What Makes a Brand Meaningful? A Nine by Nine Report Retrospect

Jul 10, 2020

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What makes a brand meaningful? We sought to answer this question in our recent report, Nine by Nine: 81 Brands Changing Our World. In this episode, we sit down and reflect on the report and the categories included, and even talk about what is coming up in Part Two.

Nine by Nine: What Is It and How Was It Received?

Nine by Nine is our report that asks the question “What makes a brand meaningful?” Spoiler alert: There are nine answers! Nine categories and nine brands that exemplify those nine answers.
The report was sponsored by Klaviyo - they made the report possible and lent a lot of creative energy into making it.
9x9 was our first time being featured in GQ, Women’s Wear Daily, Sourcing Journal, Adweek, Morning Brew, Market Insiders, Business Insiders.
Nine trends, nine answers to “What makes a brand meaningful?”:
Community Driven
New Luxury
Hundred Club
Prime Challengers
Audience First
Purpose Driven
CARLY (Can’t Afford Real Life Yet)
Late Stage Retail (or Anti Late Stage Retail)
Local Heroes

The Proposal of Nine by Nine: Why?

The things that consumers value most about a brand differ, depending on what stage of life they’re in, what their income is, and many other factors. So in order to answer “What makes a brand meaningful?” we have to answer “What is a brand?”
Sucharita Kodali, who has been on the show many times, said that a brand is a promise. What makes a brand meaningful is when the brand fulfills that promise and the value they’re providing helps a business or consumer in a specific way - for instance, with Prime Challengers, helping businesses/consumers part ways with Amazon.
“This report is for a brand operator who is trying to take in the entire total landscape of everything that’s happening in eCommerce, retail, direct to consumer, and everything that’s digitally enabled in the retail environment. What is meaningful to a consumer? It depends on who the consumer is.” - Phillip Jackson
We didn’t want to just create another list of brands. We have created a system with weighted rubrics within each category, and our scoring system is open to view. On top of this, we received our information from many different angles of different types of operators.

Prime Challengers

Amazon comes up in a lot of conversations about retail. Aman Advani, on Merchant to Merchant, said that there are a lot of brands who stand for more than transactional commerce and that the spirit of that is moving away.
“We’re moving into a world that’s more soulful. We’re moving away from transactional commerce as a culture and brands need to stand for something bigger. Rather than calling out Amazon directly, there’s a deepening and a hunger from the consumer to have a better experience… the brands that are noted on Prime Challengers help accomplish that.” - Phillip Jackson
Target and Shipt come in at number one - because they are using a much more targeted brand strategy, playing by the D2C playbook, and have a more community centric model versus Amazon’s top down approach.

New Luxury

To understand New Luxury, we have to define Old Luxury: exclusivity, quality, ‘white glove’ brands.
New Luxury is about current times, being in the know, and information. New Luxury is tied to drop brands - knowing when the drop is happening, knowing the right people, being involved in the right thought processes and cultures, and understanding ‘hype’ cycles.
Everyone is a retailer. StockX is our number one, which some would be surprised to see: “Just because something is resale doesn’t mean it’s not luxury.” - Brian Lange
New Luxury is about discovery - an introduction and orientation to an elevated experience: “Aêsop is helping a millennial man discover gender neutral skin care and self care. Lord Jone is introducing CBD to the upper middle class. Haus is introducing aperitif culture to millennials.” - Phillip Jackson

C.A.R.L.Y.

CARLY is a consumer psychographic from the acronym “Can’t Afford Real Life Yet,” that might be Gen Z but not necessarily constrained to it. It depends on sharing expenses with other people - and the way CARLY spends its money is deeply personal and considers every purchase very highly.
“Starface is interesting in that it’s taken skincare - and where skincare in the past would be used to conceal the blemishes you have, Starface celebrates them and draws attention to them rather than drawing attention away from them.” - Philip Jackson
Starface resonates with the CARLY ideal of seeing the world as fundamentally flawed and celebrating those flaws for the sake of authenticity.

Community Driven

These brands aren’t only prioritizing their relationship with their customer, but their customer’s relationships with each other - giving them the space and environments and safety of being able to embed themselves with each other.
Peloton is at the top of this list because they’ve done a great job of building a ‘tribe’ that can relate and connect their consumers with each other.
These brands have the ability to make and survive missteps because of their community support.

Listen to Part 2 of this episode: Episode 168: Rethinking Everlane on the Nine by Nine Report.