Three-dimensional storytelling: Building a brand beyond the product

When it comes to achieving and sustaining success in the retail industry, how you present your product is just as important, if not more so, than the product itself. 

This is especially true for products used daily, like those in a consumer’s beauty or kitchen cabinet. 

At a recent Future50 event hosted by BeautyMatter, Ulta Beauty’s chief merchandising officer Monica Arnaudo, Fable & Man’s co-founder and CEO Akash Mehta and Vacation’s founding partner and executive chair of marketing Lach Hall discussed the importance of building their brand’s messaging outside of their physical product offering. 

Standing out in a hyper-competitive market 

For a brand founder seeking out a deal with a wholesale partner, the struggle to stand out in a highly competitive industry can be highly overwhelming. 

BeautyMatter founder and CEO Kelly Kovack asked Ulta Beauty’s Arnaudo how brands can use storytelling to stand out effectively.

Arnaudo responded that there are four key components to a brand standing out and being chosen to be featured on Ulta’s shelves:

• The consumer-interest gap that the brand is trying to fill and the solution it offers to a known or potentially untapped need the consumer is trying to resolve.
• The efficacy of the product and its ability to be “so amazing that the consumer is willing to not use a product they were [already] using and use a new product [that adds] a new step into their routine.”
• The founder’s story to launching the brand and their love for the company. “We love the passion that founders are completely 1000 per cent invested!”
• A brand’s ability to connect with its consumers, build up a community, and effectively create content and marketing materials across a constantly evolving social media landscape.

As Arnaudo commented, “If you look back in time, the [social media] medium used to be very static… Now we move so fast that everything [in the social media space] is rapidly moving as fast as you swipe. So that means that the content has to be captivating, cool, and competing, but simple enough that somebody is going to want to learn more about, purchase and, in a perfect world, share [information about].”

Building out a unique-story-telling experience

Storytelling is one of the key components for success for brands like Fable & Mane, an Ayurvedic-inspired hair wellness brand and Vacation, an award-winning, “leisure-enhancing” sunscreen brand.

For Fable & Mane, whose logo features a Gucci-inspired Tiger, the brand leans into both meaningful and playful marketing tactics, that range from creating content showcasing India’s rich cultural ties to hair care treatments, like regular scalp oiling, to dressing up in a tiger mascot costume at Sephoria. 

In fact, it was Fable & Mane’s co-founder Akash Mehta himself who donned the costume for the event. He attended the BeautyMatter session in a sharp blazer sporting a sequined version of the striped feline. 

During the panel, Mehta explained that rather than pursuing sponsorship opportunities with celebrities and influencers, which he believes consumers have become bored with, companies like Fable & Mane can more authentically connect with their community via small social gatherings. Some of the events that Fable & Mane has held for its community, which it calls its “Tiger Tribe”, include small clay-painting classes and more elaborate play sessions filled with Indian games. He views them as a way for consumers to connect with the brand’s cultural inspiration and create a sense of loyalty. 

Meanwhile, Vacation leans into playful, attention-grabbing marketing tactics to grab the consumer’s attention.

“If you can’t imagine somebody writing about this creative concept in an article and [mentioning it in] the headline, then you got to go back to the drawing board,” Vacation’s Hall said.

Since launching in 2021, the suncare brand has tapped into a sense of nostalgia with marketing campaigns that call to mind an 80s shopping catalog. It has also leaned into kitschy and playful product designs, such as a sunscreen mousse in packaging that looks like cans of whipped cream, and a perfume designed to smell like sunscreen, with notes of coconut and banana. 

Hall stated that at the end of the day, the company’s mission is to “make sunscreen fun” again, the way it was before a more clinical style of marketing was introduced in the 1990s. 

He also noted Mehta’s decision to wear a blazer sporting a tiger, calling to mind Fable & Mane’s logo, illustrated his point that strong brands are essentially personifications of the people who create them.

“That’s when it really can become an effortless endeavour to create strong brands that resonate with people,” Hall concluded. 

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