Success and Struggle: Marketing Insights from Major Retail Brands

Imagine having a front-row seat to the marketing strategies of some of the biggest retail brands in the world. You’ve seen their campaigns, bought their products, and maybe even wondered what goes on behind the scenes. What makes certain strategies soar while others fail to take flight? Today, we’re diving deep into the world of retail marketing with insights from someone who’s been at the helm of campaigns for brands like Crocs, K Swiss, and the Getty Museum store.

Listen to the full episode below or read along for transcript highlights. And check out other episode recaps on the Agorapulse blog.]

What does it take to make a retail brand truly stand out? What marketing tactics lead to epic victories and which ones missed the mark?

These are the questions we’re diving into with our guest Erik Huberman on The MarTech Show, hosted by Agorapulse chief storyteller, Mike Allton.

Erik is the CEO and founder of Hawke Media, a marketing powerhouse known for its innovative and data-driven approach. Erik has seen firsthand what works and what doesn’t in retail marketing, from viral campaigns to behind-the-scenes challenges. He’s here to share insights and lessons learned from helping some of the most recognized retail brands achieve their marketing goals.

The Journey to Hawke Media

Mike Allton: Could you start by just sharing your journey to founding Hawke Media and how you started working with some of those major retail brands like Crocs and K-Swiss?

Erik Huberman: Where do I start? I mean, it started at six years old.

No, I graduated in real estate. That was in 2008. I made 350 dollars that year, which—for those who don’t know—is not enough to live in LA, even if it was 16 years ago. So I started scrambling, figured out I needed to do something else, and started an online music company in 2009 that I raised a million dollars for.

• Got it to profitability after two years, realized it was never going to be that big, and hired a CEO to take my place.
• Built an e-commerce T-shirt company called Swag of the Month.
• Sold a year and a half later, then joined Science, the incubator that had just launched Dollar Shave Club.
• Helped consult there for a bunch of their marketing in their portfolio, and then helped them launch an activewear brand called Ellie that we sold a year later to Bally Total Fitness.
• And then started advising and consulting for a bunch of brands around town. (I was 26 and had built a reputation for myself as building and selling to e-commerce brands.)
• A lot of other people wanted to know what I had learned and I didn’t want to work for them full time. Consulted and realized how broken the marketing ecosystem was and how, even to this day, 99 percent of marketers and agencies are just horrible at what they do, and the few that are good are hard to find and hard to work with.
• And so I just got sick of it.
• Built my own little SWAT team. Called it Hawke Media.

It was seven people in January of 2014. And now, a decade later, we’re 250 people. We’ve worked with almost 5,000 brands. We’ve built a venture fund. We’re invested in over a hundred marketing tech and e-commerce tech companies. We’ve got our own AI tool called Hawke AI that is digesting 8,000 companies, marketing, media, and revenue data in real-time and training AI against it.

Mike Allton: So you’ve worked with all these brands.

What are some of the biggest marketing challenges that you’ve faced working with bigger brands specifically? And how’d you overcome those with them?

Erik Huberman: Yeah, it’s places not talking to each other.

The advantage that small and medium brands have is that you can turn on a dime, and it’s one person usually making all the decisions for a couple of people when you’re talking about entire departments in different countries with some of the bigger guys.

When you want to do an email marketing campaign to complement a Facebook campaign, you’re talking about two different teams in two different countries with two different agencies. And so it’s just the nimbleness of it. It’s amazing to me.

But I consistently, even today, still run into companies that are consumer-driven companies that don’t have an email or SMS strategy. Like, email is not new. We’re long past the days of emailing [being] new. And I’m talking about brands that everybody listening would know don’t have an email marketing system whatsoever. And it’s just crazy to me. And it’s simply because they just can’t get through the “Well, who owns it? Is it e-commerce or is it marketing? Or is it data? And then they, you know, or is it IT? And then who gets to make the decision on which one we use?”

And by the time you get through that two-year cycle, no decision has been made, and the next guard comes in.

There are a lot of companies out there that just get stuck in the bureaucracy of it. And that’s probably the biggest challenge I see: they just can’t move, even when it’s hyper-lucrative and probably a low lift. No one can make the decision!

Mike Allton: That’s an opportunity for smaller and medium brands who can be more nimble. That’s something we’ve talked about a lot in other aspects, but definitely in this area, that’s a great example.

Do you want to do an email campaign to complement a social media campaign? Who do you talk to? Who owns what? Yeah, you’re right. And a huge bureaucracy. That’s a problem.

Erik Huberman: We’ll go into these brands, and we’ll even come through the CEO or CMO of—we’re talking Fortune 500 sometimes—and we’ll end up like in this quagmire of, “Wait, we don’t even know who to ask to get the stuff done we want to,” and then it just goes nowhere. We spend a year talking to different teams. And then it just falls off.

Success Stories

Mike Allton: So thinking about some of these larger brands that you’ve worked with in the marketing campaigns that you’ve run …

Can you share a success story? One of those brands that you’ve worked with where the strategy exceeded expectations?

Erik Huberman: Crocs is a great one. That’s a public case study we have—and we have to be cautious about what we’re allowed to share, and people are okay with us sharing—but that speaks for itself.

I’m not going to say we deserve all the credit for that, but Crocs has had a great resurgence, and we were able to bring just a Gen Z influencer army to get them back in the limelight as being relevant. They were just starting to get there already, so they had done a lot of the work themselves, but we were able to put a megaphone on it and get an army of Gen Z TikTok influencers to do a campaign for them that made them the go-to shoe of—was that 2022? And so, that’s a great one.

What I like—and some that I can’t share—but we did a great toy launch at Target where what we realized was that it was a holiday launch. We wanted to be the toy of the year, and we ended up succeeding because, again, it all goes back to, I think, the nimbleness of these big companies.

They don’t realize that, [with] digital marketing, you’re reaching real people. And if you use digital to push into retail, it’s not a common use of it, but you can be so targeted that it works well. And you’re also not competing very heavily because no one else is doing it. So it’s not like people are flooded with stuff to go to the store and buy on social because it’s harder to track that direct attribution.

So instead of people understanding it still works—and there are ways to at least get a sort of basic understanding of the performance of it because they can’t track it perfectly as you can with e-commerce—a lot of people don’t do it, which means the competition’s even lower, too. And you can crush it by driving to retail using digital. And so, when we’ve had customers and clients willing to do that, nine times out of 10, it’s been just gangbusters.

The problem is we can’t just say, “Oh, that was obviously this.” The toy company I’m talking to—we outpaced their projected velocity of sales by 8X because we ran the campaigns around certain stores. So we were able to say that those stores didn’t have that performance and which ones did.

What was the difference? This digital marketing campaign. And so that strategy, again. It’s hard to track and, people, it used to be that you couldn’t track anything. Then you can track a lot, and now you can track somewhere in between.

I think people have frankly become a little too dependent on the data and tracking side of things that they’re cutting off their noses to spite their faces and not just understanding that if you have a great product, these marketing channels should work. And you should be able to make money off them if you do it the right way.

Mike Allton: That’s a fantastic takeaway for retail brands.

I was interested in whether or not you’ve got a campaign that didn’t perform well, and what kind of lessons you learned from that experience.

Erik Huberman: I was just with the founder of a company. This is the hard part: We stepped into a brand that had already been in decline for a couple of years—but before that, it was a great brand, and we wanted to turn it around. We took digital overall, and from every metric we had, it was doing great, but the overall revenue just kept declining. I was like, “What are you changing?”

What I found out was that they were pulling out of stores. They stopped doing the other campaigns that they were doing. They stopped doing all the complimentary stuff, hoping that we would pick up the slack.

And the problem is that everything drives. And so, thankfully, we run best practices on these digital channels and the things we do day in and day out. And, again, it’s best practice. The variable isn’t us. I did this purposely; I focus mostly on scalable, repeatable marketing because that’s what a business needs to scale and be sustainable. The stuff we do doesn’t have a lot of opportunity to be a complete failure unless there’s something else wrong.

With a new company, it could be that people just don’t want the product. There’s not a product market fit. That’s possible. But when it’s a company that’s already got product market fit, sometimes they pull off the gas in other places that we have no part of. And so as we’re ramping up and starting to do well, they’re pulling all this down. And so in this case, all the other things that they had done, they thought they could stop doing. And so we were never able to get above water to catch up. And then, frankly, it got so bad.

I still, to this day, don’t understand how they had the negative performance they did.

I saw the CEO last week. We don’t work together anymore. There’s no bad blood there. We hung out and had coffee and caught up. It was more because we understood that neither of us could figure out what the problem was. And I’d say that one stands out to me just because sometimes there’s an X factor that you just can’t nail.

“I think any good business has to have natural tailwinds and natural success because you’re going to make mistakes, and you have to be able to have sort of a padding for that.

If you have to squeeze water out of rocks to get every sale you’re going to get for your company, it’s never going to work.

So there’s got to be a level of ease in some part of your business to get people in to get customers. If there isn’t, you probably don’t have a great business.”

Mike Allton: That is a fantastic example of the challenge of great marketing because nothing that we do happens inside of a box.

You’re doing a digital paid campaign. Well, your organic is going to impact that, and vice versa. And, to your point, stuff that you’re doing on the ground, inside of stores, that will also have an impact on the business. And it takes some work, and some folks with access internally to know: “Here’s all the things that we’re doing and the impact they’re having.”

The one thing you mentioned was having that repeatable, scalable approach with clients. It’s something we’ve talked about many times on our other shows where we’re talking with new agencies, and they’re building everything from scratch for every single new client.

How much do you tailor some of your marketing strategies for different retail brands? What are you looking at that might be customized just to ensure that they resonate?

Erik Huberman: It just depends on the brand, like whether we’re going to leverage more TikTok, more Instagram, more Facebook, more Google.

To be clear, this is an important distinction: It’s not about demographics. The demographic thing is long gone.

You can reach any demographic on any of these platforms. When people are like, “Oh, well, younger people on TikTok.” No, everybody’s on TikTok. From a demographic perspective, everybody’s on all of these. There’s how many, I mean, tens of millions in the U.S. on each one of these.

So stop—or until you’re a massive brand, that’s not something to even think about—but the context in which they’re receiving that ad and how people leverage those platforms is what would dictate it.

What’s interesting about TikTok is that the graph is more based on your interests, and the algorithms are based on what you’re interested in—not what you follow, who you connect with, or what you like.

And so you can create new demand and reach people that would never have engaged prior in a way that they’re used to seeing random things.

That being said, the algorithm on TikTok is not as good as it is on Meta yet, because it hasn’t had the time to mature. And so [with] Meta, you’re still getting a lot better targeting. And so it’s still outperforming, but, I think, over time that will change.

Certain brands just seem to perform better on one or the other. So we usually test them against each other. Google is more about answering existing demand. People are looking for something. So, if you have a product that specifically serves a need, you create the first—I don’t know—vegan hot chocolate, like that. If someone’s searching for vegan hot chocolate, you should be on Google. So we’re going to use Google for servicing a niche.

As you build your brand, as you do these other ads, as you get the brand out there, people might not remember your brand name, but they’re going to remember the problem it serves, and you want to make sure you show up then, too.

So it’s all these pieces that you pull in to figure out where you’re going to go, and those are the three main channels, obviously, but Pinterest is great, too. If you’re a fashion brand or a home decor brand is good on Pinterest, anything to do around weddings, anything to do around planning that people create Pinterest boards for, it’s a good thing to advertise on Pinterest.

Mike Allton: Love those distinctions between the channels and understanding the nuance of why people are on those channels in the first place: What is their intent? What are they thinking about? You know, where’s their frame of mind, when they’re using them?

What role does data play when you’re shaping campaigns for your clients? Can you even give us an example of what we would call a data-driven insight that led to some campaign success?

Erik Huberman: I think these days there’s more of a problem with treating data as gospel than not being data-driven.

I think everybody’s learned to be somewhat data-driven and—to answer your question directly—that’s where our AI system comes in.

Then this is a good example if you’re looking at your performance on Google ads from Q4 to Q1: This happened this year, and a brand went, “Our CAC on Google has gone up 18 percent from Q4 to Q1. Well, what’s wrong with Google? What are we doing wrong? Did we change our ads? Why is this broken?”

And we went and looked and we’re like, “Oh, look. The market—meaning across all the data we have—has gone up 23%. So you’re doing better in terms of your increase than the entire market. And from an actual hard number standpoint, you’re way outperforming the market.”

So if that 18 percent increase doesn’t work for you, it’s not a function of how we’re managing Google. We’re beating how other people are doing Google. It’s just a function of Google itself. And if you can’t afford to do this, we should change your budget and move it somewhere else or take your money off of there because this is what it is. We’re not squeezing more water out of this rock.

The problem is most people don’t use that kind of data/access. So they’ll see an 18 percent decline, and from the CEO down, they’ll be like, “What’d you do wrong? Why did you change your ads? We have to fix it.” And they’ll spend the next month trying to fix something that isn’t broken. It’s just changed.

And it’s kind of like: Your stock portfolio is up 15 percent this year. That’s pretty good. 15 percent in a year is great. Not if the S&P 500 is up 35%. That’s a huge miss, and without knowing what’s going on in the sort of global benchmarks and the data side of it, reading data on your own means nothing. That’s one issue I have with the data, the way people look at data.

The other one is what happened with Facebook in 2021/2022. So iOS 14, this infamous thing, basically what people talk about is that my performance declined when iOS 14 happened, and our performance on Facebook went to the toilet. And it’s so funny because it didn’t change performance whatsoever. I shouldn’t say whatsoever, but it didn’t change 95 percent plus of performance. And what I mean by that is what iOS 14 did: it made it so you could go from being able to track Facebook ads on an Instagram ad on a 28-day window, from when they clicked the ad, you could see for 28 days how it performed.

And it made it so you could only track for seven days, and it wasn’t as accurate as your ability to see the performance.

What’s funny is that nothing changed on the consumer side. People are still clicking ads and buying through Facebook and Instagram like they always did. But because these people couldn’t track that window instead of rationalizing that and being like, “Okay, I get it. So I can only track seven days now. So I have to figure out other ways to account for how much revenue this is driving over 28 days.” They compared it as if it were an apples-to-apples 7-day to 28-day sales cycle and just went over their performances. Facebook’s broken word out. And then you see the massive decline in E-commerce revenue throughout 2022 because, frankly, a bunch of idiots didn’t figure this out and were telling everyone else they knew what they were doing in marketing.

Hence my problem with most marketers and a great number.

We ended up in this place where the data was saying they were underperforming, but they didn’t know how to look at the data.

• The truth was, they weren’t underperforming. They were doing just fine.
• We even had this with a few clients who were like, “No, but Facebook is reporting this.”
• We’re like, “We get it. This is why it’s reporting that. Oh, you think you’re smarter than Facebook? Oh, all right.”
• And so that was one of the reasons we built the tool we did in Hawke AI. But also, it is crazy to me that people don’t have that one extra step of, “This is what the data says. Okay, but what does that mean? Like, what are you looking at?”
• And not understanding that Facebook data, they’re like, “Well, why would Facebook underperform or underreport?”
• Because they can’t report fully because Apple deletes their cookies now after seven days.
• It’s a very simple explanation, but that is what transformed e-commerce and digital marketing in 2022 when after the holidays, everyone went, “Oh, God, interest rates are rising. I’m not seeing the performance. We thought we would on Facebook because this Facebook dashboard says so.”

(And so, by the way, I am shocked that Facebook hasn’t done a better job of communicating this, but that is a huge shift and a good way to understand. Why you have to be careful about how you look at the data.)

Mike Allton: And it’s a great example of how easy it is for so-called experts to share misinformed opinions and yet get taken as gospel by businesses and other marketers who just don’t know any better.

We had to combat the same thing at Agorapulse, because almost a decade ago, if you had an app like ours and you were connecting with Facebook, it was a dedicated app, and those posts were shown as, you know, coming from Hootsuite or Agorapulse or whatever, somebody used a scheduling tool, and you could block those apps, which people could do.

And so 8-10 years ago, if you posted with a third-party tool to Facebook, your reach could drop, but then Facebook changed that. They stopped doing that. But a lot of folks continue to say, “Oh, don’t post to the third-party tool. It’s going to impact your reach.”

We had to spend thousands of dollars on a social media lab to test it, to prove to folks, “No, no, no. That’s not the case. Things have changed.” We understand that’s an uphill battle for many of us.

I’m wondering if you could also share some insights on when it comes to branding and storytelling because it’s a little bit different for retail.

And I think it’s even more different for larger brands who have that existing brand. How have you approached storytelling for instance, with them?

Erik Huberman: In everything you do, at the end of the day, generally, when we’re working with a bigger brand, they hopefully have their general story.

And so it’s just making sure to feed into that brand identity and that brand alignment and giving that, but I would say we’re getting early, and we’re helping develop their story.

This is something that I think has been talked about a lot in marketing, but because it became such a cliche, I think it got pushed against—which I think is just because people like to be contrarians and it’s just the legitimate thing—but I believe that all purchases, all spending, happens because someone has an aspiration.

Not in a grandiose way, but at the end of the day, I’m not buying new socks unless I’m unsatisfied with my existing socks—whether they’re not comfortable enough, they have holes in them, whatever, I’m buying a microphone because my old microphone doesn’t work, or it’s too complicated.

“The only reason you do anything is because you’re not satisfied with where you are. The only reason I get up and go downstairs is because I’m thirsty. If I’m not thirsty, I wouldn’t have gone downstairs for just the hell of it, if I’m bored. There are reasons people do everything. And I consider that an aspiration.

I’m aspiring to change my current state into something else. And so when I look at any brand story, it’s about figuring out what is that aspiration that I’m creating for my customers that is fulfilled when they purchase my products and that can be emotional, not just rationale.”

The rationale is, again: “My socks have holes in them. I need to buy new socks.” Emotional is “If I buy these socks, I’m helping homeless people get socks, too. And I need socks anyway. So I’m going to buy these socks because they’re helping people, and I’m able to help people while I also am taking care of myself.” That’s where the story comes in.

I think the problem is this is where I can talk about Hawke about performance marketing, this is actually what I mean, I believe in a lot of the brand marketing and the storytelling and everything that happens in marketing.

But I believe it needs to be thought through as to why because a lot of people will go out and tell a story. I’m going to make something up. “We’re going to have a T-shirt company that donates to a bird sanctuary.” And because we like birds, it’s like, “Okay. So if I buy your T-shirt, I help the birds. Great.” People who are passionate about helping birds will buy your T-shirts, maybe if they need a T-shirt, but that doesn’t even sync up.

“Why do I care?”

At the end of the day, this [question] is important in terms of the give-back side.

Blake from TOMS Shoes talks about this, too: At the end of the day, they need to want the product, too.

People talk about storytelling being such a compelling piece, but you have to have a good product. Like, and then the story helps you compete. But at the end of the day, your product is what matters.

And then all these other things are what build off that.

Telling a good story helps people with word of mouth. It helps them get over that buyer’s remorse. It helps them get over the hump and purchase. And it all has to feed into, at the end of the day, why they want to buy it.

TOMS Shoes is another good example. People bought this opinion from the founder Blake. They bought them because they looked good with skinny jeans, which were popular at the time. And that added a story. “We’re going to give a one-for-one and a pair of shoes to someone in need” is what gave people more of a compelling reason to talk about them, made them in Vogue, and made them an easier purchase. It helped a lot. It got them a lot of press, but at the end of the day, they did so well because of the product.

And that is a really important part of this storytelling: How does that story support why people want the product?

Because if it’s a far departure, it won’t work. It’s the same thing with building a great health brand and talking about health and wellness will work. But if you build a great running shoe brand, and then you try to talk about food all the time, which is a random one. You talk about being the shoes for people that like to eat.

It’s like, “Why do I care what shoes I’m like?” and that is what I see happen. Like, maybe it’s a great story on its own, but it has nothing to do with the product you’re creating, the aspiration that someone has to purchase their shoes.

Could you go for fashionable? Could you go for good-looking? Desirable? Sure. Can you go again, athletic, healthy? Sure. But it’s got to fit that piece of the story.

We’re a society and, I’d say, probably down to our genetics of storytellers. And so we want to hear the story behind it. We want to talk, we want to communicate, we want to have a narrative.

I think it all has to lead back to that product.

Mike Allton: That’s a really powerful point.

Because to your point, a lot of folks are trying to tell stories. They don’t understand the purpose of the story. It doesn’t have to be a Sarah McLachlan sad song moment to have that connection there, but it does need to be a connection. Like, your made-up example was perfect. What do T-shirts have to do with social media? With a bird sanctuary. Why do I care? Whereas, if we’re talking about homeless people and socks, I can instantly understand the connection that homeless folks are going to struggle to have necessities like clothing and so on.

How are you currently measuring the business impact, particularly when it comes to social media and the marketing channels for these kinds of retail clients?

Erik Huberman: Revenue. That’s what I care about.

Like, are we driving profitable revenue growth? We need to be growing the company. We need to be driving efficiently. And that is what we’ve always cared about.

That doesn’t mean we’re talking about day-by-day. I think that’s where the mistakes come in. And back to the data point, you know, the average sales cycle online for a consumer is somewhere between three weeks and three months for a product.

So if we’re measuring things, even monthly, you’re missing out a lot of the half-life of how it’s performing over time.

Measuring that performance and that growth and how you’re doing month over month, year over year—those kinds of things are definitely what we’re measuring in terms of success.

That’s what we’re focused on.

And don’t forget to find us on Apple, the Social Pulse Podcast: Retail Edition, and drop us a review. We’d love to know what you think. Until next time.