Tim Donald is the Creative Director at Sneak, the cult energy brand known for its disruptive campaigns, chaotic storytelling, and fiercely loyal fanbase.
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In this episode we discuss:
- Why you shouldn’t chase seniority
- Building from DTC to retail
- The power of design for Sneak
- Satanic cults for marketing activations
- Building a brand around gaming culture
- Finding the sweet spot between nerd culture and popular culture
- The creative pressure to stay true to the brand heritage
- The impact of price promotion on brand
- Building communities for marketing while not “selling out”
Tim Donald
With a background in brand building and cultural strategy, Tim specialises in helping brands cut through by leading with entertainment, embracing risk, and building genuine fandom.
From satanic cults to spoof dating shows, Tim has been the driving force behind some of Sneak’s boldest creative work, always with a sharp understanding of why “unhinged” marketing works (when done well). He speaks from the point of view of a creative, not a founder, and brings a refreshingly honest take on what it means to build a brand that thrives on unpredictability and cultural relevance. Find Tim on LinkedIn
Recommendations
The Creative Act by Rick Rubin
Strategy Sessions Host – Andi Jarvis
If you have any questions or want to talk about anything that was discussed in the show, the best place to get me is on LinkedIn or Instagram.
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Episode Transcription
This transcript has been done automagically using Happy Scribe and hasn’t been checked by a real person, so there may be some hilarious mistakes where the AI can’t work out our accents – I’m sure they’re trained on just the American accent.
[01:00:00.000] – Andi J
Tim Donald, what one thing do you wish you’d have known 10 years ago?
[01:00:05.800] – Tim D
This is actually a really interesting thing to think about because it made me reflect a little bit. But I think that the thing I wish I’d known was probably not to chase seniority, really, more than anything else. I think when I first started out, I had it in my head that I wanted to become creative director as soon as possible. I came into it with this race to the top mentality where I just needed to get to that top role because that was the coveted thing as a creative. But what you don’t realise and what I think you find out over time is that as you get more senior, you actually become a bit more removed from the day-to-day work, the creative work that you actually got in the first place to do. Because you have to start thinking broader, you have to start looking at the bigger picture stuff and you can’t get into the day to day. And so I wouldn’t be in a hurry to remove myself from the thing that I enjoyed the most, if you know what I And it’s something that you think you need to… You do it when you’re ready.
[01:01:03.780] – Tim D
There’s no time frame or putting that pressure on yourself that you’ve got to get to that position by a certain time. It’s just not valuable.
[01:01:12.800] – Andi J
There is always someone, isn’t there? When you start your career, there’s always someone who’s just been announced in the job that you always thought you wanted at another agency or at another company at the age of 24. And you’re like, How the hell have they managed that? I remember, I forgot the guy’s name, Adam Somebody. He was chief exec of Royal Mail when he was about 34, then went on to be chief executive of the FA or chairman or something before he was 45. Most people are still getting drunk and pissing in the back of a behind a pub at that age, and he’s running a multi-billion pound company. So you do sometimes get into that and go, Oh, well, they’ve done that, so I want to see if I can get there quicker. And it becomes the thing, but actually, you can quite quickly get away from the parts of the that you actually love.
[01:02:02.240] – Tim D
Yeah, absolutely. And obviously, there are some people who are incredibly talented and get into those roles really quickly because they’re great at what they do. But I think even in that position, you miss out on a lot of more junior roles when you haven’t got the pressure and responsibility and you can experiment and explore more and you can get really, really focused on developing one or two ideas at a time. You miss out on all that, which is just such valuable experience that when you actually get to a CD role, having on all that, it becomes much more useful than just going straight into it.
[01:02:36.600] – Andi J
So now in your role, which is Chief Creative Officer, if I got that right? Yes. Chief Creative Officer at Sneak. We’ll talk about that in a minute. How do you manage to manage that tension between doing the job that you have and also maybe keeping your hand in on some of the stuff that you really, really enjoy doing? Do you manage to get to do a little bit of both or do you have to do that in your own time?
[01:02:58.980] – Tim D
Yeah, I mean, Unfortunately here, because it’s quite a small internal team, it’s still very hands-on and still very collaborative in the way that we work. If it was a much bigger place, obviously, you’ve got more to manage, more people, more things going on. We have a lot of stuff going on, but because we do so much in-house, it does mean that I may be not doing the actual doing and producing of the work, but I’m definitely involved in the creative process from the beginning to the end. So that’s the reasons why I came to sneak in the first place and why I love being here is because there is that approach, and it’s not so… I haven’t become so managerial that I’m too detached from what’s going on.
[01:03:45.220] – Andi J
Eyup and welcome to the Strategy Sessions. My name is Andi Jarvis. I’m the host of the show and the Chief Strategy Officer at Eximo Marketing. Thank you for tuning in today. It means a lot to me and the team behind the Strategy Sessions. Before we go on with a guest, can I ask you to do a few things for me. One, please interact with this episode. If you like it, if you hate it, I’d love you to leave a review and just let me know a few things about it. If you want to send it to me directly, my email address is in the show notes, so please do just fire me a message. I love to hear what you think. But interacting with the episode does help more people find it, so it really does help. So thank you for that. The second thing I’d like to say is send it to a friend. Is there someone you drop a WhatsApp to or an iMessage to and be like, Yeah, If you’ve heard this episode, you want to have a listen to this person? It’s great. Honestly, it’s a great way to help people discover things.
[01:04:36.080] – Andi J
So please do interact with the episode or share it with a friend if you’ve enjoyed it. And that’s about it, really. Let’s get on with the show and you get back to the guest interview. So, Tim, we’ve already discovered you are Chief Creative Officer at Sneak. Tell us a little bit about Sneak for those who don’t know the brand.
[01:04:55.780] – Tim D
So Sneak is, well, it is now is a functional drinks brand. So we started in 2018 as a purely an energy brand, and it was founded by two guys, Will and Johnny, who basically saw a bit of an opportunity in the market. Back in 2018, there were not many sugar-free energy drinks on the market. You had your main stage Red Bull Monster, but there weren’t any real sugar-free variants at the time. They wanted to make a better version of the energy drinks that were available. And they chose a different format, which is the powder that you mix with water. For a number of reasons, you can have a more complicated formula and it’s better value for money, ultimately. And also they wanted it to be targeted specifically at gamers. And at the time, I think as well, there weren’t many brands that were specifically aimed at gamers. So you had some of the bigger brands that had probably a gaming strategy, but they were mass market products. They weren’t for gamers streamers, specifically. So that was the proposition. It was gaming energy, and it was launched very social first with streamers and building that community.
[01:06:10.820] – Tim D
But over time, that’s expanded to where we are now, which is more of a broad functional drinks brand. So we have the energy product, we have a canned energy, RTD, we have a hydration product, we have a meal replacement product. So it’s really broadened out, but it’s still with the same principles that we want to make better versions of what’s currently available.
[01:06:33.980] – Andi J
Just for those listening who aren’t in the drink sector, RTD is a- Ready to drink, yeah, can. And you now- It’s okay, it can’t happen in the drive. So we’ll stick with it. The RTD is now in all sorts of retail outlets as well, isn’t it? So you’ve moved from direct to consumer into retail now.
[01:06:51.420] – Tim D
Yeah, and that’s been a really interesting and challenging journey, really. We started that at the beginning of 2024. And obviously, the canned energy retail market is very long-standing, very saturated now, loads of brands that have been around for a while. And it’s a very noisy category as well. It’s So everyone’s trying to get your attention. It’s visually very noisy as well. So coming into that market as a new brand is very difficult to cut through and to get people’s attention. But I think we started in the right way, building it up gradually from the Northwest where we’re based in Manchester, starting in convenience and not trying to jump too far ahead before we’re ready, really. So we’ve been steadily building up our distribution over the last 18 or so months, and it’s working. And in the places where we are available, we often find that we’re third or fourth place in terms of rate of sale behind the likes of Red Bull and Monster, which is amazing for us. And it just shows that the brand has got that traction and the ability to come through where we need to.
[01:08:04.220] – Andi J
So what I want to do is come back to the launch into retail shortly, but I want to talk a bit first about the design. You mentioned it’s visually noisy as a category, and your brand is visually striking. So is that from its gaming heritage? Is that a deliberate leaning into that so that you can stand out in, as you say, limited shelf space that you’re taking now in retail?
[01:08:27.790] – Tim D
Design has always been a really important part of the sneaker brand, really. I think the label designs of the tubs have always been designed with that… It’s a mashup between streetwear and gaming, I think was the original look and feel of it. And because we’ve had this drop culture that’s part of the brand of limited edition products, it had this collectability to it that we’ve always really We’ve really leaned into. And it’s really important to us that all of our products should feel collectible in some way. Some of the Sneak community have got rooms and shelves dedicated to sneaked products, and they’re not just the limited edition stuff. That’s the core product as well. Because we always go over and above on design. And obviously, we’ve got the Bunny, the Sneak Bunny logo, which is something that people always remember, and it’s the consistent part of the brand is you always see the Bunny logo. So I think with those things combined and the attention to detail, we’ve got a super talented design team in-house that are really, really passionate and put so much work into what we do. And I think that shows, and it pays off when people see it on Shell.
[01:09:44.400] – Andi J
Those distinctive brand assets that have been cultivated over time. Are you now at a place where you can play with them a little bit? Because I know you do… There’s been some bespoke gaming stuff that you’ve done. You’ve done all sorts of bits with it. Does having that asset Does it give you something you can have fun with? Even in a fun brand, something you can have more fun with?
[01:10:05.040] – Tim D
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it’s been a bit of a funny journey since I joined Sneak three years ago. When I joined, it was really that transition point between founder a led startup, and then the brand was acquired by Tru, a private equity firm. When I came in, it was really transitioning from that startup to a scale of business. But as part of that, there were no brand guidelines. When I When I first joined, everything was instinctive from the people that had been there since the beginning. And part of what I’ve been trying to do is, along with Shantel, who’s our head of design, is Try and bring some order to the brand without killing the creativity that has existed in the brand since the beginning. And that’s a really delicate balance sometimes. But yeah, I think the bunny has been the consistent element, and we’ve always remixed and played around with how the bunny is represented, so with some of the limited edition stuff. It’s always themed around something from pop culture. We’ve done gaming-related things, stuff from movies and TV, fantasy, horror, all that thing. So we’ve remixed the brand loads and loads of times, but the bunny is always the central character, whether that’s in a toy or on the packaging.
[01:11:24.820] – Tim D
So I think that’s the thing that’s always kept that integrity.
[01:11:28.440] – Andi J
When you say horror, there Something that’s something that raised my eyebrow on the briefing notes I’ve ever sent, part of Tim’s bio, From Satanic Cults to Spoof Dating Shows. Now, I’m assuming that means something you’ve done for the brand rather than just what you do in your spare time. Or does it? Maybe it’d be more interesting if it is just what you do in your spare time.
[01:11:48.840] – Tim D
I’m not going to go there right now, but it’s the brand. Don’t worry. I’m not into Satanism. That’s the second half of the interview You’ve got him.
[01:12:00.220] – Andi J
You’ve got him. Ruined it.
[01:12:04.720] – Tim D
Yeah, it’s what I was talking about in terms of drawing from pop culture. So to take a little bit of a step back, I think one of my personal beliefs I think that as a gaming brand, I think the mistake a lot of brands make is that they assume… It’s quite a one-dimensional view of a gaming audience, I think, in that if you’re a gamer, that all you want to do is see and consume gaming content. Then quite early on, we decided that actually gamers are more multifaceted than that. So if you’re into gaming, you’re also probably into fantasy, sci-fi, anime, comic books. There’s a whole world of cultural territories that surround gaming that felt like really rich for us to play around with rather than just laser-focused on gaming and only really talking to maybe a subset of our overall consumer. So with that in mind, we always dip in and out of things that are… Nerd culture, basically, is what we’re talking about, is things that are on that nerdier end of the spectrum. And it’s from movies to films and games as well. So it’s all things combined. So to get back to Satanism, that’s where it was one of our Halloween drops, which it was all themed around culture Satanism from movies and TV and that thing.
[01:13:34.700] – Tim D
But part of what we do is try and push things as far or even further than what other brands could do. So we had this idea really early on that we wanted to work with a real Satanist, like a real practising Satanist, and get them to put a curse on one of their tubs. So the launch content that we made, we flew out to Colorado, which where we found someone who was willing to do it.
[01:14:03.590] – Andi J
I must say, I am shocked, stunned, and indeed amazed that you had to go to America to find that, and the desert as well. But anyway, sorry.
[01:14:12.480] – Tim D
So you went to Colorado. Surprise. Yeah, surprisingly hard to find someone who was actually willing to admit they were practising Satanist than someone that would do something as stupid as they were. But we filmed them doing this ritual, putting putting a curse on one of the tubs, and then we sealed it in a wooden box, wrapped it in chains, and we offered it for free to a member of our community if they came into the office to collect it in person and to sign a disclaimer that if anything bad happened to them, it wasn’t our fault. That was the whole theme of the campaign. We had a branded Ouija board that was a piece of merchandise that went alongside the collection. So we always love to go really deep into whatever theme that we’re exploring at the time. We just go we go fully into it.
[01:15:06.700] – Andi J
Just so we can go end-to-end with this as well, have you had any exorcist-type moments where people involved in this have been dead or dying Loads of people involved in The Exorcist met a rather untimely end, didn’t they? Or something like that. But yeah, has anyone met an untimely end? Does the consumer come back to you with horns or anything like that?
[01:15:28.320] – Tim D
Fortunately, not yet. I say yet because we still got plenty of other things to explore, but we are definitely pushing it. The last Halloween campaign that we did, we spent the night in a haunted prison with some drag queens, and we held a seance in the prison, and we were trying to find ghosts. The ambition was to be the first brand to contact a ghost. So we spent the night in a haunted prison, we held a seance and apparently the warden from that particular prison in Shrewsbury was not a very nice man and actually died in his office. So we held the seance in the warden’s office. And there was some pretty weird stuff that happened. I’m quite sceptical of this stuff, but there was definitely some banging noises and it was quite intense.
[01:16:24.860] – Andi J
Well, listen, where I wasn’t going to go next, but where I am going to go is I want to Can you talk more about your creative process? I mean, is it alcohol-fueled? Is it acid? Or is it just walking around in a bit of fresh air? How do these ideas come to you for Ouija boards and drag queens in prisons and seances?
[01:16:47.120] – Tim D
It’s not a process as such. I think it’s just a childhood of raised on B movies and games myself. So I’m really into that stuff anyway. So I love… Horror was one of the things I loved as a kid growing up. And it’s really that I think as any creative person, you’re a product of your experiences and all the things that you’ve absorbed over time. And what I was always told really early on was that you become a bit like a sponge and everything that you’re exposed to, you just absorb. And in a situation like that, you’ve got to come up with ideas. Sometimes weird connection just happened from something you saw 20 years ago. And you just have to be receptive to all the stuff that’s around you and lean into your own experiences a little bit.
[01:17:44.380] – Andi J
No, Absolutely. People sometimes say, Oh, the idea came to me out of the blue. And it was like, Yeah, but it took you 25 years for that idea to come to you out of the blue. It was all that experience in the background. So cool. Okay, well look, going back to gaming, in the summer… Hold on, let me just get a big flex coming out here. I went to Cannes for the first time and I interviewed a couple of people while I was there. One of them was Jonathan Stringfield, who’s the VP globally for Microsoft’s Gaming division, Microsoft Activision, for their advertising products. And we talked a lot in that interview about gamers. 3.4 billion people worldwide are gaming on a regular basis. This myth that gamers are just basement pizza eaters who never go outside, male, young, is just false in a gaming world. I do sense, though, when you’re talking about gamers, you are talking almost of the stereotypical gamer, that male solo gamer as opposed to someone playing Happy Fish or whatever it is on the phone. So how do you define a gamer within sneak?
[01:18:56.060] – Tim D
I don’t know if we are necessarily talking to the stereotypical gamer. I think, as I said before, we try and take a bit more of a well-rounded view of what gamers actually are. Even the term gamer is something that not everyone identifies with. So there’s actually quite a big scale between someone who’s a casual gamer that just plays on the weekends or an hour here and there when they’ve got time to someone that is competitive gaming, esports, and that thing. There’s a big gulf in between that of people’s engagement with games and mobile games. And mobile games, like you say, it’s not quite as simple as just going, you’re either a gamer or you’re not. I think really early on, we did some brand research just to find out who our consumers actually were. And it was really surprising to us having launched as a gaming brand. I think in the data we had a couple of years ago, we actually found that only about 50 % of our consumers played games at all, and a smaller percentage knowledge of that 50 % would actually self-identify as a gamer. So I look at it myself.
[01:20:05.620] – Tim D
I play games, but I wouldn’t call myself a gamer. I don’t identify as a gamer in the traditional sense of how people think of gamers. And I’ve always kept that in mind when we’re doing what we’re doing, not to be too narrow in how we’re looking at the traits of a gamer. So we talk about our audience in terms of the spectrum between nerd culture and popular culture. So if you picture a Venn diagram at one end of the spectrum, you’ve got the most populist culture. And then on the other end is the super, super nerdy stuff. And what you’ve been seeing over time is that there’s a lot of things that were previously quite nerdy that started to permeate into popular culture. And you look at things like Dungeons and Dragons, for example, being pushed into mainstream culture.
[01:20:57.420] – Andi J
Pokémon, for example. Pokémon was a It was a very nerdy thing when I was a kid. That’s a long time ago, but post me being a kid, it was a bit nerdy and a bit geeky to play Pokémon. And then everyone’s playing Pokémon. Adults running around park, trying to find them. What’s changed? So, yeah, that crossover does happen, doesn’t it?
[01:21:19.140] – Tim D
Yeah, absolutely. And I think that’s where the sweet spot for us was in that middle territory where we had a not even a legacy consumer, but the consumer that we have that’s been with us from the beginning, let’s say, who are probably skew slightly more on the nerdier end of the spectrum. But there’s also other people that are somewhere in the middle. So it allowed us to play around in a territory where we weren’t switching it up and being a different brand that the people that’ve been with us since the beginning didn’t recognise anymore. But it was a bit more accessible to to a more casual audience, I suppose. We’re never going to be a fully mainstream brand. We’ll never be over that other end of the popular culture spectrum. We don’t want to be necessarily, but there’s a need, particularly when you start to look at the consumer that’s picking us up in a retail context. There is a need to broaden that brand out a little bit, make it a bit more accessible and just more relatable to that slightly more casual audience.
[01:22:29.100] – Andi J
You’re in retail, you’re in W. H. Smith travel retail, you’re in supermarkets, you’re in convenience stores, where your customer in these places is fundamentally different to somebody who is buying you direct to consumer. Online, waiting days, whatever it was for it to show up. So are you under pressure from retailers who are now your customer to modify, grow up a little, conservative, tone it down? We don’t want to be stocking people who are doing certain worshipping stuff. Can we just… Yeah, that shit’s all nice five years ago, but can you just be a little bit more sensible now? Because actually, you’re being picked up by Sally, who’s 49, who’s just tired on away to another meeting. You’re being picked up by Derek, who’s 60 because his kid’s there and he doesn’t want to be seen in a certain way. So can you just… Do you get that pressure from your customers? Because effectively, retail Billy is a big customer for you now.
[01:23:31.560] – Tim D
It is. And fortunately, we’ve never had that. We’ve never had any pressure to change who we are as a brand. In fact, it’s been a real selling point for us. People like the fact that we’re not like other brands and that we have this cult following that’s been built for our D2C brand. So that’s what they want to see more of in their stores, really, is having this disruptor come into the space. And and do things differently. So it’s actually been a great strength of ours getting into those spaces rather than something that’s counted against us.
[01:24:06.660] – Andi J
So let me ask the question the other way around then. Do you feel more pressure to be even wackier then? Landing in that sweet spot between You’ve got two very different customer groups now. So do you feel like, Oh, we need to do something outrageous, something interesting to keep that angle and keep that together? Do you feel that competing pressure, or is it really easy just to go, Right, now this is our We land here and that’s really easy for us to do.
[01:24:32.860] – Tim D
I think that pressure is entirely self-inflicted for us, to be honest, because we’ve done some pretty crazy stuff in the past. The pressure comes from us just wanting to keep that momentum and outdo the thing that we did last time. I don’t think it’s as much of a trying to out crazy our competitors. It’s trying to make sure that we’re staying true to who we are. We’ve always been like that as a brand. It’s not performative in any Going into the energy space, like I said, which is all really noisy and extreme. And you got Red Bull doing skydives from space and all this stuff. We’re not going into there going, how can we compete and do crazier stuff than Red Bull? We’re just How can we show ourselves as a brand in those spaces? Because that’s the biggest challenge for us is from a D2C perspective, you’ve got a lot more space to show brand personality. Functionality. When you’re in, particularly in independent retailers, you have no real control how that product shows up in an independent retailer. You don’t have a POS space necessarily. So all you’ve really got to communicate the brand is on the pack.
[01:25:46.580] – Tim D
That’s the big challenge for us is how do we keep that thread of brand through to every touch point, and it becomes more and more challenging in spaces where you don’t have anything more than the pack.
[01:25:58.880] – Andi J
The big lever in retailers love to pull is promotions. Retailers love working with brands and going, That’s fantastic. You’ve got X amount of shelf space, which is usually under pressure, but you’ve got this shelf space. But if you want to run a promotion, you get the bid end, you a bit more space, but you’ve got to hammer the price as well. And marketing science will tell you that if you keep hammering your price, you’re going to affect your brand at some point. So how do you deal with that tolerance of… That tension, sorry, of retailers, as I’m sure, asking you for price reductions constantly and trying to keep the value in the brand.
[01:26:35.680] – Tim D
Obviously, there’s some circumstances where it’s quite promotion-driven and the promotions might be part of the offering of being in that particular retail space. It’s not something that we are strictly against, but pricing is a pretty crazy thing overall because it’s not just about retailers wanting to discount, it’s about how consumers are viewing price as well compared to what’s going on in the rest of the market. So when you’ve got brands like Monster and Red Bull, they’re huge brands who can sell their product for cheaper, we’re often more expensive in some shops that you go into. Because obviously, as a much smaller brand, we can’t match that. And once you start getting on a price competition, it’s one that we can’t win.
[01:27:25.060] – Andi J
I did some work, another name dropping moment, sorry. I did some work with Seth Gordie. And he describes the scary thing about getting into price competitions. He says, The problem is it’s a race to the bottom, and the scary thing is you might win it, and that becomes a difficult problem for you. It’s like, Oh, yes.
[01:27:43.490] – Tim D
Yeah, it’s definitely something you don’t want to win. So for us, it’s more about how we demonstrate the value of the product. Our RTD is not just a standard energy drink. When you look at a formula side by side with the likes of Red Bull and Monster, there’s actually more benefit from our product than there is from theirs. We have the standard things you would expect from an energy drink, B vitamins, caffeine, but we also have an ingredient called Brain Berry in there, which is really exciting. It’s like a berry extract that’s got some great clinical data on how it improves cognitive function. And we also got prebiotic fibre in there as well. So there’s this gut-brain axis thing going on in there with the connection between gut health and brain health. So side by side, we have a better product, I would say.
[01:28:42.460] – Andi J
The question, sorry, I had. Sorry to jump in. Does that matter to consumers? And the reason I ask is many years ago, probably a decade ago now, there was a very, very popular energy brand in Northern Ireland. At the time, it was out selling Red Bull. I don’t know if still is, 10 years ago. The agency I was at, we pitched to them, and they’d said in some of their documentation that it was the number one product because the brand was great. It was the The quality of the product was better than Red Bulls. It was this, this, and this, and this. It just didn’t smell right to me. We went out and stood in a couple of retail outlets and talk to your customers is my big thing. Studying, chatting to some kids, and it was really noticeable that actually the bulk of the buyers, no matter where we went and when we were quite young. When we asked them, said, What did you buy that for? I was like, It’s 99 pence. I was like, Well, Red Bull is £2. 50. I don’t have that. I’m buying this for because it’s a quid.
[01:29:42.640] – Andi J
And everywhere we went, all the research that we did, and we did a bit more research after that as well, it was all price, price, price, price, price That actually all anyone cared about was price. That’s what we should focus on, didn’t win the work. But it was really interesting how in their bubble, all they thought people cared about was the quality of the product and the logo. When you got out of their bubble, all the customers were telling us was price was the only thing that mattered. Does that quality of the drink, all those bits, because there’s another brand, Tenzig, I think, is it called? Named after Sherpa Tenzig. They’re in energy. They talk about natural products and this and natural this, natural that. Does it matter? People are going, Yeah, actually, I want an energy drink. Or is it an energy because I’m knackered and therefore just give me the thing with the caffeine?
[01:30:37.340] – Tim D
It’s both. I think it’d be stupid to ignore the fact that it’s very price-driven. Energy, particularly in a retail context, is quite need-driven. There’s hardly any time that you’re going to a shop and buy an energy drink that you’re going to have later on. It’s like, I feel tired. I need something to pick me up. And it’s very need-driven. So there’s a certain consumer that doesn’t care. They just want something that is going to address that need in that moment, and they’re not loyal to any particular brand. They’ll just get what’s cheapest. That customer, you’re never going to win that customer unless you’re the cheapest. So there’s no point in trying to convince that particular consumer to trade up because that’s not what they’re looking for, and you’ll never win that. So it’s about addressing the people that do care about that. And I think, particularly, what you’re seeing more and more of now with the younger consumer is that they are very health-focused and are looking for things that have additional benefits, and they’re willing to pay more for things that have perceived greater benefit. And that’s why you’re seeing the rise of more functional drinks products on the side of prebiotic sodas, kombucha.
[01:31:50.900] – Tim D
That whole end of the market is really growing, and it’s generally more expensive by quite a lot than other drinks in the category.
[01:32:01.340] – Andi J
In retail, do you consider those drinks, the kombuchas and the likes, as competitors? Because in a D2C space, they were probably never a competitor. But when you get into retail, and especially in travel retail, where their fridge space is really tight. So if they’re going to take on, we need four lines of a new category, something’s got to go. So all of a sudden, they might not be consumer competitivity, but they are customer-competitive to you. So do you look at that as well? Is that all part of your, how do we make our brand show up so it’s strong enough to not be the one that gets bombed?
[01:32:35.780] – Tim D
Yeah, we absolutely look at it. We don’t consider the more functional soft drink end of a direct competitor, but it’s all the same category. I think the piece of brand strategy work we’ve just done recently is looking at the functional drinks category as a whole. I think it’s sometimes quite easy to think of energy and functional drinks as two separate things, but it’s one category. Energy drinks are a functional drink after all, but they’re the biggest chunk of that market. So it’s easy for us to go, Our competitor is Monster. But actually, there’s, again, I love a Venn diagram, but if you look at energy function as a spectrum, there’s actually a a new space that’s submerging in the middle, which is energy plus. One of the brands that’s come out that’s doing that is James Smith’s brand, I don’t know if you know that. Really, at its heart, it’s an energy drink, but they market that as a productivity drink because it has additional benefits above just caffeine. It’s not just a, I’m tired, I need a hit. It’s around concentration, focus, cognitive, all that stuff. So there is this middle category opening up that is not just a hit of energy, and it’s not some of the more nebulous areas, the wellness drinks area, which is I don’t fully know.
[01:34:07.160] – Tim D
Cbd, for example, people still don’t really fully know what CPD does and whether they should have it or not. So there’s a little bit of a muddiness to that end of the spectrum. But that middle ground is really interesting. I think that’s where we start to occupy that space, where people will, if we do it right, people will not necessarily just bundle us in with Monster C4, all that That territory.
[01:34:32.100] – Andi J
Let’s take a step back a little bit further then. As a brand, you mentioned that you were bought by private equity and therefore you’re moving from startup to scale up. Is it just the obvious move, therefore, to go, Okay, we’re going into retail. What were the considerations around that discussion, those decisions that were taken? Because it’s not as straightforward as in, Oh, we’ve got a brand, we’ve got a community. Let’s just whack it somewhere else to sell.
[01:34:58.800] – Tim D
It’s quite different, isn’t It’s very different, yeah. And I think the original consensus was that retail wasn’t the right opportunity. I think right the way back when the brand was first acquired, particularly because of how difficult it is for a new brand coming into the energy market in particular, as I said, very saturated, very noisy. And you’ve got some very, very big mainstay brands in there that have got 90% market share or 90% brand awareness, where they’ve been around for so long that they’re just a default choice for most people. And that’s really hard to break through that and even get on the same level as that. So I think initially the consensus was that actually retail is not where we should be focusing. Let’s grow the D2C side of the business. But then over time, you hit a challenge where it’s a format challenge for us, really, because powder energy still now isn’t what people think about when they think of drinks. It’s far more sports, nutrition, pre-workout space where the familiarity is. The powder energy category in the UK is still quite new and quite small. It’s not really an entry-level product as well.
[01:36:15.400] – Tim D
What you find is that the consumer that switches to an energy powder is probably someone who’s drunk a lot of energy drinks in the past and wants a little bit more from it and wants to have the powder control how strong they have it and mixed flavours, which is what we find a lot of people doing with Sneak. But it’s not your immediate, I’m going to start drinking energy drinks and I’m going to go straight to a powder product. So there’s a little bit of a format challenge of how you can scale up that particular product. Which is where the can comes in as the bigger opportunity, because the market is magnitudes bigger for canned energy than it is for powder energy. And that was really what was driving the decision to actually let’s Let’s push this out and make go of it.
[01:37:03.020] – Andi J
Moving down that line into retail. And so you’ve got design challenges coming out of your different places, but you’ve also got a community of people who you’ve built over the years of the brand. You’ve got a Discord community and a Facebook community. Now, at the risk of sounding like a high court judge, could you explain what a Discord community is there, please, Tim?
[01:37:26.460] – Tim D
Discord is It’s a really interesting place. So it was born out of the gaming community, and it’s a social network, and it’s mostly gamers or people who are into gaming that use it because it’s not quite as user friendly as some of the more mass market social networks. But you have a private server, basically, which you set up and invite people to. So you have to have your own server set up. But that’s where our most hard core fans are, really, the sneak servers. I think we’re up to about 16,000 people on the server, which is… Yeah, it’s crazy for a brand our age to have that size of it. But I think that’s testament to how the brand was launched in a very community-first way. And it’s not just that people are on there just purely talking about the brand. It’s just become a bit of a space where where like-minded people have come together and built that community around the brand. And it’s largely happened organically as well. So we have some great community management. The guys here are really engaged with people on there, and it’s not something where we just set it up and left it, and whatever happens, happens.
[01:38:49.560] – Tim D
It’s managed. And we do try to grow it, but it’s not been… It’s happened organically at the same time.
[01:38:58.440] – Andi J
So I love talking about I’m not trying to pick fights that don’t exist. But as you go from this relatively niche gaming-focused brand with a Discord community and a bit of a Facebook group into this mass market, have you noticed any rising? You wouldn’t be the first brand where people are like, Oh, yeah, but they’re not for us anymore. The Northern Irish have a lovely phrase, They’ve lost the run of themselves. Basically, you’ve just moved away from what you were. Do you find… Is that attention that you have to be really careful how you manage, or have you managed to take community with you on this journey into more mass market sales?
[01:39:34.620] – Tim D
Honestly, we thought we might get quite a lot of that. I like sneaks selling out and going mainstream. We thought we would get some feedback like that, but honestly, it’s been really supportive from the community, that the people that are super into Sneak love seeing it out in the world. There’s often people sharing pictures on Facebook and Discord of sneak in the Wild when they gone into a shop and seeing a sneak on the shelves, it’s like an exciting thing, which is great because they share the excitement that we have of being out in shops and being more available to people. So it’s not quite as… It’s not gatekeep in the way that you would expect it or almost anticipate it to be, which is really good. And people just love seeing it out in the world or spotting someone else that’s got some sneak merch on or something like that. It’s like a bit of an unspoken thing that people just love to see.
[01:40:33.160] – Andi J
Amazing. Amazing stuff. Well, look, I want to have a bit of a change of gear. I want to pull the hand break up, spin the wheel around, get the tyres burning, and just point off in a different direction and talk just a little bit about you briefly before we wrap, because you’ve got a really interesting background. You’ve been agency-side and your brand-side now. So you’ve had a foot in both camps. And I had a guy on last season, James Hayhurst, who runs the Magic Sauce Course, which is how to get better work between agencies and clients, because there’s often tension there. Back to talking about tension again. In your experience of being agency and client-side, what is that magic sauce that makes great relationships between agencies and clients?
[01:41:17.680] – Tim D
It’s a very interesting question, and it was really an eye opener for me coming into brand side because it is such a different experience of how… Ultimately, you’re doing the same thing. You’re using creativity for a brand, and what we do in-house isn’t so dissimilar from what an agency would do. But in-house, you’re far more connected to the impact of the work that you do and how it relates to the business challenges and how you the other way around as well, how a business challenge can come up that then needs to be addressed using creativity. Whereas I think on an agency side, although the brief is driven by a business problem, once you’ve delivered that work, you’ve disconnected from it then and you’re on to your next brief. I don’t think you ever really know how much impact that’s had unless it’s a retained client that you work with year on year and you get to see that impact. But I think retainers are becoming less and less, certainly for smaller agencies. There’s that disconnection between the impact of the work. Whenever we put anything out now, I can see pretty much in real-time in the community how well that’s gone down.
[01:42:30.000] – Tim D
And that’s quite an uncomfortable thing sometimes to get that instantaneous feedback. But it’s also super interesting to I’m in the Discord, I’m in the Facebook group, I’m looking at what people are saying. And you can listen too much to that and that cloud your judgement sometimes, but it’s that connection to the impact of the work that you do has. So I think really it’s given me a greater appreciation of when I pitch ideas to clients what they’re looking for, because I’m now in a position where agencies pitching to me sometimes, and that’s a surreal experience because then I see their work in a different light, and I see some of the mistakes that I must have made when I was on the agency side. And I really struggle now to find an agency that understands our brand. So I think, it probably doesn’t answer your question, but from a personal experience, I think it’s I think anyone in an agency should really spend some time to get to know what is going on with that particular client, what challenges they’ve had on a day-to-day. Spend more time understanding the brand before trying to solve the problem.
[01:43:47.580] – Tim D
And this is a difficult thing to do because obviously time is not always on the side for stuff like this. But it’s that mutual understanding of both sides of the table that will ultimately make work better.
[01:44:01.180] – Andi J
To me, it all starts with asking better questions and asking more questions as well. You’d be amazed sometimes, even if the questions aren’t great, if you ask more of them, a volume just does help because people start talking. And start telling you things and you’re like, Oh, all right. And it’s amazing what you learn when you start asking more questions. Well, look, in terms of asking questions, I’ve just got one more left to ask you, Tim, and that is what both book or podcast or resource would you recommend people check out that might make them better at their job?
[01:44:36.240] – Tim D
So the one book that I love and I tell everyone about, and it’s a bit… It sounds quite pretentious, and it is, to be honest, a little bit pretentious. But it’s Rick Rubin’s book, The Creative Act, The Way of Being. I think this is one of those books that comes up a lot with people in a creative field because it is… One of the things I like about it is the way he frames creativity is about process, not output. And I think definitely having been agency-side, there’s a trap of falling into execution before really fully developing the idea. You’re almost approaching a execution first. But you already know it’s going to be a TV ad, for example. So then you’re having to fit an idea to an execution. Whereas the way that Rubin talks about creativity is removed from the output as process over outcome is what he talks about. And I I think the course I went to at Uni was quite an unusual advertising course, really. It’s creative advertising at Leeds Arts University. A lot of the other advertising courses were quite vocational in how they were set up. It was by the end of it, you’ll have a book, and then you can go to an agency and get a job.
[01:45:49.580] – Tim D
But for the first year of that course, we didn’t even make ads necessarily. It was all about creative thinking. I remember at the time being like, How is this helping me? But it’s actually been It’s super useful because earlier on, when you’re asking about creative processes, probably a lot of things that I absorbed during that I’m not even aware of about how you actually come up with ideas. And that’s what the book is about, basically.
[01:46:13.820] – Andi J
It seems like Leeds Creative Advertising University or whatever it was called, has gone for the Mr. Mayaghi approach to teaching you advertising. You’ve been painting the fence and waxing the car and dropping your coat and all that stuff before you get into the ring. So no, I love it.
[01:46:30.160] – Tim D
Yeah, absolutely.
[01:46:31.160] – Andi J
Perfect. Well, look, Tim, tell us, how do people get in touch with you? You probably have agencies trying to pitch you now going, We understand gaming culture, but how do people find you? Is it LinkedIn? Is that the best place or Discord?
[01:46:41.680] – Tim D
Yeah, LinkedIn. Yeah, that’s a good place. So feel free to get in touch on that.
[01:46:49.060] – Andi J
Great stuff. Thanks very much, Tim. Talk to you soon, mate.
[01:46:51.460] – Tim D
Thank you. Cheers, Andi.