As the food landscape changes, the equally disruptive media-machine upheaval reaches into and upends conventional CPG brand communications strategies – Where’s Don Draper when you really need him?

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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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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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