Our ‘elevator speech’ requires unconventional response

At the recent GroceryShop convention “Friends of the Future” networking event we helped produce in Las Vegas, I was asked repeatedly, “what is Emergent?” – The event was an exciting veritable meet-and-greet mosh pit of first-time introductions. At one point a colleague of ours from the Food Marketing Institute turned to me during an overture to a Pepsico executive and said, “Bob, give him the elevator speech about Emergent.”

In these moments when time and everyone’s headspace is at a premium, we tend to default to the simple explanation, frequently bound up in the tactics of what we do. So reflexively I reached for the convenient list of tools in the toolbox: brand strategy and positioning guidance, earned and social media, etc.

I left these conversations thinking, “that really doesn’t convey the essence of our secret sauce.”

A reflection on who we are and why that should matter to you

When we look back over time at the special moments when clients have allowed us to rise to our very best, we find a legacy of bigger ideas and strategic concepts that represent game changes of various kinds in various categories.

Understanding that transformational change is at the core of what we do, this immediately shifts the focus from tactics and tools to strategic platforms that inform the solution. Candidly, communications tactics without a strategic, differentiating concept forming the foundation underneath are just messaging vessels.

So here it is: Emergent is in the CPG brand and food retail transformation business, delivering strategic platforms that can impact the behavior of the organization and its business to bring incremental, sustainable growth. Yes, we can actualize strategic ideas all the way to the ground and execute at the tactical level, but it’s the diagnostic upfront and our ability to not only see the big picture but distill the barriers to added growth that represents our defining moments with clients.

The real secret sauce is Lori Miller, my partner, and me in our strategic diagnostic analysis that helps build a roadmap for change. More often than not, we find organizations mired in the conventions and routines in their category and how they go to market. Thinking differently means looking for the marketing “zig” when everyone else is “zagging.” This is baked into how we tend to see things. Uniqueness and differentiation are never overrated.

Clients desperately want their marketing investments to hit engagement squarely on the head, no pun intended. Engagement these days, however, demands a customer-first approach to literally everything a company does.

Rule number one – we know the consumer is in charge and control of the brand relationship, requiring businesses to be less self-absorbed and more creative and agile in how they look at the opportunity to earn permission for a relationship.

Yes, relationship.

Consumers are on the hunt for deeper meaning in the products that matter to them and want brands they choose to engage with and buy, to be a mirror of their values and passions.

So, as a strategic brand communications platform, the standard, “let’s focus on the product features and benefits” messaging as the marketing chin you lead with is a non-starter. Self-reverential communication is exactly that.

Thus at Emergent, we are indeed Architects of Engagement. We work to ameliorate the tendency to dance the dance of self-serving promotion when the real opportunity starts with enabling, coaching, and guiding your consumers on their journey to greater fulfillment. This is where the messaging focus and relationships move beyond transactional interruptions and pleas. The goal is authentic alignment and conversation with consumers and the opportunity then for legitimate interaction and belief.

A specific point of view that recurs in our work

One of Emergent’s key insights is reflected in our agency’s ‘Validation Marketing’ planning model. We believe that consumers increasingly are challenged to trust the assertions and claims made by brands. In our digital always-on world, we all are confronted daily with a variety of public revelations in the media of misdeeds, scandals, errors of omission, half-truths and hyperbole.

Brand trust has taken a hit, and year on year, we see evidence of declines. Earning trust is fundamental to successful marketing outcomes and so we develop transformational strategic platforms, tools and tactics that help burnish trust, including:

• A first-in-its-industry Transparency Council for a premium pet food brand in a category where consumer demand to know more about what’s in the food and how it’s made is valued and differentiating; and
• Creating the first “True Cheese” trust mark in the cheese industry in a segment marred by product fraud and mislabeling to elevate our client’s brand and integrity above the bad acters.

We strategically deploy social media as a pipeline to social proof in the observations of delighted user stories.

We engage outside experts and credible voices to help validate what a brand states are the essential truths about their product.

We employ earned media to bring the imprimatur of editorial, reportorial assessments in consumer and trade news channels.

We create videos, that in unscripted moments, capture the essence of consumer experience and ‘see for yourselves’ tours behind the product creation curtain.

In the end, it’s our empathy for consumers as people and insight into their desires and concerns that is embedded in Emergent’s thinking. This is foundational as a primary skill in our client engagements; best seen in our devotion to putting the consumer at the center of planning each and every time. Out of that study comes relevant messaging we can successfully deploy.

Health and wellness – redefined – no longer a tertiary consideration

One visit to our web site and there in headline form is this recurring statement about Healthy Living. For a long time, “healthy” was defined as a food science proposition in varying attempts to create addition (healthier) by subtraction – less calories, fat, sugar or sodium.

Now, health and wellness are fundamental to what consumers want and is redefined as emphasis on high quality, real food experiences – less processed and with a provenance story to tell – that delivers greater transparency to the supply chain and entire product creation process.

• We know how to bring this to life and secure relevance to these principles at a time when consumers absolutely demand it.

We’re on a mission, too

As keepers of this essential truth and the flame of consumer relevance as the non-negotiable precursor to engagement and purchase, we see our mission to bring this understanding to organizations seeking to write a new chapter – whether that’s an emerging brand or an established legacy business.

This is what gets us up in the morning and characterizes our ambitions and goals for what Emergent brings to the marketing challenge for our clients.

Should this strike a chord with you, we should talk.

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Once you’ve tasted an heirloom tomato you can’t go back…

For most of my adult life I have experienced a love/not love relationship with fresh tomato. The routine, ubiquitous beefsteak variety a frequent guest star that decorates the roof of a hamburger with some color. The pink flesh offers a hard, mealy somewhat bland flavor. In a salad the standard tomato as hero can be even more pronounced in its meh-ness. We hear it travels well through distribution channels and offers some shelf life. Yay.

Along comes the heirloom tomato with its erratic colors, crags, lumps and fissures to completely upend everything you think you understand about a tomato, punching your taste buds with luxurious flavor, acidity and tenderness that elevates anything it swims with. More expensive to be sure and worth every penny. Once you know this you can’t retreat to the beefsteak.

• So it is with the continued culinary-ization of America: as higher quality food experiences forever elevate the palate and expectation of nearly everyone who eats, the baseline standard of what people want is changing with it.

Thus why strategic planning needs to address this development because as the old but very real saying goes, “times are changing and if you don’t change with them, you’re in trouble.”

What happens when the consumer is at the center of strategic planning?

If it is vital for the collective futures of food retail and food CPG companies to put the consumer at the epicenter of planning and work backwards from there, then we’re going to pay attention to cultural and behavioral shifts. The goal to sync strategies and capitalize on those insights. It is definitely not business as usual these days because the pace of change has accelerated so significantly in the last five years.

Seven observations on the changes now upon us.

The quality bar keeps rising. The impact of chefs-as-media-heroes, cooking shows, elevated corner bar food, transformation of legacy food categories with reimagined higher quality versions, and the advancement of culinary experiences at restaurants – all blend together in a perfect recipe for moving taste and quality expectations upward.

1. Once you’ve experienced the added value of a pan reduction sauce to transform a flavor- challenged piece of chicken, you want the sauce every time.
2. Home delivered meal kits operate as boxed culinary academies, teaching consumers about roasting techniques for vegetables, layering flavors and saucing.
3. Higher quality ingredients and preparations now reflect the new intersection of indulgent taste and healthier. Healthy now redefined not as calorie math but the use of better quality fresh, real food ingredients, less processed and with a clean label as evidence of same.
4. Weekends are now calendared opportunities for scratch home-cooking exploration, experiments and food adventure. Which grocery stores observe this phenomenon and move to inspire ideas, ingredient solutions, menus and culinary guidance? …More meatloaf?
5. Maybe we’re still selling boxes, cans and bags off shelves at velocity and so there’s no time to match merchandising to the elevation of food experiences in America? Can you afford not to when disintermediating options are emerging all over the food business landscape?
6. Restaurants are trial generators for new global flavors, cuisine exploration and realization of unique cooking techniques. Outsourced meals aren’t just about convenience on a busy night, it’s also part of the food culture milieu that’s stoking the fire of culinary excitement.
7. Where’s the Chef de Cuisine now? He or she is a home chef operating in the kitchen looking to create, innovate and experiment with standard menus and dishes now getting an elevated makeover with layered flavors, sauces and artisanal quality ingredients.

The headline: could it be that the American home kitchen is not that far behind the restaurant kitchen, save a few thousand BTUs from the stove burner, as a place to produce distinctive flavor experiences? The answer to this query is yes. How are retailers and CPG innovators working to recognize and service this consumer? Small niche you say!? Not so fast…

In a recent report from the Hartman Group we find evidence in Compass data:

• 39% of restaurant sourced eating occasions are efforts to lean in on the culinary skill and experience going on in the professional kitchen. Remember the quality of restaurant food keeps going up, and while doing so challenges some chain foodservice operators who are trapped in cost structures and business models that make it difficult to profitably move up.
• 29% of at home eating occasions use cooking sauces, flavor aids, Deli prepared items, alongside higher quality produce, meat and seafood intended to replicate the restaurant experience at home.

Food culture changes are an undeniable juggernaut impacting where the ball is moving and challenging everyone to determine if they’re keeping pace with it or languishing behind.

Emergent’s guidance:

1. Consumers want the unique, higher quality flavor experiences they find at restaurants, repurposed for them in food retail available products. Hence the emerging brand phenomena now roiling legacy CPG market shares. Consumers yearn for the surprise and delight of more innovative packaged and prepared foods.
2. On the other side, food retail is ideally situated to sponsor artisanal exploration in cheese, baked goods, alternate proteins and cooking ingredients. Yet many find it difficult to get beyond the traditional infrastructure to position themselves in the culinary chair alongside shoppers who want more relevance and food experience in their shopping trip…and their shopping cart.

While so much preoccupation now exists with installing e-commerce platforms and digitizing the management and flow of inventory, we should not lose sight of what the consumer longs for and how we can enhance food relevance and adventure for them.

Your products and store could be a culinary Field of Dreams!

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Are you speaking clearly or in Morse Code?

During World War II and prior to the U.S. entering the war, the British government working feverishly to counteract the devastating German Blitzkrieg, authorized the launch of a spy network intended to sabotage the Nazi war infrastructure. It was called the Special Operations Executive (SOE) and began training ordinary people with a passion for country and duty to become spies and saboteurs. Their principle form of communication would be Morse Code. The objective to avoid detection while operating behind enemy lines.

The cinematic stories of heroism and sacrifice are legion as SOE undertook its desperate calling to disrupt – by blowing up trains and power stations, often while hiding in plain sight. These days some brand communication starts to feel a bit like spy-savvy Morse Code. Businesses can find it hard to step away from internally-focused, self-reverential monologues and ‘us-speak’ to, instead, talk plainly and directly with people about what THEY care about. Conversation not code.

It was strong beliefs and shared values that underscored the passions and bravery of SOE operatives that drove their communication. Those same characteristics, passion of shared interests, values and connection, now mark the attitudinal changes governing how people interact with brands and make purchase decisions.

Consumer behavior research over the last five years has monitored the change to what we call ‘symbolic purchase’. As beliefs and values increasingly shape popular culture and thinking, we observe that people use their purchases to flag to others who they are and what they care about. Purchases have become posters of personal expression and are largely emblematic demonstrations people believe will telegraph to everyone what they think is important. Not in Morse Code but in real, observable terms.

What Are Your Values and Are They Aligned with your desired consumers?

You may have detected the increased importance of shared values in how consumers decide what brands and businesses matter enough to them to be granted a small portion of brain time, consideration and wallet. For many years, marketers were preoccupied with efforts to convey their, hopefully, superior product features and benefits in the firm belief that logic and rational arguments would hold sway. After all, it’s 25 percent faster than the other leading brand, right?

People have evolved, and our insight optics have improved. We know that humans are driven by heart-over-head – and that all purchases are influenced through emotional connectivity. Indeed, it is the absence of genuine connection that sits at the foundation of why some brands struggle to truly engage their customers.

This isn’t, by the way, a discussion of new media channels or digital platforms, mostly social, as a means to secure the engagement sweet spot. Failure to nail relevance can be traced back to overlooking a prerequisite to correctly mine the consumers’ continual search for deeper meaning.

What your brand says, does, how it behaves and the many signals it broadcasts (some intentional and some simply reflected by actions – which always speak louder than words) either reveals shared values or it doesn’t. And as such, it will resonate and motivate people to want to interact with and purchase your brand or it won’t. This is in some ways a character issue more so than about deploying clever words and phrases.

Here’s the LitmusTest:

What do your best customers care about? And that question is not a request for evaluation of your features and benefits!

• How do they live?
• What do they struggle with?
• What are their aspirations and dreams?
• What are their concerns, wants and wishes?
• How is your brand and business an enabler and partner in making their lives better and answering their desire for deeper meaning?

In our increasingly cynical society people have become less trusting and more skeptical. The Internet amplifies this by illuminating every misstep, mistake, scandal and recall to a replay-able loop-tape of evidence that businesses tend to look after their own self-interest. In response to this, consumers yearn to connect with brands that are built around a higher purpose, a shared value system and, frankly, a “soul” that transcends commerce.

Mining the Treasure Trove of Engagement

What an amazing opportunity for the more enlightened brand-minders who can blaze a trail to long-term connection with their users. How can we create marketing that people actually want and seek out rather than work to avoid? Having the courage to disconnect the hard-sell and instead, start talking with consumers about their interests and needs is the starting line for deeper connection.

• For example: When the pet food company recognizes it’s not in the kibble business but in the pet care relationship and guidance business, you begin to see how the brand voice should evolve and how a bond can be nurtured. How exciting to be forging connections and conversations around the lifestyle people seek out with their four-legged family members. The specific quality of nutrition and ingredients doesn’t become unimportant. Rather, it’s what chin do you lead with – protein percentages or health and wellbeing? It’s the latter.

The great news here is the treasure trove of content engagement opportunities that can be created with an audience on the hunt for a steady diet of this material.

What is the Main Goal of Marketing?

If you simmer everything down to its core essence, the mission of marketing is trust creation. We have ample evidence that trust is an elusive commodity. It’s hard to secure it and even harder to keep it.

Trust development cannot just be a “strategy” in the marketing plan. It is an outcome of the very belief system and values we’ve been talking about here. There’s no ‘fake it till you make it’ in the trust curation department.

• The heroic performances of SOE recruits was delivered through an out-sized commitment to their mission and higher purpose. Their calling serves as a stunning example of what’s possible when more is going on than just seeking transactions.

The irony here, is the less selfish aspects of caring about the health and wellbeing of customers and contributing to achieving their life goals, in fact, feeds the relationship that leads to transactions. Fearlessly leaning into the understanding that shared values precedes the creation of any type of affinity or loyalty.  The honest development of a real bond and relationship is where all of this begins.

One of the most exciting aspects of our work at Emergent is when a client looks for guidance in this very arena and we have the extraordinary privilege of helping define what that higher purpose looks like and how it can become an anchor for business and marketing strategy.

What’s the definition of a really big idea? It’s an idea that you can immediately, obviously see how it will impact the behavior of the organization from top to bottom. The beauty of landing on this understanding is the refreshing clarity it delivers to every decision around product, innovation, organization, people and very importantly, marketing that works.

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Perhaps the most important convention in the food industry

From September 15 to 18 the food industry convenes in Las Vegas at the Venetian Hotel for the second edition of GroceryShop, Anil Aggarwal’s novel answer to a lingering gap in the meetings realm for food business and related technology companies.

Unlike most industry meetings focused on presenting a vast ocean of booths where company sales and marketing staff feature their latest products and services, GroceryShop is more focused on the sea changes, business model disruption and consumer shifts impacting one of the nation’s most important and robust industries.

E-commerce and digitization of the food business has buffeted the value propositions of traditional supermarkets, supported the emergence of new, higher quality food brands with mission-oriented story to tell, and witnessed the rapid rise of e-commerce channel shopping as consumers increasingly acquire food from the comfort of their dining room table.

Packaged food marketers and retailers alike have sought to better understand how to manage the transformational changes occurring around them. Mr. Aggarwal stepped in with a conference concept long on content and insight presentations more so than a straight buyer-meets-seller proposition.

GrocceryShop’s rapid rise can be attributed to creatively answering the thirst for guidance and direction in a rapidly changing business environment. Unlike the food business conventions of yesteryear where global food corporations such as Nestle and Mondelez held court with retail buyers, GroceryShop connects the likes of Google and Facebook to the conversation on how consumers will operate in a digitally-enabled world and what trends in fresh and prepared food will get traction at retail outlets.

GroceryShop presentations examine new technologies in supply chain management, while brand marketing discussions look towards the shift from traditional ad media and promotions to engagement based on relevance to healthy living and lifestyle aspirations, fed by digital forms of outreach and social media.

 The Future of the Food Business

The content forward approach Mr. Aggarwal has landed on serves as inspiration and best practice showcase to retail and CPG executives alike on how to remain relevant and inject deeper meaning into their brand and banner propositions.

The food business is in a state of rapid transition as consumers increasingly shop for menus rather than stock ups and the rise of super-convenient restaurant delivery makes out-sourcing dinner a viable last-minute option on a busy weeknight. Food has never been more competitive as quality choices are within arms-length from virtually anywhere.

• According to Accenture, the 80 million or so Millennials, now in their prime spending years, wield roughly $600 billion in annual spending power. For the grocery industry that ladders up to about $2,300 per year on average spending at food retail. According to a recent national survey by Sweet Earth Foods, this cohort will try at least 46 new foods each year, helping drive the emergence of new food and beverage brands now gaining additional in-store real estate at supermarkets.

Meantime the grocery industry is reacting to the significant moves by Amazon into their territory through Whole Foods and its own Prime delivery, by bolting on outside e-commerce ordering and delivery solutions from Shipt and Instacart.

So much change and so quickly for a retail business that for many years was fueled by selling boxes, cans and bags off shelves at high velocity and razor-thin margins. Now the perimeter fresh departments hold the magic and in-store groceraunts are popping up to satisfy the inevitable last-minute rush to answer the pounding question, what’s for dinner?

All of this helps explain why GrcoeryShop has traveled so far so fast as business model disruption impacts Big Food and small grocery chains alike. If you haven’t thought about where you need to be this September, might be good to check it out: http://www.groceryshop.com

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A storied call to embrace trust creation

Consumers continue to vote using their time, attention and spending to favor brands they trust while virtually ignoring the rest. Yet this important insight apparently hasn’t informed the daily barrage of product claim and assertion-style communication that dominates the food and beverage marketing landscape.

What’s needed is a fresh approach and new ideas that disrupt the old model of overt selling in favor of a more enlightened view of reciprocity — which works to form the proper foundation of any successful brand and consumer relationship. What’s changed? The ever-evolving consumer who shapes cultural norms and with it, expectations that impact what they find meaningful, relevant and purchase-worthy among the brands they consider.

Here’s the profound truth about what sits at the core of consumer behavior: Jerald Podair, Editor of The Rutledge History of the 20th Century United States said it succinctly, “we live in the age of disputed facts, disputed truth, personal truth, my truth and your truth.” The collective desire and yearning among people are simple – they want to know and believe they are in receipt of the truth about products and services they love.

This explains the rapid rise of transparency, product creation candor, and validation as a fundamental driver of what people require ahead of purchasing the brands that matter to them. See-for-yourself-marketing. Thus, food marketing best practices must move further away from gloss and artifice, and closer to embracing the plain-spoken credible voices of personal experience intertwined with respected expert guidance.

Survey data shows the extent of this important swing

At the recent Cannes festival celebrating the ad creative world, Edelman once again presented their annual Trust Barometer, a quantitative study focused on consumer attitudes about brands. The evidence reinforces the conclusion that trust is required for anything in marketing to function effectively.

Here’s the hard truth:

• 73% of people actively work to avoid advertising. This is likely to increase with continued adoption of ad blocker software that makes it easy to do so.
• 41% of people say about the marketing activity they do encounter that the communication is seldom seen as truthful.
• 63% trust what outside third-party experts and influencers say more so than what a brand conveys on its own – what’s that tell you?

Lest this all appear to be an assault on brand communication, there’s another statistic in the report that bodes well for brands that put trust creation at the center of strategic planning.

• 76% of consumers want and will pay attention to advertising from brands they trust. How come? Because they believe in and embrace the story as true.

The path forward: Emergent guidance

It’s important that we note the difference between trusted and not yet trusted. Brand believers want affirmation of their good decision. Believers enjoy and seek out (confirmation bias) a little positive drama and emotion connected with the community they’ve joined.

On the other hand, the unconverted require evidence and credible demonstration of the product creation backstory, disclosure of company beliefs and mission, and proof of visible actions that shine a light on the truth of what’s being conveyed.

Here are three simple steps to improved engagement and greater marketing success:

1. What is the message?

Shameless brand self-promotion isn’t nearly as effective as aligning the brand with the consumer’s lifestyle interests and needs – and becoming an enabler of them. You have to earn trust first. Before you can sell your pet food for example, pet parents need to see how the brand helps enhance and contribute to the experiences and interests they have in their shared lifestyle and pet’s wellbeing.

2. Who is the messenger?

For the yet-to-be-converted credibility matters. Social proof is a critical factor to help foster trust. People believe their family, friends and contemporaries first. How is the brand enabling the voices of fans to convey their experiences and to distribute content that tells their stories? Outside credible experts can also be enlisted to amplify the evidence underneath the product creation story about ingredient sourcing, standards of quality, safety and generally walking the walk.

3. Intentionally following the path to trust

It’s important to note here this is easier said than done. It requires changing the mindset on why the company exists and what, in the larger, human, universal scope – and certainly beyond the balance sheet – is the company trying to contribute to the greater good. It requires everyone to care about the consumer’s welfare and to see the brand as contributing to their health and happiness. However, what you think and believe will inform every action. It’s hard to get away with messaging around this without addressing the company’s true higher purpose and at its foundation what it stands for.

People are very astute these days at recognizing the truthful from anything that isn’t. If your brand heart is in the right place and you’ve optimized strategies to make trust creation a top priority, there’s an opportunity to earn permission for a relationship that can drive sustainable growth.

What kind of conversation are you really having with your prospective consumers? Is trust creation a top priority around the strategic planning table?

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Building an emerging brand when you don’t know what you don’t know

If ever there were a time when new emerging food and beverage ideas have a chance at stardom, the golden age has arrived. Investment capital is flocking to the culturally relevant and unique, while new food ideas and innovations are popping up right and left. While the barriers to entry are lower than ever, the stakes and requirements for sound strategy are accelerating rapidly as more emerging brands compete for share of limited consumer attention and stomach. This, by the way, was the genesis idea underneath creating Emergent, the Healthy Living Agency.

Into the abyss entrepreneurs jump, entering the fray seeking to answer what looks to be a nearly insatiable appetite for new, higher quality, healthier and novel food and drink experiences. At the front door all appears promising in a world yearning for new and better.

Meatless meat, lab grown proteins, dairy milk without the cow, probiotic and prebiotic, keto kits, ancient grain snacks, pea protein-infused everything – and now in the developing pipeline – food-as-medicine. Whew. Yet many of these aspiring enterprises will encounter critical interruptions along the path; challenges to scaling the business that will relegate some to permanent small ball status and others to the heap of failed concepts.

Marketing plays a significant and important role in mitigating the challenges that exist in moving from very early adopters to scale-able mainstream audiences and wider distribution channels. More often than not, however, we encounter the misappropriation of marketing as essentially a social buzz-making proposition. Rather, it should be a disciplined strategic asset built on a foundation of sound consumer insight.

What’s lacking in the emerging brand zeitgeist is this: experienced marketing brains and early strategic, hands-on guidance – thus why Emergent is a partner in the Food Marketing Institute emerging brands “Mentor” program. There, we counsel that marketing is not just sending out a press release, filing content routinely in social channels or retaining an influencer with a foodie follower base. It is a strategic proposition that optimizes the entire go-to-market plan for growth, effectiveness, measurable outcomes and fewer mistakes.

The eight deadly sins of marketing myopia

Here in random order are eight mistakes that can impede growth and hold the emerging brand proposition back from a leading role in the evolving food and beverage industry:

1. A form of business grade narcissism – business in love with itself to the exclusion of what’s relevant to the consumer’s passions and interests.
2. Absence, then, of a continuous devotion to seeking consumer insight and putting the customer at the very center of business planning. One thing to say and another to do.
3. An undernourished mission and higher purpose that should become the driver for everything the brand stands for and its ability to acquire deeper meaning and connection with consumers.
4. Improper positioning most frequently manifested as no real discernable positioning. This should be created through careful exploration of how best to push uniqueness and differentiation.
5. Scattered and less relevant messaging that is the outcome of not addressing the first four sins correctly, and the vanity of assuming consumers will resonate simply because it’s there (if you build it, they will come).
6. And messaging’s twin sister, an absence of sound strategy in trade and consumer facing communication that mirrors their lifestyle aspirations and wants. This directly impacts any opportunity for engagement.
7. A real show-stopper: a clunky packaging presentation that dilutes impact in any crowded retail setting at a time when consumers long to know more and care about the product creation backstory.
8. Finally, failing to fully optimize the brand’s opportunity story in the context of real-world competitive advantage and own-able equity with existing and potential investors. Experienced brand and business storytellers know how to skillfully navigate this arena.

There’s simply no margin for error

No one gets a hall pass from doing the strategic heavy-lifting to refine the brand, its meaning, how it’s presented and what is conveyed. Experienced hands are needed for this work. It can be tempting for founders to think they know marketing even when their background, training and experience does not hail from this discipline.

After all, founders understand the product from the ground up, right? Yes – but, experienced marketing players grasp the consumer, the retail environment, and know the tools to refine how the entire concept is served up, and how best to make every communications dollar work like 10.

• Emergent’s Brand Sustainability Analysis, for example, constitutes the kind of foundational work that creates a strategic anchor for a new brand to maximize its higher purpose, differentiate the concept and imbue the story with greater consumer relevance and deeper meaning.

Yet in many cases, none of this is done as new brands hire a designer for package graphics – call it “marketing” and then call it a day. Evidence of the oh-so-powerful axiom: you don’t know what you don’t know. Some of the more fully funded emerging businesses have witnessed faster acceleration because they understood the long-term importance of engaging the right marketing minds at the start.

For others it seems less of a priority because, again, owners believe they can do it themselves. The honest answer here is no. In varying degrees of involvement from guide to outsourced execution, it is wiser and better to get the marketing experience in the door early for the very reason – you never get a second chance to make a first impression.

The strength created today will, pay dividends for years to come and when you start out on the right foot good things tend to follow. Success is in the eyes of the beholder certainly. That said home runs will always be more satisfying than base hits.

Luck by the way has nothing to do with it. This is hard work that requires enough time in the saddle for those at the marketing helm who can quickly recognize, develop and separate the big ideas from anything less than that.

• Owners create extraordinary products with a story to tell.
• Investors invest capital to fuel the effort.
• Marketers should shape the brand and go-to-market plan, and tell the story.

A word to founders: it’s hard to let go and it is also tempting to assume you can do anything if you put your mind to it. Engaging experienced, professional marketing talent is not a nice to have, it is essential to the future of the business because you won’t achieve jet engine results if you fuel the brand with regular, unleaded expertise.

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