The Brand Hackers Way™
Our thesis on how you efficiently build brands, from your kitchen table to scale up. Based on insights from 300+ brands - The Brand Hackers Way™ is built around 5 principles that help challenger brands scale smarter and faster:
Simple Strategy
Focus on actionable priorities, not lofty plans. Strategy is about what not to do.
1
Customer & Commercials
Champion both your customer and your numbers. Both should guide every move.
2
Find the Secret Sauce
Identify your unfair advantage - then exploit it relentlessly.
3
Individual Experts
Don't hire 'jack-of-all trades'. Get experts in their field and align them as a team.
4
Smash up Siloes
Your teams must work in collaboration otherwise you're missing out.
5
About this thinking...
Over the last 5 years and immersed in the P&L of more than 300 brands, we’ve been gathering data: what do early-stage brands who grow disproportionately fast have in common? What are the mistakes we see made over and over again? What are the interventions we can make that have true impact? The goal is that How to Brand Hack becomes a book. For now, we’re having far too much fun driving results to go on a writers' retreat, so welcome to the synopsis…
There are 100,000 actions any brand could take that might help you sell more. The challenge is never to think of all the possibilities. Instead, when there is limited money and even more limited time, the skill is in choosing which one action to complete first. Then, to choose the second.
Each action needs to be executed with a ruthless focus on the short-term goal.
The mistake we see brands make over and over again is in spreading themselves too thin and worrying about what will happen when they get “big”, often before they’ve got off the ground. Our goal is that you don’t make these mistakes too.
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1. Start with Simple Strategy
Start-up marketing that works needs to be really focused. This is strategy, but it’s not the kind of strategy most business books talk about. We believe in Simple Strategy.
Simple here does not mean basic. It doesn’t necessarily mean quick, or cheap. It means actionable.
The problem with most “strategy” is that it never sees the light of day. It’s so cerebral that when the rubber hits the road (on your average Tuesday, with a full inbox and sales targets), it gets ignored.
Simple Strategy is clear choices on the priorities to hit your goals.
As an early boss once taught me, “strategy is what you are not going to do” and for brands trying to grow in the face of crowded competition, that’s almost everything.
The metaphor I often use is climbing a big mountain. Founders & leadership teams spend way too much energy worrying about what will happen when they reach the summit - what will happen to my customer service when I have 10,000 customers? Or my favourite, “I think our Meta performance has reached a plateau at £10k a month spend - help?”. Instead, for these brands in reality, the only task in front of them at that stage is how to reach the very first pitch.
While thinking ahead enough to have a hazy peak at where you are going is essential, any more time planning problems that you don’t yet face, is a waste of resources you can’t afford to make.
2. Champion the customer - and the commercials
A marketer's job is to get close to the customer and champion them within the business. Except, today, most marketers spend far more time in the Instagram reporting page than they do with the people who matter the most to the business. You’d be surprised just how many brands I speak to that have never interviewed a potential customer, and it’s almost a given that staying on top of customer insight is on the list of things that never actually gets done.
Deeply understanding what keeps your customer up at night is one of two levers that direct Simple Strategy.
The other is commercial context. Marketing teams (in-house, agency or freelancer… it’s all the same), often get left out of the knotty financial conversations. Or, to put it more crudely, they don’t invite themselves in because they don’t see it as their problem. As Brand Hackers, we believe each marketing decision should be centred around what’s needed to achieve the next commercial goal - whether that’s securing the next round of funding or reducing CAC to hit profitability goals…you get the idea.
3. Find the Secret Sauce
To Brand Hack, you have to execute incredibly. Incredible execution does not just mean aesthetically stunning, although it might. It doesn’t mean perfectly consistent if a test-and-learn approach is what’s been decided. It means executing with total commitment the strategic decisions that have been made as a working group.
The brief is to perform a magic trick - use less money than other brands to achieve something way bigger than anyone else. Our belief is that this comes down to determining your Secret Sauce - the unfair advantage that you can leverage hard. We’ve seen packaging work as a Secret Sauce, access to partnership opportunities, Founder personal brand, turning your fans into an army of content creators…There is no single right answer, but the brands that know their inherent strengths and leverage them hard win.
4. Individual Experts, in tight knit teams
We don’t believe in building teams around “jack of all trades”. Our experience has taught us that marketing is too broad and complicated now for this to not end up requiring huge outlays in learning and development time. Our business model, but also our advice, is to gather experts for only the jobs to be done and align them behind a central goal.
To learn fast, to stay close to the customer and to be incredibly focused on one single goal at a time, communication between the experts leading different areas of execution is fundamental. How you get sh*t done is just as important as what you are choosing to do, as ineffective culture and process can be the biggest leaky bucket of time (ultimately money) and cash (obviously money). The fundamentals are a no-ego environment, very decisive business objectives and for all conversations to start with both customer & commercial data.
5. Smash up Siloes
If the organic social team aren’t talking to the growth team (who run paid ads), you’re missing opportunities to super-charge reach.
If your growth team aren’t talking to your brand team, your comms aren’t going to be insightful.
If your marketing team aren’t close-knit with your financial reporting, they can’t build for both bottom and top-line growth.
Having clear roles and responsibilities is crucial. “Everyone working together” sucks up time, which is precious money. Instead, continual, clear communication allows each individual contributor to nail their role, while staying connected to all the learnings from the rest of the team. We have rituals that solve this, from the micro-daily Slack updates to monthly Progress Loop deep dives where we review our 90-day path ahead.
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We’ve seen enough to know these 5 principles can be your guide as you build brands. The Brand Hackers Way is evolving, as each project we run teaches us more, but we will only elaborate and not re-think.
My DMs are always open to discuss this stuff. Getting ready for my future career as an after-dinner speaker, so I’ll take any soapbox I can find!
To chat with one of the team about how we can help your brand, get in touch here.
LUnwin
Lottie Unwin, Founder
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