Millennials, Cultural Branding & Individualism: A Holistic View of Dollar Shave Club and Allbird’s Grand Slams

Marketing changes over generations - it has to. It has to because people change, both at the generational level and the individual level.

Different generations represent different ideologies imbued with idealistic intent, fueling different purposes, amalgamated by the messy mixture of pop culture, justice, current affairs, social infrastructure (think the transition from AOL Instant Messenger to WhatsApp and WeChat) and, dare I say, the parenting of the previous generation.

At the people level the change is stark. Attention spans are shorter, short term gratification seems to be king, now is no longer soon enough. People want more, but don’t want to give as much for it. Young folks, dare I say, feel entitled to convenience. They’re traveling more, spending more, and are more curious. Debt is running wild as university tuition has increased 260% between 1980 - 2014 (while all consumer items have seen a 120% increase). Fewer home owners, fewer marriages. Stark only strikes the surface of the difference.

Societally, natural disasters are increasing in frequency and intensity, the climate is changing, mass shootings occur at disastrous frequency, divides are growing strong and intent to change America grows along with it.

While it’s impossible to analyze all of this, growing marketing trends can be cross referenced with identifiable differences among people to make conclusions, and develop strategies. This blog post intends to do just that, using Dollar Shave Club and Allbirds as examples.

My hope is for firms to be able to tap further into the specific needs of the often hard to understand Millennial generation.

Millennials

One thing is certain. Millennials feel empowered.

They feel like they are the arbiter of their own fate. They own their own lives, they own their own identity. And millennials like seeing other millennials do the same thing. Individualism is the fire, social interaction is the oil: the metaphoric wildfire is born.

While this is all fine and dandy, these changes in people also reflect a change in need. I observe that the change in people has been far more stark than the accompanying change in firms offerings. Firms have to react, while people spur the change - so this makes sense.

Of course many firms have changed, and new ones have come into existence. Airbnb, and the shared economy in general, is an example that is a direct result of the millennial mindset (and technology of course). There are many examples.

Yet, there are also products that are being served the same way they always have. This doesn’t mean, though, that people aren’t going to buy them. But. And it’s a big but. It leaves an elusive, yet huge gap in the market.

Enter Dollar Shave Club & Allbirds.

Dollar Shave Club

Razors. They take hair off of your body with finely engineered blades. They’ve been marginally the same for almost a century (with some incremental changes in design and quality). How can you change that?

I guarantee you Gillette never anticipated that something like Dollar Shave Club would catch such fire. And while they basically own the Home Shaving market, Dollar Shave Club’s emergence represents how tapping into Millennials needs - their need for convenience (cause they’re busy and stuff) - and their psyche - basking in a sea of individuality - is part of the recipe in a company going viral.

Yes. A company can go viral.

Here’s How.

Dollar Shave Club Goes Viral

I assume most people reading my marketing blog have seen this ad. In essence, Dollar Shave Club individualized their brand identity. They broke the norms. They went against the grain. They took a risk.

Breaking the norms is the foundation of individuality. It’s what individualism is. In the individualist pursuit, individuals hope that this individual identity created fits into the social fabric. Dollar Shave Club did just that.

First I must say that an identity isn’t necessarily associated with a person. We personify all things to various extents. It’s for this reason that a business can brand. It’s why branding exists. Sure people are the business. It’s appropriate calling a business a group of people working towards a unified goal by offering something to people that those people can exchange for money. And yes, corporations are seen as people in the US.

But that’s not the essence behind brand. People reacting to the brand aren’t reacting to the people per say, but the ‘idea’ they nurture that they then associate with a firm. This is what a Brand is.

Branding is all about feelings. We feel brands. We personify the actions a company takes, and that personification is a brand. Up until social media, the best way to do this was via advertisements in magazines, newspapers and television.

But then social media came along, allowing brands to reach a whole new depth of brand identity, allowing them to interact side-by-side with literally individual users like you and me. That’s personification. Marketing is based on it.

In that ad released by Dollar Shave Club, they birthed their brand. They were literally born the day that ad went live. It can be considered their birthday.

And who were they born as?

Personified, they were born as a sarcastic and relatable late 20s ‘bro’ who you’d probably like to knock back a cold one watching the NFL (notice my male interpretation of it, becuase I am male). That’s how Dollar Shave Club’s personified brand identity feels to me. And everyone has their own interpretation of it - much of this happens subconsciously. Their instant relatability for millennials made people trust them.

Then, in addition to this trust, the ad was funny. This means Social Currency.

Social Currency is basically the value one receives when something worth sharing is shared, due to how interpersonally, your sharing this specific piece of content raises your credibility and makes ‘the pack’ like you and accept you. You share something funny, people associate you with someone who knows funny things. (C’mon we all know that one person on Facebook who posts the funniest memes - that person has a high level of social currency)

Everyone loves a fun person to do relatable things with that makes you laugh.

From the firm’s point of view, it was a huge risk. What if they don’t think it’s funny? What if people ‘don’t get it’? What if I offend someone? Should we really put our small marketing budget into this?

But it paid off. It paid off in a $1 billion acquisition. By Unilever. Going from a low budget video on youtube to a $1 billion acquisition…That’s called winning.

But don’t get me wrong. There is no recipe. Yes, companies can go viral, if they relate to millennials on a human level. In addition if a firm addresses a subset of the population, in this case generationally (which means a lot of people), and connects to their needs and their psyche, well then suddenly Gillette and Schick are having to play catch up.

But what about from the firms perspective. What’s all this like?

The Firms Perspective

Intense deliberation, planning, collaboration, coordination of efforts at a variety of fronts, and a keen sense of people and their needs are required to develop a successful branding campaign.

Months of work, anticipation, doubt, confidence, trust, teamwork, brainstorming, video production, working with ad agencies are put into these. Imagine if they fail? That’s gonna hurt the checkbook. Might even burn the whole dang thing.

It’s a lot of work to create a brand. It’s not easy. It involves an unquantifiable risk.

I recently applied to a position at Allbirds, the shoe company claiming they have “The World’s Most Comfortable Shoes”. While I haven’t tried them, basically anyone who has, says they live up to the hype.

If you’re a social media user, you’ve probably seen their advertisements. Maybe even, all over the freaking place. If you’re into advertising or marketing, maybe you've seen this Meet Your Shoes ad, or this one.

Pretty great commercials. Then I discovered their marketing department… well… let’s just say it’s really quite small [Don’t know the exact number]. Unbelievably small for the digital and branding footprint they’ve left across the social media landscape.

How did they do it? By tapping into Millennial’s needs and their generational differences.

Allbirds Taps into a Generation

Millennials care about the environment. And their holding companies responsible. All companies now, for the most part, try to do their best to be sustainable and be conscious of the environment. Any large company has sustainability campaigns (to various degrees), Corporate Social Responsibility efforts, and so forth.

This is all fine and good, but it’s reactionary.

Allbirds value proposition is proactive. They aren’t reacting to a generational cause, they’re shoes literally address the issue with intent. Allbirds’ flagship shoes are made out of wool. They make other shoes out of trees. Both are sustainably sourced through working with third-party non-profit organizations.

The value proposition their product offers is that shoes can be both comfortable and sustainably made. And how do you know their serious?

They’re offering some of their technologies for making insoles to other companies - it’s open source. They acknowledge that if they want to make change that matters, it needs to be industry wide, and not hoarded by a company. That’s the difference between trying to be something [“Hey look, we’re sustainable, look what we do” —> “Doesn’t share it with the world thereby not inciting change”], versus walking the walk [“We made something that can actually push sustainability, and we’re going to spread the love”].

This is why people trust them. Silicon Valley has taken notice, as the New York Times observed. Google co-founder Larry page, and Twitter CEO Dick Costolo were both seen wearing the shoes.

Allbirds has successfully become part of a movement. They're the example, and are not playing sustainability-catch-up like many organizations are (to no fault of their own). It’s hard to just adjust being sustainable, and it’s good that companies are doing it, but new companies have a huge opportunity in providing sustainably sourced products.

For one, it speaks to millennial’s social cause.

For another, it’s literally good for the environment.

To think that such a great combination can also make you money. Out of no where exists a giant opening in many markets: re-thinking how to source materials and create goods, and offer them.

Allbirds has successfully tapped into a generation via the sustainability cause. Furthermore they’re making actual change in a $246 billion global industry. But if you add in their powerful social media presence, and their knack for making relatable social media posts that people actually want to share, and you have another company tapping into both the psyche and needs of millennials.

Firms, I’m Looking at You

The more firms are able to tap into the specific needs of the generation, the more edge firms will have over their competitors.

It’s hard to do. While it is something that you can learn, more than that it requires intuition, keeping up with the trends, knowing some actual millennials, and just knowing people.

Knowing people. Lame right? Like that’s some end all solution to everything. To the fortune of some and to the misfortune of others, this is absolutely true. But marketing is without a doubt geared for the so-called ‘people person’.

Anyways, spend some time studying the people you intend to target. Performing focus groups, interviewing and direct interaction are good (and do require an innate skill), but I believe literally observing people, or people watching, can tell you things no focus group will ever tell you. The valuable insights are generally hidden.

Both Allbirds and Dollar Shave Club did this. There are still many gaps in markets. Using a developed understanding of generational differences, those gaps may just show themselves.