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.
Want to learn how to set up your post-purchase survey for your brand? Read more here.
