How you convince ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini your brand should be recommended

For the first time in the history of modern marketing, a machine holding vast global insight and knowledge on every product, category and company, steps in between the consumer and the brand to provide authoritative, easy-to-understand, supported advice on what products to buy. The voice is empathetically human, like your colleague at work, except it possesses more knowledge than all of the world’s experts you could amass in one place at one time — and offers its assessments in a conversational, two-way forum.

LLMs will remember every conversation they have with you.

Imagine what it will understand about your preferences, needs, wants, desires, problems.

It responds to any query in seconds.

Asks follow-up questions to refine its ability to send relevant help.

Is available 24/7 and never gets tired of hearing from you.

It may offer to complete a purchase on your behalf.

Consider what this means when a third party (not your brand) with this kind of knowledge, credibility and influence makes recommendations and offers specific guidance, diminishing any need to first visit your brand web site or expend mental calories tracking down other sources of valued information. Further, it validates conclusions and can support its advice with a treasure trove of data. (Of note, it is vital to your business success to gain LLM trust early and control how your brand is perceived).

We know consumers desire certainty in purchases above all things because every human works predictably to avoid the possibility of making a bad decision (read disappointment).

• Could agentic AI become a recuring advisor for help on purchases? Yes, and it is.
• Could this evolve into a relied upon, habitual “go to”? Likely, unless it violates our requirement for trusted reliability, privacy and confidentiality.
• Will this impact your marketing and strategic plans? It must. Read on.

Global unseen Internet traffic, more than 50% of it, is constantly crawling media, government, industry, academic, political sources, and your web site to inform itself – so in light of this vigilant non-stop digital data mining…

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 trade partners trust this on-tap source and rely on it for decisions?

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

Note, not all web site content and related information about your business and brand is AI friendly. Brand stewards have a responsibility to do everything possible to better inform and influence the assessments AI platforms are making, thus assuring the brand story is correct, complete and compelling.

Is this for real? Is this now or later?

Marketers may wonder if Agentic AI is a near-in priority. While the use of AI has touched hundreds of millions, the role of agentic advisors in everyday life may appear to be a tertiary phenomenon. We are moving past that at lightning speed. More and more people are turning to their LLMs for advice on everything from gym workout regimens and relationship tips to pet care guidance and what car to buy. The time is now for brands to proactively manage what LLMs believe about their brand and business.

What proportion of consumers are already using AI for advice on purchases?

• U.S. consumers who use agentic AI for online shopping: at least 39% from a survey of 5,000 U.S. consumers. Within that cohort, 47% of them turn to AI for product recommendations and 55% for research. A related stat — Adobe Analytics also reports a ~1,200–1,300% year-on-year surge in AI-search referrals to retail sites.

• Overall consumer AI usage: Menlo Ventures’ 2025 consumer study reports 61% of U.S. adults used AI in the past 6 months — and ~1 in 5 are using it daily (we believe this is evidence of habit formation).

• Shopping-specific: WSJ states 42% of consumers are using generative AI for shopping guidance, thus why it’s time to adopt GEO “generative engine optimization” strategies to show up correctly in various agentic AI platforms.

Bottom line: Across trusted sources, the active shopper-use is ~35–45%, with Adobe’slarge U.S. study clocking in at 39% overall and 47% for recommendations. That’s not a niche.

Agentic Engine Optimization (AEO) is here

Various LLM platforms (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, et al) look at brands and businesses differently, their assessments and recommendations are not all the same. Brands need to start now to inform and influence the various LLMs so their stories and messaging are showing up fully, correctly.

LLMs may not get the full picture —unless we make the effort to guide them

Risk of inaction: AI answers can omit brand differentiators including sourcing, formulation standards, ingredient nuances and science-backed claims – especially if facts aren’t consistently managed and reinforced across various channels of media LLMs scan (press, reviews, Q&A, retailer PDPs, etc).

Without proactive optimization (GEO), AI can misrepresent your brand strengths and story.

As agentic AI becomes the “first advisor” consumers consult, what LLMs recommend or state can sidestep CPG brand messaging, claims, and nuances—creating risk if left un-curated.

AI models learn from “earned media” because they trust the authority

LLMs train on publicly available text—reviews, articles, press, forums—so what’s being said about your brand and your competitors can shape an LLM query response. Managing that narrative is the new strategic game plan. Chatbots are a lot like people—except they are unimagining, unfeeling, electronic ones. The things you need to do to win them over include making your product stories clear, detailed and easy to navigate, clearly explaining your company’s vision. Additionally winning positive third-party endorsement through coverage in the news—which is also relevant to how you inform your real, human customers.

The Agentic Optimization Engine (GEO) game plan

Assessment and ongoing LLM management

This is an evolving story because LLM crawling is constant. You need to know what the various LLM platforms think they understand about your brand and competitors, and to stay on top of that over time. New online GEO management platforms have emerged to help brands track LLMs, gain knowledge of what they know and monitor how this evolves.

LLMs are swayed by narratives

1. Long form, conversational content alongside linear stories with timelines and Q&As are AI crawling friendly. Recency is an issue for AI, so company blogs are an important part of the plan because they are constantly updated.

• Third-party authoritative blogs and e-newsletters matter as AI assigns authority to the voices of outside sources that verify the stories and claims your making. Are you working actively to gain attention in third-party publishing channels?

• Product pages with detailed descriptions and narrative guidance resonate because this is what LLMs are doing – making recommendations on what products to buy so they are evaluating your product bona fides while making their recommendations. Thus why fact sheets, timelines and Q&As are equally important on the LLM crawling journey.

• Earned media is a significant and vital part of this ecosystem because LLMs consider editorial reporting to be a credible and authoritative source. Now your earned media strategies perform double-duty – not only building credibility and awareness of what you want consumers to believe about your brand and business from a respected third party , but also to inform LLMs. Note that AI is crawling wire service platforms so now the decision to put press releases out on the wires gains added importance as a source of AI guidance and understanding.

• Web sites should be optimized to provide easy navigation of content that is AI friendly. The good news: you should be refining your product stories for guidance and clarity anyway, so even if you’re not ready to accept that Agentic AI is here and happening, your work to make these improvements will be good for business anyway.

• Research confirms paid media is less important in GEO guidance because LLMs don’t assign the same credibility and authority to self-promoting, short form messaging. While you hope and may believe an ad is breaking through, a direct recommendation with authority from an LLM platform will be more intrusive, compelling and persuasive than an ad.

Authority and credibility are key because LLMs are looking for that trusted quality to train themselves. Now is the time to pursue GEO with intention, before LLMs start to regiment what they think about your brand and products. In short, don’t just assume they will get the story straight.

Emergent can help you.

• We can perform an audit of your current communications, content, PR and web site to assess where you may have weaknesses in the GEO journey.

• We can help you optimize content plans and programs to address AI friendly information while improving your product communications and education.

• We can help you identify and pursue the right third-party blogs and e-newsletters, seeking to place favorable stories about your brand and products.

• We are highly skilled in earned media and can create immediate improvements in your earned media strategies and placement rates to optimize editorial attention and outcomes.

Use the link below to arrange an informal get acquainted conversation or to ask questions.

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.

Announcing our new service for mid-year brand fine-tuning and 2025 Planning!

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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.

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Welcome to dangers of the Replacement Economy

Dear readers,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Let’s start with what people really want

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

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

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

Food

Wine

Pets

Dating

Travel

Outdoor

Cars

Fashion

Cosmetics

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

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

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

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

Meaning

Mission

Socializing

Adventure

Discovery

Leisure

Belonging

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Designing a story is the starting place

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Being relevant and valued in the moment of need

The New Yorker published a story chronicling China’s historic crackdown on the movement of people in public places in an effort to control spread of the virus. An interesting outcome is that home (quarantine) cooking is on a rapid rise especially among younger Chinese consumers who previously were much more likely to outsource their meals.

As massive numbers of people must stay home, turn on the stove and make their own food, popular Chinese social channels such as Douyin and Weibo are turning into online quarantine-driven cookbooks with recipes, journals and menu suggestions. Home grocery delivery is equally impacted. People are ordering the ingredients used that will help hone their cooking skills while they also discover the benefits of greater control over flavors, ingredients and preparations.

This event has disrupted normal food consumption habits and required many with limited cooking skills to seek support, inspiration, comradery and cooking tips to weather this lifestyle altering storm. This may have long-lasting impacts on food making and buying behaviors.

Home and hearth offer stability in an uncertain world

We’ve written before about the skyrocketing growth in online ordering through delivery apps like GrubHub and Doordash. This growth is connected to the consumer’s desire for convenience but driven in part by a sense of greater safety and control at home in a world that appears to grow less friendly and out of control by the day. Online everything allows the consumer to shop and also to eat easily without having to venture outside the household sanctuary. This is a powerful motivator that may only accelerate in the face of COVID-19.

The need for help – an opportunity in the making

Food retailers and brands are facing an extraordinary moment when behaviors and offers could coalesce to help consumers realize new home-based food consumption habits and even culinary ambitions. Of course, there will be a need to prepare for a potential onslaught of online ordering that could tax delivery services.

However, and importantly, there is an enormous opportunity here for retail, food brands and meal kit providers to be of help to consumers in gearing up for home cooking realities and adventures. Conditions like the potential of a pandemic are unusual and may create behavior shifts that will continue beyond the end of the crisis.

• Here it is simply stated: how can you help the consumer with a rapid rise in home cooking occasions and a parallel need to know more about creating menus, meal preparation techniques, ingredients, food storage and safe handling, and sharing their experiences and ideas with others in your brand communities?

Now is the time to step up with tools and resources designed to enable these at-home eating experiences while positioning your banner and brand as a go-to, empathetic voice and valued resource.

Home cooking tool time

Some recommendations on the path forward:

• Publish download-able menus tied to special offers and connected to shopping lists.
• Serve as guide by providing instruction via online video on cooking skills and techniques – especially for vegetable dish preparations that aren’t as well understood.
• Inspire the home cook by bringing chef techniques and voices to the table on cooking hacks and layering flavors.
• Enable social sharing of meal ideas and preparations among your shopper community.
• If ever there was an Instagram moment, this is it. Your social pages can be a helpful, informative and inspiration resource for novice home cooks.
• Answer common food preparation and storage questions like, should you refrigerate berries or should you avoid storing apples near bananas. Shelf life questions will likely be common.
• Communicate early and often on food delivery conditions, wait times and manage those expectations.
• Get creative: food retailers can offer online meet ups and interactive webinars that will help families manage at-home events and dinner parties (social channel broadcast opportunity).
• In short, become a resource and not just a product source.

Emergent believes this return to the kitchen is likely to have a lasting impact on the growth of e-commerce grocery ordering, and a long term upswing in home cooking.

If you’re wondering how to navigate this rapidly changing environment, we can help.

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Transparency advances to gold standard for successful brand building

The value proposition of verified truth and honesty is rapidly turning into the foundation of strong marketing strategy in an era where consumers, starved of trust and belief, impose change on how brand relationships are built.

We’ve lost the signals of credibility.

Some time ago we reported on the impact of digital conditions in the marketplace and instantaneous access to anything you want to know. This manifests as ‘anything that can be known will be known’ – hence every company now resides in a glass house. This is an outcome of pervasive social and digital communication and dramatically increased scrutiny of how brands and businesses operate. Daily we are confronted with outed fraudulent practices, misinformation and less than genuine product representations, mislabeling, omissions, recalls, investigations, misrepresentations of fact, even indictments — all while messaging perceived as self-reverential brand apple-polishing and brimming with marketing hyperbole falls increasingly on deaf ears.

Toss into this milieu, everyone with a device is now a content creator…and not all content creators (or their motives) are created equally. Today’s digital platforms foster an environment where opinions look like news to our always scanning eye. And those who opine may not be professionally trained, held to or bound by time-honored journalistic practices which have protected the word-consuming public. John Kass, columnist at the Chicago Tribune recently lamented the rush-to-support style of reporting in the Jussie Smollett debacle as evidence of how journalism standards remain vital. He urged reporters to revisit the old but wise axiom of “if your mother loves you, check it out.”

Brand trust heads south.

An outcome of fractures in belief and trust is a shift away from marketing’s traditional tactic of attempted ‘persuasion.’ In this environment, when assertion-based claims are deployed it can breed further contempt. People aren’t buying any of it.

The unintended consequence of always on 24/7 availability of everything about everyone is the rapid spread of information chronicling corporate misfires. The steady drumbeat of ‘caught in the act’ misdeeds subtracts from the consumer’s willingness to trust any voice driven by a profit motive.

1. In a recent global research study of some 350,000 consumers HAVAS advertising found that consumers would not shed a tear if 77% of the world’s brands were to disappear. So much for the millions invested in building brand equity. If the brand becomes a less relevant commodity in the consumer’s eyes, there’s no deeper meaning or relationship there to be had.

 

2. Further 58% of advertising and promotion for the world’s 1,800 leading brands is seen as irrelevant. If the communication isn’t constructed around what’s important to the consumer, and is more about the brand’s self-reverential promotion, the disconnect is already embedded in the communications strategy.

 

3. Of note, brands that are considered truly meaningful to people soared over other businesses on overall impression, purchase intent, advocacy and justification for premium pricing. Meaning, values and purpose are fundamental to earning permission for a relationship. Does a brand have a soul? Apparently one is needed. Those without risk dying on the shelf.

The study concludes: usefulness and delivering on what you say you are may be more important than anything else. What does that tell you? Demonstratingcredibility and taking actions to earn trust are prerequisites to engagement. Transparency is an important path to proven authenticity and belief.

• The value proposition for truth and honesty goes up daily in proportion to the growing weariness over evidence that some brands operate selfishly at best and dishonestly at worst. What consumers want are brands that listen; that make a priority of working overtime to be relevant and engaged in their lifestyle aspirations. Consumers are resonating to brands that have a soul, stand for something greater than themselves, and see the value of integrity standards and faithfulness to more human values.

There’s equity and opportunity in operating openly. What does the alchemy of advantage look like when the formerly powerful rules of brand command and control that once governed how to go to market no longer apply?

Credible proof in the form of verified and validated claims

Several years ago we were helping a client (Schuman Cheese) in the cheese industry to mitigate rampant fraud, adulteration and mislabeling in their category. A significant percentage of the Italian cheese business in the U.S. was adulterated with lesser ingredients to protect profit margins. To help solve the challenge, we developed and launched the first trust mark in the cheese industry. The True Cheese seal we created would appear on product packaging to signal the product inside meets or exceeds the standard of identify for the type of cheese, and that the ingredient label is indeed truthful.

Outside testing of products bearing the seal would be done randomly and unannounced by sampling retail products from store shelves – the same products consumers buy. Tests performed by a respected outside third-party laboratory confirmed adherence to the code of Federal regulation and findings were published.

When we launched it was a big media story – about fake Parmesan cheese – that went viral in 72 hours and got sufficient traction in popular culture to prompt the Late Show with Stephen Colbert to feature an entire segment on the adulterated Parmesan cheese development.

Important to note that retailers resonated to the verified trust approach and believed they were better off to stock the real thing than take chances with something that might not be.

What’s the story you’re telling?

Consumers want the truth but understandably are reticent to accept company assertions at face value. Hence the incredible surge of interest in Transparency.

Being transparent means you allow consumers to observe for themselves what goes on behind the corporate curtain in product creation and ingredient sourcing.

Trust marks and seals are shorthand for validation. Standards and testing organizations like NSF.org are gaining traction as companies in food, beverage and lifestyle categories increasingly look for ways to credibly prove the quality story embedded in their products.

Recently Organic Valley and Maple Hill jointly announced the “Certified Grass-Fed Organic Livestock Program” to address misleading labeling in the grass-fed dairy products marketplace. The program, unlike others in the organic category, requires a full supply chain verification before qualifying to use the mark.

The strategic linkage in these validation programs and others we predict will come, is recognition that trust is vital to consumers and that assertions aren’t good enough to secure belief. Transparency’s call for openness and clarity, for access and demonstration to be brought to life through various techniques aimed at letting consumers, experts and media in the tent to see for themselves what brands hope they will recognize as truth.

Blockchain to digitize honesty

Perhaps the most significant development to come in the quest for verifiable trust is the advancement of digital solutions that are essentially tamperproof. Blockchain’s great promise is digital ledgers and contracts supported by the deployment of sensors and scanners — and backed by algorithms that monitor and validate every step from the soil to the store. Truth tech that will prove the tomato’s organic and heirloom heritage, its cultivation and harvest, its safe handling and freshness from the ground to store shelf.

Imagine the marketing opportunity that awaits for digitally verified trust… Emergent is following the development of Blockchain technology and is studying its evolution as we seek to stay ahead of Transparency strategies for our clients.

Where are you on the curve to provide these proof points in your marketing strategy?

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