Psycho Bunny

Matthew (Hatch) M is the Vice President of Brand and Marketing at Psycho Bunny, who has over 20 years of experience in the multi-faceted arena arching over areas of fashion, music and culture. Having been trained in the visual arts, he has produced electronic music and toured worldwide under the sobriquet, Hatchmatik. Matthew has also worked with global brands such as C2 Montréal, The Huffington Post, Red Bull, and Vice. He is also a former fashion editor for ‘Dress to Kill Men’, a Canadian fashion magazine for men. Furthermore, as a Co-Creative Director, Matthew launched “La Montréalaise Atelier,” a cult lifestyle brand of women’s t-shirts and sweatshirts.

In an exclusive interview with Construction Business Review, Matthew shared his valuable insights on the challenges, trends and best practices in the Brand Management space.

What are your key roles and responsibilities here at the organization?

My primary focus is brand development and creativity and looking at everything we do from a digital marketing point of view, be it paid media, customer relationship management or first-party data. Moreover, the physical environment where our brand emerges is paramount for attracting new customers. Moreover, the physical space where our brand comes to life is very vital as far as customer acquisition is concerned. We launch our stores in heavily frequented commercial areas to ensure maximum first touch points from potential customers. This, in turn, stipulates the right brand positioning.

 What major challenges and trends have you seen impacting the brand management space lately?

Ensuring the fabric's softness is maintained while producing items with high tactility is more or less challenging. Every polo we produce is from pure pima cotton, and a lot of time and attention goes into ensuring they are all perfect crafts. Another major hurdle we are trying to overcome is to certify that the right customers walk into our store where the brand is explained to them by a human being, resulting in effective brand positioning. This can be done alongside investing in paid and digital media and hosting cultural events where potential consumers are exposed to the details of our brand. The need for our first-party data has become vital and almost challenging due to recent changes in privacy laws and digital marketing techniques. Finding as many client touchpoints as possible along the customer journey is another crucial thing to remember.

“Efficient and straightforward evaluation of visually communicable systems becomes essential when prioritizing brand development and marketing, as creative endeavors inherently involve subjective elements.”

How do you envision the future of the marketing space with all these potential transformations and disruptions?

It is important to retain a clearly stated brand vision and develop the necessary equipment to train staff, who end up being the frontline of the organization and, eventually, the brand itself. I consistently emphasize the importance of ensuring that every member of our firm effectively communicates a clear understanding of the Psycho Bunny brand and its impact on shaping the buyer's perception, especially in interactions within Psycho Bunny stores. As a result, we have dedicated significant efforts to ensure that our ambassadors are well-informed about our brand promise and the three core principles we uphold: quality, color, and vitality. This encompasses translating the information into multiple languages as needed and developing suitable training modules and video content. Additionally, we place great emphasis on creating content that is accessible and engaging for individuals with learning disabilities.

What are some of the projects that you have been working on recently? Furthermore, what are some of the technological elements that you have implemented to make the project successful?

I will have to answer in the negative as far as technology is involved. From the influencer marketing perspective, brands of today use social media influencers to attract new potential customers to their products. This has aided us in managing the connections between our clients and endorsers and spreading awareness of our brand among the appropriate consumer circles. It also helps us track if this ends in purchasing our brand. Predicting when awareness will lead to a bottom-funnel behavior can also be impossible. A technical capacity we didn't have before allows us to expose our brand to the same audience over a predictable length of time and influence them to take the desired action. We are now collaborating with an influencer marketing platform called AspireIQ to make this achievable.

What advice would you like to share with the other leaders and fellow peers working in the same space as you?

Efficient and straightforward evaluation of visually communicable systems becomes essential when prioritizing brand development and marketing, as creative endeavors inherently involve subjective elements. By mentioning those three pillars of quality, color, and vibrancy, as well as the double take, it is possible to provide a lens or a checkpoint before launching work into the market. This is a way to assess if something is living true to the brand positioning or promise you wish to represent in the market. It has been the starting point for our work, which we have been applying to as many other industries as possible. It has proven to be a good way to streamline our work across all the many disciplines involved. We are applying this framework as systematically as possible across the board. Ultimately, our main task is to strive to create tools and methods that will make the work of the members of our teams as simple as possible.