💸 The Storytelling Playbook Brands Are Using to Scale to 8 Figures a Year

Hello!!

Thanks for joining me again as we explore the weird world of building fun, highly profitable brands.

If you missed our last newsletter, we went deep, real deep.. on how 1 wallet company grew to 200 million per year using unique design and luxury marketing tactics. Definitely one you’ll want to revisit - check it out here.

It’s clear many of you want to hear more about the brand building and story telling skills needed to build a profitable business. This week we’re diving in head first into the Storytelling Playbook we’ve seen many 8 figure brands use to profitably scale up and create loyal customers.

And we’re highlighting 1 company doing it better than anyone else.. a chocolate bar startup none the less. This ones about to get messy!

If you’re new here, this is the Up Next newsletter where we bring you the latest data, trends and storytelling to help you launch your own products that actually make money.

My name’s Ken, my ecom company has now done north of $45 million in sales and my team does research for some of the biggest brands on the planet.. then we take what we’ve learned and share it here with you!

First, shoutout to all of you who respond to our emails, send a quick reply and show love. It’s a lot of work putting these together and I can’t thank you enough for letting us know how it’s helped you.

Before we jump into things, we’d love to get a little more feedback on the industries you’re looking to build in.

Vote below and let us know what industries you’d like to launch a brand/product in..

Alright, on to the good stuff. Today we’ll be looking at…

• The unique storytelling playbook we’ve watched dozens of companies use to grow their business

• A Chocolate bar company crossing $25 million a year in sales using this exact playbook

• Some ideas on how to use this playbook to launch your own physical products brand, including what we did at our company to get product sales off the ground and start cashflowing before shipping product 👇

The Chocolate Bar Startup Using Content Marketing to Surpass $25 Million a Year

Mid Day Squares is a Chocolate Bar Startup based out of Montreal, Quebec. They started out as a small team of 3 founders, making bars out of their condo.. and have grown to what’s become a full manufacturing facility with staff and machinery to pump out thousands of bars a day.

But the operations and ability to make bars only tells one part of the story. How were they able to build demand to thousands of bars sold per day, especially through old school, retail grocery and big box stores?

Taking on the oligarchs of the chocolate bar industry is no joke. A few big players like Nestle tend to dominate the space without leaving much room for anyone else to jump in.

Let’s dig deeper into their marketing strategy that’s grown Mid Day Square’s brand searches by 200% over the past few years 👇

As we researched different companies and their content strategies, we came across the same playbook over and over. Companies using a Storytelling approach and weaving their product into the story. Get users emotionally hooked and drawn in, and showcase the product in the story.

The Content strategy break down:

1. The Founders story: How the brand and product came to be, including all of the peaks and valleys of getting a product off the ground. MDS nails this and we’ll jump into their viral approach below.
   

2. Showcasing the Product: This comes down to cinematically telling a story around a specific product and showcasing that product as the protagonist of the story. MDS really knocked it out of the park using this approach with one of their new flavor releases.
   

3. Behind the Scenes and Day(s) in the Life Content: This one is self explanatory but again, follows the cinematic up’s and down’s of operating a company in a “day/week in the life” format. The issues a business faces and using this format to market the product. MDS crushed with this one as well as they made a push to get into one of the biggest retail stores in Canada & the United States.

While MDS is completely crushing on the retail front, the product itself requires refrigeration and cold storage making a direct to consumer and ecommerce approach much more difficult.

We noticed their direct to consumer sales are not as strong (which is to be expected as shipping can be complex) and website traffic is on the lower end for a company doing $25 million per year. This is simply due to the fact that the product requires refrigeration otherwise it melts.

Also, if we’re being honest, when’s the last time you bought a chocolate snack through facebook ads?

While the story telling content will certainly drive traffic to both amazon & shopify, it’s doing most of the heavy lifting to continue their retail expansion.

1. The Founders Story - Why the Brand Started and How It Came to Be

Mid Day Squares had an instagram post go extremely viral with over 5 million views, all connected to their founders story and the birth of the brand.

The story dives into how Mid Day Square’s was started and their mission to take on Big Chocolate (seriously, it’s like a mafia type industry). They started out to reduce sugar and create a delicious bar that rivals that of Nestle, Hersheys and other big brands. If you’ve never tried the bar, I think they nailed it.

Most importantly, they refuse to give in to a quick acquisition only to get bought out and sell a product with poor quality ingredients. Instead they’ve made their goal of $100,000,000 per year very public, which has their customers and audience rallying behind them to help get them there.

The story shows the up’s and down’s of entrepreneur life including lawsuits and manufacturing issues along with the high’s of launching into Whole Foods and Target.

And they end it with a bang - “follow us to see us become the biggest chocolate company in the world, or crash and burn in a blaze of glory.”

How could you not get behind that?

Watch the viral vid below.. it’s raw, authentic and perfectly embodies the founder spirit.

2. Cinematically Launching a Product - The Ultimate Product Placement, Build a Story Around Your Product Launch & Relaunches

MDS has done a brilliant job of cinematically telling a story and weaving their product into that story.

In this case the story fixes on bringing a new product (and reworking the flavor) to market and how to perfect the perfect fudge taste without costs and sugar getting out of control.

On a personal note, I truly never knew what went into building a bar like this. I’ve tried Mid Day Squares before, they taste amazing but the video showcases over 140 flavor trials before dialing in on the perfect one. The flavor has to be perfect in a consumable product like this, or customers simply won’t come back.

Like most of the brands we’ve featured, they’re not just winning through marketing but a premier product as well.

You’ll notice they pack a ton of ups and downs into a minute long video. Flavor development is their version of “product design”, and bringing one product to market while perfecting the flavor took them over 1 year 🤯

It’s a simple format to introduce your product into an incredible story. And they use a marketing tactic called the open loop (often used in copywriting). Ending the story with “want to find out what happens next? We’ll explain in part 2…”

A classic soap opera move embedded into a quick instagram reel. Love it.

Click the image below to check out the cinematic product reveal 👇👇

3. Behind the Scenes Struggles of Growing a Business

Last but not least, we have the behind the scenes struggles of growing a business. While everything looks like sunshine and rainbows from the outside, what are the real issues taking place that customers would never know about?

This is incredibly powerful content because it makes the customer the protagonist and hero of the story, not the product. The viewer is the one who is in control.

What do I mean by this?

In another viral instagram post, Mid Day Squares shares a huge success story, hitting record sales numbers during a Costco Roadshow week.

The problem? This doesn’t mean their products are guaranteed to be on Costco shelves now. There’s many factors to consider before Costco will carry a brand.

So, MDS puts the customer and viewer behind the wheel. Instead of making themselves or their product the hero in this story, they let the customer know:

Everytime you make a MDS purchase and pickup a box, it’s a vote of confidence while Costco tests our products on their shelves. It lets buyers from Costco know “we want this product and we’ll buy them in bulk!”

It’s not overly pitchy or salesy and has the viewer and followers bought into the journey.

This is a page taken straight out of Building a Brand Story - with the goal of building a story but making customers and fans of the brand the hero in the story. I highly recommend the book, for branding, storytelling and how to raise prices.

Check out the Behind the Scenes Reel below 👇👇

Using Brand Story to Bring a Product to Life:

A real world example of how one of my companies used content and storytelling to launch a product with $40,000 in opening week sales:

We pre-sold a coffee container that uses sensors to auto detect when beans are giving off too much CO2 and remove any oxygen that slips inside the container.

The sensors would auto detect any gases and vacuum them out, keeping beans potent & fresh for months (I may be biased but I truly think it’s the best storage experience available for coffee and consumable goods).

So how did we launch it?

Similar to the MDS launch process video, we made the customer the hero of the story. 

The villain? Dried out beans, poor flavor and an awful tasting morning brew.

We started by letting customers know we were pre-launching a product and they’d receive a 20% discount if they pre-order.. But this simply isnt enough, the product has to stand out.

We introduced the standard competitors. Containers that use manual twisting and turning where the seal gives out daily, requiring as we called it “a part time job” to keep your beans fresh.

The other option is a standard bag or jar. While many don’t mind this, the oxygen does slowly erode the beans over time. Most coffee drinkers probably wouldn’t care, they’re drinking burnt beans from most chain coffee houses anyways..

But we’re going after a higher end customer. Someone who enjoys the ambience of storing, grinding and making an amazing coffee every morning. Someone who would use our product daily and most importantly, someone who would actually taste and notice the difference.

In this instance, we made them the hero of the story. Other containers that ruin flavor and potency and require a ton of work were essentially made out to be the villain.

This is where we introduce our product, again, not as the hero of the story, but the hero’s weapon of choice. Fight back against weak, unflavored morning brew.. A bit corny perhaps, but it worked!

Our sales page pre-sold over $40,000 worth of units and we were profitable before the manufacturer even finished the order. This allowed us to profit cash in the bank before shipping a product and allowed us to find product market fit without having to take a huge risk.

A couple of notes I wish I had known going into this:

1. We used a pre-sale page to story tell and explain why other containers weren’t the best option. Our page did include a product video to display how it worked, however, I would have dedicated a full video to the story.

Similar to what Mid Day Squares did, the story video doesn’t have to be overly produced (although I would advise the product video is).

In fact, I think if you can show raw footage of building the product out, shipping, packaging and all of the problems along the way it will make your brand more endearing and have customers cheering for you (especially if you have their money).

2. The product has to be A++. Our product was tested relentlessly before we went to market and included a dial to show Oxygen levels, humidity levels, temperature and more in a digital format.

This can go very wrong, very quickly, especially with a pre-ordered electronic product. Test the samples with at least 20 customers to uncover any flaws and make sure they have an understanding of how the product works without it being too difficult.

They’ll also give you valauble feedback on the instructions, if the same question comes up repeatedly you’ll want to include that as well as anything else they’re not understanding.

Often times you can tweak the directions and instructions without having to make costly product changes. Missing a point in the directions and guide can be the difference between 1 star and 5 stars - we learned this the hard way on initial product launches.

3. Finally, provide constant feedback and communciation throughout the pre-order process. Customers often don’t even mind if there’s an issue, hiccup or delay in the delivery. The issue becomes when they feel you have their money and cannot get a response.

Here’s a simple breakdown of what we did:

1. Had the manufacturer shoot actual product footage as it’s being made. Again, doesn’t have to be professional but lets them know it’s real.
   

2. Take a poll and have them interact with the packaging and style. You can poll them on different fonts, color, packaging creatives but ultimately getting them involved in the process gives them skin in the game and looking forward to seeing the final product.
   

3. Be precise in your communication around shipping and important dates. Let them know when manufacturing will be done, what day products plan to ship and how quickly they can expect them.
   
   If you miss a deadline it’s not a huge deal, just explain why and potentially be prepared to throw in something for free, we used branded hats when we missed one of our delivery dates.
   

It sounds like a lot of work.

Creating a brand and product story, manufacturing product, collecting payment and keep customers up to date.. But, it’s much less work then building something and hearing crickets with $0 sales coming in (yes, this has happened to me as well).

It’s also a ton of work putting a product out, and having to recall it because something doesn’t work as planned and refunds are flooding in.

Pre-selling is an amazing opportunity to keep profits and cash as well as find exactly what your customers want to buy. Build a story around the pre-launch sale and you’ve got a recipe for scaling a big biz.

That’s it! Hope this helps, make sure you take it and run with it!

Next week’s newsletter will be a masterclass on running profitable ads and how to build multi-channel distribution from the start (aka not be reliant on one single platform to drive sales). 

Talk Soon,

-Ken

P.S. I’m opening up 2 slots per month for 1 on 1 consultation calls for brand owners looking to launch new products and acquire customers.

We’ll send you a Google Docs sheet to fill out to get more information about your brand. From there, we’ll research your brand, market, and put together a plan for you; there are only a couple of spots, so if you’re interested, you can book it below..

—> Click Here to book a 1-to-1 call with me