The audio and video are in Spanish. These notes are a translation.
Today I have as my guest Guillermo Villegas, cofounder and Chief Marketing Officer of Zebrands, one of the largest e-commerce companies in Mexico. Before Zebrands, Guillermo was an executive at Linio and Procter & Gamble.
Zebrands started as a mattress brand, Luuna, and it has quickly expanded into other categories such as travel, home, and sports products, with more than 10 additional brands. Zebrands has become one of the companies that does digital marketing best in Mexico.
Today, Guillermo and I talk about:
- How to measure and increase the effectiveness of your digital marketing
- The biggest mistakes in digital marketing
- How to experiment with few resources
- And what to do to restart growth when your business stalls
I hope you enjoy my conversation with Guillermo Villegas of Zebrands.
Youtube Timestamps*
[01:38] - Intro to D2C
- How did Guillermo arrive in the fascinating world of startups?
Guillermo has said that eventually he started to get tired of the bureaucracy and slowness of Procter & Gamble, and that he was drawn to Linio’s chaotic, fast environment.
Naturally, as a startup grows, more processes and hierarchies get established.
- How does he keep what happened at Procter from happening as Luuna grows, and from that driving away new talent with an entrepreneurial mindset like his?
Something curious about Luuna and Zebrands is that they took inspiration from direct-to-consumer brands such as Casper in the US, which were on the rise in 2015 and, in the end, did not turn out to be such successful businesses.
Today, this category has been “burned” for venture capital investors.
- Why is Luuna succeeding and Casper is not? What reasons does he attribute that difference in business results to? Is it the market, the execution, or something else?
Guillermo: “When we started Luuna, digital marketing was a virgin field. You could arbitrage a lot of things. Today, it is very saturated.”
- What have been the most significant changes in the digital marketing landscape from when they started versus today? And given that, what have been the most significant changes in Guillermo’s way of thinking about digital marketing?
- If he had to start Luuna again, would digital marketing be as effective a channel as it was back then?
[32:31] - Performance Marketing Frameworks
Alfredo Castellanos: “the #2 at Facebook and Google Mexico told me that Luuna is the best company at digital marketing and the gap with second place is enormous”.
In a hypothetical case of starting a startup and evaluating whether Facebook and Google are the best channels for the business.
- How should they think about performance marketing as a way to grow the business, from the most basic level? There is this concept of Product Channel Fit. What key variables should you evaluate before putting resources into it?
At Luuna, they have high-ticket products whose purchase decision takes longer, such as a mattress or a bed.
They also have low-price products whose purchase decision is faster, such as sheets and pillows.
- What role do these kinds of variables, around a product’s characteristics, play in their digital marketing strategy?
Success in performance marketing depends not only on how much you spend on advertising, but on how much you experiment with the message.
- What has Guillermo learned about the message itself? How should you think about the message? And what is the role of data, creatives/copy, and iteration in what you say to your potential customers?
- How much does a marketing team’s ability to experiment matter?
- Do they have any system or process for pulling insights out of those experiments?
Talking about conversion in general, the message and the website play an important role, but assuming you take someone to a good website.
- What does a very good conversion mean? What does a very bad conversion mean?
There have been stages where Luuna’s sales slowed down, or growth simply cost a lot more.
- How does Guillermo analyze the problem in these situations? What is his mental model? Is it a funnel? And if it is a performance marketing error, where are the most common errors or bottlenecks?
- When someone asks him for advice, is there any common error in how funnels are built that affects conversion?
Episode Mentions
You can find Guillermo on LinkedIn
Discover More from the Startupeable Podcast
Listen to every episode at startupeable.com/podcast.
Subscribe to the newsletter to hear when a new one comes out.
Follow Enzo Cavalie on X: @enzocavalie.