Showing is more important than telling

Marketing expert Bernadette Jiwa recently wrote: “Harley Davidson’s most powerful marketing isn’t the details about engine size, speed or low-end torque that’s written in the brochure — it’s the stories riders tell about the feeling they get when they ride one. And often your most effective marketing may not even be done by you.”

Most efforts in food marketing will begin with telling consumers about facts and features that go into the product: its recipe, nutritionals, superior ingredients, preparation steps and taste claims. But the days of assertion marketing are at a close, as consumers move away from anything that looks like self-promotion and overt selling.

Food is experiential and cultural

Food – its preparation and enjoyment – is a social, cultural phenomenon and symbolic statement of what people would like the world to believe about them. People have connected the quality of what they put in their bodies TO the quality of their lives. Equally, they’ve discovered the benefits of flavor and experience achieved through improved cooking, preparation techniques, and the quality of the fresh ingredients they use.

The paradigm for successful food product marketing can be summed up in three equally important pillars:

• Sharing = forging communities
• Showing = inspiration
• Guiding = education

In terms of effectiveness and impact, consumers’ experiences, reviews and testimonials are most compelling. It is their assessment and comments that drive belief and trust.

Community development and activation cannot be underestimated as a fundamental strategic component of the food brand marketing plan. It is mission critical to create the forums and opportunities for consumers to provide their testimonials and feedback. It is their words that fuel and validate what marketers want the world to believe.

Thus, user-generated content (UGC) is paramount. It’s important to enable and encourage consumers to share photos and videos of how they use and enjoy your brand. Make it easy to upload; create incentives to do so.

What’s the marketers’ role?

You already know we live in a content marketing world. So, the kind of content you create is key to creating the levels of engagement you expect for the funds you invest.

Guiding, coaching and teaching should be the driving force behind your content marketing plan. This is what it will look like:

• Instructional and educational video on creative ways to use your product
• Content that answers questions
• Content that inspires creativity
• Content that celebrates home cooks, food enthusiasts and their stories

This kind of marketing puts the brand in league with the consumer as a partner and facilitator of their lifestyle passions. Nothing you do will outshine the benefits of acting as tour guide to a healthy lifestyle, and showcasing the culinary ideas that make food experiences transformative and memorable.

Talking “at” consumers will not be more impactful and powerful than the sharing of their own experiences and your efforts to showcase uses and ideas relevant to their interests and culinary goals.

In sum, put the consumer at the center of your go-to-market strategies and work backwards from there!

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A counter-intuitive strategy that drives brand growth and engagement

Successful businesses sell great products. Or do they?

For the last zillion years, we’ve believed that business exists to improve people’s lives by: selling them a (hopefully) useful, necessary well-made item, while generating profitable returns to shareholders and investors. Thus, business growth spins on product superiority and continually improving features and formulas, while marketing puts a spotlight on these attributes to drive the virtuous cycle of commerce and earnings. That is, unless people stop reacting reflexively.

Having a great product is table stakes now, so what’s next?

The world has shifted dramatically though and the path to business growth and consumer engagement has changed. Today, a brand is not a thing, it’s a promise people align with, believe in and invest of themselves. Twenty first century brands are Purpose-driven. As such, there’s a deeper reason brands exist beyond transactions and financial returns.

Said another way, value creation looks a lot different. It is now based on:

• Wants not needs
• Feelings not facts
• Beliefs not features
• Purpose before profit

Guidance, coaching, insight and inspiration have become a feast of value for those with a passion for what you’re selling. Ironically, it’s when the focus moves from commerce to lifestyle enablement that trust breaks out and brand relationships form.

The Gestalt of Glossier

Glossier is a company all about beauty – that just happens to sell cosmetics, not the other way around. This is an organization since inception that understood the premise of helpful guide as a vessel for creating legions of devoted followers.

What Glossier is to beauty…

• Yeti coolers is to outdoor lifestyle
• Plum Organics is to parenting
• Under Armor is to athletic passion
• Seventh Generation is to protecting the environment
• Blue Apron is to culinary inspiration
• Whole Foods is to health and wellness
• Organic Valley is to family farming

Glossier exists to celebrate beauty insights and ideas from their unique point of view. By putting the consumer’s desires and passions first and seeing the relationship as a dominant characteristic driving their decisions, Glossier hits hard on relevance and shared values. They understand the point about wants, feelings and belief.

Products are not an end in themselves. Rather, they sit in service of the users’ self-image and lifestyle interests. Glossier is a coaching organization that celebrates beauty and facilitates a community of like-minded believers.

The company does not try to be all things to all people. Even its product lines evoke a philosophy about make-up – less is more. The brand’s content channels are created by staffers mostly – who pull the curtain back to reveal their personal, real-world interests and solutions. Customers are encouraged to submit images and video of uses and ideas. Engagement is built around answering questions and enabling testimonials and feedback.

Commerce and transactional thinking are not driving the business bus at Glossier.

The outcome is prophetic. The brand has achieved a cult-like following of fans that help create routine ‘sold-out’ conditions when new items are launched. You might wonder if Glossier is spending big bucks in traditional ad channels to drive eyeballs to their platform? No. They don’t need to.

Can food brands secure a devoted following?

Food and beverage are high involvement categories that cater to a culinary and health/wellness centered lifestyle. Like beauty, creativity in the kitchen is a thing and source of personal passion and self-esteem.

Food companies can adopt the behaviors of a ‘non commerce’ commerce organization. Food is an emotional and culturally-informed business. It connects dots to health, wellness, creativity, family, relationships, social experience, romance and lifestyle.

Just as cosmetics are applied to skin and food and beverages are consumed – both are highly personal parts of living as we know it. Consumers have come to believe that the quality of what they eat will directly impact the quality of their lives. Food is not just fuel, it is a path to some of life’s most treasured experiences.

This is rich territory for mining deeper meaning, creating Purpose beyond product and enabling culinary passions. But to do so means the organization has to see itself not as an earnings machine, rather an enabler celebrating the love affair people have with food.

Bernadette Jiwa of The Story of Telling said it best: “A brand story is no longer like the top coat of gloss paint applied at the last moment to make the surface shinier and more immediately attractive. It’s the undercoat that often nobody sees, but which allows the brand to endure…” – base material integrity if you will.

Business is built from the inside out. Substance now rules over assertions of value. By deciding to serve the very human interests of consumers first, the goals of commerce can be fulfilled.

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