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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Engaging consumer sub-conscious for action and decisions

Neuroscience helps us understand that consumer actions and decisions (to buy) are controlled by the sub-conscious side of our brain. The conscious, learning area of our intellect will play a role post-purchase, as cognitive bias compels us to seek out more factual type information that confirms the wisdom of our choices.

• This area of the brain isn’t influenced by analytical arguments and fact-based messaging. Yet we find the vast majority of CPG and retail marketing communication presumes that people process rational information on the road to making a purchase. Not true. Doesn’t happen that way.

It is how people FEEL in the presence of your brand that influences their decisions and actions. Heart-over-head every time. So why is this insight not the center of brand strategy? Rather it’s an afterthought or addressed only at the surface level through a compelling image for example that drives food appetite appeal.

All-in on sensory strategy

Profiled in a recent report by AXIOS, one company, Mastercard, has jumped fully into multi-sensory marketing strategies that stretch the very core of how a brand creates a feeling, a relationship, an emotion – knowing this is directly connected to below-conscious cues and actionable behaviors.

Mastercard is indeed pushing hard at the edges of differentiation by pulling their brand into totally unusual places that disrupt expectations of how a credit card payments brand might normally behave. In doing so they are actively mining virtually all of our sensory cues including taste, sight, smell, touch and sound. Authentic strategy is always a ‘swing for the fences’ kind of proposition that causes you to step back, blink and notice, and say “wow, that’s unexpected.”

• Mastercard’s Priceless positioning amplifies the value of experiences over merely buying things. This is activated in ways that allows the brand to fully envelop the consumer in an encounter that closes the loop fully on emotional response.

A brand you hear, taste and smell

Mastercard amps its Priceless experience concept by opening fine dining restaurants, six of them so far, under the Priceless banner. You can snack on red and persimmon colored Ladurée macarons, while sipping signature cocktails that match the logo color scheme. Your Mastercard date-night experience enhanced with the compelling scent of either Priceless Passion or Priceless Optimism fragrances packaged in the same logo-inspired colors.

Leaving no stone unturned, 590 million POS terminals have been programmed to play a Mastercard pneumonic ‘song’ when every transaction is completed. The auditory layer again respectful of how people can experience Mastercard by conveying the scent, sound and flavor of its name and “Priceless” theme.

• In an interview with AXIOS, Mastercard CMO Raja Rajamannar explains:  “The theory is that a normal human being is blessed with five senses. Each sense is a mechanism by which information goes into the individual’s brain, [where they] process it, and then they either think, feel, act or do something with it. Marketing people have only historically relied on the sense of sight and the sense of sound, and they were doing it in a highly intuitive rather than a scientific fashion.”

To drive the concept home Mastercard recently held a media dinner at their Peak with Priceless restaurant, on the 101st floor of 30 Hudson Yards in Manhattan. The exquisite menu and inspiring views designed to mirror and breathe life into the kinds of experiences the “Priceless” branding campaign is founded. Likely AXIOS attended, don’t you think?

What’s going on here?

This brand fully embraces the humanity of people who use their product on a routine basis. Here planning and strategy combine to power-up emotional engagement between a payments company and the people they serve. Not by pushing factual statements or information dense narratives. Instead, knowing how people operate with the sub-conscious always in charge of the actions we take, the brand executes on all five senses.

What’s more, the novel and creative ways this effort manifests shows real thought and creativity at work in doing the unexpected in powerful ways.

Dialing up emotional context and brand interaction

Occasionally brands will look at ‘pop-up’ experiences solely through the lens of how media-genic and disruptive it is as an unexpected showcase location for their brand to show up. If you think this through to its emotional roots, so much more can be accomplished by considering the project holistically on ways to amplify all five senses. Why? Because that’s the key to open the door of sub-conscious influence.

How does this work?

The starting gate is understanding that actions and decisions by your customers are driven from the sub-conscious – and that complex part of our brain is far smarter than we give it credit. 60,000 times smarter than the conscious arena, to be exact.

• Emotion is the path to influence here. Knowing this, how can you elevate experience and activity that interacts with the senses. How do you step completely outside your category norms and rules of behavior to show up in unexpected ways?

Mastercard made Priceless a tangible player in their activation scheme. Further, they fearlessly jumped all the way into the pool on this confident knowing they were playing directly to how humans operate.

Recognize fact-based selling for its true role

Your product or retail “what you do and how you do it” story comes after purchase as justification for the decision that was made. A great place to start on your rode to improved strategy is your brand “why” – your higher purpose, mission and value system that informs virtually every decision you make in the business.

• Your Purpose is a great exploratory place to be when looking for a concept like Priceless and then pushing that idea further out on engaging people through the senses.

The creative work here can be some of the most exciting and gratifying you’ll encounter as a brand steward and builder. It can be liberating to let go of traditional feature/benefit tactics and let radical differentiation move your thinking into new territory.

It can be helpful to have a guide on this journey. That’s what we do. Use the email link below to share your ideas and ambitions for emotional marketing with a team of like-minded experts who can help you formulate the right plan.

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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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People yearn for belief and assurance…

Is it any surprise the most powerful force influencing consumer choice is the desire to avoid making a bad decision? The threat of disappointment lurks in every corner on the path to purchase. So great is our need to elude the risk of unhappiness, we will stubbornly hang on to anything we believe to be true, while potentially missing the opportunities of new product or category exploration.

• Yet herein lies an enormous opportunity for brands to step into the midst of this condition with tools that work to resolve consumers’ express need for certainty in an uncertain world.

Yes, you can help people overcome their perceptions of risking a bad decision.

Yes, you can earn consumer trust and confidence.

Yes, you can solve this intractable barrier on the path to purchase.

Yes, you can create a real relationship with users that evolves into fandom.

Why are people so distrustful and risk averse?

In our hyper-digital media-saturated world, we have entered the era of glass brand houses where anything that can be known, will be known almost instantly. Thus, people are exposed to a revolving rogues’ gallery of living, real world case studies in deceit, manipulation, lies by omission, under-delivering, overt selfishness or failures to protect the integrity of promises made. Too many times we witness the extension of claims conveyed that either can’t or won’t be served and instead appear as a form of marketing spin or at the minimum, outright failures of honesty and integrity. People witness too many brand perp walks that fuel distrust, enable anxiety and cement our static cling to the tried and true.

The end result is a more cynical mental state that slathers on a deep coating of skepticism factored into risk assessments of literally everything we consume and do. Fearless people, those most likely to step into the abyss of uncertainty and take the risks of new product and service trial, represent a small proportion of any addressable market – roughly 14% on average. For a business to be successful, you simply must leap way beyond the fearless minority of early adopters.

Dawn of the age of advocacy

Every day, you have an opportunity to earn trust and belief. By the way trust is a prerequisite to secure a lasting, genuine brand-to-consumer relationship. Yet people are subjected to outcome claims and assertions by brands, mounted too often inside self-promotion of product features and benefits. Therefore, the brand’s commercial self-interests is the primary message and leaves the consumer to think the brand cannot be an objective, reliable guide.

You can step into the warmth of belief and trust by carefully examining all points of consumer interaction, while working to field flags and symbols of purpose, mission and beliefs that convey there’s a genuine heart and soul informing your brand’s business behavior and ethics.

Consumers want to believe they are always your top priority – that their happiness and wellbeing is paramount to your brand. When the business presents itself as customer-first, and actively operates in their best interests, then and only then have you opened the door to gaining trust.

Brand communication and action on the road to credibility

Having instilled customer centricity as an anchoring principle of brand ethos, advocacy is your most important strategy towards cultivating risk-abating comfort and confidence. What do consumers actually want from trusted brand communication?

Credibility – consider the mediums of trusted communication

Validation – invoking the imprimatur of respected sources

Verification – deploying believable voices

Advocacy can help you narrow the chasm between what brands proclaim and what consumers will accept as true.

The source of advocacy

There are outside voices we pay attention to and believe. …Those with unique knowledge and credentials that qualify them as respected experts. Especially people who elect to study and evaluate the merits of products and businesses and whose objectivity and reputations precede them. Thus, we grant these voices a mantel of independent assessment that we’ll accept.

Important to note, advocacy at its heart is about independent observation, and is not the province of paid influencers who have commercial biases attached to their endorsement.

Whom do we trust?

1. Outside third-party subject matter experts, scientists and authorities
2. “Medium is the message” – credible channels such as social community activation and earned media reporting
3. Activating word of mouth – the most credible form of communication available
4. Employees – the most overlooked cohort for advocacy support

Active and optimized brand social communities are recognized when the majority of content is supplied by community members who share their experiences, rather than the usual ample dosing of brand self-promotion content. We accept the evaluations and testimonials of IRL users before we will believe the brand’s claims of performance.

Advocacy in action

We represented the largest cheese company in the Italian sector at a time when adulteration, mislabeling and misrepresented products had been growing like a cancer in the category. We were tasked with working to help put an end to food fraud in Italian cheese. As our client was market share leader, we needed to bring the voices of the entire industry to bear in support of eradicating adulteration, otherwise the effort risked being seen as self-serving.

We met with industry and government organizations and leaders to advocate for change. Their presence was intended verify and validate the scope of the problem and reinforce why consumers deserved to know the cheese they were buying was genuine and made correctly according to the Federal standard of identity.

When we launched this effort in the media, these voices were essential to confirm the conditions impacting Italian cheese and the call to “out” the practice of making fake products in order to hit a lower price point. The project turned into a referendum on truth and best practices in cheese making. It would not have been successful without advocacy from all sectors of the business.

Advocacy in brand communication

We worked closely with the CEO of Jamba Juice Company on an enterprise level strategy to re-stage the business from a smoothie chain to a healthy lifestyle brand. This was happening at a time when consumers were increasingly scrutinizing Jamba beverages based on sugar content against the desired concept of healthier choice.

Thus began an initiative to address product formulation and new product innovation in an effort to reframe consumer perceptions of Jamba’s menu board and its role as part of a healthy lifestyle. To help confirm, verify, validate and educate consumers about these key initiatives we formed the Jamba Healthy Living Council, recruiting some of the most well-known and respected names in the world of registered dietitians and nutrition expertise.

We asked Council members to advise the company on healthier recipes while also verifying the efficacy of the changes Jamba was making to its existing products. Their voices were essential to helping the world see and believe that real changes were being made by America’s number one smoothie restaurant brand. It was the Council’s affirmation and validation of these developments that built credibility under the brand’s healthy lifestyle strategy.

• Brands are faced with risk-averse consumers who seek belief from the right sources when uncertainty is present. Which is everywhere by the way. Advocacy offers a path to reliable, credible truth that works to authentically confirm what we want people, retail customers, consumers, employees and other category players to believe.

Belief leads to trust while trust leads to acceptance and repeat purchase. If this sparks a conversation on your end about the potential role of advocacy strategies in your business, use the link below to start an informal conversation with an experienced team of advocacy strategy experts.

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New direction on the evolving role of brand marketing

For the last 50 years CPG and retail brand building has been focused on chasing awareness. The theory that top-of-funnel recognition will lead to consideration, and if the brand is persuasive while spiraling further down the funnel, a consumer purchase will occur. Leave it to the impact of evolving culture and the presence of existential, environmental threats to shift behaviors and push the funnel off its pedestal. A distinctive new path to brand building has emerged and we will unpack it here. The good news: we are entering a period of unprecedented brand engagement, but the rules to success are decidedly different.

Remarkably the century old thinking that underpins the funnel was first developed in 1896 by E. St. Elmo Lewis, owner of a Philadelphia-based ad agency, who published the first theory on “consumer path to purchase” he called AIDA – short for Awareness, Interest, Desire and Action. By 1924 this concept had morphed into what we now refer to as the Purchase Funnel. Yes, there have been a few modifications along the way to accommodate digital and social media channels, but the basic view of awareness as the golden goal has traveled with the adjustments, until now.

The funnel is dead, long live the funnel…

The fundamental weaknesses of the funnel model have been exposed, as follows:

• It is grounded in transactional thinking that positions consumers as walking wallets
• It fails to address the dynamics of how real brand relationships are built
• Assumes that consumers will behave in a linear fashion on the road to purchase

It’s fair to say that the focus of brand marketing work and investment has leaned heavily on top of funnel activity, frustrated somewhat by the demise of mass media, the splintering of consumer attention across channels and their uncanny newfound ability to avoid it all. Of note, tactical sophistication here in digital media eyeball aggregation isn’t helped by inherent strategic weakness.

Here’s the truth as we now know it. Consumers – especially Gen Z and Millennials – no longer operate in linear fashion. For one, the purchase isn’t the end game, rather it is the starting point. Consumption is now an infinite loop of inspiration, exploration, community participation and advocacy.

• Old brand world: defined by conventional advertising, digital or analog
• New brand world: defined by content, events, experiences and fandom

What are you risking if you continue to be an awareness chaser?

Declining relevance: your brand and business are seen as exploitive, possibly manipulative and transactional.

Lacking authenticity: your brand expresses promotional hype over user help in a world now longing for trust and deeper meaning from the brands consumers care about.

Incidentally, this is why Emergent exists. We focus on new strategic approaches that are grounded in culture and the latest consumer insight. Today, when consumers buy a product, they are actually buying your story and not a stock keeping unit (sku).

Edelman Trust Barometer sheds light on the shift

Edelman’s latest trust report revealed a remarkable change in behavior that has significant implications to sound brand building strategy. People have a strong cognitive bias for post-purchase rationalization. In fact, we also know that 95% of the time, consumers are driven by their efforts to avoid making a bad decision, or to experience disappointment.

Edelman’s research confirms where the action is: 50% of consumers now conduct the vast majority of their brand research AFTER purchase and not before. What’s more, 78% are looking for credible proof and validation that they made the right decision. Turns out post purchase is when people are most open to brand engagement.

You might be wondering what’s behind this change…

1. The systematic dilution of trust and belief based in part on the absence of any prevailing brand value system, higher purpose or real, obvious evidence of same.
2. The precipitous rise of vulnerability, uneasiness over a perceived lack of personal control authored by political, social and environmental stresses. 
3. Too many brands think all they have to do is invoke the word trust in their marketing and they are automatically, well, trusted. Not so. Trust is earned not acquired. Always deeds more than words.

Right below the surface people look for safety and security in the midst of accelerating experiences sponsored by uncontrollable events around them. This manifests as a desire for deeper meaning, purpose and trust – now at an all-time premium. Call it heightened expectations for visible, demonstrable, easy-to-see brand values and a courageous point of view.

So how does it work now?

Consumer pre-purchase research leans into the influence of brand social communities where they uncover member reviews, experiences and hopefully advocacy. Thus, the strongest predictor of a thriving social strategy is the rate at which members connect with each other vs. the brand’s self-promoting posts. It just makes sense – people believe and respect the voices of their peers before they accept assertions claimed by brands.

Brand marketing is now about cultural influence

The great news – consumers in a post-purchase focused world are primed for engagement. No need to wrestle them to the ground with look-at-me overreach. Here’s directional advice on best practices.

1. Trust creation: you should be conveying and demonstrating your brand purpose, mission and identity beyond the product on offer. Brand actions, reinforced through communication and education, helps you earn trust. 
2. You’re working to confirm: competence, ethics, values and relevance to your consumer based on their identity and aspirations, which you endeavor to help enable.
3. You deploy: credible and trusted voices in the form of “people like me” (via User Generated Content), scientists and academic experts, brand tech experts and employees.

It’s exciting to know that following purchase 79% of consumers engage in branded content, will participate in brand activities and want to connect on your social platforms. Your brand marketing should be operating to help feed and encourage this behavior. Trusted brands are repurchased, they secure loyalty and encourage evangelism.

If you’re interested in exploring the implications and strategies of a post-funnel marketing environment, use the link below to ask questions. Discussion and exploration can be enlightening, and we would be honored to talk informally with you about this exciting topic.

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How’s your sustainability practices’ steering right now?

Last year was the warmest ever for our planet. We continue to pump more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere anyway. Consumer sustainability concerns are evolving and it’s about to take a hard turn. Are you ready to navigate? Stay with us while we peel the onion on how we got here and what’s coming.

In June of 2020 Emergent started working with a new food technology start-up called Air Protein, founded by MIT physicist Dr. Lisa Dyson. We came onboard to help install the strategic building blocks for a new category, brand and business. Dyson’s ground-breaking mission to create meat proteins that were identical in every way to the animal version without any animal involved in making them. Instead, she borrowed a chapter in protein creation research from NASA that launched during the Apollo Mission era – aimed at figuring out how to feed astronauts during extended space travel.

The basis for this ground-breaking work was emerging evidence responding to the detrimental impacts of livestock farming and industrial agriculture on our environment. We were in a word, awestruck, by the gravity of the environmental challenges and convinced that Dr. Dyson’s “carbon transformation” technology held great promise for a more sustainable way to create meat proteins that didn’t carry the eating experience challenges of plant-based options.

• The more study we did through our relationship with this important new company, the more persuaded we became that the entire food and beverage industry needed to step up on the journey to more sustainable practices. Admittedly, we were likely ahead of the curve at that time on the details that sit underneath why our food system (industrial agriculture) is a significant contributor to carbon emissions.

By late 2020 and we had amassed enough secondary research on the emerging issue of climate impact and sustainability to draw some conclusions. First, consumers were responding with some alarm to stories of global warming outcomes and rising greenhouse gas levels. Second, it was clear to us that food, beverage and retail brands were trying to figure out what this meant to the business and how they should navigate the issue.

Early in 2021 we responded by creating the Brand Sustainability Solution (BSS) platform designed to help frame the key challenges, compile what we knew about evolving consumer preferences and tie it all together with a five-point sustainability readiness best practices guide.

At the time our primary conclusions were:

1. The food system is a significant contributor to greenhouse gases, primarily from raising livestock for protein.
2. Consumers are trying to identify sustainable choices, but brands were behind the curve in responding.
3. Businesses were unsure of the correct path to sustainability readiness. Even what readiness consisted of was hotly debated.

Today we stand at the edge of a significant change

Sustainability impacts to date have been defined within a framework of Systems 1, 2 and 3 impacts. System 1 and 2 are both within an organization’s own ability to manage and make changes whether that be energy use, resource consumption or packaging upgrades. However, studies have confirmed that 80 to 90 percent of companies’ carbon emission challenges are in System 3 – outside their direct control and in the hands of suppliers. In sum, the primary source of greenhouse gas emissions for food, beverage brands and retailers are in the supply chain. Said another way, how products are produced, the ingredients that go into them.

Now comes the tough part

Consumers are increasingly connecting the dots between sourcing, ingredients and emissions. As have regulators and other influential players including media. Here’s what the New York Times recently had to say: “Supply chain hurdles complicate food companies’ climate pledges – The bulk of emissions — in many cases more than 90 percent — come from the companies’ supply chains. In other words, the cows and wheat used to make burgers and cereal.”

• Witness the explosion of interest in regenerative farming practices as brands seek to mitigate the System 3 conditions. Goes without saying, we’ve reported time and again that scientific assessments are vital to this process for the simple reason you can’t know where you’re going until you know where you are to start with.

Now we enter the era of emissions reporting. Businesses will need to conduct credible System 3 assessments of current conditions, report on that data and also set realistic targets over time for mitigating GHG (greenhouse gas) contributions. The operative word here is reporting. People want to know what products constitute a more sustainable choice, and the conditions underneath the supply chain will be a determining factor in that understanding.

Our analysis over time of where companies are on the path

For 18 months we conducted questionnaire assessments with numerous CPGs and retailers on their sustainability journey. We learned:

• Science based System 3 assessments were lacking along with the mitigation goals that accompany them.

• A significant disconnect between sustainability investments and policies, and programs designed to convey that progress to all stakeholders, especially consumers.

• A pervasive presence of siloed conditions inside organizations where newly formed sustainability teams were working separately from marketing, where outreach and communications resources usually reside.

Far too many brands are still preoccupied with the low hanging fruit of say recyclable packaging when we know that the vast majority of emission issues are in the ingredient supply chain. It’s time to make science-based assessment of System 3 a core part of the sustainability management discourse, and to connect that analysis with reasonable steps to improve through partnerships and goal setting among suppliers, farms and other actors along the product creation path.

What consumers want

Truth, transparency and honesty from the brands they care about, backed up with credible, third-party verified data on current performance and a clear path forward for setting sustainability improvement goals.

The hard turn

Transparency and reporting of emissions status, visibility to science-based analysis and disclosure of current conditions followed by reasonable targets over time for advancements. Thus, a call for brands and businesses to collaborate with supply chain partners to create a virtuous ecosystem designed to bring all participants along on the path.

Importantly, communicating this work to all stakeholders, too.

Marketplace competitive leverage

Progressive brands get the urgency of this and the opportunity it presents. As consumers want to make more sustainable choices, this presents an opportunity for category leadership in sustainability best practices. And by doing so to gain lasting competitive marketplace advantage as a best practices leader.

The downside of pushing this off

As the call for clear emissions reporting and standards gains traction, brands will increasingly be held to account on their progress or lack thereof. Those who choose to wax on about progress in System 1 and 2 at the expense of dealing with the more complex and taxing conditions in the supply chain will risk being called out for half measures and greenwashing.

As consumers start to look for this information from brands and on product packaging, those operating without that data will become conspicuous regardless the reasons. This is an opportunity to seize the day and lead the category towards better practices and outcomes for people and the planet.

The future ahead

What’s notable now, however, is the absence of clear standards that help prevent a descent into the wild west where brands and businesses decide independently what constitutes an acceptable outcome. Third party recognized frames for different businesses are essential. It will come. Here’s the evolutionary changes we expect to see:

• Carbon emission labeling
• Development of recognized standards of performance
• Best practices in supply chain emissions management

Sustainability guidance for 2024

The most glaring error we’ve encountered on this journey is the absence of robust efforts to communicate. Too many brands labor on these issues behind the corporate curtain without a strategic, creative program in place to let consumers and other stakeholders know what you’re doing. Some may be fearful of getting called out for not going fast enough.

We think its time to worry more about helping people understand the great efforts you’re making to map a more sustainable future. In fact, we’d say you have already acquired a responsibility to do this early and often.

Should you decide your organization would benefit from guidance on better managing these changes and the communications tools needed to enhance your effectiveness in getting the word out, use the link below to ask questions and start an informal conversation. We’d love to help you sort out the right path, message and comms tools.

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