A Marketer’s Cheat Sheet For Reaching Gen Alpha

BY

Gen Alpha. Depending on who you ask, they might be considered our best hope for the future or a real piece of work, but for marketers, they represent potentially billions in buying power in the next 5 years as they reach 18 and begin making adult brand choices.

Family First: Why Brands Have To Address The Values Of Millennials and Gen X To Win Gen Alpha

Luckily for marketers, Gen Alpha is a true digital native generation with strong brand identification. But marketers can’t connect with them directly via marketing due to COPPA—so that means winning the trust of Millennials, and in some cases, Gen X, their parents. In this article, we’ll look at Gen Alpha, how they are being reared and how marketers can win their parents’ engagement and trust.

Born between 2010 and 2023, Gen Alpha are most frequently the children of Millennials and Gen X. Diverse, urban and digitally brand aware, Gen Alpha is the first generation to spend hours interacting with digital media as toddlers—and holding brand awareness from kindergarten.

Source: McCrindle; Understanding Generation Alpha

The majority of Gen Alpha owns a tablet (54 percent), and over one-quarter lives in a household with a VR headset. That proximity to digital content goes well beyond exposure to older siblings’ or parents’ activities. For example, 46 percent of 5-7 year-olds spend 1-2 hours daily online.

In addition, well over 75 percent of children 4 and under showed brand recognition for groceries and snacks and asked for those brands specifically.

With their Millennial and Gen X parents guiding and approving their brand choices, brands that align with Gen Alpha parents’ values and priorities can forge lifelong relationships with Gen Alpha.

When attempting to connect with Millennial and Gen X parents, research suggests that brand marketers should be mindful to:

Highlight values. Articulate their alignment with values that Millennials and Gen X focus on when choosing brands. Millennials prioritize sustainability and other ESG concerns when choosing brands to purchase from, so if brand marketers have these values to showcase, this may provide a competitive edge when attempting to reach Gen Alpha through their parents’ purchasing choices. Millennial parents prioritize wellness, independence and a broad worldview. Brands that offer tools or pathways to help Gen Alpha children nurture these traits or experience moments to exercise these traits may win Millennial loyalty.

Source: Morning Consult

Be creative with social strategy. While Gen Alpha uses digital media frequently, 75 percent of Millennial parents want to keep their children off social media as long as possible, so marketers should not rely on traditional social marketing tactics to influence Gen Alpha. However, younger consumers are heavily invested in short-form video, so marketers should lean into video content—such as YouTube, the choice of 52 percent of Gen Alpha—that appeals to their targeted demographic on and off social platforms.

Understand that Millennial parents are often striving for “perfection” in lifestyle choices. While Millennials don’t believe they’re “the greatest generation,” a higher percentage of Millennial moms (80 percent) than Gen X (70 percent) think that being a “perfect” parent is a legitimate goal to work towards. That often translates into seeking advice from peers in addition to heavy research before every purchase. 

According to Weber Shandwick data, 55 percent of Millennial moms state that they frequently give advice to members of their social circle on which products to buy. So, influencer relationships and product and brand transparency are key to raising brand awareness and winning social circle trust that will drive conversion.

AR Ads: A Sleeping Giant For Brands?

BY

As platforms battle for the attention of brands in an era of uncertain marketing budgets, their differentiation efforts have shifted markedly towards solving ROI-related problems for brand marketers—like boosting audience engagement and providing granular performance metrics. That led to a new release of AR advertising options from Meta and Snap. Below, we’ll look at what’s new and how marketers might benefit.

AR Is Everywhere: Meta And Snap Want Marketers To Care

Meta and Snap are rolling out new advertising options designed to position AR—traditionally an underutilized but often performant advertising tool as a new solution for audience engagement and analytics visibility. As tracking cookies disappear and consumers resist app tracking in increasing numbers, marketers are scrambling for deeper audience insights, Snap and Meta are hoping that marketers concerned about metrics and audience engagement will see AR as a cross-platform marketing tool as well as a new landscape for branded content creation built for lean, cookie-less times.

AR marketing is already growing at a stunning rate. According to Statista, by 2025, global AR ad revenue is projected to grow to $6.68 billion, up $1.36 billion in 2020. 

Part of this may be marketers’ lower confidence in traditional marketing segments—like streaming. According to Nielsen, just 42 percent of marketers believe that their streaming budgets deliver on ROI, and only 54 percent are confident in any digital channel providing the performance they seek.

Those concerns may have contributed to the AR marketing boon.

According to Statista, 37 percent of marketers who are aware of the marketing applications of the Metaverse said they would spend between 10 and 25 percent of their budget on Metaverse marketing and advertising, including AR, in 2023. Another 30 percent stated they would spend between five and nine percent of their budget on metaverse marketing and advertising. Respectable, but not a landslide of investment. Those numbers may lift if Meta and Snap’s most recent reveals of new AR advertising options at the recent IAB NewFronts land with marketers.

Meta and Snap have reason to be optimistic. According to Shopify, referencing a joint report by Deloitte for Snap, 75 percent of all consumers will likely use AR in their daily lives by 2025, with 76 percent stating that they expect and desire to use AR as a practical tool in the future. In addition, per the report, consumers who interacted with products that were connected with AR experiences showed a 94 percent higher conversion rate than those consumers who did not.

That good news is backed up by recent research—but with a caveat.

While a recent survey found that 70 percent of consumers stated that they wanted more AR-driven ad experiences, and 74 percent stated AR ads capture their attention better than static ads, much of this may have to do with AR’s newness.

“We conducted eye-tracking experiments that demonstrate AR advertisements indirectly increase consumers’ attitude toward the ad through an increase in curiosity and attention toward the ad,” reads a 2020 joint report from The University of Richmond, Hunan University, and Donghua University. “However, these effects only hold when consumers are unfamiliar with AR ad technology; as consumers become more familiar with AR ad technology, its serial effect through curiosity and attention on attitude toward the ad diminishes.”

More recent studies have shown that AR ads perform better in terms of ad reception, brand perception and purchase intention. Still, research also shows that context and powerful content—even when AR ads are not new to the viewer—unlock AR’s full potential to engage users.

When combined with social experience, more recent studies state AR deepens and intensifies the impact of the ad when the content facilitates social sharing, hence enhancing the social nature of consumers’ human interactions online. 

That makes AR a powerful tool for marketers—and an opportunity for Meta and Snap.

What Snap’s And Meta’s New Ad Options Mean For Marketers

Snap has been a long-time player in the AR space, but starting in 2021, the brand began broadly promoting its leadership in the AR space as a reason for brands to delve into the possibilities of AR advertising. And rather than promoting the use of AR as an add-on to add campaigns, Snap promoted its AR and VR hardware in tandem with its brand marketing options, presenting enterprise AR rooted in Snap Lens use as a new, separate content experience.

At the recent IAB NewFronts, Snap leaned heavily into content, announcing new options for brands to work with influencers via the Snap Collab Studio, reserve priority video ad placement via First Story, and leverage sports content to reach new audiences through Snap’s sports partnerships. Each component of Snap’s new offerings is integrated with the company’s push to get its AR tech out to more brands by making integrating AR components into ads on any platform easier.

Meta’s IAB NewFronts announcement showed that the company is aggressively attracting marketers seeking to solve measurement issues. The company announced the integration of AR with Reels ads and Facebook stories at the event, along with enterprise-grade analytics options specifically for AR. 

“After you run your ad, you can analyze your results with metrics for augmented reality ads, including Instant experience view time and Effect shares,” a FAQ read. You can also create an AR Experience engagement custom audience to retarget people who engaged with your ad.”

Metrics available for Meta AR instant experience ads include “Effect Share” which allows marketers to see how many times a viewer shared an effect from an ad across the Meta ecosystem—allowing marketers to track the impact of a new AR component separately from other content.

Takeaways:

Meta’s new integration of AR means that product views and e-commerce can “grow up” on Facebook and Instagram with the same powerful AR effects that consumers find on e-commerce sites. Meta could provide brand marketers with new ways to A/B test e-commerce strategies, as AR tools could let audiences connect with products without leaving their stories stream. In addition, the AR integration could allow creators to create and sell branded Web 3, like NFTs, via a live shopping event while allowing consumers to interact with or examine the new work before purchasing. In addition, the ability to track Effect shares allows marketers to get a clear view of how much (or how little) AR moves the audience engagement needle.

Snap is making it easier for brand marketers seeking to engage audiences with new types of content to integrate AR experiences with campaigns on their platforms. At the same time, Snap is opening up new options for brands to connect with “Snap Stars,” who can create AR-driven branded content for the platform’s younger-skewing audience. That means brands can leverage the full range of Snap’s creator-friendly tools—like Snap Lens—to build content that can work for social commerce strategies with add-ons like Shopify.

Philanthropy: Good For The Soul And The Business With Tom Nolan, CEO At Kendra Scott

BY

Tom Nolan serves as CEO of Kendra Scott, where he balances day-to-day functions and strategy. He was the first person in his family to graduate high school and attend college on sports scholarships. He worked the summers and never did an internship, so getting a job after graduation was difficult. Despite this, his work ethic landed him a cold-call sales job at a publishing company. His competitive spirit and work ethic caused him to rise quickly through the ranks, which helped him become successful in his career, earn multiple board seats, and achieve his goals. In addition to serving on the Board of Directors, Tom oversees Kendra Scott’s substantial omnichannel growth, global expansion, and evolving retail model. He has more than two decades of experience in brand building, management, and results-driven strategic planning from a diverse range of companies and is happy to be able to use his skills at a company that sees value in giving back.

In this episode, Tom and I discuss how determination led to his success, what he believes is the role of marketing, and the three pillars at Kendra Scott: family, fashion, and philanthropy. Tom tells us philanthropy is the pinnacle, and ESG has been a focus with Kendra Scott since the start. He gives specific examples of how Kendra Scott gives back to its community and employees, as well as a heartwarming event that convinced him he needed to be a part of this organization. Tom talks about the challenges of staying relevant in an attention-hungry marketing environment and warns that people can sniff out brands that are disingenuous. For Tom and Kendra Scott, what they do is not about a transaction; it’s about a connection. Ultimately, knowing, respecting, and loving their customers has propelled Kendra Scott to become a billion-dollar jewelry business.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

  • How he became the first in his family to graduate high school and go to college
  • What Tom sees as the role of marketing
  • Why philanthropy is good for your soul and your business

 Key Highlights

  • [02:00] Being a first-generation high school graduate
  • [03:15] From college ball to Kendra Scott
  • [06:30] “I wasn’t going to be the smartest person in most rooms, but I know that I would outwork anybody.”
  • [11:20] Board seats and side gigs
  • [13:20] CEO’s advice to CMOs
  • [15:40] Eyes on the scoreboard
  • [17:20] The importance of philanthropy: “Giving back is the truest form of success”
  • [23:30] Philanthropy drives loyalty.
  • [25:00] Great marketing and hyperlocal campaigns
  • [27:10] Staying relevant in a noisy marketing environment
  • [28:45] What’s next for Kendra Scott?
  • [30:20] The impact of losing his sister and having his children
  • [32:40] Don’t waste time on things that aren’t important.
  • [33:20] Don’t lose your customers in the data.
  • [34:55] Brands to watch
  • [38:00] Knowing your customer isn’t enough. You have to love them.

Resources Mentioned:

 Follow the podcast:

 Connect with the Guest:

 Connect with Marketing Today and Alan Hart:

Post-Production Credits:

Alan B. Hart is the creator and host of “Marketing Today with Alan Hart,” a weekly podcast where he interviews leading global marketing professionals and business leaders. Alan advises leading executives and marketing teams on brand, customer experience, innovation, and growth opportunities. He has consulted with Fortune 100 companies but is an entrepreneur at his core, having founded or served as an executive for nine companies.

We Buy Joy: What Zero-Party Data Says About Customers

BY

In the new post-cookie landscape, zero-party data is becoming increasingly important for brand marketers. Below, we’ll look at some key zero-party data findings and some tips for launching your own zero-party data strategy.

A Zero-Sum Game: What Data Says About Consumer Spending

As consumers scrutinize their spending and look for value over brand awareness, brand equity and user experience are becoming more important to consumer choice.

“Spiraling inflation forced families to put discretionary purchases on hold and focus most of their spending on necessities,” Target CEO Brian Cornell stated recently. According to a 2023 PWC survey, 96 percent of global consumers have altered their spending habits to focus on value—necessities, and brands that offer the quality they seek in exchange for a fair price. 

Although half of the 9,128 consumers surveyed across 25 countries reported that they were very or extremely concerned about their personal finances—70 percent stated that they would be willing to pay more, despite their financial concerns, for products that aligned with their personal beliefs.

“More than 70 percent said that ‘to some or to a great extent’ they’re willing to pay more for food produced by local farmers and for goods made by a company known for ethical practices, such as supporting human rights or avoiding animal testing,” the report stated. 

That means as consumers shift spending to wholesale clubs and discount stores to conserve cash (per McKinsey), they are saving their pennies to buy brands or access experiences that have a perceived value that justifies a higher price—like a farm-to-table dinner or a high-end cosmetics. Despite its retro subtext, Estee Lauder’s famous “lipstick index” is still relevant. Lipstick and cosmetics sales – considered “affordable luxuries,” indicating mild consumer optimism, were up by over 40 percent in January as cosmetics shoppers embraced luxury brands. 

According to a new global consumer survey from Deloitte, 77 percent of consumers have splurged in the last month on—wait for it—joy: brands and experiences that, according to research, make them feel in control, comforted, or excited. 

Surveys also found that consumers are looking for that joy everywhere, showing a strong preference for omnichannel shopping that allows them to compare shopping experiences, product value and price and use those perceptions to deliver the best and most “frictionless” interactions with retailers. 

User experience is also high on consumers’ brand or retailer differentiators list. A recent McKinsey survey showed that even online, when click-to-purchase was relatively effortless, 56 percent of digital shoppers who were unhappy with shopping experiences noticed poor user experiences or design. That means consumers—whether in-store or online—are sensitive to customer experience fails through the entire shopping journey, from onboarding to checkout, and retailers can’t afford to alienate price-sensitive shoppers when choices are so abundant.

All of the above insights came from zero-party data; information consumers readily gave to research firms in surveys. From opt-in forms to surveys to content personalization decisions, when consumers share data willingly, marketers can gain insights that can provide direction for new, revenue-focused marketing strategies. 

TLDR: What It Means For Marketers

Brands or retailers that are capable of matching a consumer’s perception of value (“a combination of consumers ethical or social beliefs and their measurement of ‘value-for-money’) or meeting their criteria for delivering the kind of joy that justifies a splurge can drive sales, even in the shadow of inflation. That opens up new opportunities for marketers. The specifics of how these trends may impact your audience can be revealed through the use of zero-party data—information that is by nature regulatory compliant and offers deep, often irreproducible insights into customer preferences and motivations.

Three Quick-Start Strategies For Collecting Zero-Party Data

When composing your zero data strategy, make sure you direct your data collection efforts with a clear focus on the end goal: creating seamless content experiences that make your consumer want to share new data on a regular basis and feel rewarded for doing so. Here are some best practices tips:

Cross-channel integration: Combine data from multiple touchpoints, such as email, social media, and in-store interaction, through a single dashboard where it is possible to optimize your insights with additional data as it arrives in real-time. 

Progressive profiling: Gradually collect more detailed information from customers over time, using a variety of data collection tools that automate data flow. Ensure that audience profiles and data handling practices remain compliant with data privacy mandates and agile to accommodate new data cuts or granular insights.

Partnerships and collaborations: Integrate data from trusted partners but ensure that their data-handling practices support data clean rooms or other modern compliance practices. “Go to the source” to ensure data-management visibility with all shared data tools or insights when working with new partners.

Once you’ve developed a method for collecting zero-party data, you’ll need to ensure you’re using it in a way that delivers optimal value.

How To Unlock Zero-Party Data’s Value

Here are three powerful ways to use zero-party data once you’ve integrated it with your marketing strategy:

Amplify audience segment accuracy. With deeper insights into what consumers may think when they purchase, you can uncover hidden trends that can help you target content and campaigns more accurately. For example, if you know that Gen Z consumers are more likely to splurge on higher-priced brands based on their data and preferences, allowing for targeted marketing campaigns that drive higher engagement and conversions.

Make personalization granular. By utilizing zero-party data, marketers can create highly personalized campaigns that resonate with individual shoppers – in a not-creepy way. For example, knowledge of a customers’ purchasing history and their generation would allow you to target them with content featuring “You might also like” product mixes that reflect a trending cultural moment—like Coachella—while highlighting your product’s value in comparison with a “Get the Look” promotion.

Optimize predictive analytics. Zero-party data adds context to your existing predictive analytics findings. While ad tech and audience management tools are creating powerful results for brand marketers, there are always deeper stories within the numbers. Zero-party data can help you sift through insights based on aggregate consumer data to find granular insights that support better marketing strategies based on an insider view of customer behavior and trends.

As your marketing mix plan evolves, ensure that the customer’s preferences, values and needs are at the forefront of every strategy.

Coachella Recap: Navigating The Influencer-Earned Media Mess

BY

Earned media can be a complex topic, especially for brands that grow with audience engagement. If it’s “free,” how much should you pay an influencer to generate it? And if you do pay, how can you tell where to direct your efforts?

Take Coachella, for example.

RivalIQ

For 24 years, Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival has grown its brand through earned media—first as a reflection of emergent youth culture and now as a hub of the creator economy. With tickets now topping $500 and global stars like BLACKPINK headlining sold-out performances, Coachella the festival is now generating hundreds of millions in revenue annually, and its global status means creators have numerous opportunities to collaborate with the brand. 

However, the value of specific types of influencer content has been called into question, as some influencers in 2022 and 2023 were reportedly charging as much as $2,000 per Instagram post to mention the event—and sometimes leaving early. 

That brings us back to value. How can you really determine how much an influencer relationship, Tweet, or Instagram post is actually worth—and who should be sharing it? 

What is Earned Media Value?

RivalIQ

While most marketers know that earned media is the publicity and attention a brand receives through channels that are not paid for, tracking it and then attaching a monetary value to that media is more complex. 

That’s a problem because earned media is often considered more authentic and credible than paid advertising by consumers. When you have access to a tool that allows you to measure the value of earned media, you can:

  • Discover the right influencers and brand advocates: By monitoring EMV, you can identify key influencers and advocates that are engaging in conversations with their followers about relevant products or services and bring them into your fold. 
  • Improve segmentation: EMV data can provide valuable information about the characteristics of the audience engaging with specific content. As you drill down into comments, likes, and shares, you can adjust your strategy based on new insights into your audience’s preferences.
  • Optimize owned-channel impact: By understanding which owned channels are generating the highest EMV, you can add content to owned channels that will drive traffic while amplifying brand awareness and providing new opportunities to share content.

Calculating earned media value entails more than just counting likes, shares, and comments; it means transforming that data into a clear monetary value that can inform decision-making.

Accurate EMV measurement can help you:

Enrich Third-Party Audience Analytics: Earned media value measurement data can enhance the accuracy of audience insights from third-party audience analytics tools. Integrating EMV into your third-party analytics suite can provide a more holistic view of your marketing, branding, or sales performance by showing how much you could save (or how much you are losing) with a particular media strategy and revealing where targeted audiences are most engaged.

Benchmark against competitors: EMV measurement allows brands to compare their performance with competitors in terms of organic audience reach and engagement. That means you can use EMV data to estimate how much value in monetary terms competitors have gained from their media strategy and set your earned media goals accordingly.

Inform future media strategies: Access to EMV data can help you fine-tune influencer partnership strategy so that you can create the most long-term value. You can optimize your spending around long-term engagement goals with accurate, day-to-day information on the earned media channels producing the most value.

Using Social Index to Calculate Earned Media Value

It’s incredibly simple. Social Index calculates a monetary value per like, share, comment, and view and instantly shows you where your efforts deliver the most value.

Just plug the latest numbers from Social Index into the Earned Media Value calculator and discover which channels can reveal your highest potential ROI.

Here’s an example using BLACKPINK:

RivalIQ
Full values for TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, YouTube are unlocked with a subscription to Social Index., along with access to the Earned Media Value calculator.
Full daily values for TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and YouTube are unlocked with a subscription to Social Index.

The Results

Based on BLACKPINK’s over two million impressions from a single Facebook post, they generated $819K VPV (Value per View) and $63K VPS (Value per Share) with a single share.

BLACKPINK generated approximately 78 percent of the social media buzz around performances at Coachella. The EMV derived from the group’s Coachella appearance may help the group secure additional brand sponsorships and drive new audiences to virtual concerts that have earned the group millions in direct sales. But earned media’s value doesn’t only matter for pop stars and well-known brands.

Marketers can extend the impact of their marketing spend by leveraging earned media to build brand awareness and connect with new audiences. Creating an effective strategy starts with data.

Discover your brand’s EMV with Social Index by connecting with us for a free 1:1 demo.

Three Ways Brand Marketers Can Optimize The Value Of AI And ML Tools

BY

A recent survey by Sprout Social found that 71 percent of marketers have begun to integrate AI and ML tools into their workflows, and 82 percent of these marketers report positive results from adopting AI and ML tools. In this post, we’ll look at three ways brand marketers can leverage AI and ML tools to optimize their marketing strategy.

Automate Repetitive, Productivity-Draining Tasks 

From generating alternative headlines from keyword lists for SEO blog posts to rewriting meta descriptions to conform to character count best practices, repetitive, tedious tasks can be automated with AI. According to Sprout Social, 61 percent of marketers surveyed stated that delegating tasks that don’t require human insight or experience improved their productivity.

But using a bot for mundane tasks like generating headline versions is just one aspect of AI’s value. More powerful versions of ChatGPT, for example, can generate Python scripts that allow marketers to automate data collection on a particular topic from an open source, free-to-access public website like NYC open data, for example, to enrich your first-party or third-party audience insights (be mindful of copyright laws). With deeper insights into your data, you can pull insights from findings to create more accurate portraits of the content and messaging that resonates with your audience. 

Optimize Content Targeting Efforts

The Sprout Social report also revealed that just under half of social marketers using AI and ML algorithms to analyze user behavior, demographics, and preferences saw higher content engagement rates and conversions. That’s a powerful testament to the power of AI, but marketers can do even more with AI tools, provided they’re willing to dive into the code side of things. A competent developer can use any powerful AI tool to create a customized paraphrasing tool that can allow you to update preexisting content quickly to reflect changes in SEO strategy or a change of format when retargeting ad copy, for example, or an email stream. 

Stretch Your Marketing Spend

According to the Sprout Social report, 55 percent of marketers who have not yet adopted AI and ML tools plan to test them in the next six months. But using AI and ML options incorrectly—or an extended onboarding period when attempting to adopt new tools—can drain productivity and drive up costs. There’s also the fact that many organizations are just not equipped to integrate the most advanced and efficient AI tools into workflows. While a survey conducted by KPMG US revealed that two-thirds of US executives surveyed in March 2023 believe that generative AI will have a high or extremely high impact on their organization in the next three to five years, 60 percent stated they were a year or two from being ready to implement AI across their organizations. That means marketers seeking to use AI and ML tools may be on their own. 

One of the easiest ways to use AI—and demonstrate its value to your organization—is to use it to optimize your marketing budget. That means leveraging AI to identify opportunities to generate buzz and inspire consumers to share free content that can be reshared across social channels. Here are three ways to do so:

Make AI Content Creation Tools Accessible To Influencers Who Will Boost Your Brand

Leverage AI to automate the generation of videos, images, or ads, allowing content creators to easily edit, adapt, and create high-quality content and share it with their networks. Monitor interactions and direct your spend toward influencers who are consistently delivering the most valuable engagement. 

Use The Right Prompts To Repurpose Premium Content

Leveraging AI to build content portability by using specific prompts to explain complex concepts to audiences with different professional knowledge gaps is also possible. Those methods of delivery can be adapted for repurposed content so that a single article can reach multiple audiences as an infographic, a longer post, or a short, informative quiz when edited for tone and audience.

Use AI To Streamline Workflows By Automating SEO Operations With The Right Data

There’s much more to SEO than just search engine magic. Google’s latest algorithm changes and the demise of the tracking cookie means that your first-party data is more valuable than ever when creating and sharing content. Getting SEO right means understanding what your audience is doing with your content on a day-to-day basis, even when your keyword research might suggest otherwise. AI tools can help you scan your existing content and identify opportunities to insert trending keywords and shift tone or emphasis to take advantage of a new engagement trend, such as a news item that is shifting focus toward your brand.

Operating In The White Space And Creating A New Category With Jason Andree, CMO At Nufabrx

BY

Jason Andree is the CMO of one of the fastest-growing companies in the country, Nufabrx. He grew up on a farm, and showing cattle translates surprisingly well to being a CMO. Jason joined Nufabrx from GlaxoSmithKline, where he led their global digital marketing department, executing marketing strategies across global categories. He is now a senior-level marketing executive with over fifteen years of success within the healthcare industry and is forging a new path in Healthware with Nufabrx.

Nufabrx puts medicine in clothing by making it water-soluble, infusing it into yarn, and coating it onto textiles. The company started in Seattle but soon relocated to Alan’s home state, North Carolina, to be closer to experts in the textile industry. Due to its proximity to suppliers and researchers, Nufabrx is able to source all of its product materials within 90 miles of its manufacturing plant.

In this episode, Jason and I discuss why biohacking is becoming mainstream and the challenges of operating in the “white space” to create a new product in a giant industry. Jason and his team are crafting creative to make people rethink solutions to pain and targeting the demographic that is most familiar with pain: older consumers. Many marketers want to focus on the flashy fun of younger consumers, but older consumers are often overlooked, and Nufabrx is taking the opportunity to fill the gap. As a smaller brand, Nufabrx has to be innovative with its marketing dollars, so they keep a keen eye on performance and know they have to be flexible, take risks, and stay close to consumers. In addition to B2C, Nufabrx operates in the B2B space as well. Jason believes innovation can only come from consumer behavior. By licensing its technology and working with established brands rather than against them, Nufabrx is leading the charge in the construction of a new category.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

  • Why we are seeing a ride in mainstream biohacking
  • How to build and think about a new product, brand, and category
  • What is “co-opetition”?

Key Highlights:

  • [01:30] Cowboy Kid
  • [04:00] Jason’s path to Nufabrx
  • [05:50] Nufabrx Overview
  • [09:10] Why is biohacking big right now?
  • [12:30] Building a new brand, new product, and new category leader
  • [15:20] Crafting creative to make people (re)think
  • [19:40] Making less money work more
  • [22:00] “Co-opetition” in B2B
  • [25:10] How to handle your ambition
  • [26:45] Plan your steps, but not too much.
  • [28:10] Less about marketing performance. More about telling better stories
  • [29:50] Biomes to watch
  • [32:10] The Times They Are A-Changin’, fast!

Resources Mentioned:

 Follow the podcast:

 Connect with the Guest:

 Connect with Marketing Today and Alan Hart:

Post-Production Credits:

Alan B. Hart is the creator and host of “Marketing Today with Alan Hart,” a weekly podcast where he interviews leading global marketing professionals and business leaders. Alan advises leading executives and marketing teams on brand, customer experience, innovation, and growth opportunities. He has consulted with Fortune 100 companies but is an entrepreneur at his core, having founded or served as an executive for nine companies.