In partnership with Soho House, Culture Digital held a talk with the VP of Brand Marketing of fashion superpower Lyst, Katy Lubin, hosted by Kevin Adom a growth marketer with 10 years experience and currently at Drool, a contemporary art online store.
During the conversation, Katy discussed her career path, what shaped her as a brand marketer, the now famous quarterly Lyst Index of hottest brands and what brands she thinks are killing it right now.
Behind the Lyst Index
The Lyst Index has now become a cultural phenomenon, being shared by the likes of Kim Kardashian and transcending just those deeply engrained within fashion culture.
Katy spoke in detail around how the Lyst Index came about 6 years ago, stemming from a large portion of Lyst’s internal team being made up of data scientists and those working day-in-day-out within data.
They wanted to create something led by data and not a list based on who had paid to be there or an editor’s personal favourites, it had to be “objective and real”, and therefore the team were tasked with building a formula in which could list and rank brands through various data points.
To look at “hottest brands” rather than “biggest brands”, they had to factor in data points around “talkability”, and although Katy didn’t give away the secret sauce on how the algorithm is made up exactly, she did say that social stats make up part of the total algorithm to factor in what brands people are talking about.
How important is investing in brand marketing?
Kevin asked a question around the importance of brand marketing and how important is it when everything is pointing towards the opposite.
Katy’s thoughts were “strongly branded businesses outperform the market always”. Unlike performance marketing where you see a quicker ROI, brand marketing is a slower burn but when done right, it helps all your other marketing investments work harder.
From a personal perspective, when working with a brand that sees an increase in brand searches as of a result of strong brand marketing, it can support SEO efforts and drive further traffic as you also target non-branded terms within your SEO strategy. A strong brand marketing strategy aligned properly with a well thought out SEO strategy can yield incredible results.
The future of creator-led marketing
The conversation turned to creator-led marketing and how this could change in the future, and the real focus was around co-creation rather than just using influencers in the traditional sense where they are given clothes and/or money to promote, but instead actually working alongside the creators to create content that feels real.
But to do this, Katy said that brands have to feel comfortable with losing some control. This means that if brands want to create authentic content alongside creators and influencers, they need to allow them creative freedom to create the best content.
After all, who knows that creator’s audience better than the creator themselves?
This approach is key for brands who are looking to enter the influencer marketing space and wanting to create meaningful and impactful content.
How can you tell when a brand is doing well?
Fashion brands are in a revolving door of who are hot, who are doing well, and who are not.
One of the questions asked was “how can you tell when a brand is doing well?”, and Katy’s answer focussed on energy.
Teams where everyone is contributing to the conversation and come into meetings full of energy and ideas tend to be the ones that are now doing well, whereas those that may be lead by a CMO who is owning the conversation and others aren’t adding to the conversation, tend not to be the brands who are making things happen right now.
Katy also touched on diversity and how different ages, backgrounds etc within these teams added to a melting pot of ideas and allowed for more creativity from these brands. This is something that Katy touched on too in building her own team, wanting people with different backgrounds and interests to bring different perspectives, new views and things to share with the wider team.
Which brands does Katy think are killing it right now? The two names that popped up were Loewe and Miu Miu, both brands which had exceptional 2023s and 2024s are looking incredibly strong so far too.
There were a variety of other topics of conversation, but overall the talk was incredibly insightful into Katy’s view on brand marketing within the world of fashion.
You can find both Katy and Kevin on their respective LinkedIn’s below:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/katy-lubin-00381a23/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/kevin-adom-5a8b53a4/
To find out more about Culture Digital’s upcoming events, you can check out their website here: https://cultureisdigital.com/
