Ryan Gracie Spills on Branding and Staying in Your Lane

“It’s been very interesting, I’d say, the last eight years, as marketplaces started to grow throughout Australia,” said Ryan Gracie, the CMO of MyDeal at the Online Retailer Conference & Expo. “We were a bit late to the party, but now there’s this proliferation of marketplaces, there are ones popping up daily; I think there are over 30 at the moment that dominates the landscape. It will be very interesting to see where this goes in the next five to ten years.”

Do you think we’re heading towards an over-saturated marketplace landscape?

“So there’s probably no such thing as peak marketplace, but there’s peak same product in every marketplace,” Gracie told us. “And what’s happening is that we’re all competing for the same keywords and the same products at the same price. So consumers are becoming fatigued, trying to find the product they’re after because I type it into Google, there are these products in 20 different marketplaces at the same price? So they have this conscious decision makings around ‘Where do I go? It’s all the same thing. But why are they from different sellers?'”

So, you took the ‘Of the Day’ off the Catch branding, and you are an integral part of the MyDeal re-brand, which took place last year as well. 

“Yeah, so I joined Catch in 2016 when it was Catch of the Day. So the suggestion and advice was that we dropped [‘Of the Day’], and after going back and forth, we got there in the end. And I think it really changed the demeanour of the marketplace around the daily deal sites,” said Gracie.

“What I found was that the marketplace just got into it, taking it from one deal a day to thousands of deals, and now millions of products. And then last year, when I arrived at MyDeal, it was obvious that it needed to rebrand. We had to go through that journey, which is always a little bit painful but well worth the effort. And working on it with a colleague of mine, John Barkle, we got there and launched in September last year, and it’s been great; it’s been really successful.”

There was one thing that you mentioned in that panel that I thought was interesting about staying in your lane. I’d like you to explain why it’s important for a marketplace to pick a lane and stay in it rather than expanding out and something that might not fit really well.

“I just don’t believe that there is room to help too many general merchandise retailers in the country,” Gracie told Power Retail. “So we have Amazon, we have eBay, we have Catch, of course, we have MyDeal, Everyday Market. And then you look at these these these lanes occupied by Barbeques Galore, THE ICONIC with fashion, now they can experience success. But as soon as they’re trying to start selling things to your customer base that they don’t expect; I think that is a little bit mercenary, trying to get money because they have an audience. There’s also the value proposition, so stick to it and extend the aisle as far as you can.”

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