How to make product your growth engine – Lesson 1/3 by Yoto

If your customer can't tell everything they need to know about your brand JUST by looking at the product, your brand is never going to be able to pull its weight.

Huntly Gorden, Head of Brand at Yoto – the BRILLIANT kid's audio platform taking the global market by storm – shared some seriously insightful thoughts on this during his recent Up Club talk.

This is lesson 1 of 3 from Yoto’s playbook on how to build a brand that people are absolutely die-hard for.

It’s a deceptively simple idea that a great brand begins with a great product.

Huntly began the talk by telling us how early on he realised this.

He recounted a pub meetup with a friend who was working on the earliest version of the Yoto audio player.

At the time, Huntly didn’t have even the slightest interest in kids' tech, but he remembers being instantly convinced of how great Yoto was going to be; all it took was seeing the device in front of him.

Your product is the truest expression of your brand, a physical embodiment of your values and mission.

The better the product is, the more readily it gets bought and referred.

It becomes a self-sustaining engine that requires little maintenance.

So to build a brand people love, you’ve first got to engineer greatness into the product.

And to be clear, your product isn’t just the physical thing you’re selling. It’s the entire experience around it. Yoto built their product in layers like these 👇

Get these layers right, and they become a steady jumping off point for comms, design, ads – and everything else you typically associate with brand.

But over-rely on brand to sell your product, and you'll find yourself lost in a maze of endless marketing challenges and customer disappointment.

So if you’re building a business from scratch, or even just wondering why your growth might be stalling, this is your sign to ask yourself: is my product actually great? The best it could possibly be? So good that it can do most, if not all of the convincing?