No need to focus on the bad poetry of a mission statement…

Every successful business begins with a story. Yet this critical narrative can get lost or sidelined on the path to maturity because organizations instead put too much energy into endlessly polishing their mission statement.

These statements are often generic assessments of aspirational perfumery and over-reach that does little to inform the organization’s decisions and strategies. Jet Blue famously declares their mission is to Inspire Humanity in the air and on the ground. Just how inspirational is it to be confronted with upcharges for the basics of carry-ons, seats and even pillows. Adidas hopefully states their mission is to be the best sports brand in the world. Which could easily be swapped out for furniture, fast food or fertilizer. Does this really help the organization make better strategic decisions? Not likely.

In devoting so much time and energy here, the organization is inadvertently robbed of a significant guidepost to help inform business decisions and successfully keep the organization dialed in the right direction — even through generational leadership changes. Origin stories propagate deep truths about what the business is on earth to accomplish.

Where you started charts the course for where you are going

Founder narratives explain how the company came into existence and hence are a treasure of information about the people involved and their journey to discovery.

• There’s often an ‘aha’ moment
• There are interesting characters in the storyline
• A setting to visualize
• A problem that needs solving
• And a moment of realization

Humans are hard-wired to respond to stories, especially ones featuring real people making real decisions with real stakes involved. The key ingredient in these narratives is an epiphany that caused the founder to redirect their life and pursue a higher purpose or goal.

This often gets buried as companies devote energy to mission statements they believe will better inform and guide the organization’s path over time.

Humanizing your company’s strategic direction

Your origin story is about a person or persons on a journey with an idea about how to change the world. Often there’s an experience or event along the way that serves as inspiration for starting the business. In many instances, it’s this experience that informs the shape of the brand that follows.

Air Protein and the future of food

Consider the story of former Emergent client Air Protein and how its founder decided to build the first carbon transformation-based alternative proteins company.

“More and more people are starting to consider the harsh reality of our food system as a global contributor to greenhouses gases (GHG) and climate change,” explains MIT physicist Dr. Lisa Dyson. “Our agricultural system produces more GHG than all of the fuel-burning sources of transportation combined. When you mix that with the finite limitations of available land and water resources for farms, ranches and fisheries, you know it’s going to be nearly impossible at some point to feed a rapidly growing global population.”

Dyson’s moonshot is a fascinating recipe of uniquely combining carbon dioxide, oxygen and nitrogen with water and nutrients, then adding common microbes in a fermentation process similar to making wine or cheese. The high protein flour outcome of this brewery-like approach is turned into authentic meat analogs by using pressure, temperature and natural flavors. Her sustainable “Air Protein Farm” operates more like a yogurt making facility than meat processor.

How did the future of food become her calling? What brought her to this transformational decision to start the Air Protein journey?

Climate change serves as a call to arms

Dr. Dyson came to New Orleans to help resolve the horrible devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina that claimed more than 1,800 lives and left $125 billion in property damage, much of it in New Orleans when the levies were overcome. Her experience there served as a Road to Damascus moment as she labored to help restore a city overcome by a natural disaster that many assigned to the accelerating menace of hostile weather patterns borne from climate change. Dyson vowed to make solving the rampant build-up of greenhouse gases (GHG) an avocation, which led to the genesis of a new company formed three years later.

“My experience in New Orleans was life-changing. I decided it was my calling to study how to sustainably feed people in the midst of climate change. During the years following, it became clear to me that our food system is a major culprit in this unfolding crisis. The world’s population is expected to reach 10 billion by 2050, how to feed everyone affordably is the big question we intend to answer,” she said.

Her story forms the foundation of why her company exists, its purpose and meaning, it’s goals and strategic direction. There is more energy and useful grist for navigating decisions in her genesis narrative than other messaging constructs.

Common among these stories is a need, a problem, an unresolved conflict and a person or persons who decide to do something about it.

• Howard Shultz’s experiences in Milan drinking up Italian coffee culture served as a guide for bringing the world a better cup of coffee.

• Jobs and Wozniak’s inspiration to democratize computers for ordinary people and become an enabler of communication and creativity that built the world’s most valuable company.

• Simple Mills, one of the most sustainability-forward food brands in the nation, began when its founder Katlin Smith saw deficits in her own diet and found relief in consuming whole foods. Her baked goods informed background led to realization the entire industry was lacking the kind of products that were good for you as well as good tasting. Today Simple Mills is one of the most successful bootstrap adventures in food brand building, informed by a unique belief system its founder installed on day one.

Emotion borne of conflict, need and inspiration

There are endless examples of how founders came to a place in their lives where business creation became the instrument to resolve a profound need. These stories are compelling because there is embedded emotion and deeper meaning that carries more persuasive horsepower than any technology leap or process innovation.

As we’ve conveyed here many times, the path to influence is paved with beliefs and values that invite consumers to join a movement as ambassadors — far more effective than the recitation of product feature/benefit details.

No need to focus on the competition

When you are preoccupied with competitors, there is temptation to define your organization in comparison. In doing so your brand is commodified and uniqueness diluted in the frame of working to be “better than” another business. This encourages comparisons which leads to price competition, plus any advantage claimed will be difficult to defend over time.

It’s a stronger strategic proposition to focus on your own story and reason for being that helps inject the brand with ownable uniqueness and differentiation. Moreover, the human experience in these stories is much more compelling and engaging than more transactional assessments like identifying whitespace opportunities to exploit. There’s no emotional equity there.

Can the origin narrative evolve?

Yes. Microsoft was at one time about putting a computer on every desk and in every home. That goal has been realized, and now their narrative has shifted to empowering individuals and organizations to achieve more. In sum these stories help anchor the business in a reason for being that has more going for it than technology achievements. Well-executed, they are memorable, repeatable and become part of the brand’s fabric and belief system, to be passed on by employees and stakeholders.

If this discussion has you thinking about your origin story, and how best to tell it, use the link below to open a conversation with a team of experts who can help you craft the most powerful approach to your company narrative.

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

Welcome to dangers of the Replacement Economy

Dear readers,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Let’s start with what people really want

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

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

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

Food

Wine

Pets

Dating

Travel

Outdoor

Cars

Fashion

Cosmetics

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

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

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

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

Meaning

Mission

Socializing

Adventure

Discovery

Leisure

Belonging

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Designing a story is the starting place

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You have a short time to earn trust…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So now what?

The secret to a successful digital relationship is…?

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

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

Your digital experience must avoid being:

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

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

The humanization of digital brand experiences

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

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

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

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

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

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

How will you amplify, facilitate and enable:

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

Think about it –

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here’s the litmus test:

Does your web experience deliver:

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

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

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

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

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

Your customers are not analytical decision-making machines…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

People reflexively face regret for:

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

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

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

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

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

So what exactly is this loss people seek to avoid?

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

Implications to marketing planning and strategy

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

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

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

Where to start?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Moral imperative motivating action

A cultural transformation underway now in food, beverage and lifestyle categories is having an impact on the path to purchase. Are you ready for it? Consumers are moving away from buying decisions founded entirely on evaluations of “what’s good for me” to also embracing “what’s good for the world around me.”

• In a recent study conducted by our insight research partner Brand Experience Group, 66% of US consumers are either passionate or concerned about sustainability commitments by brands and retailers. This insight is translating into marketplace behaviors as consumers look for more sustainable solutions at retail.

A form of moral imperative is rising to the surface in how consumers view their purchasing decisions. Increasingly, consumer buying is founded in symbolism and signaling to the outside world not only their own values, but also the sustainability readiness of the brands they prefer.

Conscientious Consumption has arrived. It is a criterion in the hierarchy of meaning consumers assign to brands. People are now voting their values and beliefs at the cash register. They want to align themselves with brands and retailers who are signaling environmental responsibility and standards of performance. Is your brand sustainability ready? Is this embedded in your go-to-market plan?

How brands address this shift on the path to purchase is creating significant questions about brand messaging strategy, as well as aligned on-pack and shelf communication to inform users of sustainability bona fides.

The coming shopping friction

How does the consumer actualize their moral motivation when shopping across multiple brand choices in food, beverage and lifestyle categories? How can they assess the sustainability readiness of Brand X vs. Brand Y? Consumer sentiment is once again tracking ahead of the current marketplace reality. Brands and retailers that step in to help guide shoppers on environmental standards will reap the benefits of added relevance multiplied by surprise and delight.

• For food retailers much as the “international” aisles became a shopping destination point years ago, can there be a health, wellness and sustainability section that features brands with an environmentally-responsible story to tell?

If brands don’t step up to acknowledge this change and improve communication based on these insights, it becomes near impossible to translate sustainability investments into tangible balance sheet outcomes. For those who do, the rewards may be great!

• The formula for sustainability success is science and metrics-based environmental and climate mitigation analysis of your operations and supply chain, served alongside clear established metrics for change and improvement. This performance is then multiplied exponentially by a strong, creative communications platform to tell that story to the right audience. Awareness of this narrative drives purchase.

Feeding the primacy of emotional outreach

Product feature and benefit selling has been the hallmark of CPG communications for decades. The emergence of these new societal and moral imperative considerations on the path to purchase recommends a more culture-forward brand messaging strategy. “What’s good for the world around us” is, by definition, an emotional construct.

In a recent Marketing Dive interview, Matt Kleinschmit, founder and CEO of insights research company Reach3 said, “Brand loyalty is really something that is, in fast-moving consumer goods, more of an aspiration than a reality. As a result, modern marketers in the CPG world have latched on to this idea of trying to establish emotional connections with consumers. If there’s an emotional connection, that will often trump functional benefits,” he reports. “Brands that can execute that in a smart way are winning.”

Smart in this case is recognizing the importance consumers are already placing on sustainability and environmental performance. From there brands can work through investments, policies and actions to demonstrate in credible ways how that readiness manifests in the products on offer. When higher purpose and mission intersect fully with product outreach strategies a form of engagement magic can occur. Now the motivation to buy takes on deeper meaning and added importance that transcends any existing parity (similarity) on price and formulation.

Is a trust mark needed?

Is it time to begin thinking about the development of a trust mark that employs credible independent third-party analysis to validate sustainability readiness? A mark could serve as a visual piece of retail shelf-friendly evidence that a brand is a better choice based on its verified sustainability bona fides.

Emergent is examining this idea in greater detail and will report back to our readers on potential solutions. The objective: create an anchor for trustworthy choice and credible reassurance that the fox isn’t guarding the hen house on the veracity of sustainability claims.

Stay tuned.

Closing the loop to digital marketing and activating purchase in the moment

Walmart recently announced a major partnership with Meredith, publishers of media brands like Better Homes & Gardens, Eating Well, Parents and Real Simple. The new AI driven integrated marketing platform they jointly create will feature “shoppable” content in the first-ever ‘Bookazine’ to feature embedded ecommerce links. The content will allow consumers to purchase directly from the delivered stories and recommended meal experiences.

• Imagine how this could evolve in stories related to climate readiness, sustainability issues and developments around standards of performance that promise new metrics-based mitigation targets. Consumers could execute a purchase right then and there at the “point of thought and realization.” The high emotional index coupled to commerce-in-the-moment is a truly powerful idea.

Media partnerships connected to shoppable content can open an entirely new window of brand relevance on top of a value proposition built around deeper meaning. This is exciting! The created content becomes actionable, fully closing the loop from awareness to sale authored by the most worthy of buying motivations. Wow.

Matching sustainability readiness to business performance

If you understand the powerful paradigm of sustainability as a concern among your customer base, now is the time to optimize this development on the path to purchase with emotional messaging and digital shoppable content.

Use this link to ask questions and explore this concept further with our Brand Sustainability Solutions team.

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

Advantages you can plan and design for

Food culture in America has dramatically shifted during the last 10 years. People favor premium quality, higher priced products that address modern dietary needs serving health, wellness and sustainability goals. Better food experiences, fresh ingredients, more sophisticated tastes and the brand sustainability symbolism that goes along with it help complete the mission and taste adventure. This is the preference paradigm where all innovations whether from legacy brand or new player must pay homage on the road to success.

• Here are four key strategies that hold sway over your ability to succeed, to grow and gain share for food and beverage innovations.

We highlight these four distinctive growth strategies in part because they are passed over all too frequently. Eclipsed by the allure of instant scale, every-new-retail-door-is-a-good-door and ill-advised distribution moves that undercut the very brand value proposition that premium CPG solutions embody. This helps explain the high innovation failure rate or seemingly insurmountable plateaus where new emerging brands stall out, never getting a shot at the high volume homeruns of wider adoption downstream.

Want to assure your brand innovations are successful and not a casualty on the path to pantry and fridge domination? Then read on.

1. Your product concept is the marketing lynchpin (watch out for the Special Occasion Trap)

Food retailers care about velocity and monitor it relentlessly. Marketers care about scale because velocity and scale together are the flags of a winning concept; thus, why growth nirvana for premium CPG success always begins with strategic product and category design. Your innovation goal is a product that naturally, intuitively fits with frequent if not daily consumption occasions and feeds high repeat purchase behavior. Retailers understand this and look for it.

Products that are intended for niche, episodic occasions are much harder to score scaling victory for the very reason they don’t lend themselves to velocity, high repeat purchase business imperatives. If fancy jams are your jam, be prepared for the embedded difficulties that come with slow turn categories or segments with a narrow, special interest fan base.

2. Public ‘display’ categories add symbolism romance to marketing

Food and beverage purchases these days are largely symbolic. People ‘wear’ their brands as a statement, a flag, a visible demonstration of what they value and what they wish to signal to the world around them about who they are.

You know this so can you plan for it, use it. How can you enable consumers to fly your symbolic brand flag? Does your premium brand innovation lend itself to public display occasions such as barbecues, parties, taken to the office or gym and consumed in a social setting? Brand iconography, symbolism and telegraphing of same can be deployed here to help your users display and vote their beliefs and values. Too often this opportunity gets overlooked.

3. Pack strategies can ignite new occasions

No doubt you’ve heard of price-pack architecture. There is a bit of CPG magic in this strategic growth solution. It helps you lean into new and different occasions while creating higher average retail price points (more cash and flow) with a perceived embedded consumer discount, and more facings (brand billboard) at shelf. Pack architecture projects open the door to migrating your users to new consumption occasions.

Amplify Brands’ Skinny Pop brand rode the pack architecture idea to fame and fortune by creating both smaller bags and larger pack sizes of their pound-able guilt-free popcorn. The move lifted average price points while leveraging new use occasions from school lunches to birthday parties. When you offer new packs the input costs are manageable while adding exponential growth on the income side and serving the usage occasion/velocity rule at the same time.

4. The slightly uncomfortable but immutable rule of upscale zip code distribution

There’s an old but wise saying: fish where the fish are. For premium priced food and beverage innovations the distribution strategy decisions you make will have an enormous impact on your ability to gain traction and scale the business. Where you do business matters especially in the early going.

Premium innovations are home to higher quality ingredients, real food-based formulations.  These brands reflect the lifestyle symbolism embraced by consumer cohorts who in reality control the fortunes and failures of new product fame or flame out.

What do we know: educated, high earning households congregate in upmarket neighborhoods. Trial for premium priced CPG innovations will always be better served in retail doors that exist to serve an upscale shopper base. These folks not only won’t flinch at your higher price point, they are also hunters of new premium innovations. Early trial fuels their social currency of being a word-of mouth warrior.

There was a time when Whole Foods owned the early trial zone for premium CPG innovations, but other banners have caught up in their premium offerings. Now it’s a zip code exercise where your decisions are more about the education levels of the communities you distribute in ahead of other considerations.

The guidance: not every new door is the right retail door. Controlled expansion plus patience are better for building your business rather than taking distribution wherever you can get it. EDLP retailers have a different model and a different shopper base driven more by price point than your quality ingredient, healthy lifestyle bona fides. Walmart is better for mass legacy brands for this reason.

• Broader distribution and wider geographic expansion make sense when innovations become mainstream and lower income households begin to take them up. Going that route too early can create problems leading to profit-eroding price drops and even delisting if you’re not careful.

There are 40 metro areas in the U.S. where greater than 30% of the adult population has a Bachelor degree or higher. That’s a cohort of more than 65 million adults. Higher income zip codes within those metros are primed for premium CPG introductions. These higher income, higher educated households are tuned-in to the evolutionary changes going on in modern dietary preferences. They are listening to your narrative.

• In sum, you will grow in geographic areas where large numbers of people attach their lifestyle symbolism to your brand and spread it in their social circles. You should be on shelf in the banners where the shopper population is experientially primed to look for you.

Don’t forget to consider University towns for the same reason. These can be enthusiastic communities for bold, dietary alterations and innovations. Young adults especially are early adopters and influential in making new dietary shifts.

Here is the premium CPG innovation recipe for success assuming the product design fits squarely in the frequent consumption arena.

• Build visibility, awareness and discoverability in the right stores in the right zip codes.

• Increase local household penetration.

• Increase consumption rates among early-in users by adding consumption occasions.

If you have these challenges and strategic questions as you plan your innovations and launch strategies, use this link to start a conversation with us. We can help you create a roadmap to success and the brand narrative well told to go with it. We are new product launch specialists.

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