A Pirate and a Shark - Brands Doing It Right

Pirate Ship? GymShark? Who are these brands and what do they have in common? They both have identified a tight niche and taken a unique approach to a tired category. Call them the Uber of shipping or the Stanley of the gym rat. Unique. Exciting. And fun for our special guest, Cheryl Henderson -- creative director at Innis Maggiore -- to wax phil-arrrrr-sophical. Join the positioning gurus, including Cheryl, as we discover a few new brands who have become overnight sensations.

Spend 30+ ish with Mark, Lorraine, and Cheryl as they discuss all things marketing, advertising, public relations, and of course ... positioning!

Transcript

Mark Vandegrift
Welcome to the Brand Shorthand Podcast. I'm your host, Mark Vandegrift, and with me today is a seaworthy pirate of positioning, Lorraine Kessler. Welcome, Lorraine.

Lorraine Kessler
Hello, thank you, hi.

Mark Vandegrift
We also welcome one of our creative directors, Cheryl Henderson. Welcome Cheryl. 

Cheryl Henderson
Ahoy!

Mark Vandegrift
All right, love it. Before we get started, allow me to introduce Cheryl to everyone. She's a fascinating human being and I think one that our listeners will fall in love with in about a hot second. So Cheryl's been with us for over 20 years and worked her way up from entry level graphic designer to now she is one of our creative directors. She is a stage four cancer survivor, a crazy cat lady, a Broadway enthusiast. In fact, we have that in common because whenever anyone ever gives us two words of a lyric, we break into song and jazz hands. And she is a Disney fanatic. Like if you need tips and tricks, For Disney, just go to Cheryl. 

And she's a retired… retired, she's too young to be retired. She's a retired cookie artist who appeared on two of Food Network's shows, the Christmas Cookie Challenge, and I think that was just before COVID, right, in 2019? And then the Halloween Cookie Challenge, and I think that was a reappearance, and she was so popular on the first show, they asked you to come back. And that was 2022, right? Okay. So basically, she's our local, yeah.

Well, basically she's our local celebrity. Lorraine, you've worked with Cheryl as much as I have. So tell us one of your favorite memories of Cheryl during the, you can go back the last 20 years. I know Cheryl doesn't look like she could have worked here for 20 years, but.

Lorraine Kessler
No, no, no. Well, I think Cheryl, she's our Contessa of culture, right, Mark? Don't you agree with that? Yeah. Culture. I mean, the campaigns that Cheryl has done in our agency for Arts and Stark and United Way, they're legendary. Legendary for fun and raising money and getting everybody on board with supporting the community. So no small feat. Unbelievable energy in that. And she's one of the rare people that you ever meet that the minute you spend time with her, you just want to be a better person. And as someone from New Jersey and sometimes known as acid rain Lorraine, that's very much needed. 

But I think one of my favorite campaigns that you did Cheryl, really, was the open doors to announce the acceptance of all insurances by the Aultman Health System in our community. And that was a very complicated change for the system, but you made the campaign so easily understood and so simple for the consumers, as well as catchy. So kudos.

Cheryl Henderson
Thank you so much. I appreciate that.

Mark Vandegrift
Cheryl, tell us something about you that very few people would ever guess if they were playing that game -- I think it's called the personal facts guessing game -- you know, the one where you write something down about yourself, they draw out a slip of paper and someone says, okay, guess who that is. Give us like this little known fact.

Cheryl Henderson
Okay, I think I could probably stump some people because most people are surprised that I absolutely love a good disaster flick. I mean, like the more death and destruction, the better. Yes, yes. Give me the weather events, the shuttle disasters, the giant sharks, the crocodiles, all of it. And I even love... I even love the low budget terrible ones like Sharknado. Like they're so bad that they're hysterical and I absolutely love them.

Mark Vandegrift
So are you going to be like the Thursday before the Friday that Twister comes out? Are you going to see it?

Cheryl Henderson
Well, I can't stay up that late. So probably opening day. I went to a midnight movie once and I regretted it.

Mark Vandegrift
That's another fact about you. You go to bed early.

Lorraine Kessler
My gosh, I am knocked over because we could have shared. I tend to binge on like airplane. There's May, mayday videos on YouTube about plane crashes and ship disasters. And I'm like totally, totally into that. I'm shocked. I'm shocked. I couldn't be more shocked if I told you that I watched the Hallmark channel, which I don't.

Mark Vandegrift
No. We know that's not true. There's no way. You couldn't make it through 10 minutes of a Hallmark show, Lorraine. Now I know you're gaslighting me.

Lorraine Kessler
No, no, and my sister is addicted to it, so she'll be here. I know, and it's like, okay, I'm going to go weed. I'm gonna go rake the beach.

Mark Vandegrift
Yeah.

That's awesome. Well, for those of our listeners who are not clients or clients who have not met you, Cheryl, tell us about your tenure at Innisfree and just give us a few highlights.

Cheryl Henderson
Okay, well, I'm gonna go back a little bit to give you a little bit of background of why being here is such a special thing for me. So, I was homeschooled from third grade on, before it was cool, by the way, you know. I went to college to get my elementary education degree with a minor in English and a series of unfortunate events led me to leave that profession as quickly as I got into it. And I didn't know what I was going to do. I ended up going back to the manufacturing company where I worked during college and they kind of slid me into the marketing department. And I just kind of fell into graphic design. I've always been artistic, but that's not what I went to school for. So, I would never have in a million years have thought that I would be a creative director at an advertising agency because everything I learned about graphic design was pretty much from the school of hard knocks, you know? 

And this is also why I daily have a serious ballot of imposter syndrome because I technically shouldn't really be here, but here we are. So, a couple of years after I started, one of my pieces actually won best of show in our local Addy awards. And I was just flabbergasted like, somebody must have made a mistake here. But that really gave me a little bit of validation that, OK, maybe I can do this. Maybe I'm on the right track. So, that was kind of the boost that I needed to really dig in and get to it here. And I learned so much from people here. And so, I've gotten my paws on everything and anything you could imagine graphic design-wise. But recently, it's been really heavy on social media content creation, which I really enjoy, a lot of video production, another of my things that's really close to my heart, and I've been doing a lot more writing lately. So it's been a lot of fun. It's been a good 20 years.

Mark Vandegrift
Good. And you trademarked a term recently in relation to social marketing.

Cheryl Henderson
I did. I call them the SoshMedes because everything needs a good abbreviation.

Mark Vandegrift
That's right. And for those who want to know how to spell that, S -O -S -H, and then capital -E -D -E -S with a trademark symbol. So SoshMedes, we'll put it on the screen. We're going to make sure everybody knows they cannot touch Cheryl's trademark term.

Well, Cheryl, the reason we invited you onto the Brand Shorthand podcast today is that you recently wrote a blog for us in our position as few and you've done that before, but this one kind of hit a tone and a topic that we're on right now. And that's a few brands that we see getting it right. Such as Dr. Pepper, by the way, who we talked about last week, supplanting Pepsi as the number two most favorite and most popular soft drink and a few more that we'll discuss today. So, tell us the name of the brand you had in the focus of your blog post and how you discovered the brand in the first place, because I had not heard of it.

Cheryl Henderson
Yeah, it was a fluke sort of thing. We all get those emails from LinkedIn with job recommendations. Hey, you're a high skills match for this. And I just happened to see at the very top of the list was for a company called Pirate Ship. And of course, ding, my ears perk up a little bit. But the job title was for Vice President of People, which made me laugh because that's not really a formal job title. So that again, piqued my interest a little bit. But then I saw that their logo was a Jolly Roger pirate flag. So I was like, okay, there's something going on here that I need to explore.

Mark Vandegrift
That's awesome. Well, we're glad you didn't take the job or apply for.

Cheryl Henderson
Yes, I was not I was not a high skills match because it was for human resources.

Lorraine Kessler
What was really caught your attention about the company and what it does and what it stood for?

Cheryl Henderson
When I clicked through to read the job description, internally they call it vice pirate of people. And as I started reading down the page, they are just freewheeling with the pirate lingo. I mean, as much as you can imagine, every pirate thing that you can imagine a pirate saying, they were saying it on this page.

And this is something that's near and dear to my creative writer heart because I live and die by a theme. And if I can take a theme to the nines, it's going there, believe me. And these people did that. But what further captured me was that they were spending just as much time talking about how important it is for the people they hire and their employees to have fun as they were talking about the qualifications for the job. And who does that on LinkedIn? Normally it's like, we are a business, we must not have fun. Well, this was not the case here. And it was just a delightful read, this job posting. I've never read anything like it. It was just a pure delight to read it.

Lorraine Kessler
So what do they do and what's their position? What makes, what are they trying to do in the market or own in the mind?

Cheryl Henderson
Okay, so it starts with the name itself, Pirate Ship. Not only are we referencing an actual pirate ship, but they all are a band of pirates who ship things. Pirate ship. I mean, the more I read about these people, the more I was just like, these are my people. Like, they get it. So, their position is they are the people who make shipping fun. And they, yeah, yeah.

It is just, I mean, if I ever had a brand crush on anybody, it's on Pirate Ship. So, the owners who started this, the founders, they were pioneers in the shipping box boom of the 2010s, not shipping box, the subscription box. They were pioneers of that. So, you find a thing that you like and they curate a box of things and they'll send it to you every month. So they pioneered this concept. And they actually show a picture of a desk with one of those little label printers that prints off in the continuous sheet, label after label. And it is a pile that goes from the floor up to the bottom of the desk. And there's all their subscription boxes behind it. And it's just, oooh, it gives me anxiety. And that is the opposite of fun.

And so they lived it and they said, this is a bunch of baloney. What can we do about this? So they decided to pioneer this software that made that whole process easier. And they specifically target small businesses. They're not going after the big, you know, mega corporation shippers. They're going after the mom and pop people who are just trying to get their stuff to the people who want it.

That's what they decided to do, and they developed this software. And I'm sure in that doldrum of purchasing and arranging shipping for your products, this is a welcome change. I mean, who wouldn't want to have fun while you're doing this dull thing that needs to happen in order for you to make money? So that's definitely what sets them apart from their competition because I don't think any other shipping service that I've ever seen is about fun, like this.

Mark Vandegrift
Well, and they back that up with efficiency then, right?

Lorraine Kessler
Yeah. Okay. So it's just, right. Well, there's a, there's a business word for you, Mark. Efficiency. That word, that word. Here's fun. You just killed it.

Mark Vandegrift
Yeah, I know you love that.

Cheryl Henderson
You are a fun killer.

Mark Vandegrift (15:41.614)
I’m not a fun killer. I am saying it's the logical word behind the fun word. You got to have both sides of the brain here. That's why we're on this podcast.

Cheryl Henderson
That's why we make such a good team, right? Because I’m the fun squad and you're the fun killer. No, I'm totally kidding.

Lorraine Kessler
No, but I think that's I think what's interesting is they're waking up a category with a service and Here's some great positioning points, right? They have a very focused target audience for whom this process has been a huge encumbrance not fun tedious difficult all that And yet it reflects on their business so much if things aren't shipped out properly and on the right time into the right person

And they took something that is pretty much banal and made it interesting and fun and light. So it fits that target audience just perfect. And they, like you said, take it to the nines with the theme. So it's not something every company can do, but I applaud the creativity and it certainly is working because they have a lot of good things lined up with what they're doing. The name is fun too.

Mark Vandegrift
In your article, you called out the brand style guide, which was interesting because like we never call out brands. And mostly because we see brands who don't maybe use them correctly, right? They exist, but they don't know how to deploy them. So using Pirate Ships Guide as an example, what do you find makes for a brand style guide that provides you guidance as a creative, like the right balance?

Cheryl Henderson
Right. The right balance is a hard one to find. You need more than one sheet that shows the logos and the fonts and the colors, but you need less than the designery noise where people just want to show you how much they know and how artsy they are. There have been some incredibly laughable, pretentious explanations in some brand guides I've seen where I could not roll my R's. My R's.

Mark Vandegrift
Yours. That was a Freudian slip.

Lorraine Kessler
It's the pirate ship!

Cheryl Henderson
I'm really getting into the theme here. I could not roll my eyes hard enough because it was so absurd. Like nobody needs this stupid artsy explanation. Nobody cares. So we need to find the middle ground with that. So Pirate Ship didn't just talk about their brand, but that brand guide was the brand. I mean, from the cover all the way through, it showed all the imagery -- the pirate ship imagery -- juxtaposed with shipping labels and shipping boxes. Like who would think of putting these things together, but they weave them together so seamlessly. They have a custom font called Arrrr-ial and they have their own set of pirate emojis. I mean, it's just, I can't even, I cannot even with these people because it's all just so great. 

And their CEO, has a picture of himself as a pirate. I mean, it's just they don't take themselves too seriously. They are living the position of fun while getting the job done. Like you said, Mark, we have to be able to not just have fun, we have to be able to do the thing, but do it with panache and style.

Mark Vandegrift
Good. Well, you didn't work on pirate ship, but you regularly execute on our client work, right? And as a creative, do you find that positioning makes it harder to execute, you know, with perhaps handcuffs, or that it frees you up to be more creative?

Cheryl Henderson
Well, a lot of stereotypical artists, they balk at being directed like, you know, they've got all the answers and don't mess with my art. I've never been like that, maybe because I didn't go to art school. But the opposite side of that is it's paralyzing to not have any direction at all. When the world is your oyster, to continue the seafaring theme, it's almost too much freedom and you just like, I don't even know what to do or where to go. 

So I feel like positioning gives you that guideline that it's almost like I'm a dog owner. So people that have invisible fences, you know, you need that to contain them. They still have freedom to run around and play in there, but you're reined in enough to know what you need to do and to do it well. You can still be creative, but you can still be on topic because if you don't have the strategy right, we're wasting everybody's time here. Like, what are we even doing? So I feel like positioning just gives you that little bit of leeway that you need, but also the guidance that you need.

Mark Vandegrift
Well, we're going to move on to a different brand, not one you wrote about Cheryl, but we should be able to have fun with this one too. And that one is called GymShark. So that's not J-I-M that's G-Y-M as in a place that I never go to. It's called GymShark. Lorraine, you brought this brand to the table as an example of doing positioning right. What caught your attention about the brand?

Lorraine Kessler
Well, first of all, the idea of GymShark, which I had not heard of, came to us from Doug Burton, who's a very good friend of the agency, a marketing consultant, and ever vigilant in his study of positioning and brands that are doing it right. And so he sent several links about this GymShark, and GymShark is a unicorn brand. And for those listeners who don't know what a unicorn brand is, it's a brand that reaches $1 billion in sales in 10 years or less. 

So, I have never heard of this brand. I don't know if you've heard of this brand. I don't know if our listeners have, but apparently, it's a UK brand and they did reach unicorn status. And what they do is they make fitness apparel and accessories. And they really sell very well online, this particular line of product. They're a manufacturer as well as an online seller. So, they're making the product and they're selling it. 

Now, the interesting way, the founder of this company and now CEO is a guy named Ben Francis, two first names, who started the company and now it's worth $1.5 billion and he started the company at 19 while making five pounds an hour at a pizza hut in England, which is $6.31. So what were you doing at age 19, Mark and Cheryl? Slackers. What were you doing, Cheryl?

Mark Vandegrift
I was in school.

Cheryl Henderson
I was in college for elementary education, probably making valentines in my art class.

Lorraine Kessler
Yeah, yeah. I was in college learning the art of drinking and working at the same time, keeping the balance, as Cheryl says, and no disasters. But yeah, I mean, 19 to have this. So the brand focus of this particular GymShark brand of apparel and fitness accessories act of the position is athletic wear for men and women is both fashionable, which is table stakes in anything fitness. ‘Cause if you're going to go to a gym, like that's why I don't go to a gym. ‘Cause you got to worry about what you're wearing. Right. And I rather just go down my steps, but you have to wear it. You have to, you have to look fashionable, but it's the blend of fashion and high performance. So, their difference, the real differential I think is the high performance. So, let's just put it together. It's fashionable high-performance gym wear. 

So GymShark is a perfect name because it informs the audience, just like, you know, pirate ship. It informs the audience in terms of someone who's really serious about working out and appreciates the gym and goes there and wants to be seen, I think, as well as work out. And then the benefits of high-performance, Mark, we, right, we love the idea of a high-performance brand.

High performance can apply to cars, a high performance car, high performance boat like Mastercraft, a high performance turf like our client, high performance fabric, right? And the beauty of saying something's high performance relative to its category is the customer immediately knows the benefits that means to them, right? So, for anybody who's working out, it might be that it sheds water better or sweat better, right? It's comfortable to wear. It may even help my posture. It might help me work out longer. It might help me get better form as I'm doing things. So, there is a connection, believe it or not, to that. So, I think the name is great. High performance is great because the other point of high performance is it's an immediate credential, right? 

It signals higher value and it's a credential for a higher price. And ultimately, one of the main goals of branding is not just to sell more, it's to be able to charge more for what you do. Otherwise, don't sell, just put stuff on the aisle, end caps and hope it sells. So that's, I think that's really great. Now, this is a really crowded category and we can talk about that in just a minute, but do you guys have any brands that you know of that really camp out on this high performance kind of position.

Cheryl Henderson
The category of things that I am willing to pay a higher price for performance is hair products. This curly mane of mine is hard to tame, so I'm not going to go to the drugstore for that. I'm going to fork out the extra cash because it needs all the help it can get.

Mark Vandegrift
And I go there and building, yeah, I go there and building products. So, when I flip a house or do a renovation or something like that, whether it's the tools I'm using or the products I'm using, I just know that anything that is high performance or a grade above. So, like Provia Lorraine, you remember when we gave them, they were professional grade, which is kind of a statement on performance. Yeah, it's above.

It's above what we call contractor grade, which we all know is cheap and last not very long. And so I prefer if I'm going to work on something and install something that I don't have to think about it again for maybe a lifetime. That would be my preference. So high performance.

Lorraine Kessler
Yeah, high performance and quality link, right? And the benefits can be different depending on the product and the category, what you're doing. But that's, you're buying quality products, Cheryl, because you know they're going to work. There's a reliability factor and all that. 

It's a great way to position, I think. And it's also, while it's fairly new, and this was a startup category, and they went from insurgent to a leader, how did they do that? I'll talk a little bit about what I saw that they did. 

Well, I guess the best thing is to talk about what Ben Francis, the CEO said. He said, in addition to the naming and the position, which links so beautifully together, which clearly they had a strategic idea and they saw a hole in the market. Not a lot of people doing this.

But how they execute it is really key because you can have the best strategy in the world and if you don't execute properly, we just talked about Pepsi. It's not how much you spend, it's where you're spending and how you're spending, what you're saying when you spend. So, if you have the right message but you're not executing properly, so what, right? And vice versa, if you have a great execution but you're not saying anything differentiated, that's weaker too. 

So Ben Francis said this, “we're at a point where we're like,” and he's trying to figure out why they're successful. “Is it our user generated content? Is it our product? Is it our social growth? Is it our ecommerce site? There's no silver bullet.” And I hope every person listening to this who's a client hears that there is no silver bullet.

It's about bringing all of those things together. It's about driving traffic from all those different places, whether that be through influencer marketing on Facebook or Instagram into the website, whether that be using your owned media to drive, owned meaning own, we own the media, we created it, to drive engagement on a social media strategy to build the brand and grow followers. Everything matters. Everything needs to work together. There is no silver bullet. 

And so in sum, they had the right strategy with right execution and just persistent net execution over time. And you need both. And I would call this the rule of bothism. I do think there's a challenge for GymShark to hold this position. I just saw last week on the Today Show, they did a whole expose with a fitness person evaluating different gym or workout apparel from a performance standpoint, like how did it improve endurance? How did it improve posture, calories burned, wicking, comfort? And GymShark was not one of the brands. And it's just so ironic that I saw this right after I got this email from our friend Doug. So that's a brand alert, right? They should have been on that show and they weren't. So that tells me there are competitors and nothing lasts forever. So, they got here, how do they stay here? What would you recommend Cheryl and Mark?

Cheryl Henderson
Well, I would say, like you said, there are lots of athleisure and sportswear products on the market. You can go into any store and find their own house brand of it. It's probably a lot cheaper. But GymShark has that elevation, that aspirational aspect to it that, if I want to be cool, I need to wear that. So they just need to keep that top of mind familiarity and awareness and they need to be the first one somebody thinks of, kind of like how you think of Starbucks when you think of coffee. It just needs to be that automatic. So they just need to keep that and associate that name with that high performance sportswear. And that's what I need to have if I want to be cool and add that broad brand marketing to their social and digital closet.

Mark Vandegrift
Yeah, I agree with that. Absolutely. And, you know, we were just talking yesterday. I was training some of our interns and our new associates on positioning. And it was funny because the topic of mugs came up, you know, coolers. And I said, as an example, we were going, yes, exactly. And we came on the topic or the way to position of hotness.

And I said, so for example, Stanley. And they said, well, Stanley's not hot anymore. Now it's Owala. Like I haven't even heard of that name yet. And yeah.

Lorraine Kessler
Yeah, I have. They're Hawaiian, right? Are they Hawaiian? And they make flip-flops? Okay.

Mark Vandegrift
I haven't even had time to look it up.

Mark Vandegrift
But that would be my warning to Gymshark, right? Because how easy is it if you can change your drinkware, you're going to change what you wear to the gym. So I think name awareness connected to the positioning ideas is pretty critical. They have to stay away from just being hot. And I understand they don't have patents or anything like that, but you could lose market share overnight just like that.

And it wouldn't be hard for somebody else with some sense of style and an understanding of the market and the need for that high performance to just come in and scoop in just because they're the next thing. Right? We have this society right now that just wants to switch things out right and left and they'll do it at the drop of a hat, especially if it saves them two dollars and thirty three cents.

Cheryl Henderson
I did look at their social media and they have, I don't know, was it like seven million followers? And their posts get hundreds of thousands of likes. So, they've got it going on. And like you said, they just need to worry about keeping it. But it seems like they've built that loyal following and they just need to hang on to them.

Lorraine Kessler
Yeah, I would advertise 7 million people can't be wrong, right? GymShark, the best, you know, high-performance athletic wear or something like that. I mean, that's a credential. And they really need to capitalize on that. And PR can help with that, with other branding techniques, just pure advertising, right? And keep that cash. Yeah.

Mark Vandegrift
Well, and they've picked an audience, right? Why did none of us hear about it? Because we don't go to the gym. But they picked gym rats and they went after the gym people. And if you work out at a gym, you probably know them really well. I bet, Cheryl, I bet Justin probably has heard of them. Justin's our resident bodybuilder and we have some other guys go to the gym, but Justin's number one with that.

And it would be interesting to even ask them, Justin, have you heard of these guys and what do you think? Because it's so focused.

Lorraine Kessler
Well, that's a good challenge for those who are listening and viewing. If you know someone who's an avid gym goer and really like Uber, do they know this brand? But just like Apple, what you do is you aim at your core, but you realize other people are listening. So other people are listening and those people could be me who buys this kind of apparel for my husband who goes to the gym all the time. And I haven't heard of it. 

So, you know, make sure that's where branding comes in because branding is broadcast. And they've been narrow casting. So it's now time, I think, and that's what Cheryl was saying is to broadcast. And I think your point, Mark, is make sure the name and the position are hooked together. So if you say the position, you say the name, say the name, people can say the position.

Mark Vandegrift
Yep, absolutely. Well, good. Cheryl, thank you for joining us today. We appreciate it.

Cheryl Henderson
Thanks for having me.

Mark Vandegrift
And Lorraine, of course, always thank you for co-hosting with me here. And we appreciate all those that have joined us today. And if you haven't liked, sharrrrrd, subscribed. Did I do that right, Cheryl? It's hard to take shard and make it shard.

Lorraine Kessler
Arrrr! Arrrr!

Mark Vandegrift
So again, if you haven't liked, shared, subscribed or told your friends about the Brain Shorthand Podcast, we really appreciate if you would. And until next time, have an amazing day.