DIP 039: Power plays

PLUS: International group shipping, subverting big data, and a noodle rave

May 18, 2023

👋 Hi. I’ve been going deep on the Overthink podcast, which talks about contemporary culture through the lens of philosophy. Their episode on the unconscious, and particularly the belief that ideas require incubation periods, felt especially validating. As always, reply with questions, comments, or thoughts about anything you read here.

This issue features 13 brands. Fifty-four percent are white-led, 15 percent are Black-led, and 23 percent are led by non-Black people of color. You can find the complete Chips + Dips inclusion index here.

The Chips 📚

Baggu’s picnic capsule is brilliant — the grass blanket?!
To help customers offset international shipping costs, Both& is facilitating group orders for people in the same region.
Coach’s effort to appeal to GenZ, Coachtopia, is fascinating to me.
As someone who loves anything that subverts typical use cases for digital tools, this syllabus on screwing with big data is delightful.
BEM is a bookstore centering food and Black identity.
Speaking of food and identity, I’ve really enjoyed listening to The Stephen Satterfield Show, from the founder of Whetstone.
Suá Superette is a Sichuan grocer opening in LA from Fly By Jing’s Jing Gao and Stephanie Liu Hjelmeseth.
Run As You Are seeks to reshape running culture through tech.
Omsom hosted a rave to launch its noodle collection.
Intrinsic is building a house of women’s health brands through acquisitions.
Olive oil company Graza has been partnering with buzzy New York City restaurants like Pasquale Jones, Carbone, and Caleta, to host exclusive dinners and produce special items.
- This feels not dissimilar to Caviar’s activation strategies circa 2015–2016.

The Dip 💡

I’ve seen “brand” used to describe an entire company, a visual identity, a reputation… The reality is that everything can be a brand because everything has some sort of experience (or potential for experience) associated with it.

But when brand feels like it can be everything, what is it, really? What matters most?

A stake in the ground

Earlier this week, Forerunner Ventures launched the Brand Power Score, described as “a new standard for measuring brand impact.” The Brand Power Score is determined by the FRIEND Framework, which captures consumer perceptions of a brand across six categories: Feelings, Reliability, Identity, Experience, North Star, and Differentiation.

Forerunner is one of the most well-known VC firms in the consumer product space, having been early investors in Away, Glossier, and Hims. The companies Forerunner invests in tend to invest heavily in brand marketing. The Brand Power Score makes sense given Forerunner’s track record. It’s also a smart marketing move, giving companies outside of the Forerunner portfolio an opportunity to engage with the firm and reaffirming Forerunner’s position as a thought leader.

But the Brand Power Score doesn’t just enhance Forerunner’s reputation. It also puts a stake in the ground. Through the six criteria outlined in the FRIEND Framework, Forerunner is not only outlining what it values as a firm but also declaring what a brand should value and measure itself against.

What gets measured gets managed

Companies tend to focus on improving metrics or KPIs that correlate to revenue growth, like conversion rate and acquisition cost. But those metrics don’t tell you how a company is really doing — they’re vanity metrics, in a sense. They can reveal the efficacy of marketing strategies, but they don’t measure value or impact or what people actually think of a particular company or product — the intangibles that contribute to a company’s staying power.

The Brand Power Score offers a means of measuring hard-to-quantify qualities like affinity and perception. The criteria around Reliability, Experience, Values, and Differentiation aren’t surprising to me — a brand is made manifest through its products and transactional experience. What does stand out to me, and where I see Forerunner pushing its own values, is in the categories of Feelings (“[brand] is inspiring”) and Identity (“[brand] has an engaged community”).

Forerunner shares that while all six criteria are essential to brand success, “Reliability appears to be table-stakes while Feelings often drives outlier success.” But does a company need to be inspiring? There are certainly product categories and industries that lend themselves more toward inspiration than others, but is a fragrance company inspiring? Are my DTC socks inspiring? If a founder’s story is deemed to be inspiring, is their company inspiring by default?

Who you attract reflects who you are

I latched onto the category of Identity when first reading through the Brand Power Score. By “Identity,” Forerunner means that “the brand has a distinct visual identity, voice, and overall experience, and its collective identity draws a clear community of supporters toward it.” By their definition, a strong brand identity begets community.

I’ve written about community previously (see DIP 003 and DIP 034) and the different ways that companies build and define it. Modern brands love community. For some, it’s a pool of superusers whose feedback informs product decisions. For many, however, community is just anyone who will engage with the brand on social media channels and share a referral code. True community — fostering connection between customers and facilitating a culture of care — is exceptionally rare in the brand space.

I do believe that the audience a company attracts is a reflection of its brand, but much of that comes down to products and marketing strategies. I’m not sure I see the link between identity and community. In fact, to suggest as much strikes me as reductive. It’s possible that community is meant to suggest loyalty or enthusiasm. Even still, I believe experience drives loyalty more than a company’s identity.

Forerunner’s Brand Power Score is brilliant for several reasons, but I find it most interesting as a reflection of the state of contemporary marketing. And, of course, as a reflection of Forerunner’s own brand.

Still hungry?

This essay on vanity metrics landed in my inbox this week and feels very relevant.

Real Dip 📸

Refried beans.

Register for the Rancho Gordo Bean Club, wait two years to be notified that you’re off the waitlist, then receive two shipments in rapid succession and amass a stockpile of 12 pounds of dried beans.

Soak pinto beans for ~4 hours. Heat some olive oil in a Dutch oven. Add a sliced onion and wait for it to soften. Add two sprigs of thyme, a bay leaf, and a dried chili. Drain the soaked beans and dump them in the pot, adding enough water to cover the beans by a couple of inches. Add a 4-inch piece of dried kombu (this is the most important step).

Crank the heat to high, cover the pot, and wait for it to start boiling. Once the water is boiling, set a timer for 10 minutes. After 10 minutes, shift the lid so the pot is partially covered and turn down the heat so you have a consistent simmer. Add salt after about 30 minutes.

Once the beans are cooked through, cut the heat to let them cool off. Fish out the thyme stems, bay leaf, chili, and kombu.

In a second pot, heat some olive oil and add a thinly sliced white onion. Let the onion soften for about 10 minutes, then add salt, maybe some paprika, the cooked beans, and a couple ladles of bean broth. Lower the heat, mix well, and crush the beans with a potato masher. You might want to add more salt.

Plays well with fried eggs, leftover rice, and ramps.

Thanks for snacking,

— Emily 💘

Chips + Dips