Spacegoods’ really clever comparison trick

When you look at a brand like Spacegoods from the outside, it’s easy to assume it’s a brand built on going viral and being the trendy new thing. 

We mean, in just a couple of years, Spacegoods have gone from zero to 150,000+ customers, broke £4m in revenue in their second year, and were on track to break £10m in Year 2.

(That's when public numbers end, alas.)

But under the hood, there’s another very boring, very unsexy reason (we think) they’re so successful: they just get their customers. 

Underneath everything they write is a really deep understanding of how people think and make decisions.

Love it.

We're such big fans of this bit of Spacegoods' copy that we wrote a full deep-dive on it for our newsletter a few months ago.

But here's the TLDR: the reason this bit of Spacegoods' copy is so good is because they've realised that their competitor isn't other mushroom coffee brands.

While other functional mushroom brands are talking about purity and dosage, Spacegoods have figured out that their biggest growth audience is the 63% of adults who drink coffee every day and have never thought about switching.

So instead of writing category copy that speaks to the 3% already sold on functional mushrooms, they gear their message towards getting people to just make a little switch.

In other words, sometimes your real competitor probably isn't who you think it is.

(There's this popular phrase that Netflix's competitor isn't Amazon or the cinema, it's sleep. Which we're not wild on, frankly. But it's a handy little nugget to reframe this idea in your brain: you're fighting against the default behaviour that's stopping people using you, not your competitor.)

And that's huge.

Because on a copywriting level, the Spacegoods copy isn't the best. The 5X stat isn't backed up, the bullets don't line up cleanly so the comparison loses some of its punch...

And yet, despite that, this copy gets people to think "oh, maybe I'll try this instead of my morning coffee".

And that's way more effective than any clever line will be.

Customer insight and consumer psychology > clever lines, almost every time.