Are You Positioning Your Brand Correctly?
A Roundtable Discussion with Executives From Doris Day and Canopy
The way you position your company in the eyes of your customers is the most make-or-break decision you can make. Who are you selling to? What problem are you solving for them? Why should a customer buy from you? All these questions need answers, and if they aren’t the right answers, it’s going to be a pretty rocky road. So when you hear about a humidifier that’s being positioned as a beauty product, what do you think? Good idea or bad? Well, for the guys at Canopy, it turned out to be a great idea.
“Educating people around the skincare story for humidifiers has been a major initiative that we’ve really leaned into,” Eric Neher, CMO at Canopy, said. “But then what we saw actually, as we got into the market was… maybe the secondary group of customers, like one ring out from that super tight ring that we started with. We found that those people were coming to us naturally because a lot of people search every month on Google for ‘best humidifier.’ There’s just a lot of search activity. We were finding that both based on how customers were finding us and how the press was placing us, we weren’t just the humidifier for beauty. We show up on the list of the best humidifiers against all of the legacy brands who positioned their humidifier just as that thing for your baby or your sick family member. So that’s been really, really interesting.”
Joining Neher in helping to build Canopy into a successful company is Justin Seidenfeld, CEO at Doris Dev and Co-Founder of Canopy, and Lucas Lappe, Head of Product and Co-Founder at Doris Dev. Doris Dev is a product development agency that has helped scale companies like Blueland, Magic Spoon, BioLite, Supply, Lalo, and many more, and Seidenfeld and Lappe lean into their experience there to guide them with Canopy and beyond.
“It’s been very enlightening on both sides as a brand owner and then as a service partner,” Seidenfeld said. “And I think being involved with both — Lucas and I straddle both Doris Dev and Canopy — we’ve been able to make better decisions, more informed decisions, both for the brands helping them do things more efficiently, but then also as a service partner to service some of the Doris Dev clients in a better fashion, because we understand some of like the risks or the issues as a brand owner too.”
Sometimes, though, Lappe and Seidenfeld’s broad scope of product experience needed to be reigned in for Canopy to succeed.
“When Eric started, Canopy was a million things,” Lappe said. “It had so many features, it had all these things. We wanted to talk about everything. And Eric came in and was like, well, that doesn’t make sense. You’re not talking to anyone here. And he really crafted Canopy into the brand it is today that speaks to the right number of people. Before we were only speaking to, effectively, one person — a beauty consumer who hated their humidifier — and now we’ve started to speak to more and more people with the same product, but we allowed Eric to the brand to allow that conversation to grow.”
To hear more about the strategies the Canopy team put in place to succeed, tune into Up Next in Commerce.
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