While many companies spend months defining their target audience using data analysis and customer research, some prefer to entertain people first, and use that as a basis for building a customer base. Let's look at a couple of men's grooming products who owe a lot of their success to their founder's sense of humour.
Josh Blanco founded Dollar Razor Club as a service where you sign up and pay a dollar a month for a razor. This simple idea turned out to be so successful, the company was recently bought for $500 million.
The success started with a video that went viral. You've probably seen the ad, where Blanco himself walks through the warehouse, shouting about how fantastic their product is. The funny lines and the visual humor clearly put across the message that this was a confident brand that you could trust. More than that – by subscribing, you would be in the same club as this fun and likeable guy.
The ad didn't come from a brainstorming session in the marketing department – Blanco had performed as a stand-up comedian and understood the power of humor to tell a story. He was clearly right. The ad, which took one day and less than $2,000 to make, has been viewed over 20 million times on various social media platforms. By making people laugh, Blanco set the company apart from competitors, and created any company's dream – marketing content that their target audience wanted to share across their demographic.
Another brand in the men's facial hair field started marketing before it even had a product to sell. Stefan Schwarz initially built a following by posting grooming videos, where he showed men how to look after their beards, using humor to make the content particularly memorable. These videos quickly developed a life of their own, collecting hundreds of thousands of followers. Schwarz realized he had, almost by accident, created an audience who was just waiting for a product. He knew exactly who his customers were and what they wanted, so he started researching high-quality products that would fit the feel of his brand. A year later, the first JustBeardz products went on the market.
Turning the traditional model on its head, these two companies gathered huge audiences before really trying to sell them anything. In both cases, the product – although, no doubt, good – is not particularly exciting or revolutionary, so it is almost as if people are paying to be part of a community of like-minded people rather than for the product. Maybe this is the end of customers being seen as just a credit card.
97. Why was someone prepared to pay so much for the Dollar Razor Club?
