World has changed, now what?

Marketing and communication will not be the same as lock down conditions begin to abate.  Consumer confidence is in need of triage and should be foremost on your radar as you make plans to re-energize the business.

• Confidence in their own safety.
• Confidence in your businesses’ on-premise and product safety protocols.
• Confidence in how and where they shop for food, whether that be from grocery or restaurant delivery.
• Confidence your brand has their best interests and welfare at heart.

This checklist is intended to help inform your thinking and strategy in light of the transformational lifestyle shift consumers have experienced.

You might agree that any marketing plan must be founded on respect for the consumer’s mindset and behaviors. Families have endured one of the most harrowing, precedent-setting and impactful changes in their world, ever.

What we know about the COVID-19 impact:

• Health and safety are the top priority for people.
• At home is safe, out of home is not safe.
• Invisible threats exist that can impact your health or take your life.
• These events have disrupted every aspect of living and society.
• People cannot control these conditions and are forced to adapt based on self-diagnosis of their own needs and preferences.
• What consumers value changes when life is literally upside-down.

The key changes:

• At home: time and space have become more fluid, less regimented.
• Blurring of home and work separation.
• Desire for guidance on home-focused activities from exercise, to gardening to cleaning/decluttering to baking/culinary.
• Digital experience now a necessity for art, music and escape.
• Content consumption is nearly 24/7 as average weekly screen times skyrocket.

Top priority for people:

• Physical, mental and emotional health.
• Staying well.
• Boredom, anxiety and uncertainty meet desire to be distracted/inspired/entertained, productive and composed.

What we know about people:

• Human beings are feeling creatures who think – not thinking creatures who feel. Emotion governs behaviors, decisions and actions.
• How brand relationships are cultivated and built must adjust to be respectful of where people find themselves, emotionally, now.

Marketing and communication priorities

Insight:

Every brand is unique; what do your core users care about, need, want, desire?

Diagnostic:

Is the brand correctly positioned for shifting lifestyle relevance and empathy?

Strategy:

Holistic solutions that answer, tangibly, how you can help improve your core users’ lives.

Media:

Digital first and emotionally relevant content is king.

Social:             

Now more than ever social community building is embedded in the desire for conversation and interaction. Witness Zoom is a verb and people long for regular contact and interaction. Social channels have acquired an entirely new and uplifted value proposition.

Tactics:

• Overwhelming importance of shared purpose, meaning and values in messaging.
• Emotional communication vital to engagement.
• People believe other people before they believe companies – who is speaking?
• Health is the new wealth – your brand is the guide, expert and coach.
• Storytelling vs. story-yelling – days of shameless brand self-promotion are over.
• Consumers feel out of control, how can you give it back to them?
• Trust creation as core brand platform – earn belief through higher purpose.
• Be careful, data can be a false god – algorithms don’t dream.

Secret sauce to success:

Put your consumer at the center of planning, decide relevance matters most and work backwards from there.

To help you navigate these unprecedented changes and chart a course to sustainable growth Emergent can provide deep CPG and retail marketing experience, insight to consumer behavior, health and wellness lifestyle expertise and transformational ideas. Use this link to let us know if you’re ready to explore new solutions.

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Emotional connections can drive consistent growth

Your consumer is not an analytical, fact-based decision-making machine. Ironically, however, most brand marketing and communication automatically presumes people lean into logic to rationally assess the prevailing evidence of superiority or product benefits companies provide.

The Pandemic has added an exclamation point to this intel as consumers increasingly want brands to be authentically rooted in shared values, beliefs and a higher purpose. Understanding how the DNA of successful brand/consumer relationships has changed is vital to gaining business traction. As you’ll see in the Harvard Business Review case study we review later,  evidence is piling up that mining emotional connectivity is simply a far better business-building decision leading to increased sales and market share over time.

We now have data that confirms brand relationships tethered to emotion are far more effective in delivering the engagement and business results you seek. Here’s the headline: all people are emotionally-driven creatures whose decisions are governed by how they feel about your brand.

Like a lightbulb to a lamp, brand growth is powered by its relevance with consumers who show the highest propensity to engage. Emotion and engagement are uniquely bonded in a vital marriage that will stand the test of time, weathering adversity and continuing to grow deeper, richer like fine wine in the cellar.

How important is this discovery about emotion-led marketing to your business?

Motista conducted a study of 100,000 consumers across 100 different brands and learned that emotionally-connected consumers are more valuable to the balance sheet than the ‘highly-satisfied’ customers you may covet. The former spends, on average, two-times more with retailers they prefer and have a 306% greater lifetime value to the business. Emotionally-invested consumers even recommend favored brands at a much higher rate than those who claim to be super satisfied – 30.2% vs. 7.6%.

Motista concluded emotional connectivity is the most valuable, predictable and enduring strategy you can deploy to build a business that routinely surpasses category growth rates.

Insight Informs Your Strategic Platform

1. Emotional connectivity happens when your brand reflects back to the consumer values, desires and aspirations consistent with their own. If you want a deeper relationship with your users, then imbue your brand with deeper meaning.

2. Knowing your customer on an intimate level is necessary to provide the understanding and ability to secure three important qualities of like, know and trust. This will require an ongoing investment in consumer insight research designed to unearth details of what they care about and who they are.

3. All purchases today are largely symbolic gestures designed to flag to the rest of the world around us what people value and who they are. It isn’t possible to achieve this kind of relevance without knowing what your best users desire.

4. Which leads to this key question: is the relevant lifestyle symbolism people look for embedded everywhere your customer is likely to encounter the brand online and off? Said more succinctly, is the entire customer journey infused with the insights that feed emotional communication?

Harvard Business Review case study offers proof

HBR published an intriguing report to fully test the hypothesis that emotional connectivity leads to out-sized financial results. You can read the report here. Their conclusion, when brands are able to successfully build emotional connections, the payoff is significant.

The journey begins with correctly assessing emotional motivators that are relevant to your brand. An example: “I am inspired by a desire to…”

• Enjoy a sense of well-being.
• Have confidence in the future.
• Become the person I aspire to be.
• Experience fulfillment and purpose.
• Feel secure in the midst of uncertainty.
• Experience a sense of freedom.

HBR reported on a fashion retailer who participated in the project. Appropriately, the company identified a “propensity to engage” segment they characterized as Fashion Flourishers. The segment represented 22% of the customer base but accounted for 37% of sales. This enthusiast customer group spent $468 a year on average vs. $235 for traditional shoppers, and 46% visited the stores at least once a month over 21% for everyone else.

Initial analysis showed this cohort was less price-sensitive and remained a loyal customer over a longer period of time. The goal was to initiate direct investments in forming emotional connections with this group.

To start, the company conducted discovery research around emotional motivators for the segment and found three distinct attributes:

• Makes me feel more creative.
• Makes me feel a sense of belonging.
• Makes me feel a sense of freedom.

Marketing programs were created around the insight. For example, to leverage the sense of belonging motivator, the retailer invited customers to submit selfies wearing their favorite outfits which were then posted as slide shows on video walls inside the stores.

Further the company weighed into emotionally-relevant media and experiences such as social channels and enhanced store design to marry the shopping experience to the emotional traits. Similarly, an email campaign was created around messaging that nurtured the ‘makes me feel creative’ attribute.

Outcomes confirmed the hypothesis

As a result of investing in emotional connections, stores optimized to reflect the emotional interests of Fashion Flourishers averaged 3.5% annual sales growth vs 1.0 percent for other stores in the chain. Inventory turns improved by 25% and customer advocacy scores grew by 20% year over year.

Key to success

Emotional motivators will vary across brands and audience segments, which underscores why the insight research component is so important to achieving results.

Bottomline, brand communications focused on building emotional connection is the secret sauce to consistently strong business results. Emotional connectivity works because it is respectful of what we now know about how people operate and how they make decisions (not analytically).

Thus, it is important to marry the emotional-driven strategy to every touch point and contact opportunity consumers may have with the brand. COVID-19 and the cultural disruption it is creating will change the face of marketing. The emotional-led strategy is aligned with these shifts and can help improve the future business results for brands that are wise enough to pursue it.

We can help you develop the strategic plan and execute the appropriate research for building emotional connections with your consumers, as well as bringing it to life with creative communications tools. Let us know if you would like to discuss informally.

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This is the moment to help consumers adopt a healthy lifestyle

COVID 19 has changed everything for consumers, who are now looking for ways to get back in control of their lives amidst unprecedented uncertainty. Food, beverage and lifestyle brands and retailers have an enormous opportunity to step into this need right now and help consumers do the one thing that can help protect themselves and their families from the advance of the pandemic: take control of their health and wellness.

• Strong immune systems are supported by optimal health and wellness and can be of benefit to everyone no matter their age. While the world operates uncontrollably around everyone, the ability of people to acquire healthier eating habits and experience other activities that will enhance their wellbeing, is within their grasp.

We have growing evidence that brands are becoming more relevant (important) than public institutions as a source of help and inspiration in these trying times. If you are considering where to place your bets on messaging and communications strategy, supporting health and wellness is your new calling.

Emergence of higher purpose strategy

For years now we have continued to publish routinely on the shifts in public sentiment and behavior that merit brand’s adopting a higher purpose to govern their decisions, operations and marketing. The pandemic serves as a catalyst for making this strategic endeavor a fundamental part of sound marketing best practices. The days of self-promotion and strict transactional thinking about brand building are over. More enlightened brand support is required, especially in view of the transformational change brought on by COVID-19.

Brands need a relevant, useful, valued voice right now, one that helps inspire people to adopt the changes that will help benefit their own health. This is the strategic path to establishing your brand’s higher purpose.  Content creation here can vastly improve the traction and engagement levels of brand communication in any relevant category, from better-for-you beverages to pet food.

The role of the higher purpose brand in health and wellness

The role of your brand in this important mission is as credible guide and advisor on the path to enhanced health and wellbeing. The instruments to deploy include:

• Healthier eating, preparations and menus
• Enhanced exercise and wellness regimens
• Improved sleep, relaxation and physical renewal
• Stress reduction and emotional management
• Family engagement, learning and relationship development
• Integration of pet lifestyle in all of the above
• E-commerce shopping tips and guidance to navigate dietary and wellness objectives

Stated simply, the best path is a holistic one that recognizes the integration of physical, emotional and spiritual needs – fundamental to enriching the lives of your customers and making a difference in how they successfully address the upheaval they’re experiencing.

Deployment of third-party voices

Key to activation is the use of outside third-party voices to help tell your story. Whether they are ‘real consumer brand fans’ who want to be of help to those around them, or experts in these subject matters areas from nutrition to culinary guidance.

Restaurant businesses are not faring well, and your efforts here could provide a new voice and relevance to chefs at a time when they need other channels of opportunity. Believe me, they want to help, too.

This is not the time to go dark

Ample evidence exists that brands who continue to invest, who continue to actively engage their consumers, come out ahead in sales growth and market share positions during tough economic times. Consumers remain open to receiving marketing messages from brands, especially those that have their best interests at heart.

However, the character of the message becomes ever more important and why the health and wellness platform for communications is directionally significant. Helping people get back in control of their lives is an important call to action. You have an opportunity here to earn their trust and their attention.

How Emergent can help you

1. We can help you shape strategy around a higher purpose mission, tailored to the unique characteristics of your brand, business and consumer.
2. We can build a compelling messaging platform that provides guidance to all external and internal communications efforts.
3. We can help you identify and secure the right outside voices to help build trust and validate what you want people to know and believe.
4. We can help you create content and execute outreach in earned, owned, paid and social channels of communication.

Let us know your questions and challenges. We’re happy to help in any way we can.

After all, we’re all in this together.

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New research flags brand trust declines amid crisis

A new report from Forrester Research concludes consumers are growing less optimistic that brands will keep their promises. Of all the significant attitudinal changes occurring, trust rating has fallen the most and is in dire need of improvement.

How you respond to this crisis of confidence and belief will impact business outcomes and reputation going forward. A change in message and brand voice is required, and we have guidance to provide. First a little more texture on the current situation and how it informs content strategy.

Contributing to the attitude shift, according to Forrester data, is a pervasive feeling of consumers ‘being out of control’ with their lives and the environment around them. Uncertainty has a way of unsettling people and how they perceive the world around them, casting doubt about whom to trust.

The acid test for consumers now: will the brands I care about put my needs and concerns first?

Two important insights from the research:

1. Consumers are looking for information, entertainment and ‘adventure’ to help fill the void. Online engagement is up significantly as people work from home and are otherwise confined to the house. Online content strategy decisions are critical here to optimize messaging for relevance to their needs.
2. Consumers remain open to receiving marketing communications from brands. While this is encouraging news, it is also a slippery slope if the messaging is deemed overly self-promotional or tone deaf to the crisis around us.

When the dust finally settles, people will remember…

There will be winners and losers coming out of the current conditions. Brands that work hard to express care and concern for the health and wellbeing of their customers, who authentically work to guide, help and assist stand to gain additional business, followers and fans.

Brands that go dark, stop communicating and otherwise, in effect, abandon their customers or willfully treat them like walking wallets, will face other difficulties once the COVID-19 crisis is over. People will remember those who stepped up, those who continued to operate in service of their needs and concerns vs. those who didn’t.

Now is the time to double down on your outreach efforts. Your immediate goal is to deploy content that strikes the right emotional chord and builds trust.

Emergent’s content guidance

• Address the isolation. People are living in an extraordinary period of social distance. Beyond the uncertainty about health, wellbeing, and what lies ahead, the opportunity for social interaction is greatly diminished beyond occasional Zoom meet-ups and Skype calls. How you activate your social channels to create community and conversation is vital.

• Demonstrate integrity to neutralize consumer skepticism. Time to step back and consider ways to actively show how promises will be kept, that you are walking the walk of higher purpose and commitment to their needs.

• More specifically, how your company and brand is prioritizing their health and wellbeing ahead of financial objectives. Research shows 58% of adults don’t trust a brand until they witness real-world proof that promises are being kept. No doubt there are ways to bring this to life.

• Assist people in regaining their sense of control, by providing ways for them to exercise control in their relationship with you. Where appropriate, give them the reigns and ability to carry a decision forward.

People trust people first

Perhaps the most important guidance we can provide concerns the medium that is carrying the message. Corporations only begin to sound human when they enlist real people to speak on their behalf. Third parties and expert voices are critical in these times to humanize the brand voice and validate what you want people to believe.

The new advertising in this era of unprecedented change is about authentic storytelling. Stories that serve and inspire people around meaningful behaviors and events that demonstrate true caring and compassion.

This is your higher purpose right now. Are you ready to step up?

If you need help navigating in these uncertain times and experienced support to refine messaging, please let us know.

Looking for more food for thought? Subscribe to the Emerging Trends Report.

Guidance as new voice required in the face of cultural upheaval

Whatever the marketing plan looked like four months ago, it’s changing now in the face of a new reality and shifts in consumer attitude. Here we will chart the conditions and explain an enlightened approach.

So you understand what sits underneath the shifts:

Awhile back when we were engaged in the home safety products category, we had access to reams of quantitative and qualitative research to help us understand what the barriers were to purchase of potentially lifesaving products. The primary hill climb can be summed up in six words: “It will never happen to me.” Home fires, carbon monoxide incidents and other similar close-to-home threats happen to “other people,” consumers believed. This complacency could only be disrupted when confronted with real people stories of loss and tragedy.

The self-assessment people made was, never in my backyard. Now that sentiment has broadly shifted.

The unfolding events around us all has created a new reality. The change can be summed again in a statement, only modified as “it CAN happen to me.” We are witnessing the emergence of primal fear, anxiety nourished with uncertainty, multiplied by the speed of change going on and accelerated by public policy moves in an effort to flatten the curve of pandemic impact.

People believe they are truly vulnerable, while news reports of continued escalation in COVID-19 cases operates as confirmation of that view.

What does this mean to you? There is a rapidly increasing need for emotional support and preparedness. If you’re wondering whether or not consumers are paying attention to your behaviors and communication, a new research report suggests they are closely watching your moves.

• Gfk research has been tracking the changes and in a recent report said that 73 percent of consumers say how companies react and handle the unfolding crisis will have an impact on future purchase decisions. No surprise, 85 percent of Gfk respondents indicated the virus is impacting their shopping behaviors, presaging a significant, and likely lasting, migration to e-commerce channels.

Primary call to action: consumers are looking for “a brand I can trust to guide me.” Thus, it’s time to step back and take a hard look at what initiatives and outreach in your current efforts are specifically addressing the need for trust creation.

Trust and safety are paramount

• How are you expressing and addressing empathy and support for the lifestyle upheaval and anxiety people are experiencing?
• Can you help people answer and manage the emergence of ‘family cabin fever’ conditions in the home?
• Can you provide lifestyle encouragement, advice and ideas to help home-bound families continue healthy living regimens and behaviors?
• Of note here, the more ‘unexpected’ it is from you in the areas to try to be helpful in, the more unselfish and trustworthy you appear.
• Time to enable and encourage community conversation of shared experiences and events in your social channels. People need a place to engage and share.
• Reveal details of your ingredient safety and testing standards in product creation. In fact, generally there has never been a better time than now to be transparent about everything.
• What are your manufacturing hygiene protocols and safety procedures?
• For emerging brands, communicate your supply chain integrity and ability to continue the regular flow of products to distribution. If there are limitations in this area, explain them openly and honestly.
• For food retailers, your customers are going to hit exhaustion with home meal preparation 24/7. How can you amp up your prepared meal solutions business to bring some welcome relief for home chef monotony syndrome?

Engagement likely to be at an all-time high

With fewer distractions and a feast of extra time on their hands, people will be more open to engagement and have the bandwidth to pay attention. Content creation strategies can help fill the void. That said, it’s important to observe the rules of being helpful and useful over product promotion hype.

In 2008 and 09 when the economy tanked, a great lesson was served to businesses everywhere. Companies that continued to invest and communicate experienced share gains over rivals who answered the soft economic conditions by going into a fiscal fetal position.

You have the chance now to be seen and heard. What you say will impact perceptions of your ability to be trusted and of value to consumers’ rapidly changing lives.

If you need help navigating in this time of great change, please let us know.

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Efforts to create, innovate and communicate will inform your brand’s future

You’ve undoubtedly run across the ‘dystopian future’ movie storyline, usually brought on by some cataclysmic disaster with intrepid or hysterical survivors running into a grocery store, only to be greeted by empty shelves while wading through torn packaging detritus everywhere. I had this movie-like experience only last night at the Mariano’s supermarket nearby. I witnessed the fear-driven cart Olympics mad dash as aisle after aisle of products were emptied save a lone, bruised apple and a dented, torn box of cereal left dangling precariously on an otherwise barren shelf.

Uncertainty and media drama are partners in the perceptual stew that pushes people into behaviors normally reserved for cinematic storytelling. Fear of the unknown grips as the house now achieves safe haven sanctuary status and toilet paper becomes one of the most elusive, rare and sought-after commodities in the nation.

Keep Calm and Carry On

In 1940 at the height of the Blitzkrieg (The Blitz) that showered Great Britain with bombs in the night, dropped indiscriminately on London neighborhoods, the government released its now famous poster Keep Calm and Carry On. This statement became a dominant theme embraced by incredibly brave British citizens in the face of unrelenting catastrophe and sharpened their resolve to weather the life-threatening storm.

Right now, today, you have an opportunity to help your customers Keep Calm and discover the opportunities presented by a large dose of enforced family time and homebound adventures and experiences. Creative, innovative thinking and generous outreach is the required skillset.

Lemonade from lemons

The foodservice industry is taking it on the chin. In Seattle, the hardest hit city in the nation from COVID-19, business has virtually disappeared from restaurants as people remain home. Arguably Seattle’s finest dining establishment, Canlis, an iconic example of culinary quality that has led the dining scene there for decades, elected to close.

Chef-owner Tom Douglas told Restaurant Business magazine revenue was off by 90%, which might as well be 100%. Nonetheless, Douglas’ response was instructive to us all. He announced the opening of three concepts based out of Canlis kitchens that will serve the takeout, drive through and home delivery market segments. The Bagel Shed will offer breakfast options; Drive on Thru will provide lunchtime burgers, veggie melts and salad; Family Meal will offer a rotating menu of dinner entrees and a bottle of wine delivered to your door. A creative deployment of solutions and assets that helps keep the team employed while answering the opportunity for off-premise consumption business.

Salve for Uncertainty

Communication, and lots of it, is required in these unprecedented times. Your motivation is not only to inform users of what your business is doing to keep the flow of goods and services they need safely in motion, but also to express care and concern for their health, wellbeing and happiness.

The schools my daughters attend are now closed. My youngest is a dancer, and her classes and performances have been cancelled. My oldest is an ice skater and the rink is shut and practices stopped. What we have going is each other, our wonderful dogs, more time together and adventurous spirits.

How can your brand operate as coach and guide for family activities, more hands-on experiences with the pets, and a renewed focus on home-prepared meals? With no sports, no concerts, no large group events of any kind, the marketplace may well be listening and consumers more open to engagement than ever before. There are certainly wayyy fewer distractions competing for precious attention.

Your brand’s ability to operate as an enabler and resource is important in this environment. Social communities can become outlets of shared experience. In Chicago, the Nextdoor online community bulletin board is on fire as people share thoughts, ideas and concerns on the changes occurring before us. One of the most active conversations is around the status of fresh food supplies in local supermarkets and guidance on who has what.

People want to share and engage with each other

We have arrived at a new era where businesses increasingly understand they are about more than manufacturing, retailing and commerce. Companies have discovered their growing role in authoring the greater good. This self-discovery opens the door to building a more human and approachable brand that understands relationships with users are increasingly like real, human friendships and the natural reciprocity that exists in that personal dynamic.

When brands talk, walk and behave in a more human and relate-able manner, they become more resonant and trustworthy. You have been handed an extraordinary opportunity to help people in the midst of a trying storm. Empathy is a great characteristic and will serve you well as people embrace your voice of reason and support.

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