The benefits of a focused strategic platform and message

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

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

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

It all begins with…

The power of an anchoring, differentiating concept –

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

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

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

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

Here’s the thinking that informs this approach:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brands that lean into deeper meaning and prosper

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

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

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

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

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

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

Merits of a focused platform

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Trust failures infect successful brand building…

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

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

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

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

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

This recurring barrier to brand belief is soaking in reputation challenges

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

Who do you believe?

Who has an unassailable reputation?

Who is honest?

How do you know what’s truthful?

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

Consumer shift

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

The dawn of trust-ology

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

Anatomy of trust-ology

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

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

The hierarchy of trust-ology

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

Trust-ology as strategy

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

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

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

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

The trust-ology building platform – Champion Transparency Council

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

Three steps to transparency transformation

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

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

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

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

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

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

Components of trust-ology

Access

Openness

Dialogue

Customer-first values

Demonstration

Transparency

Integrity and honesty

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

Why is this so vital to business growth?

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

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

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

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

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

Link to Download Champion Case Study

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

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

Fighting the creep of commoditization…

As all business categories grow and evolve, there’s a law of physics in the food, beverage and retail industries that comes into play to establish an implicit set of brand rules and behaviors. This often emerges in the form of industry accepted standards, regulatory requirements, consumer and trade partner expectations and competitive actions.

A pervasive condition, it creates a palpable magnetic momentum that pushes category participants towards the middle of the market — and away from whatever unique corner of the industry they originally occupied. Over time, it will manifest in comparable features, benefits, even pricing and product offerings. The edges of distinction get dull.

At its zenith it translates into sameness across business practices, supply chain standards and manufacturing processes – all helped along by growing similarity in product development as well as the technical processes employed for manufacturing.

The impact of category commoditization unleashed

As category players inevitably work to drive scale, secure efficiency gains, improved margins and retail leverage, brands level out their distinctiveness to appeal to a wider mass market. This happened in the dairy aisle cheese category as the major branded players eventually started to compete on price rather than disruptive innovation. The similarity in product choices and packaging helped commodify the consumer’s perception of quality.

The outcome? “Cheese is cheese is cheese” took root and the share leadership torch passed to private label products. Inevitable because the product experience wasn’t substantially different between private and national brands.  This ushered in an era of tit for tat price wars as combatants worked to build share by reducing price at the expense of brand equity and margins.

We encountered this condition and moved to tackle it while representing Sargento. The agency/client team launched a multi-stage process aimed at repositioning the brand, optimizing the product portfolio and walking away from “all things to all people” forms of marketplace behavior. The resulting “premiumization” of the Sargento brand showed up in new European influenced package design, new value-added products called Artisan Blends that borrowed equity from artisanal cheese makers. Most important to success, breaking out required recasting who the core customer is. We narrowed and focused on a high involvement premium cheese consumer called The Food Adventurer – roughly 26% of the category shoppers.

The customer priority decision was key to breaking the back of commoditization. It pushed our marketing team to rethink everything from innovation to messaging, media and market strategies while building in separation from all other players in the dairy case. The impact was startling. Sargento brand strength and resilience multiplied, while also helping establish more control over what was a price-driven business. The impact resulted in share gains against a larger competitor and fostered a spirit of creativity that set the stage for break-through new category ideas like the Balanced Breaks snack cheese innovation.

We’ve observed commoditization conditions blossoming in other places such as cell phones, computers, airlines and mainstream cars. When meaningful brand differentiation and separation dissipates, market leverage moves almost automatically to favor expanded budget investments that chase “top of mind awareness.” When the brand isn’t remarkably, authentically different, dependency on profit sapping awareness spending is required to keep repeatedly reminding consumers of the product features. Whereas distinctive and differentiated brands are naturally alluring and therefore less dependent on heavy media spend to attract and retain a loyal following.

When meaningful differentiation starts to fade, courage is required

It takes vision, fortitude and courageous leadership to create and launch the antidote to commoditization. You must be willing to tear up the category conventions rule book and seek fresh territory in the form of:

• New and emerging markets where competition is still forming.

• Bravery to jump over category behavior traditions and pursue whitespace opportunities that offer a new solution.

• Become a disruptor – a challenger brand that pursues radical differentiation designed to shut the door on equity robbing price competition.

When a brand is informed by a clear set of values, a strong “why” and a purpose that brings deeper meaning beyond transactions, it’s easier to recognize the advance of commodity behaviors and react proactively.

Sound strategy ignites the engine

Pushing the envelope of new category creation is a dynamic and powerful exercise intended to dial the brand far enough to the right or left of the vanilla middle that a new, ownable category can be established.

• Distinctiveness here is the essence of sound strategy because the goal is to offer a product or service the consumer can’t get anyplace else.

Here’s the catch: the forces at work in every category that drive brands towards similarity are fierce. Thus, vigilance around observing the creep of commodity inducing behaviors in pursuit of a mass market are ever present. Simply said, you will face it eventually. Your courageous efforts to catch this early before it takes root will pay long term dividends.

The last thing you want to hear is the word “mature” to describe your brand, which is code for the plateau you reach just before tipping towards the slippery slope of declining relevance.

If this discussion has you thinking about remedies to ever-present commodity pressures in your category — and fresh thinking around renewed emphasis on differentiation — use the email link below to start an informal conversation about refreshing your plans and programs.

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

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

You don’t need to roll the dice on chasing attention…

The legendary Peter Drucker said, “business has only two functions, marketing and innovation, and everything else is just costs.” His bucket of cold-water reality statement is based on a profound understanding: even superior products can fail to gain traction in the marketplace, where strong brands built on a foundation of compelling strategic differentiation can beat everything else. However, perception doesn’t lead reality by very far, so the relative strength and power of the product innovation remains a critical component of sustainable business growth. Yet still his point well taken, but often missed.

• Thus why Emergent is a hybrid integration of brand strategy guidance and creative brand storytelling, because both must be in harmony for business results to manifest. A poorly positioned and undifferentiated brand does not improve when the media spotlight is turned on and amplifies those weaknesses.

• Our perspective and experience having launched hundreds of brands, new categories and products helps shorten the distance between investment and bankable results. Yet all too often, businesses get stuck in rinse and repeat performances that essentially handcuff the “marketing” outcomes to marching in step with prevailing category conditions (good or bad).

Far too many organizations view marketing as “the department down the hall,” and don’t give it the priority and resource allocation it so richly deserves. Perhaps this is a holdover of old business school traditions about the importance of finance and operations. Yet we have mountains of evidence that marketing/brand led businesses will outperform everything else. You can’t “balance sheet control” your way to marketplace success.

Equally important though not to conflate this perspective with big attention chasing ad campaigns and media spend overreach that depresses profits while serving up some marquis brand-ertainment. Pepsi just recently released a Gladiator-themed commercial to coincide with the return of football season, stuffed with A-list stars including Megan-thee-Stallion and Travis Kelce. It’s big budget blast used to chase awareness. Is this strategy at play? No, it’s tactics at play, albeit a well-financed and cinematic version. Of note, retailers may appreciate the spend regardless of whether or not the brand itself is sufficiently separated and elevated from all choices it competes with. However, most businesses will need to be more strategic to succeed.

The goal of sound strategy is differentiation. Said another way, an effort to gain monopoly-like status in a crowded field. Businesses faced with a lot of similar competition can struggle to deliver profits because` of market forces that inevitably push pricing towards the top of the competitive agenda.

A better path

Marketing in its purest form is always led by strategy, and optimal strategy is centered on how to separate and elevate a business from the competition, such that it creates its own distinct category by offering something consumers can only get from you.

Peter Theil in his excellent book, “Zero to One” helps us understand the relative power of successfully positioned brands in his description of challenges posed by sameness and similarity in a category. “In 2012, when the average airfare each way was $178, the airlines made only 37 cents per passenger trip. Compare them to Google, which creates less value but captures far more. Google brought in $50 billion in 2012 (versus $160 billion for the airlines), but it kept 21% of those revenues as profits—more than 100 times the airline industry’s profit margin that year. Google makes so much money that it’s now worth three times more than every U.S. airline combined. The airlines compete with each other, but Google stands alone.”

• Different business model you say, but the principle is clear: the more you seek to operate as a market of one and not many, the more control you have over your destiny.

The business end of marketing well played

Entirely too much emphasis is placed on expensive ad campaigns as a poster child of marketing best practices. The war is often won in the trenches and chasing high media investment awareness is an expensive, profit draining gambit many brands would be foolish to pursue.

Well-positioned brands that are imbued with deeper meaning and mission can attract legions of ambassadors, enthusiasts and believers who join the brand community and then turn around and talk about it. This is the 80/20 rule writ large (most of your sales and profits come from a smaller segment of devoted customers) and the most powerful and credible channel of communication because it is trusted and not dependent on mega-sized paid media spending.

Combine this with a solid retail marketing plan and you’ve got your hands on the levers of push and pull that can drive profitable results. Let’s take a closer look at example elements of strong retail support that can secure sales traction for a well-positioned brand.

Retailer support concepts

1. Strengthening retailer relationships

• Personalized engagement through dedicated account handlers to build stronger relationships and ensure retailers feel valued and supported.

• Ongoing communication to keep retail customers in the loop about new products, promotions, and company news using tools such as e-newsletters, webinars, and retailer townhalls with executive presentations.

2. Tailored marketing support

• Co-branded marketing materials, including in-store displays, brochures, and social media content.

• Localized marketing outreach designed for resonance with the specific demographics and preferences of a retailer’s customer base.

• Providing training on digital marketing techniques, such as social media marketing and online advertising, to help retailers more effectively reach a broader audience.

3. Comprehensive training

• Developing training programs for store sales staff, focused on your brand narrative and differentiated story. This can be delivered through online modules, in-person workshops and webinars.

• More targeted lifestyle education in meaningful areas like nutrition and wellness, helping store staff become trusted customer advisors — to enhance retailer reputation as knowledgeable and caring.

• Sales training to help staff improve their customer service and engagement skills.

4. Exclusive promotions and incentives

• Building exclusive promotions around special discounts, bundle offers, or limited-edition products to help drive traffic and sales.

• Retailer loyalty programs that reward partnership and performance, such as rebates, free product samples, or marketing support funds.

• Partnering with retailers on in-store events such as seminars, product demonstrations and experiences to engage customers and increase brand visibility.

5. Feedback and ongoing Improvement

• Creating retailer advisory councils to gather ongoing feedback and insights so you can better understand their needs and challenges.

• Conducting regular surveys and feedback sessions to monitor the effectiveness marketing activity and identify areas for improvement.

6. Leveraging community and cause campaigns

• Supporting local cause events and charities that retailers are already involved in to strengthen community ties and brand loyalty; or partner with retailers to build original cause marketing campaigns that resonate with their customer base.

Why does this matter?

Getting as close as possible to your customer at the point of decision is never a bad idea. The moment of truth at shelf can be significant as consumers navigate choice and think about their priorities and spend.

Yes, it’s an eco-system that helps people understand and “feel something” about your brand BEFORE they go to the store. However, what happens at retail should also be carefully designed and not left with other brands to usurp.

Integration of the two is your strongest play: a highly differentiated brand with a great story to tell, matched with strong retail partnerships and support to close the loop. In a way this explains why Emergent exists and what we aim to deliver. Separately, these tools don’t perform as well. Planned and integrated, it forms a strong cohesive foundation on which to build a lasting, profitable business.

Can you see it?

If this approach stimulates questions about how it can apply to your unique brand challenges, us the link below to ask questions and open a dialogue that should prove insightful and useful for your planning.

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

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

Who is the hero of your brand story?

If you want to witness great storytelling designed with skill to be engaging, immersive and occasionally transformational, go to the movies. Yet 90 percent of the time, storytelling in the brand communication world fails to engage, move or influence its intended audience because construction of the outreach is upside down.

• There’s a simple formula in here to help improve the effectiveness of brand comms just about 100% of the time. It follows simple rules that great movie screenplays serve up with exceptional skill. But you don’t have to be a famous screenwriter to do this.

Granted words are meaningful and a deft hand at casting a narrative will matter in helping convey a message with stickiness and impact. That said the principles governing the ability to connect and engage are there for anyone to employ.

Here’s the fundamental insight that most brands fail to grasp:

• The hero of your story isn’t your brand or product.

• The hero is your customer — their wants, desires, aspirations, needs and concerns.

The role of your brand in powerful communication is a character that shows up often in the best movies: the guide, coach and enabler who supports the hero on their journey, and who selflessly helps the main character overcome adversity to improve and ultimately succeed.

The customer is James Bond and the brand is Q

The customer is Luke Skywalker and the brand is Yoda

The customer is Frodo and the brand is Gandolph

The customer is the hero of your story for the very simple reason that each and every day your user wakes up believing they are the hero of their own life journey. They have needs. They make mistakes. They suffer. They improve. They learn. They ultimately win. Their character coach in the form of Q or Yoda provides guidance and tools that help them prevail.

• When the brand is focused on self-promotion and talks endlessly about product features and benefits, the communication is automatically embedded with a disconnect. For the very reason the brand is now competing with the customer for the hero role.

What happens: the customer walks right on by, tuning out the story while continuing to look for the brand that will help guide, improve, enhance and enable their own growth and fulfillment. For many in brand marketing this will appear counter-intuitive because they’ve been trained to believe that marketing is about selling product features and benefits.

Moviemakers know the one thing, the great insight, that will powerfully engage audiences they want to attract. Here it is: the person viewing their story is a human being and not a fact-based, analytical decision making machine.

We humans are feeling creatures who think and not thinking creatures who feel. Moviegoers put themselves in the hero’s shoes. They identify with the struggle, the challenges, the setbacks and the desire to learn and improve. Over the course of the movie, the main character overcomes barriers and eventually wins. We drink in the thrill of the victory at the end, embracing the journey with all of its harrowing conflict, usually doled about by a recognizable villain. Meanwhile the Yoda character dispenses counsel to evolve and improve.

This is the core essence of impactful storytelling.

Here is the recipe in sum:

Stop talking about yourself.

Embrace the humanity in front of you.

Recognize the power of emotion.

Be the guide and enabler.

Focus your narrative on the customer as hero.

Their lives. Their needs. Their struggles. Their desires.

Show them the way.

Help them win.

Care about their success.

Your brand communication will move from flying over the top of acceptance and into the center of seen, heard and appreciated. Some brands do this better than others to be sure.

The Nike of 2012 got it right in their pool of stories entitled Find Your Greatness. The soulful vignettes recounted the stories of people who faced various obstacles and challenges in their lives, and how they overcame those limitations. Was the communication focused on shoes, designs, product features or trendy fashion? NO. The heroes were real people struggling to grow and improve.

Are you seeing it?

The heartwarming stories draw us in so We-Pay-Attention.

Most important it makes us feel something. In that moment, the brand is connecting with the heart and soul of its customer. Now we’re getting somewhere. Now we’re witnessing engagement and results. In the end, your brand’s deeper meaning, purpose and thus ability to secure a base of committed enthusiasts and believers — runs in correlation and proportion to your focus on them and their journey.

Boom!!

It’s how people feel in the presence of your brand that ultimately tips the scale on the path to purchase. All of the facts and rationale for your better mousetrap will come into play post-purchase to satisfy our reflexive need for confirmation — evidence we made the right decision.

If you apply these principles to your brand communication, it will be transformational on the path to engagement. Your litmus test? Who you invoke as the hero of your story, and how the brand is positioned as guide and coach. There it is. The secret sauce of being seen and heard. So stop selling and start communicating.

It will take discipline and commitment to break with the past and walk from the self-promotion paradigm. Just remember how movies occasionally rivet your attention for two hours. The writers know how to craft the journey so you get invested in the outcome. You just need to work on bringing out your inner Ridley Scott and Steven Spielberg.

Scene One, Take Two!!

If you think your brand might benefit from better, more relevant storytelling, use the link below to open an informal dialogue.

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The updated formula for powerful brand communication

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

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

The new and improved role for brand comms

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

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

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

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

Our daily behaviors

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

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

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

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

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

7-point recipe for effective brand communication

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

The best work falls from partnership

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

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

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

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

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

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