A brand strategist explains how Virgin and Richard Branson turned boring categories into cultural phenomena by leading with design and storytelling instead of product specs. The difference: creative-first companies build identity around cultural trends, while MBA-led startups focus on rational attributes. Even packaged goods can become billion-dollar businesses with the right branding.
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most companies are started by business people in the most part. It's like— where I was really inspired most by my point of view on business and branding is from Virgin, like Richard Branson. What, you know, early in my advertising career when I worked in San Francisco, the main account that I worked on was Virgin America, the airline. So I got like super deep into Virgin and I read, you know, Richard Branson books and I just would love that their model was like, we go and try to find a stale category and we make the one really cool, fun brand within that category where it almost changes the category, where the rest of the category almost has to start adapting. Like airlines, like nobody was excited to get on an airplane. Were to eat airplane food or anything. And then they were the first ones to make planes with like neon blue lighting and like, you know, TVs in every seat, which now is like a common thing in every airline now, right? So it was like, that really inspired my way of looking at where I would look for things that were like, what is something that, like you said, like cottage cheese, like what is something that is extremely boring or like what's a category that just nobody cares about where you can't think of one cool brand in. And obviously, like, if it's something that seems like it could still have appeal, it's just the victim of poor brands not getting it and, you know, just not innovating or whatever it might be, and you see an opportunity— hey, this is actually— could be a thing that people really would love, but it's just been stuck in this, like, dull drums of branding for so long that it needs something. Because at the end of the day, with especially with packaged goods, like branding is so much more important than most suppliers or companies think, right? You know, because most companies are started by business people in the most part. It's like someone with an MBA, someone who understands the nuts and bolts of building a business. It's rare that businesses are started by creative people. Like artists and people that are, you know, graphic designers and stuff. Like, it's two different things. And usually what happens is the business folks think really rationally, like, okay, my product contains this, so the name of the product should be about that, and I should list all the rational reasons why someone should buy this. Yeah, right. It's like, and then that gets them a certain part of the way, but then they end up hiring a creative agency to get all these creative thinkers in to build a story around this boring thing to make people actually care about. So what I think is interesting is when you have creative people at the very beginning of the process where it's like just considering what the company should be, what the name should be, what the product should even look like, will someone even care about whatever it is you're selling? Because I think the creative people do have a good sense of culturally what's going on, what's cool, what do people care about, what's the climate. Business people, not so much. I feel like they're more in like the nuts and bolts and weeds of like numbers and manufacturing, which is hugely important, which is why there's so many brands that never get the creative side, but still they just become these logistical Swiss Army knives that still get acquired. But it's like, just imagine if they had great creative too. You might be a $2 billion brand. Right.
You know, speaking of water, I'm good friends with this guy, Scott Harrison from Charity:water. Have you ever met Scott?
Yeah, I've never met him. I heard of the brand.
And so you've heard of the brand because I think they've done a phenomenal job with the brand. And so this is just like we were thinking when we're just brainstorming, oh, what's another category in a grocery store that you could do this with? Which is definitely a totally legit brainstorm we can do. But this is a very different analogy, but I think he did the same thing. So Scott was a party promoter, like you came from a punk rock background, then ads, and then you went into this CPG space, which is not the— maybe the most conventional path. He's a party promoter, club promoter in New York for 10 years, convincing dudes to buy $3,000 bottles of Grey Goose that they know you could go buy for $50 across the street to get table service, right? And so then he goes and he sort of has a come-to-Jesus moment, goes to Africa, decides I'm gonna take the next step in giving back. but all he knows is how to promote parties. All he knows is cool. And so he reinvented charity as a cool brand. And he has this quote he does when he like tells his story, which is, it's a quote from someone talking about philanthropy. And they say, man, imagine if we could sell charity with 1/10 of the finesse that brands sell toothpaste. Like, imagine if we had 1/10 of their marketing power that they do, they use on toothpaste. Imagine how much good we could do in the world. And so that's basically what he did, where he was like, all right, I'm gonna make a brand that actually stands for these 3 things, and I'm gonna have awesome design, 'cause every charity website sucks, and it looks like they hired their 8th grade cousin to build it for them, and I'm gonna do these with influencers, I'm gonna do these print campaigns, et cetera, et cetera. And he's now been raising over $150 million for the cause. He's one of the fastest growing and best charities out there because he did what you did, which is, He applied cool to a category that was totally uncool, uh, before.
