 | |||||||||
| |||||||||
| | |||||||||
 Hi Marketing Bestie, First I would like to say Happy Half Birthday Week to my wife. Yes, we celebrate half birthdays at our house. Second, I'm back being scared to start a new show because what if I hate it. I need serious recs on shows to binge. I've been watching Lioness and Ted Lasso. But need some others. And once I start I can’t not finish so I can really lose a month if not careful. Was this email forwarded to you? Sponsored by Vibe.co Your customer is watching TV with ads. SPARKNOTES FROM THE PODCAST 5 WAYS TO LAUNCH IN A NEW MARKET WITHOUT LOSING YOUR BRANDJena Wolfe wanted to be a magazine writer in New York. Ended up in advertising instead when the freelance checks stopped covering rent. Spent almost 15 years running creative agencies before making her first move brand-side as VP of Marketing at Goop Kitchen. She's led the brand from a single California concept to expansion across markets with wildly different personalities: fast, high-intensity New York. Slow, sun-soaked San Diego. Each one demanding a completely different playbook, while somehow still feeling unmistakably Goop Kitchen. Her approach to entering a new market isn't about reinventing the brand. It's about knowing exactly what never changes and building everything else around the local culture. Listen to the full episode here where Jena breaks down how she launched Goop Kitchen in New York and San Diego with completely different campaigns, why she kept the menu untouched in every market, and why she believes marketers need to stop playing it safe. 1️⃣. Know What's Sacred To Your Brand Before You Enter A New Market.Jena's Take: "I think you have to understand who you are. Just like a person, a brand has to know what it believes in, what it cares about, what it absolutely won't change. For us, it's pretty easy because it's baked into the food that we serve. We have this long list of no's, but our yes list is delicious food that makes you feel great." Before Goop Kitchen touched a new city, Jena knew exactly what could never move: the food itself. Gluten-free. That non-negotiable core became the filter for every decision that followed. Brand partnerships, photography, language, campaign tone. If it didn't align with "delicious food that makes you feel good," it wasn't Goop Kitchen, no matter how good the opportunity looked on paper. Having that clarity meant she could move fast and flex hard on everything else, because the 1 thing that couldn't bend was already locked down. Takeaway: Write down your brand's non-negotiables in 1 sentence, the same way Jena did: delicious food that makes you feel good. Test every new market decision, partnership, or campaign against that sentence. If it doesn't reinforce it, don't do it. That single filter lets you move quickly without diluting what makes the brand recognizable everywhere you go. 2️⃣. Resist The Urge To Localize The Product. Localize The Story Instead.Jena's Take: "The menu didn't change. We didn't launch with an exclusive dish. We brought the goop kitchen that everybody loves in Southern California and Northern California now to New York City. The number one selling dish was the Brentwood Chinese chicken salad. In LA, it's the teriyaki chicken bowl by far, but in New York that salad is the forerunner. I think people want that taste of LA in New York." When Goop Kitchen launched in New York, they didn't create a New York-exclusive menu item. They brought the exact same food that worked in California and let New Yorkers discover it on their own terms. The surprise: New Yorkers didn't want a localized menu. They wanted the actual taste of LA. The Brentwood Chinese chicken salad, an LA-coded dish, became the top seller in New York specifically because it represented something people associated with the West Coast. What she did change was the campaign, the local partnerships, and how the brand introduced itself. The product stayed constant. The story around it adapted. Takeaway: Before diluting your core product for a new market, ask whether people actually want the authentic version of what made you successful elsewhere. Test the unmodified product first. Change your go-to-market story, your local partnerships, and your positioning to fit the new market, but resist the instinct to alter the product itself before you have real signal that it's needed. 3️⃣. Match Your Campaign's Energy To The City's Actual Pace, Not A Generic Brand Voice.Jena's Take: "New York is fast and it's intense and it's high paced and it's rushed and it's high low and it's dirty and it's glam, it's all those things at once. And San Diego is slow and beautiful and sunny and easy and clean and relaxed and not stressful at all." Jena ran 2 completely different campaigns for 2 completely different cities, and neither 1 used the same tone. For New York, she partnered with a Liberty player, a New York City Ballet principal dancer, a PR maven, and a viral Instagram account of grumpy older Brooklynites. The energy: fast, gritty, high-low, unapologetically New York. For San Diego, she partnered with pro surfer Rob Machado and his daughter, building the entire campaign around the meditative, unhurried rhythm of surf culture. 92 seats. A dine-in space designed to mirror the slow pace of Del Mar. Same brand. Same non-negotiable food values. Completely different emotional register, because the cities themselves have completely different registers. Takeaway: Before launching in a new market, spend time understanding its actual pace and culture, not just its demographics. Is it fast or slow? Loud or quiet? High-low or polished? Pick local partners and campaign tone that mirror that energy authentically, instead of exporting the same campaign voice you used somewhere else. The tone should shift even when the product doesn't. 4️⃣. Choose Local Partners Who Represent Different Facets Of The City, Not Just The Biggest Name Available.Jena's Take: "We partnered with Jonquel Jones who's a forward in the New York Liberty, Jovani Furlan, who's a principal dancer of the New York City Ballet, Kelly Cutrone, who's an epic PR maven, and a few other Old Jewish Men who are an Instagram account of these grouchy, kind of crabby, older Brooklynites. We wanted to show there's something on our menu for everyone." Instead of picking 1 massive celebrity to front the New York launch, Jena assembled a mix of people who each represented a different corner of the city's identity. An athlete. A ballet dancer. A PR insider. A viral account of cranky Brooklyn old-timers. The message wasn't "here's 1 famous person who likes us." It was "we understand every version of New York," reinforced by matching that diversity to an actually diverse menu: salads, pizzas, wraps, bowls, rotisserie chicken. She used the same logic in San Diego, tapping surf culture specifically because its unhurried, patient values mirrored the pace she wanted the brand to represent there. Takeaway: When choosing local faces for a market launch, resist defaulting to whoever has the biggest following. Build a mix of local personalities that each represent a distinct slice of that city's identity and lifestyle. The goal is showing you understand the full range of who lives there, not just borrowing 1 person's audience. 5️⃣. Take The Risk That Feels Scary Instead Of Defaulting To What's Logical.Jena's Take: "I'm a risk taker. I always ask myself, what's the worst thing that could happen? And if I could live with that, I'm all about the risk. I think you have to take big swings and really know who you are as a brand, and then take some scary bets, because when it pays off, it pays off in a really big way." Jena's marketing hill: most marketers default to the logical, safe move. Turn on Meta ads. Run DoorDash promotions. It's the path of least resistance and it's defensible in a meeting. But she points to the bigger bets Goop Kitchen made instead: designing a full dine-in restaurant space from scratch, partnering with surfers instead of predictable food influencers, betting on unproven local personalities over safe celebrity names. Her filter for risk isn't recklessness. It's asking what the actual worst-case outcome looks like, and deciding if she can live with it. If she can, she takes the swing, because the safe move rarely gets remembered. Takeaway: Before defaulting to the "logical" marketing move, ask what the actual worst-case outcome of the riskier option looks like. Write it down. If it's survivable, take the bigger swing instead of the safe one. The campaigns that get remembered and drive outsized results are rarely the ones that just turned on the obvious channel. Sponsored by Wrike Before you go, did you see my rant about the Marketing Ops paradox yesterday? IN A MEME  OPEN TABS 🍹: Updating my travel bucket list *I wrote this with impact.com 1 last question: what's your favorite Marketing event you've attended? Your friend, Daniel | |||||||||
|
