Glossier: Co-Creating a Cult Brand with a Digital Community

Jill  Avery

Teaching Note | HBS Case Collection | April 2020

Glossier: Co-Creating a Cult Brand with a Digital Community

Abstract

Teaching Note for HBS No. 519-022. Flush with cash from its Series C fundraise, cult beauty brand Glossier considers its next phase of growth, facing critical decisions on how to allocate its capital to support various marketing communications and distribution strategies. Glossier’s proclaimed strategy was “born from content, fueled by community”. The digital-first, direct-to-consumer beauty brand had experienced rapid growth, with sales up 600% in 2017 and a customer portfolio that grew by threefold. But, its founder, Emily Weiss, was not complacent. Instead, she dreamed of creating the world’s first socially-driven brand that inserted its community into the buying experience so that the company was merchandising people, their opinions, and their content, just as much as they were merchandising products. As her team debates marketing strategies for 2018, they recognize the opportunities and challenges associated with managing Glossier’s rapidly scaling brand community. While the community’s support had emerged organically in the past, the team was now debating whether the company’s next phase of growth would need to be fueled by a greater emphasis on paid peer-to-peer sales representatives, professional influencer marketing, paid media, and a physical market presence.

Keywords: digital marketing; crowdsourcing; social media; CRM; Startup; direct-to-consumer; DTC; Marketing; Marketing Strategy; Brands and Branding; Consumer Behavior; Customer Relationship Management; Venture Capital; Business Startups; Entrepreneurship; Beauty and Cosmetics Industry; United States;

Language: English

Format: Print

26 pages

Purchase

Citation:

Avery, Jill. "Glossier: Co-Creating a Cult Brand with a Digital Community." Harvard Business School Teaching Note 520-099, April 2020.

Marketers have long appreciated the value and power of storytelling. Stories fill brands with resonant and relevant meaning and empower brands to serve as critical elements in the lives of consumers. Mastering the art of brand storytelling is an increasingly important part of managing brands in the contemporary brandscape, as today, we live in a world filled with an ever-expanding panoply of physical and virtual media spaces and places within which to create and tell stories with and to our consumers. This technical note outlines how and why consumers respond to brand stories, illuminates the four elements that make up good stories, discusses the use of archetypal plots and characters and other storytelling appeals, and provides guidance and a template for creating resonant, relevant, authentic, and differentiated brand stories.

Brian Perkins, chief architect of the $6 billion Budweiser brand, was excited about 2018, in which the company would launch Budweiser into several new markets in Africa and Latin America. He was feeling the pressure to finalize a global brand strategy that would define Budweiser’s value proposition and guide its development and execution around the world. The problem was that Budweiser actually had two distinct brand realities that differed across geographies and that often interfered with each other. He worried whether the company could keep selling a premium brand proposition abroad as the brand’s less premium reputation faced challenges at home in the U.S., and whether he needed to force a monolithic global brand strategy everywhere or allow for local market customization. Could Budweiser simultaneously accommodate two or more brand realities?

Case | HBS Case Collection | April 2019 (Revised October 2020)

Kraft Heinz: The $8 Billion Brand Write-Down

Jill Avery

On Friday, February 22, 2019, following an unexpected and disappointing earnings report, The Kraft Heinz Company’s stock price fell 27%, wiping out $16 billion in market value. CEO Bernardo Hees had announced that the company had taken a $15.4 billion asset write-down, that the company would be cutting its annual dividend from $2.50 to $1.60 and that it was under SEC investigation for accounting irregularities related to its procurement process. $8.3 billion of the asset write-down was related to a loss in value of the firm’s intangible assets, specifically its Kraft and Oscar Mayer brands. As Kraft Heinz looked ahead to the future, it was time to recalibrate its brand management strategies. With $50 billion in brand assets remaining on its balance sheet, effectively managing its brands going forward was critical to avoiding another brand asset write-down and to regaining the $8 billion brand value the company had just lost. Was Kraft Heinz's brand asset write-down the beginning of the end of the market dominance of "Big Food" brands across the board or was it idiosyncratic and a result of the firm's brand management resources, capabilities, and strategies?

Keywords: brand management; Brand Value; Brand equity; marketing ROI; brand storytelling; Intangible assets; brand valuation; Marketing; Marketing Strategy; Brands and Branding; Management; Corporate Strategy; Consumer Behavior; Food; Marketing Communications; Advertising; Private Equity; Consumer Products Industry; Food and Beverage Industry; United States; North America;

Citation:

Avery, Jill. "Kraft Heinz: The $8 Billion Brand Write-Down." Harvard Business School Case 519-076, April 2019. (Revised October 2020.) View Details

Cite View Details Educators Purchase

Faculty & Research

Glossier: Co-Creating a Cult Brand with a Digital Community

Abstract

Citation:

About the Author

More from the Author