Nutrabolt’s chief marketing officer Robert Zajac is on a mission for growth.
As the chief marketing officer of energy drink company that is prospering in the “functional” beverage category, the company – whose portfolio includes C4 Energy, Cellucor, XTEND and a strategic investment in Bloom Nutrition – his job is to drive growth in a category that is exploding.
“We’re a performance driven company,” says Zajac. “If you spend a dollar – whether it’s short term or long term – prove that the dollar is moving the business. Every day we talk about marketing growth. It’s the essential part to keep getting dollars.”
The Energy, Sports, and Functional Drinks category is up 34.5%, according to Spate. Last year, Olipop was valued at $1.85 billion and PepsiCo acquired soda brand Poppi for $1.95 billion. Nutrabolt is on track to earn $1 billion in annual revenue and this growth-driven.
“My vision for the organization is to be a growth engine for the entire company,” Zajac continues. “I want to do it while helping the team create amazing work. We want to be incredibly creative and disruptive. We want to move the whole marketplace and prove that we’re creating value.”
Prior to joining Nutrabolt, Zajac was an SVP of marketing at Abercrombie & Fitch Co. He also spent more than eight years in senior leadership roles at Nike and worked on the agency side.
Brand Innovators caught up with Zajac from his office in Austin to discuss how he is growing the company’s portfolio of brands and his approach to performance marketing. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
How do you lead your team with this performance approach in mind?
A lot of it is building infrastructure and hiring the right people. Part of my remit is integrated marketing and brand but also our growth engine. Growth is marketing data and analytics. It’s our digital platforms Amazon and DTC. It’s media. We’ve tied all of that together. We just built a custom marketing mix model. We took about a year because we didn’t want to do an off-the-shelf. We built a really robust test and learning model with geo matched market tests, household penetration tests, market share tests.
We’ll over invest in one market with one distributor and then we’ll test everything –household penetration, brand lift, impact on Amazon. We’ll say, we invested this many incremental dollars with this distributor. This is what happened to our digital business. Then we’ll evaluate whether or not it was worth it. If it was, then we’ll do that in five more markets. It’s the undercurrent of everything.
How are you growing a business in a growth category?
Energy is incredibly competitive. It’s an incredibly dynamic category within carbonated soft drinks. It’s one of only two categories that are growing at a robust clip. Everybody wants a piece and you see that with M&A activity there. Functional soda is the other one that’s growing. Energy is a $30 billion category and functional is probably a $2 billion category. BAll the big distributors and brands want to be there. It’s incredibly competitive.
It’s a really dynamic marketplace. If you look at what we call traditional energy drinks. Full sugar plus caffeine has been around for a long time. They still dominate the marketplace. But the last four waves of growth have been functional energy drinks. C4 was born as an energy drink in 2018. We have three different angles for C4. The first is function. We have three labs – Auburn University, Bentonville, Austin. We have PhDs on staff to do clinical tests and trials. We have come a long way from putting some caffeine and some sugar in a can. We’re clinically proven to enhance endurance right to elevate focus and we can show the results. The future of energy will all be functional.
The second one is flavor. We have an incredible team when it comes to developing flavors. We recently launched Cereal Killer, a clear zero-sugar liquid that tastes like fruity cereal in milk. It broke a record for DTC sales. It immediately got picked up by 7-Eleven as an exclusive and it’s our top-selling sku at 7-Eleven.
The third piece is sports. We were born as a gym and fitness brand. We have long-standing roots with NFL players, the NBA. We have drivers in NASCAR. We have athletes in every sport from an NIL perspective. Last year we signed our largest NIL deal in history. We signed 128 players. We signed a player from every school in the March Madness tournament male and female so we had one from every 64 teams and one from the other 64 teams.
How are you breaking through to capture attention in a crowded category?
It is really unique in our big swings. For this NIL deal, we put our energy drink into a champagne bottle and called it liquid gold. We basically took that champagne bottle and we gave it to all the teams that were in the final for the NCAA tournament men and women. We have no right to say, ‘if you win It’d be great if you pop this champagne’ because they’re all underage. But we gave them champagne and the Florida team won the National Championship. Then they put on C4 goggles and they popped bottles of yellow C4 champagne and went on SportsCenter for 17 minutes wearing those C4 goggles. It’s those big swings. It’s basically taking a page out of some other categories’ books.
Can you talk about the importance of showing up in culture?
We’ve taken a very specific approach to the intersection of sports and culture. For example, we have NBA partnerships. We partner with The Heat, The Celtics, The Knicks and most recently we are the Official Energy Drink of The LA Lakers. It’s rooted in sport and that’s why we are there but it’s also culture. It’s four of our key cities, cities that drive culture – New York, LA, Miami and Boston. Kevin Hart is a long-standing investor in our business. He gives us a really unique angle. He is an incredible advocate for fitness. He’s in the culture. We try to build an intersection of sports, athletics and culture.
We have a product that’s just come out called Mango Fuego with mango and habanero. We’re partnering with The Hot Ones and it’s perfect. We’re going to get two players from The Miami Heat on The Hot Ones. That will insert us into culture, but it’s rooted in sport because we are a sponsor for The Heat. For America’s 250, we’re partnering with Black Cat Fireworks – the oldest fireworks brand in the country. It’s all about intersecting at the place where sport and athletes meet pop culture.
What do you have planned for the World Cup?
Our intention is to be real and relevant. We’re an eight-year-old brand that’s fighting in a $30 billion category. We’re not going to go and spend millions and millions of dollars, so we have challenged our team to be creative. What is our NCAA locker room moment? That’s a page out of the Nike playbook. Nike’s modus operandi for the Olympics is being creative and disruptive. It’s a challenge we’re embracing.
Tell me about how your experiences at brands including Nike and Abercrombie influence you in your current role.
For Nike that whole company and the whole incredible brand and ecosystem that they built on is around listening to the voice of the athlete. On your first day to your last day, you listen to the voice of the athlete – everyone from LeBron all the way down to the 14 year old kid who picks up a ball. I’ve tried to bring that here, which is basically let’s be the most knowledgeable brand when it comes to our consumer, let’s over index on research. Then when opportunities are revealed we can flip and act quickly. We still consider ourselves an entrepreneurial company. We still founder led.
Nike also has incredible centers of excellence. They hire the best talent. We’ve picked up and modified from that Nike ecosystem and that enables incredible integrated marketing. Don’t let consumers see your org chart. Don’t go out there and be like, well, it was clearly done by a social team. Have functional experts in place to drive an integrated marketing plan. It creates autonomy and empowerment.
Abercrombie was incredible. Almost everything was done in-house with very little agency help across any function. We’ve done the same thing. When I got here, a lot of money went out the door to agencies. Over time, we’ve built an internal creative engine. We in-housed influencer and creative marketing and have driven well over 2 billion impressions. We control content. We control contracts. We control spend. We control the media injections.
