My guest today is Brian Watkins, former VP of eCommerce for Bulletproof 360, the diet and supplements company. This is Part 2 of the interview where we explore how he grew the Bulletproof business.
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Transcript
Edward: This is part two of my interview with Brian Watkins. Today, we're going to dive into his experience as head of ecommerce at Bulletproof 360.
Brian, can you start by explaining what Bulletproof does?
Brian: Bulletproof is a health and wellness brand started by Dave Asprey about six or seven years ago now with the goal of radically improving your own life. What Bulletproof does is basically develop a line of supplements, protein powders, MCT oils, and just a variety of healthy intakes primarily driven around the ketogenic diet. But it resolves, at the end of the day, around the Bulletproof diet, which Dave Asprey created with the idea that by bringing in healthy food into your system you can have better energy, gut health, and mental performance.
Edward: What are the main products that Bulletproof sells that drive the majority of its revenue?
Brian: There are six main product lines. There's MCT oil, which is modified coconut oil, which is a high fat, low carb, zero carb enhancer for food and diet. There's a supplement business so vitamins and other items that you can take for mental clarity, energy, and immunity. There's protein bars, protein powders, ready-to-drink coffee, and packaged coffee. Those are the six main product lines that are offered to incorporate different parts of the Bulletproof diet throughout your day.
Edward: That's a pretty wide variety. It's practically a packaged-goods firm. Are some of those more important than others, or they’re all fairly evenly divided?
Brian: Back in the day, when it first started, Bulletproof is highly focused on the biohacker. There's a lot around what MCT oil was, and Bulletproof truly developed that category in time. But then also the supplement of a collagen protein regime and then also supplements created with the biohacker community was focused on and looked for.
As the company has grown, we've grown beyond what a biohacker is to help maximizers—people that just care or are naturally invested in their health. A lot of this runs back to my days of considered purchases within jewelry because if you're going to be consuming something that you want to know about, there's a little bit more research and a little bit more pause. It made sense as we shifted from biohacking to broader consumer goods, how could we bring education in the consumers along in that process?
Edward: Initially, your customers were primarily people who knew your founder, who read his books and were bought into his philosophy rather than his products?
Brian: Dave started by blogging (more than anything else) about his own personal journey with food, and energy, and health. He ended up using content in building this foundation and then starting to provide very simple rudimentary products they wanted just falling because they were asking for. Dave, can you get us this? Can you show us this? Can you provide this for us? That then developed into what we know today.
As you go down, it ships because what you had day one was a highly knowledgeable person making these purchases. Fast forward today, Bulletproofs at Whole Foods, and Walmart, and Target and it changes the overall value proposition of how you communicate the brand, the brand values, and also what it can do for you in terms of performance onto a single package as you're walking down the shelf.
Edward: How do you do that, beyond the fact that he has built a reputation for himself and has a blog and has a book? How do you broaden the awareness and consideration for Bulletproof beyond that core audience?
Brian: There's a couple of things. This is what brought me to the company is the product's work. One, people are making these purchases and then coming back like, wow, I can feel a difference. You start with just a very basic repeat-and-referral. You're developing these core pockets of influencers that are starting to communicate out. From that, you can build a foundation.
When I think about Bulletproof, especially on the digital acquisition side, we started from the bottom of the funnel and moved up. We were very focused on repeat-and-referral businesses building our email communication and our content. What we did unique about the content is we didn't just spend time talking about the Bulletproof diet, ketogenic diets, or about these products. We went back and said, what are the things we're trying to solve? Are you having a problem with sleep? Are you having a problem with your energy? Are you having midafternoon crashes?
What we would do is create content that was more solution-oriented. What that allowed us to do is move up the funnel and get highly qualified prospecting traffic to our brand where they weren't aware of the brand, but they were aware of their issue. We were able to provide a solution both in content and also product recommendations that would help expand that group over time.
Edward: I often think of many products as being either Tylenol or vitamins. Either they're solving a specific problem, or they're making your life better in a way that you weren't even aware that you needed. It sounds like Bulletproof started, hey, we make your life better in a way you didn't know you needed and then shifted to be, no, we can solve these specific problems. Were you doing search marketing for people searching for how do I improve my sleep?
Brian: We did some of that—this goes back to analytics [...]. We would take all the search marketing information, all the keyword information. You'd also be using the Google search webmaster information to understand keyword volume. If you think about a three-dimensional Rubik, you could understand where's the keyword traffic coming from, what issues are out there.
We can then overlay that with the Bulletproof product line, which product lines are doing immunity versus health versus energy versus sleep. Then you could understand the phase of that consumer either based on their search queries—have they already been to the website or whatnot—within this very dimension.
Then you have a consumer journey you can communicate to. Is this a prospecting visit, is this a repeat purchase, or is it the subscriber that might be thinking about unsubscribing? You can tailor these journeys to each of these consumers, and we used it across three channels at all times.
You had the digital side for sure. Out there, either Facebook look-alikes or Facebook prospecting and Google-branded terms and non-branded terms, depending on what the ROI was. But then we also integrated that very tightly into look-alikes and [...] within Facebook, and then we also did physical mail as well—direct mail.
With that, we were touching people across multiple communication channels with their need-solution in mind. That's what helped to elevate the awareness of the brand.
Edward: How did you target with direct mail? Was it broad-based, or did you have the equivalent of look-alikes on your direct mail?
Brian: We started by focusing on just our existing consumer. Step one was saying look, we know—from our email database—how many of our physical mail addresses have been purchasing or moved to inactive. We started by doing very basic inactive work, which is, hey, we haven't seen you in three months. We've sent you a ton of emails. You haven't opened them, so we're going to send you a physical email. We’ll give you a small offer to see if we can get you to re-engage on our website.
Edward: How did you know those people hadn't switched to buying at Whole Foods?
Brian: We don't, technically. We don't have a single source to a thread online and offline consumer consumption. But what we found is that it's an issue around convenience. If people would typically have shifted to one medium or the other, if they like that, it doesn't matter what we're trying to communicate with them. It's not going to happen.
How we thought about our value proposition fell into four lines across all of our channels. The first one was the price. We made sure that Bulletproof maintained the same price. If you're going to buy something at Whole Foods, Walmart, or online, you'd find within 5% or 10% depending on the pricing strategies of certain retailers, but the price would be the same. It definitely was online.
The second thing was product selection. Whole Foods was only going to offer two or three items within a protein powder versus online, where we offer the entire assortment. You had a different set of selection. Convenience, nothing could beat that up. You're already at Whole Foods checking out and you're buying that. We can't win on that.
Ecommerce convenience is around shopping at home, delivery from home. If you have Amazon, you could have fasted delivery. Then you're left with the brand experience. It's a long way of saying that we knew consumers for passing back and forth between channels. They weren't necessarily passing back and forth because of price.
Even by incentivizing some of the 10% coupon or 20% coupon, we typically found they stayed in the channel that they wanted to be in versus having people optimize between channels overtime.
Edward: When you found someone who had dropped out of your online purchase channel and you sent a direct mail to them, the assumption was they dropped out of the online channel. They hadn't switched to Whole Foods, they just dropped out completely. I assume you ran a test and control. You held back some people, sent direct mail to others, and saw whether the reactivation made sense in the long run.
Brian: Exactly right. What we found is it absolutely did. It had almost a 2X improvement with our test sample size, and we do this for 3-, 6-, 9-, 12-month lapse customers so we could track and see their interaction over time. The other thing you can do is you can go back through and see—if you're using Amazon or whatnot—you can also start to mirror in your shipping addresses across multiple platforms as well. Those other ways to consider overtime, narrow that list of who is inactive versus who is just maybe moved on to a secondary channel.
Edward: Talk to me about the Amazon channel. How did you work with Amazon?
Brian: You got to love them in Seattle, and there's no doubt they're highly successful. But it's hard to be a brand on Amazon—I say that cautiously. At Bulletproof, we ran a 3P relationship. That means that we were managing our own data on our own pricing within the Amazon ecosystem, and that was important to us because it goes back to this, we wanted to have consistent pricing. We didn't want people to figure out or feel like there is differentiated pricing between our channels.
We've grown to be one of the largest 3P sellers within Amazon. We use FBA, fulfilled by Amazon. We ship our product to Amazon, Amazon executes, and ships our product out to the consumer. But what's hard is that when you're in that Amazon ecosystem, you get two types of buyers.
One is, you have people who are very brand loyal. It's just more convenient. To be on Amazon, you're going to get it in two days, you can add it to a broader order. Some of their subscription tools are just cleaner. You have brand loyalists that are already on Amazon that have a great LTV, and then you have this group there just discovering.
What's hard about that is how do you stay top of mind in your Amazon search results. Because unless you have a brand recall, there are so many places within a page for Amazon to compete against you, either from their own brands or their 1P brands, which are brands that they're buying the merchandise for and selling on behalf of the other brand, or just other product placements and advertising. You're constantly trying to work that piece of it.
And then you have to respect part 3 of that is there's a lot of data that shows if you look at where Amazon searches occur—and I don't have this data but Amazon does—but if you were to geolocate people as they are on an Amazon app, what you'll find is there's a lot of people shopping in an aisle at Target, pulling up an Amazon search result. Not because they plan to buy on Amazon or check the price, but because they're looking at the reviews. They're looking for a clean way to know what is the best product to look on the shelf of Target. They're not going to target.com. They go to Amazon because that’s a large market. You also have to plan that to create credibility in some of your offline channels as well.
Edward: You need the reviews on Amazon in order to drive conversion rates in other places. Is that just an assumption or do you have any data to make sure that's actually happening?
Brian: There's a decent amount of research that shows that that is occurring. We never did. I'd have to think through it a little bit more, but I don't think we ever did a tremendous amount. We never plotted our review rates on Amazon to our conversion rates across channels or our adoption rates across channels.
In general, if we found that we had a lower product rating in general on Amazon, that was a weaker product across our entire assortment. Is that just because it was a weaker product, to begin with, or was it an Amazon umbrella effect? We don't know. But when you talk to a lot of people working within Amazon advertising within the VC community for CPG goods, they do talk about this additional conversion effect, where Amazon advertising now is lifting overall conversion across a lot of channels outside of just Amazon.
Edward: Amazon is definitely a distribution channel for you, people who are looking for Amazon and the review factor. Would you find that it was effective at all for discovery?
Brian: It is if you're willing to make that investment. The question there goes into the efficiency of that listing and how are you going to get promoted. The key thing within Amazon is to be on the first page. If we're not doing branded keyword searches, but you're just typing in protein powder. The first question is, are you on that front page? Because if you're on that front page, you need to pay to make sure you're on that front page.
If you're on that front page, the question is, are you getting the right traffic, the right keywords, and the organic lift you want to have? That's the key thing to brand awareness or prospecting marketing. When you go out and bid on the keywords of protein powder, it is so highly efficient out there that it goes back to the days of Google where it's probably break-even at best. Then you have to have that following and understanding which says, a first-time protein buyer on Amazon, what's the likelihood they will rebuy your brand on the second purchase?
What you'll find is there are certain categories because what we've got at Bulletproof is you research that there are certain categories in certain product lines to have a high propensity of repeat and branded options. Those are the areas where we would spend exponential dollars in or incremental dollars in to promote those products. These just aren't going to be Amazon products that we can do profitably, so we leave that as a distribution solution to our loyal brand followers, but we're not going to use that for prospecting within that ecosystem.
Edward: Did you use any of Amazon's display network stuff or only on their merchandising, only on their core search results?
Brian: We did display as well. When you think about Amazon display, we viewed it as there are three different ways to apply it. Once again, I'll go back to the marketing funnel in reverse order which is, you could do display advertising around the realm of loyalty.
Which one of the benefits of selling supplements is I know that there are 30 capsules in that bottle, which means in about 30 days you need to repeat order. What we do is we run loyalty display campaigns to go re-find those consumers if they had not already placed an order to date.
Edward: You are using retargeting, not so much like look-alike audiences.
Brian: On a delayed basis, retargeting. That would be one channel. The second channel would be straight retargeting right after they first did their search. That's remarketing. They've probably already seen our results once, chase them down for the next three days, don't know if they've made a purchase or not, make sure that they know about Bulletproof, and then the final one is that prospecting look-alike.
What's the benefit of what Amazon does there in their display network is they have a tremendous amount of sub-genres and look-alikes, and so you can use that to mirror it over time. The hard part about Amazon display—and they definitely heard it a lot from us—is that they like to report out on view-based conversions.
One of the difficulties with the display is trying to understand the role of view-based, which might make sense at the prospecting level. But it sure doesn't make sense when you get down to this reactivation loyalty level because you only want to spend that if you know it's driving an incremental unique conversion. It has to get down to that click-through because I already know they’re converting. I need to know if that display ad drove that conversion or we got them from some other means, and that makes the data very difficult in those situations.
Edward: I’d imagine that if you're retargeting, so many of those people are going to come back and buy from you anyway. If you're going to give them credit to anyone who sees the view, effectively, you're just stealing all this attribution you would have had anyway.
Brian: There'd be a lot of meetings where they'd come and be like, oh my gosh, you should triple your display budget. It's going incredibly well. I can't take any of that money to the bank because those conversions were happening at a consumer level, but we couldn't attribute back to that channel. That's such a critical piece to this when you get down to the lowest part of the funnel is understanding what role that final conversion piece is.
We wanted to use Amazon display more and more for loyalty and for cart abandonment, but we couldn't effectively always deploy it in a way and therefore, it’s left in middle effectiveness in terms of a channel.
Edward: Let's talk about your physical distribution and retail. How do you drive more sales there? Is it the same thing, hey, get on end carts and do lots of demos?
Brian: Yeah. That's one more like, yeah, you should talk to our retail and brand group.
Edward: Fair enough because you were only doing ecommerce.
Brian: I was only doing ecommerce. I’ll tell you two things. One is that it goes back to the days of Ritani, they play off of each other. There's something to be said that when you move your product into Whole Foods, Sprouts, Walmart, or Target and people see it, that's going to help grow the overall awareness of the brand. There's no doubt.
The flip side is when we're doing the right things online and we're getting our information out there and we're showing it to people, that's going to help the in-store as well. What we would do a lot of times in store—which goes back to being an ecommerce person, where you can track that transaction, you can track that conversion so much easier—is you find things like we would do in-store demos. It's just really hard to understand.
By the time you put a demo team in there—are they a product expert and people are trying it—and then you look at that store lift both that day and then 30, 60, or 90 days later, I'm not convinced that in-store demos truly drive a real change. I think the retailers love it because it's a value add to their consumers walking the aisles pre-COVID, but I'm not sure the economic proposition is there.
Edward: Is it the equivalent of a view-through conversion?
Brian: Yeah, in my mind it is. It absolutely is. Maybe that's why I don't end up helping out on the in-store marketing is because it's harder for me to quantify that next dollar. I feel confident when I say, hey, I'm going to put a dollar into this channel. I have a 90% degree of certainty I'm going to return X% back, be it two-time, three-time, or four-time [...].
When I do an in-store demo or when I do high-level brand impressions and campaigns, I'm told, in 3-6 months, what we hope to see is a lift of X%, and that's important at some point. I always joke around like I appreciate the people of Budweiser when they run the six Super Bowl ads because I think they're hilarious. But as a marketer, I would have such a hard time trying to justify that sixth spin because I couldn't quantitatively put it back into where that sale occurs based on that investment.
Edward: Brian, this has been fantastic today. Before we go, tell me about your quake book and how it changed the way you think about the world.
Brian: I'll give you two because they are the very far extremes of book reading. One, I'm a huge Dr. Seuss fan. Maybe I created the lowest bar ever for Marketing BS. But Oh, the Places You’ll Go! is an outstanding book to create perspective around one’s journey. especially if you’ve ever done a day-one startup or gone through really hard career items. That book summarizes what it feels like and the highs and the lows.
The other one that comes around with management is—Gallup produced a book several years ago called 12. It's around the 12 questions of employee engagement. That was a game-changer for me because when you influence people, you have three ways to influence them. You have role power. Being a previous CEO or head of the department, you walk around with this red neon light that says, I can fire you. It turns out people are going to laugh at your jokes and they're going to do what you say you do. That's role power.
You can also have expertise power where you can walk in, and because you've done this for so long or you know the patterns better, the people are going to follow you because you've done it and you have this understanding that they don't have.
But the real power is around relationship power. The book of 12 talks about highly engaged teams and how do you create engage-core forces over time. It all goes back to a high EQ and emotional understanding of teams. When I finally realized that and understood how to develop teams like that, it's just been a complete game-changer to how I look at my career and how I managed teams going forward.
Edward: Brian, thank you so much for being here. This has been fantastic.
Brian: Thank you so much.
Interview: Brian Watkins, Bulletproof 360, Part 2