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 [email protected] 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 [email protected] and follow on Twitter @BobWheatley.

The updated formula for powerful brand communication

Today we nail, confirm, codify, canonize and draw the proverbial line in the sand, concerning what effective brand communication should focus on in recognition of vast consumer behavior changes. This article offers tangible direction about where to place your bets and how best to secure engagement with consumers that will lead to a lasting, trusted relationship.
 
So, what changed?
 
For 50 years (or more) brand communication was defined as the shiny amplifier in the marketing toolbox, a look-at-me cudgel for products determined to seek out attention. Marketing plans historically, traditionally, extolled the value of top-of-mind awareness-building as the best path downward from the lip of the ”purchase funnel”  — where awareness preceded everything else that could matter on the rocky road to a transaction.
 
The world, however, has shifted dramatically. The purchase funnel as we know it is no longer a relevant business recipe. As we flagged in an earlier post – today consumption is an infinite loop of inspiration, exploration, community participation and advocacy.

• Old brand world: defined by conventional paid media awareness (digital or analog)
• New brand world: defined by content, events, experiences, earned media and fandom

The new and improved role for brand comms

Much has been said about the decline of conventional, non-digital media as the sheer number of viable newspapers, magazines and radio stations has shrunk like conventional taxi service. A great deal of that subtraction due to the shift of media spending away from legacy media platforms. Why? Because consumers have left that building in droves. Digital media brands and platforms now proliferate as the vanguard of trend reporting and product assessment – and all of it online.

What has not declined and only advanced is the insatiable thirst for trusted guidance in a world rife with perceived uncertainty. Consumers universally hate risk (or the perception of it) and seek to avoid that experience. What people want more than ever is assurance of truth and credible corroboration of what brands claim and want them to believe. They also seek reliable coaching on their personal journey and support to determine what’s the best way to fulfill their hopes, wants and dreams.

Somehow this is lost on brands that continue to navigate the awareness pathway, thinking once consumers are aware of the brand’s better mouse trap of benefits, sales growth will inherently follow piggy-back style. However, consumers no longer play ball with that kind of marketing behavior. And they have other options.

Here’s the marketing challenge of the era: brand communication absent genuine, authentic strategy (pursuing differentiation, uniqueness, singularity rather than “better”) is largely a wasted effort (and spend). So too, is any product or service seeking attention ahead of real faith and belief. What’s missing for the consumer in that scenario? Trust. In its place, resides risk and plenty of it.

Our daily behaviors

Whether it’s apps like Instagram, Tik Tok or online news sites such as Fast Company, Thrillist and Axiom, we look to experience review and reportorial forms of content to help us sort the wheat from the chaff, the good from bad, the hot from not, the truth from fiction for what is important to us. We want assurance from a credible source to decide A vs. B. Is this an exercise in building awareness? No. It’s risk mitigation built on the back of a trusted source of guidance.

Doesn‘t it make sense then to shift the planning approach from aggregating eyeballs to winning hearts and earning trust? If so, how can we do that most effectively as stewards and builders of brand relationships and reputations?

What do all of these case study examples have in common?

Sara Lee – restoring brand relevance and growth.
Sargento – leaping ahead of the tyranny of a commodity category
Jamba Juice – restaging brand belief in the health and wellness era
First Alert – establishing a new category solely through editorial reporting
Champion Petfood – leveraging a unique brand strength for enhanced trust and reputation
Molson beer – restoring business credibility and brand resonance
Schuman Cheese – ending the era of category fraud and restoring trust and faith\

They all represent Emergent’s approach using an integration of client/agency collaboration, authentic sound strategy, consumer and trade insight, curated messaging, advocacy and trust tactics, credible voices, industry participation, focus in earned media and cross channel deployment creating a bandwagon effect (multiple sources that agree).

7-point recipe for effective brand communication

1. Foundational strategic work on brand purpose, mission, values, differentiation, archetype, language, consumer insight and foundational narrative precedes tactical considerations
2. Optimizing business behaviors, policies, plans and infrastructure to role model and enforce a culture of consumer centricity and brand reciprocity founded on improving consumers’ lives
3. Brand communication designed around consumer as hero of storytelling, with brand operating as coach, guide and enabler of the consumer’s journey.
4. Investment in building a community of advocates and trusted sources to verify and validate key messaging, build credibility and earn trust.
5. Steering clear of self-promotion, feature/benefit selling and other old school behaviors that make consumer relationships transactional and self-serving
6. Deep investment in earned media and integrated social community activations to influence consumer perceptions, build relationships, develop trust and affirm claims
7. Seamless integration of message and story from web site to social channels, outbound communication and branded content creation

The best work falls from partnership

Our experience with this approach signals evidence that when brands invest in their “why” over how and what they do to imbue their brand with deeper meaning founded on a relentless drive to help improve consumers’ lives, the business results follow.

When earning trust and working to mitigate risk is foundational in go-to-market behaviors, a new era of engagement and relevance is established because consumers elect to “join” the brand’s mission as advocates rather than mere users.

• We’ve seen this recipe pay dividends over and over because the brand and business’ heart are not only in the right place, the tools in the marketing toolkit have been optimized for relevance and meaning rather than chasing awareness.

The most powerful way to achieve these outcomes is through a true collaboration between brand and agency. Partnership vs. vendorship – are miles apart in outcome potential.

If this inspires questions and conversation about improving your marketing approach — Use this link to let us know if you would like to discuss further.

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

New direction on the evolving role of brand marketing

For the last 50 years CPG and retail brand building has been focused on chasing awareness. The theory that top-of-funnel recognition will lead to consideration, and if the brand is persuasive while spiraling further down the funnel, a consumer purchase will occur. Leave it to the impact of evolving culture and the presence of existential, environmental threats to shift behaviors and push the funnel off its pedestal. A distinctive new path to brand building has emerged and we will unpack it here. The good news: we are entering a period of unprecedented brand engagement, but the rules to success are decidedly different.

Remarkably the century old thinking that underpins the funnel was first developed in 1896 by E. St. Elmo Lewis, owner of a Philadelphia-based ad agency, who published the first theory on “consumer path to purchase” he called AIDA – short for Awareness, Interest, Desire and Action. By 1924 this concept had morphed into what we now refer to as the Purchase Funnel. Yes, there have been a few modifications along the way to accommodate digital and social media channels, but the basic view of awareness as the golden goal has traveled with the adjustments, until now.

The funnel is dead, long live the funnel…

The fundamental weaknesses of the funnel model have been exposed, as follows:

• It is grounded in transactional thinking that positions consumers as walking wallets
• It fails to address the dynamics of how real brand relationships are built
• Assumes that consumers will behave in a linear fashion on the road to purchase

It’s fair to say that the focus of brand marketing work and investment has leaned heavily on top of funnel activity, frustrated somewhat by the demise of mass media, the splintering of consumer attention across channels and their uncanny newfound ability to avoid it all. Of note, tactical sophistication here in digital media eyeball aggregation isn’t helped by inherent strategic weakness.

Here’s the truth as we now know it. Consumers – especially Gen Z and Millennials – no longer operate in linear fashion. For one, the purchase isn’t the end game, rather it is the starting point. Consumption is now an infinite loop of inspiration, exploration, community participation and advocacy.

• Old brand world: defined by conventional advertising, digital or analog
• New brand world: defined by content, events, experiences and fandom

What are you risking if you continue to be an awareness chaser?

Declining relevance: your brand and business are seen as exploitive, possibly manipulative and transactional.

Lacking authenticity: your brand expresses promotional hype over user help in a world now longing for trust and deeper meaning from the brands consumers care about.

Incidentally, this is why Emergent exists. We focus on new strategic approaches that are grounded in culture and the latest consumer insight. Today, when consumers buy a product, they are actually buying your story and not a stock keeping unit (sku).

Edelman Trust Barometer sheds light on the shift

Edelman’s latest trust report revealed a remarkable change in behavior that has significant implications to sound brand building strategy. People have a strong cognitive bias for post-purchase rationalization. In fact, we also know that 95% of the time, consumers are driven by their efforts to avoid making a bad decision, or to experience disappointment.

Edelman’s research confirms where the action is: 50% of consumers now conduct the vast majority of their brand research AFTER purchase and not before. What’s more, 78% are looking for credible proof and validation that they made the right decision. Turns out post purchase is when people are most open to brand engagement.

You might be wondering what’s behind this change…

1. The systematic dilution of trust and belief based in part on the absence of any prevailing brand value system, higher purpose or real, obvious evidence of same.
2. The precipitous rise of vulnerability, uneasiness over a perceived lack of personal control authored by political, social and environmental stresses. 
3. Too many brands think all they have to do is invoke the word trust in their marketing and they are automatically, well, trusted. Not so. Trust is earned not acquired. Always deeds more than words.

Right below the surface people look for safety and security in the midst of accelerating experiences sponsored by uncontrollable events around them. This manifests as a desire for deeper meaning, purpose and trust – now at an all-time premium. Call it heightened expectations for visible, demonstrable, easy-to-see brand values and a courageous point of view.

So how does it work now?

Consumer pre-purchase research leans into the influence of brand social communities where they uncover member reviews, experiences and hopefully advocacy. Thus, the strongest predictor of a thriving social strategy is the rate at which members connect with each other vs. the brand’s self-promoting posts. It just makes sense – people believe and respect the voices of their peers before they accept assertions claimed by brands.

Brand marketing is now about cultural influence

The great news – consumers in a post-purchase focused world are primed for engagement. No need to wrestle them to the ground with look-at-me overreach. Here’s directional advice on best practices.

1. Trust creation: you should be conveying and demonstrating your brand purpose, mission and identity beyond the product on offer. Brand actions, reinforced through communication and education, helps you earn trust. 
2. You’re working to confirm: competence, ethics, values and relevance to your consumer based on their identity and aspirations, which you endeavor to help enable.
3. You deploy: credible and trusted voices in the form of “people like me” (via User Generated Content), scientists and academic experts, brand tech experts and employees.

It’s exciting to know that following purchase 79% of consumers engage in branded content, will participate in brand activities and want to connect on your social platforms. Your brand marketing should be operating to help feed and encourage this behavior. Trusted brands are repurchased, they secure loyalty and encourage evangelism.

If you’re interested in exploring the implications and strategies of a post-funnel marketing environment, use the link below to ask questions. Discussion and exploration can be enlightening, and we would be honored to talk informally with you about this exciting topic.

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

Reclaiming higher purpose renews brand energy…

Most brands with a strong higher purpose (a refined “why” that informs behaviors and decision making) got that way because the founder(s) injected beliefs from their own sense of mission.

Staying true to the founder’s core purpose/vision and retaining the brand’s deeper meaning over time can be challenging. If higher purpose is intentionally woven into the fabric of how the organization operates, the belief system can be steadfast generationally. If the mission is largely a reflection of the leader’s ethos and the company experiences regime change, the “why” can disappear in the hands of executives who manage most often for profit and loss priorities rather than refueling the company/brand belief system.

• Apple lost its way when Steve Jobs was forced out in 1985. The company suffered as a result. When he returned in 1997 the higher purpose roared back. Business boomed.

• Starbucks began with religion around changing the coffee experience, from better beans to establishing the Italian espresso beverage traditions in its unique “3^rd Place” setting. When Howard Schultz left, the “why” went with him and subsequent leadership focused on operational efficiencies and expansion. Business declined until Schultz returned.

“Why” is influential to how a brand is built and sustains – providing a true north that transcends changing conditions and cultural shifts over time by securing a devoted community of true believers. It is fundamental to how brands engage successfully with core customers. It flies in the opposite direction from commoditization pressures and an unproductive focus on the competition.

• Nonetheless “why” can be left behind if new leadership isn’t entrenched with the same point of view as the founders.

Our brush with half-baked “why” – A mini case study on reclaiming purpose

In 1949, Chicagoan Charles Lubin was trying to figure out how to send his epiphanous cheesecakes to a man in Texas enamored with his sweet, dense creations. But cheesecakes (and baked goods like them) generally didn’t travel well; thus, why the bakery industry of the era primarily consisted of smaller businesses servicing a local trading area.

Lubin began experimenting and later innovated a new brand at retail through his pioneering of flash freezing tech – a process to preserve the taste, texture and eating experience of his baked delights. As a result, a new category was established through his single-minded mission to make high quality baked goods available to a much wider audience. Reinventing the baked goods business to create widespread access was his “why.”

Lubin’s innovation was personified by creating the iconic Sara Lee brand – named after his nine-year old daughter, who for most of her life would remain hidden in the background. He was wildly successful and eventually sold his company to Consolidated Foods. The corporation renamed itself after the bakery division (Sara Lee Corporation) even though it was largely a meat products business. After the sale, Lubin eventually retired and a series of CPG experienced leadership teams came in to run the company, expanding distribution into foodservice and adding new categories to spur growth. But along the way Sara Lee lost its why.

The company was focused on volume and balance sheet considerations, not the embedded love affair with bakery creations that touch people’s lives. With a diluted soul, the business resorted to price promotions and other commoditizing behaviors to keep the volume numbers going.

As we’ve seen before when the “why” dissipates or disappears all together, the energy underneath the business often goes with it. Sara Lee lost relevance as the focus moved from consumers to chasing the competition. Performance inevitably flagged and the parent company started to consider if it was possible to divest the Sara Lee baked goods division even though their corporate identity was tied to it. Tough to do.

In a last ditch effort to turn the bakery ship around, we were retained on a mission to restage Sara Lee Bakery and recapture the qualities and meaning Charles Lubin had originally brought with him. We needed to break with the most recent past in a big way and author a new story for the future.

• How do you quickly, decisively disrupt perceptions?  You do something over-the-top that forces consumer reassessment. You create a new story and put substance underneath it. It was time to swing for the fences.

Solution: Sara Lee’s First International Symposia on Dessert

Go big or go home. We sat down with Sara Lee, the actual person, and after many hours of conversation about our plans to rescue the business her father had started, Sara agreed to become a spokesperson for the brand named after her. To properly showcase her debut, we decided to create an event to showcase a new era at Sara Lee, complete with an updated product line. It would be done specifically for the top North American food media so the story could be told as widely as possible in a credible setting.

We decided to create a symposium on dessert – in the dessert capitol of the world, Vienna, Austria – the birthplace of sweet bakery creations and traditions beginning in the 18^th century. We also knew that a media event staged in Vienna was likely to be enthusiastically attended, and over three days we would have the full and undivided attention of our media audience 24 hours a day. It would be an extraordinary opportunity to exercise great influence, a ‘must-do’ if we were going to change the paradigm of what people think Sara Lee is.

Working with Austrian Airlines, the Austrian Economic Council and the Vienna Tourism Board, we were able to secure airline seats for 56 journalists for a song, hotel rooms at the famous Hotel Imperial at a rate more like Motel Six and free access to the famed palaces that made Vienna the cultural heartbeat of the world during the time of Mozart.

We recruited the top seven pastry chefs of Vienna to help reimagine new desserts using Sara Lee products as a base, to enchant and inspire the food media luminaries who would attend. We developed a comprehensive itinerary of educational events and experiences designed to provide so many varying story angles that any media decision maker would feel they could carve their own unique narrative around the experience.

• We brought a in a food historian who charted the emergence of sweet baked goods from the Roman Empire to modern day.

• We created a section on the psychology of eating dessert revealing the cultural issues at work between American sensibilities and European attitudes on indulgence.

• We prepared a hands-on cooking experience for all 56 media, dividing them into teams to work alongside Viennese pastry experts each challenged to work with a specific Sara Lee product.

• We brought the media to the oldest operating bakery in the world, opened in 1560, to hear a presentation on the history of chocolate.

The most important facet of all though was on the opening night where the editors gathered for a special reveal – they would be meeting the real Sara Lee and Charlie Lubin’s wife for the first time. This event, fit for royalty, was staged in a palace next door to The Hofburg, the Imperial seat of the Hapsburg dynasty. The editors were to experience a curated menu based on a 18^th century royal banquet, dining on china from the royal house. Ahead of a presentation that would whisk them forward to the modern era of baked goods and the new Sara Lee brand.

After dinner a video presentation chronicled  the history of dessert – a retrospective on the birth of sweet baking traditions and its evolution over time, a way for the brand to lock in its ‘knowledge broker’ cred on bakery expertise. At the conclusion of the video the room went dark and then Sara Lee was introduced to an awestruck crowd of food journalists (there really is a Sara Lee). You could feel the electricity when Sara walked into the room. Sara spoke of her father’s legacy, mission, values and unveiled the new product line for the editors, inviting them to join a dessert fantasy experience.

• Sara Lee’s top chefs created a dessert fantasy in the adjoining gold-gilt ballroom where Viennese pastry masterpieces were arranged near and around new desserts made with Sara Lee products. The editors were challenged to determine which was which. To a one, they couldn’t tell the difference. Perceptions were changed.

For three days it was around the clock substance interlaced with dazzle, including a specially staged concert with the Vienna Symphony Orchestra at another palace in an unusual oval shaped hall where Mozart conducted his first concert when he was six years old.

From this hosted media experience, Sara Lee Bakery dined for more than a year on story after story after story about the events and tastes in Vienna. The media showcase for new products was unprecedented for Sara Lee. A reacquiring of the brand’s “why” sat at the center of the entire venture and with it a departure from the price oriented self-promotion that had been going on for years before.

• The business results were gratifying and the project was credited at Sara Lee Corporation’s annual shareholders meeting as the reason for significant improvement in the bakery division’s results.

The most important aspect of this campaign was its ability to reframe the Sara Lee brand and product experience in a relevant and resonant way. Sara went on to be the centerpiece of  brand communication for three more years before she ’retired’ to her former and much quieter life with her family.

The lesson: when the “why” is diluted, the business resorts to manipulations to create a reason to buy, and these tactics don’t – and will never – connect in the same way as purpose, beliefs and values. When Sara Lee found its footing again, it was remarkable how that change was reflected in the brand’s performance. Beliefs, deeper meaning and mission are core to creating the emotional connections that impact consumer buying decisions and actions.

• Great care should be exercised to help ensure your company’s “why” will remain steadfast and vital over time – even if new leadership arrives to carry the torch forward.

If locking in your company’s “why” resonates with you or if your organization needs to optimize its purpose and belief system, use this link to start a conversation. We promise it will be interesting and enlightening.

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Deploying the biology of effective communication

For a brand message to have any real impact, to influence behavior and seed advocacy, it requires more than awareness and publicity. It must advance a relevant higher purpose, cause or belief system that people who share your values will immediately resonate to. Only then can your message create any lasting marketplace impact.

It is not the quality of your products that causes the category to tip your direction. Absent a refined brand WHY, new innovations and technologies will rapidly find themselves playing the circular and commoditizing price-and-feature game. Your competitive advantage gets real traction when you are crystal clear about the human-relevant purpose and mission you exist to champion.

An identifiable cohort of consumers exists who share your beliefs and then want to integrate your ideas and products into their own lives. It is their ability to understand and embrace your purpose, your WHY, that causes them to embrace your brand. They view what you make as a tangible path to reflect and demonstrate their purpose and beliefs to the world around them.

Beliefs are powerful and can be enlisted to change the trajectory of brand growth

It’s important to remember that “consumers” are first and foremost real, human three-dimensional people. As such, we are hardwired to gravitate toward people, places as well as things (products) that reinforce what we believe about the world and ourselves.

• Beliefs influence our behaviors and how we see ourselves
• Beliefs are emotional and rise from deep within us to inform decisions
• Beliefs run underneath our cognizant, analytical radar to impact our feelings and decisions
• Beliefs help people understand, connect and engage with your brand
• Beliefs are respectful of human biology and how we’re wired to take action (through feelings not facts)

Yet we find that belief systems are largely undernourished in business strategy because of a flawed assumption that a better mousetrap is the motivating tool that draws in consumers. Ultimately, products in any given category will be more similar than they are unique. Frankly, there isn’t any proprietary tech advantage that can be sustained over time without competitive dilution.

Instead, people are magnetically drawn to leader-type brands that communicate what they believe. This unique approach helps consumers feel safe and special – like they belong – and are inspired to align with the brand because the story and mission resonates so personally.

Future of food brands are often mission oriented

Emergent works with emerging food brands who are reinventing how food is created with a vastly improved sustainability story. To a one, the founders and leadership teams believe they exist to improve the health and wellbeing of people while measurably improving the impact of our current food system on global warming.

Their technologies are instrumental in changing the greenhouse gas paradigm. But that is not the reason they will be successful or that people will be drawn to their offering. It is the inspiration they provide to help enable consumers in exercising their conscious consumption wishes. To improve their wellbeing with healthier food choices and create a safer future for themselves and their families. These brands understand that taste, eating experience and proper price are all table stakes and not the real reason for marketplace success. Empowering consumers to experience ‘making a difference’ is the real brand elevator.

Thus, why conveying values, mission and purpose are so vital to success rather than relying on historic tactics that attempt to leverage features, lower price or the more subtle tactical manipulations of persuasion, fear, vanity, status, shame, peer pressure and social acceptance to close a sale.

One big example: we live in a nation founded on inspiration of a better future for people

In July of 1776 the world was forever changed with the emergence of the United States, the first-ever constitutional republic – a democracy ‘of and for the people’ – now at 247 years of age the oldest of its kind on earth. A new nation founded on ideals and principles that espoused freedom of speech and press, an elected representative government, the rule of law and a promise of a better future for people.

These ideals form the foundation of an inspired sense of opportunity and the expectation of an individual’s ability to pursue their own goals and aspirations. Despite the enormous flaws and inconsistencies that dogged the nation through a Civil War 84 years after its founding, the resilience wrapped in these beliefs and sense of purpose have stood the test of time.

America is one of the most powerful examples of “Why” culture and the influence of deeper meaning writ large. It is embedded in our American attitudes, thinking and distinctive behaviors. These principles and aspirations have spread around the world, yet most of these new democratic governments are less than 70 years old and still evolving.

• We have unique stories to tell about our nation’s founding
• Symbols abound about the American legacy of freedom
• It is inspirational to how we think and see our lives
• Our societal beliefs are founded on the concept of greater good

Yet for all of the evidence of how a nation founded on beliefs and values serves as an inspiration to a brighter future over time, and the power of values to impact attitudes and behavior – this POV hasn’t rubbed off as fully as it could on business and brand development thinking.

When brands become symbols of values and beliefs we hold close

Health, wellbeing, achievement, creative exploration, better relationships, education, love, serving others – there are so many places a brand can live to inspire users and improve their lives. It is in this moment of unselfish thinking that an environment of trust is created.

The process to explore and refine a brand’s “why” begins with consumer-centricity and works backward from there. It is formative insight into your customers’ interests, concerns and desires that informs a creative exploration around brand beliefs – which should reflect and mirror your users’ aspirations.

Emergent has developed a proprietary process for this evaluation we call Brand Sustainability Analysis – in this case the word sustainable refers not to environmental concerns directly but to sustainable brand growth over time.

The six primary components include:

• Core beliefs that are consumer centric and address how the brand contributes to improving users lives and the world around them.

• Based on those beliefs, Why the company exists, its core mission and higher purpose.

• How the company will fulfill its belief-driven higher purpose and mission.

• Therefore, What business the company is truly in and assets required to fulfill that promise based on the brand purpose.

• The company BrandStand that expresses the business’ true north and becomes an embedded guide for decisions on strategy, policy, employee policy and recruitment, innovation and marketing going forward.

• Implications of the BrandStand on company operations and marketing strategies.

If you agree that inspiration is a stronger path to influencing consumer decisions than passe’ tactical manipulation, and that an optimized purpose and mission – your why – can lead to brand advocacy and evangelism, then we should talk. Use this link to begin an informal get-acquainted conversation.

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