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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New formats, new ideas, new media, new channels — all at once

By Bob Wheatley

What’s for dinner anyway? Well that could be curry braised baby carrots in shallot sauce with duck confit that you picked up from the hot table area of your favorite supermarket-as-restaurant store. What was once a four-walled pantry and acres of shelving to serve up a mind numbing array of umpteen thousands of skus of packaged items, is now leaning into lifestyle relevance in a big way. Food shopping organized around how people actually live, what their food passions, interests and concerns are about, now factored into store and retail brand concept.

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Can indulgent choices exist in a healthy diet?

By Bob Wheatley

Your running a business that at its core is indulgent. The brand story more closely aligned with pleasurable tastes experiences, or quality ingredients than with a DNA founded directly in healthier choice.

You know the consumer environment is moving increasingly towards recognition that food and beverage decisions can impact quality of life. And you wonder: can indulgent coexist with healthier? Are these paths mutually resistant to one another or is alignment possible? Is there a scenario downstream where consumers increasingly become more adamant about healthy and how do you answer this shift in preference?

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Relevant: food brands that enable their customer’s desire for learning, creativity in the kitchen…

Optimizing relevance in a marketing environment where relevant is everything

By Bob Wheatley

We have come to a place where brands‐that‐matter have relationships with their best users that look increasingly like those we have with our closest friends and family. They look human: Trust. Reciprocity. Care. Helpfulness. Listening. All are markers, icons of human relationship qualities. Now the same can be said of brand connections that transcend the merely transactional to the incredibly meaningful.

And what’s lies at the intersection of commerce and relationship? Relevance. When brands work overtime (baked into the mission) to align themselves with their core users’ passions, concerns, interests and pain points, they are on the hunt for relevance.

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Jamba’s new, refined web pages tell the story of healthy living

Restaging who you are unlocks the door to prosperity and growth

By Bob Wheatley

When I say Jamba Juice most likely your mind turns to fruit smoothie outlet. So is a Jamba store essentially four walls with some blenders and pureed fruit in a cup? For a period of time in their history it may well have been. The word healthy loosely attached to the brand persona and a bright, colorful, fun atmosphere to deliver some fruity refreshment. So far so good, but if candor is applied, the picture was fair financially. Some questioned the long-term value proposition on a business that seemed to straddle the trench between beverage and treat…

Here’s another layer of candor: Emergent now represents Jamba so we have our hands deeply in the pool of change at this dynamic company.

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