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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Why is it evaporating in CPG and retail brand building?

Your customers want to be part of a brand world and ecosystem you construct through conscious cultivation of your brand’s deeper meaning, higher purpose, convictions and expressed values. Never before have CPG and retail brands had this extraordinary opportunity to build such close and endearing user relationships because our culture — and consumer behavior with it — has permanently changed. Yet far too many organizations struggle with this, or ignore it, because they have inadvertently lost, diluted or forgotten their own soul. Yes, brands indeed have a soul.

• In the absence of a clearly wrought and codified “brand constitution,” too many compromises amidst the battles of year-to-year commerce and the inevitable maturation of category rules and conventions, work to chip away at this essential brand foundation.

In the go-go 80’s and early 90’s prior to arrival of the Internet and the power transfer from corporations to consumers, much of the dialogue in brand building had a distinct military flavor to it, with brands seeking to dominate their categories, erect barriers to entry and defend their territory through command-and-control tactics. Vestiges of this thinking still remain, despite the evidence that consumer-to-brand relationship creation has transformed. In this milieu, too often the disciplines of soul nurturing are circumvented by surface level attempts to bolt on shiny imagery and applied marketing lipstick that glosses over a baked in priority for commerce metrics and transactional behaviors over consumer-relevant strategic thinking.

Building, codifying, prioritizing and delivering on the levers of brand soul are indeed vital and essential to sustainable growth in the modern consumer-powered era. People are far more interested in and attracted to your “why” (values, purpose, beliefs) than either what you do or how you do it — no matter how enamored you may be of your superior product mouse trap.

How a brand’s soul gets buried

As virtually every business category grows and matures, an implicit set of rules and boundaries begin to arise, informed by consumer and retail customer expectations, competitive actions, regulatory requirements and industry standards of conduct. These conditions tend to push all category participants towards the middle resulting in comparable product offerings, features, benefits and pricing. Over time this includes growing similarity in business practices, supply chain standards and even manufacturing processes.

The not-to-be-taken-lightly threat that incubates in this environment is the ceaseless, endless and rust-advancing march of commoditization. The condition that compels category players to emphasize scale over other considerations as they pursue efficiency gains, enforce retail leverage and bolster thinning margins.

Commoditization has already taken root in cell phones, computers, hotels, airlines, cars and many food and beverage categories – and in doing so, opportunities for innovative, soul-inspired disruptors are unleashed to move in and gain marketplace traction.

In sum, over time…

1. Meaningful differentiation can dissipate
2. Marketing leverage based on budget tonnage in spending eventually starts to post diminishing returns
3. Brand soul and purpose recedes into the background amidst commoditization pressures
4. Increasing similarity rules the day among category participants
5. Businesses begin to focus on price promotion to achieve volume goals

Whole Foods was once a champion of purpose and meaning, its business model informed by advancing the organic movement, education around same and the firm belief foods produced this way ultimately contribute to the improved health, wellbeing and happiness of people and the environment. Since its acquisition by Amazon the belief system has receded, and in its place traditional supermarket merchandising mechanisms like PRIME promotions are driving the brand story.

Meaning and values were at one time the insulation and inoculation for Whole Foods’ higher pricing and the value proposition underneath it. Now the banner faces more competition and pricing pressures because the belief system is no longer the tip of the brand spear. Further the adoption of organic brands and sections within mainstream supermarkets serves to commodify the uniqueness of Whole Foods’ differentiation and so the advantages of its original specialness atrophies.

• Soul is the engine that drives brand separation and elevation with consumers who actively pursue and are attracted to deeper meaning and values-leaning strategies.

Symbols can tell the tale

Consumers are remarkably adept at reading the room. We immediately understand the cues, signals, icons and images that explain what and who we’re dealing with, where we are, how to behave and what to expect from a brand.

• What signals is your brand transmitting?
• Are you sending the right message?
• Do your values come through in the symbolism you generously (or not) display through every point of consumer contact?

Brands informed by their soul are always focused on fulfilling consumer need, dreams, expectations, desires and growth. They are also unafraid to express views on societal issues that consumers care about such as sustainability, environmental responsibility and the wellbeing of disadvantaged people.

Soul signals and consumer-centricity

Brand soul and higher purpose tends to fall from a deep understanding and preoccupation with supporting consumers on their life journey. This manifests from genuine care and consideration for their welfare and personal growth while also helping people realize their hopes and dreams.

It is in those dreams and aspirations that we find an emotional anchor for storytelling that moves people to embrace and join your brand ecosystem. Every human, every day wishes for progress and improvement. Are you actively helping them on their journey to grow?

From:

Unhealthy to healthy

Good to great

Weak to strong

Lonely to popular

Confused to wise

Invisible to recognized

Novice to expert

Poor to secure

Plain to fashionable

Make no mistake, to be human is to be emotional. However, brands without a soul-led code of conduct tend to talk endlessly about themselves and product features rather than enablement and celebration of consumer passions. In doing so the brand story is likely to be fact-dense and analytical, despite the reems of research confirming people won’t burn the mental calories to decipher that kind of messaging. People simply are just not fact-based, analytical decision-making machines.

How do you know if you’re succeeding? When consumers can state with clarity what your brand stands for, its meaning and purpose.

A powerful tool at your disposal: surprise and delight

Do the unexpected. In his book Unreasonable Hospitality, restaurateur and author Will Guidara tells the tale of a table of New York City visitors who were overheard saying they were disappointed that the following day they were leaving the city without ever having sampled a hot dog from one of the many carts that line the streets of Manhattan.

Mind you his restaurant, Eleven Madison Park, is one of the finest, most elite culinary palaces in New York. His team sprang into action sending a runner to track down hot dogs at a cart. They were ferried back to the kitchen where the chef arranged an artful hot dog presentation. The diners were blown away that the restaurant would do this without a word ever being spoken to staff about their hot dog curiosity. It was the restaurant’s soulful belief in unreasonable hospitality that brought the surprise to life.

Have you ever been to Harrod’s department store in London? If so, have you shopped in their over-the-top food hall? Harrod’s isn’t a supermarket mind you but thy indeed sell fresh and packaged foods. Their fresh fish displays are legendary for their artistry and creative arrangement of fresh fish choices.

Of course, any grocery store with vision and applied talent could do the same thing, with the goal of making their store talked about and Instagram worthy. Yet nothing of the sort happens past the layers of crushed ice surrounding rows of whatever fish is on feature.

Surprise and delight are a choice. It is a strategy. It recognizes the very human preference for artistry and empathy.  Stores and brands with a clearly curated and developed soul are more likely to find this path and exploit it than those that don’t and who are more comfortable staying within the category accepted norms of behavior.

• When you’re willing to be a disruptive player you have a chance to alter the paradigm of what consumers think you are about and engineer a new and more engaging perception of your brand.

If this article has you thinking about how this could be brought to life in your business, it’s important to note you will need outside experts to help you work through the right mix of tools and messages. Use the link below to start a conversation with our team of brand soul experts.

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Narrowcasting to fans, followers and advocates…

If you look under the hood of a strong brand with a demonstrated higher purpose, belief system and investment in social community building, you will find a percolating audience of consumer ambassadors and believers. A symbiotic relationship exists here as the brand invests in them and they reciprocate with support as frequent users and evangelists often via word-of-mouth. All of this, mind you, can be strategic and intentional, even when the manifestations appear to be organic.

An outcome of the digital age, we find greater efficacy in narrower channels of media that cater to special interests and topics resonating to the hearts and minds of the brand’s most devoted followers. In many cases this also attests to the 80/20 rule: 80 percent of profits come from 20 percent of a brand’s most ardent followers and users. This happens repeatedly.

• So we pose the question: how does this play out in earned media strategy? It’s a fair question because earned media outreach is often devoted to a long-standing tool of the mass media era, the venerable press release, its distribution usually a shotgun affair that goes in every direction.

Narrowcast vs. broadcast

Name the category where strong brands exist and you’ll find media resonant to core lifestyle interests and passions of a brand’s most frequent users. It is here where the truly gifted earned media artists devote time and energy to building relationships with editors and contributors – those who populate these influential media channels with engaging content.

Earned media isn’t transactional, at least not most of the time. The path to outcomes in this setting are negotiated through interaction and conversation between people. The communications experts from the brand side are packaging and presenting relevant story background ideas/material to discuss with reporters whose areas of focus closely matches the topics of interest for a brand’s best users.

The entire proposition is driven by mutual respect, credibility, service to the reader, editorial sensibility and well-researched supporting material, reports and sources who form the alchemy of any solid feature story treatment. The paradigm is fueled through mutual interest and effort over time to build a solid, reliable relationship between source and scribe. It’s definitely not “spray and pray” as press releases can be referred to in wire service distribution terms.

• Our point: there’s more to be gained in narrowcasting earned media strategies to specific channels where special interests are served, and this is territory where media relationships are nurtured over time. Reporters tend to go back to reliable sources.

The ladder: vertical to national

Ask any brand executive and you’ll get feedback that national bluechip media coverage is always a desirable outcome from elite media brands like the New York Times, Bloomberg, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal or network TV news. Vertical media often get the short sheet in this conversation, but they shouldn’t. Category trade media plays a vital, vibrant role not only between a brand and its key stakeholder audiences of distributors and retailers, it’s also a proving ground for larger story ideas.

Trade coverage that touches on a core editorial idea relevant to larger national media is an immediate credibility booster to the story efficacy and dimensions in a non-competitive setting. This comprises a circular editorial eco-system where coverage in trades is useful in conversations with national media. While national coverage tends to drive incremental stories in vertical channels. Both are good, solid, strategic components of a strong earned media plan.

• Both indeed are driven by relationships, creativity and solid performances by brand PR experts who know their results depend on fulfilling the promises in a good working relationship with key editors, reporters and producers.

If this stimulates some questions about optimal editorial media strategies or similar situations you wrestle with, use the link below to open an informal dialogue.

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Don’t play in someone else’s sandbox

What we’re about to discuss here is vital to brand marketing best practices and sustainable business results.

Most of the time brands and businesses focus their marketing on being better than X. When you are better than X your brand identity is linked to a competing brand. This is a trap. Being better is actually worse. Being different is better than better. Why? Because superior products often lose to brands that dare to be different.

When better silently runs the show, your storytelling is always focused on features and benefits. Some may even strive to be the best – which is really “better” dressed in a suit. Example of a “better” expression: “more” is a slippery slope to feature selling. More control. More perks. More of magic ingredient X. You’ll find hidden under every feature benefit message there is a “better” snare.

• It’s a misguided, if all too common, principle that inevitably focuses the conversation on competitive benchmarks and comparisons. It is an endless cycle that leaves real consumer traction and engagement unattended – because the story always makes the brand the hero and not the consumer.

Better brands are never about product features and benefits, and consumers no longer buy them anyway. That’s table stakes. Instead, people are attracted to deeper meaning, aligned values, higher purpose and are magnetically drawn to different. Your brand should offer a point of view, express opinions and bring a vision of the future.

Rule number one: in compelling brand storytelling the consumer must always be the hero of your narrative. Your brand should avoid competing with the consumer for the hero role. Every consumer, every day wakes up believing they are the hero of their life journey. Your brand’s proper messaging role is as coach, guide and empathetic enabler of their journey.

Stronger brands always focus on being unique, not better

Strategic brands say and do things differently

They hew a unique tone

They often carve a controversial path

They see the future through a different lens

They operate with a belief system

The belief is the benefit

Great brands are always founded on beliefs

You may think that users care about better. However, you just haven’t given them something greater to believe in. Shifting the story spotlight takes the glow off of your competitor – who incidentally really doesn’t matter to your future prospects and growth.

It isn’t easy to be different. It takes incredible discipline and the support of your leadership team not to fall back into feature/benefit selling. Strategic strength springs from a well-defined understanding of who you are as a brand and company, and what you want to become over time.

Following the path to different

Here are some examples of how you can embrace different in your strategic game plan.

1. Create a new category

Historically and traditionally skincare and make-up brands conveyed that beauty is always applied. It exists on the exterior as an aspirational expression of status seeking and attraction. More enlightened brands have arrived to flip the script by attaching a broader vision of what beauty is and how it manifests. Instead, real beauty comes from within.

Beauty evolves as a coalescing of better health, fitness, spiritual growth and is inclusive of different body types, ages and lifestyles. The brand voice morphs to focus on wellbeing, happiness and growth rather than the singular application of a product. This different view authors a unique voice that carries added relevance and value to its audience of believers in a more validating life view.

Category creation is the ultimate move to inject different into brand strategy and positioning.

2. Move from product utility to lifestyle association

All too often product communication is devoted to specific technologies, formulation superiority and benefits of same. The product and brand are always the authoritative voice. Instead, moving to a lifestyle brand strategy enables personal authority. Great lifestyle brands insert themselves into important moments and experiences sought after by users. These are often situations and memories that echo the brand’s deep belief system – it’s “why” rather than what or how.

Yeti is an iconic example of a brand enrobing itself in a cloak of lifestyle experiences that celebrate outdoor adventures and enable the freedom of the soul in nature. Yeti is not selling coolers and tumblers. It’s singular devotion to breathing life into the emotional experiences of lifestyle association endears itself to its audience of evangelists and ambassadors. Yeti’s deeper meaning separates and elevates it from other brands who offer similar products.

3. Change the story focus

Most brands talk up themselves incessantly. It’s always about who we are and what we do. There is self-reverence and promotion. All about me. Instead of revealing yourself to the customer, how about revealing the customer to themselves. Stop expressing who you are and start talking about the customer – their aspirations, interests and needs.

Most hotel brands focus on their properties to extol design, amenities, services, architecture and location. Here are our features. Frankly the entire conversation is nearly generic brand to brand and separated mostly by price class.

Along comes Airbnb to completely violate the rules and tropes of travel brand communication. Rather than say look at who we are, they flip the lens around to say I see who you are. It comes from a different view of what travel is and how it can be experienced. Belong Anywhere is a unique concept that makes the customer and user experience paramount. The brand becomes an enabler of a unique experience – a coach and guide on a different and more human way to experience travel and destinations.

4. Change the reality

Disruption can be a useful tool when it reorients what people take for granted. The goal is to help people find and accept a new reality. Everything we thought we knew about __________ is wrong. This is how to do it (understand it) right.

The emergence of sustainability strategies and a new understanding of the role our food system plays in climate change is a reality-changing condition. Most people don’t think of food as a contributor to global warming. A brand that steps fully into conscious consumption and the commitment to improving sustainability bona fides creates a game changing story for consumers – and potentially a transformational view of how food should be created.

Similarly, what we think we know about health, wellness and aging is ripe for a makeover. Creating a new reality is a road to difference, uniqueness and sought-after guidance. The new paradigm of belief positions your brand as arbiter of a new way of thinking, doing and believing.

Different is the Holy Grail, let’s look for it!

It is time to back away from being better or best to refocus your marketing and messaging energy on radical differentiation. Best practices in this area inevitably leads to refinement of brand belief systems and adding deeper meaning to who and what you are as a brand and business. Collectively, if you can do it and stick to it, your brand will benefit from a new era of transcendence and value to users who come to you for better and more lasting reasons than a product feature.

If this discussion stirs some thinking and questions in your mind, and you’d like to get those ideas on the table to ponder with some like-minded thinkers, let us know. We’d love to think with you about how this thinking can be applied to your brand and business. Here’s a link to start an informal conversation.

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Doing business in the era of higher purpose and beliefs

As a brand builder focused on burnishing your organization’s most vital asset, your business goal isn’t to convince and persuade customers to buy. Consumers, weary of persuasion tactics and overt brand promotion, quickly dismiss those efforts with a simple click. To pass through the gatekeeping gauntlet, brands need to understand what consumers really want from you – and it’s not more of the same. Rather, your brand marketing goal is to inspire. You might agree motivating people isn’t easy. Thus, why you can’t build a community of committed users and devout brand evangelists by promoting improved formulations and recipes.

Yet so often we find brands preoccupied with their slightly better product mousetrap, thinking enhanced features and benefits comprise the alluring magnet to fuel growth. Not so. Instead, you are navigating in a mental and emotional ocean between the rational and the heart.

Giving people a sense of purpose, deeper meaning and belonging lie at the foundation of every sustainable brand-to-consumer relationship.

The incredible power of “why”

In the early editions of The Fast and The Furious movie franchise we witnessed the recurring testosterone-amped challenges of street racing. Inevitably, as our hero races neck and neck towards the finish line, a canister is activated next to the console that injects Nitrous Oxide into the engine. Boom, an incredible burst of horsepower slingshots our intrepid protagonist across the finish line, literally blowing the competition away.

The NOS (Nitrous Oxide System) is a secret acceleration amplifier that supercharges engine output, thus burying the other racers in a cloud of oxygenated dust. Today similar competitive advantage exists for brands that tune their value proposition with an advanced power generator of relevance and resonance. The NOS of brand marketing is a different kind of “air and fuel” chemistry, founded on an emotional alchemy of mission, meaning and values.

Just like engines of a certain size generate similar levels of horsepower, food and beverage brands focused on claims of superior taste cancel each other out because great taste is table stakes. On a technical formulation level, products in most categories are nearly identical. Competitive advantage based on assertions of technical wizardry isn’t sustainable because everyone brandishes the same wand. Literally everything we eat or drink can be reverse engineered to deliver comparable taste and texture performance.

“Why” is the catalyst for authentic relationships with your users

Here’s the news: the consumers’ worldview has changed – and relating to a brand is now fundamentally the same thing as relating to a person. When you refine and invest in brand purpose and mission, it creates an opportunity to achieve transcendence – the state of being admired – where consumers “join” your brand as members, not merely customers.

Meaning, in order to secure significant financial premiums, sustainable brand relationships must be built first on their admiration and trust of your brand. As evidence of the shift, brand advocacy is now a more important and relevant goal than loyalty.

Of note, this representation of goodwill can be isolated as a component of business value. It can result in higher margins or traffic. Moreover, deeper relationships with consumers will ultimately help reduce the cost of promotion, improving ROI and bottom-line performance. This happens because you are no longer relying on a constant (expensive) drumbeat of self-promotion to refire fleeting, fickle attention spans.

Businesses built on “why” understand that brand relationships work best on the basis of true, authentic reciprocity and humanity. Consequently, they are not superficial, opportunistic or purely transactional. In order to mine the advantages of sustainable brand relationships, marketers have a responsibility to push added meaning, trust and belief to the forefront of the relationship. This insight forms the basis for sound strategic planning.

• Consumers expect premium food and beverage solutions to meet their great taste requirement. Competitive marketplace leverage isn’t found on the factory floor. It is discovered in the hearts and minds of consumers who now care more about why you do what you do than either what you offer or even how it is made.

Mining the influence of cultural shift

Operating in tandem with a refined value and belief system is the wider influence of cultural shifts on preference and behavior.

Purchases today are largely symbolic gestures. They are flags consumers wave to inform the world around them about their lifestyle priorities – an expression of who they are that is in many ways a mirror of the cultural context swirling around them. For consideration: to what extent have you embedded symbolism and flags of meaning in how your brand story is packaged and presented to help consumers signal those values-based belief statements through purchasing your products?

Larger issues now influence food culture precipitating changes in what consumers are looking for in brands. The store checkout lane today has evolved into a form of voting booth where consumers cast their ballot in favor of a better life and world.

What do they want? Are we helping them with what they want?

More sustainable choices:

One of the most powerful cultural influences of the era we live in is the emergence of conscious consumption – a realization that our eating and purchasing decisions have a consequence. People are learning about the relationship between food production and carbon emissions impact.

• Climate change is upon us and with it comes a sensitivity to what goes on behind the curtain of our carbon-heavy food system.

Recently in Chicago, for five straight days a grey haze and smoky odor blanketed the city, sending air quality to “worst in the world” status – all due to Canadian wildfire smoke that traveled south and wouldn’t dissipate. Wildfires are occurring at record breaking levels now. These global climate events are a recurring theme.

People were advised to stay indoors. To avoid breathing the outside air given its hazardous particulate content. Meanwhile unrelenting heat waves in the south impact farm and crop viability while helping sponsor conditions that encourage deadly tornados. All of this serves as real-world evidence to everyone that climate change impacts are among us.

The outcomes of these environmental incidents and increasingly erratic (dangerous) temp and weather conditions is a cultural shift towards preference for eco-responsible and sustainable choice, although in many cases brands haven’t made it any easier to identify what is a credible carbon-friendly option.

Health, wellness and a desire to reassert personal control:

Latent pessimism reinforced by daily media reporting has most people believing the future is less certain and that conditions beyond their control may impact future quality of life. Humans resolutely look for ways to add control when everything around them appears chaotic. This has served to amp the importance of investments in personal health and wellness. This is a move to create physical (and emotional) resilience in the midst of events that suggest the environment is suffering at the hands of policies and behaviors which inflict various forms of climate damage.

No longer just a weight management motivation, healthy living is a lifestyle and “survival” choice that helps people reacquire a sense of control over their wellbeing. Gym visits, the explosion of Pilates classes, cycling exercise studios and online therapists. Similar to how consumers increasingly see the connection between food choice and sustainability, efforts to improve personal and mental health are cultural mandates increasingly embraced by a wider swath of the population.

Experiences over consumption for its own sake:

Culinary and environmental tourism, chef-inspired food and wine events, even dangerous expeditions to the deep ocean floor, serve as reminders that experiences offer a form of expectation magic that has surpassed the former thrill of the consumption economy.

We have managed to pack and stack storage facilities with the worn-out treasures of “buying stuff” – evidence that years of acquiring has left families with mountains of extra clothes, furniture, equipment and credit card debt. “Things” as evidence of elevated status and success no longer hold the same allure.  We have exhausted materialism and replaced the void with interests in adventures that reward our emotional desire for transcendent and novel experience.

Modern brands as coach, guide, advisor and enabler

All of these evolutionary changes in behaviors and desire provide one of the most positive, significant and vital opportunities for brands to acquire a valuable role in their consumers’ lives. Your brand’s number one job is to help your users on their life journey. To provide value that extends beyond the utility of the product you sell.

• How incredible is it that consumers have arrived at a place where advice and guidance are key to achieving their goals. Can we help provide it? Can we step into the breach to be an enabler of their wishes and interests? Can we impart wisdom and tools they can use to improve their lives?

Yes we can! If we finally decide that improved relationships are key to business growth more so than product feature/benefit selling. This is the challenge of the age and one, if you choose to accept it, that can result in a deeper relationship with your users founded on delivering deeper meaning and value.

• Here is a link to our one-page overview of these shifts and changes. Please take a moment to click the link to read. It may serve as inspiration for a deeper conversation with us about ways to map an improved future for your brand and business.

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