Innovation leverage is fading fast…

We are entering a period of uncertainty in the pet industry as underlying strategic challenges and product proliferation – accelerated by the extraordinary impact of AI – are reframing what competitive advantage looks like. Here we will pull apart and examine the forces at work, identify the impacts and launch a conversation about the next threshold of durable marketplace strength. Stay tuned for our recommendations at the end.

Premium pet brands have spent more than a decade expanding by segmenting the market into ever more specialized dietary propositions: grain-free, ancestral/biologically appropriate, raw, fresh, gently cooked, human-grade, limited ingredient, high protein, functional benefits, sustainably sourced, breed/life-stage solutions, probiotics, freeze-dried, etc. 

However, these successful innovations also escalated the competition. The competitors then normalized them, and what began as a meaningful brand distinction increasingly became a category expectation. 

Don’t get me wrong, product innovation is and will remain essential. However expecting product innovation to fuel lasting brand competitive leverage is becoming increasingly unrealistic.

In sum, here’s the strategic challenge we will examine:

1. When nearly every premium pet food is nutritionally sound and on point, where should competitive advantage spring from?
2. When the supply of premium pet food solutions outstrips demand and the law of economics flip, what should brands do to build and hold incremental gains?

Simply put, more brands and more SKUs and more innovation alongside enhanced nutritional claims are competing for a finite number of households, pet stomachs, shelf space and dollars. At some point, yet another product improvement stops creating proportional incremental demand. Instead it mostly redistributes existing demand. Slowing pet category growth makes this an imperative issue to confront now.

To its credit, the industry has invested enormous resources to improve what’s in the bag, can or pouch. And it worked. The nutritional quality available to pet parents is extraordinary compared with 15–20 years ago.

But there’s an unintended consequence:

• The industry’s relentless pursuit of product superiority has produced an increasingly superior and rather closely aligned field of competitors who chase each other into every innovation territory.

Here’s the current essential truth…

High protein isn’t distinctive. Functional nutrition isn’t distinctive. Probiotics aren’t distinctive. Minimally processed isn’t unique. Human-grade isn’t nearly as distinctive as it once was. Freeze-dried isn’t. Fresh is already spreading among brands. Even claims around ingredient quality, veterinary expertise, and science-backed are increasingly shared territory.

Claim proliferation is upon us. According to Innova Insights 2025 launch data, among new products carrying a high-protein benefit, 71% also carried another health claim, 64% had a digestive-health claim and nearly half added a skin-health claim. Gut-health positioning appeared on 31% of global new launches; immune and skin health each appeared on 22%.

Fresh category is the latest expansion arena: 

Fresh began by successfully challenging assumptions about what pet food should be. Today fresh/frozen territory includes Freshpet, Farmer’s Dog, Ollie, JustFoodForDogs, Nom Nom and numerous others, while conventional premium manufacturers increasingly offer adjacent, similar formats. Fresh/frozen dog food posted a 24.5% CAGR from 2021–2025 versus 5.7% for the overall dog-food-and-treat category. What was once a category disruption transforms into another highly competitive segment.

The same process occurred earlier with grain-free and high-protein formulations. A claim can be true, important and compelling to consumers—and still have almost no competitive currency if a dozen brands are credibly making the same claim.

“High protein” is valuable but not differentiating.
“Science-backed” is reassuring but without being proprietary.
“Premium ingredients” is meaningful without offering separation.
“Veterinarian developed” forges trust but not ownership.

Pricing aside, what happens when brands prioritize reasons to believe over the more elusive yet critical trusted reasons to choose.

We should note, premium pet category strength continues to be a business driver. APPA reported 41% of dog owners and 38% of cat owners purchased premium food in 2024, both up from 2023.

Packaged Facts similarly found that 70% of dog and cat owners remain willing to pay more for foods offering health-and-wellness benefits. While the demand for premium benefits remains strong, what’s becoming harder is capturing a disproportionate share of that demand when so many brands make comparable benefit claims.

Let’s dive in on the underlying economic mechanism fueling current conditions

• Innovation → success → imitation → proliferation → normalization → declining differentiation creates a condition where greater marketing investment is required to deliver the same year-to-year growth report card.

When competitors quickly replicate any innovation, the category may expand but without creating durable, sustainable advantage for the innovator.

The strategic competitive question then changes from:

“What can we make that is better?”

to:

“What can we become or offer that competitors cannot easily replicate?”

Where does the next increment of value surface from when most of the new nutritional niches have already been occupied?

Alongside innovation parity, an unseen contributor is helping enable these current challenges.

Ten years ago when premiumization was gaining momentum, the demand for higher quality ingredients, sourcing, manufacturing exceeded the supply. If you went to market with an authentically better product and handled the retail distribution, support and marketing requirements with skill and creativity, you likely saw solid growth and returns.

The red hot premium pet food market attracted more competitors in the same space, so brands began to look for unique needs, gaps and marketplace niches to serve while securing separation. This also worked for a time until most of those nutritional need gaps had been satisfied. 

Meanwhile many traditional barriers to entry in the pet food business have fallen.

Nutrition and science based formulators are readily available to help bring a product vision to life, while co-packers with sourcing expertise can serve as the asset light path to making a product. AI helps quickly build the business and operations plan while direct to consumer models make it considerably easier to get in front of potential customers (Packaged Facts states 39% of U.S. pet-food sales now occur online). The result is more and more new brands entering an already crowded marketplace seeking attention and share of wallet. One trip around the convention hall at SuperZoo helps verify the environment.

• When supply starts to outstrip demand, the forces of competition begin to shift. Competition turns inward. Brands rush to participate in every corner of novel innovation and you begin to see brand similarity and sameness converge.

This impacts the strategic game plan when category conventions and normalized behaviors keep everyone locked into a cycle that replicates the same go-to-market moves. It simply gets harder and harder to squeeze incremental balance sheet gains year to year when the differentiation of choices narrows. Of note, pricing power also softens when brand distinction is diminished and becomes more trivial.

Prevailing business conditions are demanding improved strategic solutions

Consider the overall industry growth status reported by Packaged Facts: U.S. pet food and treat retail sales is projected to grow just 2.1% in 2026, to $70.45 billion, with a forecasted 3.2% CAGR from 2025–2030. The trend lines show a slower pace with dog and cat food sales rising 14% in 2020, 15% in 2021 and 2022, and 13% in 2023, before decelerating to 3.7% in 2024 and an estimated 2.8% in 2025. 

The supply of premium solutions continues to expand while category growth is moderating. This will simply intensify the fight for new, novel growth solutions. Now is the time to get on this.

So what’s next?

Places where the strategic pet brand building conversation can go:

Proprietary brand meaning—ideas, beliefs, cultural territory, communities and emotional propositions that aren’t bottled up in the formulation. This is a search for a ‘secret sauce’ or true north that may exist inside the organizations’ business structure, operations, behaviors, history, standards and beliefs.

Category creation—not another variant within an existing segment, but identifying an unmet pet nutrition problem that changes how stakeholders will think or behave. When most needs are already met, this is a tougher (but not insurmountable) question overall. 

Authority—owning trust, credibility and belief rather than merely making claims and assertions of performance and outcome. 

Business-model differentiation: experiences, services, retail models, personalization, relationships and other assets that competitors can’t duplicate simply by sending another formula to R&D.

In sum, the product still has to be excellent. Innovation remains essential. But durable advantage will increasingly come from proprietary meaning, authority, community, experience, business model, cultural relevance, category creation or some other asset competitors can’t duplicate by formulating an enhanced recipe and putting another package on the shelf.

An aligned avenue of strategic exploration: industry weaknesses and gaps

When there’s less leverage in products, the challenge to leadership teams is how to create added business value that isn’t easily over-run by competitors. Perhaps it’s time to solve systemic problems the industry faces that other brands elect to ignore or soft pedal.

If you zoom out to 30,000 feet and look at the pet food business there are numerous issues and weaknesses that your brand may be in a position to help solve, and in doing so, to step outside the conventional competition handbook to create a unique story your brand can champion.

A few examples –

• Sustainability is an enormous hole the industry has talked around the edges of but no one leads at the strategic level to authentically resolve the supply chain (system 3) impacts.

• While AAFCO standards enforce conformity on nutrition specifications monitored by state and federal regulators, still quality varies without verifiable consumer assurance of exactly what they’re getting. Is transparency really transparent?

• The conventions of pet retail and product form hold the industry in a commodity-like grip cycle of bags, cans and pouches that present the product in the same fashion brand to brand. At times category conventions beg for fresh thinking.

These are not simple challenges, but one thing is for certain: there is a requirement now for real strategic work to investigate, interrogate and determine what the next roadmap to brand growth will look like. Here are some of the elements worthy of deep dive analysis:

What does the brand currently own?

Which claimed advantages are proprietary versus replicable?

Where has category convergence eroded differentiation?

Which latent brand assets have greater strategic potential?

What consumer/category white space could the brand credibly occupy?

What organizing proposition could drive innovation, communications, retail and go-to-market?

The next growth recipe may not be another recipe at all.

We should begin by answering a harder question: What can your brand credibly own that competitors cannot readily appropriate?

For premium pet brands fighting over increasingly similar nutritional territory, finding the answer may become one of the most consequential growth assignments ahead.

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Bob Wheatley is the CEO of Chicago-based Emergent. Traditional brand marketing often sidesteps more human qualities that can help consumers form an emotional bond. Yet brands yearn for authentic engagement, trust and a lasting relationship with their customers. For more information, contact Bob@Emergent-Comm.com and follow on Twitter @BobWheatley.

Far too many brands miss the reason and the recipe

Two alarm bell-ringing stats about the current state of brand building:

• According to a study from HAVAS – for roughly 78% of all brands, if they disappeared from the earth tomorrow, consumers wouldn’t really care and instead simply move on to another alternative. (Ahem).
• Meanwhile 85% of advertising has zero impact on brand health.

What does this tell you about the state of brand strength, equity and the tools employed to achieve it? Have we so myopically moved to embrace transactional behaviors that the organization’s most important and valued asset is inadvertently being starved of the fresh thinking and investment it so justly deserves?

As an Emerging Trends Report reader, you likely agree that a strong brand is vital to sustainable, profitable business growth. We know healthy brands deliver lasting competitive advantage as evidenced through unflinching brand evangelism, rapid uptake of new product innovations and reliable repeat purchase. Even through economic down cycles — because the brand matters to users by virtue of its integral relationship with the consumers’ lifestyle priorities and beliefs system. By definition, this is the polar opposite of a commoditized business where price and deal frequency are the most meaningful separators.

Accelerating AI conditions are forcing rapid change

The AI tech revolution is currently conspiring against organic brand strength. It is our singular calling here to fight these growing odds that conflate uniqueness, suppress acts of courage and marginalize the competitive playing field.

What’s going on here?

Every successful brand will labor to own a prominent place in the consumers’ collective memory, such that it is more likely to be top-of-mind in buying decisions, while earning a higher probability of credible recommendation and exerting greater pricing power.

This bulwark of resilience and strength requires that brands be simultaneously different and relevant. The challenge now is the significant shift in why and how people attribute “difference and relevance” to brands that matter to them.

Different: is amazingly less about how a brand performs or how it is made — and more about the perception of why it exists, what it believes and how it expresses itself. Understood purpose and mission loom large.

Relevance: is now primarily attributed to how well a brand is aligned with the consumer’s social values and cultural viewpoint. Fulfilling a functional need remains important, but it’s not the dominant factor.

While brand minders may be aware of these shifts, many are drawing the wrong conclusions – resulting in a marketing approach that’s inadequate for one of two diametrically opposed reasons.

The myth of “Mirror Brands”

The meteoric rise of social media fed by proponents who recite its tactical virtues, has stoked a marketing religion focused almost entirely on winning people’s attention — at the expense of earning the right to be part of their lives. We characterize this marketing behavior as Mirror Branding – meaning the brand operates as a reflection of whatever’s currently hot in popular culture. This is blatant pursuit of virality for its own sake, grasps at fads while routinely mistaking memes for lasting memories.

An example of au courant tactic-over-strategy can be observed in a well-known popular deodorant brand that created a new product tied to a cryptocurrency – in itself inspired by a meme featuring a dog – and launched a campaign on a day when that cryptocurrency is in celebration mode.

Through forcing an impression of difference, occasionally a Mirror Brand can briefly secure a spotlight in popular culture. However, without the hard work of building deep-seated, enduring relevance, they operate on a shorter fuse that eventually fizzles and goes dark. An example in the UK, Liquid Death, the brand built on irreverent disruptive marketing memes, has withdrawn from the UK market after less than two years.

The fallacy of “Shadow Brands”

The marketing misstep that focuses blindly on visibility while failing to deliver any tangible emotional or cultural connection – this is the purview of Shadow Brands. Consumers are aware of their shadowy presence, but remain unclear about their beliefs, deeper substance and mission.

Shadow Brands aren’t necessarily irrelevant, but they can also fade away under pressure. Without a meaningful difference, it’s harder to maintain traction in hyper-competitive markets. Hate to say it, but this is a large and growing group and includes many distressed legacy brands, and a significant percentage of DTC brands that start to struggle after a promising start.

We must raise our ambitions on investing in brand strength and deeper meaning

To be more than a Mirror or Shadow, brands must construct enduring memories around the things people love and love to share. This is much easier said than done and requires full commitment to:

• Conveying a point-of-view that is both meaningful and distinctive.
• Adding value to consumers’ lives – supported through every expression and every experience.
• Showing up in imaginative, inspiring ways that help define current culture.

Specifically, we should be focused on building “Iconic Brands”

Icons are never created in a heartbeat. It takes continuous commitment and investment over time. For example, the Dove brand’s “Campaign for Real Beauty” that celebrates self-esteem among women has been an evolving work-in-progress since 2004.

There is, however, an accelerant. Emergent has been a long-time proponent of integrated communications – the lashing together of multiple channels and disciplines to create a more effective and powerful brand. While the core principles of integration remain important, it’s simply not enough anymore. Radical changes to the marketing and business landscape mean both thinking and practice should evolve. This necessary leap forward is Interrelated Marketing.

It’s no longer possible to earn and maintain growth and business expansion through one-way communication alone. Ambassadors, evangelists and advocates must be enlisted as agents to act on the brands’ behalf. This will require mastering an intricate interplay between consumer-centered earned, owned, and paid media to create a flywheel that propels a brand towards Icon status.

Interrelated Marketing is designed to deliver this outcome by uniquely blending the four key drivers of modern brand success:

1. Unlocking cultural relevance through compelling narratives at the intersection of a cultural tension and truth about the brand that shapes the conversation AND resonates with key audiences.
2. Earning a solid enduring reputation by capitalizing on the influence of brand fans, respected expert voices and relevant credible institutions in authentic ways that cultivate positive, lasting renown.
3. Designing reciprocal relationships through personalized experiences and value exchanges that customers will share with the brand.
4. Driving desired response by satisfying an identified consumer preference with an effective, believable solution and call to action.

Many brands treat these four R’s — Relevance, Reputation, Relationship and Response — independently. But the magic happens when they are harnessed to a common purpose. That is the end-product of Interrelated Marketing: a connected ecosystem of expressions and experiences, where every piece of content, every social post, every event and every initiative builds seamlessly on the last.

The incredible impact of Icons

A reminder: marketing’s primary purpose is to build brands with the strength to deliver lasting competitive and economic advantage.

Despite what some pundits would have you believe, this requires setting the bar higher than simply mirroring an audience’s social media feeds or buying eyeball attention. Instead, the goal must be to earn a prominent, persistent place in a person’s memory by having a positive, enduring, meaningful impact on their lives. This is how brands achieve iconic status.

It’s a prize worth fighting for. Icons deliver impact via increased penetration; deeper, stickier customer relationships; stronger competitive defenses; and more powerful, resilient marketplace momentum. Finally, the bottom-line is the bottom-line: financial returns that are exponentially greater than the costs of its creation and delivery.

For businesses who are ready to make this commitment, Interrelated Marketing provides the right strategic drivers: every idea, every action, every behavior should demonstrate an obsessive focus on unlocking cultural relevance, deeper meaning, mission, belief systems and earning reputation that attracts strong 1:1 relationships.

Brands that succeed in conjoining these four drivers, with the right kind of creative thinking, will generate an impact that is unreasonably greater than the sum of the parts and eventually will win not just a larger share of the market but a greater share of the future.

The sea-change urgently pushing this agenda to the forefront of your planning

• “The transformative potential of AI is not short-form video or treating it as a glorified search engine. It’s to advance human intelligence and what we’re capable of as a species.”

AI is upending how consumers discover brands, and large language models could soon be the window to a company’s reputation — as cast from its own point of view.

LLMs — the smart interloper in between brands and customers

The arrival of Agentic Advisors is at once favorable to guiding consumer decisions and more confident purchase outcomes by delivering unprecedented analysis on the efficacy and superiority of products. The unintended consequence, however, is the parallel rapid commoditization of categories that will be supervised by super intelligent machines who neither care about, promote nor recognize the emotional equity brands work to create.

AI advisors will come between you and your customers and future customers, focused entirely on clinical analysis of product bona fides, formulations, sourcing standards, and authentic delivery of promises. This means the strength of the brand relationship will be paramount to your future, alongside managing the narrative product story LLMs express about your business.

• Your future can’t be left in the hands of AI opinion alone. Your brand’s relational strength and emotional equity through its Iconic status and reputation form the critical alchemy of your future business success.

If this article has you thinking and wondering aloud about the right path to follow, use the link below to air questions and start an informal conversation.

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

Bob Wheatley is the CEO of Chicago-based Emergent. Traditional brand marketing often sidesteps more human qualities that can help consumers form an emotional bond. Yet brands yearn for authentic engagement, trust and a lasting relationship with their customers. For more information, contact Bob@Emergent-Comm.com and follow on Twitter @BobWheatley.

What does AI believe, say, recommend about your brand and business?

What happens when agentic AI steps in as the authoritative source of information and credible recommendations about brands, products, claims, technology, formulations, ingredient sourcing and emerging health/wellness issues – bypassing any need to visit your website at the start of an exploratory journey? Think for a moment about the implications of a super well-informed digital advisor making trusted recommendations to consumers based on its own assessment of your brand and product strengths vs. competitive choices. We’re standing at the edge of nothing less than a transformative shift in how people and trade partners get information, find solutions and make decisions.

To succeed in the era of LLMs, brands must now optimize for AI agents—not just customers.

• More than 50% of Internet traffic is now populated by non-humans — AI crawlers operating out of sight on a subterranean highway of digital data collection, scouring every available channel to train and inform LLMs so they can be instantly summoned to dispense informed recommendations.
• Unlike any previous technology generation such as Google search, AI speaks to its users in an authoritative, empathetic voice while supplying answers and a point of view. Yes, this is a machine, but we say it again — with solutions and recommendations — from a source that isn’t your brand saying it. A smart source that over time will get more and more familiar with customer needs, aspirations and desires. It never forgets, never sleeps and remembers every detail about preferences, concerns and prior conversations.

Will consumers and trade partners make decisions, form impressions based on what they read or hear from an AI guide? Likely. Could this become reflexive and embedded behavior? Yes.

Managing agentic AI in the battle for trust and influence

What does AI know and believe about your brand and product line?

Your company?

Your technology expertise?

What will it say about your formulations and claims?

What will it recommend?

Is the narrative accurate?

Is your brand story presented in the best light possible?

What portion of your key messaging came through?

What’s missing?

Will your customers trust this on-tap source and rely on it?

This is not a phase, a passing fad or a novelty. It is business infrastructure, and it’s about to change everything including your strategy, marketing and comms game plan.

Over the past 30 years, the phrase “Google it” emerged with the revolutionary idea that any answer was just a web inquiry away. Over the past few years we’re also hearing, “Ask your AI.” Google search links still require effort and time to investigate, collect, digest and assess.

This week I requested AI help to find a hotel near the University campus where my daughter will attend this fall as we prepared to join her freshman orientation. In seconds I got a list of options, then a filter of those choices based on AI’s assessment of the best deal, location and quality plus an offer to assist with booking. Follow-up questions for clarity were answered in seconds with refinements. The process was easy, painless, quick, convenient and presented in an authoritative and helpful voice.

• I went with it. Done and done. For a travel and hospitality brand, or any other business really, you have to be concerned about the presence of a machine that doesn’t behave like a machine gaining a recurring trusted role as arbiter and sage of risk-free choice.

All of this potentially happens without anyone first visiting your web site or social channels. This begs the question of how to control and enable your brand narrative — when an unseen army of AI bots are hoovering everything available, good or bad, right or wrong to formulate its own assessment of your brand and business from what it collects.

An AI mandated moment of truth

The AI agent era flips the script—you don’t search for information – that information comes to you through an intelligent liaison that knows what stakeholders want.

We’ve reported previously on the pervasive levels of uncertainty and anxiety consumers are facing right now. What do they want above all? The return of certainty and a sense of control. Can agentic AI offer a resurgence of perceived control? It’s quite possible that this pipeline from mountains of aggregated data digested and served up in conversational recommendation form could become a trusted partner — when everything else often appears to be self-serving, biased and often requires burning mental calories to unearth and evaluate.

New platforms designed to monitor, gain intel and help inform LLM crawlers

If you want to know the details of what LLMs believe about your brand, new tools have emerged to help bring detailed understanding of what AI agents think they know about your business. From there you’re in a better position to design content that is AI crawler friendly. This will help assure your brand, claims and formulation story is coming across correctly, supplemented with monitoring to see how that plays out in real time.

Out of fear of losing control over brand IP, some businesses may be tempted to erect digital barriers to bot crawling access. However, that also risks ceding future control and diluting the ability to manage a conversation that’s gaining increasing traction among consumers who are going to get more and more comfortable with seeking out AI sponsored advice.

Better to manage this than leave it alone and hope your brand is properly presented, recommended and the story being told is accurate and complete.

With that in mind, LLM engines prioritize the following brand content characteristics:

• Language. LLMs like to navigate rich, conversational text such as blog posts and newsletters, more so than webinars or embedded images.
• Agentic-optimized structure. Prioritized lists, definitions, and guides make it easier for LLMs to synthesize and summarize information.
• Clean, scrapable web sites. Accurate, fully indexed web sites are better than keyword optimization or navigating older legacy pages designed to elevate site authority.
• Third-party earned authority. Outside publications, external media and expert commentary can help confirm, verify and validate your brand story and value proposition.
• Deep customer conversations away from your site. The presence of external reviews and forums generates authoritative mentions, backlinks, and credibility.

Elevating importance of earned (editorial) media to credibility and trust

Whatever your brand states and claims remains an assertion – of what you want people to believe about your brand, business standards, unique strengths and added value. Running alongside the advice of agentic AI, and also a part of its assessment structure, is the increasing importance of third-party credible endorsement.

Journalism and reporting are third party evaluation of what you claim from a respected source. Earned media will play an increasingly important role in the agentic eco-system, operating in two directions as an added authority in what LLMs process, and as an independent voice that validates and verifies what you want stakeholders to believe. PR has always been important resource for credible third-party evaluation. Now it has added gravitas in the system of informing LLMs and also providing a trusted resource consumers also look to for affirmation.

The one-two punch of LLM crawler optimization and earned media outreach forms a formidable strategic foundation for brand storytelling in the era of AI advisory.

Next gen strategies to manage an LLM informed future

LLMs can circumvent brands, cutting them out of directing the consideration process before they even know a consumer is investigating. Thus, why adapting current strategies to engage LLM crawlers can build a virtuous, holistic solution. Optimized web content, earned, and social media leads to better AI references, greater trust and engagement, and prioritization in LLM assessments.

Considerations on the AI crawler journey

It’s time to systematically evaluate how LLMs will impact customer consideration, and how that will change go-to-market strategies. Engaging with new AI crawler intel, analysis and impact tools can help build a fluid map of the customer buying journey alongside an AI-engaged buyer journey, and how brands will show up in AI-powered search engines. While LLMs and AI-powered search are constructed on similar inputs, they can produce radically different results and outcomes. An LLM scorecard can help your brand identify the areas of greatest need and inform the tools designed to secure the optimal brand story and recommendation.

Adapting your strategy to engage LLMs will create a virtuous eco-system: Strong internal, earned, and social content will lead to more AI references, greater trust and engagement, and further prioritization in LLM queries.

If you’re wondering how these developments will impact your business and what’s the best path to navigate an agentic AI informed future, use the link below to ask questions and start an informal conversation.

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

Specsmanship skips over relevance and resonance…

Our goal in this article is to reverse some entrenched myths about brand outreach, consumer behavior and sound strategy, working to reorient thinking on the most effective deployment of your investments in marketing communication.

The status quo in marketing

All too often we find brands laser-focused on touting their “superior” specs: formulations, ingredients, sourcing, process, science, engineering and standards of performance, believing this forms the unshakeable foundation of their brand outreach path to fame and fortune.

• Afterall, doesn’t it make sense considering the steep investments in R&D, processes, better ingredients, superior formulation skills and novel manufacturing design. Thus, the theory goes once the world is made aware of this better tech, consumers will in turn respond by beating a path to the shelf or showroom and reward the hard work, high quality commitment with ever increasing sales.

• Isn’t it then vital to tell the world why your brand is better than the other choices? That you offer 25% more of the best ingredient than the closest competitor. Or that your sourcing standards are flying above everyone else?

Better mousetrap marketing has been a foundational paradigm of go-to-market thinking since the dawn of the mass media era in the early 1950’s. Companies showcase their deep commitments to build a compelling value proposition through their efforts to innovate, improve, engineer higher quality into products. It seems fundamental then, that brand communication must focus on telling stakeholders about the facts and details of these accomplishments.

Are you always reaching for product ‘betterness’?

The rinse-and-repeat environment that fosters this way of operating is woven into the institutional fabric of many brands and businesses.

• The regional potato chip brand that believes to beat the big guys they must be better by meticulously sourcing an improved strain of potatoes. They carefully curate a blend of frying oils to impart taste and texture without any greasy residue. In-house chefs work to test and combine the highest quality spices and flavoring ingredients for dusting the chips to assure the perfect taste notes. Their manufacturing technologists perfect a frying process to achieve the right texture and crunch. Surely this level of quality commitment and superior craftsmanship forms the foundation of a compelling story to capture the hearts and minds of chip lovers?

• The team of highly talented engineers and food scientists committed to inventing the future of more sustainable food, works tirelessly to develop a molecule that perfectly replicates the identical protein of a meat or dairy product. Their discovery delivers ideal, sought-after characteristics of a protein ingredient that is indistinguishable from its conventional counterpart, such that no taste or nutrition sacrifice is required in the finished product.

The new innovative process completely reinvents a legacy product category without any requirement to employ the living, resource-intensive, carbon emissions contributing impacts of an animal-derived version. It’s an incredible leap forward to fully satisfy the consumer’s preoccupation with taste and eating experience, yet is sustainable, cost comparable while it also de-risks the supply chain. Surely this bio-technology achievement story well-told to consumers, investors and retailers will draw people like a magnet to the new, better solution.

• The pet food company that knows dogs and cats require high quality proteins to assure their health, wellbeing and quality of life, so their nutritionists and scientists devote considerable energy to formulating food that utilizes the very best in class animal-derived protein ingredients, fruits, veg and botanicals. The formulation meticulously combines this cornucopia of better ingredients into a nutrient dense feast for fido and fifi.

Their supply chain experts scour the globe for the best sources to secure ‘human grade’ food ingredients that will deliver on the foundational ‘better’ nutrition story. Manufacturing works to optimize the process by improving cooking techniques designed to preserve the nutrient quality of the finished food in a shelf stable or refrigerated form. Of course, once pet parents know of these details, the decision to buy will follow.

• The auto brand known for its better engines that employs world-class engineers using higher quality parts to produce superior power that won’t break down over time.

• The running shoe company that devotes countless resources to understanding human anatomy, the mechanics and physics of athletic performance, building better shoes to help the wearer win races.

• The computer company that looks at machines as enablers of creative expression and reinvents designs to democratize technology forming an intuitive tool anyone can use.

The list goes on and on… That said, what if this isn’t the reason why your brand will be more successful. What if this incredible investment of time, talent, quality and infrastructure is actually table stakes to your victory. And second, that all this data and information works harder and more effectively with consumers as post-purchase confirmation of why their decision was a good one.

Best-in-class product creation is a must-do

Yes, you need to make the very best product

Yes, you need to employ the highest quality ingredients

Yes, you need to refine and improve manufacturing processes

Yes, you need the best people

Yes, you need to continuously innovate and improve.

However, this is not the path to successful brand communication that helps you achieve leaps in sustainable business growth.

Our point is while authentic best-in-class products are integral to your marketplace growth, there is a difference between providing top quality solutions and effective, engaging brand communication. If you consider how consumers think and behave you see that fact-based, analytical selling is not the path to consumer behavior victory on brand preference and purchase.

Facts don’t change minds

The brand that gets closest to the consumer wins. That means embracing their humanity.

It also means acknowledging that consumers are feeling creatures who think and not thinking creatures who feel. Facts and features serve to feed our need for confirmation bias after purchase that we’ve made the right decision. The experience with your product is rewarded by its performance because you’ve labored to produce the very best product. However, when it comes to effective outreach communication…that’s something else entirely.

Heart-felt connection

Moving as close to the consumer as possible means putting your brand in league with them on their journey. It’s forging an emotional connection founded on trust and integrity, where the consumer understands and wants to join your brand mission, purpose and deeper meaning. Ultimately, they see through your integrity and actions you have their best interests at heart.

• Your ability to form a relationship with consumers is not based on the stats and specs of your product formulation. Relevant brand engagement operates on a higher plane of context much like the heartfelt bonds that form between people we care about.

The neuroscience informed path to purchase

The steps to taking action on a purchase decision look different when you know how the brain’s Limbic System informs our actions. Emotion is at work here. It is how we feel about a brand that guides our decisions, not rational analysis of factual arguments. Simply stated, humans are not analytical, fact-based decision-making machines.

Sound strategy: different beats better

Most of what we see in legacy marketing outreach is a belief that “better” is the winning approach. Except that’s not bank-able strategy to start with. Uniqueness and differentiation comprise the basis of beneficial strategy, not being better. Better is tantamount to saying you’re the same as the other choice, only better. This is a zero-sum and unwinnable game of one-upmanship that operates to commoditize your business. Parsing degrees of better-ness isn’t as powerful as “only” and uniquely different.

When you know emotion rather than analytical arguments form the basis of successful communication, how will that change your messaging approach? This isn’t an indictment of your efforts to make the best product. It’s a given you must never dilute your quality commitments. However, when it comes to brand communication, the most effective outreach is based on emotional drivers, not specsmanship.

If this article has you thinking about improving brand communication and you have questions, use the link below to ask them. We promise to respond quickly.

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

Bob Wheatley is the CEO of Chicago-based Emergent. Traditional brand marketing often sidesteps more human qualities that can help consumers form an emotional bond. Yet brands yearn for authentic engagement, trust and a lasting relationship with their customers. For more information, contact Bob@Emergent-Comm.com and follow on Twitter @BobWheatley.

The benefits of a focused strategic platform and message

There is no substitute for a relevant, focused brand story that capitalizes on a form of ‘secret sauce’ — conjuring added meaning, purpose and value to support why consumers should join your brand’s “movement.”

These transformational moments in business trajectory are an outcome of amplifying a story that rises beyond your products to focus on a higher purpose platform. One that unifies the brand value proposition in a more impactful, powerful narrative.

It may seem counterintuitive to push hard on meaning and mission ahead of product features and benefits, but the neuroscience, consumer insight and real-world examples of this are too compelling. Want a deeper relationship with your core consumers (of course you do)? Then imbue your brand with deeper meaning and make that the hero of your narrative.

It all begins with…

The power of an anchoring, differentiating concept –

In every case where we’ve been privileged to help shape transformational growth for a client, there is one recurring and vital theme: a foundational idea that focuses marketing and your message on pushing deeper meaning into the brand.

When this occurs, it is always in collaboration and partnership with a courageous client looking to transform their business outcomes — rather than settle for recycling another product-as-hero launch “campaign” with reworked theme and tactics.

• The alchemy of this transformational thinking falls from consumer insights blended with a refined understanding of brand purpose and value. There is a core principle at work here that can manifest across different businesses when brands reimagine who and what they are about – we describe this as leveraging your brand “why.”

These ideas always forecast change, momentum, growth and renewed energy for a brand because they spring from a culturally relevant insight: people now want to be part of something greater than themselves. This explains why brand building has shifted to a more purposeful, relationship-centric path.

Here’s the thinking that informs this approach:

When connecting your brand to a new and deeper understanding of its higher purpose, we create a cohesive guide for all go-to-market tools, strategies and decisions.

This method is a consistent winner because it employs the new rules of brand building:

• Relevant brand relationships are now built on admiration and trust and will deliver significant financial premiums
• They represent goodwill that can be isolated as a component of business value
• They can result in higher margins, traffic
• They also work to reduce the cost of promotion, improving ROI and balance sheet performance

This strategic foundation creates the opportunity for transcendence – the state of being admired – where consumers “join” the brand as community members, not just customers.

In order to mine an opportunity for building a more relevant and resonant brand, we have a responsibility to push added meaning, trust and belief to the forefront of the brand-to-consumer relationship.

We express it this way because the world has changed and relating to a brand is now fundamentally the same thing as relating to another person we care about.

Brands that lean into deeper meaning and prosper

• Chobani just announced its intention to transition to a wellness lifestyle brand. Yes, while they make yogurt and other related dairy products, this challenger brand is about to enter a new phase in its storied growth founded on these deeper meaning principles. It will be interesting to see how it manifests since acquiring upscale coffee shop brand, La Colombe.
• Redbull began as a highly charged energy concoction aimed at fueling a subculture of young people who inhabit bars and dance clubs. Along the way Red Bull launched a DJ training school to help solidify its relevance in this subculture. Successful yes, but then they smartly pivoted to embrace a bigger concept in extreme sports. They quickly became the author and face of this engaging athletic world with one of the most sophisticated brand content creation strategies ever devised for a beverage business.
• Yeti is a cooler brand? From the start this company understood the concept of a higher purpose and platform. Their marketing is focused on outdoor adventure lifestyle experiences. Was this approach centered on feature/benefit selling of their insulation tech? No. It was an effort to support, celebrate and align themselves with inspiring outdoor experiences inspirational to hunters, fisherman and hikers. Enlightened, engaging, unexpected and has paid business dividends since inception.
• In the early years Clif Bar pioneered the energy bar market and from day one focused their brand on celebrating a specific channel of outdoor adventure in trail, road and mountain biking experiences. Their storytelling invested deeply in this lifestyle space and created a happy marriage with the “fuel” aspects of their product line. It also provided guidance on their product formulation standards that kept their brand in sync with the ethos of people who embrace this lifestyle. Clif Bar’s narrative elevated the conversation with this unique audience and helped drive their rise to category leadership.

For our part we’ve devoted our thinking to these principles in due diligence discovery with client businesses, working to recalculate their brand narrative.

• For Sargento we helped them lead premiumization of the dairy aisle cheese business, nourished by focusing on a highly engaged consumer cohort called Food Adventurers. The brand became a guide, coach and enabler of consumers who enjoy cooking and see it as a form of creative expression and a measure of their self-esteem. New media, new voices, new narrative, new stories and new products. The business results were dramatic and transformational.

• For First Alert home safety products, inventors of the residential smoke alarm, we helped them move from an engineering centric brand focused on its tech achievements to a business centered entirely on saving lives and protecting the wellbeing of families. Storytelling shifted from product features to focus on families impacted by unforeseen, life-threatening events and their stories of rescue. When we launched the first residential carbon monoxide alarm in the U.S. this strategy helped deliver a new $250 million business and 80% market share within 18 months of launch. Emotional stories drove the purchase.

• Jamba Juice started as a smoothie innovator that owned a ‘healthy halo’ because of the blended fruits in their beverages. But alas the world changed, and consumers started to demand healthy lifestyle choices from an increasingly discerning audience that called out the sugary truth about Jamba’s classic drink nutritionals. Chairman and CEO James White recognized this and the opportunity to shift the business down a different pathway. We came on board to help author the framework for a healthy lifestyle brand transition, that included developing a slate of new better-for-you beverages. Our goal to help this brand secure a respected voice for healthy living. Lifestyle relevance led resonance for this new story.

• For Champion Petfoods we created a foundation concept designed to earn brand trust and belief by positioning Champion as the pet industry transparency leader. At a time when consumers were demanding more complete and credible information about how pet foods are made, we created the perfect truth serum. The Champion Transparency Council delivered the voices of trusted third parties to observe, examine, see and report on the truth about how Champion sources ingredients and crafts its pet food. The openness rewarded brand believers and reinforced the role of higher quality nutrition as the consumer’s primary path to express love for their furry family members.

Merits of a focused platform

When the brand narrative centers on a core idea that brings deeper meaning and purpose to life, great things begin to happen:

Deeper engagement – because the approach is always consumer driven, people see themselves in the narrative. We quickly achieve higher engagement levels while cultivating a stronger community of ambassadors and evangelists.

Emphasizing earned, owned and social channels – higher purpose brand outreach is steeped in story relevance and so the path to engagement is dependent on expensive “better than” paid media awareness building tactics. You don’t have to chase awareness when your story is naturally magnetic.

Focused message builds clarity – outreach effectiveness and message comprehension go up because all channels of communication are complimentary to each other and there’s less risk of confusion by chasing too many message imperatives.

• The product story doesn’t disappear. It simply moves adjacent to the core concept as information that reassures and confirms consumers have made the right choice.

If this approach to building business has got you thinking, we would be honored to help you sort through the options and determine the right anchoring idea. Use the email link below to start an informal conversation.

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

Bob Wheatley is the CEO of Chicago-based Emergent. Traditional brand marketing often sidesteps more human qualities that can help consumers form an emotional bond. Yet brands yearn for authentic engagement, trust and a lasting relationship with their customers. For more information, contact Bob@Emergent-Comm.com and follow on Twitter @BobWheatley.

Trust failures infect successful brand building…

Now more than ever, earning consumer trust is paramount to the growth and development of your business. You can’t claim it. You can’t invoke it. Trust is only earned through credible, verifiable behaviors and openness. We believe this is sufficiently important that it deserves a unique discipline in the marketing eco-system we’re calling “Trust-ology.” Emerging trend: the world around us keeps supplying consumers with reasons to be skeptical, wary and thus more susceptible to perceiving added risk from engaging the vast array of brands and businesses seeking our attention.

Dramatic and ‘didn’t see it coming’ case in point

The iconic, premium positioned grocery Deli dominant meat brand, Boar’s Head, suddenly faces an unprecedented self-inflicted challenge to its busines and reputation. Tainted meat processed at one of their plants is recalled after 9 customer fatalities and 57 hospitalizations from listeria food poisoning. Amazingly, the investigation reveals an incredible failure in the most fundamental aspects of quality control, food safety and plant hygiene. Astounding. Once again, the world sees a business reputation fouled by performance that incredibly fractures the perception of basic standards and values the public expects. What was hidden behind a corporate veil is suddenly revealed in the intense, bright spotlight of media reporting.

As the lens of this media scrutiny inevitably widened on Boars Head, we also discover disturbing allegations of sexual harassment, racial and disability discrimination the company is facing in the form of lawsuits now getting visibility in the press. Where there’s behavioral smoke, there’s bad reputation fire?

Yet another example of why consumers are skeptical and hesitant of what companies say vs. what they do. What appeared as bright and shiny on the outside (gorgeous roasted hams) is revealed to be darker and without proper values on the inside. Thus, why trust must be earned through openness, vigilance and purpose when brands operate with the consumer’s best interests in mind 100% of the time.

This recurring barrier to brand belief is soaking in reputation challenges

In the digital era, all things that can be known, will be known instantly. Every brand now exists in a glass house that too often reveals breakdowns in trust. We observe brands, businesses and individuals outed on half-truths, misstatements, bogus claims, failures to admit mistakes, reckless hyperbole, baseless assertions, lies by omission, overt selfishness and outright deceit.

Who do you believe?

Who has an unassailable reputation?

Who is honest?

How do you know what’s truthful?

The mechanics of effective brand marketing requires trust. Without it, messaging becomes noise, dismissed as self-promotion wired to self-interest acted out on a paid media stage.

Consumer shift

Consumers today are demanding, for good reason, more information about the products they use and how they were created – some companies are paying attention. Earlier this year, bedding brand Boll & Branch launched Origin Track, which lets consumers trace how their sheets are made, from raw materials to finished product. At the foundation of this development is trust and how to acquire it. Brands that offer more disclosure and information earn deeper loyalty and engagement from consumers.

The dawn of trust-ology

Trust is needed in any brand-to-consumer relationship that lasts. You can’t simply say ‘we’re trustworthy’ and expect consumers to fall in line. Trust must be earned through daily deed and credible supporting action. Trust is the must-have goal as you work (hard) to secure consumer belief in your statements. This requires vigilance and intent.

Anatomy of trust-ology

• Belief is an idea rooted in a form of truth
• Faith is more than a thought — it is a deep-seated conviction
• Belief is centered in faith, and faith is centered in trust
• Trust is actionable, based on a credible, verifiable validation of rightness

Trusted means you accept the sender’s message because you believe they have your best interests at heart. You have faith in them and what they tell you. It is earned through consistent actions and verified by the validation of third-party trusted sources – expert voices without a compromising financial incentive.

The hierarchy of trust-ology

1. Consumers come first – you genuinely care about their welfare and happiness
2. Their best interests are always served
3. It is supported by honesty, reliability and consistency in how you operate (business behavior)
4. Your brand is consistently empathetic to their needs and aspirations

Trust-ology as strategy

In a study from Innova Research on the Top 10 Trends of 2023, they report 66% of consumers would trust a company that is upfront and truthful about the challenges they’re facing to operate more sustainably. The report goes on to say honesty and transparency are the most important values related to food. More specifically:

• How food is produced
• Where ingredients are sourced
• How value chain stakeholders are treated

In sum, consumer interest in transparency is fueling demands for more transparency. Why? Enabling trust. Allowing consumers to see for themselves how you do what you do results in credible proof of what you want them to believe. Thus, why trust building is a core proposition underneath brand strength and business growth.

Will you do something bold, new and unexpected in the name of earning credibility?

The trust-ology building platform – Champion Transparency Council

Champion Petfood owns some of the highest standards for quality ingredients in the pet food industry. However, that can be a tough message to credibly convey in an industry known for its lack of transparency and visibility to supply chain details, verified ingredient standards and manufacturing processes. Champion needed to reinforce trust at a critical time when consumers were demanding that pet food companies back up their assertions of high quality, human grade food ingredients.

Three steps to transparency transformation

1. Emergent’s solution: build trust through the voices and observations of real people and respected Veterinarian physicians
2. The strategic vehicle: The Champion Transparency Council
3. Their mission: see everything in every phase of pet food making from farm to production and report on what they witnessed firsthand

Leverage: we tapped into a unique operational commitment at Champion — their legacy long-term contracts to supply fresh proteins from farms, ranches and fisheries within driving distance of their kitchens.

We took Council members to nearby farms and fisheries to witness how animals were raised, chat with farmers and hear about their story and methods. We took them fishing so they could participate in the harvest of fish that would be used in making pet food. They observed the fresh proteins arriving at Champion’s kitchens. We invited them to see and ask questions about every aspect of pet food manufacturing, from intake to final packaging.

Their first-person reports verified Champion’s claims and were published through an array of channels reaching consumers and retailers. It was the truth about pet food making from a company that had nothing to hide and everything to gain by being totally transparent.

The Council strategy nourished Champion’s community of brand evangelists and enthusiasts with validation and proof that their faith was warranted and respected. We provided the media with unprecedented access to Council members for interviews.

Does your organization see transparency and traceability as a business opportunity? If so, how are you surfacing data and information to enable it and help your business benefit from it?

Components of trust-ology

Access

Openness

Dialogue

Customer-first values

Demonstration

Transparency

Integrity and honesty

This approach assures that the marketing story is consistent with company performance and consistent delivery of promises.

Why is this so vital to business growth?

Imagine for a moment that consumers no longer trust the claims and assertions brands make. Consider that their fears of misplaced loyalty and belief are confirmed in surprising moments of outing via an internal whistle-blower, government or media investigation or aftermath of a recall event. This manifests as a compelling need to know more, see more and make an informed evaluation based on evidence provided. Trust is merited through trustworthy actions.

This is why trust-ology should be a component of the marketing discipline, and trust creation must be a considered and embedded platform within the brand marketing game plan.

Open the curtain and let people see firsthand. Actions speak louder than words. At stake is rewarding their faith in your brand. When trust is secured, you should continue to invest in retaining it. As we’ve seen repeatedly, once lost, trust can be hard to reacquire.

• Trusted brands earn loyalty, admiration, and advocacy. Just make sure this commitment is woven into the fabric of your organization’s belief system. Efforts here will make your marketing more effective and your brand more resilient. Someday we hope to see a Chief Trust-ologist on the c-suite team.

If this discussion makes you anxious to discover more about the pathway to deploying trust-ology and belief, use the link below to arrange an informal meeting and start a dialogue on your questions.

Link to Download Champion Case Study

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

Bob Wheatley is the CEO of Chicago-based Emergent. Traditional brand marketing often sidesteps more human qualities that can help consumers form an emotional bond. Yet brands yearn for authentic engagement, trust and a lasting relationship with their customers. For more information, contact Bob@Emergent-Comm.com and follow on Twitter @BobWheatley.