Welcome to dangers of the Replacement Economy

Dear readers,

Our last post, “Your Brand’s Soul is the Engine of Competitive Advantage”was happily the most popular Emerging Trends Report’s article we’ve published in more than a decade of covering marketing, emerging trends and communications best practices. Perhaps the topic resonated because it is such a lynchpin to sustainable business growth, yet so often a neglected and under-developed foundation within the strategic brand-building toolkit.

Today, we continue that story by turning the page to speak to retail brands about an enormous shift in the retail landscape that creates tension, subtraction and balance sheet challenges. Much of our narrative hangs on a rethinking of how retail businesses should strategically curate their operations. This insight entails a liberal dose of soul surrounding the heart of how retailers create and deploy the shopping environment and fulfill their retail brand mission.

What’s also at stake here for CPG brands is a tangible concern. These retail houses of distribution can help you synergistically tell your story or they may end up being complicit in furthering commoditization conditions that every business wrestles with every day. Thus, it’s vital we take this up as an extension of what we started on the merits of brand soul investment.

A change in the retail universe that prompts re-evaluation, re-stage and new strategy

What happens when literally everything you consume can be had (or replaced) efficiently and cost-effectively without ever visiting a store? The historic retail paradigm of location, convenience, assortment and price dilutes alongside the ease and economy of the endless, digital shelf.

If we’re being painfully honest, I think we can agree the ever-widening, transformational impact of this business challenge is not surprising since so many retail channels demonstrate a woeful absence of sufficient surprise and delight.

You can usually assess what a retailer’s business model and strategy consists of just by observing how people behave when they enter. Are they happy, hovering, lingering and investigating? Or are they in a hurry to find whatever is on their list and get out. For the most part, you will see people moving quickly and with purpose to hit their needs and leave. That’s not just “pressed for time” happening – it’s also due to an absence of magic, emotion, joy and adventure (dare we say authentic soul) once inside the front door.

Let’s start with what people really want

Consumers look to brands and retailers to provide ideas, inspiration and solutions about how to live better and achieve their dreams. They yearn for deeper meaning while residing in a world that’s losing its grip on purpose and values. This is far beyond just the array of products you shelve. Yet most retailers believe they are in the stocking and selling business.

What’s more, for the most coveted consumers who are highly active in a consumption domain, these ‘heavy users’ are highly likely to fuss over and chase very high standards of experience and meaning-seeking. Are they being properly served?

Shoppers who are highly involved brand fans and self-identified experts can be found in many product and lifestyle categories, including:

Food

Wine

Pets

Dating

Travel

Outdoor

Cars

Fashion

Cosmetics

But what do they really get when shopping a retail footprint? The typical store environment is in danger of becoming a well-lit inventory “warehouse” – one that serves as a category specific shelfing farm only to facilitate quick selection and fast transactions. Take note, this sounds eerily close to a misguided and losing chase of e-commerce strengths.

• We wonder, does a focus on omni-channel strategy in some way create an excuse for allowing the brick-and-mortar shopping experience to wallow in mediocrity because more curated online buying options are being served?

Too often, conventional retail is designed to stock, display inventory and transact sales. What if instead you created an experience so enjoyable and rewarding that people wanted to stay, explore and engage?

When anything and everything can be had at a click, the concept of sustainable retail strategy needs a refreshed higher purpose in response. The future of retail in today’s commodified transactional environment will hinge on infusing the shopping environment with –

Meaning

Mission

Socializing

Adventure

Discovery

Leisure

Belonging

In honest self-assessment, does your retail experience offer functional access to an inventory of products arrayed in aisles and cases, or are you working to build a small universe that transports people to a new place, time, scene, memory and experience?

Movie makers are masters of carrying us to an immersive experience. Borrowing a chapter from the art and craft of movie-making – can you design “dream districts” through creating and orchestrating a scene:

• Williams Sonoma as a Napa Valley kitchen with winery culinary experience esthetic
• Bass Pro Shop as an homage to outdoor lifestyle imagery at every turn
• Trader Joe’s manifests their “scours the earth” promise for unique food experiences
• Kiehl’s as an old-time apothecary shoppe
• Eataly as an Italian farmers market
• Costco, “It costs us a lot of money to look this cheap” – for purposeful warehouse-ness

The big question organizations need to decide up front is whether they want to pursue incremental tweaks to their brand experience that are copyable, nonproprietary, and unsustainable. Or do they have the confidence to swing for the fences and pursue a game-changing innovation maneuver?

Please know the brand equity and purpose process is never finished. Instead, it requires constant upkeep, evaluation, and vigilance to maintain and manage, lest it fall out of sync with changing cultural conditions which is increasingly epidemic as shopping behavior evolves around us.

Retail presents a living, breathing opportunity for storytelling in a space

If the business mindset is preoccupied with traffic, velocity and transactions, you may end up passing right by the humanity that’s walking the aisles. People innately resonate to art, creativity, emotion, visuals, imagery and sense of place.

A retail environment can be constructed to serve as a canvas for story. The living, breathing embodiment of an experience they will remember and seek out. When does a grocery store become a haven of culinary adventure? Can a pet store celebrate the endearing bond and collaborative life with four-legged family members? Is it possible for a restaurant to serve more than a menu and become a salon of social discourse and food learning?

Or we can relax while believing a popular offer of ”buy one get one” for a bag of chips constitutes sustainable volume advantage and call it a day?

Designing a story is the starting place

When you focus on the person you wish to serve and use that as a guidepost, relevant creative ideas and options begin to flow. Story platforms can help inform your thinking about the experience you wish to create inside your front door.

“Welcome to the world of manifested dreams…” says Karma and Luck Las Vegas

My wife Kristen is a spiritual person. She happens to love jewelry that is grounded in a deeper purpose and mission. Kristen recently discovered her retail muse on a trip to Las Vegas. Karma and Luck describes itself as a “partner on the journey to lead a more meaningful life.” She characterized the store shopping experience as a trip to Bali, immersive and Zen-like.

They don’t just sell jewelry, they offer a story and promise of higher value well beyond the attractively designed yet affordable bracelets, necklaces and other pieces – all of which have carefully curated narratives attached to them that store sales staff generously share with guests. When she selected items for purchase, her knowledgeable guide took her to the center of the store and placed the products inside a Sound Bowl where a brief ceremony “cleansed the jewelry of any negative energy” while imbuing her purchase with – yes, Karma and Luck. This was not a transactional retail environment.

Her visit was a transformational shopping adventure. No surprise, she is retelling this story to all of her friends, while helping me understand this is now her go-to for gifts. Start with the story, think more deeply about the customer you wish to serve and go from there. Importantly, the Karma store design, ambiance, music, scent, and elegant product packaging serves as mechanisms to reinforce their authentic higher purpose.

To start, here are eight story themes relate-able to the human journey:

1. Interest in belonging to a community of like-minded people with shared values
2. Deep need to love and be loved
3. Desire for greater meaning, purpose and sense of mission
4. ​Drive to nurture, enjoy and protect family life ​
5. Pursuit of fun, laughter, adventure and entertainment
6. ​Requirement for affirmation and validation of status, wealth, and prestige ​
7. Love and appreciation of art, esthetics, great design and beauty
8. Intention to lead healthy, fulfilling, enjoyable, long lives

Do you see the possibilities of story strategy underneath your retail experience? We can help you design a powerful narrative that takes your brand miles ahead of simply being an inventory stocking depot. Use the link below to start an informal conversation about your brand’s future.

Looking for more food for thought? Subscribe to the Emerging Trends Report.

Why we unleash the power of emotion to inform business outcomes…

What drives people to make the choices they do? What is it that causes us to prefer one brand over another? What are shoppers actually, truly thinking? Until now, since no one had can come up with a scientifically tested, verified answer to those questions, brands reflexively plowed ahead using the same strategies and techniques as they always have. Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

However, the laws of attraction for one brand over another are locked up in the consumer’s often misunderstood brain.

• Now thanks to neuro-imaging research (known as fMRI), we have unprecedented insight into how emotions – such as generosity, greed, fear and well-being – impact brand selection and purchase decision-making.

Why is this insight so important? In our multi-channel, always on digital world, people are yanked, tugged, pelted, pushed, prodded, reminded, cajoled, whispered at, overloaded, and overwhelmed by an unrelenting stream of in-your-face product communication. The result? Snow-blindness.

Through behavioral research we can confirm that brands will most likely fail to engage when they rely on functional attributes of products – bigger, quicker, cheaper, more powerful, faster acting, or greater selection – rather than focusing on connecting to the consumer through deeper meaning. Storytelling strategies miss the mark when brand minders concentrate on only a part of the human behavior system – for example pressing hard on competitor brand weaknesses – only to leave the consumer’s emotions out of the equation.

Why do we continue to default to the time-worn approach of barking the benefits as if on auto-repeat? The answer starts with each of us. Literally everyone enjoys thinking of themselves as a rational being. We nourish and clothe ourselves. We go to the office. We think to turn down the temperature at night. We download music. We go to the gym. We handle crises – like missed deadlines, a child falling off a bike, a friend getting sick, a parent dying, etc. – in a mature and evenhanded way. Thus, we erroneously believe we’re reasoned analytical, logic-driven decision makers. Well, we’re really not.

In truth, the other part of our minds not governed by rational thought is flooded with cultural proclivities rooted in tradition, fear, how we’re raised, and a host of other subconscious influences which rise to apply a powerful but invisible influence over the choices we make. And the secret to enrolling that part of the brain – emotion.

“Emotions are the way in which our brains encode things of value, and a brand that engages us emotionally—like Apple, Harley-Davidson, and L’Oréal, just for starters—will win (in the marketplace) every single time,” reports Martin Lindstrom, author of the neuromarketing treatise, Buyology.

Roughly 85 percent of the time the brain is on autopilot. It’s not that we can’t think – rather our subconscious minds are a lot better at informing our behavior (including why we buy) than our conscious minds are. We are hardwired to defer decisions and actions to the sub-conscious and we don’t even realize we’re doing it.

Mirror Neurons are always operating in the brain

A classic example, we tend to subconsciously imitate what others around us are doing. Think about how other people’s behavior affects our shopping experience, and ultimately influences our purchasing decisions. Mirror neurons override rational thinking and cause people to unconsciously imitate – and purchase – what is in front of them.

Or our brains build a story that we believe. We may see models in fashion magazines and want to dress like them or make up our faces the way they do. We watch the rich and famous driving expensive cars and lounging in their lavishly decorated homes and ruminate, I want to live like that.

Lindstrom provides a common-place and relevant example: “A shapely mannequin wearing hip-hugging, perfectly worn-in jeans, a simple summery white blouse, and a red bandana stops you in your tracks. She looks great—slim, sexy, confident, relaxed, and appealing. Subconsciously, even though you’ve put on a few pounds, you think, I could look like that, too, if I just bought that outfit. I could be her. In those clothes, I, too, could have her freshness, her youthful nonchalance. At least that’s what your brain is telling you, whether you’re aware of it or not.”

We rely on almost instantaneous shortcuts that our brains create to help us make buying decisions.

Is the decision rational? It may seem that way as a choice is made, but it wasn’t, and not by a long shot. In a nano-second and below your conscious radar an inner conversation is occurring. Lindstrom again provides an iconic example:

“I associate Skippy with childhood…it’s been around forever, so I feel it’s trustworthy…but isn’t it laden with sugar and other preservatives I shouldn’t be eating?…Same goes for Peter Pan, plus the name is so childish. And I’m not buying that generic brand. It costs 30 cents less, which makes me suspicious. In my experience, you get what you pay for…The organic stuff? Tasteless, the few times I had it…always needs salt, too…Plus, didn’t I read somewhere that “organic” doesn’t necessarily mean anything, plus it’s almost double the price…Jif…what’s that old advertising slogan of theirs: “Choosy Mothers Choose Jif”…Well, I am a fairly discriminating person…”

That entire evaluation happens in an instant and below conscious thought, based on deep-seated experiences, acquired knowledge, cultural bias and perceptions we hold close over time.

When emotional connections are the priority

Brain-scan studies confirm our heads are hardwired to bestow upon some brands an almost religious significance and as a result we forge binding loyalties that keep us coming back over and over again.

Imagine the power of fear in bringing actions to bear on a benign and unsexy category like home safety. We were tasked with creating a new residential alarm product category for First Alert, the smoke alarm brand leader. The task was centered on the leading source of accidental poisoning fatalities in America – carbon monoxide (CO). This household hazard is odorless, colorless, tasteless, completely invisible and early symptoms are identical to the onset of flu.

Sounds like an impossible task doesn’t it. In part because we know people invariably believe that hazardous events like this “will never happen to me” – not in my back yard. We conducted deep dive research with married couples who had children in an effort to understand where the levers of reception and action could be tapped. We learned that if their children were at risk from an invisible menace that would impact kids faster than adults, they would act quickly to mitigate the problem.

We created a name for the threat that made its invisibility an attribute – “The Silent Killer.” We built the campaign around a real family from Maine who lost their teenage daughter to an accidental poisoning event in their home. It could have been prevented if an alarm had been present. The parents for their part wanted to help educate other families to help them avoid the one thing parents fear the most: loss of a child to a preventable accident. In this case, the alarm is the only way to know invisible CO is present.

The story was powerful, emotional, personal and real. We did not devote any of the narrative to product features or technology. It was instead focused entirely on a heart-rending story that ended with a call to action to protect family members by installing an alarm. The campaign was so successful the new First Alert CO alarm business went from zero to $250 million in sales within 14 months of launch. City governments stepped in to write laws requiring carbon monoxide alarms in homes. National news covered The Silent Killer safety hazard. Local TV news showed people in lines around the block outside their hardware store looking to get an alarm. Thousands of needless deaths were ultimately prevented.

The power of emotion to move people to action cannot be underestimated. The dynamic exists in virtually every product category you can think of. It’s counterintuitive, however, to the traditions of focusing story on product features and benefits. Yet we’ve seen over and over that when how human beings operate holds sway in decisions regarding communications, the subconscious becomes a powerful asset on the road to preference and purchase.

Without it, we’re talking to ourselves in what is inevitably a snow blinding experience for the consumer who avoids the message.

Curious about learning which emotional triggers might be most compelling for your users?

Share your observations or questions here. Use the this link to start an informal dialogue on emotion-based marketing.

Without careful nurturing, the deeper meaning you started with will disappear

Truth is people care more about your *why* than they care about your brand’s how or what. While they aren’t necessarily enamored with your competitive specs and formulation wizardry, what they will resonate to is *why* you do it. Your purpose – your deeper effort to do something more meaningful – a mission that transcends commerce. These are the beliefs and values that draw people in, anchor their advocacy, and make them want to be members of your brand community rather than merely users.

Yet over and over again, we observe organizations failing to see the importance of these principles and in doing so, lose the magic that resonates and attracts people to the extraordinary promise that heralded the company’s genesis.

Your *Why* matters.

The why of every organization starts in the past, informed by the life experiences and aspirations of the founder(s) –people who were motivated to do something bigger than themselves. The foundational concept becomes the secret sauce that drives brands forward. It is, however, elusive, and can disappear over time if the cultural legacy and beliefs that lifted the organization to its initial success are lost. Future management teams may believe efficiency, cost control and improved processes constitute the levers of brand affinity and business growth. Not so.

Iconic brands are not immune to this almost inevitable and corrosive condition!

Charles Lubin, a Chicago baker, established the Kitchens of Sara Lee in 1949, naming it after his nine-year old daughter and launched his first successful product, a cream cheesecake. But it was a retailer in Texas who wanted to stock Sara Lee desserts that prompted him to reformulate so it could be successfully frozen and shipped long distances. Lubin invented the frozen baked goods category. He sparked innovations in production (foil pans) and flash freezing that fueled national distribution of his “Nobody Doesn’t Like Sara Lee” brand.

He retired from the business in 1968, then owned by Consolidated Foods (later renamed Sara Lee Corporation). As is often the case when the visionary moves on, if the deeper purpose, beliefs and meaning he brought with him are relegated to historical record, the heart of the enterprise’s belief system can get usurped by process, operations and balance sheet considerations. By the early 1990’s without nourishment of the Sara Lee brand soul, inevitable decline had set in. The parent company, now called Sara Lee Corporation, began to contemplate divesting its corporate namesake baked goods business. Tough to do.

The Wheatley Blair agency was retained on a rescue mission. Could we turn the business around? It would require radical moves, marketing finesse, a complete restage and especially, soul regeneration. Our strategy: unlike so many other food brands with made-up names, there really is a Sara Lee. Could we reinstall some of the magic and meaning by bringing her in to be the face and voice of the brand?

Soon we found ourselves sitting in Sara Lee’s upper east side apartment in Manhattan talking about her dad’s legacy and how much the business needed her help. Reluctantly she agreed to get involved and so we mapped a three-year strategy to revitalize the brand around her as spokesperson and personification of a new era at Sara Lee.

What happened next was truly remarkable. To launch a new line of baked goods with a lighter formulation, we created the first International Symposia on Dessert in Vienna, Austria – the world capital of dessert and pastry.

We flew 56 top North American food media to Vienna for three days of 24/7 dessert-centric experiences, seminars and tasting events. There, for the first time we introduced the world to Sara Lee the real, living human namesake. The media were smitten. The brand garnered more media attention than it had received in its entire history. This brought a refreshing injection of tangible humanity into a brand that had lost its anchor. Within a year the business started its upward trajectory and Sara Lee Corporation credited the strategy with turning the Sara Lee brand around at its annual shareholder meeting.

“What will it profit a man if he gains the whole world yet forfeits his soul?”

Steve Jobs understood this and saw it unfold in real time.

“Something happens to companies when they get to be a few billion dollars, they sort of turn into vanilla companies. They add a lot of layers of management. They get really into process rather than results, rather than products. Their soul goes away. And that’s the biggest thing that John Scully and myself will get measured on five years from now, six years … Were we able to grow into a $10 billion company that didn’t lose its soul?” – said Steve Jobs, circa 1984, in a Rolling Stone magazine interview.

Of course, Jobs was pushed out of his own company in 1985 and we know the Scully years were not necessarily a huge win for Apple. Until, the corporate “soul” in the form of Steve Jobs returned in 1997 to reinstall a refreshed ‘change the world’ vision and “Think Different” higher purpose. That purpose has remained with Tim Cook and the company continues to follow its inspiration and celebration of creativity and empowering individuals to change the world around them.

“I want to put a ding in the universe” – Steve Jobs

Apple doesn’t sell machines. Never has. Apple Macintosh was the first personal computer to offer a “graphical user interface” and mouse. Did anyone yearn for this tech? No. It was the point and click simplicity that elevated the experience. The story around enabling creative citizen communication and putting the power of publishing in the hands of any human was a dramatic departure from everything that came before it. The emotion-driven purpose that so resonated was: Empowering Creativity. Anyone’s creativity. Everyone’s creativity. No matter what the expression of that creativity was, you were now empowered to – borrowing from another – Just Do It.

Coffee culture and experience

Howard Schultz was struck by the coffee culture he observed in business trips through Italy. The sense of community and conversation that was part of the cultural vibe around the experience of enjoying elevated and refined coffee beverages. In its earliest days Starbucks was about bean religion and ingredient provenance stories for the vast improvement they brought over the current miserable state of coffee beverages sold in America.

He created the ‘third place’ as a personification of coffeehouse culture that turned Starbucks into a destination of enjoyment around subtle European sophistication cues. In those days coffee would be served in ceramic cups. People were encouraged to stay. It was a cultural immersion. There was deeper meaning, values and lore around coffee beverages, a veritable world tour of taste sensations (now taken for granted). When Schultz left the company some of its soul went with him. In his subsequent returns some of that magic came back with him trailing like the visible tail of a comet.

• The biggest challenge any brand will face over time is how the organization continues to grow and prosper without diluting its soul. And if that happens, how to reacquire it by looking backwards, not forwards to the story and formative beliefs and values that drove the concept from day one.

Money is not a purpose, it is an outcome

Why is *why* so important?

Because it inspires trust. It reaches the heart. It is always heart over mind you know!

Nothing can be more important in the digital age when ‘anything that can be known, will be known,’ craters so many corporate and individual reputations. When the words used to describe what a company does are unrelated to price, quality, services and features, you have a clear indicator that the *why* has blossomed.

When Schultz departed Starbucks and subsequent management focused on what and how over why, the soul eroded and commoditization challenges took root.

Here is the essence of it…

When a brand clearly, resolutely communicates its *why* – its beliefs and values – consumers believe what the organization believes. People will go to great lengths to include brands with a soul in their lives. Not because of any analytical evaluation of product features, but because people hold up those brand values and beliefs as markers and signals of who they are, what they care about. Apple is a flag for creative expression. Starbucks was a statement of sophistication. Costco is not a store, it is a treasure hunt.

People form communities to be around others with shared values and aspirations. Companies can help foster those communities when the story they tell is grounded in higher purpose rather than product slogans, features and benefits.

When a company doesn’t offer anything beyond rational, analytical arguments about its product, it is attempting to force less than inspiring decisions on a purchase – and commoditizing itself in the process. The only games left to play at that point are attempts at manipulation through conventional interruption media and incentives.

• People want to belong to something bigger than themselves. Can you provide that? People aren’t buying what you do, they are buying why you do it.

If you need help and guidance in reasserting your why, or creating the higher purpose for your brand, use this link to start a conversation with a team that understands how to elevate purpose as core strategy and a business anchoring system.

Looking for more food for thought? Subscribe to the Emerging Trends Report.

You have a short time to earn trust…

“Trust Creation is a leading, modern brand communication strategy intentionally designed to build credibility and authenticity. How Trust Creation is translated in the digital experience is one of the greatest challenges of our era.” – Emergent

According to McKinsey, during the first 90 days of the Pandemic more products were sold online than in the previous decade. In short order, consumer adoption of e-commerce and online engagement has accelerated past the tipping point and likely will never go back. Google forecasts by 2024 – just two years from now – 60% of all global spending will be digital.

Therefore, it is likely the first point of contact for any new consumer getting acquainted with your brand will be online, and it will be fast. You just never get a second chance to make a first impression.

• Thus, your digital challenge: how do you get a perfect stranger to commit to a relationship with your brand online when you know risk and loss aversion is a universal human barrier to overcome?

It goes without saying, brands that get digital romance right will succeed (yes, it is romance by the way). Those that don’t get it right will risk losing the scarcest resource of all on our planet: consumer attention.

• “The consumer experience is rapidly evolving from one built upon the transactional process of in-store shopping to one that is rooted in deep, ongoing and enriching relationships.” – Harvard Business Review.

Romance is all about values, trust, purpose, emotion and deeper meaning.

So now what?

The secret to a successful digital relationship is…?

We know consumers 100 percent of the time are focused on avoiding a bad decision and the regret that accompanies it. They are more concerned about loss and unsatisfactory outcomes than a perceived gain. What they require is trust and certainty. How will you deliver it?

The most important move you can make is to inject humanity into the online experience you create. Why? Because relating to a brand is now fundamentally the same thing as relating to a person. The future of healthy brand relationship in the digital space will be built on a foundation of admiration and trust.

Your digital experience must avoid being:

1. Overly transactional – Myopically focused on selling things at the expense of lifestyle relevance and non-product related usefulness
2. Technology focused on your ‘better mouse trap’ – Asking people to burn mental calories on complex tech messaging never works
3. Self-reverential – It’s about the consumer and not self-promotion. They should be the heroes of your narrative (Read that again.)
4. Analytical – People are feeling creatures who think and not thinking creatures who feel

Instead, lean into emotion, celebrating the consumer as hero of your storytelling. When they see themselves in your content, it’s like holding up a mirror – a reflection of themselves and their interests. Now you have their attention. When it’s all about you, the brand is competing with customers for the hero role in your narrative. Bad idea.

The humanization of digital brand experiences

When you meet someone for the first time and a connection quickly forms, what’s going on there? People see early signs of: Laser-like interest in them and their needs, similarity, common values and genuine care. People pick up quickly on these attributes and signals.

What is it about the people we are drawn to and like? For the most part it stems from like-minded souls who actively show an interest in us, who we believe authentically care about us, and who can add value to our lives. Can a brand behave this way?

• Or are brands handcuffed to the hard sell, unable to adapt and adopt more human-like behaviors such as care and empathy?

You understand now the consumer is likely to engage with your business online – a behavior that is only going to accelerate – thus leaving you with a short amount of time (the zero moment of truth) to gain their trust and belief.  We know people already seek to avoid loss and disappointment so what can you do to bypass risk and earn a relationship?

No matter the product you’re selling – be it cheese, pet food, shoes, cosmetics, software or beer – you are obligated to author conditions that will encourage personal connection and engagement. Your goal is to adopt the whole pantheon of respected, cherished human behaviors that we anticipate and expect from people we know and trust.

This is why your digital experience should be built around these Eight Characteristics of a Humanized Brand.

How will you amplify, facilitate and enable:

1. Trust – reliability
2. Integrity – honesty
3. Conversation – dialogue
4. Guidance – usefulness
5. Shared experiences – common aspirations
6. Reciprocity – unselfishness and being considerate of them
7. Empathy – focus on them
8. Shared values – ethos and moral character

Think about it –

• Do any of us enjoy encountering the one-dimensional salesperson who is “always closing” and whose motives we suspect are not operating with our best interests at heart?

• Do we gain much beyond the exchange of features and price if the only conversation we’re having online is product driven?

• When consumers are looking for coaches and guides to help them fulfill their aspirations and lifestyle needs, is your brand answering the call?

• Is your web site a fun and engaging place to visit and learn, get inspired and take away tools that help improve people’s lives?

• Is your web experience a true mirror of your best customers’ lifestyle interests and passions?

Earning trust and respect begins with making the audience’s welfare and wellbeing an unselfish priority – this is how you earn the opportunity to engage on products and services. You just don’t lead with the hard sell if you expect to gain confidence and overcome the powerful motivation to avoid risk at all times.

Your web site shouldn’t be merely a digital brochure. It can’t be just an e-commerce transaction platform. A web site that is three-miles-wide and half inch deep focused on self-promotion with just a smattering of usefulness to navigating life’s complexities here and there isn’t going to achieve digital romance.

You have an enormous opportunity to break the conventions and traditions of selling and become a coach to customers who long for advice, ideas and inspiration. It may feel counterintuitive to be focused on customers beyond your own product story, but this reorientation is necessary when you know the consumer is now in total control of the brand relationship. Brands no longer dictate terms and can’t command engagement.

Here’s the litmus test:

Does your web experience deliver:

• Emotional connection?
• Learning?
• Inspiration?
• Entertainment?
• Community and sharing?

Your brand will benefit by looking beyond self-interest to see the requirement for trust creation and to embrace the humanity it takes to get there. Knowing that digital engagement will be dominant for people, it’s time now to conduct an audit of the entire web experience to look for opportunities to refine your brand’s higher purpose, mission, content and experience – to better align with your consumers’ needs.

Want to have a deeper relationship with your customers, then imbue your online brand experience with deeper meaning. We can help you think through the challenges of relevance and resonance, humanization of your story, content and visual assets. This could be the most important conversation you have in 2022.

Use this link to say ‘hello’ and let’s get acquainted.

Looking for more food for thought? Subscribe to the Emerging Trends Report.

Your customers are not analytical decision-making machines…

When consumers approach a purchase decision, are they focused on the merits and benefits of what you’re offering? Research on human behavior confirms that other issues are dominating their judgements. Read on to find out what’s really happening.

• You might agree marketing and business strategy that is informed with a clear understanding of the human being you want to reach is going to be massively more effective than efforts that don’t take into consideration what we now know about how people make choices.

Ground-breaking behavioral research conducted over decades by renowned psychologists Amos Tversky and Danny Kahneman on their Theory of Regret, forever altered the false assumption that humans are rational and analytical – making decisions based on objective consideration of the facts.

Today we will unravel the mysteries of how people behave to provide you with clear guidance on what the customer is actually thinking and doing.

People will pay a premium to avoid – wait for it – regret

According to scientific research, consumers’ 99.99999 percent of the time are working to sidestep making bad choices. Tversky and Kahneman’s analysis of choice decisions demonstrated that people focus on minimizing risk in order to reduce the chances of any regret. Said another way, people are not seeking to maximize benefits, instead they are trying to prevent or duck an unfavorable outcome. Boom.

• Most marketing activity is based on presenting gains, wins, benefits to an audience pre-occupied with trying to determine if what’s on offer is a gamble (path to potential regret) or a sure thing.

Kahneman expressed regret theory in real-world terms this way: The nearer you get to achievement, the greater the regret people encounter if you fail to achieve it. The more control you believe you have over a gamble, the greater the regret experienced if it turns out badly.

People reflexively face regret for:

• What they have chosen
• What they wish they hadn’t chosen
• What they should have chosen

What’s truly operating on the path to a purchase decision can be observed in any hesitation or reluctance (abandoned cart) to take an action. How the consumer is looking at the options before them follows their attempt to determine –

• What is a sure thing
• What is a probable gain
• What is actually a gamble in order to secure a gain

When choosing between a sure thing and a perceived gamble, a person’s desire to elude loss exceeds the desire to secure a gain!!

Not surprising, people will pay handsomely for certainty. They will take the sure thing over the perceived dice roll every time. Thus, the power and impact of a well-defined brand with deep equity, trust and a strong value proposition.

So what exactly is this loss people seek to avoid?

A loss occurs when a person believes they’ve ended up worse off than their reference point. A reference point is a state of mind based on the status quo, or a standard defined from where they started. Please note, a gain or loss will always be connected to how a problem is presented. Changing the description of a situation can make a gain seem like a loss and vice versa.

Implications to marketing planning and strategy

A consumer world balanced on the pin of regret avoidance is a cry for certainty, surety, belief, trust and confidence.

• What risk reduction tools are you using to erase loss while canceling potential regret?

It’s important to proactively manage the conditions, language and perceptions that influence consumer belief.  You want to erase uncertainty and the possibility of a bad outcome.

Where to start?

Descriptions – Language matters, how a problem or situation is framed can help or hinder the assessment a customer is inevitably making about certainty and risk avoidance.

Social proof – Consumers find claims of performance and outcome made by companies to be less trustworthy. They will believe their peers before they will believe you. Thus, social channels that behave more like communities where sharing is encouraged, perform the valuable service of offering assurance that what is promised is indeed consistently delivered.

Familiarity – If you’re working on the next great leap in food technology beware of pushing the science wizardry too hard instead of focusing on the more familiar, comfortable and assurance-building principles of food, nutrition and culinary cred for a product consumers will put in their bodies. People are wary of anything that appears to be too far away from the familiar territory of foods they understand and believe are real, safe as well as satisfying (taste).

Transparency – The more you disclose about how you do what you do, the more comfortable people get. This feeds the certainty of knowing exactly what’s in the product you make and where ingredients came from, while also speaking to integrity and honesty – two qualities people believe are sorely lacking in business behaviors.

Third party validation – Most product categories have identifiable subject matter experts and influential voices that bring credibility and cachet to the messaging table. If you turn them into promotional shills, their value is lost. Let the expert voices make independent evaluations of what you do and how you do it. Give them room to report on their observations and let the credibility flow from a respected voice that isn’t your own.

Verifiable assurance – For a cheese client experiencing a high degree of adulteration and food fraud in their category, we created a trust mark backed by one of the most respected food labs in the nation. They were given free rein to acquire products at retail independently and submit them to a battery of tests that verified the veracity of how the products were made when compared to the Federal standard of identity. It was proof the products were genuine, authentic, real and what was represented on the label was indeed accurate and truthful. Trust marks and third-party validation can bring another level of consumer confidence to the story being told.

Now you are aware that this universal human trait of risk avoidance is a dominant consideration for people on the path to purchase. Your objective, then, is to work accordingly to secure confidence, trust and belief in a manner that reduces or eliminates any perception of risk or uncertainty that might fuel consumer regret.

• Do this, and you will answer what most often lies at the foundation of a disconnect for people who are unwilling to try your new product or store. Why? Because they see risk of a bad outcome if they don’t like it or concern it won’t deliver on their reference standard expectations.

Is it time to audit your marketing plans and messaging strategies to ensure the psychology of risk is fully addressed? If so, use this link to invite an informal conversation with a team of experts who understand the anatomy of trust creation.

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“Want to have a more meaningful relationship with your users, then imbue your brand with deeper meaning.”

Ten years ago a culture shift reached the tipping point and changed the dynamics of brand building forever. Consumers acquired full control over brand engagement and became serial avoiders of overt self-reverential and promotional marketing outreach. Selling in its traditional form was no longer an effective path to interaction with users. Analytical messaging about brand recipes, ingredients and technology would not be enough to draw consumers close. The path to purchase irrevocably changed.

In the wake of this transformation in how brand-to-consumer relationships are created, emerged a new and more enlightened platform to drive brand marketing effectiveness called Higher Purpose Brand Building.

No longer is the marketing best practices game plan to be grounded solely in promoting product features and benefits. Still as 2022 draws near and strategic planning is in high gear, we still see vestiges of old-school thinking that follows the “if you build it, they will come” marketing methodology. Higher Purpose brand strategy remains underleveraged in CPG and retail categories.

Here we will provide insight into purpose-built brand practices and how best to define this anchoring platform that will positively impact every aspect of how your organization does business and how you communicate in the marketplace.

What happened, why purpose matters

It is the intersection between need and passion where people will find affection and the basis for a relationship with your brand. It is expressed this way because the world has changed and relating to a brand is now fundamentally the same thing as relating to a person.

The digital environment we are doing business in abruptly ended effectiveness of interruption-style marketing. At the same time, consumers evolved as purchasing motivation moved closer to a symbolic act and signaling of what people want the world around them to know they care about, their values and beliefs.

As such sustainable brand relationships are now built on admiration and trust – and that insight, properly executed, can deliver significant financial premiums.

• Purpose-built brands represent goodwill that can be isolated as a component of business value.
• They can deliver higher margins, traffic.
• They also work to reduce the cost of promotion, improving ROI and bottom-line performance.

How? Because real purpose creates the opportunity for transcendence – the state of being admired – where consumers “join” your brand as members, not merely customers.

In order to build a more sustainable brand, you have a responsibility to push added meaning, trust and belief to the forefront of the consumer relationship. Said another way, you have to stand for something important in your users’ lives. A higher purpose defines your business’ true north and reason you exist. It should be a deeper and more lifestyle relevant concept that reaches beyond making or retailing high quality products.

Goes without saying maximizing business growth and profit is not a purpose. A real, human-relevant, and unselfish purpose is a purpose – and in the long run devotion to it will indeed maximize financial outcomes.

How to create a purpose-informed brand

This is an effort to codify your brand’s inner self. It’s vital to invest in this process because the marketing game has shifted completely from command and control (persuasion around overt feature/benefit selling) to the Relationship Building Era.

The goal of higher purpose planning is to anchor your brand in a new and deeper understanding of its mission – and in doing so provide a cohesive guide for all go-to-market tools and strategies.

Mapping brands on the relative strength or absence of Purpose bona fides can help bring added context to evaluating what best practices should look like in the competitive set. Here are four primary conditions that inform where brands might exist on strength of their Purpose plan.

Limited – province of brands that struggle with flat to declining sales, and who command little respect or trust from the consumer.

Reluctant – brands that have limited respect and generate little emotion, but whose pricing strategy or competitive advantage trumps consumer reticence.

Emotional equity – brands that maintain respect in spite of concept limitations, transactional marketing behaviors, higher prices or other competitive disadvantages.

Sustainable – more enlightened businesses that understand brand relationships work on the basis of true, authentic reciprocity and humanity – and are not superficial, opportunistic or purely transactional.

The depth of your brand mission and purpose can range from obvious and somewhat superficial to something altogether deeper and more engaging. To help you strive for the latter consider this basic premise:

• If your brand were to disappear from the face of the earth tomorrow, would anybody but financially-interested parties truly care? Said more succinctly: is brand advocacy now a more important and relevant goal than loyalty? YES it is.

The further along the ‘help over hype’ continuum the concepts gets, the more transformational. If we’re looking at how best to leverage core purpose, then it will of necessity become the heart of everything your company does, informing marketing, hiring, sourcing, operations and communications.

The primary components of higher purpose thinking include:

Why (does your company and brand exist):

• We exist to help people ___________________________________________________.

How (you deliver on our mission):

• We deliver tools, guidance, insight and education to ____________________________.

What (business are you really in):

• Our company and brand provides ____________________________________________.

Your Brand Stand

Out of the analysis and evaluation of why your business exists and what you stand for comes a statement we refer to as the Brand Stand. It is an anchoring expression of your higher purpose that informs company decisions and behavior. It is remarkable what happens internally when this work is done to create and codify values and beliefs. Employees and other stakeholders rally to the mission.

The principles and purpose become an anchoring lever for the organization and immediately changes the dynamics of marketplace communication to create more powerful and impactful social, earned, paid and content strategies. Your brand voice acquires more impact and emotional gravitas. You are giving users something to believe in, a deeper meaning and reason to be engaged with you.

As stated earlier the outcome of this is greater efficiency and effectiveness for your investments in brand marketing because it is not dependent on tonnage of media spend.

You are no longer competing on technical specsmanship which is more difficult to sustain and defend, instead your brand’s value proposition rises above legacy category tropes.

If you are interested in learning more about Higher Purpose Brand Building you can access our guide here: https://bit.ly/HigherPurposeStrategies

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