Kitchens have fully transformed and left behind any vestiges of being the labor-focused food prep station of yore (orange cone work zone). Instead, the room has morphed to become the most dynamic and influential household space. It’s the heart of the house – where social interaction and connection, entertainment and media consumption, healthy lifestyle expression, and food adventure all coalesce.

Life unfolds here on so many levels.

A renaissance created by cultural change

When exactly did the kitchen move from cooking conclave to heartbeat of healthy living? The origins can be traced to a cultural shift sparked by the Internet age in the late 90’s and the dawn of ‘anything that can be known will be known’ – ushering in the era of consumer control. The digital revolution allows people to indulge in unprecedented access to information about fresh food, industrial food, ingredients, sources, preparations, cooking techniques, and the impact of our food choices on both ourselves and the environment.

Fanning this spark to disruptive blaze is the unstoppable premiumization of food experience in America; a massive light bulb moment that what you eat directly impacts the quality of your life. In sum, the consumer’s desire for higher quality food and beverage experiences goes along with their higher quality lives.

Let’s face it – food is just super popular. Think Food Network, celeb chefs, food bloggers, food trucks, meal kits, cooking schools, the move to fresh and local over packaged and processed, culinary vacations, gastropubs, even school food – virtually everywhere food quality has gone up. Except on your average airline.

Further examining root causes

There is an equally intense desire to invest more time in an environment we can control while the world outside roils with uncertainty. This condition has helped catalyze a resurgence in cooking skills and culinary exploration; helping fuel the deepening bond between satiating our more sophisticated sensory interests and desire for more social attachment.

Source: Peapod – From the Pod (2016)

In fact, it is the intersection of media, food experience and the social aspects of food consumption that has transformed the kitchen area to lifestyle retreat.

Stepping back – when healthy was a narrower idea

At one point in time, healthy was ascribed to calculations of addition by subtraction. A food focused trip to ingredient eradication in service of less – sodium, sugar, fat, and calories. Healthy is no longer just a food-centric science experiment. Instead, it is a way of living that mirrors the consumer’s interest in a more fulfilling life.

Know more, be more and do more. Live better, brighter and longer. Yes, we’ve connected the dots between what we consume and do and the outcomes on health and happiness. We’ve rediscovered the true path to improved and more interesting food experiences through experimentation in the kitchen.

For this reason, we increasingly prefer to have home prepared meals over dining out – for its creative inspiration, control over experience, and ability to manage ingredients to our specs. The kitchen is now an environment that bridges media and entertainment interests with family and social interaction.

An expression of healthy living

We’ve come to appreciate a more holistic integration of mind, body, and spirit. We recognize how our choices and decisions impact the direction we take, experiences we have.

The kitchen is the hub and epicenter for much of what we do each day. Here celeb Chef Rick Bayless describes the higher purpose of food in our lives:

“I want you to cook more. It’s good for you. You know exactly what you’re nourishing yourself with… It allows you to feel the natural rhythms of life in a way that microwaved frozen dinners never can. And cooking often draws people to the table, encouraging dialogue and providing a moment to appreciate the good (and truly tasty) things in life.”

Just magic!

The implications to marketers working in and around this area in the home are deep and diverse. How can brands become enablers of creativity, personal expression, learning achievement, social discourse, family life and relationship growth?

Healthy living is more than a commitment to exercise. It’s a desire to follow a path to improved happiness and satisfaction. Brands that position themselves as facilitators of healthy lifestyle and provide resources, information, and easy-to-use tools will endear themselves to this ever-growing, engaged and active consumer base.

This is rich territory for social and experiential content and brand community building – enlarging the brand voice to rise above feature and benefit selling, to become a true partner in consumers’ lives. Oddly enough, letting go of traditional sales thinking can achieve authentic engagement and real traction.

What’s more, we unlock a treasure trove of relevance to consumer’s lives and what they care about. If brands can become a genuine healthy lifestyle coach, then we can also earn permission for a relationship built on trust and reciprocity.

The creative wheels should spin on elevating kitchen strategy – designing a viable footprint in this area of the home that fuels emotional lifestyle aspirations over tech specs. Just exciting.

Everything can be summed up in this thought:
We sit in service of the whole human being, not just the stomach.

What do you think?

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My very first clients in the agency business were food companies. I was baptized in the world of CPG brand building and the power of awareness and message repetition to move business outcomes.

The changes in food culture and consumer behavior have taken their toll on the realities of marketing best practices, forcing changes in strategy and execution. As the definition of what constitutes quality has dramatically shifted (along with it a precipitous decline in relevance for many iconic brands) veritable unknowns have driven a lasting wedge into consumer preferences.

What’s sitting underneath this phenomenon is telling:

1.  Consumers are more passionate and engaged than ever in food and what goes on in the kitchen and around the table.

2.  People have connected dots between the quality of the foods they consume and the quality of their lives. Their core values have altered in the face of significant food culture changes.

3.  Food is now seen as a key to good health, happiness and lifestyle enjoyment. But how quality and good-for-you are defined is quite different.

4.  Demand for transparency, better sourcing, simple real-food ingredients, craftsmanship in production and honest labeling have shifted the focus to product pedigree. It’s experience over branding imagery and cinematic storytelling.

In the early stages for new businesses, brand takes a back seat to differentiated product experience, and operates mostly as a navigational tool. Thus, in many respects the “product is the marketing.”

Product symbolism is now the guide to messaging strategy. Communication of this product symbolism is focused primarily in highly networked social channels where early adopters share their finds and experiences. This feeds folklore and legend about consumers’ experiences with the product. Discovery is part of the surprise-and-delight proposition.

In this way trust is created not by brand image but by virtue of the product itself being separated and elevated from other mainstream options in its category. Unaided awareness levels are not key to initial success here. How the story is told in earned and owned media, rather, is absolutely vital.

Bare Bones Broth Company – an example of cultural relevance and aligned story

Disclosure: We’ve done project work with this company. Bone broth is an emerging category that on one level represents a culinary upgrade to its lower-end cousins in broth and stock. Bone broth brings a substantial new celebration of product news as a nutrient dense, savory hot beverage – one that could eventually become the healthier alternative to a morning cup of Joe.

Photo credit: Bare Bones

Bare Bones signals its cultural relevance through its enhanced protein delivery, plus higher quality, sustainably-sourced ingredients like grass-fed beef, cage-free chicken, organic veggies and a zero food waste mission.

The beverage experience is differentiated as a good-for-you savory option delivering proteins, nutrients and collagen, while the culinary promise offers greater flavor depth and richer sensory outcome to mainstream stocks in sauces, soups and braising.

The brand has low awareness, but at this stage that is less important. It is the devotion of the brand’s owners Katherine and Ryan Harvey to high quality ingredients, a more complex, culinary-inspired recipe and authenticity in manufacture that sets the stage for initial growth. How and where the story is told will impact their trajectory, as will packaging communication and tapping into other food culture appropriate experiences to anchor Bare Bones’ relevance.

Four Watch-Outs

1.  For emerging brands – ingredient or process compromise in service of lower price point runs the risk of sabotaging the very core of differentiation that drives the experience and social media conversation. So too, legacy brand owners must be careful in bringing their food-making, cost control expertise as not to upset the quality commitment now fueling growth.

2.  Additionally, channel selection is part of the equation – putting the brand in the right place where consumers shop and hunt for these new experiences. Placing the product in the wrong channel may lead to a social/economic disconnect, unhealthy pressure on pricing, loss of momentum, and eventual delisting.

3.  Thus, driving scale must be approached strategically. Patience is required. In service of rapid growth metrics, over-extending the brand too early beyond its core category and competency can lead to failures and misdirected resource investments.

4.  Protecting the mission ethos, participation of the founders and quality commitments that sit underneath the business is paramount.

Appropriate Investments

1.  Improved package design – many of the new brands in their early stages suffer from lack of experience in how optimal package design can telegraph their story. And so, it can be improved for stronger shelf communication.

2.  While media scale may not be an issue, the quality of earned and owned communication nevertheless is a thing. Often entrepreneurs are already time challenged in sourcing ingredients, expanding manufacturing and growing distribution. Assumptions that anyone ‘can do the marketing’ is simply not true. Topflight help is needed with experienced hands.

3.  Insight research has to sit at the head of the table where larger food or savvy equity ownership can assess the challenges and opportunities. Brands grow on the basis of relevance and meaning to their core users. Understanding the core values and desires of consumers requires insight research, directed by those with strategic skill sets in mapping strategy. Basing the business and marketing plan on hunches and assumptions is an invitation to more misses than hits. Hope is never a strategy.

4.  Wringing out inefficiencies – scaled food organizations have know-how in sourcing and manufacturing that can help improve cost structures and enhance margin benefits for all players involved. As stated earlier, this must be done without compromise to the quality and mission story.

The best advice we can offer investors is to help, support and add value short of pushing too fast on scale or disrupting the experience that is the engine driving emerging brand success.

Can legacy brands pivot in the midst of cultural shift?

The subject of another story to come…

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Is this embedded in your marketing plan?

Belief: Something one accepts as true or real; a firmly held opinion (Source: Oxford Dictionary)

Belief is now central to closing the deal with consumers – to earning their allegiance and engagement. Yet, belief and its sibling trust are often not acknowledged directly in marketing strategies, priorities and especially downstream business behaviors.

We already know consumers are fully in control of initiating any conversation (pull) with brands – while traditional business, marketing and media strategies (push) have been upended by cultural shifts and technological disruption. Trust, relevance, and consumer-centricity have become foundational to growth because they mirror consumer expectations, and thus inform brand preferences.

Of all the business priorities clamoring for attention, it now falls on CMOs to become belief managers – working (harder) to build trust between consumers and brands in a business environment where skepticism rules.

Trust is not necessarily enhanced in…

• Paid media channels – the channel and form carries their own liabilities
• Interruption-style tactics, both online and offline
• Brand assertions of quality, superiority and benefit

Areas where trust is cultivated…

• Earned media – a third party provides independent perspective
• Social media – the consumer’s personal opinion is aired, unedited
• Retail and digital experience – consumers witness it first hand
• Verified quality and transparency – credible experts supply the proof

Today, the marketer’s goal is to transform customers into advocates and ambassadors. But to do so first requires belief. Trust is difficult to secure and challenging to preserve. It springs from a point of view that brand relationships are really like friendships, and so trust must be earned and nurtured through actions not just words.

The bargain for Belief Management is consumers determine you are operating in their best interests, that you are devoted to quality and craftsmanship; that your business operates with real values, a tangible soul and is making an effort to improve the world around us.

There was an era when marketers felt they could control and transact belief by ordering up paid influence through advertising imagery, music, message done in an effort to persuade. Now the artifice of concocted, self-promoting story is running headlong into a reality test. The consumer isn’t listening. They are, however, listening to each other – thus ‘social proof’ is a major part of the belief acid test.

Mining moments of truth

Belief Management might be best expressed as a planned effort to identify and activate opportunities to be completely relevant and believable. How? By curating all consumer touch points, from in-store experience to operations decisions to communications:

• Be candid and honest.
• Be transparent.
• Be open.
• Be helpful.
• Be useful.
• Be generous.
• Be an enabler and supporter.

As you read those statements, they sound oddly familiar – as in the type of human behavior that leads to trust and friendship. The more brand relationships mirror characteristics of human friendships the better this gets.

In the marketing plan, belief must manifest in every step the organization takes to put the consumer at the center of strategy. That said, with consumers increasingly skeptical of corporate motivation, the pressure is even greater for brands and retailers to not only represent themselves as authentic, transparent and trustworthy – but TO BE authentic, transparent and trustworthy.

This is why Higher Purpose is such a vital component of installing belief. To the extent the business is shaped and guided by a legitimate belief system that steps beyond the transaction and profit motive, the deeper meaning and values help facilitate company behaviors that ‘prove’ a customer-first commitment.

It should be noted, there’s also a stark reality. In today’s connected world where ‘anything that can be known will be known,’ brands now live in glass houses. Honesty as an imperative is fueled by the reality of hyper-connectivity and the ability of consumers to rapidly obtain information in real time, confirming or denying, what your company does and does not do.

The Importance of Validation Marketing

At Emergent, we started work awhile back on a new planning model. We call it Validation Marketing. We created this series of steps with one fundamental concept that sits underneath: it is a trust creation engine.

If you accept the idea that belief and trust are vital to getting “permission” for any kind of relationship with those that buy from you, then this recipe for belief creation is for you. It is a virtuous circle. As belief managers we establish the foundation for engagement, working hard to build relevance and deeper meaning with consumers. Why? Because we’ve, in effect, humanized the entire operation and, in doing so, created the basis for trust.

For food retailers, if you follow this thinking all the way to the ground of shopping experience, there’s an opportunity to elevate and differentiate the banner brand. Legacy policies suggest some lack this insight or are unable to translate customer-centricity all the way through to offering food adventures in an environment that is traditionally focused solely on pushing transactions.

The irony: transactions will be better served by working harder on belief management.

Digging Deeper

Interested in learning more about harnessing the power of brand purpose, developing belief strategies and becoming the beneficiary of consumer trust?

Watch the webinar we hosted with Fresh Squeezed Ideas on the “Power of Purpose.” Moderated by the Food Marketing Institute’s (FMI) Mark Baum, the webinar features Emergent’s Bob Wheatley and Fresh Squeezed Ideas’ John McGarr, a premier consumer insights provider.

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A counter-intuitive strategy that drives brand growth and engagement

Successful businesses sell great products. Or do they?

For the last zillion years, we’ve believed that business exists to improve people’s lives by: selling them a (hopefully) useful, necessary well-made item, while generating profitable returns to shareholders and investors. Thus, business growth spins on product superiority and continually improving features and formulas, while marketing puts a spotlight on these attributes to drive the virtuous cycle of commerce and earnings. That is, unless people stop reacting reflexively.

Having a great product is table stakes now, so what’s next?

The world has shifted dramatically though and the path to business growth and consumer engagement has changed. Today, a brand is not a thing, it’s a promise people align with, believe in and invest of themselves. Twenty first century brands are Purpose-driven. As such, there’s a deeper reason brands exist beyond transactions and financial returns.

Said another way, value creation looks a lot different. It is now based on:

• Wants not needs
• Feelings not facts
• Beliefs not features
• Purpose before profit

Guidance, coaching, insight and inspiration have become a feast of value for those with a passion for what you’re selling. Ironically, it’s when the focus moves from commerce to lifestyle enablement that trust breaks out and brand relationships form.

The Gestalt of Glossier

Glossier is a company all about beauty – that just happens to sell cosmetics, not the other way around. This is an organization since inception that understood the premise of helpful guide as a vessel for creating legions of devoted followers.

What Glossier is to beauty…

• Yeti coolers is to outdoor lifestyle
• Plum Organics is to parenting
• Under Armor is to athletic passion
• Seventh Generation is to protecting the environment
• Blue Apron is to culinary inspiration
• Whole Foods is to health and wellness
• Organic Valley is to family farming

Glossier exists to celebrate beauty insights and ideas from their unique point of view. By putting the consumer’s desires and passions first and seeing the relationship as a dominant characteristic driving their decisions, Glossier hits hard on relevance and shared values. They understand the point about wants, feelings and belief.

Products are not an end in themselves. Rather, they sit in service of the users’ self-image and lifestyle interests. Glossier is a coaching organization that celebrates beauty and facilitates a community of like-minded believers.

The company does not try to be all things to all people. Even its product lines evoke a philosophy about make-up – less is more. The brand’s content channels are created by staffers mostly – who pull the curtain back to reveal their personal, real-world interests and solutions. Customers are encouraged to submit images and video of uses and ideas. Engagement is built around answering questions and enabling testimonials and feedback.

Commerce and transactional thinking are not driving the business bus at Glossier.

The outcome is prophetic. The brand has achieved a cult-like following of fans that help create routine ‘sold-out’ conditions when new items are launched. You might wonder if Glossier is spending big bucks in traditional ad channels to drive eyeballs to their platform? No. They don’t need to.

Can food brands secure a devoted following?

Food and beverage are high involvement categories that cater to a culinary and health/wellness centered lifestyle. Like beauty, creativity in the kitchen is a thing and source of personal passion and self-esteem.

Food companies can adopt the behaviors of a ‘non commerce’ commerce organization. Food is an emotional and culturally-informed business. It connects dots to health, wellness, creativity, family, relationships, social experience, romance and lifestyle.

Just as cosmetics are applied to skin and food and beverages are consumed – both are highly personal parts of living as we know it. Consumers have come to believe that the quality of what they eat will directly impact the quality of their lives. Food is not just fuel, it is a path to some of life’s most treasured experiences.

This is rich territory for mining deeper meaning, creating Purpose beyond product and enabling culinary passions. But to do so means the organization has to see itself not as an earnings machine, rather an enabler celebrating the love affair people have with food.

Bernadette Jiwa of The Story of Telling said it best: “A brand story is no longer like the top coat of gloss paint applied at the last moment to make the surface shinier and more immediately attractive. It’s the undercoat that often nobody sees, but which allows the brand to endure…” – base material integrity if you will.

Business is built from the inside out. Substance now rules over assertions of value. By deciding to serve the very human interests of consumers first, the goals of commerce can be fulfilled.

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Beliefs and Business Now Bedfellows

Nielsen’s recent study, “Unlocking the Millennial Mindset” underscores just how far we’ve come on the continuum from product feature and benefit selling to something akin to religion-style commitments in how brands and retailers come to market. Millennial consumers especially expect companies to behave openly and conscientiously.

• 81 percent want to know more about how foods are produced
• 80 percent want access to the behind-the-scenes story on how companies operate
• 73 percent are willing to pay more for sustainable brands
• 81 percent are willing to pay more for foods with a health benefit
• 51 percent check package labels for evidence of social and environmental impact

Pressing on every corner of the food and beverage industry is a pervasive consumer desire for greater meaning, higher purpose and ethical business practices from the brands and retailers they prefer.

Ideology is rapidly becoming the new ‘currency of commerce’ as consumers seek to be a part of something that’s greater than themselves. As a result deeper, genuine values and beliefs match, and in some cases exceed, improved formulas as a choice and purchase driver.

Quick litmus test:

1. Is your business driven by a profound, visible, human-relevant belief system?
2. Is your company grounded in and built on a higher purpose?
3. Does your food or beverage brand have a recognizable soul?

At the root of this purpose-driven phenomenon is cultural change. And nowhere can this be seen in greater relief than the food industry’s passing of the leadership baton: emerging brands with a clear mission and belief system are gaining significant share of interest and engagement over their less ideologically-informed legacy brand forbearers.

Ideology, in fact, has risen to be an essential part of the recipe for crafting an engaging brand proposition; one that will invariably insert the consumer’s interests and passions at the top of go-to-market strategy. Some of these consumer-relevant interests and passions include:

• Changing the food system
• Protecting the environment
• Eliminating hunger
• Supporting family farming
• Rewarding sustainable agriculture processes
• Offering super transparency
• Improving health and wellbeing

Brands as Enablers of Being Your Best

In essence, brands that contribute to the betterment of people and society, while rethinking industrial food practices that have defined the industry for 50 years, are on the more prosperous path. To be clear, this is deeper than company mission statement stalwarts like treating employees and vendors fairly and responsibly.

Food ideology has more in common with religious principles than it does with garden-variety mission statements.

What’s going on here? The consumer has evolved. What people care about has shifted.

The Marist College Institute for Public Opinion every year publishes the results of a national poll on New Year resolutions. And for the first time in 2017, Being a Better Person rose to number one, edging out weight loss, the perennial winner in three previous polls.

Better person-ship plays a role in how consumers are making brand and retail choices. It is an expression of their profound interest in healthy lifestyle, the environment and doing good for others.

Actions consumers take in brand purchase are now symbolic representations of the values they espouse. When a brand puts beliefs and values at the center of business strategy, it is catering to this notion of improvement in a tangible, meaningful way. The devotion to ideological principles also infers and imbues the brand with markers of higher quality and integrity.

Putting beliefs and values at the center of your business isn’t about just doing good for its own sake! In the end, brands with belief at their core are in alignment as enablers – helping people be, and achieve, their best. The metrics of this approach will continue to play out in share shifts and emergence of new categories. These new categories will arise from innovations; not just in formula or ingredients, but also in brand and business behavior and credo.

The Higher Purpose Audit

So what’s the optimal approach? There’s no one-size fits all solution. Every business is unique and requires a custom-designed approach – whether it’s refinement of a current mission or the development of a new strategy from scratch.

Emergent provides this due diligence in the form of a Higher Purpose Audit designed to assess current conditions in a client’s category, an inventory of brand and business practices and behaviors that may be aligned or inconsistent with the right ideology. We translate that audit into tangible strategies and ideas that will inform brand position, marketing and communication.

The end game: harnessing the requirement of true ideology as a business builder.

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Marketing investments can make a difference…

At the very beginning, the Genesis moment if you will, entrepreneurs nearly always are translating a personal belief and passion into something new and potentially exciting in the food and beverage marketplace.

• EPIC – meat-based, hand held protein bars.

• Bare Bones Broth Company – culinary quality bone broth.

• Suja – cold-pressed nutrient dense juices.

• GIVN – premium bottled water your conscience will feel good about.

• EVOL – higher quality sustainably sourced frozen meals.

And (justifiably) so, these companies invest an incredible amount of energy and effort in bringing the product to life: sourcing suppliers, makers, packaging, distribution and scouring for retail customers who will take a chance on you.

Their goals are often to improve the health and wellbeing of people, raise the bar on quality and change (improve) the food system in the process. There’s a worthwhile and worthy pursuit. Heartfelt. Making the world a better place. Giving back. Elevating the game. Disrupting categories. Creating new ones. Thus, a vision in motion.

In the beginning with some exceptions, company resources are limited, and every dollar counts. Prioritization sets in and the first consideration is getting the quality and the mission embedded into the product. Like anything initially lacking scale, the ingredient, production and distribution costs will invariably be higher.

We also know there’s ample evidence of high failure rate on new product introductions and businesses that either gain some initial traction and flame out or never quite scale and live on in under-achieving anonymity in limited distribution.

Despite this truth, we find marketing at times takes a back seat, or no seat on this go-to-market bus. The general view might be, “if you build it (exceptionally well), they will come.” Or the more specific, “great products always find a market.” It’s naturally alluring, right, because it’s just so much better than the status quo…plus the deeper belief or mission system adds value. All true, but…

X-Factor: Marketing and the human being

Human beings are remarkable creatures. People are not analytical decision-making machines, and for the most part operate on emotional cues. We call this “heart over head.” Consumers are bombarded and buried in marketplace noise. Our multi-tasking, multi-channeled digital and distracted lives require some respected credible guidance and filtering in order to get our brains around what to pay attention to – and what matters.

Strong marketing firms are keepers of consumer insight.

Great marketing vs. just serviceable will always involve more than just a toolbox of outreach tools.

Communications tactics without strategy and embedded consumer insight is like shouting your story from a mountaintop where the only real recipients are big horned sheep.

A strong marketing partner will offer brands the following:

1. Insight into consumer behaviors, motivations, passions, concerns and needs that inform everything from packaging to web site to outbound and inbound marketing content.

2. Knowledge and expertise in branding, brand positioning – and mapping the strategic story you’re about to tell in an environment where gaining attention is more difficult than ever, despite the ready availability of social, digital channels.

3. Seasoned experience in navigating the dynamics of the buyer environment, retailer needs and how best to package an intangible – which can be a significant hill to climb for a newcomer selling assertions of future success.

4. Informed design and messaging for web, sales and trade communications assets that removes the guesswork in how the concept is presented to both business and consumer audiences.

5. Contacts and relationships in the industry and with influencers who can help break down barriers and resistance to distribution hurdles, equity investment interest and consumer engagement.

6. An informed sounding board for product development ideas, formulation moves, packaging adjustments and early innovation bets.

The beneficial outcomes:

• Better results, minimizing misfires and speed to gaining account placement.
• Removing risk in how to best package and present the brand story.
• Generating media visibility at a time when steady, ongoing awareness is hard to come by after the first salvo of newcomer attention.

A great partner understands the grist of what you are trying to do right down to the atoms and electrons level. When every dollar is precious, is there added value in making marketing investments early?

Even if engagement is limited to strategic planning at the onset, there’s more to be gained in getting it right the first time; it will help accelerate the trajectory of business development.

In short, better to put marketing in the plan and on the priority list upfront rather than see it as a downstream consequence of ‘required support’ once the business is percolating.

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