Ep 595: Where Will Your Growth Come From This Year? The 5-Message Creative System for Scaling DTC Strategically

Summary

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DTC Podcast Ep 595: Where Will Your Growth Come From This Year?

The 5-Message Creative System for Scaling DTC Strategically

Date: March 20, 2026
Hosts: DTC Newsletter and Podcast Team, featuring Duncan (Strategy Lead, Pilothouse)

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Episode Overview

This episode dives deep into the evolution of growth strategies in direct-to-consumer (DTC) e-commerce, focusing on why brands can no longer rely solely on incremental iteration or "growth hacks." Instead, the discussion centers around building intentional, scalable brand growth systems—particularly the "5-Message Creative System" for guiding customers seamlessly from awareness to purchase. The hosts underscore the need to consciously architect a holistic customer journey with messaging tailored to key stages, rather than endlessly optimizing ad micro-tactics.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. The Decline of "Growth Hacking" and Incremental Iteration

• Strategic Shift:
  The DTC space is moving beyond brute-force ad iteration ("growth hacking") due to higher ad costs and market saturation.
  Quote: "You can't just growth hack your way to success anymore... people are waking up to the fact that they need to consciously design this thing." — Duncan, [00:00]
• Focusing only on tweaks and volume leads to diminishing returns and disconnected teams, rather than meaningful, scalable results.

2. What is a Brand Growth System?

• Definition:
  A framework that coordinates all marketing activities—across channels, teams, and tactics—toward a unified, customer-centric growth theory.
  Quote: "It is essentially the governing system that directs all your activities." — Duncan, [01:43]
• Moving from fragmented platform/workstream (Meta, Google, etc.) focus to an integrated strategy anchored in the customer journey.

3. Constructing a Growth Engine

• Process Outline:
  1. Identify the ideal customer—not just current, but the highest opportunity.
  2. Map the customer journey from awareness to purchase.
  3. Define the three to five key messages needed to move a customer through that journey.
  4. Distribute those messages coherently across all relevant media and touchpoints.
     Quote: "You don't need to make hundreds of ads... we already know what the customer needs to hear." — Duncan, [04:41]
• Scalability:
  Once the system is defined, it's easily replicable across new products, audiences, or channels.
  Quote: "Same playbook. Same playbook. Same playbook. And that's what makes it scalable." — Duncan, [05:21]

4. Inspiration, Not Iteration

• Concept:
  Move away from endless micro-testing ("iteration") towards strategy-led, intentional creative rooted in customer insight.
  Quote: "Inspiration, not iteration." — B, [06:33]; Repeated as a theme.
• You can invest more in fewer, higher-impact creative assets.

5. Customer Journey and Channel Strategy

• Recognize each channel's unique role, e.g., Meta for awareness and driving action, YouTube for reach, owned channels for nurturing.
• Avoid misaligned KPIs across platforms; optimize messages for where the customer is in the journey, not just for short-term ROAS.

6. Overcoming "Objection Points"

• The growth system uncovers precise friction points (e.g., a brand is loved but not purchased due to a specific objection) and crafts playbooks to address them.
  Quote: "Here is the objection… and here's a playbook on how to get past an objection. And it just like unplugs the whole thing." — Duncan, [09:17]

7. The Dangers of the Tactical Spin Cycle

• Symptoms:
  When founders/teams/agencies default to Optimization as "growth," they're often stuck in a tactical loop.
• Diagnostic Question:
  "Where will growth come from this year?" — If you can't answer with a clear customer-centric strategy, you're likely spinning your wheels.
  Quote: "If you can't answer that, then you are in the tactical spin cycle right now." — Duncan, [13:26]

8. From Platform-Centric to Customer-Centric

• Fragmentation is resolved by aligning all messaging, media, and tactics around a well-defined, high-potential customer.
  Quote: "When it works, the switch is going from platform-centric to customer-centric." — Duncan, [14:59]

9. Moving from "Optimization" to Strategic Investment

• Approach:
  True growth comes from identifying a big new audience with clear, investable messaging—NOT just squeezing efficiency from what's already worked.
  Quote: "If you're just doing the optimization thing… that's kind of limited." — Duncan, [18:44]
• Careful research often shows that the biggest opportunity isn’t always the current or historical top buyer; it requires stepping back and re-mapping audience priorities.

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The 5-Message Creative System Explained

[24:21–28:14]

• What Is It?
  A structured set of five core messages each customer must encounter on their path from awareness through to purchase (including post-purchase, i.e. loyalty/second buy).
  • Examples of message types:
    1. Showcase the brand’s appeal.
    2. Demonstrate social proof or community affinity.
    3. Highlight key differentiators.
    4. Resolve the principal buying objection.
    5. Create urgency or a compelling reason to buy now.
• How It Works:
  • For each customer "avatar," map these messages to journey stages.
  • Build creative assets for each phase, deploying them logically across platforms and collections.
  • This thread-of-messages approach is repeatable, reducing creative fatigue, making campaigns more predictable and strategic.
• Quote:
  "If you can figure out what are the five things a customer needs to hear... you don't have to reinvent the wheel every single time... It becomes predictable, reliable, repeatable." — Duncan, [26:40–28:06]

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Creative Strategy:
  "The industry is having a reckoning because it was built on the worst creative strategy of all time, which is iteration." — Quoting Taylor Holiday, [05:58]

• On Team Alignment:
  "If you think about all the people on a team… all those optimizations might not be working together." — Duncan, [09:48]

• On Brand Response and Storytelling:
  "Social media is really good for creating entertainment for people. You can entertain someone and then also make them aware your product is there. It's just classic marketing, right? ... That's a whole stage in a customer journey that you can design." — Duncan, [11:40]

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Important Timestamps

• 00:00: Opening on the demise of growth hacking and need for growth systems
• 03:54: How building a growth engine changes brand strategy
• 06:33–07:25: "Inspiration, not iteration" — the value of moving away from endless ad tweaks
• 09:12–10:00: Surfacing and resolving customer purchase objections via the growth system
• 13:26: Key question for founders/agencies: "Where will growth come from this year?"
• 14:59: Shifting from platform-centric to customer-centric strategy
• 24:29–28:06: Deep dive into the "5-Message Creative System"

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Overall Takeaways

• Performance marketing's old playbook is dead; conscious, strategic design is essential for sustainable DTC growth.
• True brand growth means mapping—and mastering—the customer journey with thought-out, sequenced messaging, not just ad testing.
• A "brand growth system" makes scaling organized, efficient, and repeatable across channels, segments, and campaigns.
• The most important diagnostic: Can you clearly articulate where growth will come from this year? If not, re-examine your strategy.
• The modern DTC creative stack is all about "inspiration, not iteration"—building a durable core of messages and experiences rather than an endless string of minor ad variations.

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Transcript

[A]

You can't just growth hack your way to success anymore. In the performance marketing industry, I think people are waking up to the fact that they need to consciously design this thing for the brands that we have the growth system or the growth engine built for. We don't need to make hundreds of ads because we already know what customers need to hear.

[B]

Inspiration, not iteration.

[A]

If you're doing iterations and small tweaks and tests and things like that, your mindset is that you, you can't invest in anything because you don't know if it's going to work. If you can figure out what are the five things a customer needs to hear to go from never hearing about you to purchase and get really good at those five things. Guess what? You don't have to reinvent the wheel every single time.

[B]

This episode is brought to you by contentful marketers. You know that feeling when your creative clicks, when that social post sends engagement through the roof, when your outside of the box campaign hits ROI positive, when a personalized homepage turns prospects into customers? It's utter marketing bliss. Contentful helps you create tailored omnichannel experiences without working overtime. No stress, no limits, only possibilities. Get the [e-mail] it's all killer, no filler. Welcome to the DTC podcast strategy lead at Pilothouse. Duncan, how you doing?

[A]

Great. How are you doing?

[B]

We're both hanging in there. Triumphing on through adversity. Here to talk about the brand growth system. What is a brand growth system and why does every brand need to have one?

[A]

Oh, you know, that's a really funny question. And I think, you know, there's a lot of terms for it. There's a growth engine, there's a growth system. There's like, you know, acquisition systems and engines and that's, you know, those are usually the interchangeable terms, but that is essentially the governing system that directs all of your activities. And it's kind of interesting because right now in the performance marketing industry, I think people are waking up to the fact that they need to consciously design this thing. Because you can't just growth hack your way to success anymore. You need to have a growth system that can scale, that you understand, that has a theory on how to grow your business to actually succeed.

[B]

It seems obvious, but at the same time, we did come from this era for the, you know, where, where you didn't you, you could kind of cheat it a bit, where you could just run more meta ads in a lot of ways and it would kind of pave over problems in the business. But it's like a lot of the room for error has been eaten up by tariffs and increased ad costs and everything.

[A]

Yeah, 100%. And, and think about it this way. You know, you've got your meta specialists, you got your Google specialists, you've got your creative person, you've got your email, and you're like, you got your CRO person, and all these people are just sort of trying to do all these hacks to squeeze out a little bit more growth, but unless they're directed by some theory on how to win, then they're just going to be toiling away in their own little spaces, pulling their hair out. And when you're in an industry that has tons of people in market and tons of growth, that worked before. But it's kind of funny, I just had a conversation today. We were trying to describe what this thing is, and the end of it was just like, oh, you actually have to do marketing. This was happening right now.

[B]

So give me an example of. I don't, I know we're, we're building brand growth systems with a lot of our top brands right now. Just can you describe. I don't know if we can give direct examples, but can you talk to me about an example where a brand didn't have this. We built one. What it looked like and what we were able to achieve with it.

[A]

Yeah, 100%. And we've done it a few times. And first of all, it forces you to step out of your area of specialization and look at the whole map of your activities. And so you identify who your ideal customer is. Not necessarily the customer you're talking to right now, but where's the biggest opportunity customer? And then you figure out what's the journey that they need to go on in order to become, become a customer. From like never hearing about you to becoming a customer. And then you figure out what are the three to five things that person needs to hear in order to believe in your brand and buy your product. And then you gotta map out those messages across all the different media you think you can use to reach them until they become a customer and that becomes a growth engine. So you need to have a media plan or a media strategy and a creative strategy mapped out across the customer journey. And once you know how those things all work together, you can just repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat. It scales out across customer segments, it scales out across channels, it scales out across collections, it scales out across creative. And we've done that. It's great. It's, you know, the brands that have one of these growth engines or growth systems, every time they want to add another tier of expansion, Either a new customer or a new collection or a new channel. It's not like we have to reinvent the wheel. We just take the same playbook and apply it. New campaign, new theme. Same playbook. Same playbook. Same playbook. And that's what makes it scalable.

[B]

And it fits with. I know we're not just talking about meta here, but it fits with the changes that Andromeda's made where it needs to be fueled by these unique, discrete angles that it then knows how to put into market at the right time.

[A]

Yeah. And guess what? Those unique, discrete angles are just the things that your customer needs to hear in order to become a customer. And so you don't need to have, you know, 200 or 500 different ads to test and sort of like, oh, we don't really know why it works. We just made a little tweak and we iterate. I heard recently Taylor Holiday, he said the industry is having a reckoning because it was built on the worst creative strategy of all time, which is iteration. And so when you're guided by iteration, usually what that means is we make ads that look like this. We don't know why it works, but it does. And we do small tweaks every week and see if we can improve versus knowing exactly who your customer is and what they need to hear. Crafting that message into an ad and then delivering it across your customer journey, that's a very different thing.

[B]

It's helped me come up with an excellent mnemonic device, which is inspiration, not iteration.

[A]

That's right. And like, iteration is great once you've got that foundation built. But for the brands that we have the growth system or the growth engine built for, we don't need to make hundreds of ads because we already know what customers need to hear. So we're just making less and less content. So if you think about the motion, people who are like, oh, motion's gonna pull out like, oh, this hook or that hook or these small adjustments, and then you're just pulling your hair out, sort of flailing, making hundreds and hundreds of ads. But if you have. If you understand what is winning and why, then you can put a lot more resources into doing one or five ads instead of 300.

[B]

That's funny. I just. While we're dropping names, I just saw David Herman, another competitive agency who was talking with, just said this exact point was that this idea of, like, spamming accounts with ads really isn't the way what he's talking about specifically was how important, especially once you have all these discrete unique angles that are out in market and working. It's about then creating the landing page or the post click experience that really references or that, that speaks to the congruency of that original angle as well. Are landing pages a part of the brand growth system?

[A]

Sure, but it's. The great thing about having a growth system is that it becomes channel agnostic. It doesn't really matter. It's like your, your channel or your medium becomes a choice over like, oh, it's gotta be this or it's gotta be that. I've seen this a lot where there's a brand that we've had tons of these come through that we've worked with at Pilothouse. There's a brand that's got a really great brand identity and people really like the vibe of the brand and then they just kind of get stuck and people like, people are following, people are paying attention, people know about it. But not a lot of people actually buy. And that's because a lot of the time there's just like some point that people get caught on that prevents them from purchase. And there's something that needs to be addressed. And I've sort of built all of my time at Pilothouse looking for this sort of objection part in the customer journey. Now, not all brands have this problem. Some of them have even harder problems. Like people have never even heard of them. They have an awareness problem. But when people really like the brand but they can't bring themselves to purchase, there's a message that they need to be delivered that gets them over that hurdle and then into becoming a customer.

[B]

But the brand growth system helps you articulate and find those particular reasons.

[A]

Yeah. So we'll build like an artifact that says this is how you get people over this hurdle. Here is the objection that most customers run into that stops them from buying. And here's a playbook on how to get past an objection. And it just like unplugs the whole thing. And then all of a sudden your

[B]

customers just rolling in and then results wise. This is what we're seeing. We're seeing when we have this holistic system. A, it's easier to manage and B, it's easier to scale in a way that actually scales and not just has a lot of sound and fury signifying nothing.

[A]

Yes. Yeah. Like think about all the people on a team who are just doing, not only trying to optimize their own little corner of the marketing activities, but all Those optimizations might not be working together. And sometimes, if you think about a very simplistic way of thinking about it, is a lot of the time meta success is measured by roas. And so if you don't have a quote unquote good roas, then you might be in trouble. But if you think about meta's role, meta is very good at getting in front of, of people who've never heard of you and then getting them to do something. You know, YouTube is good at getting in front of people who never heard of you, but it's hard to get them to do something because they're watching tv. They're not going to click through your ad because they're watching TV on YouTube. So Meta, you can get in front of someone who's never heard of you and then get them to click through. But you can't expect them to purchase if they've never heard of you right away. So what do you do? You move them over to an owned channel. If you got a really good Instagram Organic, get them to follow you on Instagram Organic, or if you've got a really good email program, get them to follow you on email and then you can reach out to them with great content for free in perpetuity. Then, okay, great, they've heard of you, they follow you on an own channel, it's free to reach them, and you have all the time in the world to tell them about why your product is awesome if you know what they need to hear, and then boom, your customer.

[B]

Like you say, it's real marketing. You know, I, because I think, I think back to, I think back to all the ads and the way we've talked about ads for so long, it's with this purchase objective all the time, Everywhere, all the time. You're always building around, driving to the purchase, you're always asking for the sale kind of thing. Does this soften your approach like it does this? Are you less focused on ruthless conversion all the time and you're more storytelling about the brand, or is everything still very focused on buying?

[A]

I would say it, it depends on the stage of the customer journey, which is a very like, you know, just got out of Marketing School 101 thing to say, but you, but you can change what you're trying to accomplish at different stages of that journey. So one thing that's very powerful is social media is really good for creating entertainment for people. You can entertain someone and then also make them aware that your product is there. It's just classic marketing, right? And so that's just enough to, you know, we call that brand response where someone is seeing someone in their community who they like, who they follow, and then they're seeing your product and then there's an association there and maybe they're just gonna like check you out. That is a whole stage in a customer journey that you can design. And also you can change the requirement of what your ad is trying to do and make it less expensive to get in front of a lot of people. That's easier planting the seed, getting someone to visit your site or follow you or whatever you might be looking for a cost per cost per follow or something like that. And then you do the selling once they've actually shown real interest in your brand and that's a lot less expensive.

[B]

In some of the pre notes you mentioned that there's probably a lot of agencies out there who are selling optimization as growth. The tactical spin cycle as we've kind of dubbed it. Right. A lot of brands with their agencies trapped in this tactical spin cycle. What are some questions that either a founder can ask a CMO or ask their agency to determine whether a brand actually has a viable sort of growth system or is kind of just in the tactical spin cycle?

[A]

My favorite question that tells you if, whether or not you're in the tactical spin cycle is where will growth come from this year? If you can't answer that, then you are in the tactical spin cycle right now. And that's Dave's question. It's really good because it kind of cuts through a whole bunch of bullshit. And if the answer is attribution fixing, it's like, oh, you don't know where your next dollar should go or your tracking is off and we don't really know how much Meta or Google is actually contributing. If that's the answer or if you're going to optimize your channels, you're going to test a bunch of creative or you're going to add a bunch of channels, then those are all signs that you're in the tactical spin cycle. Because that's just like. That is just table stakes baseline stuff that performance agencies will do and then they'll call that growth. It's not growth, it's just like optimization and sort of knob fiddling is what I call it. That question, if you can't answer very clearly where will growth come from this year, then you are inside the tactical spin cycle right now.

[B]

And can you give me an example of an answer to that question from someone who has been successfully piloted in a growth system? Like what what did the answer did. The answer became just doing more of everything, but in lockstep, so it all worked better or what's the answer to that question successfully?

[A]

When it works, the switch is going from platform centric to customer centric. That's where the, that's where the switch is. If you're talking platform centric, all of a sudden your strategy is just a fragmentation across a whole bunch of different endeavors that are sort of fiddling around in their own. But if you switch to customer centric, all of a sudden that fragmentation is just around one person. Who is that person and how are you going to turn them into a customer? And then all of a sudden you can measure how many of those people there are, what the opportunity is. And then they move through a journey and the channels show up along that journey, the messaging shows up along that journey, the tactics, actions show up across that journey. But you're able to say the answer to where will growth come from this year is we know who our ideal customer is and we think that we can acquire a certain percentage of them and that's going to grow our business by a certain amount and we're going to acquire them with these channels, with this messaging, across this journey. And then the rest is. And the rest is like, it's all very, this is the deceiving thing about performance marketing is it's all very technical and it's all very complicated. And all of that confuses the actual hard simplicity of the marketing part. That has been kind of lost on us for a little bit.

[B]

And so when we talk about having all these, you know, discrete, unique angles live, I always think, I always apply that to the meta world. Are those applying to, to Google? Like, are you, are you then are the angles that work best here, are you. Then are those drifting into your Google account so that the ads get framed in specific ways? Like how does that kind of ad intelligence move across platforms and out of. Or is it, I guess you were saying, it's just also just more about understanding what each platform is for in a way. Right. Like Applovin is a similar thing. They're going to, they're going to have to be exposed to your brand because they're going to have to. It's content locked, so they're going to have to watch the video. But again, the chances of them converting there are low because they're in the middle of Candy Crush or whatever. But still really good for that first awareness phase.

[A]

Exactly. And so when you talk about Google, like what are we talking about? Are we talking about YouTube or are we talking about shopping or search? Right. And so if we're talking about YouTube, we're probably just trying to like, getting people. This is a hot take, but it's hard to get people to purchase from YouTube. It's much better for just getting it in front of people and getting a bunch of impressions. And so I'm sure there's a lot of people that would challenge me on that, but that's how we've been thinking about it. And then Google search is like, you know, generic search is like people are looking for, you know, they're looking for a frying pan. It's like, you know, best frying pan or best stainless steel thing. They're like, okay, they're already thinking about buying and then they need to be persuaded to buy you. So you want to get in front of them then. And then shopping is maybe a little bit more specific. Or they're like, actually, I want to buy this thing. And so those messages that you're telling those people probably have more to do with where they are in their journey, which is further on. And so, yes, you would want to have some alignment, but there's not really for Google specifically, it's kind of like people are just looking for the thing. And they might be looking for, they might have some queries about specialization, like specific things they're looking for, but a lot of that stuff happens earlier in the funnel because those people are already pretty much ready to purchase.

[B]

All right, well, if you're a brand out there and you don't, you don't think you have a. First of all, figure out where's your growth coming in 2026? I think a lot of people would just say, like, spend better, more efficiently, you know, find efficiencies, like. But again, that's all just optimization, right?

[A]

That's like, yeah, like you can all these, all these optimizations, what you'll do. And you know, we've done this for a long time where we're like, okay, people come in and we acquire customers efficiently was how we worked for a long time. And people, we would find a lot of growth with a lot of people. But also if you're just doing the optimization thing, a lot of the time you see some growth, but then your costs come down. And so you're acquiring people more efficiently. And then you can take that budget and put it back into your span and then you get more customers, but that's kind of limited. And so instead of saying, okay, I know who I want to acquire, I know they've got X amount of dollars in their pocket. And so we believe that we can acquire X amount of these people. We think it's worth this much money. Let's invest in doing this properly. Let's invest in some assets. All of a sudden it makes it. Because I'm just going to back this out for a sec. If you're doing iterations and small tweaks and tests and things like that, your mindset is that you can't invest in anything because you don't know if it's going to work.

[B]

You're like, you're just trying to duplicate the success and exceed it slightly of something that's already working.

[A]

Yeah, but if you don't understand why it's working, then you can't really invest in it because you just don't really know what, what's going on. Whereas like, if you have a really strong thesis on like why something would work and how much money it can get, you all of a sudden it becomes an investment and you can invest in much more expensive, many more assets, like bigger campaigns, things like that. All of a sudden it's a complete flip of the switch. Instead of thinking about we're going to do a little bit of work on 700 ads, we're going to do a lot of work on 10 ads or 5 ads. So that's sort of the direction that things are going now, which is great,

[B]

that are really thought out based on real use cases of your product, real avatars of people. What, what sort of system do we have for gathering all that data? When it comes to like when we onboard a client, we're like, okay, these guys are in the tactical spin cycle. We want to move towards like where do, where are we harvesting the best, you know, discrete, unique angles essentially?

[A]

Well, the way it works is we do a multi step process to identify what the biggest growth constraint is for our partners. So we know where to focus and then we figure out what is the change that we need to make. How are we going to win based on this challenge? So you got the challenge. You figure out how you're going to win by overcoming that challenge and then you figure out who your ideal customer is to make that change in. And there's a lot of different ways for us to do that. We do quote unquote research and I'm sure we should give away everything that we do. But it's certainly not just looking back at who your previous customer, biggest customer was because that can be your biggest mistake because you're essentially just feeding in past mistakes back into the top of

[B]

your strategy or past limitations as well. Right. Like, if you're looking to break out with your growth, if you're plateaued by mining what's worked in the past, it's not going to get you over the hump. Right?

[A]

Yeah. Like, I'll take a perfect example. It doesn't take, like, crazy research techniques to find out that, you know, millennials have more spending power than seniors. And there may be a bigger group on something like Instagram than seniors might be. But if you're selling a product that might appeal to seniors and they're addicted to Facebook or something like that, Facebook might think that's your ideal customer. And then you just throw your ads out there, and all of a sudden your biggest customer is seniors, but there's a limited pool of them that are online. And so this is the mistake that your previous customer might be the best. And so then you look out into the world and you say, okay, what is the biggest demographic that would find our products appealing? That's a bigger pool of people. And then you might find, oh, it's millennials. And then we're going to go and we're going to change all of our messaging and targeting to reach these millennials. We know it's worth the investment because there's a way bigger pool of cash out there for us to acquire. And so that's not something that would happen. If you're in this sort of, like, iterative creative strategy, you never pull your head up long enough to look around for that sort of thing. And so that's. I don't know, I feel like we're wandering around at this altitude of the strategy part. And, you know, there's kind of like, it goes strategy, and then it goes to sort of like, media and creative strategy, and then you get to sort of tactics and execution. And I think a lot of the time, and this is not just my opinion, this is other people's opinion that have been shared with me that I really like. That sort of, like, execution part has been where so much of our industry has been stuck for so long, and now that that layer is no longer an easy win, a lot of people who are thinking deeply about this are having to step up to a higher altitude and bring up much more thoughtful, harder, deeper work into their marketing efforts.

[B]

And it's working.

[A]

It's working.

[B]

So you talked about this growth system, but how do we systematize creative. You're mentioning a creative system. What does that mean within the growth system?

[A]

Well, okay, so A creative system. You've probably heard about Andromeda and how you have different concepts and then people make concepts with different ads and things like that, which is great, but it's kind of like a never ending concepting thing where every ad is a huge Lyft. And so what we do is we create a creative system which maps along your customer journey. So you have, let's just say in very basic terms, you have stages of potential, customer is unaware of you, then they're aware of you, and then they're considering purchasing you, and then they purchase and then maybe they go for a second purchase. Is that. That's the customer journey, right? And then you have different messages that that customer needs to hear along that journey, and then those messages become concepts. If you develop those concepts that tell you how to deliver that message to each customer, it doesn't matter what collection, it doesn't matter what channel. It's a formula. You know, it's like, okay, first concept is show them how cool our brand is. That's a dumb way of saying it, but like, show them how cool the brand is and then show them that other people like them care about the brand. And then show them the like major differentiator of the brand and then get them over their biggest objection about buying it. A lot of the time with good brands it's like has to do with value and then give them some reason to have urgency now. And so that's like a five step process of getting someone to convert through your creative system. And so you'd know how to make creative for each one of those messages. It doesn't matter what channel, it doesn't matter what collection. It's always the same journey for each person and that becomes your creative system. And so I want to map this on top of Andromeda because a lot of people out there are talking about Andromeda. It's like you need all these different concepts and it becomes a never ending sort of. And you were like, oh, okay, I need 10 concepts and you're just sort of stuck. Talk about the tactical spin cycle Andromeda version. But you don't need unlimited concepts. Sure, you can win that way, but if you can figure out what are the five things a customer needs to hear to go from never hearing about you to purchase and get really good at those five things, guess what? You don't have to reinvent the wheel every single time. You can map those five concepts across channels, across campaigns, across different collections, and then that becomes your creative system.

[B]

Do you find yourself just Figuring out what the high level message is across all five of those customer journey touch points for the like. Because you could do that for multiple customers, you could do it for your male customer, your female customer, you could do it for different. You know you could. Like, it just has. You end up thinking about in creatives in terms of like, in. In a thread. Rather like individual points that you're like, oh, this creative might be clever. This might be clever. It's like, think about who your avatars are and then create a thread of creatives for each of them.

[A]

All of a sudden there's a logic for you to rely on instead of just being like, oh, it's like this atomized, totally fractured way of operating, which is just requires a bottomless pit of grinding versus, like, okay, I have a theory on how to win here. And it's going to be this customer journey with, you know, these five messages. That's our creative system. Hit that over and over and over again. And then just. That's where your investment goes over and over and over again. You know, you can win. It becomes predictable, becomes reliable, becomes repeatable.

[B]

Love it. Inspiration, not iteration. Nice. Well, Duncan, you're our resident strategy guy, so we'll. We'll check back in with you soon.

[A]

Thanks for having me on. Appreciate it.

[B]

Thanks for listening to today's episode. If you're not getting the D2C newsletter, you can subscribe for free at directtoconsumer. Co. And if you want to learn more about Pilothouse's all killer no filler services, take off to Pilothouse Co. I'm Eric Dick and this has been the DTC podcast. We'll see you next time.