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Why a brand is a story that never stops unfolding
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Selling sleep masks is not an ideal opportunity:

🛑 highly competitive
🛑 low barrier to entry
🛑 lots of different solutions already offered
🛑 pricing was a race to the bottom

Yet Mark Zhang saw an opportunity to build a brand & mission attached to the product
Β Β 
In 2016, Mark and his co-founder went all in and launched Manta Sleep, starting with a sleep mask.

But Manta isn’t selling just masks.

It's selling us the best version of ourselves.

And this isΒ  the mission: β€œempower light sleepers to sleep better so they can do more”

Here are some of the lessons that Mark shared with me when discussing how he built the brand, and the mission around his product:


👉 Sell the customer on the best version of themselves

β€œOur focus is giving you the energy to create your best life. Sleep is just our strategy.”

We all have goals.

Whatever our personal goal is, it’s more achievable when we are performing at max capacity.
👉 Create an "Us vs. Them" Narrative. Having a shared enemy creates unity among others.

This is especially powerful when it’s a contrarian approach.
👉 Make a Strong Statement:

β€œThe Pro-Nap Movement is about creating a community that incites empowerment and change in our corporations and communities.β€œ


Be unapologetic.

Strong opinions are memorable.

Mark shares more on how he crafts his brand story, and has built a brand and product that people love to talk about online.
The brand, and the mission, has naturally built a group of vocal supporters.

For eCommerce, this social proof goes a long way in brand discovery, and conversion.

Here are 3 ways that Mark told me that he gets product reviews:

  1. Great product: We started off so first a lot of people really liked the product. So organically people just post them on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram. And so we pull those content and display it on the website and social channels.Β Β 
  2. Post-purchase email: We also have a post-purchase email autoresponder asking people to submit to user generated content.
  3. Ambassador Program: Within the last six months, we also started an ambassador program, essentially engaging our most active and loyal customers with. Basically a loyalty program that encourages them to produce even more user generated content that we can then funnel back into the marketing mix.
Mark shared a lot about his process in building the brand, and mission, of Manta Sleep.

>> Read more insights and listen to the full convo here<<
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Gen Furukawa
Co-Founder, Prehook

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