We're told that startups must move fast or die. Everyone seems to know that or at least have a friend who says that. But until you've lived that, it might all seem a bit dramatic.
I worked in senior brand creative roles at Airbnb and Outdoorsy through periods of hyper-growth and change, including product launches, rebrands, vertical expansions, COVID and an IPO. So, I can confidently say that founders and early employees have plenty of reasons to outrun death.
Investors, equity, launches, margins, consumer sentiment, competition, ambition, valuations, press, fundraising, politics and regulation are all bearing down on you. Unlike companies that tightly manage business critical information, startups tend to share and discuss these kinds of issues openly. 'Radical transparency' and 'thinking like an owner' are common values held by founders.
Plugging into a company wired this way can be intense. New and consequential challenges pop up daily. A Fed announcement can shutter a division. An open-source project might render part of your business obsolete. An algorithm shift could destroy your SEM strategy overnight.
The only thing that's certain in a startup is change.
A Good Reason
In a thousand ways, your ability to adapt, focus and advance in a shifting landscape is the best predictor of success. However, there is an external factor that plays a role here. Think of it as a 'reason to wake up.'
When your business has a good one, something surprising happens. It becomes an energy source. Employees, investors, customers, governments, press and partners can all draw on it in their own way–to understand your ideals; to guide when challenges come; to inspire a brilliant innovation; to drive a team to do something impossible.
Elon Musk, a specialist in these last two arenas, calls this being 'hardcore', and he's right about that. But, I like to think of it in a slightly tweaked way: it's organizing your business around a core.
Planetary Magma-tism
Making this core bigger than any individual–or the business itself–is the most important feature of the core. It turns out consumers are drawn to businesses with a core–just as they are to church, football teams, ideologies, countries, novelists, political parties and Tom Hanks.
When I arrived at Outdoorsy, their core 'reason to wake up' was "to make memorable outdoor experiences accessible to everyone." It was a worthy goal filled with good intentions, but the leadership knew it could and should be more.
There were a few key reasons motivating the change, and they're probably not all what you think.
Why Bother?
First, Outdoorsy was experiencing rapid growth, so they needed a more crisp, inspirational mission that could drive a new integrated marketing program. For that, they needed a brand platform to give them a competitive edge and create efficiencies across their marketing activities.
Secondly, there were new innovations in the pipeline, so Outdoorsy needed to broaden its mandate to match their ambitions and investments. Startups shift and change so frequently that a rebrand can become a necessity very quickly.
Finally–and this is possibly what you were thinking from the start–on a gut level, the mission felt uninspired; it wasn't personal, aspirational or emotional. It also wasn't big enough.
No one wakes up in the middle of the night to find a new way to 'access the outdoors' unless they want to take a nature pee.
A Bigger Boat
After spending time with internal teams, owners, guests, founders and board members, a consensus emerged. Again and again, people would say that Outdoorsy's mission needed a revision.
Employees confided that they didn't join Outdoorsy to simply work in a peer-to-peer marketplace. They joined because they loved being outside. I mean, really loved it. Like, "I just hiked the Pacific Crest Trail" kind of love. Or, the "I'll be working out of my van this summer" vibe. Don't even get me started on Coachella.
The renters echoed the enthusiasm. Being outdoors had different meanings to each one we met with, but they were mostly telling stories about how their trip unlocked something profound and personal. Last time I checked, Marriott wasn't doing that.
For one renter, the trip gave them a chance to see what's been bugging their son without a screen between them. For another, it was the gift of waking up to an ocean wave instead of an alarm clock. So, clearly, the impact Outdoorsy was having on employees and consumers went far beyond the transaction.
In it for the Money?
To our surprise, the owners found Outdoorsy to be more than a matchmaker as well. Yes, it most definitely solved real-world problems that are vital to a small business like lead generation, inventory management, insurance, payments, vehicle tracking, customer communication, education, revenue realization and tax preparation. We'd built them a hardcore B2B SaaS app...for free.
So, it wasn't too much to say that Outdoorsy helped create economic freedom for our owners. But, interviews revealed that many owners were equally excited about sharing their love of the outdoors with others.
Our challenge was becoming clearer: build a brand that solved a much bigger set of human problems while also making the product innovations and vertical expansions seem inevitable. Oh, and make integrated marketing work for the first time.
Done.
0 to 1
Impactful brands are not successful because of the products they sell...their success and influence is the result of the beliefs they uphold. -Scott Hancock
We shared this guiding principle around the company and noted a pronounced uptick in head-nodding on all the little Zoom tiles. Our intent was to preview to everyone that our work together would involve shifting our focus from what we do to why we do it.
In that process, we surfaced and circulated a wide range of research that linked time spent in the outdoors to mental and physical well-being.
As we considered all of this, Alan Lightman published a powerful article in The Atlantic.
A problem worth solving
"Many of us invest hours each day staring at the screens of our televisions and computers and smartphones. Seldom do we go outside on a clear night, away from the lights of the city, and gaze at the dark starry sky, or take walks in the woods unaccompanied by our digital devices. With all of its success, our technology has greatly diminished our direct experience with nature. We live mediated lives. We have created a natureless world." -Alan Lightman
The article met a lot of the criteria we needed to build a strong core. It was bigger than the business or an individual within it. That was for sure. It was also a very timely and timeless insight that would surely resonate with consumers on both sides of the market.
Then we stumbled into something that really caught us off-guard.
Today, we spend 90% of our time indoors. It was not always this way. For more than 99 percent of our history as humans, we lived close to nature. We lived in the open. The first house with a roof appeared only 5,000 years ago. Television less than a century ago. Internet-connected phones only about 30 years ago. Over the large majority of our 2-million-year evolutionary history, Darwinian forces molded our brains to find kinship with nature, what the biologist E. O. Wilson called "biophilia"
For us, these facts had power on two fronts. To start, they pointed to a worthy mission. I challenge you to walk into a crowded room and find a single person who thinks spending almost all of their time indoors is a good thing. And yet, here we are...doing just that.
The other power this statistic offered was the cultural context that led to its existence in the first place. It provides us with an enemy that our business was well-positioned to highlight and defeat: technology overload. You could start to see a host of ways we could counter program against social media and screens to address a problem that is a genuine threat to our well-being.
But, perhaps the most persuasive aspect of the facts presented was the remedy. The passage below makes it clear why Outdoorsy was the right company for this idea.
"Social psychologists have documented that such sensitivities are still present in our psyches today. Further psychological and physiological studies have shown that more time spent in nature increases happiness and well-being; less time increases stress and anxiety."
Grounded in truth
This one article lead to a much wider search for studies. In that process, we surfaced hundreds of research papers from universities around the world. They approached mental health from many vantage points, but the vast majority demonstrated significant and measurable health benefits that are linked to increased exposure to nature.
Studies focused on everything from childhood and adult depression to anxiety and PTSD. Professor Gretchen Daily from the National Academy of Sciences concludes the following:
"Nature experience boosts memory, attention and creativity as well as happiness, social engagement and a sense of meaning in life. It might not surprise us that nature stimulates physical activity, but the associated health benefits – from reducing cancer risks to promoting metabolic and other functioning – are really quite astonishing.”
UC Berkley professor, Craig Anderson, PhD, comes at it from a different perspective and extends this premise:
“Experiencing awe in nature is a powerful way to impact people’s psychology, even as they’re doing something they really like to do. Our findings suggest that you don’t have to do extravagant, extraordinary experiences in nature to feel awe or to get benefits. By taking a few minutes to enjoy flowers that are blooming or a sunset in your day-to-day life, you also improve your well-being.”
The body of studies we read cite improvements to such things as blood pressure, cortisol levels, heart rate, mood and a number of other measures.
Taken together, it was clear that we could accurately state that exposure to nature is vital to our physiological and psychological wellbeing.
Rising Awareness
All of this research was already in the zeitgeist–metabolized through thousands of mainstream articles, podcasts, broadcasts and documentaries.
Over the last three years, led by Jonathan Haidt and others, the emphasis has been placed on the mental health crisis facing our nation and many other countries throughout the world. Not surprisingly, pandemic-driven isolation has added even more fuel to a trend that began long before COVID.
Notably, our municipal, education and health institutions are buckling due to limited resources and inadequate funding to address this widespread need.
Solving a Human Problem
These academic studies converged with customer research and competitive analysis which led Outdoorsy to a new brand positioning centered around wellness.
It starts with a revised belief:
And this led us to a purpose that opened up new horizons for the business:
This inspired a creative platform that positioned Outdoorsy as a gateway to personal growth, restoration and wellbeing.
Human-centered
Serving a higher purpose challenged us to re-evaluate the entire product experience and led to a fundamental shift from a transactional marketplace to a hospitality-obsessed community
Button to billboard
The creative platform inspired a new design system called Bonfire which was applied to the product and all brand touch-points.
Renters and owners became hosts and guests. Each user journey and every surface was reimagined from the ground up and filtered through the brand platform and the design system that came along with it.
New verticals
The Brand Strategy led to a new product vertical called Stays and drove investment in Outdoorsy-branded campsites and glamping experiences.
Product marketing initiatives also came to life looking for ways to further unlock the brand belief and monetize partnerships on a customer-centered way.
Edge
Ultimately, the brand platform emboldened Outdoorsy to take a feistier and funnier approach to culture through PR Activations that bring our values into relief through loud, absurd and highly sharable activations.
Repositioning Outdoorsy and building a new brand platform has created a core that will drive business growth for years to come. It has also created a flywheel effect for the business by increasing organic traffic, focusing innovation efforts and expanding margins.
