From your Uber driver, boss’s spouse, or your periodontist – everyone has an opinion on marketing

I want you to think about the last time someone questioned your accounting. Or pulled your CFO aside to say,

“I just feel like the depreciation schedule is off. My neighbor runs a landscaping business, and he does it differently.”

Never happens.

Nobody corners the head of manufacturing at a cocktail party to share their hot take on injection molding tolerances.

The general counsel doesn’t get unsolicited feedback from his college roommate about contract language.

But marketing?

Oh, marketing is different.

Marketing is everyone’s sport.

Because everyone has seen an ad, everyone has bought something. And apparently, those two facts are sufficient credentials to weigh in.

The CMO’s Husband Didn’t Like the Color – Is He a Marketing Expert?

I once sat in a packaging review where the CMO’s husband had looked at the label over dinner the night before. He found it “too busy.” He preferred the old one with its darker colors.

He was a periodontist. A good one, I’m told.

We redesigned nothing. But we spent two meetings discussing it. And of course, the periodontist never read the 12-page brief about the redesign.

Marketing advice from the boss’s spouse is the kind of market research no one asked for, and no one can ignore.

The spouse focus group.

The parent panel.

The “my daughter showed it to her friends, and they thought it was weird” usability study.

Here’s what those conversations have in common: the person sharing the feedback is not the target consumer.

They don’t know the strategy.

They haven’t seen the research.

And they have exactly zero accountability for the outcome.

But they have opinions, and those opinions travel upward at the speed of dinner conversation.

My Husband Didn’t Understand the Message

This one is a close relative of the first. The message wasn’t confusing. The message was clear to the 38-year-old female endurance athlete for whom it was written.

The message confused a 61-year-old man who doesn’t run and doesn’t buy this product, who was reading the ad on his wife’s phone while waiting for the game to start.

Good marketing is not supposed to speak to everyone. It is supposed to be spoken clearly to someone.

When it confuses people who aren’t that someone, that’s not a failure. That’s targeting working exactly as intended.

But try explaining that in a brand review when the VP of Sales says his wife showed the new campaign to her book club and “nobody got it.”

The book club wasn’t the audience.

The book club didn’t need to get it.

The book club, I say this with all due respect, was irrelevant.

You can’t say that in a brand review. So instead, you nod, take notes, and quietly keep the campaign exactly as it was, or you spend three weeks revising it into beige.

The Uber Driver’s Restaurant Recommendation

I used to travel a lot. And I’ve noticed something. The moment I get into an Uber in a city I don’t know, my driver will recommend a restaurant. Confidently. Often immediately.

Now, I want to be fair. Sometimes the recommendation is excellent.

But here’s what my driver does not know: whether I eat meat, how much I want to spend, whether I’m eating alone or with clients, whether I’m exhausted or energized, whether I want something familiar or adventurous. He doesn’t know if I’m pescatarian, if I had Italian for lunch, or if I have a shellfish allergy.

He knows what he likes. And he is sharing that with certainty.

“Everybody loves this place. You should eat here. All the locals love it.”

I’m not everybody, and why should I take his advice on food when he knows my name and that I’m going to a Marriott Courtyard just outside the city?

This is, more or less, exactly how unsolicited marketing feedback works. It comes from a real place. It’s genuine. The person giving it is not trying to be difficult.

But it is based entirely on their own taste, their own frame of reference, and their own completely separate life situation. It has nothing to do with your consumer, your category, or your strategy.

And yet, when that same energy shows up in a conference room, we treat it like data.

Why This Happens to Marketing and Nobody Else – Everyone’s a Marketing Expert

Finance has a moat. The numbers are the numbers. Nobody looks at a balance sheet and says, “I just feel like this column should be on the left.”

Operations have complexity as a shield. Supply chain decisions involve enough variables that most people don’t even try.

Marketing has the misfortune of being visible. The output is a thing people can see and react to. Everyone interacts with brands every day. That creates the illusion of expertise.

It’s the same reason everyone thinks they can coach a sports team. You’ve watched the game your whole life. You understand what winning looks like. Surely the decisions can’t be that complicated.

They are, of course, complicated.

And what looks like a simple creative choice is usually the result of consumer research, positioning work, competitive analysis, channel strategy, and approximately forty-seven meetings.

But none of that is visible. Only the ad is visible. And the ad looks simple. So, the feedback comes.

The Chairman’s Cousin and Other Official Stakeholders

I’ve had campaigns reviewed by people who had no business being in the room. The founder’s college roommate. The board member’s daughter, who was visiting for the weekend. The customer service rep who “had some thoughts” after seeing a social post.

One time, at a small food brand I was advising, the company’s largest retail buyer mentioned that his kids hadn’t heard of it. His kids were eight and eleven.

The brand was targeted at adults over forty with disposable income and a preference for clean labels. His children were, with great affection, the least relevant sample population imaginable.

We spent an hour discussing youth awareness.

The thing is, you can’t always fight it. The chairman’s cousin is still the chairman’s cousin. The retail buyer is still the retail buyer. Some feedback arrives wearing a badge you have to take seriously, even when the feedback itself deserves none.

The skill isn’t in dismissing it. The skill is in thanking people warmly, writing things down with great ceremony, and then going back to what the strategy actually says.

Three Key Takeaways

1. Liking something is not the same as being the audience for it. The goal of great marketing is resonance with the right person, not universal approval. If your campaign is working on the target consumer, the fact that someone’s spouse found it confusing is a footnote, not a finding. Know who you’re talking to and measure against that. Everyone else’s reaction is interesting, but it isn’t the test.

2. Confidence is not expertise. The Uber driver gives the restaurant recommendation with the same certainty as a James Beard Award winner. In marketing, unsolicited opinions arrive with exactly the same energy regardless of the credentials behind them. Your job is to listen politely, then go back to the people who represent your actual consumers. Their opinion is data. Everyone else’s is noise dressed up as insight.

3. Strategy is the immune system. When the feedback starts flooding in from people who aren’t the target, who don’t know the strategy, and who aren’t accountable for the result, a documented strategy is what keeps you from redesigning everything into a product that offends no one and excites no one. Write down the strategy. Share it broadly. Point to it often. It is your professional defense against the well-meaning opinions that would otherwise drive every decision.

Everyone is a marketer until it’s time to be accountable for the result. That’s when the room gets very quiet, and the periodontist goes home.

What’s the most memorable piece of unsolicited marketing feedback you’ve ever received? Drop it in the comments. I have a feeling this thread is going to be very entertaining.

Connect with Jeff at The Marketing Sage Consultancy. Interested in setting up a call with me? Use my calendly to schedule a time to talk. The call is free, and we can discuss your brand and marketing needs.

Would you like to read some testimonials about my work? Click here.

If you want to learn more about my new offering, The Trusted Advisor Board, click here for details. Feel free to email me at jeffslater@themarketing sage.com or text 919 720 0995. Thanks for your

Photo by Michael Kahn on Unsplash

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When The Ordinary launched under the DECIEM Company umbrella, it felt like a small, sharply focused rebellion against the beauty category.

DECIEM was a multi-brand beauty incubator. Instead of focusing on one line, it launched multiple brands at once, all rooted in science, transparency, and in-house formulation. Its most famous brand, by far, is The Ordinary, which has become a global hit. Other DECIEM brands have included:
NIOD, Hylamide, The Chemistry Brand, and The Ordinary (by far the largest)

Instead of glossy promises, celebrity packaging, and vague claims, The Ordinary offered clear ingredient callouts, clinical-looking labels, and prices that felt almost confrontational. That mix of utility, transparency, and affordability turned what could have been a niche lab brand into a global phenomenon.

This post examines the brand and marketing strategy behind The Ordinary, sketches the founders and ownership arc, offers an estimate of 2025 volume, explains their enemy and positioning, and closes with three practical takeaways for brand builders.

Origins and the founders

DECIEM was founded in 2013 by Brandon Truaxe and Nicola Kilner.

Truaxe brought a contrarian streak and a tech-like obsession with product formulation.

He launched multiple brands at once with a stated mission to demystify beauty and to expose the industry’s markup mechanics. Nicola Kilner functioned as the operational and strategic counterpart, helping scale the organization into a multi-brand, vertically integrated operation.

The company’s early years were chaotic and dramatic, and the brand survived leadership turmoil and the founder’s tragic death.

Eventually, DECIEM drew strategic investment, and in 2024, the Estée Lauder Companies completed the acquisition of the group. These milestones matter because they show how a disruptive positioning can be institutionalized at scale.

What makes The Ordinary unique: the Positioning

The Ordinary appears to compete on price and clinical efficacy.

That is correct but incomplete.

The deeper strategic insight is that The Ordinary used authenticity and transparency as an organizing brand idea.

Rather than framing competitors as using impure ingredients, The Ordinary framed the broader industry as guilty of obfuscation, hyperbolic claims, and cosmetic storytelling that hid the fundamental value proposition.

In short, their enemy was not chemistry.

Their enemy was inauthentic marketing and the category’s habit of selling beauty via aspiration rather than clear information.

The Ordinary inverted that script. It presented straightforward typography, plain bottles, and ingredient-first names to signal honesty and to empower the consumer with knowledge rather than persuasion.

This positioning created three seismic advantages.

• First, it lowered purchase friction by making product choice easier.
• Second, it built trust among skincare enthusiasts who value measurable actives.
• Third, it turned the brand into a conversation starter for influencers, editors, and online communities who could discuss percentages and compatibility rather than vague benefit claims.

Packaging and visual system

Packaging is where strategy meets signals.

The Ordinary’s lab-white boxes, clinical typography, and minimal labeling communicate science and seriousness.

That aesthetic also serves as visual shorthand on crowded shelves and small screens. While other brands fight for attention with color and photography, The Ordinary relies on legibility and a neutral grid.

The minimalism performs double duty. It reinforces the ingredient-first messaging, and it reduces perceived overhead, making price-point claims feel credible.

The simplicity is not accidental.

It is a deliberate brand lever that signals utility, positions the product alongside clinical or pharmacy brands, and streamlines content generation for social channels.

Distribution and channels

The Ordinary built its initial momentum through direct-to-consumer channels and DECIEM’s own stores.

As demand scaled, it expanded into mass and specialty retail partners, including major beauty and drugstore channels. Strategic retail placements amplified reach while keeping the brand accessible.

The combination of DTC and broad retail availability helped the brand control storytelling online while benefiting from discoverability in physical stores

.

2025 volume and scale (estimate)

Estimating volume for a private business that a public conglomerate now owns requires caution.

Public-facing sales data for the brand alone is scarce. Still, marketplace and online sales trackers suggest The Ordinary’s own e-commerce business generated north of hundreds of millions in annual gross merchandise value in recent years.

Conservative projections based on baseline and modest growth expectations place 2025 online volume in the low double-digit percentage increase range versus the prior year.

Put differently, the company operates at an accurate mass-market scale rather than at boutique, niche levels, and drives hundreds of millions in sales across channels.

That fact explains why large strategic investors were willing to consolidate ownership.

Competitors and category dynamics

The Ordinary’s success invited an immediate wave of lookalikes.

Brands such as The Inkey List, Good Molecules, Versed, and established players like Paula’s Choice and CeraVe compete on transparency, price, and ingredient clarity.

Each competitor takes a different angle.

Some focus on more explicit consumer guidance and ritualization. Others emphasize dermatologist endorsement and distribution in mass pharmacy channels. The competitive set pushed the category toward a new norm in which ingredient disclosure, clinical claims, and accessible price points are baseline expectations.

How social media built the brand

Social platforms accelerated The Ordinary’s rise because the brand’s product architecture is inherently shareable.

Single-ingredient narratives and measurable concentrations give creators content hooks that are easy to explain and compare.

The brand leaned into educational content, user-generated reviews, and community debate.

Forums and social networks turned serums into conversation topics and earned coverage from editors and influencers, amplifying that effect. The Ordinary’s minimal packaging helped here, too.

It reads well in short-form video and in editorial close-ups, and the brand leaned into community Q&A rather than aspirational celebrity storytelling.

Risks and limitations

The Ordinary’s stripped-back identity is not a silver bullet.

Minimal packaging can be perceived as clinical or austere depending on the audience. The ingredient-first approach can intimidate beginners who want a guided routine. Increased competition has led to price compression and a crowded aisle of similar propositions. Finally, scale brings operational complexity.

A brand built on radical transparency must maintain control over its supply chain and consistent product quality to avoid betraying the trust that underpins its positioning.

Three learnings for brand builders

1. Build an enemy you can own. The Ordinary did not merely oppose high prices. It opposed obfuscatory marketing. That choice allowed the brand to create a clear cultural contrast with incumbents and appeal to consumers who wanted an honest alternative.
2. Make your product architecture the content engine. When the product itself supplies simple, repeatable talking points, the community will do your creative work. The Ordinary’s ingredient-first naming convention turned every product into a content module that creators could explain, compare, and recommend.
3. Design for clarity and context. Minimal packaging does more than look good. It communicates positioning, reduces perceived overhead, and optimizes for the small-screen attention economy. But clarity must be matched with education. If your product signals expertise, provide the how-to education to make that expertise usable for customers.

The Ordinary is Extraordinary Because of Discipline

The Ordinary is a modern case study in how a coherent idea, executed consistently across product, packaging, price, and community, can rewire a category.

It did not win because it offered a discount. It won because it made honesty and ingredient literacy into a brand and a movement.

For marketers, the lesson is simple.

A disciplined enemy, a product truth that informs content, and a visual system that signals that truth can become the kernel of a powerful, scalable brand.

Connect with Jeff at The Marketing Sage Consultancy. Interested in setting up a call? Use my calendly to schedule a time to talk. The call is free, and we can discuss your brand, marketing needs, and challenges.

Feel free to email me at jeffslater@themarketing sage.com or text 919 720 0995. Thanks for your interest in working with The Marketing Sage Consultancy.

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Walk a trade show floor for ten minutes, and something odd happens. Everything starts to blur.

Booths that spent six figures on design become wallpaper. Brands shouting clever taglines fade into ambient noise. You stop seeing any of it.

This isn’t a failure of creativity. It’s biology. The human brain is a ruthless filter, and it is working against you before you even get to tell your story.

But the real battle happens at the supermarket. What brand will draw your attention in a sea of sameness?

Understanding how attention actually works, not just how marketers talk about it, is the difference between a brand that gets noticed and one that gets walked past.

Here are six things every food and beverage brand builder needs to know.

1. Faces and Voices Have Their Own Neural Highway

The face area in the temporal lobe processes faces with extraordinary speed and priority. Humans are wired to detect and respond to faces faster than almost any other visual stimulus. This isn’t cultural conditioning. It’s hardwired.

The implication for food and beverage marketing is significant and underused. Brands that put a real human face at the center of their story, not a mascot, not a founder name in a serif font, but an actual face with a personality and a voice, have access to an attention channel that most brands aren’t using.

Tabitha Brown built a spice-and-food brand on exactly this principle. Before there was a product, there was a face and a voice. Her warmth, her manner of speaking, her specific way of describing food created a neural hook that millions of people responded to involuntarily. By the time McCormick partnered with her to develop a full line, she didn’t need to introduce herself. The face had already done the work.

On TikTok and Instagram, faceless brand accounts almost always underperform accounts anchored by a human presence. This is not a trend. It’s neuroscience.

2. Emotion Doesn’t Follow Attention. Emotion Is Attention.

There’s a persistent myth in marketing that you first capture attention, then create emotion. The actual sequence is almost the reverse. Research by Antonio Damasio and others shows that emotional relevance determines whether something is remembered at all. Without an emotional signal, the brain doesn’t bother encoding the memory.

This is why purely informational content, the kind that leads with certifications, grams of protein, or supply chain transparency, struggles to create recall, even when it is accurate and interesting. Information without emotional charge passes through and leaves no trace.

Fly By Jing figured this out. The founder, Jing Gao, didn’t launch a hot sauce brand. She launched a story about a dish she couldn’t find in the United States, a childhood flavor that existed nowhere outside her memory. The Sichuan chili crisp had a specific emotional origin. Every piece of content she made connected back to that longing. People didn’t just buy the product. They felt something about it. And feeling something is the only reliable path to remembering something.

Ask yourself what emotion you are creating before you ask what information you are delivering. The emotion is the door. The information is what you say once you’re inside.

3. The Cereal Aisle’s Orienting Response

Man Cereal is a masterclass in category disruption through packaging alone. The cereal aisle has one of the most codified visual languages in grocery stores. Bright colors, cartoon mascots, or clean wellness aesthetics, friendly fonts, and happy families. It’s a category where every brand has unconsciously agreed to look like every other brand.

Man Cereal walked in wearing a completely different outfit. Dark, bold, no-nonsense packaging with the kind of visual energy you’d expect from a performance supplement, not breakfast food. The product itself is a genuine category innovation: 2.5g of creatine and 15g of protein per bowl, with no added sugar and no seed oils. But the packaging triggers the orienting response before the shopper reads a single word. It’s wrong for the aisle. And wrong for the aisle is exactly right.

The name is a pattern interrupt, too. “Man Cereal” is the kind of thing that makes you stop and read the box, even if only to figure out whether they’re serious. They are. And by the time you’ve processed that, the brand has already done its job.

4. Repetition Doesn’t Create Familiarity. Familiarity Creates Trust.

The mere exposure effect, documented by Robert Zajonc in the 1960s, is one of the most replicated findings in social psychology. People develop a preference for things they have been repeatedly exposed to, even without conscious memory of those exposures. Familiarity feels like trust.

This has a direct, practical implication for how smaller brands should approach media and distribution. One well-funded burst of attention rarely sticks. Consistent, lower-intensity presence over time builds something that eventually feels like a prior relationship.

Partake Foods is a good example. The allergy-friendly baking brand didn’t break through on a single viral moment. Denise Woodard built the brand through persistent presence: Black-owned business features, mommy-blogger coverage, school-lunch roundups, Whole Foods regional demos, athlete partnerships, and a steady drip of earned media and community appearances over several years. By the time Partake started landing national shelf space, it felt to buyers and shoppers like a brand they already knew. That feeling was the product of repetition working below the level of conscious awareness.

Consistency of presence matters more than any single big moment. The brain rewards the familiar. Give it enough chances to recognize you.

5. Your Brain Is Running a Threat-Detection System, Not a Design Appreciation Service

The orienting response is one of the most reliable findings in neuroscience. When your brain detects something unexpected, novel, or out of place in the environment, it triggers an involuntary shift of attention. You didn’t decide to look. You just looked.

This reflex evolved to help us survive. But it’s also why the most effective attention-grabbing isn’t always the prettiest or the most polished. It’s the thing that doesn’t belong.

Liquid Death understood this before most people had heard of them. Canned water in a black, heavy-metal-branded tall boy is a pattern interrupted. In the cooler, surrounded by pastel wellness brands, it violated every visual expectation for the category. Your eye went there first. Not because it was beautiful. Because it was wrong in all the right ways.

Most food and beverage brands do the opposite. They study the category, identify the visual codes, and optimize fitting in. That’s a strategy for avoiding notice.

Novel beats polished in the first three seconds. Every time.

6. People Don’t See What’s There. They See What They Expect.

Cognitive scientists call it top-down processing.

Your brain doesn’t process everything in front of you with fresh eyes. It runs predictions based on prior experience and only updates when reality doesn’t match the forecast. The rest of the time, you’re essentially seeing your memories rather than the shelf.

This has a direct consequence for brand strategy. If your packaging looks like the category leader, shoppers may not even consciously register it as a separate choice. They see the general shape of the thing and move on.

Fishwife, the tinned seafood brand, exploited this brilliantly. The natural foods channel had a long-established visual language for tinned fish: muted earth tones, nautical imagery, utilitarian packaging. Fishwife came in with bold colors, illustrated art, and a graphic sensibility closer to a record label than a grocery brand. Shoppers’ prediction engines had no filing system for it. The mismatch forced a double-take, and the double-take became a conversation.

The practical question for your brand: are you trying to fit into what buyers and shoppers expect to see, or are you creating a visual experience their brains have no easy template for?

Three Key Takeaways

Attention is biological before it is psychological. The brain doesn’t evaluate your brand on its merits before deciding whether to pay attention to it. It decides whether to pay attention in milliseconds, based on novelty, threat, and pattern disruption. If your packaging, booth, content, or presence doesn’t align with expectations, it will be filtered out before a single conscious thought is formed. Design for the orienting response, not the approval of a focus group.

Emotion is not a layer on top of attention. It is the mechanism. Brands that lead with information and follow with story have the sequence backward. Emotional relevance determines whether the brain encodes a memory or lets it pass. Find the emotional origin of your brand, not its functional benefits or ingredient story, and build your content from that core outward. Fishwife, Fly By Jing, and Tabitha Brown all understood this before they had distribution.

Familiarity is a product, not a byproduct. Trust in consumer brands is built over time through repetition, not through a single moment of attention. Consistent presence across channels, occasions, and communities accumulates into something that feels like a prior relationship. That feeling is exactly what converts a first-time buyer into a repeat purchase. Build for frequency before you build for reach.

Attention isn’t won by being the loudest brand in the room.

It’s won by being the most unexpected, the most human, and the most present.

The brands that figure that out aren’t just getting noticed. They’re getting remembered. And in a category as crowded as food and beverage, that’s the only game worth playing as you start your CPG journey.

Getting noticed is the starting line.

Connect with Jeff at The Marketing Sage Consultancy. Interested in setting up a call with me? Use my calendly to schedule a time to talk. The call is free, and we can discuss your brand and marketing needs.

Would you like to read some testimonials about my work? Click here.

If you want to learn more about my new offering, The Trusted Advisor Board, click here for details. Feel free to email me at jeffslater@themarketing sage.com or text 919 720 0995. Thanks for your

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