The 5 growth leaks hiding in almost every premium brand

Sales up, profit down? These are the 5 growth leaks we find in almost every premium eCommerce brand – and 5 questions to find yours. The RBA has lifted rates for the fourth time this year, but Australians haven't stopped spending. Retail spending is up on last year, and $82.6 billion was spent online in 2025. What's falling is profit. In this episode of The Brand Marketing Show, Catherine shares the five growth leaks that turn up again and again when we audit premium brands – with real, anonymised examples of what each one costs. Book a Brand Growth Strategy  Session:https://www.productpreneurmarketing.com/book-a-brand-growth-strategy-session/ Show notes and sources: productpreneurmarketing.com/episode-336

Black Friday early access emails started landing in September this year. Which is giving Coles and Woolworths putting hot cross buns on the shelf on Boxing Day. If your Q4 plan is basically one question, being how much do we discount and when do we start, this episode is worth a listen before you lock anything in. In this episode of The Brand Marketing Show, Catherine Langman walks through six steps to a Q4 that's actually profitable for a premium eCommerce brand. Only one of them has anything to do with Black Friday discounts. Covering the number that should be setting your ad spend all year round (and no, it isn't ROAS), a twenty-minute exercise that shows you where your real demand peak is, the five or six seasonal moments your customer moves through between now and February, why a banner across your existing images isn't a campaign, how to do Black Friday on purpose, and why January is a growth window rather than a hangover. Plus why Ezra Firestone's 2026 Q4 guide came as such a surprise. Marketing strategy for premium, founder-led eCommerce brands that want profitable, sustainable growth. Book a Brand Growth Strategy Session: https://www.productpreneurmarketing.com/book-a-brand-growth-strategy-session/   q4 planning ecommerce, black friday strategy, ecommerce marketing australia, contribution margin, premium brand marketing, how to plan black friday, ecommerce without discounting

Is your content getting likes but not sales? Here's why posting more won't make your brand more money, and how to create eCommerce content that actually sells.   Most founders aren't making too little content. They're making content that's used once and gone, and a lot of it is rushed, generic or obviously AI-generated. In this episode of The Brand Marketing Show, Cath Langman from Productpreneur Marketing explains what that costs premium brands in lost sales, profit and repeat customers.    She also shares the five-step Shelf-Life System for creating content that stops the scroll and keeps selling for months.   Listen to the full episode and read the show notes: https://productpreneurmarketing.com/episode-334/   Book a Brand Growth Strategy Session: https://productpreneurmarketing.com/lets-talk 

A 40% discount on a 50% margin product doesn't cost you 40% of your profit. It costs you 80%. In this episode of The Brand Marketing Show, Catherine Langman walks through the arithmetic almost nobody runs before building a big sale campaign, what happens to revenue in the months afterwards, and seven ways to build an ecommerce promotional calendar that doesn't depend on four enormous weekends a year. Covers the peak-event model and what it genuinely asks of a business, why customers acquired on deep discount so rarely return at full price, the difference between discounts that change customers and discounts that select for different ones, and the energy cost of running a business built around peak trading events. Marketing strategy for premium, founder-led ecommerce brands that want profitable, sustainable growth. Book a Brand Growth Strategy Session: https://www.productpreneurmarketing.com/

I finally bought from a brand I'd been following for months, and by the time I'd paid I felt slightly worse about myself than when I started. This episode is about why. Every website contains a prediction about who's visiting it and what will move her, and when that prediction is wrong she doesn't object to the tactics, she just leaves. In your analytics that looks like an abandoned cart, which is why it usually gets diagnosed as a pricing problem and treated with more social proof. We cover why you notice high-pressure tactics before your customers can name them, what happens when a brand claims care and delivers extraction, how to tell whether your offer is rewarding a decision or arguing for one, and what a red carpet customer experience looks like from first visit through to the second month.   Book a Brand Growth Strategy Session: https://www.productpreneurmarketing.com/book-a-brand-growth-strategy-session/ Full show notes: productpreneurmarketing.com/episode-332  

A premium brand in its second decade raised its ad spend by around sixty per cent. Revenue rose around twenty. Profit fell, and the founder was certain the cause was her advertising. The advertising accounted for one seventh of the decline. The other six sevenths came from her free revenue base — organic, direct, email and repeat purchase — growing just fourteen per cent while spend grew four times faster. In this episode I unpack why blended marketing efficiency is a leverage ratio rather than an efficiency metric, the three legs every profitable brand stands on, and why most brands have built all three out of rented material. Plus the three numbers to check this week that will tell you which of your legs is short. Growth strategy for premium, founder-led eCommerce brands. The Brand Marketing Show: https://www.productpreneurmarketing.com/podcast/ Work with us: https://www.productpreneurmarketing.com  

Your gross margin looks healthy – and it's probably lying to you. In this episode of The Brand Marketing Show, I show you how to price a premium brand for profitable growth, with real numbers from two brands (including Babiators). Why gross margin is the wrong number to price against, and what contribution per unit actually reveals. Why a historically "good" 60% margin is no longer enough, and why I aim for 70 to 85%. Why your channels should feed each other rather than compete. And why healthy margins aren't greed – they're what let a brand innovate, stand for something, and endure. It's the pricing episode that ties the whole series together: understand your buyer, design your channel mix on purpose, and price off the honest numbers. Want us to run this analysis on your brand? A Brand Growth Strategy Session is where that starts: https://www.productpreneurmarketing.com/lets-talk Find this episode and more at productpreneurmarketing.com/episode-330  

Your best advertising isn't an ad – it's someone else's shelf. And "just go direct" probably talked you out of it. Everyone is telling premium brands to cut out the middleman and go direct-to-consumer. In this episode of The Brand Marketing Show, I make the case for the channel most premium brands undervalue: why the right stockist is some of the best advertising money can't buy, why direct and wholesale grow each other when you stop undercutting yourself, why the right shop is the fullest expression of your brand rather than a loss of control, and how to design your channel mix on purpose. It's not "wholesale good, direct bad" – it's the right mix for your particular brand, buyer and economics. Want help designing yours on real numbers? A Brand Growth Strategy Session is where that starts: https://productpreneurmarketing.com/lets-talk Find this episode and more at productpreneurmarketing.com/episode-329

If your content doesn't stop the scroll, it's not because your packing-orders Reel lost to a better one. It lost to the four hundred similar versions that came before it, which had already taught her that packing videos contain nothing new. When content lands flat, the instinct is to assume it wasn't good enough, and the remedy that follows is usually more of the same, done more carefully. But a woman scrolling isn't evaluating your content. She's pattern-matching at enormous speed, and the only question her brain is answering is whether she's seen this shape before. The same standard now applies on a second front, for entirely different reasons. A retrieval system won't cite your page if it can already get the same thing elsewhere, and Google's first official guide to generative AI search says so about as plainly as Google says anything. In this episode Cath unpacks why posting more consistently so often changes nothing, what Google actually said about non-commodity content, why the claim circulating about AI-generated content isn't quite right, and the one input that can be neither generated nor copied. In this episode Why "post more consistently" so often changes nothing What Google actually said about non-commodity content, and what it didn't say about AI The difference between a founder bio and an origin catalyst Why most brands tell the wrong story entirely The myths you can stop worrying about: llms.txt, chunking, structured data The single question to run every piece of content through before you publish Links Google Search Central, Optimizing your website for generative AI features on Google Search: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/fundamentals/ai-optimization-guide Book a Brand Growth Strategy Session: productpreneurmarketing.com/lets-talk  

I'm the customer premium brands want most – and I recently realised I'd walked straight past one I should have loved, for a whole year, while actively shopping for exactly what they sell. In this episode of The Brand Marketing Show, I use that story to explain what actually makes a premium, considered buyer say yes (it is never the discount), why so much technically skilled marketing repels the very buyer it was built to attract, and the crucial difference between my personal values and the buying process shared by premium buyers everywhere. Then I get to the fix – which is almost embarrassingly simple, and exactly the thing most marketers are too invested in their own certainty to try. Stop guessing what your buyer needs to hear. Our Customer Intelligence Survey hands you the answers in your customers' own words: https://www.productpreneurmarketing.com/customerintelligence Find this episode and more at https://www.productpreneurmarketing.com/episode-327/ premium brand marketing, marketing to premium customers, ecommerce marketing, why customers don't buy, considered purchase, customer research, brand strategy, product based business, small business Australia