The Golden Age of Distribution
With Emma Chozick from Thingtesting
Over the last year, in Marketing, there’s been no word more hollowed out than “community”.
It acts as a wand that people (often McKinsey consultants, I’m told) wave when they seek to conjure potential-growth magic out of thin air. And yet, despite their popularity, so few brands do anything meaningful or innovative with communities. Be it creating one from scratch, owning and maintaining one, or even piggybacking on an existing one — but that’s a story for another post!
Today I want to take a step back and look at the root cause behind this: why community has become such a popular but unactioned concept?
Doubtless there are many reasons, but for me its prominence is largely a by-product of an overarching issue: brands don’t know how to reach their customers anymore.
Many Marketing leaders feel like the buyers (often seen as some variant of “Gen Z” or “the multicultural youth”) that they wish to attract are congregating in online spaces that they don’t have access to. Or they feel that the cultural moments that matter to those buyers are either unknown and in flux, or that they can’t move at sufficient speed to create adequate cultural relevance for their business.
This distribution issue is a critical one for an indsutry grappling with the growing ineffectiveness of paid advertising on social media; its once-golden goose. Yet I don’t believe that this distribution issue needs to be an issue necessarily.
If anything, I’d say that we are in The Golden Age of Distribution. As I put in a recent post on media proliferation, there are so many more avenues to reach your customer. Problematic as that may be to some Marketers (and I’m not that sympathetic if your grand plan right now is to just keep pounding out cheap Meta ads like its 2016), to others (the kind that want to define the future of the industry) it is exciting.
On this subject, this month’s
features an interview with Emma Chozick from Thingtesting. She runs content and community at what is the world’s largest and most robust version of Trustpilot or Tripadvisor for emergent consumer brands.I was excited to understand her perspective. She sits in the co-pilot seat for many early stage businesses that have constrained resources and yet still show up in the digital spaces that matter to their customer base.
It’s a worthwhile read if you’re trying to recalibrate your strategy regarding owned, earned and paid channels. More than that, it’s a timely reminder that big businesses should look to start-ups if they want inspiration for how to do more with less.
Raffi Salama: I’m excited to get your perspective, Emma. It’s safe to say that distribution is the great battleground right now and increasingly so going forward. More and more we hear the phrase: “First time founders focus on product, and second time founders focus on distribution.”
Now, don’t get me wrong, without a world-class product it’s game over for any business. But the wise heads in the proverbial arena know that you’ve obviously got to get your product out there!
So, it’s on that topic that I anticipate you will have a unique perspective. You both running community for Thingtesting - in which you support other companies with their Marketing - and you think about Thingtesting's own brand and distribution. In that sense, you carry a double edged sword with visibility across the distribution of multiple brands.
First, I’d love to get your take on why the brands that do the best on Thingtesting do so well?
Emma Chozick: To start, it's important that we set the stage on how Thingtesting works. We are a product review platform and crucially we operate fully as a third party platform: meaning that brands don't have the ability to affect the reviews on their page.
We can't curate the reviews on the page, and any review you see has been instantly published or not screened first. Now, we have subsequent moderation programming through which an AI model detects anything that seems fishy. For instance, if someone's reviewing from an email address that has the brand name in it, that’s getting flagged. If multiple people are reviewing on the same IP address that gets flagged.
Anything that goes against our community guidelines gets flagged, and it gets taken very seriously. But as far as doing well on Thingtesting: it really has to do with consumer perception of your brand. There's nothing really Thingtesting does to get a brand to do well on the platform.
With all that said, obviously, my remit specifically is head of community and curation. And so the curation piece comes in as far as thinking about how resurfacing things to our users. And so to your point of like this double edged sword: I am sitting in an interesting position where I'm not building any of these brands day to day. I have no idea what their day to day looks like, but I'm seeing a lot of these brands from before they even launch and into their lifecycle.
To answer your original question, one brand that comes to mind always is Graza. I was talking with the founders six or seven months out from launch and that brand, in the last eighteen months, has totally skyrocketed. It’s in Wholefoods, it’s all over TikTok… their distribution is an amazing achievement to talk about.
Top-line, the brands that do well are the brands that do well by consumers, and the brands that are willing to put in the work to achieve distribution. That might simply be doing the legwork to reach out to influencers in their space all day on DMs, trying to strike up a partnership with them and/or bringing value to other people that aren’t even considering buying yet.
To your point regarding first time founders often focusing just on the product… It’s hard to be too generalised. But, in the end, the brands that win are the ones who are open to feedback and are willing to listen, think and adapt to create relevance for their customers.
The important point to note here is that there are just so many products and people can always just take their money somewhere else. Consumers want to see and feel brands care what they care about.
RS: On a recent edition of The Raffi Report, we heard from the CMO of Wayfair Bob Sherwin, who explained the evolution of the last decade.
In the early 2010s, with a little bit of data and analytics, you could quite quickly stand out from the pack and achieve meaningful distribution. It feels like that tooling now is so democratized. Everyone has access to these analytics tools and all of this neat MarTech.
And Graza, that you mentioned, it's a fascinating example because, ultimately, it's olive oil! Of course, though, there's so much more that goes into it. You spoke about speaking to the founders early. What struck you about their approach — was it just the hustle they were ready to put in? Was it how thoughtful they were about their go-to-market?
EC: There are probably tons of factors here. But to pick one aspect that stood out to me: I get on calls with lots of early stage founders and the first thing that you notice is: does this person believe in what they're building and are they ready to make it their whole life? Maybe they've already made it their whole life. And those are the founders that, from the get-go, I get excited about.
Look, it's 2023. Everyone - companies and individuals - wants to have a brand. Look — I'm not knocking them, but there are a lot of founders that when you talk to them, you can’t believe what they’re building because it doesn't even sound like they believe what they’re saying!
Take Adaptogens and Nootropics… Everyone wants to put mood-enhancing elements in their products. And that's great! We could probably use a mood boost around the world right now.
Yet there's a lot of jargon, and you have to be educated in what you're building.
But those Graza founders, they had gone to the next level.
They had been to the region where they were processing their olive oil. They knew everything about the olive oil. Granted, I don't spend a ton of time in the kitchen, so maybe I was just wowed by how much other people know about olive oil! But they took something that like chefs have been doing forever, which is putting olive oil into a squeeze-y bottle and made it into a trendy thing for people at home to do. In a way, they kind of made cooking fun again!
RS: I like that adaptation of the Trumpian slogan for a startup brand. That's clever.
It also speaks to something quite integral in any marketing leaders like toolkit which is just a genuine belief that something could and should work differently. At times that can feel a little niche and even ridiculous. Like for the Graza team, they decided that their life’s work would be to say that the world needed superior olive oil. And I say that with the highest level of admiration.
When you actually think about dedicating your life to that… lots of people would push back: “really, you're going to do that?!” But if that's what you want to do… Go for it completely! I love the concept of, “you can have anything you want, but you can't have everything.”
People have to zero in on being the only, not the best; to steal from Naval Ravikant. And for Marketers, when they think about what they want their brand to stand for, that's the same game. You have to ask: what's the one thought you just want everyone to have and associate with your brand? But then you get these people who are lost trying to cobble together several different brand archetypes at once.
EC: Especially when you're building a new brand, and when you're a small team, when you have three people working on something…
For instance, I think people even underestimate how much time social media takes. It's very hard. To be on Instagram, Tiktok, Threads, Twitter and doing well on Facebook… It’s not going to happen… Every brand I think can find their sweet spot on social, but it's very difficult, especially as a new brand to find your feet on six different social platforms.
RS: From a research perspective, where I’ve spent a lot of my time lately, has been on this idea of media proliferation. If you look at graphs, 10 years ago, there were six major digital channels. And now, realistically, there's roughly 60, if not more. I saw the Roblox head of partnerships come out and declare that they want to build a media platform that every brand in the world is going to want to be on. McDonald’s CMO Tariq Hassan has said the same regarding their app. It’s overwhelming…
Assuming you will fail if you try to do them all, how do you build a media mix that works for you? How would you advise an early stage founder or seasoned marketer at, let’s say, Johnson and Johnson about finding the right blend?
EC: Crudely it’s about knowing where is your customer hanging out on the internet. For a lot of these newer brands, if you're targeting Gen Z, your customers are not hanging out on Facebook.
Your customer is probably on TikTok. Maybe at a push they're on Instagram. But you might consider going all in on TikTok and seeing how that works. If you're like a gaming brand, you might go all in on YouTube and YouTube Shorts. It’s really about thinking: who is the core customer? And obviously Johnson and Johnson is massive and they have hundreds of brands on there, but I don’t see how any one brand’s thinking should be different. Another way of putting this is: where is the person hanging out that you want to be your customer? At this point, people are surprisingly loyal to specific social platforms. I think I spend a lot of time on TikTok, but actually, if I look at my screen time every week, I still spend more time on Instagram.
And so simply it’s about doing the homework of: where is the person that you want to reach? How are they spending their time when they're on their phone or when they're bored at work? And how do you get in front of that person?
RS: One phrase you've used a couple of times, which I think is an important one, is “all in”. And this idea of when you have constrained resources, which by the way, now is true in enterprise as much as it in startups… It’s important to not dilute your focus and really go all in.
Obviously there's no one size fits all. And the real answer to this question is “it depends” But if I rule out that answer - which channel do you think people now waste their time that is commonly considered to be a good channel? So one answer might be Facebook… as in, lots of people are going hard on Facebook and you might say it's a waste.
Where do you think a lot of brands are putting energy needlessly?
EC: Ah, you ruled out “it depends”! One thing that I'll say is: we had never considered Facebook as a channel for Thingtesting. We then hired a freelancer who was the third employee at what now is like a public traded company. And she said: “you guys should try Facebook!” and was showing me all these Facebook groups that are so active around specific products. There’s, believe it or not, this 3d printer with 20,000 moms talking about it every day… I could have never imagined it! I was the person not pushing for Facebook.
RS: So don’t assume a channel won’t be a good one for you?
EC: Exactly… One thing though, to be honest, I would say probably is if you're not already big on Instagram, at this point it's hard. That’s why TikTok is so loved. Their algorithm is created to allow for anyone to go viral. Anyone can get a taste of that virality on TikTok, and you don't need to be a big brand. But look for a brand that goes all in on TikTok —- you can probably get between one hundred thousand and one million followers over a few years.
Does that mean that it can be your primary sales channel? Maybe! TikTok is still at the point where they’re optimising for new people on the platform, so they're making the algorithm skew to virality, whereas on Instagram it’s challenging to build a following from scratch. You have to put so much money into ads. And so if your resources are limited, maybe that's not like the place you go all in on.
Lastly, I also think people shouldn't forget LinkedIn. It’s a huge channel for traffic for many brands now.
RS: One additional distinction that might be useful is if you separate out existing and future customers. A fact which has been misplaced this year, because people are doubling down trying to get more out of existing buyers, is that companies only meaningfully grow when they attract new light buyers outside of their core group. And this plays out in one of the big myths of social media, that Jerry Daykin flagged in his important essay, which is that the most important metric to track is engagement. People crave likes and comments, when actually, and just think about your own behaviour, most people aren't going to like or comment. It’s typically only existing, heavy super-fan buyers who do that. Reach matters most because silent scrollers are the ones who might have never heard of you, buy you for the first time and then become a new loyal customer.
But a lot of companies are fearful at the moment, and therefore over-indexing their efforts on existing customers. But they're likely going to buy you anyway, and the potential uplift is limited versus a new buyer going from 0 to 1!
So I like your push-back on Facebook, because, in your case, it’s about winning the hearts and minds of people who have never considered using Thingtesting before.
EC: Exactly. Look there’s always the bandwidth and skills perspective. Facebook can be a tough platform because you have to spend time in there to know how it works. You need someone on your team who knows how to engage with your specific community in the moments when they’re active on there. So maybe it’s about a Slack, where it’s more always-on and engagement is higher. Or perhaps on Discord? Anyways, fundamentally, the task is this: go and be relevant to them where there are in the moments that matter.
RS: I’ve loved this conversation. Thank you for your time.