TABS: FROM COLLEGE DROP OUT TO VIRAL SEX CHOCOLATE

Morning!

Today I’m going to break down one of the simplest marketing strategies that seemingly no one has thought of.

Other than the college dropout who is using it to make over $500,000 per month with just one product.

It’s a pretty insane story and an absolutely genius marketing strategy.

Let’s get into it…

Breaking Down The Strategy

In 2021, Jake Lewin (a student at the University of Michigan) saw a video on TikTok of a woman reviewing a “Sex Chocolate” product.

Almost instantly an idea popped into his head and he messaged his friend Oliver Brocato.

Over the next few months, the pair would slave away to make their crazy sex chocolate idea a reality.

And Tabs Chocolate was born…

But honestly, as much as it sounded like an awesome product, it wasn’t anything revolutionary.

You could argue it was a slightly better mousetrap, but sex chocolate has been around for decades. The idea was far from genius, but it’s not the product that has made them so successful, it’s the marketing behind the product.

Because they didn’t create Tabs to fill a gap in the market or capitalize on a huge demand for a product like this.

No, no, no.

There was no demand for this product when they started.

Instead, they saw its potential to go viral and knew they could create demand for it.

But the real question at play was how in the world were they going to make it go viral?

This is where Oliver’s sprinkle of marketing genius comes in.

Oliver knew that when it came to going viral, TikTok was by far the easiest platform to do it. The problem with TikTok though, is that the algorithm constantly changes and it’s tough to go viral consistently.

So rather than leaving it up to chance, he opted for a different approach.

An approach that looked something like this:

1) Hired UGC Creators

Rather than creating one brand account and attempting to grow it, Oliver paid 30 UGC creators on retainer.

Each of them set up their own separate Tabs TikTok account and were paid to post 1-3 videos with Tabs chocolate per day.

When Harry Dry asked Oliver about this strategy he said:

This approach meant that nearly 100 Tabs chocolate videos would hit TikTok EVERY SINGLE DAY.

So whilst everyone was thinking that they kept seeing it all over their ‘For You Page’ - they literally were.

Because there were 30+ people posting videos of the product every day.

2) Hiding The Ads

As much as consistency and frequency were always going to be important with this strategy - the quality of the videos was important too.

So Oliver gave the creators some pretty simple guidelines:

• Film 10-second clips

• Make sure there’s always a crazy hook

• Don’t film them like ads

• Never use CTA’s or logos

The whole idea behind this strategy is to make people feel like this is a viral product before it ever was. So they had to make every video feel like it was someone genuinely reviewing or using the product.

Which is why it was so important for the creators to not push hard on the sale.

3) Conversion Strategy

At this point, Tabs are going viral all over the place on TikTok, but that didn't mean they were actually selling any chocolate.

But Oliver had a strategy to make sure that happened too.

He calls it the “One-two punch”.

The first punch is virality, he says you should always start by pushing content that has nothing to do with selling but gets as many eyes as possible on your videos.

Once you have a viral video, you come in with punch number 2.

Punch number 2 is what he calls “Replying to comment videos”. In these, you reply to as many comments you can on your viral video and go into detail about:

• Benefits

• Features

• Your USP

These videos are often retargeted organically by TikTok to viewers of the original viral video. Allowing you to essentially create a mini-funnel of TikTok videos.

4) Repurpose The Content

One of the greatest things about this strategy is whilst Tabs is going viral and driving crazy amounts of sales on Tiktok, Oliver and the team can literally hand-pick the videos that have the most views and repurpose them to other platforms.

It’s essentially trialling UGC at scale and being able to almost guarantee more views across Tabs’ other social media channels.

So now, not only are Tabs going viral on TikTok, but they can also start to pop off on all the other platforms that use short-form video.

Pretty insane.

Today, 2 years on from the initial idea of Tabs chocolate the brand still only has one product.

Yet this year they are estimated to do upwards of $10,000,000 in revenue.

Not bad for a college drop out right?

Want your own viral product just like Tabs? Here’s the formula:

1) Reverse engineer a “Viral” product
2) Use UGC creators to get content out at scale
3) Show them the “One-two punch” tactic
4) Have them create “Reply videos” to convert customers
5) Repurpose their content all over the web

This has to be one of the simplest, yet most effective, marketing strategies I’ve ever come across.

My guess is we are going to see a lot more products reverse-engineered for virality over the coming years.

But what do you think? Fire me a reply to this email and let me know.

Right, that’s it from me, until next time!

— Niall

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