When Nudie entered the Australian fruit juice market in 2003, the category was ready for a shake up. Prior to its arrival, consumers could only find the same old boring fruit juices in bottles or in cartons. Nudie‘s arrival introduced different fruit combinations to the their competitor offerings. Rather than being sold in big cartons or bottles, their juices were initially sold in smaller bottles. With shorter shelf-life compared to the competitors at the time, Nudie also signalled its freshness and more premium status. In more than a decade – in 2015 – the brand already commanded a 29% share of the Australian juice market.
Despite changes to their pack design over the years and changes of brand ownership, Nudie has stayed consistent with the sans serif brand name and the stick-drawing logo. The brand is now generally available across supermarket chains, stores, and cafes in Australia — and although they are not as actively advertising their brands, you can still find news articles and remnants of their ad campaigns over the years.
I thought I’d breeze through Nudie‘s history to highlight the same old path it trod to achieve success. It has little to do with the unusual naming. Now, let me take you to a more recent pop-marketing phenomenon. I am aware of the obsession of Liquid Death‘s success in the US. Some speculate that it’s the morbid naming, the water-in-a-beer-can, or the hard rock image that is the key ingredient to success. I would argue that it’s more about the carefully crafted mental availability and physical availability strategies. The same old hard slog to build mental availability and physical availability from zero.
Imagine if the secret sauce to success is the brand name. When Nudie achieved its success, other juice brands should just flood the market with similar suggestive names. Perhaps other beverages should emulate Liquid Death by introducing morbid, provocative, or shocking brand names to make them memorable. If this truly happens, wouldn’t that nullify the brand name novelty? It may have its five seconds of fame before the stage is flooded by every attention-seeking brand.
Come to think about it, many hot sauce producers give provocative or hellish brand names – obsessed with what the hot sauce would do to your toilet wellness. Like PuckerButt, for example. However, the names that come to your mind are probably the more mundane and big brands like Tabasco, Sriracha, or Cholula. In energy drinks, despite the arrivals of macho or juvenile brand names, Red Bull probably comes to mind more easily.
It’s natural for us to want to find the magic shortcut or the secret sauce. Unfortunately, there is no hack to brand and branding success. It needs serious and continuous effort over a long period. Let me use an analogy to tennis, as Australia Open will start soon.
Over the last 100 years, a lot of things have changed – we know more about aerodynamics, fabric science, ball tracking technology, material strength and weight for better rackets … the list goes on. However, the core of the game remains. If you want to reach the top of the ladder, you need to invest in consistent hours of practice, reviews, and improvements. It would be silly to chase Roger Federer’s Spotify playlist or use the same brand of tennis racket as Venus Williams so we could magically emulate their success.
By all means, keep an eye on better ways to advertise or distribute your products, whether there are more cost-effective ways to reach more consumers or better strategies to manage your product assortment. If we dissect what contributed to their success, Liquid Death and Nudie sought creative and nimble ways to get people to know about the brand and ensure that we can buy them easily. Stay up to date with market development, but stick to the principles. Coming back to tennis, it would be silly to play tennis now with the same racket technology or the same outfit that players used 100 years ago. However, if we teleport a top tennis player from 100 years ago, they would probably still play very well — but would be amazed with the recent smarts and technology to make them play better.
The same with brand growth — the principles researched at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute are the same, which warrant them being called the Laws of Growth: 100 years ago, now, or even 50 years in the future. It’s keeping the brand fresh in consumer’s mind when they are ready to make a category purchase (mental availability), and ensuring that the brand can be found wherever, whenever and in whatever option required by the consumers (physical availability).
The aim of the game remains – no hacking required.