How To Start And Scale With Soul

Introducing my 6-part Go To Market playbook.

Easy to Start, Hard to Scale 

Starting a beauty brand has never been easier. Low barriers to entry have allowed a flood of brands to enter the market with relative speed and ease, as evidenced by the dozens if not hundreds of new launches each month. 

But scaling? It’s never been harder. Many brands that look promising at launch fail to truly take off, build momentum, and sustain long-term growth, as evidenced by the sheer number of brand closures we’re constantly reading about. 

Sure, the path from startup to success is always uncertain, but today’s landscape feels more treacherous than ever. The runway to get a brand off the ground and on a steady climb from zero to $1M is far longer than it used to be. Even the most meticulously crafted brands can struggle to build and sustain momentum in this crowded, attention-starved landscape. 

The Glory Days 

It didn’t use to be this way. There used to be a proven playbook for launching and scaling brands: pop up a website with slick UX and smart SEO, create a vibe on your social channels, invest in a sexy campaign and throw some marketing dollars behind performance and PR. Then flip the switch.

Brand awareness happened faster and with less effort. A single press hit could cause a product to sell out. A single celebrity endorsement could cause a brand’s website to crash.   

Scaling strategies mostly relied on retail distribution. And when performance marketing, PR and retail collided, whoa! That’s when the magic really happened. 

These were the glory days. Performance marketing was more affordable. ROI was more easily attainable. Spon-con and influencer product endorsements actually worked. 

Those days are over. 

And I think that’s a good thing.

Current State of Affairs 

I’ve written a lot about the beauty landscape. TL;DR, it’s crowded, it’s noisy, it’s fragmented, and it’s micro-trendy, making it very difficult for an emerging brand to break through. While on the surface, this may sound like a bad thing, I actually think that the current landscape is forcing brands to level up.

Before I get into that, let’s look at the current state of affairs: 

1. Commerce is distributed. In the past, brands could count on reaching consumers through a handful of centralized channels where everyone was exposed to the same content at the same time. It was efficient and one-dimensional. 

   Today, commerce is fragmented. Consumers choose which platforms to subscribe to, which influencers to follow, and which cultural narratives to engage with, making the path to purchase nonlinear. 

   Because no single channel can deliver the reach it once did, a brand must be in more places at once, spending time and money building multiple channels, nurturing multiple communities, and creating a “shared experience” across multiple touch points. This concept of a brand universe is increasingly necessary, but it’s almost always cost prohibitive for an emerging brand. This is forcing brands to be much more strategic.

2. Control is bifurcated. In the past, brands held near-total control over the brand-to-consumer relationship. This relationship was linear and unidirectional: brands created the narrative and shaped the experience. The brand’s message was broadcast to consumers, and consumers received it without much room for feedback or reinterpretation.

   Today, the power is bifurcated. The community—consumers, influencers, and even detractors—now shares control over the brand's narrative and experience. They decide if a brand is culturally relevant, where it fits into their lives, and how they will use it, buy into it, and share it. A brand can no longer impose its relevance; it must be earned.

   Shared control is difficult for many brand leaders to embrace. They believe that they need to build momentum before they can cultivate a community. But it’s the other way around. Brands must do the heavy lifting of community-building first, and the community will create momentum. This is forcing brands to be much more relational.

3. Consumers are inundated.  Never before have consumers had so many choices and so many voices vying for their attention and wallet. This constant influx of options and cacophony of content have made consumer attention both fickle and incredibly costly to capture. Even when a brand nails every element—product quality, performance, pricing, positioning, value proposition, and packaging—there’s no guarantee the brand will break through. This is forcing brands to be much more intentional.

A New Playbook

Unfortunately, many brands are still following an outdated GTM playbook that focuses too much on the launch, and not enough on how to maintain momentum after the first few months. Founders are often left wondering, “where do we go from here?”

We need a new playbook—one where a GTM strategy is not just a checklist of pre-launch activities and a sexy campaign, but a detailed, adaptable roadmap that considers how commerce, community, and consumer behavior have shifted. 

I have spent the better part of 2024 creating this. Building on my Brand Strategy and Development process, my GTM playbook is a framework that will help any brand set a firm foundation for launch and a roadmap for future growth.

The real power of this process? It forces brands to align their message with their values, cater to their most passionate advocates, and build a community around real connection rather than promotion.

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The Six C’s of Go To Market

The framework is universal, but the strategic output is always original. Here’s a teaser…stay tuned for deep dives into each of the Six C’s over the next many weeks. 

Culture

If your brand strategy defines product-market fit, then your GTM strategy defines the product-culture fit.

At the brand strategy phase, it’s important to identify the practical need your product is fulfilling, the problem it’s solving. This is the product’s functional benefit, and it’s essential. But it’s not enough to win. 

Today, a brand must also have product-culture fit. It provides more than the functional benefit, and goes deeper than the emotional benefit, to embed into daily lives and cultural narratives, creating a bond with consumers based on shared values and beliefs. 

Defining a brand’s Cultural Strategy requires an understanding of relevant subcultures, their values and belief systems, cultural narratives, aesthetics and brand adjacencies that will resonate. This is a deeper, more dynamic process than the initial target audience profiling that happens at the Brand Strategy phase. 

Community 

A Cultural Strategy naturally gives way to a Community Strategy, which defines where, why, and how your audience engages with your culturally relevant brand, how your products will be used, experienced and shared between members of the community, and who to leverage to maximize awareness.  

The Community Strategy identifies which groups of people are driving the cultural narratives and how consumers engage with them. Finally, the Community Strategy creates a roadmap for authentic ambassador programs, influencer partnerships, and brand collaborations. 

Channels

Emerging brands face a paradox: they need to be everywhere, yet limited budgets and lean teams make it nearly impossible. A smart Channel Strategy prioritizes the right channels with the right amount of effort, focusing on adaptable content that can resonate across platforms, without diluting the brand’s core identity. 

In addition to the usual suspects, like Instagram and TikTok, niche media and communities and forum-like platforms are underrated goldmines. 

Content

If the Channel Strategy defines where your brand shows up, then the Content Strategy defines what and how your brand communicates. Not just which stories to tell, but the types of content that will be most effective in communicating these stories. 

Since Channel Strategy and Content Strategy are inextricably intertwined, content should be flexible, able to integrate across different platforms and touchpoints. Infotainment, edutainment, cultural memes, unscripted BTS, UGC, green screen videos and duets are just a few examples of content types that perform well today, but tomorrow is a new day. PR is another aspect of Content Strategy that determines the brand’s editorial and advertorial strategy. Content trends are constantly changing, so the aim is remaining relevant and resonant while staying on brand.

Campaigns

A Campaign Strategy is only as strong as the cultural, community, channel and content strategies that inform it. So much more than a catchy headline and hook, a GTM Campaign Strategy is a cohesive, time-released, omni-channel, multi-week initiative to build brand awareness at scale.     

Calendar  

Finally, a solid GTM strategy must be planned and executed with precision. Not sexy but so necessary, a GTM Calendar defines the schedule and the rhythm of brand communications, ensuring that content, campaigns, and customer engagement occur at the right time to maximize impact. By mapping out key moments throughout the launch, a brand creates a strategic flow that keeps them top of mind.

Subscribe!

I hope you’ll tune into my forthcoming deep dives into the Six C’s GTM Playbook. I’ll be sharing the full posts with paid subscribers only, and my hope is that each one is a resourceful and inspirational guide to help you start and scale a brand with soul.