INTERVIEW: EMILY HEYWARD
All Things Brand for Healthcare Startups from Budget to Resourcing to Scale
A conversation with Emily Heyward, Co-Founder and Chief Brand Officer of Red Antler
In this edition of M*A*S*H* (Marketing Advice for Startups in Healthcare), we have the distinct pleasure of catching up with Emily Heyward, Co-Founder and Chief Brand Officer of the New York City-based design firm, Red Antler. Emily and the Red Antler team are responsible for the imagery and messaging around some truly impressive brands, including Clear, Foursquare, Prose, and a host of healthcare startups (more on that below). She is also the author of the recently released Obsessed: Building a Brand People Love from Day One which we highly recommend. https://vsc.co/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/obsessed-2-2.jpeg First of all, talk to us a little bit about the ethos of the book. Why did you write it? And what were some of the key insights you think every startup should know? The book is the natural culmination of the 13 years I've spent so far running Red Antler. We started this company in 2007 with the vision of working with entrepreneurs. At the time, the New York startup scene was just getting going and we saw an opportunity to create the first creative services company that was dedicated to that pre-launch stage. We received a lot of pushback from people who asked, ‘why should companies start thinking about brand before they launch?’ The ecosystem was still very much in the philosophy of the lean startup and ‘Product Market Fit,’ test your way to success. Iterate was the buzzword of the day. We thought, ‘No, that's not true.’ The sooner companies start thinking about brand, the more value they will be able to create and the more set up for success they will be. Entrepreneurs are realizing how much brand matters, and that it really can be the difference. The story and how you package things up is just as important as the thing itself. It all needs to work together. So the book is really about the new rules of branding. We're seeing all of these companies that are disrupting categories, and are creating this new passionate relationship with consumers that led to the title. People are obsessed with the brands they love. The book answers: How are they [the brands] doing it? What are the principles they're following? What does it mean to build a brand in this century? And how can legacy businesses catch up because this isn’t just for startups, it's also for the companies that are being left behind and are seeing their business disrupted from these new entrants that are creating better relationships with consumers.
Do you find that founders understand the investment level needed for brand building? From that perspective, what’s the ideal founder/client for Red Antler?There are a lot of paths to building a brand that don't necessarily require working with a full-service company like ours. There's value in working with us, but I think there are many different ways, depending on a company's funding situation. It's rare that we're working with a company that's not on a venture track. That's just the reality of our business and how we think about the growth that we are going to help companies achieve. If they're not aiming for that level of growth, it probably doesn't make sense for them to work with a firm like ours. So we're typically working with businesses that have either raised a seed round or are in the process of raising a seed round, or are further along that journey. But I think that even for the businesses that are bootstrapping and planning to bootstrap forever, there are still many ways they can be more thoughtful about their brand, rather than ignoring it or trying to hack it together.
What stage of development are companies typically at when they engage with you?Half of our clients are in the pre-launch bucket. They come to us about eight months before launch and they've either raised the seed round or sometimes we're even helping them put their pitch deck together and start working while they're finishing their fundraise. We work very closely with them to build the vision out, to create the entire customer journey for that launch moment and then beyond. The other half of our business is either later-stage startups who have seen traction and need to take a fresh look at their brand. We also do some work with corporate companies that are launching new things into the world. But for our pre-launch businesses, they need to know what they're launching. They need to have a clear idea of what their business is. If you're still in the whiteboarding space, it's too early to talk to us. But once they have enough to put it into a deck, it's early enough to work with us.
Eight months before is still early. A lot can change. Do you bounce these off of your investor network to vet or do you feel like you kind of have a sense, a gut feeling?We've gotten pretty good about vetting through the years. But if we're thinking of taking a risk, in the form of sweat equity for some of our fee, then we might backchannel if we have doubts, especially if an investor that we know is involved. It's more of a reference check. ‘Do you think this has potential? What do you think of the founder?’ But I think that it usually becomes pretty clear through our new business process on both sides if it's a good fit or not. I think that we tend to either fall in love, or it's really not a fit. It's rare that it's on shaky ground. One of the main things we vet for is chemistry and personality. It's really important to us to bring good people into our fold, and to work with people who are going to treat our team with respect. It's an interesting perspective to have actually being in a services business. We sometimes get a view of founders that investors don't. They show their true colors to us, good and bad. They're more likely to reveal their fears, but they're more likely to reveal their noxious tendencies too. Overall we've been incredibly fortunate to work with not just brilliant people, but lovely, kind people.
Do you think about healthcare differently than other verticals? We've done a lot of work in healthcare. We've helped launch quite a few direct-to-consumer pharma brands. We've done several projects with Thirty Madison, which is a company that's launching specific verticals attacking a specific condition through a range of Over-the-Counter and prescription solutions. They started with Keeps which is men's hair loss, then we did Cove which is migraine treatment, and then we did Evens, which is acid reflux. We helped a company called Bonafide, women's health supplements for menopause and PMS. We worked with Alto which is a pharmacy out of San Francisco that we helped rebrand. There are also some others that I can't quite talk about yet. It's a space that I'm unbelievably passionate about. The reason I love brand building is ultimately because I think it's a way to create connections between people and businesses that are there to make their lives better. That's how I think about it. I want to work on businesses that are going to make people's lives better, that are going to create substantive improvements on what came before. I want to build brands that engage people to bring these businesses into their lives. And I think there are very few categories that need more fixing than healthcare. It's a cliche, the healthcare system is broken, it doesn't function the way it should. I'm really excited to see startups that are looking to solve that and that ultimately can create a better relationship between people and their health because there's nothing more fundamental than that, right?
It's really important to us to bring good people into our fold, and to work with people who are going to treat our team with respect.
When you're thinking about a brand and a healthcare condition, let's say acid reflux, how much of it is input from the client versus your own research of people that suffer from it, versus your own personal gut instinct and/or experiences?It's a combination of all three. We don't always do qualitative research when we're launching a new brand, like when we launched Casper. But with the healthcare businesses that we’ve helped launch or rebrand, we’ll do lots of research, sometimes talking directly with consumers. That's because there are nuances to these conditions, to these behaviors and states of mind, that we want to make sure we understand, especially if we're not sufferers ourselves. So with all of the Thirty Madison businesses, we did qualitative research and spoke to people who have these conditions. There were substantive differences between what the Keeps hair loss consumers were dealing with, versus the migraine consumers versus the acid reflux consumers, and not just the obvious differences, but even their attitude towards these things, and how it affects their lives. Those inputs greatly influenced the tone of each brand. With Evens, the acid reflux brand, this is not a condition people agonize over, it's an annoyance more than anything. It keeps you from indulging as much as you might want to. So we had more fun with that one and were able to strike a lighter tone and pull in fun imagery of tacos, whereas with Cove, the migraine brand, that's a pretty serious condition that has really debilitated people's lives. We found that migraine sufferers tend to try things that don't work and everything can be a trigger, so there was a lot more emotion tied up in how we built the brand. We had to take a gentler approach with that brand personality.When you help design the brands, do you then hand over a template to their consumer marketing team or their social media team? Whatever messaging you're going to use for the migraine company, their social media has to reflect that ongoing, maybe even after you work on the project.I wouldn't say a template because I think that a brand needs to continue to evolve. The clients we've worked with that have been the most successful are the ones who have an internal team that can bring their own touch and continue to infuse new ideas. I think of it more as a foundation than a template. It's about putting those initial ideas in place and most importantly, setting the stage for what this brand stands for, at its core. But it’s also about building in enough flexibility so that by month two, they’re ready to run with it. At that point, you’re going to need a whole new set of social media assets, and Red Antler isn’t necessarily going to be there to help. Our goal is to build a system that provides the internal team enough to play with and evolve with to continue to stay fresh.
What changes have you seen overall since we’ve entered this COVID era?Because we had a few big successes that were DTC [Direct-to-Consumer], we became externally known as the DTC branding firm. But in reality, that was always a small percentage of our business. We've always really tried to diversify in terms of category. But what's exciting for me is that in terms of what we're seeing come in the door, the inbound interest has definitely shifted in the past year. And I think we're seeing far fewer founders asking ‘how do I jump on this DTC wave?’ More recently, we're actually seeing people who are going after systemic change. Healthcare is a category that I would definitely put in that classification. In the past few months in particular, we've seen far more healthcare oriented startups and also FinTech. I think people are now asking, ‘how do we create even greater change to the fundamental institutions that we rely on in our lives?’ And I've seen that increase only more so after Coronavirus. It woke us up to a lot of the ways in which our institutions are letting us down.
I assume a lot of founders come to you that don't know about the eight-month thing. Do you have to guide these companies on how much money they should be raising even to build a brand?We've had founders think that we’re a silver bullet, that we will advise them on how much to raise and how much to spend on marketing and who to hire for PR and while we do a lot of those things, the founder ultimately needs to be driving the vision of how they want to grow and scale. So we will cautiously advise, but we're not a one-stop-shop for launching a business. I think that we're a one-stop-shop for building the brand as you launch the business. But there need to be some guardrails. We're not in a position where we can hold a founder’s hand on every single decision. They have to walk on their own.Do you want them to have a marketing person in place at that early stage or is there a set of 10 people they need to talk to you after they talk to you?Most clients that we work with in that pre-launch stage don't have a marketing person on their team. It's rare that they do. The founder sometimes has an MBA. But it's very rare to have a marketing hire that early on. I do think that a person leading marketing needs to be one of the first hires that a business makes post-launch. It's an incredibly important role to have in-house. We can bridge the gap to a certain degree, at least to get them to launch, and then ultimately that's a capability they have to start building pretty quickly.
Since marketing is so vast, do you find that there's a particular persona that works best for these types of brands? CMO types are what's so tricky. Do you hire a person that understands brand strategy and brand voice and creative direction? Or do you hire a growth person? I'm oversimplifying, but people tend to fall into one of those two buckets. That's something that startups struggle with, and a lot of them get wrong, especially if those different roles work together. I think it depends on the category. I don't think there's an easy formula there. But I would say it's probably more important, at least in the early days, to have that growth person in-house and you can continue to outsource the brand identity to someone like us or a PR firm versus hiring somebody. Now, that being said, if we're talking about a fashion brand that needs to be showing up in cool fresh ways on Instagram every single day, you're probably going to want a creative director in-house pretty quickly.
And do you find there are any changes there in terms of healthcare startups? With direct-to-consumer as an example, are there any changes between how they think about the team structure versus a non-healthcare brand? I think it's the same. A healthcare startup is less likely to need an in-house creative director in its early years. I think in addition to having a great brand foundation, a lot of the success is going to come through incredibly smart initial targeting and then retention. Most of these direct-to-consumer products or commodity products can be bought anywhere, they’re literally generics. So how do you continue to build an experience that's going to get that stickiness and have people wanting to come back for more? And that's something these brands need to get right and need to ultimately own and have someone in-house that can be testing email strategy, testing your funnel, making sure that you're continuing to optimize conversion and retention.How many people are in-house for marketing because every one of these functions feels like a specialty?It can be two people and then you hire an agency to fill out the rest. It's more about the quarterback. The person who's owning this every single day and managing your agency relationship and ensuring it's successful and holding them accountable, versus putting the entire thing on the agency. There needs to be someone on the brand side who speaks their language, who can look at the results and dig into them and have a reaction. I don't think it's realistic or smart for a startup to build a 10-person marketing team. You’ll have one over time, sure, but I think that an external partner can really bridge a lot of that in those early years if they're being well managed internally.Let’s discuss social media and social platforms for a minute. For consumer brands, Facebook or Instagram seem to be the focus because of their dominance and their visual aspects. What are your thoughts now on emerging platforms for brands such as LinkedIn and Tik Tok?Facebook and Instagram have gotten really crowded, but they can still be incredibly effective for the right brand if done well. What brands really need to be focused on in those early months is learning, and not doubling down on any one channel too quickly. Instead, experiment and see what works because the idea that there's one playbook that every startup should follow is simply not true. Certain brands are going to see incredible success on LinkedIn or Quora. Whereas others might be better served on YouTube and Tik Tok.We’d like to thank Emily Heyward for sharing her insights and passions with us. If you’d like to know more about her thinking and approach to brands, we encourage you to check out her recent book, Obsessed: Building a Brand People Love from Day One.