Cole Heilborn (00:00)
Welcome to the Relevance Project. A public series on this podcast following three brands as I work with them to figure out what it takes to create content that is actually relevant to their audience. This is episode two, and if you're just finding this series, I'd recommend going back and listening to episode one first. Now, before we get into this episode, I want to explain where we're at and why I decided to call this series the Relevance Project in the first place.

We're living through a really interesting moment in the world of advertising and marketing. For a long time, if a brand wanted attention, the easiest path was to buy it. You made an ad, bought the media, and interrupted someone with your message. And that still works, but social platforms and YouTube have changed the opportunity. These platforms are built around relevance. If you make something people actually want to watch, the algorithm can distribute it far beyond the audience you already have.

The cool part about the outdoor industry is that the outdoor consumer is already naturally curious and their attention is already pointed towards the outdoors. If this was an insurance industry, brands would have to interrupt their audience because people don't care about insurance. People care about the outdoors. This means that outdoor brands have another option. They can still buy attention, but they can also try to earn it. And I think that changes the job of marketing in a pretty meaningful way.

Because your audience doesn't care about something simply because your brand needs to talk about it. They don't care that you have a product launch coming up. They don't care that you need to hit a sales target. And they don't care what's on your marketing calendar.

If you want someone to stop scrolling and give you their attention, you have to give them a reason to care. Maybe that's by teaching them something, maybe it's by entertaining them, maybe it's by inspiring them, making them laugh, helping them feel seen, or just making their day a little more interesting. That's the opportunity I'm interested in, and that's what we're trying to solve through this project. What happens when brands stop treating organic as another place to distribute advertising and instead build a system for making things their audience genuinely wants to spend time with?

So here's a recap of where we're at. By this point in the project, we are a month into working with our three brands. And at this point, these three brands have started to feel a little less like companies and more like people. Not people that the audience necessarily ever meet, more like characters we could drop into a situation and ask what would they do. We had Kit at Kitworks, Lou at Lunar, and Billy at Skygoat. They were starting to feel real, but mostly to us.

They still lived inside calls and notion documents. And I was trying to figure out whether treating a brand like a character was actually useful, or whether we just spent a few weeks inventing elaborate fictional characters. At Skygoat, that question started with Billy. Billy had originally taken shape as a mythical trail angel of sorts, a character who might show up when people were taking the outdoors too seriously, comparing themselves to everyone around them, or making themselves miserable for no good reason.

But the more I spent time with Billy, the more I started to think we'd taken the character idea too literally. So Ram and I from Skygo jumped in.

more I've been thinking about that, it's like, okay, that is the right choice. I don't think we I don't think the audience should even know that Billy exists, but he becomes our inspiration source for how we show up in the world as the Skygoat brand. Not only when it comes to content, but it ideally it influences everything else.

Ram (03:33)
All right.

Cole Heilborn (03:35)
I did add some stuff here about Billy's enemy because it's important to understand, I think, what Billy is fighting against or what his arch enemy is.

So things like comparison, overoptimization, taking yourself too seriously, unnecessary discomfort, you know, physical, social. And then I was also trying to imagine how Billy behaves. Cause this is the piece that I think we've been missing. Maybe he's the type of character who uses telepathy. Maybe he uses mind games. Maybe he uses visions, teleportation. If we're really leaning into this concept of there's this mystical,

you know, mythological creature that exists out there, how would he show up and how would he interact with people?

Ram (04:21)
It's interesting for sure. I don't know how like how that would play out though yet. Like the enemy, like that that makes sense to me. The how Billy behaves. I'm not quite grasping that.

Cole Heilborn (04:31)
Yeah.

Your brand has a point of view. You know, that point of view is something to the effect of you don't need to prove anything to be comfortable in the outdoors. The character that we're working on, Billy, is the entity who believes that point of view. The piece that we were just talking about, these different scenarios, is the behavior of that character, which is how that specific character acts because of who they are. And then if we take that

and translate it specifically into content. There's other applications to this I think as well. But the content then is just a reflection of be those behaviors in different situations, if that makes sense. So all of the

Ram (05:11)
Things that you just said was great. Do you have that in writing or

Cole Heilborn (05:17)
yes.

This brand's character exercise was a really useful way to understand how the brand could show up in the world. But I was having a hard time understanding how literal it ought to be. Does this character actually exist, or does it just guide us? While Billy was in the process of becoming a mythical creature, I switched gears and started working with Mike on Lou. He's a quirky fella, but he has a pretty clear job. He refuses to let life get too ordinary, even though he

doesn't actually realize that's what he's doing. He just goes about his life in an interesting way that attracts people to how he lives his life. And what was interesting is that Mike had already started finding ways to use Lou.

Mike (06:04)
But yeah, I'm excited for everybody to kind of get on the same page and to start to feel like they can take this work and start testing a little bit. And you know, I did a tiny test. I'm like trying to reactivate and rewarm our email list and was like ready to hit send. And I was like, hey, let's run this through like a loo filter. But it was I did like a a goose geese email. But like that was super helpful and like such an easy, quick

week and I feel you know, I felt a lot better sending that email out than the version before it. And I know over time that's just going to compound as it has more personality and perspective. Yeah, I j I just refresh it again, like, yeah, we've already gotten one sale out of that email. And like over the last ninety days that's in our I think maybe moved into third or fourth place in terms of performance and we're two hours in. So

Cole Heilborn (07:06)
In episode one, Lou was the character that was furthest along. And so being able to check back in with Mike as the concept of Lou was percolating was really interesting to me. Now, this email example, it's not proof of anything. I don't think we cracked the code. I don't think we figured out a way to create incredible email content. But what was interesting is that.

Lou and how we were thinking about communication from the brand was making sense to Mike, and it was already starting to have an impact, even if there were too many variables to say that Lou caused the result of one of their highest performing emails. But what was interesting is that just a few weeks earlier, Lou was this weird character we had invented that didn't exist. And now Mike was using him to make real decisions.

about the brand before hitting Send. This was the first time that I started to see how Brand as character might actually scale and influence a team. And at Kitworks, Kit was starting to take shape differently. Greg and 8 had already described the brand as a guide, and my job was to make that guide human enough that we could understand how he behaved. To recap, we had Mike the Muse representing the kind of multi-passionate person the audience aspired to be.

And I wanted to introduce them to my understanding of kit.

It feels like Mike is more of the explorer. Kit is more of the sage mixed with a little bit of everyman with a little bit of the explorer. If he if he's playing the role of the guide, then he isn't necessarily the one who's out there exploring and living the adventures. He's the guy who is helping helping our our people become and achieve that.

Greg (09:00)
Yes, totally. All of those things.

Cole Heilborn (09:02)
So I was thinking about like what is his job? Simply, I think it's to help people become more capable, prepared, and confident so they can say yes to more adventures. I think his point of view on the world is something we've been talking about from day one, which is this idea of preparation creates possibility because the best adventures are the ones you didn't see coming. I think what matters is how Kit makes people feel when they interact with him.

For some people, he reminds them of that one river guide who is calm, could carry a conversation, and help others feel at ease. For others, he reminds them of their high school shop teacher, who is patiently supportive and always present, but never lurking to help offer advice when needed. And yet for others, Kit reminds them of that park ranger who still mans fire lookout, someone who carries a quiet stillness, has a particular way of packing his pack, decades of experience and a reverence for the mountains. As you as you kind of think about Kit, can you see how he might

Interact and show up in the world.

Greg (09:59)
Yeah, it's like incredibly clear to me. I think this this takes it a a nice step forward.

Cole Heilborn (10:08)
Now, with an understanding about who these characters were, it was starting to become a foundation that gave us a way to turn a belief about the world into behavior. Which raised another question. If we understood how these brands behaved, what were we actually trying to accomplish with all of this communication? We had gotten pretty deep down the rabbit hole. We were inventing fictional campground hosts, mythical mountain creatures, and river guides who didn't exist.

And I started to wonder if I needed to go back to the basics. What is marketing actually supposed to do? Around the same time, I've been reading a book called How Brands Grow Part 2 by Byron Sharp and Jenny Romanick. So I decided to reach out to Jenny and see if she'd be interested in having a conversation on the podcast.

Jenni Romaniuk (10:56)
The biggest danger of advertising is it's wallpaper. It's just not noticed at all. It doesn't have a negative effect. It just has you've spent money for nothing. So that's what we're trying to avoid.

Cole Heilborn (11:06)
I

see. Interesting. So is it too simple to say that all we're trying to do as marketers is just build associations with our products and our brand with the customer? Is that all we're trying to do?

Jenni Romaniuk (11:19)
lot of cases, yeah. I mean in terms of when we're talking about things like advertising and and we're building stuff in people's heads, so that in the future when someone's in a buying situation, we're giving our brand a better chance. The vast majority of people who will buy you in the next year aren't in the market for you now. and so, you know, so this is where a lot of our work now is about building our future demand rather than satisfying our current demand.

Cole Heilborn (11:45)
I see. Interesting. And what are the elements of mental availability?

Jenni Romaniuk (11:49)
Well, mental availability is about the long-run propensity of a brand to be thought of in buying situations. So mental availability is that, and it's underpinned by three key areas, and that is reach, getting out to as many category buyer brands as possible, branding, making sure that everything you do is.

clearly and unmistakably about you and and then messaging and that's about building up useful memory and that's what we call category entry point.

Cole Heilborn (12:20)
You talk about category entry points as a way to if you can identify those, you can then start to build memory structures around those category entry points. Is that the the idea?

Jenni Romaniuk (12:32)
So category entry points are used by people whether you market them or not. So it's not like you create them, they're there. You just get to choose whether or not that's what you message in your marketing or something else.

Cole Heilborn (12:50)
This conversation with Jenny gave me another piece of the puzzle. The character work was helping answer how the brand behaves. The muse was helping us understand who the brand was trying to serve. And category entry points added another question. When should the customer think of us?

If most customers aren't ready to buy now, then a lot of the job of marketing is to build useful memories for later. My question was, how can we design content to reinforce those category entry points? So with each of the brands, we spend some time identifying a handful of category entry points.

Ram (13:28)
One that I hear from people, right, is getting home from work and putting on their their comfy clothes, right? Or their that could be having, you know, morning coffee at the camp at the campsite, you know.

Mike (13:42)
You know, like the the low-hanging fruit with kind of my my core demographic that I originally started with is you're slipping off your ski boots and what are you putting on your feet next when your dog's staring at you to go outside and it's freezing and you're still in your pajamas and like you're you you're putting your jacket on over your pajamas and you're trying to find the tallest, warmest pair of boots.

Because you're only wearing pajama pants and your dog needs to go out.

Greg (14:15)
Planning a family ski trip with my spouse while making sense of all of your gear after a trip.

Cole Heilborn (14:26)
Understanding the CEPs that each brand needed to build mental availability has felt like a game changer. Because it explained the function of all types of marketing, but it allows us to be strategic as we would start to design content ideas. But there is still a pretty big problem. We can make something strategically perfect and still make something that nobody wanted to watch.

Around the same time, I had a conversation with Joe Prebich, the VP of Benchmade, and he helped me put words to that problem. Now, Joe has spent his career on the creative side of brands like Red Bull and Benchmade, and his argument was pretty simple. Great strategy doesn't save boring creative.

Joe Prebich (15:05)
Powerful content that connects and can break through the noise is worth a lot of money. it's worth, you know, millions and millions of dollars in in revenue and and more so than that, it's worth a lifetime of brand loyalty. It's just gotta be that good though. Right? It it it doesn't work if it's not actually interesting, if it's not actually

Cole Heilborn (15:26)
like like concept and then the execution of it.

Joe Prebich (15:28)
Yeah, that the idea, the execution has to be worth somebody tuning in, right? Access to customers is relatively, you know, easy today. It's pretty cheap to get your content distributed. so the question is, is your content good? What are we trying to say and is this gonna be interesting and what would somebody say back to us?

Cole Heilborn (15:49)
So now we had even more constraints. The content needed to be relevant to the audience, it needed to feel distinctly like the brand, it needed to connect the brand to useful moments people might remember later when they were ready to purchase, and none of that mattered if the content and the idea wasn't interesting enough to earn their attention. Which finally brought us to the part I've been waiting for. What should these brands actually make?

For the next phase, I deliberately stopped trying to make everything fit around guardrails. I didn't want us brainstorming while staring at category entry points, production realities, or everything that might make an idea impossible. We had spent weeks putting constraints around each brand. Now I wanted to see what would happen if we started to play inside them and let our imaginations run wild. Up first was Kitworks.

Greg (16:39)
I'm actually looking at these again, be helpful, have more fun, and our perspective. And I'm wondering if our perspective is actually just part of be helpful. I think there are two pillars, honestly.

Cole Heilborn (16:56)
At Kitworks, as we started to talk about these two content pillars, be helpful and more fun, we started to realize that we should focus 70% of our effort on be helpful content and 30% on more fun.

Greg (17:11)
There is the recognition that we all have.

Hot storage and cold storage. One of the f the fundamentals of creating a great gear garage is to have a staging table. And that is the place where, like, okay, the your hot storage, your gear to like lands on that thing, you grab your nutrition for the day, you grab your layers for the day, you fill your bottles, they go in there and you're out.

Cole Heilborn (17:41)
The more Greg shared about their perspective on gear management, the more opportunities we started to see around being helpful. Before versus after, the organization test, top-down stop motion showing the pain of getting outside, gear versus knowledge, what you don't need, gear under $25, what's in my backpack, forgotten outdoor tricks, how first responders prepare, fueling adventure, and ordinary rituals.

kind of anchor anywhere. It might be more of like YouTube or the blog where it's like long term evergreen helpful content I think is just gonna do better. We wanna create meaningful, helpful things that will resonate with the right people.

And as we started to brainstorm around being helpful, the ideas grew quickly.

Greg (18:33)
There's like so much fun to be had and this stuff is awesome that we're doing and like it's a creative playground for us to express who we are. Gear management enables this. So like if you're able to be like, yeah, we should totally reroute and go do that because it looks fun, or we should stay out here a little bit longer because we're a little bit more prepared for you know, like that's they work together in that way.

Cole Heilborn (19:02)
The other thing that I think would be really fun to get in is just a series called That's a Thing highlighting the random things that make the outdoors so fun. The random, ridiculous, multi-sport, crazy sports that we've never heard of. The thing that I like about that's a that's a thing. it's an interesting social growth strategy if we are curating interesting fun things that are really brand aligned.

This conversation then opened up a bunch of other content ideas. People we admire, alternate routes, what if? Freaking awesome. Coffee geocaching. That's a thing. Shitty rigs, and $100 adventures. Again, these are just titles to concepts that we were coming up with. But these were things that celebrated interesting people, weird traditions, alternate routes, cheap adventures, hack-together setups, and little ways to make an ordinary day outside more memorable and more fun.

Greg, Nate, and I were filling up a notion document as fast as we could type. And as we kept brainstorming ideas, I started to switch gears and work with Mike from Lunar on the same exercise. We decided to start with a product truth and start brainstorming around cold feet. Now we decided to position cold feet as the enemy, and once we started with that in mind, things got pretty weird pretty quick.

The first one that I came up with was Give Cold Feet the Boot. And this Lunar invites creators in the community to show us the most creative ways they can literally give cold feet the boot. Punt them, launch them, evict them, bury them, tow them away, send them packing. Each piece works as a standalone social post while together they build a larger idea that cold feet are the enemy and Lunar is here to get rid of them. My thought there is I I would ask the question, well, how would Lou give

Cold feet the boot. So maybe it's like someone builds a catapult and launches I don't know, like a pair of old shoes. Or like we

Mike (21:09)
could

we could send them a ice mold that's a foot shape, a silicone foot shaped ice mold that then they destroy that frozen foot.

Cole Heilborn (21:21)
Right. The second concept I had was asking myself what would happen if Lou was a door-to-door salesman. So here's my description. What would happen if Lou goes door to door offering unsolicited help to people suffering from cold feet? Maybe it's a tiny porch side cold feet assessment, a folding demonstration table with absurd warming inventions, handwritten charts, bad science, strange sales exercises, and little tests.

Mike (21:44)
But I would almost say the funnier thing there might be this Lou Energy selling crazy footwarming stay warm devices and it almost like the stupid door-to-door salesman shit.

Cole Heilborn (22:05)
That's sweet. I dig that. All right, last one is it's called The War on Cold Feet. Well, what if Lou had his own campaign against cold feet? And we as the audience never, you know, again, we're never interacting with Lou. We never even know it exists, but we're seeing and discovering evidence of this campaign that he's been planning. The audience discovers evidence of his obsession through the things he leaves behind. Inventions, observations, questionable theories, historical research.

propaganda and field reports. Each piece could stand alone as its own strange artifact from Lou's campaign while slowly revealing how seriously he takes the problem of cold feet. The inventions I was coming up with were things like a hot water bottle stuffed into boots, heated insoles connected to a car battery, you know, boots wrapped in emergency blankets, tiny charcoal hand warmers taped around every toe, a propane-powered foot warmer, boot f a bootliner stuffed with

Geese feathers.

Mike (23:06)
And again, maybe like with the colorful ones, it's like he's going door to door offering to like paint their boots.

Cole Heilborn (23:15)
that's really good. The second concept I had was asking myself what would happen if Lou was a door to door salesman. So here's my description. What would happen if Lou goes door to door offering unsolicited help to people suffering from cold feet? Maybe it's a tiny porch side cold feet assessment, a folding demonstration table with absurd warming inventions, handwritten charts, bad science, strange sales exercises, and little

Mike (23:39)
Almost say the funnier thing there might be this Lou Energy selling crazy footwarming stay warm devices and it almost like

Cole Heilborn (23:56)
Now,

as Mike and I were brainstorming about Lunar, Ram and I, from Skygoat, started to do the same thing. With Skygoat, the content started with the things Billy was pushing up against. Comparison, overoptimization, unnecessary discomfort, and the feeling that you have something to prove outside. The question became, what does that actually look like as content? Here's some of the ideas we were playing with.

What is important though, I think, is the concept, which is a recurring therapy format where people unpack the strange pressures they put on themselves outside over a post adventure meal. Needing to go farther, move faster, own the right gear, suffer more, or prove that they belong. Played straight like a real therapy session, the humor comes from how absurd those anxieties sound once someone actually says them out loud. Yeah.

Ram (24:47)
I like that.

Cole Heilborn (24:47)
The next one is I'm calling unexpected comfort.

Unexpected comfort is a reoccurring format built around real, unscripted reactions to strange acts of coziness appearing where people least expect them. A pair of camp chairs shows up on a summit. Hot drinks are waiting at a freezing trailhead. Someone comes out of a cold river and finds a warm blanket folded on a rock. The important part is that people discover the people discovering these things do not know that they are there ahead of time. The mystical feeling comes from never explaining where the comfort came from. No one mentions Billy, no one solves the mystery. The whole point is to

inject coziness into just random outdoor situations. And so I think this is the clearest example to me of Billy's behavior played out in the real world, which is no one knows where it came from. It's kind of mysterious, but everyone feels really comfortable and really cozy. Yeah.

Ram (25:39)
I li no, I think it's pretty cool.

Cole Heilborn (25:40)
I don't know, for lack of a better title, it's called over technical versus comfort. Someone shaves ounces from their pack but sleeps terribly. A hiker chooses the most technically

efficient meal possible while their friend cooks something incredible. Someone obsesses over fabric specs, calories, pace, or gear charts, while completely misses the obvious question. Is this actually comfortable?

Ram (26:00)
There's always like the person in the group who's like the gear weenie, right? Like that's spent like made charts and graphs and like spent all this time and energy and whatever. And maybe they show up in some s like overly technical thing that actually doesn't and doesn't actually do the job that the more comfortable sky gets could be.

Cole Heilborn (26:24)
Just a few weeks earlier, the question was what should these brands make? Now we almost had the opposite problem. There were so many directions we could go. And the more we talked about them, the more obvious it became that another hour in a Notion document probably wasn't gonna tell us which ideas were good. We had to start finding ways to test them, because ultimately the audience decides what is good. So next time, on episode three, join us as we get into the field. We're gonna pull out cameras, we're gonna pull out microphones.

And we're gonna start making stuff. And more importantly, we're gonna see what's relevant to the audience. If you're enjoying this series, I'd love to hear from you. What is this content like as a listener? Do you have any thoughts or advice for me as we're doing this thing live? I'd love to hear from you. You can find me on LinkedIn or you can shoot me an email, cole at portsidepro.com.

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