“Adopt a curious approach or lose out”

In this first instalment of our new Discovery Diaries Q&A series, Journey Further CEO Robin Skidmore tells us why he believes discovery is the next evolution of performance marketing, and how we’ve reached this era. Read on to get his advice on how brands can achieve sustainable momentum today.

How would you define discovery?

Discovery is about whether your brand is found, immediately understood and chosen in the places consumers now make decisions. That used to be much simpler. You could win on Google, run strong paid media, build some awareness through channels like TV and move people through a relatively neat funnel. That world has changed, that funnel has collapsed. People now discover brands across search, social, creators, marketplaces, LLMs, reviews, Reddit threads, recommendations and feeds. Some of those journeys are visible. A lot of them aren’t. And increasingly, algorithms are deciding what gets surfaced before a customer has even made a conscious choice. So for me, it's the next evolution of performance marketing. It still has to drive growth. It still has to be accountable. But it requires a much wider view of where influence is happening and how your brand is understood by algorithms (new) and people (old). And that’s the rationale for the repositioning. We don’t want to be an agency working from yesterday’s playbook, because that playbook isn’t effective anymore. Performance marketing has been brilliant for us, but the market has shifted and now we need to shift with it. Discovery gives us a clearer, more current way to talk about the work we already do, the way buying behavior has changed, and the opportunity for brands to engineer growth across the full landscape, not just the obvious channels. Performance now becomes discovery and we want to lead the pack.

What do you believe makes a brand genuinely understood?

I think it’s easiest if we start with some examples of brands who have really succeeded in ensuring that they’re being interpreted super clearly by their audience. Let’s take Gym Shark for instance. From day one, they’ve known exactly who they’ve wanted to be and have stayed true to those origins. Not straying from that path means that message to their audience remains crystal clear and super authentic. Their “We Do Gym” campaign really spoke to that. That tagline of “We’re not good at everything, we’re great at one thing”, showed a one-track mindset that made it easy for their audience to really get their purpose. Or how about Oatly? They are laser-focused on understanding what they are solving for their audience who use their products day in, day out. They have clear, consistent messaging, but it’s very much tailored for every channel. So wherever you encounter them across that vast discovery landscape, you’re going to be met with a message that feels native to a particular platform, but still reinforces that message that ladders up to a higher purpose of customers continually having a carton of Oatly sitting in their fridge. And that strategy stems from leadership. Often they understand the audience because they are the audience. The product and the strategy to sell it typically permeates from an individual that doesn’t feel like they’re getting what they need from the brands who occupy a particular space. So they say “Fine. I’ll do it, because I know I’m not the only one”. And a brand is born from very authentic origins, which is the best springboard you can have for it to eventually be understood by their audience.

What do you think the difference is between visibility and being chosen as a brand?

Visibility is a funny one. For anyone who’s ever worked in Programmatic, you would put together a report saying X ad had been viewed X amount of times. But then who’s to say how many people have actually seen my ad? What if someone hasn’t even scrolled to the bottom of the page where your ad may be? Or from an Organic Search perspective, you’ve jumped up from the top of page two to the bottom of page one. You’re getting a few clicks, but if you’re solely looking at these metrics in isolation, that visibility is futile. You’re only reading the very start of the story. We’ve always worked in a way here at Journey Further where we look at those visibility metrics, and where they are actually linking to tangible conversion and sales revenue figures, and that’s particularly vital in the era of discovery. Because those figures then ultimately ladder up to you being chosen. That’s not a one-off transaction between brand and customer. Being chosen is about being trusted as an authority. Your audience actively wants to spread the word about you to their community. And ultimately selecting your product again and again over the duration.

When it comes to discovery, what’s one insight you’ve learned that others often overlook, and how can brands use this to their advantage?

Be curious. If you’re not, you will lose out. Often, I’ve found brands have this false view of who their real competitors are. They have the market leaders or the brands they are actively challenging firmly on their radar. But what some of the less digitally native brands fail to grasp is that your competitor set is wildly different depending on the platform on which you’re being encountered or the audience segment you’re targeting. Staring at a simplistic legacy competitor set leaves you blinkered, where new potential touchpoints are sprouting up every day. So it’s about being curious about who’s coming to eat your lunch. What are their strategies? What can we learn from the two-person startup that has popped out of nowhere, and is outperforming us on Meta? Because they are your competitors. You may not think that, but once category leaders are at the peak, they rarely stay there. After all, just one of the top ten companies by market cap in 2000 was still in that list a few years ago. The rule book changes constantly, and those who are still flicking through an out-of-date version promoting stale marketing tactics won’t lead you to become a category leader. As an agency, we have a circumspective outlook on the nuance of different platforms - meaning that we won’t just tell brands where to put their money - we’ll give them the whole picture including the competitors they may have not have even seen coming in the rearview mirror. Because ultimately, your brand is going to struggle to be discovered if you’re only recognising 10% of your true competitor set.

How do you think brand discovery has evolved over the last five to ten years?

I’ve been in this game a long time, and one of the biggest shifts I’ve seen is the accessibility to a richer format of content which has been offered by emerging platforms. Long gone are the days when Google was the only platform you’d open up when you had a question. Social networks have become competitor search engines. Whether you’re looking for your next vacation, fashion trends for summer, or your next dinner recipe, your most likely destination is TikTok or Instagram. It feels more authentic, and when it comes to video content, I am far more inclined to recruit a content creator in a lo-fi reel which really helps the audience step into their shoes to experience the brand over something that’s highly polished. And some of those challenger brands I mentioned before are pivoting their discovery strategy to not just get engagement through those emerging platforms, but direct sales, and clean first party data. A recent study from Small Business Expo reported that 67% of small and medium-sized businesses say that social is very important or critical to sales, while 38% said that this channel is generating more sales than last year. It shouldn't be a surprise sales are increasing YoY via social, as the platforms are constantly making their ads more targeted, easy to buy through and generally removing ecommerce friction on the path to purchase. This underlines the shift in the prominence of the role of those emerging platforms which is vital to acknowledge in the new marketing landscape.

What’s a campaign you’re particularly proud of that has unlocked brand discovery?

A good example would be the way we’ve approached growth for brands like Barbour, where discovery isn’t just one channel doing one job. You have SEO capturing intent, paid media creating demand, digital PR educating and building authority, content improving relevance, and marketing science predicting where the next pockets of growth are found. The important bit is that these channels aren’t operating in isolation. They’re working together as a system to make the brand more present, trusted and likely to be chosen across the moments that matter. That’s what discovery looks like in practice. It’s not just visibility. It’s joining up the signals that influence how people find you, how platforms understand you, and why customers come back to you.