I’m going to be completely direct about a strategic failure I see leaders making every single day: I don’t care if you worked for L’Oréal, or if you spend all day analyzing Rare Beauty or Rhode.
Stop it.
You, as the leader of an emerging or mid-size brand, are fundamentally operating under different laws of physics than a giant. You cannot—and should not—copy their strategy because your job is not their job.
The Strategic Lie of Role Models
We all look at the explosive growth of brands like Rare Beauty or Rhode and want to copy the playbook. But you are looking at a system built on decades of scale and celebrity equity—and the people running those systems have completely different roles:
The Giant CEO (L’Oréal, Estée Lauder): Their job is managing political risk, global supply chain, mergers and acquisitions, and brand maintenance. They are managing massive agency relationships and lobbying efforts. They are playing chess with a billion-dollar insurance policy.
Your Job (Emerging/Mid-Size Leader): Your job is execution, sales, and culture. You are the head of marketing, the chief budget officer, and the head of strategy. You are not maintaining; you are building the foundation. You must be hands-on, ruthlessly efficient, and focused on clarity.
The moment you, as a builder, start thinking like a maintainer, you lose.
The Autopsy: The Non-Replicable Strategy
The math confirms this strategic mismatch. When Rihanna or Hailey Bieber launch, they possess scale as an asset that you don’t:
Zero CAC Launch: Their Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) for the first ten million people is effectively zero because the audience is pre-built and trusting. You, however, are paying peak pricing for every single lead.
Budget as Insurance: The giant can afford to spend money on mass awareness because they have the capital to wait 18 months for the customer’s Lifetime Value (LTV) to pay out. Your limited budget is an investment in immediate, profitable growth, not an insurance premium.
If you try to run their mass awareness playbook on your operating budget, you don’t get 80% market share—you get 0.0001% market share and a systemic failure.
Read more: Happy New Year. Now Stop Making Resolutions.
The Mandate: Focus on Systemic Truth
Good leadership means seeing the brand for who it is, not for who they wish they were.
Your job is to execute the foundational work tailored for your current reality.
Execution Over Aspiration: Focus on the tangible system: securing repeat business, defining clear milestones, and improving your win rate on proposals.
Clarity Over Noise: Your strategic conversation must be about specialization. The giant ignores your niche because it’s too small. You must own it.
Stop obsessing over the big-name playbooks. We’re here to build a stable, profitable system for your specific reality.
Lara
