Leveraging your brand for more sales

[NeoDialectic]

I recently got a question about building out your brand with more products which I think deserves it's own thread. Part of the reason building a brand is so powerful is that you could literally print money just by putting your brand name on it. But there is definitely a right and wrong way of doing it.

The pertinent part to the question I received here could be summarized with:

I've had a few different one hit wonder products but have had difficulty adding to the product line successfully. If I had success selling women's bike saddles, could I expand to high performance bike brakes.

This is a great example of a poor leveraging of a poor addition (without further context). The high performance brakes may sell great, but only by standing on it's own two legs as a product. You will likely have a hard time getting purchases on the brakes solely for brand reasons because you aren't really leveraging your brand correctly. Let's say that you sufficiently branded your product in a such a way that the customer associated Brand X with your product (When someone asks them where they got their saddle, do they reply with saying it's brand X or for their friend just to Amazon saddles and get one that looks like it).

The first thing you should ask is something along the lines of "If someone likes my product, what will it make them think my brand is an authority on?". The more specific, the better the additional product could leverage the brand name. Off the top of my head, I would think that when they buy your women's bike saddle and they love it, they would likely think you make great saddles or great woman specific bike products. Offer them one of those and it will get some action solely from being associated with your brand. You could put the product in a table on your Amazon's A+ page and you could easily get 2%-10%+ of your customers ordering it.

So a good example option may be woman shorts. You could advertise it as designed to fit the woman's body and work in synergy with your women's saddle to offer the most comfortable ride. See how that fits into your brand like a glove, while high performance brakes just sounds like it's a completely separate product and why would they want to buy your brand over brands that have a name in the field? Their only tie to each other is that they are bike parts. For your brand to earn the authority on something as broad as "bike parts", you would likely have to have many successful products across many bike parts.

Anyone else got any tips on simple ways to leverage your brand to sell other products? Success/failure stories?

 

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[SC87Dominik]

I agree. It sounds like that brand is meant to cater to women's biking comfort as opposed to bike parts. This is a good example for why a sub-niche is often more successful than a broader category.

There is always a deeper motive (from a consumer's perspective) as to why a purchase is made. More often than not, a product that isn't a necessity in life is bought because it makes someone feel good. You don't need a nice car, but it makes you feel good. You don't need to post on Instagram, but the likes make you feel good. Attention, status, validation, comfort, convenience, speed, certainty, function, luxury. These are all the labels of feeling good.

By sticking to comfort --> more specifically women's biking comfort --> perhaps middle-aged mother's biking comfort...
is how you can build the authority to then leverage your brand since your people will trust you with this specific topic.

 

[K1 Lambo]

I recently got a question about building out your brand with more products which I think deserves it's own thread. Part of the reason building a brand is so powerful is that you could literally print money just by putting your brand name on it. But there is definitely a right and wrong way of doing it.

The pertinent part to the question I received here could be summarized with:



This is a great example of a poor leveraging of a poor addition (without further context). The high performance brakes may sell great, but only by standing on it's own two legs as a product. You will likely have a hard time getting purchases on the brakes solely for brand reasons because you aren't really leveraging your brand correctly. Let's say that you sufficiently branded your product in a such a way that the customer associated Brand X with your product (When someone asks them where they got their saddle, do they reply with saying it's brand X or for their friend just to Amazon saddles and get one that looks like it).

The first thing you should ask is something along the lines of "If someone likes my product, what will it make them think my brand is an authority on?". The more specific, the better the additional product could leverage the brand name. Off the top of my head, I would think that when they buy your women's bike saddle and they love it, they would likely think you make great saddles or great woman specific bike products. Offer them one of those and it will get some action solely from being associated with your brand. You could put the product in a table on your Amazon's A+ page and you could easily get 2%-10%+ of your customers ordering it.

So a good example option may be woman shorts. You could advertise it as designed to fit the woman's body and work in synergy with your women's saddle to offer the most comfortable ride. See how that fits into your brand like a glove, while high performance brakes just sounds like it's a completely separate product and why would they want to buy your brand over brands that have a name in the field? Their only tie to each other is that they are bike parts. For your brand to earn the authority on something as broad as "bike parts", you would likely have to have many successful products across many bike parts.

Anyone else got any tips on simple ways to leverage your brand to sell other products? Success/failure stories?

Lamborghini is a perfect example. In the 80s and 90s, they were known for constantly having quirky failures and horrible to drive on a daily basis but then again, someone who buys a Lamborghini doesn't really give a shit about these things. That type of customer is not looking to get from point A to point B like your ordinary Volvo driver. That customer is buying the experience, the status, the exclusivity, the prestige and the thrill of owning a car like that. Why doesn't Lamborghini advertise on TV?

Skip forward 20 years later when Lamborghini Urus got released; Which by the way was met with huge criticism with all the so called "experts" who know everything about cars. In 2022, it's the most sold Lamborghini ever despite the big criticism. Why? Well, as MJ would say, the market responds to what it wants!

There might be a couple of reasons as to why it is:
1. Lamborghini is already associated with high status and prestige. Let's be honest, how many people can realistically afford a $300,000 SUV in cash? Less than 0.001% of the world population?
2. Lamborghini got bought by VW in the mid 2000s and they fixed most of the "crappy" stuff from the Tractor days of Lambo and made it more liveable for the buyer which is a big plus while still retaining the Lambo prestige. And most importantly:
3. It's a 4 door Lambo with a big V8 engine and 657hp! How cool is that! Not only can you drive over 200mph on the Autobahn, but you can do that with your wife and 3 kids while towing a trailer! Damn, that's something else! Not only is it very practical, it's comfortable as well for long rides compared to the Huracan or the Aventador. You can take it to river and enjoy fishing with your buddies too.

Lamborghini has never made a four door car in their life but because they already had a big brand, it allowed them to succeed tremendously in this new suv coupe market. Now Ferrari is following the same footsteps by creating the V12 Purosangue and they already got a list of buyers when they've never done that! McLaren is probably gonna do the same. Since very fast SUVs is a thing now that got started by Lamborghini.

 

[RisingStars]

I recently got a question about building out your brand with more products which I think deserves it's own thread. Part of the reason building a brand is so powerful is that you could literally print money just by putting your brand name on it. But there is definitely a right and wrong way of doing it.

The pertinent part to the question I received here could be summarized with:



This is a great example of a poor leveraging of a poor addition (without further context). The high performance brakes may sell great, but only by standing on it's own two legs as a product. You will likely have a hard time getting purchases on the brakes solely for brand reasons because you aren't really leveraging your brand correctly. Let's say that you sufficiently branded your product in a such a way that the customer associated Brand X with your product (When someone asks them where they got their saddle, do they reply with saying it's brand X or for their friend just to Amazon saddles and get one that looks like it).

The first thing you should ask is something along the lines of "If someone likes my product, what will it make them think my brand is an authority on?". The more specific, the better the additional product could leverage the brand name. Off the top of my head, I would think that when they buy your women's bike saddle and they love it, they would likely think you make great saddles or great woman specific bike products. Offer them one of those and it will get some action solely from being associated with your brand. You could put the product in a table on your Amazon's A+ page and you could easily get 2%-10%+ of your customers ordering it.

So a good example option may be woman shorts. You could advertise it as designed to fit the woman's body and work in synergy with your women's saddle to offer the most comfortable ride. See how that fits into your brand like a glove, while high performance brakes just sounds like it's a completely separate product and why would they want to buy your brand over brands that have a name in the field? Their only tie to each other is that they are bike parts. For your brand to earn the authority on something as broad as "bike parts", you would likely have to have many successful products across many bike parts.

Anyone else got any tips on simple ways to leverage your brand to sell other products? Success/failure stories?

Thanks for making this thread. I was wondering, besides choosing the right products for the specific customer group, what else did you do in your 8-figure brand to build brand authority? Did you do anything off-amazon like building an audience on Instagram, posting helpful blog articles for your group or start a youtube channel?

And if I may ask: how many brands did you & your partner run at the same time? I find it personally very challenging to do anything outside of Amazon when having more than 1 brand (and without having a huge team).

 

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[NeoDialectic]

Thanks for making this thread. I was wondering, besides choosing the right products for the specific customer group, what else did you do in your 8-figure brand to build brand authority? Did you do anything off-amazon like building an audience on Instagram, posting helpful blog articles for your group or start a youtube channel?

And if I may ask: how many brands did you & your partner run at the same time? I find it personally very challenging to do anything outside of Amazon when having more than 1 brand (and without having a huge team).

All the things you mentioned could definitely help and were always on our todo list. We just never got to them because of time/priorities. We mainly focused on all the marketplace platforms (Amazon/Walmart/eBay/Shopify/Google ads). We also had mentions in news/publications.

The traditional branding routes of older and larger companies is basically spamming your name everywhere and hoping it leads to sales. (Like ads in time square). With a large enough time frame that is obviously something that works for alot of companies.

Otherwise, we relied on:

1. Have a good product
2. Different than competitors
3. Products that require the customer to reorder
4. High price, which has many benefits and among them it usually confers a level of authority to be able to command that price

When you have a good consumable product that worked for a customer, they have no choice but to reorder if they want to continue getting the benefits! The more they order from you the more they know and trust your brand. If I am remembering correctly, 20% of all our orders for some of our products were some kind of reorder.

So lets say my first product in a brand was a women's saddle like in the last example. If I didn't care about branding, I could make something that would get the job done, possibly be interchangeable with other products, and maybe even undercutting my competitors prices. On the other hand if I wanted to make something with strong branding I would probably lean towards making a more expensive saddle so that I could make it stand out compared to competitors (color/ fabric quality/ unique shape/ etc). Both products could sell very well and make your alot of money. The 2nd one will have a strong brand association.

 

[NeoDialectic]

I agree. It sounds like that brand is meant to cater to women's biking comfort as opposed to bike parts. This is a good example for why a sub-niche is often more successful than a broader category.

There is always a deeper motive (from a consumer's perspective) as to why a purchase is made. More often than not, a product that isn't a necessity in life is bought because it makes someone feel good. You don't need a nice car, but it makes you feel good. You don't need to post on Instagram, but the likes make you feel good. Attention, status, validation, comfort, convenience, speed, certainty, function, luxury. These are all the labels of feeling good.

By sticking to comfort --> more specifically women's biking comfort --> perhaps middle-aged mother's biking comfort...
is how you can build the authority to then leverage your brand since your people will trust you with this specific topic.

I think this is also an important observation. As you mentioned, sometimes brands are actually experts on making someone feel good, versus the product itself. So you have to be cognizant of whether that is what you are selling. To the general public buyer, they buy Nike's because of the status and social validation involved and not because Nike is an expert in shoes (even if they are in some fields). That is why it was so easy for them to spread to most apparel categories.