What Is A Fairing?
It’s hard to unsee fairings once you know what they are — and we’d like
to think the metaphor rings true for our product, given the thousands of
brands who’ve found us through organic product exposure. Of course, step
one of that process is learning what a fairing actually is, and if last
year’s rebranding
announcement
just wasn’t detailed enough for you, we’re about to rectify that issue
with this deep dive.
You See Fairings Every Day
Those things that stick out under airplane wings… we’ve all seen them,
yet most of us have no clue what they are. Well, those are fairings.
Actually, a lot of the parts you see on an airplane’s surface are
fairings of some sort.
That’s one of the keys to our metaphor. All these surfaces you’re
looking at? They’re aerodynamically engineered to keep the vehicle in
harmony with external forces (in this case, the air). For obvious
reasons, a plane that isn’t in harmony with its airflow will not get
very far. So, any parts that are critical to a plane’s operation — but
not so harmonious with external forces — will typically be protected by
a fairing.
Let’s get a bit more on-the-nose with this metaphor:
External forces = the market . Your customers are a collective
external force, and they can make or break your company based on their
experiences with your business.
The plane’s critical parts = your business operations. There’s so
much that goes into building a business, and in fact you probably refer
to some of those parts in vehicular terms like “the engine”, “the fuel”,
etc. All those components are vital, but rarely are they in any kind of
shape for the customer to interact with directly.
The plane’s fairings = well, that’s us. Fairing . Your customers
experience this surface (i.e. Question
Stream™ ) in a way that works for them, and
in turn, their experience is routed to the critical parts of your
business. In the same fashion, airplane fairings meet the air on its own
terms, and ensure that airflow goes where the plane can best make use of
it. The same goes for cars, boats, motorcycles, semi trucks, rockets...
if you're looking at any smooth surface on a high performance vehicle,
the odds are pretty good that you're looking at a fairing.
Fairings Turn External Forces To Your Advantage
What’s funny about fairings is that the higher you perform, the more
they matter
(this is why we don’t offer a free plan for low-growth merchants).
Sitting still, the fairings covering this Porsche’s critical parts may
just look like decoration — and at zero miles per hour, they are little
more than that.
But, once the Porsche (that’s you) gets moving, air resistance and
friction become noticeable. The faster you go, the more these external
forces play a role in what you can and can’t do. When we talk about
known-unknowns
, this is one to watch out for: your business may appear to be running
smoothly with very little friction, when in fact it’s just moving too
slow.
It’s worth noting this friction isn’t simply something to be avoided.
The point is that it becomes a force you can harness to maneuver more
confidently, make decisions faster, and supercharge the parts of your
operation that perform best at speed & scale.
As a growing brand, you’ll see this friction manifested when attempting
to understand your marketing metrics, rev ops, market & product
expansion, etc… for instance, your “growth engine” that was absolutely
singing on a $50k/mo budget might now be struggling to handle $100k/mo.
That’s obviously not a problem you could directly confront the market
about; customers won’t know or care about the inner workings of this
mission-critical part. Without the fairing in place to meet that
external market force, you’re stuck with a lot of mysterious and
inefficient behavior, which may feel a bit like this:
Now let’s address the issue by installing Fairing, and using Question
Stream™ to streamline the flow of the
market force. Perhaps we’ll ask a few questions like:
- How did you first hear about us?
- How would you describe yourself?
- How do you plan to use our product?
This is a surface that customers can naturally engage with, and what
comes out the other side can be properly routed to the critical parts of
your operation that can best make use of the data stream. In most cases,
those will be your tech integrations we call Destinations .
The resulting insights might reveal that a certain paid media channel
was never really performing, but rather taking credit for much of the
dark social traffic that came from a customer base you didn’t even know
you had… and were therefore underserving once they became customers, so
repeat buy rate took a dive over time.
Through Fairing, you’ve identified two new customer personas you can
better retain with relevant personalization, and from their feedback
lighting up dark attribution, you know to shift that growth engine spend
toward some of the top-of-funnel or hard-to-measure channels they
mentioned. The friction that was previously holding you back is now
working in your favor to keep you running at a high rate of growth.
Welcome To The World Of Fairings
Now that you’ve got your spotter’s guide to fairings in the wild, we
hope you’ll take note of how high-growth brands use Fairing to turn
their external forces into a sustainable advantage. Of course, if you
want to get up to speed as quickly as possible, take a seat in our
14-day free trial and see the impacts for
yourself.