Posts tagged "content marketing"

Big ideas inform business and brand behaviors

How Emergent can help you win in the year ahead

December 3rd, 2020 Posted by Agency Services, Brand Activism, brand marketing, branded content, CMO, Content Marketing, Digital marketing, food retail strategy, Healthy lifestyle, Healthy Living, Higher Purpose, Marketing Strategy, Navigation, Social media, social media marketing, storytelling, Transformation 0 comments on “How Emergent can help you win in the year ahead”

2021 will not be kind to ineffective strategies

Emergent’s secret sauce is our unique ability to help clients understand and navigate barriers to their growth – mission critical in what will be a challenging year ahead. The 2021 strategic goal posts have already been moving. In sum, current conditions place an extraordinary premium on correctly dialing in your brand’s higher purpose and deeper meaning – essential to creating consumer trust that unlocks the path to purchase.

  • We can help you define brand higher purpose in your category. Translate this understanding into a strategic go-to-market game plan and map your brand’s relevant messaging. Then create the communication tools to help build an enthusiastic core of brand fans who voluntarily spread your message in their own communities and social circles.

Why this matters to you: consumers’ trust in companies and brands has been declining for years. People believe the voices and experiences of other people before they will accept a brand’s claims and assertions. Social proof is the required verification and validation of what you want people to believe about your brand and products.

Our services:

  • Brand sustainability analysis: defining your higher purpose and brand stand that informs every aspect of the go-to-market plan.
  • Connecting consumer insight to strategic planning: dialing in and optimizing your brand’s relevance to consumers’ lifestyles.
  • Messaging and brand storytelling that engages, enlightens and guides: making the consumer the hero of your brand communication.
  • Building social channel strategies and tools that engage consumers in word-of-mouth activity: the most powerful, credible communications tool on earth.

Free consultation and audit:

We’re offering an easy, zero cost way to assess fit. We start with an informal conversation about your needs and interests in the year ahead. With signatures on an NDA if you desire, we will conduct an audit of your current brand messaging and business priorities. We’ll provide our guidance and thinking at no charge. If what we offer creates value for you and further interest, then we can discuss a scope of work appropriate to your unique needs.

Use this link to open a conversation and let’s talk about how to transform your outcomes in 2021.

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

Bob Wheatley is the CEO of Chicago-based Emergent, The Healthy Living Agency. Traditional brand marketing often sidesteps more human qualities that can help consumers form an emotional bond. Yet brands yearn for authentic engagement, trust and a lasting relationship with their customers. Emergent helps brands erase ineffective self-promotion and replace it with clarity, honesty and deeper meaning in their customer relationships and communication. For more information, contact [email protected] and follow on Twitter @BobWheatley.

Marketing planning for 2021

Top five marketing resources to power your 2021 growth plans

November 18th, 2020 Posted by brand marketing, Brand preference, brand strategy, CMO, Digital marketing, engagement, Growth, Integrated Communications, Marketing Strategy, Social media, social media marketing, storytelling 0 comments on “Top five marketing resources to power your 2021 growth plans”

What you will require for success in the new year

Unprecedented complexity in marketing channels, platforms and media priorities can subtract from the confidence and clarity you need about where to make the best strategic investments. The potential for engagement misfires (wrong message, wrong channel) is at an all-time high and it seems as though every other day a new media platform rises to claim its narrow territory in an ever more fractured communications landscape.

  • You need a clear path and navigation chart to inform your decisions on where to invest precious marketing assets next year – when every dollar needs to perform like 10 and there’s not a lot of room to recover from mistakes.

We aim to provide specific guidance here.

Fortunately, the marketing game plan priorities are making themselves known. Today we have the benefit of hindsight to examine what tools performed to greatest effect in this uncommon year, and we also have a grip on where to place the marketing plan bets headed into 2021.

Here’s the most dramatic piece of evolutionary perspective unfolding for next year: what’s old is renewed again. I am personally ecstatic to see this change arrive. Read on.

I came up at Ogilvy & Mather (O&M), the first 11 years of my career bathed in the ample light of how David Ogilvy and his immensely talented colleagues saw the marketing universe. While David was a renowned and talented ad copywriter, he was first a business builder, problem solver with a remarkable grasp on the levers of how to grow a client company. He was indeed a holistic thinker.

David was forever espousing a point of view that we aren’t on the planet just to make advertising or PR. We’re here first to:

  • understand the challenges of business categories,
  • help incubate innovative product solutions,
  • understand the delicate emotional characteristics of brands,
  • navigate the cultural issues that impact company behavior,
  • and, inform and educate that most mysterious creature known as the consumer (“who is not a moron but rather your husband or wife,” says Ogilvy).

Said another way, a more myopic view would have us believing it’s all about the ad or PR creative product. Thus your proverbial marketing hammer comes back repeatedly to the same tactical nail. If that were true, our value as counselors, guides and business experts would deteriorate overnight and the agency business would be diluted to churning out cinematic representations of feature and benefit stories. Or the lesser digital display ad?!

Instead, we are tasked with being strategic guides who make our client’s business and category a deep and comprehensive ongoing study involving the mechanics of:

  • product creation and
  • market influences and
  • economic conditions and
  • cultural shifts and
  • competitive challenges and
  • the endless study of consumer and organizational behavior.

In short we are devoted to strategic investigations and assessments ahead of any conversation about a creative idea, in part for the very reason that all of that analysis nourishes enlightenment and leads to more relevant and powerful marketing ideas. The kind that make communications all the more effective at turning the screw of share and volume growth.

  • What’s the definition of a big idea? One that you can immediately and intuitively see how it will impact and change company behavior and the dynamics of the marketplace in which it competes. That’s a compelling adventure to join and why I appreciated what I learned while at O&M. Big ideas tend to bubble up in the midst of strategic business conversations.

However, with the growth of digital everything, over time the marketing guidance task largely contracted into a tactical role of managing the digital platform du jour and erstwhile electronic flag waving. In recent years the consultive forms of agency and client relationship have diluted in favor of operating a digital marketing automation dashboard. Execution driven assignments more so than operating within an authentic marketing partnership.

Well, all of that is about to change in 2021.

We’re entering an era where the importance of strategy and branding has re-emerged as the decisive lynchpin in priority and design of nearly every go-to-market plan. Why? The toolbox game has fallen in on itself under the sheer weight of so many options competing for eyeballs at a time when consumers are tiring of the relentless barrage. People are tuning out entirely the self-serving, self-reverential bullhorn of marketing message social channels. They reflexively reject that interruption right out of the gate.

The Pandemic has also lowered the tolerance boom on brand self-promotion – while rewarding efforts by enlightened brands that closely align themselves with higher purpose values and drive deeper meaning into their brand story and behavior.

What worked and what’s coming next year

A recent national survey of agencies conducted by SharpSpring revealed universally the most effective outreach tool deployed in 2020 was paid social. Not a surprise given the importance people place on social conversation, the levels of engagement there (which also correlates with the consumer’s prevailing interest in dialogue) and hearing the experiences of others to inform their purchase decisions.

Looking ahead at next year, this same study drilled down to what is likely to be in demand by clients in the year ahead, which also bears remarkable similarity to what clients are prepared to outsource to their agencies.

The re-emergence of strategy and branding as a top priority activates to assure marketing investment decisions will, indeed, deliver on their engagement objectives. This helps to measurably influence purchase decisions at a time when the consumer’s view of what matters is rapidly evolving.

Taste, price and convenience used to drive food and beverage purchases. Now those triggers are overtaken by a host of new more issue-like considerations such as health and wellness, transparency, purpose and values, supply chain integrity, sustainability and food safety.

  • Add to this an emerging concern about climate change and the impact of our current food production system on greenhouse gas (GHG) levels – meat production is by far the largest single contributor followed by agriculture. The food system creates more GHG than all of the global transportation systems (cars, trains, airplanes, etc.) combined.

We are seeing a rise in consumer demand for change addressing their concern to know what the carbon footprint is of the foods we consume. More on this topic to come from us.

Meantime, the verdict is in on resources to receive the most attention and likely investment in 2021 while brands continue to grapple with the impact of the pandemic on preferences, shopping and purchase behavior.

The top five marketing needs for 2021

  • Marketing strategy: this begins with insight into consumer behavior and cultural shifts taking place that impact what people care about, and what they expect of the brands that matter to them. Active participation on issues like climate change will be one of them.
  • Branding: the role of higher purpose and deeper meaning are now critical to your business and brand voice. This is not a “nice to have” but a core strategic platform to secure relevance and engagement at a time when people expect brands to participate in making our world a better place.
  • Social media management: social media is a top priority and has remained so for some time now. How brands engage here, support community growth and encourage user generated content, will play a critical role in trust creation. Trust is a top objective and this channel is part of the solution. It’s remarkable that at one time the idea of actually talking directly to a brand’s consumer was virtually unheard of. When it finally arrived many brands looked upon it skeptically as a scary and potentially treacherous and uncontrollable development. My, how times have changed.
  • PR and reputation management: trust is the currency of any brand relationship. It is a requirement. Now harder to earn and maintain, the scrutiny and filters being applied by consumers seeks to determine whether a brand’s activism is messaging masquerading as champion of a cause – or is it real where the brand behavior matches the rhetoric. A recent IBM study on purpose reports that when consumers think a brand has a strong and authentic purpose, they are 4.1 times more likely to trust the company.
  • Digital advertising and re-targeting: a strong and verifiable correlation exists between awareness and velocity performance at retail. The more present and top of mind your brand is, the more likely this recognition will convert to a sale, assuming other considerations on purpose, values and trust are properly aligned. People live online. That bit of behavior enhanced by shelter in place and work or school from home conditions is why digital channels are having a heyday.

Brand activism on the rise      

An important strategic focus in 2021 will be where your brand sits on the fence of increased calls for activism on societal issues. Generation Z, the most woke generation of all, is decidedly focused on this and will be voicing their sentiments in the purchases they make. Their wallet is their vote and symbolic flag to those around them about what they consider to be important.

  • A recent study from Zeno Group found that for brands of comparable quality and pricing, 91% of consumers will switch if one of those brands supports an important cause. That might as well be 100%.

Here’s another way to look at it:

The more activist a brand is, the more earned media attention it’s likely to secure. This leads to greater visibility and brand awareness in trusted media channels – which in turn will help drive recognition leading to higher sales outcomes. All of this is happening in a media model that is derived at lower cost (compared to traditional media) thus helping wring more benefit out of tight budget resources.

The key is how real the brand’s activism is vs. an attempt to “message” around it without the anchoring back-up of verifiable brand behavior. Fake activism is discoverable and can (will) backfire.

If a conversation on 2021 planning priorities would be helpful to your decision making, we would welcome the conversation. Use this link and let’s start a conversation.

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

Bob Wheatley is the CEO of Chicago-based Emergent, The Healthy Living Agency. Traditional brand marketing often sidesteps more human qualities that can help consumers form an emotional bond. Yet brands yearn for authentic engagement, trust and a lasting relationship with their customers. Emergent helps brands erase ineffective self-promotion and replace it with clarity, honesty and deeper meaning in their customer relationships and communication. For more information, contact [email protected] and follow on Twitter @BobWheatley.

Pandemic influences consumer behavior

Pandemic and cultural shift combine for rapid change smackdown

October 6th, 2020 Posted by brand marketing, brand messaging, brand strategy, branded content, Consumer insight, Content Marketing, COVID-19, Emotional relevance, engagement, food retail strategy, Healthy lifestyle, Healthy Living, Higher Purpose, Marketing Strategy, Pandemic 0 comments on “Pandemic and cultural shift combine for rapid change smackdown”

We unpack handwriting on the (relevant marketing) wall

If you’re like me, you’re probably exclaiming, “so now what?” Another day and another revelation of upheaval in an era of unpredictable, unsettling events that cause you to sleep with one eye open.

In an exceptional moment of corporate disclosure, Amazon announced that nearly 20,000 of their employees tested positive for Coronavirus just hours before the President and First Lady were diagnosed with the virus. No doubt the pandemic has reached into the lives of virtually everyone with unprecedented and transformational impacts that continue to reshape the way people think, shop and live.

Within the last few days major furloughs and layoffs have been announced simultaneously by a string of companies including Disney, Allstate, major airlines and others as business shortfalls consume cash reserves leading to headcount reductions.

  • Emergent has followed these developments closely. We are examining these events to translate them for useful guidance on what food, beverage and lifestyle brands should consider in business planning and how these issues impact marketing strategy.

Here we will unpack the most significant conditions. Focusing on what informs the immediate future for companies grappling with uncertainty via new revelations surrounding the economy, the disease, climate challenges and cultural disruption – all of which are inter-related.

The end of stimulus and the start of fiscal free-fall

In June media attention shifted to the looming end of Federal stimulus programs. Millions of people who were fortunate enough to qualify for meager state unemployment benefits, saw a life-preserving $600 a week added to their stipend payments. This action temporarily closed the financial gap for families who otherwise would be facing a cliff of cash shortages. That cliff has now arrived, impacting their ability to pay the bills, especially housing and food.

It is unclear if new stimulus support will return anytime soon due to the impasse between Congress and the Senate over the size and components of a national economic support package. Even with House passage of a $2.2 trillion measure, it’s unlikely it will go any further before the election, as both sides draw hard lines in the budget sand.

Thus, the income disparity between wealthier and middle-class families is widening and becoming more obvious (visible to all). Those less impacted by the recession continue to accumulate cash due to slowdowns in spending for commuting, business or vacation travel and discretionary activity in restaurant dining, sports and entertainment. Those directly affected by the economy slowdown experience layoffs, salary or hour reductions and wholesale permanent disintermediation of their jobs, while trying to manage life with quickly dwindling cash reserves.

Middle class spending is an engine that drives the U.S. economy so what’s happening here over time has domino impacts everywhere. It is in everyone’s best interests if stimulus support is turned on, and concerted efforts made to restore jobs or create new ones.

The number one impact of all of the above: stress and anxiety

Whether it’s class polarization, economic and employment uncertainty, concerns over social justice and all-too-apparent climate eruptions, plus a surging virus – all combine with the absence of control over one’s life and surroundings to manifest in a form of anxiousness. It is showing up everywhere in what people eat.

Legacy packaged food brand resurgence is evidence of filling a need for:

  • Comfort
  • Familiarity
  • Satisfying stress eating behaviors by reaching for higher fat and carb foods that somehow make people feel better. Apparently, a bag of chips is self-medicating. However, 27% of American adults are also reporting 5 or more pounds of weight gain since March – a troubling development especially as a good portion of the country experiences declining seasonal temperatures and more inactive time spent indoors.

As a sort of ‘flip side’ of this culinary coin, stress eating behaviors leading to high fat and carb foods, has its own polar opposite: the growing search for low sugar foods in an effort to exert more control over health and wellness at a time when investments in immune system integrity are a top priority for many people.

On the retail side, we’re witnessing a related swell in transactions and channel migration to hard discount. Not a surprise under these conditions. Again, we see the presence of an alter ego for stores in higher income zip codes. These retailers may see increasing opportunities for trial and volume growth of premium indulgent food and beverages. It’s just ‘nuts’ if you get my meaning.

Work-From-Home (WFM) not going anywhere

As we pour through reports on the status of WFM, we conclude this phenomenon isn’t likely to go away anytime soon. Now breakfast and lunch are prepared and consumed at home, adding to the need for guidance, kitchen counter coaching and convenient solutions. In many places the kids remain home for school as well, adding to the pressures in meal preparation. Can you help with emotional support, menu guidance and prep ideas?

Meal kits took a beating pre-COVID due mainly to cost and complexity. Now kits are returning as a viable way to vary menus and fulfill consumer interest in sophisticated (global) flavors and restless palate syndrome borne of at-home cooking boredom. Grocery retailers have an opportunity here to showcase kits in varying degrees of ‘do-it-for-you’ to meet the interests of the scratch cookers and those who are simply exhausted with all the constant chopping and slicing.

The Wheatley kitchen is a veritable round robin of cutting boards, knives, saute’ pans, bowls and leftover containers as two teenage daughters exert control over their food preferences, while the parents handle another portion of the chores. It’s an unending cycle of cooking and cleaning. I’ve not seen teenagers with such accomplished knife skills and baking expertise except on Chopped Kids.  

  • Snacking is now a 24/7 activity. The room for brands to play here is nearly infinite. The refueling is almost non-stop, some of it functional and some indulgent.

The opportunities for brands and retailers to become a partner with people in the kitchen has never been higher, yet so few are stepping-up to the plate. Perplexing.

E-commerce crazy

Time is all we have. How we spend it is all that matters. Why will e-commerce become such a dominant channel? Because it is built to give back time. The pandemic closes the door on casual browsing and spending extra quality time in brick and mortar retail. Shopping trips are fewer and purposeful, aimed at minimizing viral exposure.

Meantime the seamless digital shopping platforms people encounter are getting better and better. We’re now at a $70 billion run rate in e-commerce transactions. Experts in the field believe once you pass 50% of typical transactions in food or lifestyle, the tipping point may very well have been reached. Not there yet, but the leaps in digital purchasing this year are significant.

At this stage, as good online experiences and comfort level take over, people begin to appreciate the time they’ve been given back by avoiding the hassle of driving to and running the cart through stores.

That doesn’t mean retail disappears, far from it! It does mean that shopping experience and environment must be on a whole other level to romance and engage people in a sought-after and magnetic reason to be inside your doors. Disney does magic well, so should you.

Shopping for what?

According to IRI data through mid-August, the top five categories in retail sales volume are:

  1. Health care products
  2. Frozen meat/poultry/seafood
  3. Personal cleansing
  4. Other refrigerated
  5. Baking

Within the top 25 categories in sales growth, frozen and refrigerated holds 14 of them. Evidence that consumers care about preserving shelf life and guarding against food waste and scarcity, while the baking binge is no fluke. It is an effort to bring control back during an era when there is a predominant feeling of none.

Strategic direction: identify passionate cohorts, apply hyper relevance

If you can step back and see your marketing and communications strategies remains widely targeted at virtually every human on earth, now is the time to prune. The need for mattering has never been greater. Achieving that enviable position isn’t easy and requires significant focus and discipline.

Step One –

Identify the most committed and passionate consumers of your product or shopper groups in your stores. What do they care about, how do they live, what are the pain points they need to solve? Your goal is to become a refined and optimal solution to their problem. To get there you need to lean hard on the strategic thinkers and those with insight to consumer behaviors on your team. This is true customer-centric planning.

Step Two –

The goal of your marketing is hyper relevance to these consumers, to the point where they see a mirror of themselves in how the brand communicates and behaves. Your values and theirs become one. You step fully into higher purpose and deeper meaning with this cohort (there may be cohorts). Whatever end of the economic spectrum, you lean in to where they live and how they feel. You’re looking for common ground and ways to be of help. Your value proposition isn’t just the product or store. It’s how you tangibly work to improve their lives.

Step Three –

Your communications and content creation should be packed with advice, guidance and counsel. You walk away from the temptation to self-promote and instead focus on them and their stories. You enable social proof mechanisms and encourage people to share experiences because you know it’s credible proof of what you want them to believe. Your storytelling expands to address the higher purpose you’ve adopted and how you are helping improve the world around us. You now know it matters to consumers who expect this of you.

We understand that people are now literally consuming their identity. What they buy is a flag and mirror of their values, beliefs and what they hold to be important. Symbolism can be everywhere in every place that consumers encounter your brand and business. Are you deploying the markers and images they will recognize of lifestyle relevance?

The horizon: climate change

Looking ahead, what’s coming is a move to connect food and beverage choices with carbon footprint and impacts on climate change through contributing to the growth of greenhouse gases. There is genuine fear among people that food production is irrevocably linked to creating damage to the climate, leading to super storms, droughts and wildfires.

This issue is going to climb in visibility and importance. Brands have an opportunity to get in front of this concern and be part of the dialogue. The roots of this will inevitably go back to supply chain decisions and how foods are farmed or raised. To that end regenerative agriculture is going to rise as a priority and people will be looking for these practices to show up in an industrialized agribusiness that isn’t operating with these principles in mind.

The great promise of this type of farming is reversal of eroding soil conditions and processes that could help farmland become the world’s largest carbon sink. This is a horizon issue now but is rapidly building momentum.

Worth paying attention to.

As you consider the path forward, if expert guidance would be beneficial in your planning use this link to open a conversation. We would be delighted to help. Emergent’s mission is to marry marketing expertise with our belief in the rising importance and value of healthy lifestyle to the future success of relevant food and beverage brands and retailers.

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

Bob Wheatley is the CEO of Chicago-based Emergent, The Healthy Living Agency. Traditional brand marketing often sidesteps more human qualities that can help consumers form an emotional bond. Yet brands yearn for authentic engagement, trust and a lasting relationship with their customers. Emergent helps brands erase ineffective self-promotion and replace it with clarity, honesty and deeper meaning in their customer relationships and communication. For more information, contact [email protected] and follow on Twitter @BobWheatley.

Transformational idea inform company behavior

Come for the strategy, stay for the compelling brand story

September 30th, 2020 Posted by brand advocacy, brand marketing, brand messaging, Brand preference, brand strategy, Consumer insight, Content Marketing, Digital marketing, Emotional relevance, engagement, Higher Purpose, storytelling, Transformation 0 comments on “Come for the strategy, stay for the compelling brand story”

The secret to vastly more effective brand engagement

What is the definition of a big idea?

One that you can immediately detect how it will impact the behavior of a company and brand.

Big, transformational ideas rarely fall from the sky. They aren’t granted by some omnipresent deity of marketing best practices. They don’t appear in a lucky draw of the cards or manifest cosmically in tandem with a solar eclipse.

Big, bold business building ideas happen when strategy and insight coalesce around a path that disrupts category conventions and intentionally breaks the rules of standard go-to-market thinking. It is an outgrowth of due diligence into the conditions impacting how brands present themselves, what consumers want and where gaps exist for leaps of improvement.

Big ideas are not formulation enhancements, more expensive ad campaigns, clever positioning statements, new packaging graphics or extra promotional periods.

  • The questions that get asked when the goal is transformation are more foundational, such as:
  • What business are we really in or should we be in?
  • What cultural shifts are:
    • influencing the way consumers see themselves
    • behave in the marketplace
    • and change what they care about?
  • What higher purpose should we acquire that imbues our company and brand with deeper meaning and potentially leads us to participate actively in transforming the consumer’s wellbeing?
  • How can we fundamentally improve people’s lives and create change that helps them be happier and healthier?
  • What can we do differently in our business, operations and go-to-market plans that more closely aligns our brand with a cohort of consumers who are invested in lifestyle passions we can enable, support or influence?
  • How can we help change the world for the better?

The reliable pathway to transformative business ideas

We have experienced this repeatedly: when investments are made and time is spent studying the passions, interests and concerns of consumers we wish to serve, insight often leads us to the ‘aha’ moment of discovery. These breakthrough insights offer great leaps of opportunity to rethink what the company and brand are on earth to accomplish and how to dramatically build relevance with people.

In these important moments big things can happen, especially when leadership teams are on the hunt for bigger ideas rather than just extending the status quo for another year.

  • Imagine the food retail brand that falls in love with actual food and decides it has more to offer if it becomes a partner on the consumer’s culinary and health and wellness journey, rather than being a conveniently located food product aggregator.
  • Imagine the well-known cheese brand that decides it no longer wants to play in a commodity category with commodity-like business behaviors. Not content to be all things to all people, instead the brand disrupts its category and devotes itself to becoming a partner in the kitchen with people who care about cooking and food adventures.
  • Imagine the emerging food technology company pioneering the alternative meat business that decides it exists to change our future, impact greenhouse gas proliferation and create affordable products to feed a hungry world.
  • Imagine the pet food company that decides earning consumer trust is a top priority and creates an industry-first, all-in platform for openness and visibility to its entire supply chain and product creation process.

Leaps and perceived risk

What if I told you the world around us has changed so intrinsically that the more risky option is maintaining the conventions of routine category behaviors and focus on the features and benefits of product lines – rather than deciding to break with the past and disrupt the marketplace’s existing perceptions of what the business is about?

  • What if making great products were now table stakes and the pathway to real competitive advantage had swung to mining higher purpose and deeper meaning? (It has).

Indeed, that is precisely what has happened as technologies and quality formulation and improved ingredient sourcing has leveled the playing field everywhere on premium product experience. The winners in today’s marketplace are those who have gone all in on extraordinary relevance and connection to people; the brand that sees their role in the user’s life on a higher level of collaboration and partnership beyond transactional thinking that conveys we exist to sell you a product.

Risk aversion can be a killer of great ideas, a smothering blanket that snuffs out the light of reconceptualizing and redefining what the box is rather than invoking a well-worn trope to think outside it.

Ironically, the inclination to avoid risk now creates more of it.

The primacy of sound strategy

Strategic thinking has shifted away from myopic preoccupation with competitive analysis and reaching for an incremental improvement over the brands residing next door on the shelf. Specsmanship and a marginally better offering are difficult to maintain and defend over time. Moreover, the consumer doesn’t care about this like you hope they will.

The rules of sound strategy lean into uniqueness, radical differentiation and devotion to lifestyle relevance. To zig when everyone else zags. To violate the rules and conventions of standard market behaviors with purposeful intent.

  • Inspiring people requires that brands become inspirational. The ability to achieve this state isn’t an outcome of more protein per serving. People are attracted now to becoming part of something greater than themselves. They want to embrace a mission that adds meaning, value and purpose to their lives.

This aligns with a cultural shift where purchases are now a billboard of what people want others to believe is important to them. If a purchase is largely symbolic, then what’s the symbolism embedded in your brand persona and what flags of cultural relevance are flying above your business and its meaning?

This kind of strategic thinking offers the promise of transformational and sustainable growth because the brand is working overtime to weave itself into the very fabric of consumers’ lives rather than being satisfied with the subjective ‘tastes better’ or aiming for less calories and sodium.

Creating this strategic game plan in fact is the precursor to assuring the brand communications that follows will be engaging.

How to build the compelling brand story

We live in a content-driven world now. Brands are publishers as much as they are product creators. What happens to communications when the brand voice extends to embrace a mission beyond the product itself? Communication gains greater relevance and value to its intended recipient because it is no longer a sales conversation. It’s more meaningful.

Every day we are bombarded with paid media telegraphing cheap insurance, faster mobile service and drug therapies that promise some form of relief but with side effects that might make you sick. These interruptions are not wanted nor embraced nor longed for with bated breath. They are tolerated, maybe. More often they are triggers for disconnection and avoidance.

Doesn’t it make more sense to have a conversation with people about something they care about?

If consumers see themselves as the hero of their own life story and the brand continually competes with them for the hero role in its messaging, what do you think will happen?

It’s a recipe for assuring brand communication is ineffective. If the voice of the brand has more going for it than reciting product attributes, think about the opportunity to create authentic relationships with people when there’s more relevant subjects to discuss.

Yes, discuss! Real conversations are two-way experiences. When the bullhorn is retired and the brand is imbued with deeper meaning that has relevance to consumer lifestyle interests, the conversation gets more interesting. Why? Because there is inherent value in it for the consumer and utility to how they live.

When you decide to be a partner with them rather than a product pusher, the door swings wide open for connection. Isn’t that what you really want? The game isn’t about tonnage of media spend to confront audiences with a self-serving message. Instead it’s about how we contribute to making the user’s life better, healthier, happier and more fulfilling. Those are the messages they are predisposed to find of interest and worthy of their time and attention.

None of this can happen effectively if the foundation isn’t informed by a higher purpose and a break with convention to look at the business differently at that fundamental level of why it exists.

If you start there, the opportunity for big ideas that influence company behavior are on the table. When that happens the future trajectory the business and brand take can alter for the better and greater good.

  • Isn’t that something you want to be part of? To inspire people’s lives can be invigorating for all involved.

If it’s time to consider bigger, bolder ideas that transform the conversation with consumers, we would love to talk with you about it. Here’s a link to start an informal conversation.

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

Bob Wheatley is the CEO of Chicago-based Emergent, The Healthy Living Agency. Traditional brand marketing often sidesteps more human qualities that can help consumers form an emotional bond. Yet brands yearn for authentic engagement, trust and a lasting relationship with their customers. Emergent helps brands erase ineffective self-promotion and replace it with clarity, honesty and deeper meaning in their customer relationships and communication. For more information, contact [email protected] and follow on Twitter @BobWheatley.

Gen Z Activism

Food Purchases Are Now a Signal

September 21st, 2020 Posted by brand advocacy, brand marketing, brand messaging, Brand preference, brand strategy, branded content, Consumer insight, Content Marketing, engagement, Food Trend, Healthy lifestyle, Higher Purpose, Insight 0 comments on “Food Purchases Are Now a Signal”

What we buy is a waving statement of belief

Once upon a time food was food. Might be indulgent food or healthy food, but its reason for being resided somewhere between enjoyment, sustenance or weight management. The world around us has shifted once again as cultural influences work to redefine the paradigm of what food purchases are really about.

The implications here for food and beverage marketing cannot be understated: you might agree relevance to consumer interests is paramount to communication effectiveness. Thus, the impact of cultural upheaval manifesting in consumers’ lives is critically important to strategy and gaining a meaningful connection with people.

Food purchase is a cultural expression of _____________.

In 2019 Deloitte published the results of a consumer survey that revealed an emerging trend in brand preference: people believe brands have a greater responsibility to act on purposeful issues. Concerns such as how companies treat employees, impact on the environment and the communities where they operate surfaced as emerging drivers of brand preference.

This followed another Deloitte study conducted in collaboration with the Food Marketing Institute (recently re-branded as The Food Industry Association), that showed for the first time in modern history the standard food and beverage purchase motivations of taste, price and convenience were being eclipsed by interest in transparency, health and wellness, visibility to the supply chain and food safety.

What’s happening is the socialization of food and its purchase.

Increasingly, food brand selection and purchase is a telegraph of personal values and beliefs. You might be wondering, what’s driving these changes. In the U.S. there are now over 21,000 food centric blogs, an astounding bit of evidence of how food culture has risen to lifestyle prominence in the lives of most people.

  • Perhaps this was inevitable as consumers across all generational cohorts connected the dots between the quality of the food they consume and the quality of their lives. What is happening now is nothing short of revolutionary as the purpose of food acquires an even higher and symbolic purpose.

Food has always been important but now gains influence beyond consumption. People are emotional creatures and food is an emotional category that plays directly to human senses. Now, that significance is acquiring a new set of values that extends way past the physical aspects of the products’ use and roles in daily diet.

Wildfires and Green New Deal

When I was 16 my priorities were centered on how to go about buying a car and in doing so seal the path to my independence. Recently my 14-year old daughter announced her intentions to take assets from her babysitting earnings and donate them to organizations addressing hunger and racial inequality. Cultural and value changes reveal a different and more enlightened point of view on what matters. In turn, it is vital for brands and businesses to gain understanding on ‘mattering’ at a time when attitudes and importantly priorities are being reframed.

Generation Z is coming of age as an activist population focused on changing the way we live to take better care of the world around us. If you pay attention you hear the voices of concern rising around climate change and its rapidly building momentum to permanently alter the social and political landscape. Wildfires and super storms provide evidence that the way natural resources have been exploited has a serious downside. More specifically, how the food production, agricultural and energy industries are operating in service of convenience and consumption, and simultaneously exacting a horrible toll on the health of the planet and her inhabitants.

The Sunrise Movement and Green New Deal are being championed by the youngest generation. Their future quality of life may well depend on how fast changes can be created in the current systems that generate greenhouse gases fomenting weather related catastrophes, drought leading to fires, rising coastal water levels and the ongoing impact of melting polar ice caps.

Chief among the contributing threats to climate is the global food system and animal production in particular that collectively create more greenhouse gas than all worldwide transportation systems combined.

Generation Z now views purchase decisions as a path to creating a better world. In their view, if you’re not an active, visible part of the solution – your inaction is part of the problem.

“Power of the Purchase Order is Primal”

Errol Schweizer, producer of “The Checkout”, an industry trend watcher podcast, did a recent interview with Kevin Coupe’s Morning Newsbeat e-newsletter. Kevin asked, considering these societal changes on the horizon, what’s the one thing food retailers can do to build their relevance and value?

“Increase the amount of organic and regeneratively produced products that you sell. The organic trade association recently released a whitepaper that provided scientific proof organic agriculture can help mitigate the impact of climate change,” said Schweizer. He states this type of food production helps sequester carbon, reduces use of fossil fuels while also producing more nutrient dense food.

His call to action: keep growing your organic business. As a retailer you can do this, and it’s relevant to what people want anyway. He exhorts the retail purchase order can be a powerful instrument in helping answer the need for change. The cultural manifestations of food socialization are significant and will impact how retail strategy and brand building are conducted.

Food as a tool of self-definition

(The New) Brand Democracy:

I believe brands can be a powerful force for change.

I expect them to represent me and solve societal problems.

My wallet is my vote.

Increasingly, meaning is unearthed in consumption. Said another way, the food people choose is an advertisement of who they want to be and what they believe in. When purchases become a billboard for values, the marketing, product creation and innovation decisions need to reflect this insight.

Is it possible we are nearing an era when determining the contribution to greenhouse gas in production will matter as much as ingredient quality and nutrient density? The answer here is ‘yes’ and it’s coming more rapidly than previous developments such as the demand for greater transparency.

At Emergent, we suggest that successfully navigating these waters of change in human behavior can be best accomplished by brands and retailers who come to work bearing a soul – one that governs their actions and informs decisions.

When consumers see purchases as a path to creating a better world, it should play out in the brand voice, content marketing strategy and all that sits underneath.

Guidance to improved relevance in a time of cultural shift:

  • Listening is important and should be formalized as a consistent undertaking to understand the development of emerging attitudes and opinions that impact how consumers see the role of brands in their lives.
  • Building a higher purpose platform for the brand and business is now table stakes to continued relevance and connection with your users.
  • Identify specific actions your business can take to address climate change including how your supply chains operate and the standards and certifications of performance you require for compliance.
  • How can your brand contribute to the cultural conversation? What needs are you uniquely positioned to address?
  • Tell your users what you’re doing an engage them in a dialogue on their views and opinions.
  • Recognize that food is a tool of self-definition and a symbol to others of what your users think is important. How does this influence your messaging and social media strategies?

If you find this development challenging and want to consider a fresh approach, please use this link and let’s start a conversation about your questions and interests.

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

Bob Wheatley is the CEO of Chicago-based Emergent, The Healthy Living Agency. Traditional brand marketing often sidesteps more human qualities that can help consumers form an emotional bond. Yet brands yearn for authentic engagement, trust and a lasting relationship with their customers. Emergent helps brands erase ineffective self-promotion and replace it with clarity, honesty and deeper meaning in their customer relationships and communication. For more information, contact [email protected] and follow on Twitter @BobWheatley.

Pet brand sameness works against brand engagement

How to Disrupt the Sea of Sameness

September 16th, 2020 Posted by brand marketing, brand messaging, Brand preference, brand strategy, branded content, CMO, consumer behavior, Consumer insight, Content Marketing, Emerging brands, Emotional relevance, engagement, Healthy Living, Higher Purpose, Pet food, Pet food marketing, Retail brand building, retail brand relevance 0 comments on “How to Disrupt the Sea of Sameness”

Similar brand strategies lead to undifferentiated communication

Nowhere do we find the unrelenting challenge of sameness operating in full relief more often than the pet food business. No matter what product or retail category you are in, the requirement for message uniqueness and differentiation has never been higher. Here’s how to disrupt the pattern of sameness that follows brands around like a virus.

The good news: The pet food industry is expanding, fueled in part by the dramatic growth of pet owning households, now forecasted to reach 71 million in the U.S. by the close of 2020. Despite economic climate challenges, runaway joblessness and the vagaries of changing shopping behaviors spawned by the pandemic, pet business trends continue on an upward trajectory. The pandemic has served as a catalyst for elevating the pet value proposition. We need our furry companions now more than ever.

The tougher news: Yet despite this picture of continued potential prosperity that floats all premium pet brand boats, the competitive players seem to be held captive in a repetitive messaging loop that confronts pet parents trying to navigate the store aisles. Everywhere their eyes scan, the sea of storytelling sameness stares back, defeating opportunities to connect on an emotional level.

  • What marketing medicine is required to get pet brands to stop and reconsider the path to engagement? To step beyond, above and outside their tendency to reinforce similar tropes about formulation integrity, while intractably married to the protein percentage wars, and accented by assertions of nutritional superiority or human grade ingredient quality.

Everyone believes they make the best food. Indeed, many brands now have upgraded the quality of their ingredient sourcing and formulation techniques, to offer truly nutritionally- dense solutions. But does the pet parent make decisions on the cold analysis of facts and figures? The answer is no they don’t.

Here’s what we know:

  • People run in the opposite direction, away from complicated brain taxing messaging that would require them to study and consider elaborate details of pet nutrition.
  • Human beings are feeling creatures who think and not thinking creatures who feel. It is heart- over-head, always.
  • Trust is an issue in pet food driven in part by the elaborate claims of human quality food ingredients magically encapsulated in a small brown nugget known as kibble. It looks industrial to start with.

The quite natural conclusion of most pet marketing plans is focusing inwardly on all the reasons why brand X pet food is better than brands Y or Z. The incredible efforts undertaken by companies to make a high-quality product IS the story, correct?

The challenging outcome of this thinking is a recipe for similar statements and claims that operate in conflict with the fundamental requirement for brand uniqueness and differentiation. Hence the sea of sameness.

How to break the cycle of sameness.

What does the pet parent care about? Their pet. The incredible emotional bond that sits between them is unshakeable and demonstrable and visceral and real. What is pet food? It is the instrument of expressing love and care for their pet’s wellbeing and healthy longevity. Why? Because they have connected the dots between the quality of what they themselves eat and their quality of life, a point of view that translates over in a nano-second to their beliefs about pet wellness.

We know it’s really tough to refocus marketing on the pet parent and their lifestyle aspirations ahead of what’s going on in the formulation, the manufacturing and the supply of high-quality food ingredients. Yet the enemy in here is the very sameness this encourages.

  • When you can walk through the store aisles and literally transfer packaging statements from one brand to the next one over, and it remains essentially valid, you know the playing field is going to be murky for the consumer. Maybe even confusing.

Breaking the cycle requires putting pet parents at the center of planning and working backwards from there. It is the focus on them, their lives, interests and relationship with their pet where all the alchemy of marketing magic happens.

Great marketing isn’t logical and linear. It is better when the plan embraces the idea that humans are emotional and often irrational, driven by whims and the perceived wisdom of crowds.

Love in a bowl.

That’s right, love. You aren’t selling pet food or de-boned chicken or 38% protein. You are selling the means to express the great love people have for their pet. Emotional communication occurs when storytelling and images and focus are on the pet parent ahead of the product. Holding up a mirror on what they believe: “I’m spending more on pet food because I care deeply about the health and wellbeing of my four-legged family member.”

So celebrate the bond, the moments of happiness, the relationship, the companionship, the emotional connections and experiences of a life lived alongside furry children. In this way the pet parent immediately becomes the hero of brand storytelling, and in doing so the communication achieves its goal of being wanted and engaging.

Talk about the stories of your customer’s pet lifestyle experiences, triumph over health challenges, and the miraculous emotional connections people have received during one of the most uncertain periods in human history. When your marketing voice is a reflection of real world experiences and the value pet parents experience with their pets, your brand becomes a partner with them on their journey to a more fulfilling life with their pet companion.

  • This is how brand relationships are formed and fed. All of a sudden it matters less to  communication effectiveness when protein percentages vary slightly brand to brand. You are no longer chained to specsmanship. You have successfully disrupted the sea of sameness.

Should this kind of thinking inspire you to consider fresh ideas and approaches, please use this link and let’s start a conversation.

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

Bob Wheatley is the CEO of Chicago-based Emergent, The Healthy Living Agency. Traditional brand marketing often sidesteps more human qualities that can help consumers form an emotional bond. Yet brands yearn for authentic engagement, trust and a lasting relationship with their customers. Emergent helps brands erase ineffective self-promotion and replace it with clarity, honesty and deeper meaning in their customer relationships and communication. For more information, contact [email protected] and follow on Twitter @BobWheatley.

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