5 Key Marketing Success Factors for DNVB Brands

Unclassifiable and innovative, Digitally Native Vertical Brands (DNVBs) have been built on consumer expectations to evolve their products and services while shedding traditional distribution networks. Despite these common points, it’s difficult to fit DNVBs into a specific and unique model… However, they share similar know-how and execution methods (agile method, test & learn…). Trustt reveals the 5 key marketing success factors applied by DNVB brands.

A Vertical Industrial Model

Unlike a traditional brand or marketplace model, a DNVB operates a vertically integrated industrial model by handling the design, manufacturing, marketing, and distribution of the products and services it offers itself.

Replacing the economic model of traditional companies with a holistic product model shows a willingness to take risks, experiment, while relying on intuition and process observation. The corporate culture of these DNVBs, which is highly digital, allows them to adapt with agility to the evolving needs of consumers – utility, durability, environmental impact, recyclability… – and to the constant advances in digital technology.

A Digital “Direct to Consumer” Business Model

Owning their technology and data, the primary goal of DNVBs is to control the entire relationship with their consumers by creating a close connection with them without intermediation. This approach, known as “customer-centric”, places the customer at the heart of the brand’s priorities in order to:

• Offer products in line with the needs and desires of personas,
• Co-create with customers a product that meets their expectations and uses to avoid overproduction and excessive consumption,
• Advocate transparency with customers who are seeking meaning and value,
• Develop the brand’s e-reputation while enhancing its visibility on the Web through the creation of a sense of belonging and a loyalty bond with customers,
• Produce much narrower but increasingly specialized and personalized ranges,

To achieve this, DNVBs have become champions in developing an engaged proprietary community! They call upon influencers in the short and medium term to promote the engagement rate of prospects. Thus, customers get involved, sometimes even before the product launch, by giving detailed and authentic reviews on the products. In this context, Trustt allows you to establish initial contact with influencers who are consistent with your brand image and who, in the long run, can become your best brand ambassadors.

Digital: A Distribution Lever

DNVBs choose the short and direct circuit by selling predominantly from their own website or on social networks: a single inventory, to facilitate management and be able to adapt to an omnichannel approach. This mode of operation thus allows reducing infrastructure costs and facilitating operations. In return, these pure players that are DNVBs must offer on their e-commerce site a new seamless user experience in order not to lose their prospects and customers.

Note: Currently, despite the consistency of this model, some brands that have reached a stage in their development – like Sézane or le Slip Français – choose to open stores or a showroom. These places allow customers to test, touch, or experience the product without necessarily generating revenue.

Consumer-Centric Marketing

The close connection that DNVBs offer via social networks (Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn…) contributes to feeding consumers’ need for transparency and authenticity. Marketing, put at the service of customers, must necessarily meet their expectations: better quality products, fair prices, unique and memorable experience, strong social and societal commitments… Indeed, making offers that correspond to the expectations of a customer community is a way to embody change and take on social responsibility.

In this sense, the content is no longer advertising but still engaging. Thus, the various storytelling techniques showcase original and unique content to captivate the listener at their most intimate level. By blending reason and emotion, this form of narrative communication – staged in articles or advertisements – elicits reactions while making the customer adhere to your brand’s spirit and the values it embodies. To achieve this, Trustt helps you refine your marketing strategy and content by collecting valuable and proprietary information about your target audience.

The Power of Data

Data collected on customers is at the heart of the DNVB production chain. Thanks to customer reviews, these digital companies can statistically evaluate customer satisfaction with “a product and improve it” throughout its lifecycle… To address this need, thanks to ambassador programs that can be integrated directly on your site, Trustt offers your DNVB “the opportunity to collect fresh data, allowing you to” refine your overall strategy: enhanced knowledge of your consumer targets and their expectations, collection of qualified opt-ins, enhanced e-reputation, strengthened awareness, amplification of the relationship with your audience and development of products in line with your customers’ expectations…

Thus, marketing data is absolutely everywhere, whether before or after the purchase of a product, in order to personalize the consumer experience. Artificial Intelligence therefore has a significant impact and a real contribution to the production of DNVBs that create their products based on the analysis of this fresh first-party data, the collection of qualified opt-ins, and the enhanced knowledge of their consumer targets and their expectations.

The Excellence of Their Supply Chain

One of the great strengths of DNVBs is the excellence in the construction of their Supply Chain, which involves coordination between design, procurement, and manufacturing: precise and predictive stock monitoring, optimization of the logistics chain for optimal product delivery (quantity, date, location…), flow management, mastery of raw material purchases in connection with demand and suppliers, etc.

By improving the efficiency of global supply chain processes, DNVBs gain independence from the possible failure of a supplier or service provider, social risk, unavailability of the information system… while optimizing transversal flows (costs, delays, improvement of customer service quality and productivity…).

By connecting supply and demand, and minimizing inventory as much as possible, this model is perfect for offering quality products at affordable prices, generating good profitability, and providing comfortable cash flow for the brand.

The Rise of DNVBs in a Digitalized World

DNVB: What Is It?

There’s no ready-made guide to define a DNVB! Born from the digital revolution, DNVBs are shaking up the retail sector by almost exclusively ensuring the development, promotion, and distribution of their brand through the Internet. These DNVBs are not start-ups but brands “born online” that produce their own offerings, sell from their website, and advertise through digital channels, particularly social networks like Instagram or Facebook.

In this way, this new mode of commercialization and communication is disrupting traditional distribution networks and business operations.

Note: The ultimate model of a DNVB is to do pre-orders by engaging consumers in the co-design of products that then become unique, personal, timeless, and in line with consumer and market expectations.

Why Such Growth?

The Goliaths that are DNVBs are provoking the Davids of retail by inventing the consumption modes of the future… But their success is mainly due to a change in consumer expectations: loss of trust in large groups, demand for transparency, need to consume less but better… these are the elements that allow DNVBs to align their business strategies and products with these new needs.

Local production (France), eco-responsibility, fair pricing (thus no sales), simplified offerings, quality customer experience, authentic universe, fast delivery with no ecological impact, have allowed these DNVBs to quickly establish themselves in the current commercial landscape.