Episode Summary

Rob Willey is the CMO at Cheribundi, a tart cherry juice company, and Emil Capital Partners, a mid-size private equity firm focused on innovative late stage startups in the CPG, health, wellness and beauty space. Previously, Rob served as CMO of TaskRabbit through it's acquisition by IKEA.Cheribundi, a brand that has been around for 15 years, is distributed in 50,000 stores, consumed by more than 300 pro and college teams regularly for expedited recovery.

Episode Notes

On this episode of DTC Pod, Rob joins Blaine to talk about how to operate a consumer brand and think like a seasoned executive. They talk about what channels to focus on to grow, how to tap into existing infrastructure, deciding what to prioritize, how to nail a rebrand, finding quick wins for your brand, ins and outs of the beverage and wellness space, bringing a new concept to market, the similarities between marketplace and DTC as a consumer executive, positioning TaskRabbit in a competitive landscape, taking a wholistic approach to marketing, solving issues at their root cause, and much more.

Episode Highlights

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‍6:40 First, Stop Bad Spend 🚦

And so after kind of understanding the business and understanding the consumer, which I think any good executive needs to do, I don't care what department or what sort of team you lead you, then for me it was kinda like, okay, I, I actually start to try to diagnose what's wrong, you know? And because usually those are the places where you gotta stop spending first. And in my career, I'll be honest with you, people have brought me in because they need something fixed. And so that's usually the case with executives. Turnover happens, particularly at this CMO level because something's not going right.

7:30 The Price Of Being Unremarkable 💵

Marketing is the tax you pay for being unremarkable. And as a marketer, right, early in my career, I found that sort of offensive, you know, one of the executives at Task Rabbits said that to me. And at first it kind of like, sort of hurt my feelings. I was like, Wow, is that really how marketing is, you know, perceived? But then as I started thinking about it, I, it's true. You know, the more, the, the less remarkable you are as a company, as a brand, as a product, the more expensive it is to convince people to use it.

10:30 What the best Startups Get Right 💯

Every good young startup does a couple things. Well, if they wanna be successful, paid social is one of them. Generally PR is one of the other ones, right? Search marketing is part of that. Uh, and then ultimately you have to drive email or retention. And if you can get those systems in place early on, usually at least have some revenue. You have some retention, you have some ltv, right? Your LTV c a ratio starts to like at least look a little healthy and you got something to go on.

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Rob Willey - CMO  of Cheribundi
Ramon Berrios - CEO of Trend.io
Blaine Bolus - Co-Founder of Seated

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