What 'Forever Chemicals' Mean for Marketing
Sustainability might suddenly have some competition.
In this issue: why toxin-free is the new sustainability for brands; why founders love fake work; and why Amazon has decided to let us fight amongst themselves. If you like what you read, please subscribe and share. (And if you don’t, please send me your feedback. I’m new here.)
I. Consumers care, but how much?
One of my current clients is Nuttch, a sustainable clothing brand out of Milan, Italy. My interest in working with Nuttch was shaped by the depth of its commitment to sustainability: locally recycled materials locally repurposed by manufacturers meeting just about every conceivable sustainability target. There are almost no angles outside of consumption in general against which to attack the brand’s credentials.
On top of all of this, the products are toxin-free, which has suddenly become the topic du jour. The cover article of the August 20th issue of New York Times Magazine read, “‘Forever Chemicals’ Are Everywhere. What Are They Doing to Us?” The article focuses on “per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances,” also known as PFAS, which have been linked to “high cholesterol, ulcerative colitis, thyroid disease, testicular cancer, kidney cancer, and pregnancy-induced hypertension.”
It gets worse, though. In addition to being detected in the animals we eat and 45 percent of our tap water:
Government agencies and watchdog groups have found PFAS in carpets, furniture, nail polish, shampoo, mascara, nonstick cookware, dental floss, raincoats, fast-food wrappers, pizza boxes, microwave popcorn bags, yoga pants, sneakers, sanitary pads, tampons, menstrual cups, bedding, upholstery, children’s pajamas, paint, vinyl flooring and artificial turf.
As it turns out, we and everything we touch are composed of PFAS, meaning brands, including Nuttch, are not in a position to claim otherwise. That said, the incremental step of toxin recognition has had the effect of essentially reprioritizing the value systems that inform brands’ creative strategies. Consumers suddenly know, and so they rightfully suddenly care.
That said, every value-based statement brings with it a secondary question: how much do they suddenly care? Do brands simply say their products are toxin-free, or do they say they’re OEKO-Tex Standard 100 certified?
In the end, I think of it like web design: give the visitor a headline and an intro, then add a drawer for more details. At a moment when consumers are only newly aware of a problem requiring a solution, keep your first touch-point (campaigns) simple — our products are toxin-free — but give those that need further validation optional access to it. That option could be your organic social, your website, or your PR, just to start.
If I had to guess, we’re about to see a trajectory akin to that of sustainability. First, recyclable packaging was enough. Now, recycled packaging is a must. Given that both values require changes to sourcing and supply chains, those brands with a head start on toxicity would benefit from broadcasting a digestible message while giving opt-in space to the full story.
II. Founders love fake work.
Post-college, I haphazardly entered the world of digital product design and development. Those were different times. Investors had not yet realized there was only room for one or two social platforms, so we were paid for some truly niche output: an app that allowed bankers to trade currencies in person (a death wish); an app to find the busiest nightclub in your city (why?); an app that rewarded you for uploading photos of your lunch (not Twitter).
In Founder Fridays No. 50, YC-alumn
talks about founders being distracted by fake work like raising money and personal press. Instead, he tells them, “Consider how directly a task relates to growing. Obviously, building and selling are the best.” I left the digital product world a long time ago, but I personally watched a million brands design themselves into oblivion, iterating on the design of their products until they actually ran out of money. Design is fun, and customer acquisition is not.Today, I see more of what Westaway sees: investing in flash over efficiency, starting with tactics (PR, expensive influencers, expensive content) that look cool but do little. Worse still, because they have not developed the means of retaining that traffic (retargeting, email, and so on), the upside comes and goes. 90% of the time, this order of events will do the trick:
Agree on a set of values that will shape your campaign creative.
Find a lean means of producing that creative.
Launch variations on data-rich platforms (Meta, Google, TikTok, etc.) that will make clear which creative and which positioning resonates. (For some brands, influencers fit here as well.)
Make more of it.
Use that same creative and positioning input to inform decisions related to PR, influencers, brand partnerships, and so on.
Brands love the inverse. I understand: it’s more fun, and in the short term, it can be less expensive. Reality arrives unexpectedly quickly, though.
III. Update: Amazon shutting down a big chunk of its private label business.
Last issue, I wrote about Amazon’s destruction of time as a moat — the opportunity to build market share before the first wave of competitors arrives. What I failed to mention is Amazon’s own private-label brands, which it engineers off the data sellers feed into the platform.
Amazon’s decision to fold dozens of these brands is shaped by a number of factors, some FTC-related. But more interesting is this takeaway from “The Life and Death of the Amazon Brands,” which makes it clear that the real money is in draining moats, not building them:
Rather than chasing ephemeral trends with long-lead manufacturing contracts, Amazon could let sellers do their own research and absorb those risks. Rather than committing its finite warehouse space and logistics capacity to store and ship its own products, Amazon could sell that space and capacity to sellers and get paid whether or not the products sold well. Rather than taking up valuable storefront space — search results, category pages, ad units — with its own low-margin offerings, Amazon could let third-party sellers compete and pay it for advertising.
The good news is that these white-label offerings were predicted to be a major threat to independent brands. The bad news is that the volume of independent brands itself is enough of a threat on its own.