Why Michael Polk Says Great Products Are Key to Building Great Brands in Consumer Goods
For decades, one principle has followed Michael Polk from Unilever’s global marketing floors to the more contained, specialized world of portfolio brand management: a product that doesn’t deliver something genuinely different will not build a lasting brand, regardless of how much money is spent trying to explain it.
Polk is CEO of Implus, a portfolio company whose team manages roughly 15 to 16 brands across performance hosiery, footwear accessories, and fitness categories. He laid out that conviction in a 2025 interview, drawing on experience that spans nearly every scale of consumer goods, from a 260,000-person multinational to a mid-sized private equity-backed operator. His view is less marketing philosophy than operational discipline.
“Great products are a key to building great brands,” Polk said. “You have to have a product line that is both differentiated and relevant to a target audience for you to be able to build a great brand.”
Product Differentiation as Brand Foundation
The argument becomes more concrete when anchored to specific product decisions. At Unilever, where Polk held global responsibility for product development and marketing, the Dove soap promised a moisturization and cleaning benefit but was differentiated from other brands by having a quarter cup of moisturizer and cream embedded in every bar of soap. The product delivered both a moisturization benefit while cleaning, a functional promise that was specific, testable, and relevant to women 35 and older. That degree of product-level clarity, Polk argues, was one of the foundational pillars that made the brand positioning ownable and defensible.
The same logic shaped Implus’s approach to Balega, the running sock brand its team acquired in 2015 from South African founders Burt and Tonya Pictor, both long-distance runners who competed in the Comrades Marathon, one of the most demanding ultra-marathons in the world. They designed the original product to address the specific problems distance runners face: blisters, bunching, heel slippage. The Implus team has kept that design discipline in place. Each pair of Balega socks undergoes individual quality inspection before leaving the facility.
“What makes Balega different is its fit, the yarn, the specific design, and the obsession with quality,” Polk said. “We inspect every pair of socks, so we don’t let any product out to the consumer without having gone through that kind of rigor.”
That product-first orientation extends across the broader Implus portfolio. The team behind SKLZ, the leading sports training brand in the USA, is focused on the development of youth athletes in baseball, softball, soccer, basketball, and golf, and develops training aids tied to the specific skill development coaches and parents prioritize. Harbinger, which makes weightlifting gloves and lift-assist straps and belts, builds toward the strength and muscle development goals of the athletes who use it.
Building Awareness Without Mass Media Budgets
Polk spent years inside organizations where advertising operated at a different order of magnitude. Unilever ran a 5 billion euros global advertising budget. Implus works with resources far smaller, which makes the question of how brands reach their target consumers a more exacting one.
The Implus team positions Balega at the exact moment runners are most focused on gear: race expositions for the New York City, Chicago, Boston, Capetown, Melbourne and London marathons. Limited-edition sock drops connect the product with runners immediately before competition, when the purchase decision is felt rather than abstract. Ambassadors and influencers then carry the story outward through their own accounts.
“The product has to be superior for that to happen,” Polk said of word-of-mouth marketing. “In fact, the whole proposition is grounded in the product experience. We commit that our runners will Feel the Difference . . . the Balega advertising tagline. Peer to peer advocacy only happens once the product credibility is established.” A prospective buyer’s confidence, he noted, is reinforced by peer advocacy once the decision is already in motion.
The peer-to-peer strategy’s impact was highlighted when a content creator posted about an SKLZ product on TikTok and the video went viral. The Implus team sold $60,000 worth of gear in a day and a half.
“The future leverageability of these approaches is increasing for small companies,” Polk said. “The value of it to a small company is it eliminates the scale advantage some of our bigger competitors have.”
Staying Decisive When Conditions Shift
Product conviction and lean marketing address normal competitive conditions. When conditions become unstable, whether through pandemic retail shutdowns or sudden tariff policy changes, Polk’s framework for the Implus leadership team centers on a single discipline: act on what is known, not on what is speculated.
Recent U.S. trade policy changes created considerable cost pressure for Implus, which sources products internationally from lower-cost manufacturing countries. Tariff announcements shifted within days of each other, which meant that reactive decisions made too quickly could become wrong decisions fast.
“You have to be careful not to churn the organization with your response,” Polk said, “because that can lead to inefficiencies, that can lead to a lack of understanding within your company about why you’re making the choices you are making.”
Speed still matters. But Polk distinguishes between decisive and hasty. “I’m looking for the generally right decision in moments of volatility,” he said, “and you can wait a long time and mortgage opportunities that come with volatility if you’re not decisive.”
The Implus leadership team rebuilt from scratch after Polk joined in February 2020. That same core team has since navigated the pandemic, supply chain disruptions, inflation, rising interest rates, a recapitalization, and now active tariff mitigation. The continuity of the people who weathered those events, Polk said, is itself a buffer against whatever disruption comes next.
