The Disruptors, Part I: Digitally Native Brands and the Creator Archetype
Digitally native consumer and retail brands powerfully promote the creator archetype.

Although the consumer and retail industry has long been dominated by flagship corporations using economies of scale and large marketing budgets to maintain a loyal customer base, digitally native startups are proving themselves hardy challengers in more ways than one. After all, the consumer and retail giants are often sleepy innovators, reacting to trends after losing market share rather than seeking to anticipate and take advantage of upcoming changes in customer taste.

Digitally native e-commerce companies powerfully promote the creator archetype, provide greater transparency by cutting out middleman services, center brand identity around powerful influencers, and promote word of mouth marketing. These qualities position them to win over not only millennials, but also the digitally native Generation Z.
In the first part of my series, I will address the creator archetype.
I. THE CREATOR ARCHETYPE
Many digitally native brands identify and address the ‘one-size-fits-all’ drawback to larger, more established brands. When certain demographics or use cases fall through the cracks of larger product lines, digitally native brands can pick up the slack by allowing customers to personalize or even create their own products. The creator archetype promoted by these e-commerce companies empowers customers as active creators — in contrast to the passive consumer role encouraged by traditional brick-and-mortar companies.
There are two main approaches to the creator archetype that startups can take: 1) customer-driven, 2) personalization/concierge.
The customer driven model (Glossier, crowdsourced or crowdfunded companies such as Pebble) uses customer feedback on social media channels to design and test new products. A prime example of this strategy is Glossier, a beauty startup born from founder Emily Weiss’s popular blog Into the Gloss. As customers often face common problems ignored by larger beauty brands, Glossier’s crowd-ideated products — such as an invisible and easy-to-apply sunscreen offering substantial SPF protection, in contrast to commonly greasy and inconvenient sunscreens — are highly appreciated by its young customer base. After a product is released, customer driven startups engage in dialogue with consumers to understand how to improve their product, creating and strengthening content marketing platforms in the process.
The personalization model (Madison Reed, Ritual, care/of, function of beauty, Third Love, Curology, Lola) takes the creator archetype one step further by allowing customers to personalize their own product experience in a way that best suits personal pain points through a mini quiz or online concierge approach. It is relatively more difficult for larger companies to allow customers to design their own experiences in this way given the economies of scale involved in most supply chains, but many digitally native startups have designed their supply chains to accommodate for this kind of personalization. Since e-commerce products cannot be tried out immediately in person (in contrast to brick and mortar stores), personalized products tap into the creator archetype by allowing customers to make important product choices online and, in some cases, even visualize what their product choices would look in a tangible way, a la Madison Reed’s hair color chatbot combining an online quiz and customer-uploaded selfie in order to generate what customers would look like after dyeing their hair with Madison Reed products.
Personalization is especially effective when the creation aspect doesn’t just offer a product, but also bundles the product with a professional service (in the form of advice regarding the specific qualities of the customer designed product). In the process of creating a product, the customer answers questions designed to personalize the product with attention to individual medical, stylistic, or other needs; the product will often also include instructions for usage designed for the individual customer. In this way, the startup doesn’t just offer a personalized version of the product already available on brick and mortar shelves, but provides additional value by bundling, say, a multi-product skincare treatment with the equivalent of a visit to the dermatologist (Curology), a multi-vitamin treatment with what is similar to a visit to the nutritionist (Ritual, care/of), and a shampoo with the equivalent of a visit to a professional hair stylist (form of beauty). Given the streamlined convenience of the experience, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts — although its cost advantages over simply buying the product and service separately still need to be marketed properly to customers in order for customers to fully appreciate the value of bundling a product with a specific service.
In the process of creating customer-driven and personalization experiences that are mobile first or online first, startups are better situated than their larger competitors to collect and eventually incorporate customer data through AI/machine learning processes, creating a positive feedback loop that drives repeat purchases and increases brand loyalty by providing increasingly personalized experiences. For the frugal millennial and Gen Z shoppers who are growing in shopping power and often research a product’s price and quality before buying it, a highly personalized mobile and online experience is incredibly important.
For the consumer retail giants who may not want to develop more personalized homegrown brands to stave off competitors, acquiring or investing in successful upstarts (Bonobos, Warby Parker, Dollar Shave Club) has become an attractive option. But not every company has enough cash on hand to do so, and even when they do, these acquisitions are expensive and reactionary, only occurring after the company has experienced loss of market share. For the giants, catch-up is not a particularly fun game to play, but startups only stand to gain from the heating M&A environment and growing number of consumer retail firms opening startup accelerators (ABInBev, Mondelez, Unilever) and corporate venture capital arms (ABInBev, Unilever, Nestle).
For Part II, please stay tuned!
