How Wise Built A $10B Brand Without Traditional Marketing

Talk, talk us through that and perhaps, you know, given live examples that you have in, in Cazoo and Wise, um, some of the problems maybe where they did reach that and, and how sort of you overcame the chasm.

Yeah, very interesting.

So I, I think two completely different examples.

So Cazoo, we invested from brand day one, which is, was very, very unusual.

So we launched at the beginning of 2020 with, uh, we had kind of run, uh, marketing, just performance marketing maybe for two months, really, as we were kind of testing out the website, but always had the intention to go kind of big on TV, out of home, radio, everything from day one for, for very good reasons, but that's very unusual for, for a startup.

Um, and the reasons are that a few things from a commercial point of view, we had [laughs] a lot of cars to sell.

Uh, really to make that proposition work, you need a vast range of choice on the website, way more than any other kind of equivalent car dealer.

So we had two and a half thousand cars.

Used cars depreciate roughly by about £5, £5 a day.

So, like, very important to commercially start selling those cars as quickly as possible.

From a brand point of view, uh, we were a completely new brand in a category that is famously unloved and untrusted [laughs] and is not typically...

There are no big retailers that are national, uh, within, in the used car space.

So we had to build trust, build awareness at a national scale as quickly as humanly possible, and we had the money, we had the investment.

We had a, uh, an amazing amount of seed investment of about £30 million.

So for, for a few different reasons, we were kind of very committed to brand from day one, and that, that worked incredibly well for us.

The vast majority, I would say probably all, all kind of scale-ups don't do it that way, um, do start with performance marketing a- and that works incredibly well up until a point, as Grace and Tom pointed out, often typically you'll find that that growth plateaus.

Um, and that I think that's a fascinating point for businesses to try and navigate through how do you evolve from that to...

And often, you know, businesses are well aware that that's an issue.

But actually the, the steps you take and the approach then, the way that you adapt your business to be both brand and performance, I think is hugely interesting, very complicated [laughs] and involves a lot of different skills, different ways of measuring, different kind of mindsets, often different people that you might need to bring in to help you along the way.

So that brings me on to kind of Wise, which I think is, is very much at that place in some instances.

Um, but I think what's fascinating about Wise is it's got to that stage, but has managed to get to an enormous scale without really having to think about it.

So, um, it's a business that has over 11 million customers worldwide.

Um, it turns over over a billion pounds a year.

It's, it's profitable, it's listed, um, valued at about £10 billion.

Uh, and it's really just at this stage [laughs] that the business is recognizing that, yes, this is something that we really need to get to grips with.