It is increasingly difficult to build brand loyalty in today’s saturated market.

“Acquiring customers is now so expensive and so competitive” Lauren Kleinmanthe founder of PR firms Dreamday and Quality Media said last Friday during an Inc. 5000 panel. “The barrier to entry for all of these brands has never been lower. »

Despite this, Klienman’s companies, one of which ranked #719 on Inc.The list of fastest growing companies this year is thriving.

The same goes for Jesse Merrill, co-founder of cottage cheese brand Good Culture and Katherine Homuthfounder of sustainable tights brand Sheertex and parent company SRTX, the technology behind it, who joined Kleinman for the discussion.

How did these successful founders build a loyal following in such a crowded market? Their approaches differ, but all three brands have something in common: they have what Homuth calls a “defensible” idea.

“If all you have is brand differentiation, and not infrastructure or supply chain or truly defensible intellectual property or something that makes you truly unique, I don’t think you’ll be able to turn this wheel and grow quickly. “, she said. “You’re going to grow the way the market allows you to grow. »

Merrill, who was previously vice president of marketing at Honest Teasaid he got into cottage cheese because of what he saw during a trip to the grocery store in 2014. The yogurt section “had all this sex appeal, all this innovation” , he said, while the cottage cheese section seemed to be “stagnant.” » and “asleep”. He saw an opportunity to change that.

As an organic, high-protein, creamy product with modern branding, Good Culture stood out to millennial and Gen Z shoppers: “We spoke to the younger consumer, and it really resonated very well. significant.

Homuth, a serial entrepreneur who owns several patents, brought innovation to another stagnant product in 2017 by creating Sheertex’s iconic ripstop tights.

She decided to develop a technology, not a consumer brand, and only did so out of necessity: “I wanted to produce technology that could get other brands thinking about a product. And it turns out we had to start going direct-to-consumer to teach people what the product was before any brand would want to work with us.

It took time, effort and about $75 million, Homuth said. But as more customers experimented with the tights, confidence grew. NOW brands such as Skims establish partnerships with it.

Kleinman, meanwhile, said she created “performance PR” after years of frustration with the metrics typically used by PR agencies. These agencies often present the number of impressions through press hits, even if “none of these publications really translated, necessarily, into traffic or revenue for the brand”.

She said PR performance instead allows her businesses to say, “Hey, this article generated X amount of affiliate traffic, X amount of affiliate revenue. » With this information, clients can more easily quantify the value and impact of their team’s work, which can be a powerful differentiator in a highly competitive industry.