Sharm Tank Vol. 18

Author

Nik Sharma
March 22, 2024

Happy Friday,

So WTF is happening in the UK right now? I’m not sure if we’re all being gaslit or if something else is going down, but this whole thing with Kate Middleton is turning me into a conspiracy theorist.

Yesterday the Palace claimed that she was, “working from home on a special project.” Sure, why not.

Maybe I’ll get our Head of Internal Brands, Bailee, to do a bonus newsletter on this whole debacle since she’s been our go-to source in office for everything with the royal family.

But anyways, yeah, back to marketing. I noticed that while you guys enjoyed last week’s newsletter on incrementality, engagement wasn’t as strong as our more brand-focused emails.

Totally understandable TBH. I’m still trying to figure out what kind of content you guys want to see so I’m going to leave a poll at the end of this email where you can let me know what you want to see (because that's what we do as marketers).

That said, for this week, let’s jump back to the brand side of things and do a deep dive into one of my favorite retailers and their killer social strategy.

We’re Hiring!

  • Director of Paid Media — you will oversee our team of media buyers, providing strategic input around campaigns, how to achieve client results more efficiently, and working with our internal creative and web UX/UI team. You must have good experience to apply for this role.

  • Office Assistant - We are looking for a part-time office assistant to help us with administrative tasks for ~5 hours each week, coming in on Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday. We’ll need your help with organizing the office and assisting our team.

The Main Course

It’s no secret that, in the last few years, Instagram adjusted its algorithm to heavily favor sharable content.

This means that sharing a post with your friend will have more weight than a like or comment. It’s also the exact reason why every brand and retailer has come to embrace one strategy, memes.

Memes communicate an idea in the simplest format, using a basic static image and a caption. Almost sounds like an ad, right?

In essence, memes and ads are a match made in heaven. Just look at the Starter Pack trend of the last few years that pokes fun at different consumer stereotypes using a sort of mood board.

And no brand or retailer has executed this strategy better than the multi-brand luxury retailer, SSENSE.

What SSENSE has done is taken its minimalistic branding and applied it to a marriage of mood boards and memes.

For example, a recent social post plays on the “realize, real eyes, real lies” meme to promote different styles of sunglasses.

Another post takes the ”spectrum of good and evil” meme and reimagines it using different styles of footwear that speak to SSENSE’s diverse customer base.

The content is inherently sharable due in part to its visual style, but also because SSENSE targets different sub cultures and speaks directly to them in a “if you know, you know” sort of way.

It’s not just about building brand awareness, it’s about building a well-defined community that’s equally as aspirational as it is authentic.

In a recent campaign promoting its kids’ wear, SSENSE put on a fake spelling bee where children would spell out designers and ask a question about them while wearing the brand. The question would be something that defines the brand’s identity like, “I’m going to Berlin next month so I bought a bunch of Rick Owens.”

Not only is this incredibly endearing, but it also shows how SSENSE truly understands their customer, the person behind the clothes.

Considering the vast array of styles sold on the site and the different types of customers SSENSE caters, this demonstration of understanding is imperative to unlocking trust (a size fits all solution would actually backfire and seem disingenuous).

As of late, they’ve rolled out a new Out-of-Home (OOH) campaign using entrancing billboards to make bold statements in major cities.

But these campaigns are a departure from traditional product oriented campaigns. Billboards emphasize text over visuals, featuring memes and comments that are sourced directly from the brand’s social media.

Some billboards cleverly poke fun at the challenge of correctly saying "SSENSE" (pronounced as "essence"), injecting a touch of humor into the offline experience.

This kind of humor diffuses the supposed stuffiness associated with a high-end retailer like SSENSE and speaks directly to the Gen Z and Millennial consumers that frequent SSENSE.

"We want to give our audience the pleasant surprise of seeing something they know online in a highly offline setting," says Thom Bettridge, Head of Creative & Content.

These billboards sport a minimalistic design akin to SSENSE’s brand and feature copy referencing popular staples and adding more real-world context to them (ie. “Where your Pilates teacher gets her Tabis”)

Considering that the SSENSE brand primarily lives online, investing in a OOH campaign helps consumers contextualize how SSENSE can fit into their daily lives, outside of the Internet. 

Not to mention, the minimal, text-heavy design is a departure from the boisterous billboards we see today, further differentiating the campaign.

SSENSE’s recent campaigns are a master class in social marketing. They somehow leverage exclusivity, community, and familiarity in one foul swoop, and every brand should take note.

SSENSE’s content strategy works because it is built on years of heritage, but also because it takes risks.

They’ve built a well-defined brand and are now extending the messaging behind the brand while maintaining its integrity.

Now, let’s get into some fun stuff…

What We’re Reading This Week

Campaign of the Week

Honestly, the main course this week felt like one giant “campaign of the week.” But I’m not going to scam you guys out of the top-tier content you came here for. I’m a man of the people and I deliver.

That’s all to say that our favorite campaign this week came from CoorDown, an organization that raises awareness of the potential of people with Down syndrome.

The campaign featured influencer Madison Tevlin calling for an end to Down syndrome prejudice. Throughout the ad, Tevlin is shown in a variety of situations where she is undermined simply because of her disability. In every situation, Tevlin responds, “Assume that I can.”

It’s a simple but powerful campaign that reminds us about the constant prejudices people with Down syndrome face and the myopic view that perpetuates a cycle of bias and limitation.

Vendor of the Week

We use a lot of tools, platforms, and integrations over at Sharma Brands, but one of our favorites is easily Postscript. Postscript is the only SMS revenue platform for Shopify merchants designed to make SMS your number one revenue channel.

But more importantly, it provides one channel for every step of the customer journey. You can use Postscript to set up beautiful, on-brand phone number captures, personalize messaging, create automated journeys, and deliver top notch experiences for your most loyal customers.

Postscript also enables two-way messaging to stand out with customers through highly segmented campaigns thanks to SKU-level segmentation, 65+ event triggers, and 40 user filters.

The result? Lower program costs and a median ROI of 31X across all 10,000+ Postscript brands.

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