Your Next Move - Infusing Personality Into Your Brand

Episode Date: March 4, 2025

Welcome back to Your Next Move. On this episode, we learn how to create a unique brand identity through experimentation and strategic feedback loops.

Hi, and welcome to Your Next Move produced by Inc. and Capital One Business. I'm Mike Hoffman, editor and chief of Inc. We're excited to have a conversation today in our brand new Your Next Move Studio to talk about sales and marketing. With us, we have two great entrepreneurs who are experts in building a mission-driven brand and bringing creativity to all that they do. Yalitza, let's start with you.

You're the founder of Healthy Roots Dolls, and this is a 10-year-old company. You've built this amazing brand that's mission-driven, and it's based on creating greater representation in toys. Can you talk about, like, so where the idea came from and how you started out? So, Healthy Restalls was born out of my own experiences growing up. I never really had a doll that looked like me,

that had hair like me, had my nose, had my lips, had my skin tone. It took that conversation to social media, and what I was doing at the time is actually getting validation for that concept to demonstrate that there's a need, because hundreds of comments later, my friends and I talked about how we never had products that looked like us or we didn't know how to do our hair and saw it as an opportunity

to do more than page a doll brown, but to create an educational hair play experience. Piera, you're the founder of 29 Rooms, an experiential event company, and before that, Refinery29, which is one of the great media startups and media brands of the last 25 years. Going back to the early days of Refinery29, how did you guys think about that brand and how to market it and how to position it relative to all the other media outlets that are out there that serve very similar audiences? At the time, the media landscape, especially speaking about fashion and style and beauty, was very serious and very rules-based. There wasn't that much experimentation happening in digital, especially among the big brands.

And so we saw that as such a great opportunity to play, experiment, try new things. We would host parties and really bring people together in person. We were focused on these independent designers, independent boutiques, and people said we wouldn't be successful because those brands didn't have a lot of money, didn't have a huge reach, but they were our initial community.

They were our first advertisers, our first investor was one of these small boutiques. So it really became a self-supporting group. Thinking about grassroots marketing, you actually use Kickstarter in a really interesting way. Can you talk about that? I was a designer, not an entrepreneur. I didn't know anything about raising capital

or necessarily running a business. And I found that it was really challenging because I was being met by people who were telling me this idea is too niche, it's too small, there's no market for this, this isn't fundable, nobody's going to buy this. And so as I kept running into that wall, I was like, I'm just gonna show them. So we used it as a way to show that there was a demand,

get the funding necessary to build our prototype, and then bring it to market. And people will always ask me, like, how did you get those press features? I was like, I spent nine months before the Kickstarter campaign talking to people, going around, going to the events, meeting people, shaking hands, sending emails,

and building relationships, and also growing your newsletter, because it's important to own the audience because you can always communicate with them. So that was how I brought my product to market. I think it's interesting, right? Because Kickstarter is a vehicle for raising money but also has a marketing effect. Right? And newsletters are a vehicle for reaching

your customer but also has a marketing effect. So how did you think about each activity that you take in the early days of a startup and as your business grows, and what the multiple reinforcing effects of those might be. P.R., let's go with you. It was really just about doing small low-stakes experiments that we were excited about, that we had intuition about,

and then seeing how they panned out. Sometimes they worked, sometimes they didn't work, and if they worked, we would do two more experiments in that direction. As we grew, obviously, we had more strategy. But I think that balancing strategy with playful experimentation and taking small bets, is really how you move forward and how you

continue to do fresh and new innovative things. I love that idea because so much of marketing now is like quantitative and around lead gen and performance and results, and that's all important, right? Yeah. But I think that consumers have a real sort of relationship with brands that are fun or that inspire emotion.

It could be fun and play. It could also be something like inclusivity, which is a powerful emotion. So I'm curious, how do you think about that balance, Yelitsa, between playful experimentation and results-oriented marketing and whether the two combine? I feel like my brand kind of lives in both because it's a children's brand.

We get to be playful. We get to be fun. I know when I started, similar to you, like we were experimenting, I call it spaghetti to the wall. I love that. You're trying to see what sticks. And I think a lot of people are afraid to put out bad content or put out something that doesn't look good. The first version of my product was awful, to me at least.

I didn't think it was cute. But if I didn't put it out, I wouldn't have my current product because customers wouldn't have given us feedback about the packaging, how the hair was pinned back, how the shipping experience was, so that we could work with different fulfillment partners and build out these systems. I'm proud of the fact that I wasn't

afraid to put out things that I thought were bad, but open to receiving that feedback. I think something that a lot of brands get wrong and people honestly is, you know, holding things back and waiting for perfection, trying to over engineer and, you know, over perfect and because out of fear of putting something out that's not 100 percent there, but if you wait and wait and wait and wait, you don't get those insights that you get from putting something out when it's part of the way there so that you can get it all the way there in a way that actually resonates with the people you're making it for. What's a powerful piece of feedback that you got from customers that you then were able

to actually change the approach, the shipping, the product, the content for your business in a way that actually then resulted in growth? When we were first growing Refinery, we were early on in the world of branded content. And so we did a partnership with a bag, and we curated the bags that we thought our audience would really like. And they said, no, these are the ones that we're pushing right now. You have to feature these. And we needed the money, as many businesses do, and we put the branded content piece out,

and we turned off comments on it, but our audience was so mad at us that they went into other stories and were complaining about the fact that we put out this piece of content that felt misaligned. That became really important as we grew to make sure that both aesthetically and values-wise we were pushing back on brands, not to just push back, but because we knew that they would be more successful if we did a true collaboration.

I think it's really great that we can use our customers and our audiences to direct us down the right path and keep us accountable. So we also use it as an opportunity to align ourselves with our goal of being about hair play and hair education. So when we redesigned the doll's body, we also relaunched that product in partnership with My Black is Beautiful through Pantene P&G's hair care line. It helps position our product in this space as like this is hair and beauty and we're all about representation and showing you how to understand your hair and also make it a big splash. So we got featured in Essence, all these media platforms and things like that.

We also got to show everybody how we had improved the product. So it's a win-win. Is that an innovation in the toy space? Yes. It is an innovation in the toy space. So not just a doll painted brown, but something that you can actually style with real haircare products, wash it like your own hair. Then we've seen children actually do matching hairstyles,

like the braids, the twists, the afro puffs, all these things, and also learning haircare. And one of the other pieces of feedback we got from customers was, show us how to do the hair. It's like, you're right. We should make video content showing you how to do the hair. And that has created so many viral pieces of content for us so far. You've both built marketing machines,

really strong brands, and you both have a design background, and that's unique. And I imagine that there are are lots of CMOs of growth companies who would love to capture the magic of what you've done, who don't have a design background. So what do folks with a design background know about marketing and about engaging

customers that anyone can learn from? As we were growing Refinery and we were starting to bring in people from more corporate backgrounds, I actually started to feel a sense of imposter syndrome and I felt like the kid at the adults table. I've gone to art school, I didn't have an MBA, and I thought that it was actually something that was hindering me. And then I decided to reframe it for myself and to say, well, what do I bring to the table with this art school background, with this design background? And I realized it was actually such a strength to be able to think in that way.

Because at the core of it, design and going to art school is about problem solving, it's about creativity, it's about nimbleness. Well, that's fascinating. I'm sort of curious, as a founder, you have the keys to the brand and the brand marketing and the voice of the company. And as the company grows and expands and you move into retail or you have other partners,

other people, more people start to have keys to, if not the whole brand, like parts of the brand or parts of the marketing. Is that tough for you as a founder? And how do you manage yourself so that you both allow the business to scale while also making sure it's really dialed in? We started so small so I did everything myself from

moderating comments to creating layouts to writing, and then over time I had to learn how to export my knowledge to other people. So when I did that, what I really focused on was, first of all, understanding how I made decisions and giving people a framework for decision making that was really clear. Then it was trusting, you know, telling people that I trusted them. And then it was also helping people to understand the why, the values behind what we were doing, that that was the most important part,

the most important filter for decision making. But then it was really exciting to have other people being the voice of the brand because it was seeing, I can only have so many ideas, I can only express it in so many ways. When you bring other people in with different lived experience, with different perspectives, with different touch points.

It just starts to become so much more vibrant. I had to learn how to get everyone's ideas out. So one of my favorite things was, have you ever heard of a Pecha Kucha? Yeah. So we would do, we would do Pecha Kuchas. And then in our weekly meetings, people would share what are they seeing on their social media? What are they being inspired by? For those who don't know, what's a Pecha Kucha?

A Pecha Kucha is basically like a short, where you get a couple seconds per slide on a particular topic of your passion. And you go, tch tch. It's a very, very fast presentation. Yeah. An opportunity for people to get comfortable talking in front of the team, sharing their ideas,

sharing their passions, and for other people to be inspired, and letting them be confident knowing like, okay, you can run this email marketing campaign. You don't need me to tell you what to do. You already know what to do. Go with it. So right now, what is the most important marketing channel that you see, either the most effective or the best one for your business?

How is that different maybe from five years ago, or 10 years ago, or when you started? Do you guys remember when Facebook ads were like pennies? The days, the days. So when I'm talking to other founders I always tell them like you can only focus on so many platforms at a time so decide which one is most important based on the audience that you're trying to speak to or where you're seeing the most traction and double down on that.

It sort of depends on your platform, your brand, who you're trying to speak to or where you're seeing the most traction and double down on that. It sort of depends on your platform, your brand, who you're trying to reach. And I think it comes down to experimenting, you know, don't panic, play. Do you remember like one marketing moment for your brands that really performed well and that really kind of went viral? And why do you think it did? It was summer of 2020 and I just posted a tweet, just an innocuous tweet, just a regular tweet that was based off of a viral format that I had seen other people doing.

So sharing a photo of myself, the founder and the product, like, oh wow, look at this beautiful product I didn't know existed and the message behind it. It went super viral, almost like a million likes on Twitter, X. We got so many big press hits, It went super viral, almost like a million likes on Twitter, X. We got so many big press hits the week before I had transitioned the website over to pre-orders,

just to see if there was any interest. We sold out back-to-back three times before the holiday season. That's why I always tell people, stay ready so you don't have to get ready. Make sure you're always ready to capture those leads. So when you have a story that goes viral or a tweet that goes viral, how do you turn that virality into a lasting marketing benefit for the company? You have double down. So I think that was a key moment for me

recognizing that the founder is a key part of the marketing and branding and storytelling. People love seeing founder-facing content. So I had to get comfortable with integrating myself into that content, doing videos, doing Facebook Lives, Instagram Lives, live wash days, and then expanding on that. Repurpose your content. That post could be used in your newsletter,

can be used, make it long form, make it short form, cut it up, re-edit it, put a different audio on it, you can do so much with that. So we were able to create basically a content machine that was distributed across social media. So if you have a high performing piece of video content or high performing photo asset, turn them into an ad and find the targeted audiences. So retargeting your people who have engaged,

people who have visited your website, all those things. I agree. We used to always have this expression, sweat the assets, sort of a weird. I never really liked the expression, but it was essentially, how do you take what you're doing and really make it work for you? And again, often I think when people are creating content,

they think, okay, I already did that onto the next, it's no. You did it, now can you cut it in different ways? Can you do it as video? Can you do it as text? Can you put it on these different platforms? Can you come up with a new spin on it? If you had a business that was 10 or 15 years old and had grown nicely, but was stuck of stuck.

All of a sudden, everyone's looking at the marketing team and trying to figure out what's going on, why are we stuck? What advice would you have for the founder of that company for how to move it forward, how to get unstuck? I would say to build a culture of creativity and really focus on how are you creating a safe space

in your company for creativity, for experimentation, and helping to really juice the creativity in the room. It's counterintuitive, right, because in a moment when things are not working, you do tend to get focused on that sort of scarcity of that, and you have to work on bringing people into that place of possibility and curiosity and inflation. So finding the way there, I think, is absolutely critical so that then the team can work together to find

the creative solutions. You have to constantly be feeding yourself. I think one of my mistakes in my founder journey was I stopped making art, I stopped playing music, I stopped doing a lot of things that made me the creative who was the one who started the company. So you have to constantly be looking for inspiration, finding inspiration in media and the things that make you passionate. I love that. Well, obviously, the name of our series is Your Next Move. So as you think about your founder journey and the marketing of your brand and what comes next,

what's your next move? My next move is to make sure that my brand is forever in a place to support the next generation of children. Beyond that, I want to be not just someone who pushed the industry forward, but someone who continues to bring ideas to other spaces and other companies and other industries and recognizing the value we can create

for people of all different backgrounds. My next move, I'm doubling down on playful creativity. I'm writing a book right now called The Playful Way that'll be out with HarperCollins. So it's really all about helping people to tap into creative, playful way of life. And I'm also opening a new company which is called Numaluma, and it's going to be, I'm calling it the Strava of Creativity.

So helping people to live creatively in ways that are communal, that are inspiring, and that are fun. Thanks to Yalitza and Piera. And we'll have more from them ahead. But first, we want to hear from you. Here's a poll question, and please give us your answers in the chat. What's your most powerful marketing tool

for scaling your business? Is it social media marketing, email marketing, strategic partnerships, or paid advertising? And now, we're joined by another sales and marketing expert, Karen Bonner, who's the Vice President of Brand and Acquisitions Marketing at Capital One Business. Thanks so much for joining us today, Karen.

Thanks for having me, Mike. So fast growing companies need strong sales and marketing functions for continued growth, but there are so many competing demands for budget. How can companies begin to narrow down where to invest? Yes, fast growing companies just need to stop every once in a while and ensure they're focused on the right customers with the right messages

through the right channels. You need to understand who your best customers are and how they might have changed over time. So for example, for many growing companies, larger average transactions have evolved over time. So are you now looking for customers who can place a larger order or purchase with you? Or maybe your original focus was on a luxury or premium audience and now as you grow you

may need to think about being more price inclusive or accessible. The more precisely you can understand and define that ideal customer, the better you can hone your messaging and your strategy to market to them more effectively. And are there other factors that companies should be looking at when it comes to making investments with their precious sales and marketing dollars? Well, one thing to think about is technology.

Do a deep dive into the technology you're using for key sales and marketing functions. Ask yourself, are you using the exact same technology as when your business started? Evaluate whether that technology is still serving you or if it's time to upgrade or optimize. So for example, are you using some of the newest AI-powered CRM tools?

What about data-driven personalization and targeting tools? Upgrading your tech stack can actually make a huge difference and make your sales and marketing efforts far more impactful, organized, and efficient. What are some other considerations for small and medium-sized businesses when investing in sales marketing efforts? No matter where you focus those sales and marketing investments,

it's very critical to make sure your sales and your marketing teams are working together in lockstep. Sales is an invaluable source of feedback on customer experience. They are on the front lines every day, understanding customer pain points, needs, and even which marketing messages are resonating the most. Marketing, of course, provides leads to the sales team, but they're also the ones creating brand awareness and really enabling your company to turn prospects into customers. So creating that open feedback loop and collaboration between sales and marketing can definitely improve lead quality,

but also improve customer experience with consistent relevant messaging across the entire customer lifecycle. Thanks so much, Karen, for being with us today and for sharing these insights about making smart sales and marketing investment decisions. Thanks so much, Mike. In today's digital landscape, businesses need to be more strategic than ever to reach their customers.

So are you ready to make sure your brand's message isn't lost in the shuffle? Inc's own Sarah Lynch is here to explain how. Thanks, Mike. Picture this. You're standing at a busy intersection, cars honking, people crossing from every direction, and someone's blasting music. That's what today's marketing landscape feels like. Chaotic, noisy, and difficult to get across.

But what if you could guide your message directly to the people who need to hear it instead of shouting over the noise? Multi-channel marketing is how you make sure your message reaches the right customers wherever they are. Multi-channel marketing is exactly what it sounds like. Reaching your audience across multiple platforms, whether it's email, social media, a website, or carrier pigeon. Okay, maybe not carrier pigeon, but hey, if it gets the job done, why not? The point is, it's about being where your customers are and making it easy for them

to connect with you. In fact, businesses that embrace multi-channel marketing see their efforts pay off with three times the effectiveness compared to those that stick to single channel. Before we dive into the big players doing it right, let's clear up what multi-channel marketing isn't. Just running campaigns on multiple platforms doesn't automatically make it a multi-channel strategy. A true multi-channel marketing strategy

ties everything together while tailoring the campaign to each platform. So why does multi-channel marketing matter? You reach a broader audience by being present where your customers and prospective customers already are. You increase engagement by creating more opportunities for them to interact with your brand, and you build trust through consistent messaging,

which makes your brand recognizable and reliable. Take Airbnb, for example. In 2014, the company launched its Belong Anywhere campaign, and it's still considered a masterclass in multi-channel marketing. And remember, this was long before Airbnb was the big public company it is today. The central theme of the campaign was about personal connections made between hosts and guests.

Airbnb launched a new logo, the Bello, a distinctive mark combining symbols of people, places, and love. Commercials on TV and YouTube featured emotional storytelling about hosts and guests, and love. Commercials on TV and YouTube featured emotional storytelling about hosts and guests, and the feeling that you're home, even while traveling the world. Meanwhile, over on social media platforms like Instagram, Airbnb encouraged customers to share user-generated content,

such as photos and videos of their stays. The company also bought billboards and transit ads in major cities that featured the Bello logo and campaign message. The campaign was carefully crafted to suit each individual marketing channel. No matter where someone saw the campaign, on Instagram, a YouTube ad, or billboard,

it felt like part of the same narrative. And the results? They spoke for themselves. More hosts signed up, bookings jumped, and Airbnb's user base grew by the millions in just a year. You don't need to be everywhere to make an impact. Sometimes just a few well-chosen platforms and a creative idea can drive major results.

When Arby's leaned into branding itself as a sandwich shop in 2018, in addition to TV commercials and digital ads, the company sunk its teeth into social media with the Make My Sandwich campaign. Arby's crafted portraits of celebrities and fans alike using only their sandwich ingredients. While the message was similar across platforms, Arby's tailored the content for each marketing channel. The campaign invited celebrities and fans to request their own sandwich portraits using the hashtag MakeMySandwich. And the requests rolled in, from Arby's everyday customers to celebrities like Jeff Goldblum, and even fictional characters like Totoro.

Even competitors couldn't resist. Wendy's requested a portrait and received one with an Arby's hat as the finishing touch. And the hashtag Make My Sandwich was mentioned 32,000 times across platforms. And the posts drew millions of views on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. Even if your company isn't as big as Airbnb or Arby's and you don't have piles of cash to spend on a big marketing campaign, you can still make a big splash. Just make sure you know your audience, focus on your core messaging,

and track your results so you'll know which platforms drive the best results for your business. No matter what product or service you're marketing, remember that the media landscape is constantly changing. And relying on just one platform to get your message out can be a risky move. So find the channels that work best for reaching your customers, whether you're selling financial management tools

or small batch coffee beans. The strategy is the same. Connect meaningfully and adapt as you grow. Mike, back to you. Next up, we wanna hear your thoughts on viral marketing strategies. Weigh in and share your answers in the chat. So here's our question.

When it comes to scaling your business, is going viral one of your primary goals? Option one is yes, we're constantly looking to create viral moments for the business. Option two, it's something we strive for, but it's not a priority. Or option three, no, we're not striving for viral moments, we're looking for steady growth. Now this season, our audience plays a bigger role than ever. We've heard your questions and we're here to provide answers straight from smart season founders like our guests today. So now it's time for reader questions.

And obviously, ink.com readers are really fascinated by all aspects of sales and marketing. So we have questions from them that we want to ask you. And the first one is, how did you find and how do you define your core audience? Let's start with you, Yelitsa. I was doing a lot of organic, like, guerrilla marketing. I was going to events.

I was talking to people. I was doing research. I actually interviewed parents at one point and had their kids come in to understand what would they like to see in a product that could solve that problem for them. Similar to you, when we were creating Refinery, we were our core audience.

We were going out, meeting with all these designers, going to events, and really understanding what people were resonating with, what they were liking, what they weren't liking, so that we were able to start with what we wanted to create and the voice we wanted to have. Finding the people that, you know, the small group of the niche group

that really resonated with that. They became our grassroots evangelists. And then from there, you know, we got to know the audience through really being curious, being, you know, engaged with them, having a dialogue, going back and and forth and building from there. So our next reader question is, in this moment, organic social media growth is tough,

but what are your tips for how to do it right now? Elitza. I would say paying attention to what's trending and why it's trending. I think you have to understand what is appealing to the different audiences on the social media platform. When it comes to creating organic content, it's trending, I think you have to understand what is appealing to these different audiences on the social media platform. When it comes to creating organic content, you have to think about the experience that person is looking for online and what you can say to them or show them that's going to make them

stop scrolling, listen, and take something away from it. And I always say like just make sure you're making someone feel something. I love that point, you know, it's, you know, what's the feeling you're conveying? People can tell if something feels super manufactured if you really belabored it. So trying to make it more low stakes for yourself so that you can do that experimentation, that then you'll get, you get the viral hit that becomes, you know, the thing you double down on and iterate from. You're in the worlds of fashion and beauty and toys. These are like fun worlds. There are a lot of brands in both of these sectors.

So let's say that we're talking to someone, a viewer has a business that's not in a space where there are a lot of powerful brands, maybe it's not a consumer business. How can they create a brand narrative that resonates with their audience? So yeah, I think it comes down to being authentic to yourself and to saying, am I the only one

that can tell the story that I'm telling? Am I the only one that is gonna say this the way that I'm saying it? And building from that place and no matter if you think it's cool or uncool, it doesn't matter. If you look at a brand like Liquid Death, for example, that did something so strange,

taking tall boys and putting water in them with death metal branding. I think just the specificity and the confidence just really works right now. So just do you. Scrub Daddy is another brand that I think does an amazing job on social for something that seems to be cleaning products. If you make pasta, be passionate about that pasta. Show people the process.

You can do that for whatever it is that you're making in a way that resonates with people and makes them feel included. It's funny. It's like you're saying lighthearted, making it fun and playful. Now another question from readers is sort of the opposite of how do you stand out? This is how do you not get lost in the crowd? There is such a sea of sameness

and everyone is looking at this, you know, I think people tend to look at the same content that's performing and they're trying to replicate it and they're following the trends and there's a benefit to following the trends and staying tapped into that. But that also can just mean you're doing the same thing as everyone else. So really taking risks. I mean, I think about something for a finery. When we had our 10-year anniversary, our team, we went away and we said, we brainstormed,

and we came up with this idea to take over a warehouse, fill it with 29 different rooms, have each room represent a different piece of our digital content and do it with a whole host of creative collaborators. So that first year we had this VR room that you could go into. It looked like 2001, A Space Odyssey. We had a blacklight silent disco

that was done by this artist, Hattie Stewart. You walked in, you went through this lipstick mirror maze that we did with a beauty brand. But when we pitched it, someone in the room said, mm, maybe we should just have a cocktail party. You know, the risk felt scary, and they just wanted to do the tried and true thing that they'd seen other people do.

A sea of sameness, right? And that's the sea of sameness. And instead, we took the risk, we made it work, we did the weird outlier thing, and we had lines down the block. We reached one in four people on Instagram that year, and we created basically- All of Instagram?

All of Instagram. It was like a viral sensation. And we created an event format that then everyone in the industry copied and now that's the sea of sameness. So if your marketing budget is limited, how do you make sure every dollar counts? What are areas even in your own businesses, whether it's your current business or past business, that you would invest more in or invest less in,

and how did you make those choices? Sometimes people spend too much money on marketing. I think there's a lot of stuff you can do for free, and I think your customers are your best marketing. So investing in that relationship with your customers is one way for you to not only build a strong relationship, get the free marketing from word of mouth, but also learn from them.

Cause they might share ideas or needs that you weren't aware of and could pull you out of that sameness, make your brand stand out, and create more value. I 100% agree. People spend too much money on marketing, often in sort of this rinse and repeat way. And actually having a limited budget,

I think, trains you to be nimble, to be scrappy, be creative, and is actually a huge asset. I think it's a super powerful way to think about it. Piera, Yalitza, thanks so much for being here today and for sharing your insights. Thank you, it was fun. Thank you for having us. And we hope you enjoyed this closer look

at all things sales and marketing for today's savvy customers. Tune in next time for more industry leaders, breakthrough businesses, and the strategies you need to make your next move. And before we go, we want to hear from you. Please share your feedback in our one minute survey, which is posted in the chat,

and you'll be entered to win a $100 Amazon gift card. I'm Mike Hoffman, thanks for watching, and we'll see you next time. Thanks for watching.