Obsessed

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The 2020 Porchlight Marketing & Sales Book of the Year

The cofounder and chief branding officer of Red Antler, the branding and marketing company for startups and new ventures, explains how hot new brands like Casper, Allbirds, Sweetgreen, and Everlane build devoted fan followings right out of the gate.

We’re in the midst of a startup revolution, with new brands popping up every day, taking over our Instagram feeds and vying for our affection. Every category is up for grabs, and traditional brands are seeing their businesses erode as hundreds of small companies encroach on their territory, each hoping to become the next runaway success. But it’s not enough to have a great idea, or a cool logo.

Emily Heyward founded Red Antler, the Brooklyn based brand and marketing company, to help entrepreneurs embed brand as a driver of business success from the beginning. In Obsessed, Heyward outlines the new principles of what it takes to build and launch a brand that has people queuing up to buy it on opening day. She takes you behind the scenes of the creation of some of today’s hottest new brands, showing you:

  •  How Casper was able to upend the mattress industry by building a beloved brand where none had existed before
  •  How the dating app Hinge won a fanatical user base and great word-of-mouth with the promise that the app was “designed to be deleted”
  •  Why luggage startup Away, now valued at $1.4 billion, could build their brand around love of travel by launching with just one product–a hard-shell carry-on suitcase–rather than a whole range of luggage offerings.

Whether you’re starting a new business, launching a new product line, or looking to refresh a brand for a new generation of customers, Obsessed shows you why the old rules of brand-building no longer apply, and what really works for today’s customers.”Clear, useful and refreshingly honest, this is a practical manual on how modern marketing actually works. Buy a copy for everyone on your team.”—Seth Godin, author of This Is Marketing

“A lucid and engaging playbook on why “brand” is the most fundamental, human, and engaging element of any great venture–why it’s the business DNA, and not just the representation of it. Obsessed keeps you anchored to the raison d’etre!”—David Bell, co-founder and president of Idea Farm Ventures

“I look to invest in companies with promising new models, and a focus on brand that starts with a true understanding of the consumer. Emily Heyward’s book is a fascinating look into how branding really works, and why it matters.”—Kirsten Green, founding partner of Forerunner Ventures

“We’re all prey to our obsessions. (Yes, even you). Ready to find out why? This book will show you.”—Sally Hogshead, author of How the World Sees You and Fascinate  

“When we started Casper, our brand strategy affected every decision—and in this book, Emily Heyward shows you how. Anyone starting a company should read this.”—Philip Krim, co-founder and CEO of Casper

“The startup landscape is always shifting, but across every category we’re looking to invest in people who understand the power of brand. This book, with Emily’s valuable advice, is essential for getting it right.”—Ben Lerer, managing partner at Lerer Hippeau and CEO of Group Nine Media

“Obsessed is a clear, informed blueprint founders and marketers can use to craft a resilient brand—one that will not only break new ground, but inspire an unforgettable customer connection.”—Nir Eyal, author of Hooked and Indistractable

“Nobody understands the development of modern brands better than Emily Heyward.”—Scott Belsky, founder of Behance and author of The Messy Middle

“Heyward has written a thought-provoking book on the concept of brand . . . At once imaginative and pragmatic, this will appeal to those who regard branding as a sometimes daunting task.”—Library Journal

“Zesty debut . . .This breezy, insightful guide to understanding what customers actually want, and building a brand to meet that need, is an encouraging thumbs-up to start-up hopefuls.”—Publishers WeeklyEmily Heyward is the cofounder and chief brand officer at Red Antler, a full-service brand company based in Brooklyn. Emily works closely with founders to develop purposeful, strategic visions for their start-ups and has led branding efforts for top companies such as Casper, Allbirds, and Boxed. In 2018, she was named one of Inc.’s Top 100 Female Founders.

Emily graduated Magna Cum laude from Harvard University, where she studied postmodern theory and consumer culture. Born and raised in New York, she currently lives in Cobble Hill with her wife, son, and dog named Sprout.INTRODUCTION

You don’t need to work in venture capital or graduate from Stanford business school to recognize that we’re in the midst of a consumer startup revolution. Scroll through your Instagram feed, and you’re more likely to see a beautiful, compelling ad from a brand you’ve never heard of than you are to see an old favorite. The barriers to entry for launching a business get lower every day, which means new brands are popping up at a whack-a-mole velocity. The old gatekeepers no longer exist; you don’t need to be able to afford a TV ad or get a place on the shelf at a major retail chain in order to get in front of people. Every category is up for grabs, and traditional leading brands are seeing their businesses slowly erode as hundreds of small companies encroach on their territory. As category after category gets disrupted, as competition gets fiercer, it’s no longer enough to have a great idea, or a better price, or faster shipping. Founders need to be thinking about brand from before day one; it needs to be embedded in their culture from the very start. They need to build a brand that people will fall madly in love with at first sight, and they need to do it before they even launch.
 
It wasn’t always this way. When I graduated from college in 2001, I took a job at a large global advertising agency to work on huge, established brands, many of which had been around for literally a century. Our role at the agency was to create new TV campaigns every year that would generate renewed excitement and energy for old, familiar things. I learned a ton about how the world’s oldest and largest consumer goods companies approach brand building, and the rigor that goes into defining a target audience, sharpening a consumer insight, developing a clear and succinct brand strategy, and then using that strategy to guide all communications. I loved my job, and I met some of the smartest and most creative people I’ve ever known.
 
But after a few years, I grew frustrated. TV advertising was becoming less and less dominant, and we were tasked with coming up with new messages about brands that simply didn’t feel relevant, with no power to affect the brands or products themselves. I started to describe my job as “what new thing can we say about yogurt this year?” (The answer: not much.) I felt that we were solving the wrong problems.
 
I was looking for a change, and my friend JB, eventually my cofounder, brought me on to help him run the New York office for a New Zealand–based creative agency. It was 2006 and the startup scene in New York was just gaining steam. Because we were small, we started meeting entrepreneurs, people who had amazing ideas for businesses that could fundamentally transform behavior—people who were using innovation to solve real problems. They didn’t need advertising, at least not yet, but we discovered in our conversations that they knew very little about how to build a brand, or even what that really meant. We saw an opportunity to take everything we had learned working with large global brands and apply it to launching and growing new businesses that we wanted to see in the world.
 
Our belief was that brand is an engine that drives business growth, and the sooner businesses incorporate brand thinking, the more set up for success they’ll be. We struck out on our own and founded Red Antler in 2007 to test that hypothesis by partnering with founders to help them embed this perspective from day one.
 
Years later, Red Antler has grown to over a hundred people, but we still mostly work with startups. We’ve played a key role in launching some of the most successful and exciting new brands in the world, helping create billions of dollars of value. In fact, half of our clients are “pre- launch,” which means that we meet founding teams before they’ve launched their businesses, and help them to create the entire consumer-facing experience through the lens of brand.
 
When we first started Red Antler, many people questioned whether founders should invest in brand before they’ve proven product-market fit and started to gain traction. But our philosophy is “brand early, not often.” This directly contradicts the “lean startup,” “test to success” approaches that many earlier tech companies embraced. Today, it feels like a new company launches every second, and you can no longer get an idea out there, see if it has momentum, and then iterate on your brand as you would on a set of software features. If you’re launching a particular business, you can be sure that someone else is too. This phenomenon plays out in Holly wood, where you end up with two almost identically themed movies coming out in the same year. (Or with kids’ names—you think you’re so creative, and then there are four Marlows on the playground.)
 
The same cultural forces and gaps in the market that lead one founder to launch a direct-to-consumer contact lens business are leading someone else to do the same. And the time frame for a trend to demonstrate itself has only gotten more intense—it used to be that over the course of a year, we would notice that more and more people were launching businesses in a certain category. Now, within a month, we’ll sometimes meet with three different teams launching nearly identical ideas. Because it’s so much easier to get things off the ground, and because technology has lowered the barriers to entry for everyone, the difference in success largely boils down to brand.US

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