Walking into a business that runs on 100% performance marketing – live dashboards refreshed by the hour – is not for the faint of heart. But that is exactly what Cassandra Do Carmo signed up for as Lyka’s first-ever brand hire.
Three and a half years later, the Australian fresh dog food subscription brand, which feeds more than 100,000 dogs nationwide, has roughly tripled its brand awareness. Do Carmo shared how on the latest episode of The Brand Hunch, the podcast from Sydney brand growth agency Chello, hosted by Managing Director Lindsay Rogers.
The episode is a case study in a problem every growth marketer knows: how do you convince a performance-obsessed founder to fund brand? Do Carmo’s answer is to stop arguing about theory and start running experiments that show up in the same dashboards everyone already watches.
Skip the theory, run the experiment
The conversation digs into what it takes to build brand foundations inside a hyper-growth, data-obsessed scale-up. Do Carmo talks through moving away from strict marketing theory – including the familiar 60/40 rule for splitting brand and performance spend – and leaning into pragmatic, high-impact brand experiments instead.
The standout is Lyka’s viral “Poo Horrors” campaign. Rather than chase an abstract brand platform, the team anchored creative on a real-world moment every dog owner knows: picking up after their pooch. That category entry point became territory that could drive upper-funnel growth while still feeding short-term performance metrics.
Why category entry points win
Category entry points are the cues that trigger a buyer to think of your brand in a buying situation. For Lyka, owning the moment of scooping up after a dog gave the brand a foothold in daily life, rather than competing purely on product claims. It is the kind of brand building that does not sit in a deck – it sits in the customer’s routine.
Make brand look like performance
For marketers fighting the brand investment battle in a growth-led environment, measurement is the quiet superpower. Do Carmo discusses navigating creative wear-in versus wear-out, using Marketing Mix Modelling to tie brand activity to commercial outcomes, and tracking brand health with tools like Tracksuit.
That combination – a memorable category entry point plus credible measurement – is how brand spend survives in a room full of performance dashboards. You are not asking the business to trust a hunch. You are showing what the experiment did.
What to borrow
The practical takeaway for D2C founders and growth teams is to find an unglamorous, high-frequency moment in the customer’s routine that competitors ignore, and build a campaign around it.
- Start with the real-world moment, not the brand manifesto.
- Pair creative with measurement the CFO can see, such as MMM or a brand tracker.
- Give creative enough time to wear in before you judge it.
The Brand Hunch has form here: previous episodes feature senior marketers from Specsavers, Future Super, R.M. Williams and Canva, exploring how much of marketing is science and how much is built on a hunch. Lyka’s story suggests you do not need perfect conditions to build a brand. You need one memorable idea anchored in the category, and the numbers to defend it.
Source: Campaign Brief
