🎯 How Morning Brew ‘owns’ an emoji

A simple tactic to stay top of mind

Read time: 3 minutes

Welcome to the 4,181 strategy nerds who have joined us over the last 2 weeks!

Join the growing community of 19,845 readers getting byte-sized strategy playbooks here:

Last edition we asked for feedback on how to make this your favourite newsletter.

Thank you for the suggestions - we had a tonne of fun riffing on ideas with you in the replies!

Here are some themes we noticed:

  • More brevity: Some editions crept beyond 3 minute-reads. Keep ‘em short and sweet.

  • More practical: The narratives are interesting, but the more reusable the tactics are today, the better.

  • More variety: Not everyone is building a grand-slam-network-effect-unicorn. Let’s spice up the types of companies we spotlight.

You spoke, we listened. The next few editions we’ll be experimenting a lot to nail these improvements.

For now, we’re steering towards this north star:

Make this newsletter “the voice note your business partner sends you when they discover a growth hack to try”.

Casual. Interesting. To the point. Useful. Worth sharing.

Sound like a plan?

Here we go!

Today’s Strategy Breakdown is brought to you by… AE Studio.

Building your Minimum Viable Product or AI solution doesn’t have to be a headache – AE’s world-class development studio is the reliable shortcut to getting to market. Fast.

AE Studio has a one-of-a-kind guarantee: “We’ll treat your product or project like it’s our own startup and do whatever it takes, with a founder-level mentality, to make it spectacularly successful”.

How Morning Brew ‘owns’ an emoji

Chess Move

The what: A TLDR explanation of the strategy

Any way you can get your brand noticed online and occupy customer mindshare, you do it.

Morning Brew (business newsletter with 4 million readers) use a simple tactic to reinforce their brand whenever it pops up online.

They claimed ownership of the coffee emoji (☕️).

Social Media accounts associated with the company (company page, founder, even employees) all sport a ☕️ in their name.

They even include it in every subject line of their daily newsletter.

It reflects their logo (a coffee cup), their name (Morning ‘Brew’), and has become their internet-native mascot / signature.

Breakdown

The how: The strategic playbook boiled down to 3x key takeaways

1: Visual differentiation

Emojis stand out in text surfaces like Twitter and email inboxes.

When users see a post / email from Morning Brew account, the emoji is eye-catching and instantly recognisable.

For a trusted brand, seeing the emoji triggers an easy click for readers.

2: Employees as a force multiplier

With employees rocking the signature cup, Morning Brew multiplies it’s brand touchpoints across Twitter.

Morning Brew’s employees act as virtual brand ambassadors, even when they aren’t posting directly about the company.

For a digital native brand that thrives on organic social funnels, employees with an active online presence provide a leveraged marketing boost.

3: The power of default association

Once you’ve seen the Morning Brew mug ☕️ a few times, you start to notice it everywhere.

Even in situations unrelated to the company.

Colleague Slack-ing you about a coffee ☕️ run? You think of Morning Brew.

Replies to a Twitter thread about a coffee shop? Morning Brew creeps in.

Even if it’s only a fleeting thought, and only impacts a cohort of readers who have noticed the emoji, Morning Brew’s brand is netting free impressions all across the internet.

Rabbit Hole

The where: 3x high-signal resources to learn more

Why I Took an Emoji and Made it 3D (And You Should Consider Doing the Same)

A behind-the-scenes blog post at one of our new favourite niche sites.

Glen Allsopp took inspiration from Morning Brew, laid claim to this little guy (👾), and got a freelancer to whip up a pixel-perfect 3D render to sprinkle around his site.

Come for the story. Stay for the beautiful website + SEO tips + quirky easter eggs.

[6 minute read] ➔

Order Dominos by tweeting a pizza emoji 🍕

By going down the rabbit hole of “emoji marketing” this week, we stumbled upon a few memorable campaigns.

Here’s one from Dominos we loved.

They also shipped a bunch of other creative tactics to let customers order pizza from different surfaces, like a Slack bot, an Apple Watch app, and an Alexa Skill.

[5 second read] ➔

The real reason why Morning Brew grew to 1.5 million subscribers in 5 years

Growth.design is truly one of the most creative content sites on the internet.

Interactive animated comic books breaking down UX + Psychology case studies on interesting tech companies.

Since you’re here, you’ll love it there.

Here’s their Morning Brew piece.

[6 minute read] ➔

Recommendations, friends, and sponsors

Touch Stay - Last week I stayed in a wilderness cabin that had a Touch Stay guide. Awesome product, made my life so much easier. Take a peek at Touch Stay, use it to create a guide to literally anything!

Taplio - This newsletter was initially launched off the back of a LinkedIn audience. Start building your tribe today with the best-in-class LinkedIn publishing tool.

Faster Than Normal - Our friend Alex Brogan’s newsletter packages value-dense brain food you won't find anywhere else, helping you go faster than normal. Sign up today, you won’t regret it.

We have a growing audience of 19,000+ readers from top companies like Google, Meta, Atlassian, Stripe, and Snapchat. If you’d like to sponsor Strategy Breakdowns, see more information here.

That's all for today’s issue, folks! Optimise your feeds by following on Twitter [@tomaldertweets] and LinkedIn [/in/tom-alder]

Thanks again for being here.

Join the conversation

or to participate.