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Imagine you’ve invested years into building an incredible product, driven by sleepless nights, a dedicated team, and unyielding passion. Finally, the day arrives to unveil your creation to the world. You press the proverbial button, anticipation coursing through your veins. But then, silence. No media coverage, no rush of traffic, just a trickle of interest. Panic sets in as you ponder how to face your team and investors.
This scenario, all too common, underscores a crucial lesson in today’s competitive market. The secret lies in the art of storytelling. While it might sound generic, effective storytelling is more critical now than ever.
The Shift to Brand-Led Marketing
We can partly blame Apple for this shift. When Apple allowed users to opt out of tracking, it upended the performance marketing industry. Costs per thousand impressions (CPMs) skyrocketed, and giants like Facebook reported massive losses.
With technology advancing rapidly, the differences between products, especially in the smartphone industry, have become negligible. Minor variations in price, design, or features no longer captivate consumers. The real battle now is in creating an attention-grabbing brand or campaign.
Crafting a Compelling Story
Consumers today have limited attention spans and countless options. They don’t need to upgrade their smartphones annually, and they certainly don’t have the bandwidth to care about the numerous similar products flooding the market. As marketers, we must adapt by embracing strategic storytelling that makes a lasting impression.
When founders are close to their own product, they’re often under the belief that it will sell on its own merits. Of course this can be the case for some companies, however, 99% of products are similar to dozens of others. This is more apparent as a journalist. When you’re receiving 50 to 60 pitches per day, and as a journalist you’re covering consumer tech and startups, you tend to get pitches around very similar products and it’s often hard to differentiate them. So the key for brands is to establish social proof and craft a narrative that resonates on an emotional level.
Take Jellibeans, for example, a B2B startup launching a generative AI platform for the fashion industry called jelli.studio, which at its core, enabled its users to quickly output new or optimized fashion designs with an array of design tweaks or iterations. One of the key selling points this startup had was a database of 10 million data points, which for an investor could be impressive, but for a journalist is near-meaningless in 2024. Databases even in the fashion industry are a dime a dozen.
In fact, we had two major challenges we’d have to overcome for Jellibeans.
First, it wasn’t exactly the first generative AI platform for creating fashion collections. CALA for example comes to mind. So that meant we didn’t have the benefit of claiming to be ‘the first’, which is often a go-to angle as CALA could have a stronger claim to this.
Second, the claim of having a large database alone we knew wouldn’t resonate on its own with the journalists. And part of this realization stems from our work with crypto startups. Once upon a time, back in 2017-2019, every company would aim to one-up their competitors, claiming that they had the highest Transactions Per Second (TPS) in the industry, leading to dilution of its meaning and significance. Talking about the size of a data set, not to mention in 2024, was no different.
We had to think one level higher. Specifically, tie the size of the database to the key benefit of having a proprietary database of this size and caliber, within the context of competing databases in the market.
This meant that it wasn’t the database size itself that was worth talking about. Rather it was a shift in the perception that we wanted to communicate. It wasn’t necessarily the size of the database, but rather what the database of this size could do that other competitors couldn’t offer. In fact, talking about the database alone often is found to be too technical for many (though not all) journalists.
Instead, we centered Eleven International’s task around building a story around what impact the end beneficiaries (jelli.studio’s customers) would have from having a robust data set to work with in the first place.
First and foremost, Jelli.studio was created to use generative AI to improve the design of a creator’s collection based on current trends. And this aims to improve the sell-ability of the design itself. For any designer or even suppliers large or small, this is a major benefit to improving their operations and efficiency. But as referenced earlier, Jelli.studio wasn’t really the first to offer a SaaS of this nature, which complicates finding a unique positioning.
To refine the product’s positioning, we finally turned to 10 million retail data points that Jellibeans had amassed over several years. We made the objectively provable argument that Jelli.studio had the most robust independent database on the market – unlike most databases that were used solely for proprietary purposes like Farfetch or Shein and not open to consumers as a SaaS solution. Plus, it was arguably more quantifiably accurate than the industry leading trend forecasting service, WGSN.
On the back of this massive database, when compared to other generative AI design platforms on the market Jelli.studio was by far the most likely to outperform and offer on-trend optimizations that could make a collection retail-ready.
At the same time, with generative AI increasingly entering the conversation as more journalists were exploring the broader implications of OpenAI’s GPT-4 toward the end of 2023, the timing was relevant (though admittedly early). We sought to draw attention to a new, yet practical type of use cases for generative AI within the fashion industry. Not to mention within an industry that was still heavily reliant on using human analysts to identify the latest fashion trends and was ripe for disruption.
But in addition, at Eleven International, we think of expectations and results on the basis of odds. The probability that a journalist might end up wanting to cover a story. And with every announcement, we aim to optimize the odds in our favor. For the launch of Jelli.studio, this was no different.
While we found a position that just might help the story stand out, we also (through a lot of back and forth) aligned on adding to this the investment from Aussco, among the largest knitwear manufacturers for the most influential high street brands. This would enable us to increase the odds of landing coverage in publications that often would only cover fundraisings like TechCrunch.
And all in all, the launch was a success, landing in retail, fashion and tech publications including WWD, Just Style, TechCrunch, Retail Technology Innovation, Daily Front Row and Grazia.
Francis Bea is the founder and managing director of Eleven International.
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