19. Marketing Post-Pandemic… and Post-iOS with Stephanie Bregman, CMO of Manly Bands

Stephanie Bregman is the Chief Marketing Officer at Manly Bands. The brand has an easy-going and hilarious voice, but Stephanie works behind the scenes as the science-based marketing professional who keeps everyone aligned with a common “why” and clear direction.

In this interview on E-Commerce with Coffee?!, we learn why Stephanie believes in “taking marketers’ opinions out of the equation.” She sees marketing decisions elsewhere made based on assumptions and personal preference, but she instead found success looking at the right data in the right way. Listen in for her insights on what numbers matter today and how to use them in omnichannel marketing success.

What to listen for:

• The interview opens with Stephanie telling the story of Manly Bands. Its origin is an empowering one—with one customer’s dissatisfaction with a status quo, an idea was born. Stephanie explains how the idea was merged with top technology and a clever marketing strategy.
• Stephanie stepped into the CMO position ready to roll with the punches. Global disruptions like a pandemic hit industries like wedding bands particularly hard when weddings were postponed and canceled, but she was ready. Even today, Stephanie is still excited by the growth opportunities, because: “who doesn’t want to sell a client a product at one of the happiest moments of their life?”
• Right as lockdowns started to sweep the country in 2020, Stephanie held a meeting and said, “all the stuff we were going to do is going away. We’re going to have a totally new way to talk to our customers.” Her focus was simple: “What could make someone laugh when there’s so much stress?”
• Stephanie then digs deep into some of the shifts Manly Bands had to make with recent changes in consumer thinking. They already had a killer brand voice going into the pandemic, a sort of “wingman” vibe that customers found instantly relatable. However, Stephanie and her team quickly learned how short the shelf life was on certain jokes. Listen to the interview for the full story.
• Manly Bands has an all-star customer service team that takes real agency to find opportunities for customers and for the brand. Listen to the full interview to hear what Stephanie says about how that kind of company culture is built.
• Brand voice is something Stephanie’s team has mastered in a truly remarkable way. In the interview, she discusses how that kind of brand voice comes from a team ready to evolve its voice over time. Every time a new campaign is launched, one of the questions Stephanie workshops with the team is, “what will our voice be for this?”
• Being present on multiple marketing channels is different than being on multiple channels with a consistent brand voice, Stephanie assures us. “This is a big missing part of the omnichannel strategy.” Stephanie avoids this common problem by filtering every campaign on every platform through the team’s shared “WHY.”
• Stephanie also digs deep into some of the new beta programs on TikTok and trends in video content in general. Listen in as she explains how Manly Bands often gets 1,000 new followers from one single video!
• The interview then dives into Stephanie’s insights on the iOS 14 update. It’s admirable for a company like Apple to focus on better consumer security, she says, but the unintended consequences will cloud what benefits there are. Listen to the full interview for all of Stephanie’s predictions.
• The show wraps with Stephanie’s suggestions about how brands can use data. “Looking at consumer data, we’re getting cloudy information and it’s getting cloudier,” she explains. Looking at A/B testing brings bigger benefits, and Stephanie leaves no doubt as to why.