Why Solo Stove Was Stoking the Wrong Fires

Welcome to "A Different POV," a new series from The Variable where we delve into the complexities of modern marketing through the lens of our agency's experts. In this edition, we chat with N. Kate Wilson (Masten) , Senior Director, Communications Strategy who has led communications strategies for several outdoor brands including Char-Broil , to unravel the intricate balance between brand awareness and performance marketing.

In the whirlwind that is marketing, it's easy to mistake noise for impact. Solo Stove's recent campaign with Snoop Dogg, serves as a vivid reminder: the flash of viral success doesn't always kindle the fires of business success. And that can happen for several reasons – but most often because of a disconnect between sales and marketing, and misguided expectations.?

Let’s get into it with Kate …?

There has been a lot of conversation in and around the industry about the on-going challenge of awareness driving and brand building versus performance marketing as it relates to Solo Stove, but is there a larger context that many people are missing? Was/is Solo Stove up against market factors that would make any and all marketing challenges harder than those that could be solved with what amounted to a PR stunt??

Kate: Yes, absolutely. Snoop is a scapegoat here for bad business forecasting. This campaign was designed to drive awareness and expand the brand’s reach. By those measures, it was wildly successful - the likes of which only Snoop could achieve. But what is clear now is that those awareness goals might as well have been vanity metrics; the real goal was immediate sales.?

In the last five years, marketing’s success has been driven by an obsession with sales immediacy. Ironically, it’s an obsession fueled by the explosion of brands like Solo Stove which saw unprecedented pandemic growth without significant awareness investment. While we would all like to believe pandemic sales growth wasn’t a global marketplace anomaly, it was. The pandemic was a boom for higher ticket outdoor and home products, but there wasn’t a universe in which consumers could maintain that spending.?

Asking Snoop to immediately course correct that trend would be like asking Michelangelo to paint the Sistine Chapel overnight. Marketing drives sales, but it isn’t a panacea.?

That convo on awareness vs. performance isn’t going to go away any time soon. What’s the one piece of advice you can give to marketers who are trying to figure out the right balance between the two?

Kate: The right answer is to still aim for a balanced approach.?

Demand has to be both captured and grown. But that’s easier said than done in today’s marketing environment. Certainly look to capture as much as possible of today’s current demand, without losing sight of scale. A big part of the solution is ensuring that long-term investment is accountable for measurable growth. Vice versa, short-term investment needs to be accountable for incrementality. It isn’t today.?

My other advice is to make marketing part of an integrated growth solution, especially in the case of downward-trending sales. If marketing is better integrated into sales strategy, product strategy, distribution strategy, etc., there is less room for finger-pointing.?

Solo Stove's experience underscores the importance of setting realistic expectations for marketing campaigns. How can businesses align their leadership teams around achievable goals and KPIs?

Kate: Too often marketing is held responsible for goals they didn’t set. I’m not saying that happened here, but it isn’t unusual. Marketing forecasting needs to be very clearly aligned with business forecasting and budgets set accordingly. That includes setting current and future sales expectations, which need real buy-in from all levels. Otherwise, like with Solo, it’s all a facade.?

If marketing continues to be seen as a line-item expense, marketing and leadership teams will be perpetually misaligned.?

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