Greg (00:00)
We see gear management as a really underserved kind of element of having great days outside. So it as a category, we don't believe it really exists.

Ram (00:13)
I feel like our audience is aware of us and paying attention to us to a certain degree, but not engaging with us. That's what I mean, that's what I want to see is people excited to to see the next post or to hear the next bit of news, and have you know, have more, I think even more dialogue with it as well.

Mike (00:34)
The only guardrails we've ever really created for organic is our overarching brand guide. There is a you know an idea of our personality and who we're trying to be and that sort of thing at a at a very high level, but we've never tried to condense that in a way that's meaningful.

Greg (00:54)
From the early days, I think one of the things Nate and I really aligned around is this concept of building a durable growth engine, one that is not tied to making a ongoing investment at a high level in of like a pretty fickle performance marketing strategy. We wanted something that like if we turn performance marketing on, we can ramp up the business. And if we turn it off, we still have a very healthy business.

Cole (01:26)
Welcome to the Relevance Project, a public series that follows three brands as we try to grow them through organic content. This is episode one. Now we have a lot to get into with this series, but I wanted to share a little behind the scenes as to how we ended up here and what exactly we're trying to do. My name is Cole, and I'm a filmmaker-turned creative director who's been obsessed with trying to figure out how brands can grow by leveraging content and winning in the attention economy.

According to Byron Sharp and Jenny Romanuk, brands grow when they're physically available and mentally available. Marketing hasn't changed, but what has changed are the tools, the platforms, and the way that customers consume content. For the first time in maybe forever, the customer has control over what they watch.

Their attention, as fleeting as it might be, is valuable. And this creates an opportunity for the brands who want to grow if they can unlock the power of creating content that is genuinely valuable to their audience. The challenge is that to approach this advertising in this way requires a different approach than regular advertising. It requires leading with value. Now, over the last 10 years of running my production company and hosting this podcast for six years, I decided to launch a public experiment. This is the Relevance Project. We ended up picking three brands.

Skygoat, Kitworks, and Lunar, who also saw this opportunity and wanted to try. The first task at hand was to agree on benchmarks. In order to see if we were making an impact, we had to know where we were starting. Hey, good morning.

Ram (02:53)
Good morning.

How was your weekend?

Mike (02:55)
What's happening, Cole?

Cole (02:56)
Hey Mike. Hey. Good morning, guys. How's the week? Hi

Cole. Good see ya. This is Greg and Nate from KitWorks, a gear management company trying to reimagine what gear management should look like. and so what I did is I built out this it's currently a six phase process. I'll say like I don't expect us to follow this to the T. I expect this to evolve, I expect this to change, but I think it's a good place for us to start. Really, where we start here is phase one with goals and benchmarking. For based on our kickoff call.

I filled these in, just trying to document our goals and then the challenges. And so I do think it's worth us just kind of touching on these and making sure that these feel accurate and that I heard you correctly and there's nothing else that we'd wanna add.

Greg (03:39)
I would bring the first point about durable growth engine up a level. content is a really important part of this. Understanding all of the vehicles that we have to create an impact with a customer.

Cole (03:55)
How would you want to rearticulate this to provide clarity to that nuance?

Greg (03:58)
Build a durable growth engine that drives like long term success without becoming dependent on performance marketing for acquisition.

Cole (04:07)
For the purposes of this project, Greg, is it create the content that supports the durable growth engine? This is Mike from Lunar, a boot company inspired by Japanese ski culture. In your own words, what do you want out of this?

Mike (04:23)
better defined strategy around our organic content in a way that'll be easy to create briefs, plans, proposals for any of our organic content we put together. And that ultimately produces content that

Cole (04:39)
And when you say content that works, what do you mean by that?

Mike (04:43)
We create an idea and create a brief and a concept, deliver that in a brief to a third party, and what they return is within the realm of what we were hoping for or impresses us in some way. So we actually, you know, define and create strategy that's like repeatable. and it's not just something that Cole and his team can do and figure out, but it's something that we can actually

Define handoff and see people produce.

Cole (05:15)
Something to the effect of clarity around repeatable content for third parties and other team members. Does that describe what you're saying?

Mike (05:22)
You know, there's the metrics that we'd like to see grow. We'd like to see the audience grow. Hopefully that's a by product of of the work we do in the first part. Yeah.

Cole (05:31)
And this is Ram, the owner of Skygoat that makes microgrid fleeces. What I heard from you in our last call was, I mean, a couple things, but primarily you're trying to figure out can this business support me and a team monetarily? Like that's basically what you're trying to figure out. Is that right?

Ram (05:48)
And it is, yeah, growing the business to a point to financially support myself and a small team of teammates. I mean, as a as a big part of that, it's as we've mentioned before, is increasing the engagement and growing the audience. And I think those are some of the the building blocks, right, that are like the more to me, like the more tangible goals or items that can help reach that overarching goal, if you will. I mean, sales and engagement, I mean, those are the the big ones.

I mean with engagement to me the you know the word community is something I'll continue to use because I think that's that's important. So to me that's a that's an important piece to keep is that personal connection to the community and you know, the people actually purchasing.

Cole (06:33)
It sounds like you're saying, how do we grow something that's engaging, but not do it at the expense of what you what you believe is important and you find valuable? How does that sound? Great. As I was listening to each of the brands describe their goals, it became clear to me that the challenge wasn't what type of content do we publish? It was more nuanced. The question was something like: in the pursuit of brand growth, what type of content do we publish that provides value, is on brand, distinct to us? And what are the guidelines that will allow us to work with a variety of creators and production companies and

Internal team members to execute on this plan. Now there's a variety of challenges preventing brands from showing up in a distinct and meaningful way on social these days. Number one, I think it's because social is often treated as an afterthought from leadership and internal teams. And second, most agencies aren't designed to help brands figure out how to show up on social in a way that's creative. I've seen brand decks where the strategic recommendation from the agency is to invest in big, bold YouTube content, which is pretty unhelpful in reality.

Now, as we continue down the process, I wanted to document the KPIs that we were going to track. Social stats, that's easy. We can fill that in. What do you feel like we ought to be paying attention to? What do we want to track? This

Greg (07:45)
This

is where it gets tricky because I believe this stuff is all connected. I want to see like our content doing a really good job expressing the value of Kitworks and as a result our customers are mimicking those words back to us and they're conveying them to their friends. So

Cole (08:06)
Almost

like you wanna be able to see a increase in the frequency or volume of like the zeitgeist that you guys are creating through this category. Yeah.

Greg (08:15)
No idea how we'd do that, but yeah, that I mean th this is the id idea. Yeah.

Cole (08:21)
I have a tangible one. I I think there's gonna be a world where we'll be able to make, you know, this very useful content play like a big role in our email program. When we can give people meaningful things to explore beyond buy this thing, that will drive a fair amount of clicks in the email. So I I think this should really help email list growth, engagement, email click through rate, things like that

Greg (08:48)
A higher order metric. So CAC and ROAS or Mer E R frequently tend to be associated with paid media spend, performance marketing spend. What I think the goal is here is to have a higher performing paid media that either produces more dollars per dollar spent or takes fewer dollars to acquire a customer. So it's almost like a blended CAC across all of our marketing investment.

But then there's also like the other really, really, really important part of this, maybe more important part of this equation, is the the lifetime value of our customer. We can acquire a customer by selling them a really cool tote. We will never fill every shelf in their gear garage unless we deliver the higher order value that we're talking about.

Cole (09:38)
Do you feel like there's a way we could model that out and make it simple enough for all of us to be able to understand it?

Greg (09:45)
Let's start with marketing as a percent of revenue and then also look at blended CAC and let's let's look at media CAC as well. to understand kind of like the front end of those relationships. And then let's look at one year L T V.

Cole (10:01)
I've I've kind of broken this down from between like the business and then the social stat side of things. The social stats stuff is pretty straightforward. I wanted to spend a little bit of time understanding from you what what you would like to be able to monitor on the business side to hopefully see meaningful impact. What are you most curious to try and measure?

Mike (10:24)
You know, revenue probably not as much. at least from for this project. you know, I'm certainly paying it paying attention to that. Traffic conversions.

Those things I'm I'm interested in, particularly con conversion rate. Paid spend, I think, is a tough one. I think we touched on this before, just because of how we're scaling right now and how we're scaling paid spend, it's hard to really know if what's helping us keep that lower or what's causing it to push higher.

and I already am optimistic about our paid performance this year compared to the last two years, without this project.

Cole (11:09)
Yeah, if we are producing organic content that's working and it's it's stronger than than other pieces of content, like we should be able to we should turn that into paid ads and we should see an efficiency in that paid spend. And so part of the reason I was curious about, you know, are you looking for growth at a top line or at a net level is because I'm wondering if maybe we can improve the efficiency of your ads and you could spend a little less or spend the same amount, but you know.

Have a higher efficiency. With our benchmarking complete, it was time to move into the next phase: point of view development. Going into this project, I had two observations I wanted to test. Number one, brands struggle to show up on social in a distinct way because they often lack a clear point of view on the world. And secondly, even if a brand has a clear point of view, it's really difficult to translate that into content that's actually distinct and valuable to the audience.

So to begin, I started to dig into each company's brand to try to understand what we're working with. So So there's a balance between like having a point of view on the world that is too sharp and alienates too many people. There's also the opposite is true where your point of view is so muddied it means nothing that it doesn't attract anyone that you're trying to attract.

Greg (12:27)
One thing that I struggle with a lot is a company telling me the structure that I need in order to organize and transport transport my gear. So like a very sports-specific bag that only does one thing. It does it well only if you conform to it.

So I I think that's like very presumptuous and of limited value. It kind of like, and then the the opposite side of that is that the other options are just like very general purpose and not specific to the way we actually get outside. So like we use plastic bins because everybody at the trailhead has plastic bins, not because anybody likes them or that they make our life easier.

And so like the experience that you have when you're like when you know exactly where everything is. It's clean, protected, and you like y at a glance you know that you're ready to go is so different from like grabbing the duffel bag or grabbing the bin and heading out there and like, shit, I totally forgot I left that thing.

at home or like day three of the road trip is just chaos and you spend half of your time at the trailhead looking for the thing in the bottom of the bit. Like it's just stupid. Like we can do so much better than that and the reason that we don't is because nobody has been the guide to take us to this better place.

Cole (14:02)
I've got some exercises here that I want to work through. I'll warn you, I love the parts of the process where things get messy. And so bear with me here. We're gonna we're gonna dive in a little deep and see where it takes us. Just gonna say it might feel a little bit like therapy.

Mike (14:17)
Okay, great.

I do better when it's like more proddy and lots of questions.

Cole (14:22)
First exercise

that I want to start with is thinking about tension. What and so it's I'm calling it the grind your gears exercise. Like what bothers you? What grinds your gears? Let's start here.

Mike (14:33)
conformity and the the acceptance of conformity, you know, new boring brands that have cool innovative product or technology that deliver it like another boring brand. You know, people people and companies that don't hold up their word.

Cole (14:55)
Most brands are too blank.

Mike (14:57)
Safe. You know th there's so many brands that just try and appeal to too many people or too wide of an audience and are afraid to offend anybody or take too big of a risk.

Ram (15:09)
One of the big things is how it looks, especially how it looks on the person. Cause I think those are two things and I think they go together. Because there is there are brands and there are, you know, apparel comp there are pieces of apparel and there are apparel brands that just don't look good on people. And that in that when I see and there's some competitors of mine that like I look at I s I like I'll see somebody wearing one out in the wild and I'm like,

That looks terrible. That looks just fucking terrible.

Cole (15:43)
I'm in the middle of trying to develop a framework that I can use to help ultimately solve this question of what happens when outdoor brands lean into and embrace organic content that's distinct and valuable to their audience. The way I'm thinking about it is if me, Cole, if I had my own show, what would it be? And I'm trying to think about like, okay, who am I as a person? What are the beliefs that I have? What are the the interesting

traits and quirks about me as a person that might inform how I would show up in a room, therefore, aka content. I'm not really sure how to wrap my head around this. But there's there's so much that can't be articulated. I can tell you that I'm a curious person and I think I'm a thoughtful person. But as soon as I put those on a deck, they almost immediately lose their

humanness. This feels more like a task for a screenwriter. So I called my friend Tyler.

Hey, how's it going? Hey man, I'm doing good. How are you doing? Good. Okay, I had a question for you. Do you have a couple minutes? I do. I have like probably ten minutes. Okay. The liquid death VP of Creative. He talks about how they treat the brand as a character because they want to understand how that brand might show up in a room at any given time. I feel like that's the exact same

Attitude that we have to have when we're creating content because content is just another room. Give me like the quick version of how you would do this for a character on screen. And then I think what I'm trying to understand is like what are the elements of that character that we need to identify and document in order to help us understand what this character is, who it is. The classic kind of approach to that is

Always thinking of your characters in terms of action, relationships, and motivation. So in that and that's where like natural dialogue, for example, comes from. Because if you have all of those in place, then it's just gonna flow naturally from those. Really, you're thinking, What does this person do when confronted with this situation? Because that's what the story is, right? So you're saying what I need to try to do is like identify scenarios.

And then we need to evaluate how that brand would behave in those scenarios, understand the motivations, and then from that we can start to get a picture for how this character talks and holds themselves and presents. After talking to Tyler, I was thinking about the brand Liquid Death. I'd seen their VP of creative Andy talk about the concept of brand as a character. So I reached out to him.

Andy (18:26)
I I kind of tend to think of liquid death. And I think we should think of brands as characters to kind of unpack that. A brand is like a very a brand exists in sort of a like here's a PDF of our brand book and here's our tone of voice. And we talk like this and we don't talk like this. And we would never do this, but we would do this. And and but characters are just like

Fucking weirdos. And we like as people, we love watching characters. I'm a brand is like a box that is contained. And I think like a character is much more of s something that can go out in the world is more like an expansive idea. You you can't all sometimes can't even write it write it down and understand it. Like early on with I've I've told this story before, but like early on with Liquid Death, I was trying to build a brand book just to figure out what I was doing. Everything I wrote down

I hated and I hated this whole document that I was building that was like had these little pithy explanations of what we do as a brand. After like five or six months I was just like, fuck it, we're just not gonna have a brand book.

Cole (19:32)
So to this day there's zero documentation that describes the brand?

Andy (19:36)
Yeah, yeah. I don't think I could describe what liquid death is to to anybody if I was like forced it maybe a gunpoint I could.

Cole (19:43)
Is your recommendation to not document anything?

Andy (19:48)
I I wouldn't advise that. The other thing I think is really tough about doing that sort of like upfront branding, and I've experienced this many times in my career, is it's all theoretical until you have to make something.

Cole (20:01)
Chatting with Andy was an eye-opening experience for me. And it was really around this time that I started to realize that developing a point of view was too simplistic of a way for us to be approaching this work. We needed to start with building the brand as a character. And to do that, it made sense to start trying to understand the customer. Now Kitworks had already done some work establishing their Muse and their brand archetype, so we dove in. I went through our last conversation, was just kind of like jotting some things down that this is what I heard.

Being a more confident version of yourself, becoming the guide who is laid back, cool, casual, yet confident because they're prepared. There's something intriguing about like chaos versus order, the missed opportunity of not being prepared. This idea that organization creates momentum, which leads to preparedness, which builds confidence. Confidence expands capacity or potential. I have been

spending a little bit of time after our last call playing with the initial brand archetype work that we had done and then and then the muse part and just coloring in a little bit more. I was like trying to think of like who is this person? What do they wake up thinking about? What are they like, not like type of thing. so yeah, I think this would be really valuable to do. It's gonna direct everything else.

Greg (21:27)
The company exists to organize and inspire our customers' best adventures. And we we use those words specifically. So there's like almost two different content paths we could co go down with this. Inspire is about like expanding somebody's capacity. And this is where the concept of the guide really comes back. There's like a you got this. You are prepared. You're ready for for this. Our muse. Like we

We don't have a good name for this person. I think it's like the the multi-passionate outdoors person. We need a good name for this. We were calling it the multi-hyphenate. Our person defines themselves as a friend, a skier, a mountain biker, climber, runner, fly fisher, hunter, and chef. And the more you get to know them, the more hyphens they have. They're always a little bit more prepared.

A little bit more knowledgeable and definitely the person you'd want to be stranded on an island with. I love

Cole (22:30)
The this person has a lot of hyphens after their name. That's so that's so rich, and it's so self-identifiable.

Greg (22:39)
Adventure is a personal thing. Everybody has a special like place or experience that they're trying to create and like a peak experience that they want to have in the future. And like that's awesome. We're here to support all of that.

Cole (22:53)
your ordinary someone else's incredible, extraordinary moment. It's probably more about the feeling of like it'd be interesting to be like, what does it feel like when you're on an adventure that's universal? Last year my c brother and I we went we took a boat out into the eastern Washington. We were gonna go carp fishing with a bow.

And we spent the night out there on this island in the middle of this lake. The whole night, it was just like there's just carp jumping everywhere. And we were just like that night trying to sleep, and we were like, This is so freaking cool. There's just like fish jumping everywhere. We woke up the next morning, we didn't shoot anything, we didn't catch anything. But it was like so awesome. And we were both kind of like p pinching ourselves. We were like, This is so rad.

I almost wonder if that's like we should I flag this because I think that's like an emotional barometer that I think we oughta like keep track of.

Greg (23:45)
Yes, yes. And

by the way, our Muse, having heard you say that, is like, shit, I wanna do that. Like even if they're not a fisherman or have never fired a bow in their life. You know, it's like they're like, that sounds amazing.

Cole (24:00)
Be a good test from the audience is like if they see this stuff, do they react in that way of like, I never knew that was possible, but I want to try it.

Greg (24:10)
I I love it.

Cole (24:12)
While I was working with Kitworks on their muse, who we decided to call Mike and the brand, I was curious to dive into my work with Mike from Lunar to start to flush out the Lunar brand as a character. We decided to name the brand character Lou, and we dove in again.

Mike (24:28)
You know, our character of our brand would have a tongue in cheek response. It's a little bit more, you know, it kind of like satisfies that I'm fine, I'm, you know, pretty good, whatever, but has a little edge to it or spin on it where it's like, wait, what do you say? Like we've had some fun saying that our character is foul mouth, but F O W L. I don't know if that was in the brand document or not.

Cole (24:57)
I was I was just trying to like put pen to paper earlier today and I want you to react to this. This is not written very well, but I'm trying to like wrap my head around like okay, what what could this point of view be? What is that tension? Here it is. The world is a heavy place, yet our customers just want to laugh and find levity to their life. We believe that every step in life can be a little more fun.

Mike (25:20)
Directionally,

yes. When I think about it, I don't necessarily want to start with like we're trying to turn this around because because it's heavy.

Cole (25:28)
I was playing

with the idea that like his profession is a campground host.

Mike (25:33)
I mean it's not terrible. The thing I like about that too is that you could place him, you could almost make it that campground like Jellystone or whatever, where it's like, I don't know if that's in Colorado or Pennsylvania or upstate New York or in Maine. It's kind of the ambiguous campground that works for everybody that's ever been to a campground. If there's downsides of us like, well, we were trying not to be like

stereotypical outdoor brand and that starts to feel a little you know, I know the rest of Lou isn't putting him there. But maybe it's that like in a lot of ways I love it. And another I'm like, okay, now we're kind of backing ourselves into a very outdoor brand setting, at least.

Cole (26:17)
All that all that it was doing for me was like he's like a fixture in the community, you know, 'cause he's like your goofy campground host and like everyone knows him. He's able to like pop in and out of town and like then head back out to the trailer where he lives and like that that gives us that ability to like have him just like drop into a conversation at the grocery store or in the middle of the park.

Mike (26:40)
Well, dude, maybe in but maybe if we tie it to a lake, you know, tie it to the lake and kinda you know, not that we have to put a loon on the lake and that'd be that setting, but like we're very much, you know, the loon side of the brand.

Cole (26:53)
Maybe he doesn't even have a real job and maybe his the way he makes money is just by flipping odd stuff, fixing people's stereo systems.

Mike (27:04)
That and then like that reminds me a little bit of like Kramer, like Kramer's kind of that where he's like, you know, that they joke about on the show where like you've never had a job, you just fall face first in the money. So like, who are you? so there's a little maybe a little bit of that vibe, but there's this like there's an anchor at the campground, maybe where it's like at a minimum he chops and sells firewood there, but sometimes he's the camp host, and you know, it's kind of like, and then sometimes like.

They don't have firewood for a few weeks 'cause nobody's seen Lou.

Cole (27:38)
that's great.

Mike (27:39)
And I'd rather have it be like a weird cabin than a trailer. Like a like kind of how you described at the beginning where, you know, there's some garden gnomes and flamingos, maybe some fake turf out front. Or like a makeshift fence because the campground requires it, but like it doesn't. There's holes everywhere, you know, the dog just jumps over it or under it or through it.

Cole (28:01)
Would he have a one of those talking fish plaques?

Mike (28:06)
Yeah, but it doesn't work. But he keeps it up. And people will go by and try and make it work and he's like, nah, it's just just for lux.

Cole (28:18)
As Mike and I were having fun imagining the fictional life of Lou, I started to get excited because I could see Andy's advice starting to play out. Even in the early stages that we were in, we could start to see how Lou might show up in the real world. And then what got interesting is to imagine him in a scenario that he would never find himself in. That tension started to expose how the brand might show up through content. While Lou was simmering in the background, I turned my attention to Skygoat.

Ram (28:46)
Actually, I have a I have a perfect example right now. I have a running vest that I just bought. On paper, this thing is unbelievable. And I think they did an amazing job fig trying to develop it. It doesn't work for me. Like my thing with Skygoat is like I want it to be that that piece that like just feels good and is a go-to and it's not thought about. There might be stuff that's way more technical, but that's not what I'm trying to be with Sky Goat. That's not what Sky Goat wants to be. We want to be the just right.

Cole (29:14)
The reason why you want people to pick up a skygoat isn't because you're like Patagonia and you're like you should only wear one jacket. Your thing is like you should wear a sky goat because it makes you feel good, makes you look good, and because of that, you know, you feel better about yourself and how you show up in the world on the trailhead or at the pub. Are you saying that you only need one jacket? Is that what you're saying?

Ram (29:35)
Not really. But I want Skygo to be kind of like fun in that aspect of having some character and and differentiation versus like an all black hoodie or whatever. The comfort factor. Like they just feel comfortable. I think and like to me that's that's hugely important, right? And just like feeling from a physical touch standpoint, like or in the fit, like just feeling comfortable, like they feel good.

Cole (30:01)
Imagine if our muse is like this person. They're comfortable at the summit. They're comfortable at the trailhead. They're comfortable the morning before the hike or the fishing mission. And then they're comfortable when they're back in town and they're like hanging out with their buddies. I mean, I guess this is probably you with all your skygoats. Like but like everyone has like that one piece of wardrobe. That's what Billy, his whole mission is to like help folks be comfortable.

In all the ways that we've discussed. like we could have fun with that. You could you know, the brand could show up in a really fun way, I feel like.

Ram (30:39)
Yeah, I'm I'm liking that that angle. because it's it is exactly what what this is about for me.

Cole (30:48)
How is this exercise been feeling so far today?

Ram (30:52)
I think it's I

like I said before, like this is the hard stuff for me and to have somebody pushing and asking, like to look at even with you, you know, looking I mean you're getting you know, you're starting to kind of dial in with Sky Guild and on those other companies as well, but like for a lot of people they don't think that much about or in that in depth. And then for somebody like myself who maybe he's you know had the brand for five, six, seven years or whatever, it's like you get in a rut with a certain thing or you're just not trying to explore that. So having this type of exercise I

I really appreciate.

Cole (31:23)
Okay, cool. I feel like we've made a lot of really great progress today. As I'm looking back on the progress we've made so far, we're in the process of figuring out how these brands show up in the real world. And to do that, we have to think about them as characters. Then we have the ability to understand how they interact with the customer. And while all three brands are currently on their own journey.

This is one of those projects where we're in the middle of the mess. We need to trust the process. And if I'm being honest, I have an idea of where this is going, but I'm not entirely sure.

Greg (31:57)
think pretty quickly we want to get to like a that feels right. And we should now kind of figure out how to like take that concept and make it come to life so we can put something in the world and you know, learn from it.

Mike (32:11)
I think the challenges are mostly come around just d doing the work and that we haven't done the work yet. That's part of the reason I was excited about this is like okay, now there's someone someone else, you, that's gonna help push this along and make sure we we do some stuff and test some stuff and iterate on it.

Ram (32:29)
I was excited

about the conversation being pushed a little bit, kinda just going down that path. So I'm stuck with where we're at.

Cole (32:37)
Okay.

This has been episode one of the Relevance Project. Over the next three months, we'll be documenting the work, the experiments, the wins, the misses, and everything we learn along the way. We'll see you in episode two.

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