I read an article in this week’s New York Times about how Orabrush has been successfully selling its product via YouTube videos. Click Here to read article.
One of the key points of the article is how smaller companies like Orabrush are using YouTube to advertise. Orabrush has its own YouTube channel and many of its videos are hilarious, with most featuring a man dressed in a tongue costume Click Here to view Orabrush’s YouTube channel.
While the New York Times makes an interesting point, what was even more interesting to me was that it sounds like the inventor of Orabrush did not bring in any kind of professional marketing help for the first 10 years of the company’s life. While I am typically an advocate of not bringing in marketing until at least after your first $1M in revenue, there is one case where I think you must start doing strategic marketing right away. And that instance is when your product is a consumer packaged goods (CPG) product, like Orabrush.
The reason for this is simple: In the consumer packaged goods market, good marketing is a cost of entry. Retail buyers are some of the toughest buyers anywhere, and they are presented with solid strategic marketing plans from the likes of Procter & Gamble, Unilever and General Mills sales people on a daily basis. If you have a CPG product and don’t want to wait 10 years like the founder of Orabrush, you might want to make sure that one of your early investments is in someone who can help you get your strategic consumer marketing ducks in a row so that you don’t squander any precious meetings with buyers.
And, bummer for the rest of us that the giant talking tongue genre on YouTube is now taken.