Kristen D’Arcy: Building a Lifestyle Brand on the Right Foundation—Storytelling, Data, and the Power of Brand Love
The CMO of HoMedics shares her full-funnel approach to evolving the respected consumer product company into a true lifestyle brand.
For over 30 years, Detroit-based HoMedics has been a leading name in wellness, with home health innovations ranging from massage devices to air purification to spa products. Chief Marketing Officer Kristen D’Arcy joined HoMedics last year amid a rebrand to help expand the brand story and grow their e-commerce business. With over 20 years of experience at major fashion and beauty brands like Ralph Lauren, Coty, and American Eagle, Kristen brings a global perspective to the consumer product space and a full-funnel emphasis on building brand awareness while driving new customer acquisition. She stopped by The Continuum to discuss HoMedics’ path to lifestyle brand status, driving trial, and why marketing teams must foster their internal brand love.
You’re coming up on almost a year at HoMedics. How have you approached the challenge of HoMedics, which has been a more down-funnel search-driven business than the fashion world?
I was actually brought on board to do both of those things. There's an opportunity to drive our DTC with efficient lower funnel tactics, like paid search, paid social, and affiliates, to grow our e-commerce business while also growing key retail partners globally. At the same time, we can drive the brand by turning on new channels like TikTok as well as partnerships and establishing content plays. We want to be thought of as the health and wellness destination.
What's so interesting about HoMedics is that we don’t have a direct competitor. You might think of Therabody with massage guns that could compete against our massage products, but we also have air purification, mindfulness, and sleep devices. We really cut across the entirety of the health and wellness space; we go with you when you wake up in the morning all the way through to when you go to bed at night. It gives us a really interesting opportunity to build this brand.
There’s been so much talk around brand purpose post-pandemic. How do you think about centering values in the HoMedics brand story?
We're really starting to define those values now. When I joined the brand a year ago, I inherited some initial work on a brand refresh—a new logo and new guidelines around imagery, typography, and colors—led by our chief growth officer, Daniel Kaufman. The opportunity now is to bring all that to life and deepen the layers of brand values underneath what had just been established.
Last year in Q3, we launched the first-ever brand versus product campaign, and we saw double-digit growth in our ecomm channel, which was exciting. As I mentioned earlier, that campaign showed how our products go with different people from morning to noon to night. The objective was to demonstrate how consumers can breathe better, sleep better, feel better, and live better due to engaging with our products.
Now that we're thinking about deepening that, how do we further define ourselves? One way is to talk about injury prevention. If we believe, and we do, that we can help you live better, then what better way to do that than to prevent injuries before they occur? We’re looking for the right content and tips and tricks from an editorial perspective to delve into this value.
“We really cut across the entirety of the health and wellness space; we go with you when you wake up in the morning all the way through to when you go to bed at night. It gives us a really interesting opportunity to build this brand. ”
You also announced a partnership with Bring Change to Mind last year, moving the brand more into the mental health space. Can you talk a little bit about that partnership process?
Absolutely. Let me just start by saying we love that partnership. Glenn Close founded “Bring Change to Mind” to destigmatize mental health issues and provide the right tools to high school students so that they have them in their toolbox as they face life's challenges. We really believe in this approach and now how much it is needed today.
Our partnership highlights one of my favorite products, Drift, a mindfulness sand table that helps promote meditation and relaxation. From a marketing angle, we want to give everyone permission to pause, which is rare today. Drift allows you to pause. It creates mesmerizing patterns you control with an app on your phone that allows you to relax and drift away into a calmer place.
Wellness and self-care are such prominent topics on social media now. How do you incorporate social influencers into the HoMedics mix?
We've had an always-on program with micro-influencers because these people are doing self-care routines all day long, they’re trusted from a word-of-mouth perspective, and they have zealous followings who are really engaged. Now we're exploring shifting budgets into influencers with much bigger followings as an efficient source of new customer acquisition. We also dipped our toe into TikTok with Drift last year and had excellent results through content engagement and sales, so we're looking to scale that tactic across the entirety of the HoMedics portfolio this year. We know we can’t establish ourselves as the health and wellness destination without a lot of trusted content.
As part of the rebrand last year, was there a rethink around your audience segmentation and who your target consumer is?
We have a pretty wide target audience—mid-30s until mid-to-late-50s, men and women. That was the audience we targeted with our brand messaging campaign last year. When we go down to the product marketing level, however, we know that each product has a different target, and some may have multiple audiences. Take Drift, the sand table I mentioned earlier. It's meditative in nature and promotes mindfulness, so there’s a really easy opportunity to target people who are into yoga and healthy living. But there’s also a tech component because you change the sand pattern using an app on your phone. We have hundreds of new patterns coming out every month, some that are tied to trends and culture, others that might be linked to seasonality or holidays. The techie crowd loves that aspect, so we can have paid advertising for them that looks different. Of course, drift is also a work of art of sorts, so we can also tap into the home décor audience who showcase their homes.
That’s just one example of a single product you use to go after three target audiences by playing up different features and benefits.
“We've had an always-on program with micro-influencers because these people are doing self-care routines all day long, they’re trusted from a word-of-mouth perspective, and they have zealous followings who are really engaged.”
HoMedics products are kind of unique in that they are meant to be long-term and dependable solutions. How do you balance acquisition-driven marketing with ongoing customer satisfaction and retention?
We're lucky because we have this wide array of products, with some pretty good innovation always in the queue. From a new customer acquisition perspective, we can have always-on campaigns that talk about our existing portfolio while also using rollouts of new products to appeal to new audiences.
We've also doubled down over the last couple of months on retention efforts, which is everything from retargeting to email to SMS. Due to these initiatives, we've already seen triple-digit sales increases over the last year. We've also made some major changes strategically from a segmentation perspective and quantity perspective, and we're starting to explore things like subscription and loyalty programs.
I've heard you speak about how important it is as a marketer to nurture a sense of brand love, especially for consumer-driven products like HoMedics. How do you nurture brand love within your team? And which HoMedics products do you have at home?
It helps as a marketer when you love the products you're trying to get other people to buy. We have a calf compression product, which I was a little dubious about. We were on set for our brand campaign shoot last summer with a bunch of products, and I remember my calf was sore because I was coming back from a knee injury, and I had run earlier. I put the calf massager on and turned it up to the highest compression setting, and it felt incredible. I had it on for about 10 minutes and immediately felt better and relaxed. I still have it at home and absolutely love it. I’m sure the entire marketing team feels that way about at least one of our products.
It sounds like HoMedics products tend to be the solution you didn't even know you needed, like the calf massager. How do you approach driving trial?
We tried to do just that in Q4 of last year with a couple of events. We did a pop-up HoMedics Zen Den that featured five to seven different key products to get them into consumers' hands. We held yoga and meditation classes and brought brand ambassadors who showed off products like Drift. We also had massagers in there, and customers could sign up for sessions where a professional would use the massage gun on them.
We got rave reviews and great content from influencers who hadn’t been aware of our full array of interesting products. We are trying to find ways to move that concept forward to bring the brand to places with high foot traffic and relevancy.
“ Glenn Close founded “Bring Change to Mind” to destigmatize mental health issues and provide the right tools to high school students so that they have them in their toolbox as they face life's challenges. We really believe in this approach and now how much it is needed today.”
In addition to your work with HoMedics, you’ve been on the board of St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital for several years. Could you tell us a little about your experience there?
I had the splendid fortune of being asked to join by the board chairman, Jim Schoolfield, right after I moved out to LA from New York. Of course, as a brand, everybody's heard of St. Jude, but it wasn’t until I joined that I learned how powerful this organization is, not just curing children’s cancer but also covering all costs for patients and their families. The families, particularly the children I’ve met over the last couple of years, could not be more thankful for St. Jude. It's been interesting to explore the opposite end of the brand spectrum and figure out from a fundraising perspective where we can get the most bang for our buck to help these families.
June 6, 2023
