UPFRONTS: MARKETERS WHO MATTER
DEPESH MANDALIA LOST MY NAME
publishing stack and market the book directly to customers, helping us maintain operating efficiencies and profitability.
Depesh Mandalia is marketing and growth expert at Lost My Name, publishers of personalised books for children. Last year the company secured investment from Piers Linney of Dragons’ Den. We hear the story so far.
Could you give us a quick introduction to Lost My Name? What’s unique about the books you produce and what was the thinking behind the launch? DEPESH MANDALIA: The company was founded in early 2013. It started as a fun thing to do after our CEO Asi Sharabi had been given a personalised book for his daughter. Being underwhelmed by it, and coming from a technology and creative background, the founding team (friends Tal Oron and former BBC comedy writer David Cadji-Newby) recognised it as an area that was being under- exploited. Our uniqueness comes from the way we construct the personalised experience. We use different stories based on the letters of a child’s name. Each character the child meets in the story gives them the first letter from their own name to help the child find theirs. We own the full
Last year Lost My Name secured the highest ever Dragons’ Den investment in terms of valuation. Can you tell us something about the Dragons’ Den experience and what the funding and publicity meant? DM: The short answer as to why we were on Dragons’ Den was for investment and exposure. Word- of-mouth was already working wonders for us and we wanted to attract investors that could add value, beyond their funding. Being on Dragons’ Den was, from a business viewpoint, a perfect way to place our vision in front of the right people—not just the dragons, but the viewing public, press and others who were likely to be interested in our product. The publicity attracted the attention of the UK media and we managed to nab a top dragon in Piers Linney. Our USP is that we combine the power of traditional storytelling with the possibilities of innovative technology. As a father and successful IT and technology entrepreneur, Piers was a perfect fit.
How have you approached marketing the books? What channels or platforms are you investing in and what strategies have proved most effective? DM: Our approach to marketing
has adapted as we’ve better understood our levers and developed the growth plan. It’s important to find the right blend for short and long-term growth for a start-up, so we focused on ensuring that we nailed our immediate growth whilst laying future foundations. Word-of- mouth became apparent as a growth lever very early on in the product development process and was something we looked at from the start. However, since you can only
scale word-of-mouth as fast as you acquire new customers, we needed a way to accelerate new customer growth and fuel word-of-mouth marketing. As a pure-play ecommerce retailer we focused our attention online through direct response and PR. Facebook ads in particular helped us scale growth initially in the UK, quickly followed by the US, Europe and further afield.
PR has played an important
role for us from the early days and continues to do so, with media interviews, book reviews, thought- pieces and other media placements helping to grow brand awareness and recall to support direct marketing. SEO, social media, paid search and affiliates all play an important role in the marketing mix whilst we continue to research new opportunities such as Pinterest and Instagram to reach new audiences.
It’s important to find the right blend of short and long-term growth for a start-up
INTERVIEW JON FORTGANG 9 issue 25 july 2015
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