Planning shifts to a set of consumer-savvy principles

During the old command, control and persuasion era of brand building, the common ground for planning coalesced around the legacy 5 P’s of marketing: product, price, promotion, place and people. Brands took charge of their destiny and managed their future progress mostly with increased advertising spending.

Now, things have dramatically changed.  Technology has:

• Shifted control of brand engagement to consumers
• Massively disrupted and reshaped food culture and preferences
• Knocked down the barriers to entry for new food and beverage ideas
• Enabled these ideas to rapidly find a market and scale
• Allowed the small and artisanal to gain traction, and redefine what quality expectation is
• Empowered people to share experiences and influence the trajectory of business
• Changed the face of brand communication, now about relevance and deeper meaning
• Exposed the inauthentic and triggered the move to greater transparency
• Informed the growth of online communities and the role of credible influence to build trust

Perhaps the most salient example of transformation yet is the landmark 2017 Deloitte and FMI study revealing the disruption of the old taste, price and convenience purchase behavior yardsticks for food and beverage products. These legacy drivers are now eclipsed by a new set of criteria including health and wellness, transparency, visibility to the supply chain and food safety.

The primary conclusion from all of this – is the rise of consumer-centric planning based on recognition that future growth is shaped by a brand’s ability to create and hold alignment with the needs, interests, desires and concerns of their core users. For the most part, the original 5 P’s were inwardly focused on the company’s products and self-directed decisions. Now the move to consumer control requires a more enlightened view of strategic plans founded on up-close customer insight.

Here are the new 5 P’s of marketing planning:

Engagement has moved beyond the product to include other important areas of value and meaning to people.

1. Purpose

Purchases are now symbolic of what consumers want the world to believe they think is important. Thus shared values have surfaced as a core tenet in brand preference and the consumer’s willingness to engage rather than avoid marketing outreach. Purpose isn’t philanthropy. Consumers want to attach themselves to brands that carry deeper meaning and intentionally build their business around a higher purpose that rises above transactions – focused on authentically improving the consumer’s life and the world around us.

2. Pride

People want to be inspired by use of the brand. Purchases are not secured through analytical arguments and fact-based selling of yore. Today’ consumers arrive at their decisions from the heart not the head, based on a feeling they have in the presence of the brand. Inspiration, aspiration, desire, impact and purpose form the recipe for baking the emotional attachment people have with the brands that matter to them.

3. Partnership

If brands now exist to improve the lives of their users and become an enabler of their aspirations, then this less self-centered approach automatically requires a measure of authentic partnership between the players. How do genuine partners operate? Reciprocity today is an important component in how brands and consumers interact with each other. As a true lifestyle partner, brands can operate as coaches and guides on the path to a healthier, happier life that people aspire to lead.

4. Protection

Brand relationships must be built on a foundation of belief and trust. These qualities now are earned through experience and verified by sources and voices people trust. Consumers want to feel secure in the knowledge that favored brands will always have their best interests and safety at heart, and will not put them at risk either through degradations of standards or processes that put the company’s self-interest above their own.

5. Personalization

We are awash in data about the preferences and interests of users. Brands know more about consumer preference than ever before, ushering in a new era of customization. Product offers can be tailored to the consumer’s specific needs and interests. How this condition manifests will be a key component in strategic planning in the years ahead. People will come to expect that brands understand who they are, what they care about and will deliver products that meet those needs.

Bernadette Jiwa, one of our most literate and erudite marketing minds, has an uncanny ability to distill transformative change into its most fundamental elements. Here’s how she recently expressed the relationship between brands and consumers:

“Most marketing makes the company the hero.

Most companies go to great lengths to prove that their product is better.

Most marketers’ main aim is to close the sale.

The most effective marketing makes the customer the hero.

Beloved brands show people who they can become in the presence of their product. 

The best marketers give people something to believe in, not just something to buy.”

Increasingly brand relationships are taking on the characteristics of human friendships where honesty, openness and trust are paramount. The great news in all of this is the potential reward of curating tribes of believers who “join” the brand not as buyers but as fans and followers.

Most exciting is the depth and breadth of “voice” brands can earn by moving from source of product to resource and partner. We’re no longer dependent on the artifice of paid cinematic style advertainment to encounter, inform and converse with our best customers. Instead, we now have the freedom to engage with them genuinely…authentically…you know, like people.

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Bridging the divide during historic change in food and beverage…

When we launched Emergent, it was based on an overwhelming body of research and marketplace evidence that food and beverage brands are in a state of transformation and thus, in need of new, fresh, refined and more relevant business-building solutions.

Of all the issues creating change, from the demand for transparency and clean labels and fresh foods — healthier lifestyle is the dominant driver that is impacting the consumer’s desire for improvement in the food and beverages they prefer.

Cultural shift makes healthier all-inclusive

Historically, the food industry’s approach to ‘healthier’ was an addition-by-subtraction model based on removing so-called bad ingredients like sugar, calories, sodium and fat; AKA the ‘diet foods’ business. For consumers, though, this often meant sacrificing taste and eating satisfaction. Which they did. For years. This was bound to be problematic because it existed in conflict with the embedded human desire for great taste and indulgent food experiences. Guilt only goes so far.

However, pervasive changes in global food culture caused the concept of healthier to shift. The good-for-you proposition began to look more like addition by addition. Healthy was restaged to focus on real, fresh, authentic, higher quality, less processed foods – more so than food science wizardry. Healthy became inclusive, lifestyle oriented and user friendly.

• The root cause of change: consumers connected the dots between the quality of what they put in their bodies, with how that fuels what they’re able to do, and hence, their ultimate happiness and wellness.

As consumers became more engaged in higher quality food choices, it resulted in the widespread premiumization of many food and beverage categories. At the same time, media consumption habits shifted to social and digital channels controlled by consumers rather than brands.

We believe an agency devoted to mining this insight and bringing fresh thinking to the table is needed to offer meaningful guidance in the midst of this sea change.

New implications to the food system are reshuffling the industry:

• Large cap CPG brands have experienced share and volume declines in core legacy categories. Consumers are moving away from anything perceived as highly processed or made from ingredients they don’t understand.
• New emerging brands built on higher quality, fresh and real food ingredient solutions have grabbed the spotlight to reinvent everything from frozen meals to grain-based snacks.
• Food retail shopping behaviors have shown a significant shift to the perimeter of the store as consumers increasingly look for fresh, real food products over center store packaged options. They’re also increasingly shopping more frequently for meal solutions over pantry stock-ups.
• Meal kit solutions have taken share in food, by virtue of offering menu solutions derived from high quality fresh ingredients, married to easy preparation steps. Convenience meets culinary inspiration and taste satisfaction.

Time for transformation

We know that new, emerging, purposeful brands are gaining traction and attention in kitchens across America. So we visibly witness the dawn of a true food renaissance taking place around us.

1. People are coming back to the kitchen, looking to exercise their creativity and control over preparations, freshness and quality of ingredients.
2. We’ve entered a period where transparency, health and wellness, safety and authenticity drive purchases more so than the legacy stalwarts of price and convenience.
3. We know the founder’s backstory and commitment to a real mission beyond the product itself is a critical component of the new brand marketing playbook.

We‘ve operationalized our understanding of what these changes mean and how to create traction in a fast-changing business environment.

Emergent’s value proposition

We’ve developed a proprietary planning model that reflects this understanding; one that demands a new approach to how brand relationships with consumers are formed, and thus, how effective brand communications should be created.

• We are experts in this space; our services are aligned with answering these challenges.
• We help legacy brands challenge conventional strategies and re-stage to optimize today’s conditions and help new brands accelerate their growth. We understand the consumer and how they think, how they behave and how they consume information.

If your marketing communications plans look exactly the same as last year’s, the time may be right for fresh thinking. We exist to help brands and businesses navigate and grow in the midst of transformative changes in purchase behavior. We can help you take the leap to increased relevance and alignment with this new marketing paradigm.

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Big ideas spring from living the “garage” experience…

Secrets to innovation lie in aspiration combined with consumer empathy!

By Bob Wheatley

You’ve heard the stories: Google, Apple, H-P and other silicon icons and business category disruptors all started in a garage. So will the NEXT great leap — perhaps the ability to teleport yourself anywhere instantly, solve America’s obesity crisis or build engines that run on oxygen — be birthed and incubated in a garage? That’s apparently where innovation and the next generation’s leading transformational brainstorm and company will be invented, right?

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Navigating the sea change in consumer preferences

Company behavior builds or detracts from the story you need to tell

By Bob Wheatley

Today we hear again at Food Navigator that legacy soft drink businesses are in decline. A cultural shift has already occurred and it is changing how the game is played for growth. Either you are authentically “in league” with the consumer’s passion for healthy living and their need for control in their lives around it, or you risk outright rejection despite whatever equity you believe has been retained and accumulated over time.

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Welcome to a new feature at the What’s Good For You, America blog – a recurring column that will give you an inside look at the key players, opinions, views and news of what’s going on at Emergent. A Peek in the Conference Room begins with a story about change — specifically the challenges of making a meaningful transformation, and thoughts from two of Emergent’s Healthy Living Advisors team.

Frankly, there are a million reasons not to.  “The System’s too large.  Our tastes are too iconic. We’ll never get consensus internally.  And even if we did, the business pressures just won’t allow this kind of transition.  Or investment.  Or training.  Or headcount…”

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