Episode 11 - Clarity over cool: Éva Goicochea on building maude and a category-defining brand
Most brands don’t have a positioning problem; they have a clarity problem. Éva Goicochea argues that if your team and your customers can’t explain what you are and why you exist, then you don’t actually have a brand. The brands that do last are those that pair a clear mission with ruthless discipline – and know exactly who and what to say no to.
How do you know if your brand is actually working?
Okay we’re going to ask you to gird your loins for a moment. Take a deep breath, then do the following: ask five people what your company does. If you get five different answers, your brand isn’t working.
It doesn’t matter how good your logo is, or how much you’re spending on marketing. If people can’t seamlessly explain what you are, you don’t exist in a meaningful way.
Most companies chase awareness instead of understanding. They launch campaigns, partnerships, and content, all before they’ve nailed the one thing that matters:
What do we stand for?
What separates creating a real brand from just selling a product?
“It’s not about a brand being cool or not cool. It’s about a brand being clear.”
– Éva Goicochea, founder and CEO of maude
Clarity isn’t a marketing exercise. It’s operational. It shows up in:
What you build
What you say yes (and more importantly, no) to
How every part of the company behaves
The thing is, plenty of products sell (we’ve all been effectively “Instagrammed” for better or worse). But very few brands actually stick.
The difference? Whether the company has a reason to exist beyond the thing it’s selling.
“If maude’s product went away tomorrow, [our] mission is still critical. If the product is the vehicle, but the mission supersedes product – that’s a brand. Without a heart in either one of those things, you’re not a brand, you’re a commodity.”
– Éva Goicochea
This is where a lot of direct-to-consumer (DTC) brands go sideways. Some are built purely to sell; optimized for margins, distribution, and then exit. Others had strong mission energy but couldn’t make the economics work.
Both fail. Just in different ways.
The brands that last sit comfortably in the tension:
They believe in something real
They can actually sustain it commercially
maude’s bet was on its belief that sexual wellness wasn’t just a product category; it was a human one. Not gendered. Not hidden. Not embarrassing.
That framing changed everything.
Because when you change how people see a category, you don’t just sell into it, you redefine it. And with the global sexual wellness market currently valued at approximately $43 billion and projected to reach $74 billion by 2032, there was a huge untapped opportunity for Éva and her team to establish themselves as both a category leader and as an unmistakably defined brand, even as the company grew.
Why do some brands lose their way as they scale?
Scaling doesn’t kill brands, drifting away from a North Star does.
As companies grow, different teams start optimizing for different goals – from revenue and product to partnerships and performance marketing. Without a shared anchor, things start to fragment.
Marketing says one thing. Product delivers another. The customer feels the gap.
“We have to agree on why we exist in order to figure out how to go forward.”
– Éva Goicochea
That alignment is the whole game, because when teams don’t share the same answer, and for Éva, that’s when “it goes sideways.”
Especially when only about one in five employees globally reports being engaged at work, cohesion isn’t just a nice-to-have – it’s a performance driver. Cohesion begets engagement, and engagement reinforces cohesion.
And for Éva, alignment also requires something most companies aren’t great at: restraint. She’s often referred to as the queen of no – not because she’s difficult, but because she’s disciplined (and like our lady and savior Jane Fonda often says, “no is a complete sentence.”).
Éva knows that every yes adds complexity, and every no protects the system. And what that means is that most teams don’t have a creativity problem; they have a filtering problem.
Ultimately, the brands that win aren’t the ones that do the most. They’re the ones that maintain coherence as they grow.
What to do this week
Okay so back to what we braced ourselves for at the beginning of our exercise. Let’s try it again – this time with the wind of Éva’s wisdom at our backs.
Run an audit; ask your team:
What do we do?
Who is it for?
Why do we exist?
Then ask your customers the same thing. Now compare. If the answers don’t line up, don’t touch your marketing. Tighten the story.
Then pick one thing you’re currently doing – be it a campaign, a partnership, or a product – that doesn’t clearly support that story. And cut it.
Again: Clarity isn’t built by adding more. It’s built by removing what doesn’t belong.
Happy branding!
Related Episodes
– Robbie Hammond on Building The Impossible with Tenacity, Timing, and Vision
– From Fear of Uncertainty to Strategic Advantage with Kut Akdogan
– Judgment at Work with Sir Andrew Likierman
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