Bonobos and the joy of shopping

I would lie to you if I said that I enjoyed shopping. The last time I went to shop for new clothes in a physical store was at least five months ago and given that I had to return the merchandise after a few days, it was not a happy experience either. It’s not much better with online shopping: every time I find myself visiting some web shop, I am much more intrigued by marketing strategies and technology the shop employs rather than actual merchandise it sells. So when I became a fan of Bonobos – up and coming web brand selling male pants - Facebook robots probably shook their head in disbelief.

The thing about Bonobos is that their pants look good on a male bum and they made sure to register this fact on any visitor coming to the website. Out of curiosity, I clicked on one item, then another one and another one and before long I was making a mental note to come back to the site for some shopping the next time I travel to the US. And why shouldn’t I: selection of cuts and colors was big, prices affordable and each pair of pants was accompanied by great pictures and concise product description. Plus the website was offering free shipping, no-questions-asked returns and somebody human to talk to in the customer service.

All cuts and colors you can dream of

Only later did I realize that Bonobos was actually that same apparel company that has raised  a whopping $18.5 million in venture funding a couple months ago. So when I heard Jason Calacanis introducing Andy Dunn, the founder of Bonobos, on the latest episode of This Week in Startups podcast, I was psyched! Andy talked about how he and Brian Splay got started by selling pants from the back of the car and how they shared the frustration many men feel when it comes to shopping for pants. He mentioned how the company received its angel funding from professors and MBA students at the Stanford Business School, where Andy studied at the time, and discussed the economics of running a web business with big inventory.

The most interesting part of the interview, however, revolved around Bonobos’ approach to marketing. And here I would like to quote Andy Dunn:

Selling an established brand is about sales engine marketing, SEO, because you are capturing demand that already exists. When you are launching a brand, you are actually trying to create demand for a brand that doesn’t exist in consumers’ mind. Display advertising - preferably as personalized as possible – is great for that, so actual Facebook ads are a great source of customers for us. PR, blogs and word of mouth referrals tend to work very well.

The positive effect of word of mouth marketing is nothing new when it comes to promoting brands, but it was a bit of a surprise to hear CEO’s enthusiasm about the effectiveness of Facebook campaigns. We have conducted in-depth interviews with several of our customers last week and while all of them relied on Facebook ads for customer acquisition, they were lukewarm about the effectiveness of this channel. So where does that discrepancy in results come from? Well, here is how Bonobos approaches Facebook advertising:

Facebook is the only paid acquisition channel we use. We do not target people interested in fashion, it’s the 18 to 4o year old guys we are after.  We know their top three movies are The Godfather,The Shawshank [Redemption] and Caddyshack. They like to play sports and stay active. 60% of these guys live in New York, California, Illinois, Boston, Philadelphia and Washington D.C. With so many campaigns we can be very analytical about tracking: decide based on the results, which of these campaigns we shall invest in further, which ones need to be updated on the content, and which ones we need to retire.

Did you catch that? Bonobos knows their audience so well, they can name top three movies of their customers off the bat. No wonder the company is doing so well. Now if Andy Dunn can make his ads work on Facebook, where users come to lose themselves in social gossip and virtual farming, imagine the kind of engagement he would achieve via other digital channels. What prevented him (and other smart marketers) from doing exactly that was the lack of data necessary to drive such finely targeted campaigns outside of Facebook. Well, Spockly addresses this problem by building rich customer profiles around your emails, in effect, allowing you to take the targeting capabilities of Facebook to other means of communication.

You upload your emails within the system and several minutes later they are updated with additional information we find for you on the web. After that you create a desired segment within your subscribers’ list and export it into the actual platform you use for marketing. At the end of the day, the only thing you need to run better campaigns is not technical skills or sophisticated software, but rather willingness to learn from the results of your campaign as you go along. Bonobos’ serves as a perfect illustration of how it is done in real life settings, for even weary shoppers like me get all excited when it comes to buying khakis from Andy Dunn.

Seriously, though, Bonobos makes some amazing pants. Go get some!