Our strategic roadmap for the year ahead…

Today we map the framework for business growth in 2019 anchored strategically to achieve trusted consumer relationships in the year ahead. As we begin this journey, it is important to note the incredibly important work by the Food Marketing Institute compiled in the “Power of Health and Wellbeing in Food Retail” report. In our estimation one of the best analyses FMI has produced in recent times.

This is a forward-thinking review created under the experienced leadership of Susan Borra of the FMI Foundation, and executed with persuasive evidence by David Orgel of David Orgel Consulting, and key data supplied by The Hartman Group. It is also a remarkable summation of what Emergent has been forecasting and publishing in various venues for the last five years about evolutionary changes in the food and beverage industry.

• What’s ahead is a deeper dive on the strategic priorities, areas of focus for planning, and a healthy helping of relevant consumer insight data.

Thus it is job number one at Emergent: to earnestly pursue insight into the hearts and minds of consumers – their wants, wishes, dreams, aspirations, fears and concerns. It is in this effort to get ‘underneath’ that we more fully grasp how consumer relevance and engagement can be achieved. Make no mistake, it’s more difficult to be seen and heard than at any other time in modern marketing history because the consumer controls the levers of commerce – and talking ‘at them’ is a recipe for disconnect. Thus why relevance matters greatly.

Dear reader, here we will summarize the most important and salient points and data that should be reflected in go-to-market planning for the year ahead. Simply said, this is a great way to kick off the year – offering firm, insight driven strategic guidance on what matters to people and its influential link to their purchase and shopping behaviors.

Armed with this understanding, the path to trust and relationship becomes clearer. As we’ve said many times before, genuine relationship is everything. Consumers are not walking wallets; they are real, living constituents – and to the extent businesses can make a meaningful difference in their lives, the opportunity to earn affection and spending multiplies.

• Without consumer relevance and resonance, food and beverage brands cannot gain the ear and interest of consumers who have more quality choices, more channel options, more control and power than ever before – power that will quickly mark the winners and losers in the next 12 months and beyond.

The number one opportunity for brand and food retail resonance and business traction: leveraging Health, Wellness and Wellbeing.

Consumers across all age cohorts have fully connected the dots between the quality and types of food and beverage they consume and their overall quality of life. For this reason, the very definition of health and wellbeing has expanded to include a broader array of key lifestyle attributes consumers care about such as emotional health and happiness.

Whereas “healthy” was once more narrowly defined as weight management and calories in and out, today it is about food quality and the origin story behind the food. This interest is fueled by consumer demand for transparency as a new prerequisite for creating lasting, meaningful relationships with the consumers we wish to serve.

Yes that’s serve, and not sell! Transactional thinking can infect the marketing playbook with ill-advised strategies and foster brand behaviors the consumer immediately repels as advancing the company’s commercial interests over their own; selling at them rather than cultivating their trust which precedes any willingness to spend money.

2019 Strategic Building Blocks

Five key areas demand attention in strategic planning. This list provides the basis for a holistic strategy that reflects what consumers truly care about. It goes without saying these five areas allow for a wealth of engagement from content creation to communication activities. Here they are:

1. Health – Number one is the growing influence of healthier eating on brand choice. Healthy, by the way, is increasingly a quality story not a sacrifice game. Healthy and indulgent are cohabitating.
2. Nutrition – Consumers are now looking at nutrition density in the foods and beverages they prefer. This tracks closely with the table stakes demand for greater transparency around product ingredients, sourcing and manufacturing. What was once described as a clean label is transforming into clear This is marked by disclosure, clarity, openness, honesty and more guidance not less.
3. Enjoyment – Taste is fundamental to the human experience. Higher quality food experiences can be found everywhere and the use of fresher, real food ingredients is elevating the taste experiences people crave. Food is to be savored and enjoyed. It is an adventure. There’s a hedonist lurking in everyone in varying degrees.
4. Discovery – Meal kits might offer an excellent example of how the food industry feeds low-risk culinary experimentation. The growth of new cuisines, tastes, global flavors and use of more exotic ingredients serve to expand the horizons of what consumers want and expect. We all want more choices than meatloaf and fried chicken at the Deli counter.
5. Connection – Food is a social lubricant. It is a facilitator and player in how we relate to and engage our friends, family and business associates. No surprise here that according to the FMI report, 84% of consumers say it is very or extremely important to have a family meal together at home. People hunger for the connectivity and social discourse around the table. Food is an essential player in our social lives. Great food and great conversation are partners in life’s most memorable moments.

Two Key Strategic Trends in 2019

We stand today at the threshold of a new developing category in food and food retail. Early movers in this space stand to benefit from ‘first with the most’ opportunities that fall from being able to define what this new category is about and what constitutes best practices.

1. Food As Medicine

This is an evolution and elevation of food and beverage solutions – products that aim to provide direct, measurable benefits to health and wellbeing. We’re not speaking just about weight management, although that is a component. We’re talking about food solutions that are an alternative to drug therapies or as preventatives to needing drug therapies.

In case after case we find that diet plays a role in the onset of disease. So, too, we’re discovering that foods high in fiber, plant sterols, Omega-3s, antioxidants, prebiotic and probiotic ingredients can be ‘dosed’ to achieve specific health benefits – without the often debilitating, unhappy side effects that can accompany medications.

Step One Foods in Minneapolis (disclosure: Step One is an Emergent client) is an excellent example of this emerging trend. Step One’s line of packaged foods including bars, smoothie and pancake mixes, oatmeal cereal and toppers are clinically proven to reduce LDL cholesterol at levels that match or exceed the outcomes from statin drugs.

It’s important to note from FMI’s report that 66% of shoppers already view foods as “medicine for their body.” When asked about food as a contributor to their health, the top five interests in solutions include:

• Cardio-vascular health – not surprising as heart disease is the number one killer in America, and effective options like Step One speak directly to this need.
• Weight management – a perennial concern, weight management remains connected to healthy lifestyle and a sense of wellness and wellbeing.
• Energy – the link between energy and lifestyle satisfaction is palpable. Busy lifestyles and career demands make energy an important priority for people.
• Brain function – memory and cognition are two areas we can expect more innovations to surface in as people increasingly look for a mental edge.
• Digestive health – we are only beginning to see the growth in attention paid to inflammation and its role in aging and disease. This will continue to get greater innovation priority.

2. Mining competitive advantage: Fusion of Transparency and Trust

Earning trust may be the single most important objective in the development of sound, successful marketing plans. This is due in no small part to its pivotal role in securing consumer interest and engagement and the avalanche of evidence that brand trust continues to decline.

Trust precedes any kind of brand/consumer relationship. Demand for transparency is the ante in curating trust. Consumers define transparency as “open, honest, clear and visible.” In short being transparent, providing access and more information about how food and beverages are made and what’s in them.

FMI’s report cited five key areas where consumers are looking for greater disclosure:

• Ingredients used
• Origin of ingredients
• Product creation process
• Animal welfare
• Absence of anything artificial like preservatives or chemicals

Emergent guidance: build a suite of communications and content around how you make your products, the stories of suppliers and their work, what happens at your plant, what your standards are on quality, safety and sustainability.

It’s interesting to note, when consumers were asked who their allies are in the quest for healthy living and helpful advice, the top five sources were:

1. Family
2. Doctor
3. Farmers – take note!
4. Friends
5. Fitness and health clubs

According to FMI’s report, when it comes to the most respected and trusted voices for guidance on healthy living, those sources include:

• Registered dietitians
• Personal healthcare providers
• Wellness counselors
• Scientific studies
• Fitness professionals

Emergent guidance: this insight suggests the efficacy of consumer-generated content, investment in social communities and relevant content, and use of respected third parties to validate what food brands want consumers to know and believe.

Food Retail Opportunities

There will be more competitive shifts and changes for food retail in the year ahead. So how does this play out as retailers seek to re-invent themselves?

In Hartman Group’s “Food Shopping in America” Report, a consumer survey of retail channel preferences showed supermarkets scored well on assortment, products consumers want and preferred brands. But indexed lower than other channels of retail on a good place to browse and shopping enjoyment.

As center store continues to be dis-intermediated by e-commerce, competitive advantage is shifting to favor specialization and in-store experience. FMI’s report lands on two key areas of opportunity that point the way for food retails to enhance relevance and increase traction with shoppers.

The Healthy Living Coach…

Food retail has an important opportunity to answer the consumer’s desire for healthy lifestyle by assuming a stronger role in an area shoppers already think retailers can fill.

Consumers believe food retailers are a potential ally and guide on their journey to a healthier, higher quality life. The retailer can operate as coach through access to expert voices, better and healthier food solutions and providing in-store experiences or classes on healthier cooking and shopping techniques.

Nearly 50% of consumers, according to FMI’s report, say providing healthier food choices is a way to support ‘Eating Well’ which contributes to ‘Living Well.’ When asked what the components of Eating Well include, consumers saw this as an integration of healthy eating and enjoyment.

Specifically, retailers can offer:

• Nutritious food and beverages
• Higher quality foods
• Portion control – eating in moderation
• Foods with specific benefits (food as medicine)

But perhaps the most important business growth opportunity for 2019 lies in the resurgence of home cooking. According to Hartman Group survey data, 88% of consumers say they eat healthier at home than at restaurants. Home-prepared food carries with it a healthy halo. Knowing how important eating with family at home is to consumers, retailers can answer this call with greater investment in prepared food options from complete menus to meal kits and other prepped ingredients.

What’s important to note here is the enhanced demand for better quality food, unique meal experiences and culinary exploration. Thus retailers need to up there hot bar game from ribs and rotisserie chicken to more interesting, chef forward dishes.

In sum, it’s about activating wellness solutions from produce, to center store to foodservice. Putting adventure and discovery back into food shopping will go a long way to creating advantage and loyalty even as consumers move increasingly to online shopping for everything else.

We have another post coming on omni-channel strategies. Stay tuned…

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Food and beverage brands must move to new story…

Growing consumer concerns over health and wellness.

Evolving expectations around higher product quality.

Emerging calls for greater transparency and truth in labeling.

General cynicism toward marketing that sells ‘at them’.

In study after study consumers continue to show their lack of trust while demanding more honesty from brands vying for their spending — with rewards going to those brands that ‘get them’.

Some marketers have attempted to force-fit traditional claim and assertion style marketing tactics into digital platforms but with little success. To consumers, it still smells like conventional spin so they work to avoid it entirely.

Other marketers have smartly moved their strategic game plan to focus on building more respectful consumer relationships around alignment with lifestyle interests and aspirations.

• Yet new information and insight now coming to light suggests, while lifestyle connections remain important, there’s a new sheriff in town governing what breaks through the clutter to secure brand consideration and selection.

In many respects, this revelation makes absolute sense based on our deeper understanding of consumer skepticism and absence of trust combined with their desire for honesty, authenticity and expressions of a true soul coming from brands and businesses they choose to favor.

Seekers of truth and understanding

We’ve come to a place where marketers recognize consumer interests more fully, texturally, as they evaluate new and emerging food brands with a merit-based system. It’s important to note here first, the fundamental requirement for business growth in any category requires an unshakeable bedrock of clear brand differentiation.

Around the unwavering consumer call for standout uniqueness is an equally strong desire for better products that are also better-for-you, and culturally connected to relevant social issues such as sustainable farming, green environmentally-friendly operations and animal welfare. 

The new secret sauce for accelerating food brand growth

In a recent Premium Marketing Strategy report by food industry trend expert The Hartman Group, a survey question was posed: what kind of narrative would likely cause you to select a new premium brand?

The answer wasn’t about better price or taste. Rather, consumers wanted to know more about how the product was made. Followed in close order by a related topic – the source of ingredients used to make the product; in sum, the product creation story.

So what does this mean?

It’s a gigantic red, neon flag waving three feet in front of every marketer. Consumers want to assess the merits of the food or beverage based on how and who created it.

Contained in the details of this product creation backstory is the necessary evidence of quality, healthfulness, and connection to culturally relevant practices and beliefs. Rather than accept assertions on face value, consumers want to peer under the hood, and in doing so, narrow the chance of being influenced by proverbial brand apple-polishing.

• It’s one thing to claim better-for-you, and it’s entirely another to reveal ingredients, processes, methods and sources that authentically demonstrate healthy and higher quality.

How to be the credible brand storyteller – Show Me!

So you sell hamburgers… where did the beef come from, who raised the cattle and how were they fed and cared for? About the bun and vegetables used, same need. What are your standards of quality and what about the relationships with your suppliers; their carbon footprints? How is the hamburger prepared, what evidence can be provided about food safety, ingredient integrity and freshness?

No matter the category, there’s a transparency story underneath about how you make things, how you source ingredients and what goes on in your kitchens.

This is the information that forms the basis of earning brand trust and evaluation of the brand’s relevance to consumer beliefs and cultural affiliations. Said another way, the product creation story isn’t a nice to do, rather it’s a must do in getting to active consideration.

Worried that this kind of information demand will be difficult due to weaknesses in your creation story? Then, you have a mandate to make improvements. It may be time to recognize that new premium food solutions are growing while many legacy brand businesses are losing share of heart and sales.

The strategic recipe

Armed with this consumer insight, the food and beverage path to marketing best practices begins with creating an inventory of competitively strong product attributes. These attributes will inform the rationale for how the product will credibly deliver on its key benefits.

1. Important to note this should be cast as unique attributes that help elevate and separate the product from competing brands, and that make the product better at delivering its promised benefits.
2. Competitively significant attributes are then integrated in storytelling about product creation and ingredient sourcing.
3. This means elevated, premium production and sourcing criteria outweigh benefits in the hierarchy of successful brand outreach strategies. Thus, it’s important to cite value-added attributes not offered by legacy brands.

As the decline in consumer trust continues to chip away at the authority curve for brands, what moves in to fill the vacuum left when assertions and claims don’t resonate? A new era of food and beverage marketing opens based on a real-world reality-check about what’s inside the product.

Tangible, visible evidence of quality now passes assertions of quality in effectively reaching consumers with the motivating message. What the consumer is really saying: Show Me!

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Are you aligned on the pathway to true relevance?

What is the most powerful and pervasive condition impacting consumer product category growth across the lifestyle continuum? Effectively answering the consumer’s desire for a healthier lifestyle. This is the driving force that sits underneath Emergent’s agency value proposition and the work we do for our clients.

At the foundation of this transformational shift is an over-arching interest in a higher-quality life. Consumers believe their decisions and actions in this arena will impact personal happiness, safety and wellness.

Healthy living knocks at the front door of relevance to consumer wants and desires. It is a mindful choice made by increasingly mindful consumers across all age cohorts. Nowhere can this be seen in greater relief than food and beverage choices which have morphed in recent years from taste, price and convenience purchase drivers to a more enlightened set of criteria that pays homage to the healthy lifestyle priority.

Transparency, supply chain visibility, clean labels, ingredient quality, fresh and real food preferences are all evidence of momentum behind the consumer’s growing self-awareness. They are in charge of their lives, in control of brand relationships and thus able to exercise choice to reward those brands that are aligned with their personal interests, beliefs and needs.

• Simply stated, consumers believe that the quality of what they consume impacts the quality of their lives. What people choose to eat manifests in their daily lives as a contribution to health, wellness, career performance, happiness, satisfaction and the ability to achieve life goals.

This is no longer a tertiary issue or a sub-segment of the larger consumer population. It is a swollen river of preference that is washing away the less relevant while rewarding the brands that mirror consumer lifestyle requirements.

How did we get here?

We can trace the origins of this shift back to the early 1990’s when the organic foods market was still emerging, and consumers started to pay attention to a new voice on how food is produced and what the differences are between factory made and farm fresh options. This became transformational when the rBST debate took hold and the organic milk business started to skyrocket as serving organic milk to children became a marker of good parenting skills.

Concurrently, the explosion of digital communication created a shift in the balance of power where anything that can be known will be known, and with it a cultural change. Now consumers want to be informed on where food comes from, how products are produced, thus enhancing the value proposition for higher quality real and fresh foods vs. packaged and highly processed legacy brand mainstays.

You are what you eat

The relationship between what people put in their bodies and how it affects health and wellness goals changed from addition by subtraction – the scientific removal of fat, sugar, sodium and the like, to a different picture of addition by addition.

People now perceive the quality of the food they eat or drink is related to the quality of their lives. This cultural swing resulted in a sea change at food retail, with center store packaged food businesses facing headwinds in share losses and volume declines. Meanwhile, the perimeter departments selling fresh and reimagined, more transparent and relevant versions of packaged stalwarts have skyrocketed.

• Equity investment in the food space has plunged into the abyss in efforts to help scale the myriad of new, nascent food brands coming to market with quality elevations in virtually every category with a growth pulse.

Meanwhile, home cooking is experiencing a renaissance as consumers shop fresh ingredients and menus that require preparation; looking to feed their appetite for new flavor adventures. Convenience in this new world order translates to enhanced Deli menus and fresh solutions at supermarkets, and the emergence of meal kits to help curate the dinner need with prepped high-quality ingredients and tantalizing recipes.

Relevance and the future of food and beverage marketing

What does it all mean? This is what keeps the C-suite leadership teams in CPG food and beverage companies and food retailers up at night. What was once a brand controlled state in the marketplace, where heavy media spending could spell the difference in achieving quarterly results, has fallen away as consumers own and operate the levers of commerce.

Consumer control requires deft and agile moves by brands to align themselves with their desires, interests and lifestyle goals. The more powerful path in marketing is no longer lined with assertions of product features and benefits. Now the momentum belongs to brands that truly try to help and enable what their users dream to accomplish.

Marketing today is a reciprocity construct where brands earn permission for a relationship by thinking past their own product and trying to make a clear difference in their customers’ lives – be that by activating their creative aspirations in the kitchen, the social experiences around the table, or serving as a functional contributor on their path to healthy living.

Emergent as arbiter of insight and translation to strategy, better communication

This, ladies and gentlemen, is what we do at Emergent. We’ve been ahead of the trend even before healthy lifestyle became a ‘thing’ and remain a voice in the industry on this evolving landscape upheaval.

Our value proposition is bound to the insights we own on consumer interests, needs and the new marketing toolkit required to successfully leverage that understanding for business growth.

By virtue of that, Emergent is purposefully a hybrid of strategic guidance tied to creative communications, smothered in a secret sauce of consumer insight that helps inform our thinking, messaging and go-to-market ideas.

Whether you are a food retailer trying to evolve as conditions around you in e-commerce and consumer preference change, or a food and beverage brand, large or small, trying to optimize and scale the business you’re creating; we can help optimize your core proposition and add value to your efforts to gain the ear of elusive and hard-to-reach consumers.

How can we be helpful to you?

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The sub-conscious rules consumers’ decisions and actions…

This article is about getting results from marketing investments at a time when it seems harder than ever to achieve the desired outcome. There’s a reason and a solution.

The end of time-honored approaches…

When my career started at Ogilvy & Mather-owned Cole & Weber in Seattle, I was enamored by our disciplined approach to immerse ourselves in the client’s business. Exhaustive reviews of competitive brand communications would follow, coupled with deep download discussions on the product’s unique features and benefits. We would dissect and parse this understanding to arrive at a summary of superior claims and advantage. Sound familiar?

And all of this was based on the assumption that if consumers were exposed enough times to the essential ingredients of our client’s product benefit story, in enough places, we would deliver on the almighty combination of awareness and preference.

So where are we now?

It’s fair to say every dollar invested in brand communication comes with an expectation of business-generating result: consumer engagement and action. It is vital to note that we now have a deeper understanding of psychology, consumer behavior and a better grasp of what motivates decisions. This must be factored into how brand communications strategies are assembled.

Even so, it remains common practice to focus singularly on outlining product attributes (all about me), looking to leverage an area of uniqueness that helps separate the brand from everything else it competes with. While this remains a worthy and important part of the strategic process, it should be a secondary consideration behind looking carefully at what we know about the human involved (all about them) and how they really behave in decision making – which is, most often, without consciously thinking.

Fundamentals of more powerful communication

Let’s start with this revelation: attitude change is not the goal. (gasp)

Perhaps most important is understanding that people are feeling creatures who think, not thinking creatures who feel. This is why actions and decisions mostly occur in the sub-conscious – and without the analytical rule of rational consideration of facts, features and benefits.

Instead, we now know that emotion is perhaps the most important and powerful persuasive force, along side the comfort we inherently cherish with top-of-mind familiarity (know it) and perceived popularity (endorsed by others) of a product or service.

So if most decisions and actions are created by the sub-conscious side of the brain, why do we continue to stay focused on analytical forms of messaging that assumes people make rational decisions? History perhaps – and maybe an incorrect assumption the consumer is a fact-driven decision-making machine.

What we now understand is the unrelenting dominance of emotion. Our actions are motivated by how we feel about a brand or business. Purchase decisions are informed by the emotions people have, positive or negative, when they are in the presence of a brand – your brand.

This understanding should have a profound impact on how we go to market –especially food – which is en emotional category to begin with. Better questions to address in planning:

1. Do we have insight into the consumer’s passions and concerns around their lifestyle and how the brand sits in service of their needs?
2. How can the brand be an enabler of their lifestyle desires?
3. What is the emotional fabric and connectivity we can identify between the brand and the consumer’s self-interests?
4. How can we best mine emotion since the purchase decision is going to be made by heart rather than head?

For food brands, culinary or healthy lifestyle inspiration is a great place to start because it immediately looks at food through the experience of adventure and eating enjoyment, and the dynamics of higher quality life.

• An example: you can emphasize educational data on the healthy benefits of vegetable consumption, or you can move on the more indulgent flavor experiences of improved vegetable preparation (roasting for example). The indulgent flavor approach will win the battle every time on increasing consumption.

Why? Because we’re human beings first – ruled by our sub-conscious and inevitably tethered to the emotions that govern what we do. This is the path we must follow we get to effectiveness and outcomes that are transformational!

Worth noting that the work produced by Cole & Weber in its heyday, that won respect and awards in the creative community, and client affections, was largely about emotional forms of outreach. It continues to be heart over head…

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Writing the new rules of successful marketing

Recently Emergent became an active Mentor partner with the Food Marketing Institute’s Emerge platform. FMI, under the leadership of Julie Pryor and Margaret Core, has created Emerge to help nurture the increasingly important population of up and coming food and beverage brands. These growing businesses are gaining attention of the food buying public and occupy an ever more significant proportion of in-store real estate at food retail.

This new world of emerging brands is evidence of a dramatic shift in consumer preferences for food choices with a creation story founded in higher quality, more artisanal and sustainable attributes. These businesses are often married to a higher purpose that transcends commerce; a purpose aimed at improving the food supply, sustainable farming, battling hunger or some other altruistic commitment that imbues the business with greater meaning.

For our part, we enter the FMI Emerge relationship as Mentors – a resource that new and emerging brands most likely would not have access to until later in their development. The goal is to help scale these businesses more rapidly while avoiding some of the mistakes that can occur early in the fundamentals around marketing, packaging, distribution and channel decisions or innovation.

Reengineering of the food and beverage business

The emerging brand growth engine has attracted the interest of private equity investment and large cap CPG looking to participate in this unique, culturally relevant space. Additionally, retailers interested in leveraging this wave must adopt a new set of best practices to help support these new brands that don’t come to the table with deep-pocket promotion and brand-building budgets.

As the pendulum swings towards marketplace reward for the more entrepreneurial food brand business – where everything about their origins and path follows the beat of a different drummer than legacy CPG food brands – NEW marketing rules must also be considered and executed with commitment to maintain the specialness of these businesses.

What remains true for all participants is an interest in scale. But not scale at any cost. Great care must be exercised in building these brands to make successful expansion a reality in a shorter time span. Wrong moves can violate the very principles that sit underneath why these emerging products got traction in the first place.

Application of old-school marketing technique and thinking can interrupt and disrupt the very important reasons why consumers prefer these up and comers. It’s critical that entrepreneurs maintain the artisanal characteristics of their products which is the very reason consumers are attracted to them in their ongoing treasure hunt for new and more interesting, real food experiences.

What’s changed?

To uncover the right formula for growth, it only makes sense to understand the context that makes these businesses relevant and important to the future of the food and beverage business.

Perhaps fundamental here, is the influence of food culture cues on consumer behavior. At one time taste, price and convenience held sway in defining what consumers want. While taste remains an arbiter of anything that ultimately succeeds, other issues command consumer attention and help pull the purchase lever.

Consumers now look for cultural symbols and lifestyle relevance in the food and beverages they buy for the very reason they believe that higher quality choices help them secure a higher quality life.

Here in sum are some few of the evolutionary changes taking place which these new brands are tapping into:

• People see food differently: higher quality, real and fresh food = higher quality and healthier lifestyle
• Cultural markers are advancing around health and wellness, clean eating and cleaner labels, shorter ingredient lists, local sourcing, visibility to supply chain, more unique flavor profiles, even fresh versions of previously processed food ideas
• The pace of innovation and development of new food ideas has made a quantum leap– from concept to beloved at speed — witness Ripple pea milk and Beyond Meat
• Radical Innovation = new category creation – this is no longer a story built around line extensions of a legacy brand. Wholesale new categories and reinventions of existing ones are becoming the norm
• Embracing small-is-good – big used to be reliable, trusted and consistent. Now craftsmanship, ingredient integrity and more culinary-inspired solutions hold sway. Smaller often translates as better quality
• Mission mentality – what used to be understood as philanthropy has changed to represent a core belief imbedded at the onset of product development that then stretches beyond the product. It is most often anchored in a mission aimed at improving the world around us. Food brands with a true soul, if you will

Mentoring new brands

Perhaps most evident in early stages of emerging brand development are resource constraints that make optimal investments in marketing more difficult.

Yet, it also remains true that superior product experience is most vital to initial sales outcomes. The product itself is the marketing in this respect, and relies heavily on the creation story, higher quality components and more unique formulations to gain ground. Nevertheless, scale is a desired outcome for all involved and thus brand marketing will inevitably become a catalyst.

Challenges for new brands trying to scale:

• Lack of internal seasoned marketing talent
• Early mistakes and missteps in packaging, pricing, distribution (channel choice)
• Inability to fully leverage differentiation in crowded product categories
• Little to no investments in consumer insight that informs, adds relevance to the story and dials in the messaging
• Loose, patchwork sales infrastructure
• Supply chain inefficiencies that layer on cost and depress the ability to invest in consumer-facing communication

These conditions make intermediaries like FMI Emerge so important in growth and development. Larger CPGs and equity investors alike would also benefit from making contributions and resource investments in emerging brands that extend beyond sales and distribution infrastructure.

Emergent: The Bridge to Scale

Our agency, Emergent, is focused on these developing brand opportunities because we believe this is the future of the food and beverage industry, and so we have an obligation to support and address the need for scale on a more rapid trajectory.

To do this we help food, beverage and lifestyle brands successfully navigate the sea change from interruption style, talk-at marketing and communications to a more healthy lifestyle relevant and participatory model.

Here are some examples of appropriate guidance we make to emerging brands and CPGs working to help accelerate the pace of growth:

• Insight research on core user lifestyle, message testing, innovation assessments
• Wringing out inefficiencies in cost structures (supply chain) to help fund marketing
• Improved package design and communication; telegraphing from the shelf
• More strategic, consumer/lifestyle-relevant earned, owned and social communications assets and programs
• Developing novel trial-generating programs and product demonstrations

In the end, our offer is a team of experienced marketing, communications and operations talent focused on the unique needs of emerging brands. We eat, live and think Emergent. Our goal with FMI Emerge is to help provide this guidance while the industry continues to transform.

Are you ready?

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Actions and experience overtake words…

You see the ad on TV for the casual restaurant chain; beautiful food, luscious, mouth-watering dishes redolent in bright colorful hues with freshly-made steam stunts and sizzle sound effects designed to get that mouth watering. You might eat the screen.

We’re confident the chain brand minders see these displays of gastronomic splendor as adoring portraits of what they want consumers to believe. You can almost taste the flowing, cascading drawn butter. But then…there’s the actual experience. You can also see the disappointment train hurtling towards the taste buds at break-neck speed, when in reality the product itself can’t reasonably fulfill the promise envisioned in the marketing.

Over-cooked proteins running along side the previously freezer-burn state of ingredients comes through in chewy textures and dryness that slams head-on into the saucy, just-ripe, fresh product pictorial. Imagery can be artfully arranged on beautiful plates displayed in the advertising. If everyone could just eat the ad, please!

What’s the price of breaking a promise and expectation?

What is presented as hand crafted comes through as factory made, and in that bright shining moment the aura of disenchantment comes home to roost. Yes you can cynically declare, “sure but what did they expect, it’s a chain restaurant after all, not some high-end white tablecloth place.” Even in the silver service trade the same experiences of historic letdown can be had when chefy epicurean food doesn’t ring true and questions arise about who is really behind the kitchen stove.

Just beyond the restaurant service levels, dining room experience, wait times, order accuracy, cleanliness, friendliness and all-around happiness-inducing procedures, lurks the opportunity to either delight or dissatisfy.

Across the continuum of retail experiences from supermarkets to clothing retailers to department stores, boutiques and beyond, everyday there are moments available to wow and surprise or participate in an epic fail. In today’s digital culture, the reality, broad-daylight moments can be relayed to communities of friends or fans in mere seconds -replete with accompanying photography or video to verify the facts.

True experience is key. The validation of assertions in marketing is so incredibly important, we, at Emergent, have built an entire marketing model around trust creation. We call it Validation Marketing. The price of failure to build trust is just too great. Reputation is everything and reality is the truth serum administered daily by measuring the gap between promise, purpose and actual proof.

The decline of marketing effectiveness has often been laid off to the “interruptive” tactics of forcing people to gulp down sales messages. Now that consumers have control over media, the force-feeding is about gone. Persuasion sits on the garbage pile of old-line mass media ploys – a communications dog that just won’t hunt anymore as consumers click to avoid the onslaught.

However we have another aligned explanation: the wink-wink of imagined expectation vs. authenticity served early and often, has constructed a concrete chasm between brands and their users. You cannot underestimate the fallout, the insidious rust and corrosion that’s heaped on brand/consumer relationships when ‘actual results may vary’ stings the hardest. It happens all too often when what someone thought would occur inside the store or product package gives way to the “the little white lie” that was shaped with cinematic story in the marketing.

Transparency reigns supreme

There have been too many trips to disappointment junction. What we now have is a belief breach in the brand relationship. If the product or store experience doesn’t match the marketing is it wrong to go there in the first place? It might be.

Every brand, every business today lives in a glass house. What can be known will be known digitally, quickly and by ever-larger audiences. So the distance between anticipated outcome and actual experiences must be closed. The trophy in the battle for future growth will go to those marketers who understand the significance of this behavior principle. Sweating the details of how everything works to deliver on expectations is required. What you say, especially do and provide must all match up.

How does an organization assure that the truth is told rather than fiction? If the truth about the product is sub-optimal, fix the product – ditto store experience. By the way, the product and experience IS the marketing.

When transparency is embraced as a marketing principle, the move to ‘reveal all’ changes the paradigm of how plans, programs and communications are built. If you are amply proud of your product and store experience because the real encounter and formula is indeed terrific, then pulling the communications curtain open a bit wider becomes more comfortable, do-able.

• Trust sits at the core of everything in marketing and in business. Having respect for the consumer’s welfare and intelligence should share equal stature in how strategies are created. Employing trusted sources and voices as part of the marketing mix are vital to helping validate what is promised.

This is the price of admission, now, to a brand relationship. It’s a 360-degree approach to marketing and planning that recognizes how all aspects of what a brand or store or restaurant does and how it performs must be factored into the trust equation.

What delivery on the promise looks like:

• SweetGreen’s promise of devotion to fresh, real produce ingredients is true and lives in the product experience.
• Starbuck’s assertion as a third-place of social experience is for the most part, a true thing (some recent behavioral missteps a note-able exception).
• Apple’s promise of intuitive product experience is for the most part, true.
• Amazon’s delivery of a friction-less e-commerce shopping environment bears truth daily.

For every true there’s many more that routinely blow the tire between what’s promoted and what happens. The organization’s total commitment to optimal quality and experience is required BEFORE communications are designed.

Communications inspired by transparent outreach and allowing consumers inside the tent, will win out over the portraiture that looks great on the surface, but is hiding something else underneath. The really great athletes in virtually every category of competitive sport achieve their fame and fortunes daily by working, sweating, training, trying and performing. They are driven to do so.

Marketing should fully embrace those same operating principles, energy and work ethic. No disguise needed.

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