Rachel Roberts Mattox
“A brand with soul is not interested in chasing trends. They are more focused on what is timeless and what is true about what they have to say.”
Rachel Roberts Mattox is a beauty brand developer, go-to-market strategist, advisor, and angel investor known for her expertise in guiding pre-revenue and early-stage brands to success. Her proprietary strategic process has transformed countless startups into award-winning brands and household names.
With experience supporting over 100 founder-led companies, her client roster includes startups, venture-backed beauty and wellness companies, and award-winning brands. She specializes in Brand Development and Go To Market Strategy, and also supports Brand Revitalizations, Brand Transformations, Campaign Strategy, and Fractional CMO needs.
Rachel is a founding member of THE BOARD, a vetted network of C-level consultants working across DTC retail, beauty, tech, fashion and lifestyle brands. She is also a graduate of Columbia Business School's Chief Marketing Officer Executive Education program.
How do you get brands in the right headspace to think about their soul?
I don't begin by asking about their soul because it's too woo-woo, too intangible. People can get lost in that question and they get nervous.
Instead, whether you're talking to a brand-new brand or a brand that has lost its soul and is trying to reclaim it, I try to get to the brand's core equities. In that sort of exploration, we tap into human and universal truths that will resonate deeply with the founder and the team.
I've been asked to define a brand's soul in the most basic terms, but it's not one thing. It's very elusive, but there are signs, one of which is that a brand with soul is definitely not interested in chasing trends or even becoming a trend. They are more focused on what is timeless and what is true about what they have to say.
Soulful brands are not rushing to market every quarter. They are taking their time with the craft, the quality, the materials, the ingredients. All of that is felt in the outcome.
Look for the soul through the whole lifetime of a brand, from the very beginning when it's usually a founder or a small team putting their stake in the ground and saying, "This is why we exist. These are our values, our mission, our vision, our promise, our why." Those things can shape, shift, and be received differently in culture. New teams interpret them differently. But they do not fundamentally change.
For a legacy brand trying to recapture that soul, how do you help them get there?
It begins with mining the history. It's a visual, archival sort of excavation. It's also written and, you know, looking at the words that were used in the earliest days.
I often look at the founder, who is typically deceased. Was that person an inventor? An innovator? A pioneer? Eccentric? Oftentimes, legacy brand teams take the talking points of their heritage, the five or six pillars, as a statement set in stone.
But history is not that neat and tidy. There are contradictions within a 125-year-old brand. Things get edited out along the way, and elements get deemed as not culturally relevant. Finding those unpolished stones in the trunk of the archives and saying, I know we tossed this aside, but let's actually re-explore this right now.
It's like we're unearthing a diamond with many facets, and the current brand we're looking at today is only reflecting a few of them. But there are so many more facets we can shine to reflect culture today, if you have the time, the patience, and a team willing to really do the excavation work.
“If building a community is a marketing objective, the first question is why? Do you see them as just a pool of consumers? Because conversions are not a community.”
What is the biggest mistake legacy brands make when trying to appeal to new customers without running afoul of their longtime followers?
You always want to, as fast as you can, get beyond the monolithic psychographics and the demographics of what you think your core customer is.
You have to start with a baseline understanding of your audience, of course. But once you actually have data to see who is shopping your brand, you should get much more granular about the microcommunities engaging with you. I am usually able to identify five or six microcommunities that make up the core audience.
When I'm working with a brand that has a really solid base but wants to reach new audiences, I encourage them not to think generationally. I can't tell you how many clients say, "We need to reach a younger audience. We need to reach Gen Z. We need to reach the Alphas."
Don't think about it like that. Audiences grow up. Any brand that said that they were a millennial brand or an alpha brand, where are they going to be in five years? It is such a short-sighted way of thinking about market expansion and market growth. It will come back to bite you. There are very recent cautionary tales of what happens when you go after a "younger" demographic, and the subsequent backpedaling when it doesn't work.
Instead, look at your microcommunities. What unites them? What are their subtle differences? Are there adjacent brands that would make for a good collaboration? Who else is out there with similar needs and desires? It demands a much more sociological exploration.
Every brand says they want to build a community. Great. What’s the first thing they should think of when doing that?
Not every brand is a community brand, and not every customer wants to be part of a community.
Maybe they just want to buy your product. It works better than the other products that they have tried. It aligns with them. Done. Don't invite me to a party. Don't expect me to join a loyalty program.
A brand absolutely must have strategies in place for the quiet, loyal consumer who has no interest in being part of a community. But if building a community is a marketing objective, the first question is why? Do you see them as just a pool of consumers? Because conversions are not a community.
Again, understand the microcommunities that already exist based on where they hang out, shop, study, and live. What conversations are they already having that your brand authentically can start engaging in, or that your brand can start? What other brands are part of this ecosystem that I'm about to be in? Can I partner with them?
“Unfortunately, for most big influencers and thought leaders, they have made attention their God. And when attention is your God, then your entire life becomes a studio.”
Founders are part of the story of their brand, but they can’t live inside of it completely. How do you approach that public/private balance for your own brand?
I have felt from the very beginning, when I had my own agency, that entrepreneurship is a spiritual journey.
When the brand is you, you have to ask yourself, "Are we required to bear our souls as founders and as leaders?" We talk a lot about vulnerability and how powerful that is, and how much that helps to unite and connect people. All of that's true.
But it's also essential for any human being to be able to retreat and go inward and do a lot of the work on themselves in solitude without being in the public eye, and without having to write about it or put it on an Instagram story.
We're in a cultural moment where a lot of us are trying to find that balance. That is a spiritual question that we have to ask ourselves, and only the individual can answer that. Unfortunately, for most big influencers and thought leaders, they have made attention their God. And when attention is your God, then your entire life becomes a studio.
We've also romanticized the founder's hero journey, right?
We've definitely put founders on a pedestal. Young kids want to be brand founders, as if it's not the hardest, most grueling, up-and-down, 20-year roller coaster.
Influencer culture has commoditized this in a way that works for them. They're able to sell their brand more because of this sort of public persona that needs to be crafted and shaped. But I think the tides are turning slowly. A sea change is happening for that sort of thing, where we're kind of over the performance.
There's a lot to be said about just putting your head down and doing the work. What we're going to see over the next five years is real transparency about the difficulties of being a founder and how unglamorous it actually is. And we're going to see the smartest founders leaning harder into their personal boundaries, their personal values, and not needing to build in public, and then coming out when they've got something big to say or show or reveal.
And then they'll be celebrated for just doing the work. I love that human beings are smart enough to know that we went too far, and that our hunger for hyper-connectivity is actually making us sick. This is not making us happy. There's no end to this game. I have a choice, so I'm going to make the call to just remove myself from this. It's freeing.