Mm-hmm.

Joe Anhult (16:52.238)

… internally to visualize what it is you're selling. What is this brand promise you're promising to your consumers? And having those visuals, having that vision board, as cheesy as it sounds, I think does help fine tune, again, your brand, your positioning, and put you on a path that everyone can be walking at the same time. Again, as opposed to if you don't know what path you're walking on, then you're just kind of scatterbrained and you can't focus.

And that's where a lot of brands suffer from a lack of focus. So it really is focusing your team, focusing your efforts, adding some visuals to that, building this world internally so everyone understands what you're doing and what that promise is to your customers.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (17:35.68)

Yeah, no, that's great. And you know, I know you were saying before as well, too, once you have that elevator pitch, that value prop to shout it over and over and over again. Yeah.

Joe Anhult (17:45.613)

Exactly. Yes. Thank you. I mean, people underestimate how, you know, your frequency levels in terms of how many times you can communicate this elevator pitch. And, you know, you're so tunnel visioned internally, you think, this is getting tiring. This is getting overused, but your customers are maybe listening half of the time. And I mean, Apple's been selling the same phone for what, like 15 years, right? So.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (17:57.184)

Yeah. Mm -hmm.

Joe Anhult (18:13.806)

Obviously, that's, I would say, an outlier, but also Nike's been selling us the same thing for 50 years. Just do it. The runway for communicating this core value prop is a lot longer than I think people understand. You want to be memorable as a brand. One thing that we all know from our flashcard days of learning fractions and long division is repetition. Another analogy is,

What are your flashcards that you want your customers to see over and over and over again? And you can have some slight variance there. Nike doesn't just say, just do it over and over again. They partner with athletes and entrepreneurs and politicians to tell this story. But it's all the same story, just in a different way, kind of with a slightly different tilt to it. So what is that for you? And don't shy away from having a higher frequency than you think.

customers are inundated with these messages. So another thing I like to say is, you know, don't get cute too soon. Keep it plain and simple so people understand what you're doing. Try to have another analogy I use is, you know, what is your in and out model in and out burgers have is like a very simple menu. Every restaurant looks and feels the same. You know, what is that for you? Early stage companies and entrepreneurs get very excited about the shiny, bright new thing. But there's so much … 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (19:29.792)

Yep.

Joe Anhult (19:40.142)

… more you can do with just your core offering and refining that. And again, I think there's a longer runway for that initial in and out model than a lot of people think.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (19:50.624)

Yeah, definitely. And I think one other thing you were pointing out is that your customers are only listening one tenth of the time, or they say that everyone has a shorter attention span than a goldfish. So it's just reiterating that consistent message, but hitting them over the head over and over. And I love the flash card analogy. I think that's a really strong one. And it makes me think about others ...

Joe Anhult (20:01.262)

Yeah.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (20:16.224)

… marketing examples, my own marketing is just, yeah, keeping it simple and repeating it. Yeah. Yeah.

Joe Anhult (20:21.71)

Exactly. It's all the old tropes that Ogilvy, the famous advertising head would always preach about. And that's why jingles were such a thing when radio was big, right? Because people could recall, people could remember why logos are important, why taglines, again, just do it or have it your way or I'm loving it. These things are just on repeat so customers can recall them whenever they're in market for whatever product you're selling.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (20:28.704)

Yeah. Mm-hmm.

Joe Anhult (20:50.318)

It makes sense.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (20:50.432)

Yeah, for sure. Joe, one other question I wanted you to speak to is that a lot of the branding upper funnel initiatives aren't as clearly measurable as some of the more performance -based. So talk about how you help your clients measure the initiatives that can't be as directly measured as some of the others.

Joe Anhult (21:13.038)

Yeah. Yeah. Not as easy as like, what's our Facebook ROAS from last week? Yeah. So I always start with, this is going to be hard to do, right? It's not going to be as black and white as again, like a Facebook ROAS, which honestly these days it's really not black and white at all anyway. So it's becoming more and more gray.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (21:17.472)

Right, right, right.

Joe Anhult (21:33.262)

So I try to lengthen the time horizon, right? This isn't going to be overnight next week, next month. It's going to be at least three to six months, right? So extending that time horizon. And then also the more tangible KPIs that I like to point to are what our organic traffic looks like from day one to day 180 or day one to six months? What do our brand search terms look like? You know, has our brand keyword search got up?

Kerry Curran, RBMA (21:33.6)

Mm-hmm.

Joe Anhult (22:02.382)

Our PR hits, our number of followers on social media, our number of email signups, again, from that organic channel. What do our general business KPIs look like? As a leader, as a founder, I assume that you have the best pulse on your business from anyone else in the company. So you know the inputs and you're also looking at the outputs, the outputs being your business KPIs. So if you know your inputs on, let's say, January of 2024 were X, Y, and Z versus January of 2023 were ABC. And then the six months prior, you can have an understanding again, just by having a pulse on the business. Did those inputs have an effect? Did your sales go up? Did your retention go up? Was your AOV hire? Was your UPT hire? And you have to have some sort of intuition as a business leader and point to.

Ok, we actually ran these brand initiatives feeling a certain level of confidence, it's never going to be 100%, that these efforts, these inputs had an effect on the output. So it's not a perfect science. There's more art to this than there is growth. But those are just a few ways that I like, you know, those are just a few KPIs I'd like to point to you for measuring the impact of, yeah, of your brand. And I don't think liquid death … 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (23:13.184)

Mm-hmm.

Joe Anhult (23:26.99)

… knew what the impact was going to be from naming and the, again, the vessel they chose and the packaging. But you have to assume that that had a large piece of the, you know, the end result, right. Or when Nike partnered with Michael Jordan, right. Or when Apple ran those TV spots of like 1984, those were all educated bets, right. And you're always just trying to obviously minimize … 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (23:34.08)

Mm-hmm. All right.

Joe Anhult (23:57.006)

… the risk, you know, how can you underwrite that brand moment? And at some point as an entrepreneur, you have to be an entrepreneur and you have to make that bet. And it should always back to my elevator pitch story and the brand pitch story. It needs to align with that tagline, with that North Star, with the world that you're building. It becomes really challenging if you execute a brand moment that doesn't

Kerry Curran, RBMA (24:13.312)

Mm-hmm.

Joe Anhult (24:27.342)

… align with this world you're building because the consumer is going to get confused and it's going to be even more challenging to measure the impact because it probably won't be as important.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (24:37.92)

Excellent. Well, thank you, Joe. Any other, this has been extremely valuable and educational. I've taken notes myself, but any other like last minute or I shouldn't say last minute, any other additional recommendations for brands that are getting started or, you know, want to, to essentially drive greater growth.

Joe Anhult (24:59.565)

I don't think anything out of the ordinary, you know, I think just start somewhere. Don't have decision paralysis where you don't know where to go and just start and be forgiving to yourself. It's not going to be home runs every time and understand that it's going to take, you know, just extend your time horizon. You know, it's, it's not going to be next week, next month. Give yourself more grace for a longer period of time. And as you continue to refine, to learn.

To educate yourself, you will get better and the results will come. But in the early days, I would focus more so on the input and getting better each and every day as opposed to we don't have enough followers, we don't have enough email subscribers, we don't have enough sales. Try to focus much more on the input in the early days and just getting better than the previous day, getting better than the previous week and improving on those inputs as opposed to those outputs. That would be my advice to those early stage companies.

Kerry Curran, RBMA

So Joe Anhult, what do you recommend for brands to work on becoming more memorable with their audience?

Joe Anhult

Yeah, totally. So back to the flash card thing. I mean, again, don't be scared to increase the frequency of your messaging, right? So with an email, maybe you're sending like two a week. It's okay to ramp that up to like five a week, right? Be repetitive with that core message, right? So fine tune that one liner, that tagline, whatever it is you are, that clearly communicates who you are.

And do that over and over again. If you want to go as old school as writing a jingle, which I've done before in the past, write a jingle. Audio is massive again, obviously. It's not radio, it's podcasts. And then also visuals as well. Obviously, humans love to look at pictures, videos. If you can clearly define what your visual aesthetic is and kind of tune that in and have a very distinct visual identity. Logos of the most obvious example here. But even if you have a certain style aesthetically for images, maybe they're high contrast, maybe you only use black and white, maybe you only use a certain looking model or your product shots are unique in some way because of the way the light hits it or your PDP pages are unique. Just be consistent with that. And again, be repetitive with that and think of it as a flash card. And it's going to take a lot of time for your consumers to …

Kerry Curran, RBMA

Mm-hmm.

Joe Anhult 

… remember and recall because you're competing not just with your category closest to you but you're competing with everybody. You're competing with Netflix, you're competing with TikTok, you're competing with Act Creator, you're competing with the news in the world and it's really hard but it takes time and it just takes repetition and it takes consistency.

Kerry Curran, RBMA

Great. Thank you.

Joe Anhult

Totally.

Kerry Curran, RBMA

Well, thank you so much, Joe Anhult. Really appreciate you joining us and hope we can have you on again sometime soon. Yep, thank you.

Joe Anhult

We'd love that. Thank you again, Kerry.