Are you aligned on the pathway to true relevance?

What is the most powerful and pervasive condition impacting consumer product category growth across the lifestyle continuum? Effectively answering the consumer’s desire for a healthier lifestyle. This is the driving force that sits underneath Emergent’s agency value proposition and the work we do for our clients.

At the foundation of this transformational shift is an over-arching interest in a higher-quality life. Consumers believe their decisions and actions in this arena will impact personal happiness, safety and wellness.

Healthy living knocks at the front door of relevance to consumer wants and desires. It is a mindful choice made by increasingly mindful consumers across all age cohorts. Nowhere can this be seen in greater relief than food and beverage choices which have morphed in recent years from taste, price and convenience purchase drivers to a more enlightened set of criteria that pays homage to the healthy lifestyle priority.

Transparency, supply chain visibility, clean labels, ingredient quality, fresh and real food preferences are all evidence of momentum behind the consumer’s growing self-awareness. They are in charge of their lives, in control of brand relationships and thus able to exercise choice to reward those brands that are aligned with their personal interests, beliefs and needs.

• Simply stated, consumers believe that the quality of what they consume impacts the quality of their lives. What people choose to eat manifests in their daily lives as a contribution to health, wellness, career performance, happiness, satisfaction and the ability to achieve life goals.

This is no longer a tertiary issue or a sub-segment of the larger consumer population. It is a swollen river of preference that is washing away the less relevant while rewarding the brands that mirror consumer lifestyle requirements.

How did we get here?

We can trace the origins of this shift back to the early 1990’s when the organic foods market was still emerging, and consumers started to pay attention to a new voice on how food is produced and what the differences are between factory made and farm fresh options. This became transformational when the rBST debate took hold and the organic milk business started to skyrocket as serving organic milk to children became a marker of good parenting skills.

Concurrently, the explosion of digital communication created a shift in the balance of power where anything that can be known will be known, and with it a cultural change. Now consumers want to be informed on where food comes from, how products are produced, thus enhancing the value proposition for higher quality real and fresh foods vs. packaged and highly processed legacy brand mainstays.

You are what you eat

The relationship between what people put in their bodies and how it affects health and wellness goals changed from addition by subtraction – the scientific removal of fat, sugar, sodium and the like, to a different picture of addition by addition.

People now perceive the quality of the food they eat or drink is related to the quality of their lives. This cultural swing resulted in a sea change at food retail, with center store packaged food businesses facing headwinds in share losses and volume declines. Meanwhile, the perimeter departments selling fresh and reimagined, more transparent and relevant versions of packaged stalwarts have skyrocketed.

• Equity investment in the food space has plunged into the abyss in efforts to help scale the myriad of new, nascent food brands coming to market with quality elevations in virtually every category with a growth pulse.

Meanwhile, home cooking is experiencing a renaissance as consumers shop fresh ingredients and menus that require preparation; looking to feed their appetite for new flavor adventures. Convenience in this new world order translates to enhanced Deli menus and fresh solutions at supermarkets, and the emergence of meal kits to help curate the dinner need with prepped high-quality ingredients and tantalizing recipes.

Relevance and the future of food and beverage marketing

What does it all mean? This is what keeps the C-suite leadership teams in CPG food and beverage companies and food retailers up at night. What was once a brand controlled state in the marketplace, where heavy media spending could spell the difference in achieving quarterly results, has fallen away as consumers own and operate the levers of commerce.

Consumer control requires deft and agile moves by brands to align themselves with their desires, interests and lifestyle goals. The more powerful path in marketing is no longer lined with assertions of product features and benefits. Now the momentum belongs to brands that truly try to help and enable what their users dream to accomplish.

Marketing today is a reciprocity construct where brands earn permission for a relationship by thinking past their own product and trying to make a clear difference in their customers’ lives – be that by activating their creative aspirations in the kitchen, the social experiences around the table, or serving as a functional contributor on their path to healthy living.

Emergent as arbiter of insight and translation to strategy, better communication

This, ladies and gentlemen, is what we do at Emergent. We’ve been ahead of the trend even before healthy lifestyle became a ‘thing’ and remain a voice in the industry on this evolving landscape upheaval.

Our value proposition is bound to the insights we own on consumer interests, needs and the new marketing toolkit required to successfully leverage that understanding for business growth.

By virtue of that, Emergent is purposefully a hybrid of strategic guidance tied to creative communications, smothered in a secret sauce of consumer insight that helps inform our thinking, messaging and go-to-market ideas.

Whether you are a food retailer trying to evolve as conditions around you in e-commerce and consumer preference change, or a food and beverage brand, large or small, trying to optimize and scale the business you’re creating; we can help optimize your core proposition and add value to your efforts to gain the ear of elusive and hard-to-reach consumers.

How can we be helpful to you?

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Mentoring for the greater good in food and beverage business

Today Emergent formally announces a partnership with the Food Marketing Institute’s new Emerge platform, a forum to help nurture and grow new, developing food brands on their way to potential stardom.

FMI recently created Emerge (love the name!!) as a path to helping its stakeholder base of food retailers and CPG brands, realize growth opportunities presented by investments in developing food and beverage companies. It’s no secret these nascent brands are now gaining shelf space and consumer devotion, often at the expense of legacy brands that at one time dominated the food preferences of American households.

• At stake for all is helping scale these new enterprises without inadvertently upsetting the proverbial applecart ̶ by violating the product truths and marketing rules that influence their hard-won fan base.

Emergent was established to help food, beverage and lifestyle brands successfully navigate the sea change from interruption style, talk-at marketing and communications to a more healthy lifestyle relevant and participatory model. In keeping with this mission, we have focused also on emerging brands and the distinct differences that govern their go-to-market best practices.

We saw an opportunity through our long-standing alliance with FMI and the evolution now taking place at food retail, to be of greater service and value in helping organizations deal with the seismic changes going on in the industry. We have joined Emerge as a Mentoring partner, there to offer our deep experience and familiarity with how consumers behave and marketplaces evolve, to help these new food ideas gain a faster footing in the race to meaningful volume.

We’ve had the distinct pleasure of meeting and guiding entrepreneurs who are making a difference in their efforts to create a sustainable business while also embracing a higher purpose. This matters to us greatly because we have a mission, too.

Our higher purpose is to influence the health and wellbeing of people by helping improve the food and beverage industry’s efforts to align more closely with preferences for a healthier lifestyle. Our values are their values and vice-versa.

As business people we respect the need for all parties to achieve scale while maintaining the integrity of the original concept and remaining faithful to the principles that guided the creation of the business.

In this, we are Mentors that understand the motivations and desires of those who create these new companies as much as we know intimately the needs of people who buy and consume their products.

For that reason we’re honored to join with FMI in this endeavor to embrace change and be a catalyst for helping the industry adapt. The food industry is unique in its blending of technology and emotion – a perfect alchemy that respects the fact we eat to nourish and experience enjoyment, while recognizing the impact the food system has on the world around us.

Best time ever to be in the food and beverage brand building business!! Thanks FMI for inviting us.

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Can regulation make it rain?

On Monday, May 7 Federal regulations went into effect requiring any foodservice retail business with 20 or more locations to begin posting nutritional details for food and beverage items on their menus. For most foodservice operators this means a revamp of menu descriptions and the addition of nutrition data sections at their web site and point of order. Typically this features spreadsheet-type lists spraying a blurry, eye chart-worthy inventory of calorie, fat, sugar, cholesterol and sodium stats.

But hidden within the clarion call for more what-you’re-eating disclosure is a potential restaurant business goldmine. At stake is an important regulatory-inspired opportunity for change. Important given foodservice businesses already face increased dining dollar competition from the significant resurgence of home cooked meal popularity. Yes, a home kitchen renaissance is underway, spurred by pervasive consumer interest in healthier foods and a desire to exercise more control over meal preparations, portions, costs and ingredients choices.

• Studies show consumers believe dining out means agreement to compromise on their healthy eating interests while they navigate a trip down the boulevard of indulgence. A recent report by food industry trends watcher The Hartman Group, revealed consumers increasingly blame restaurants for a stunningly short list of healthier choices and absence of transparency around food – thus why they feel obligated to stow their healthy lifestyle interests at the vestibule of their favorite restaurant.

According to Hartman’s work, when the majority of consumers who already claim eating out is less healthy answer why this is true for them, the top scoring reason ̶ at 41 percent of those surveyed ̶ was a focus on ‘other things’ rather than health and wellness. But maybe it doesn’t have to be this way.

If prevailing food culture shifts point to home-cooked meals as the best and healthiest option for the vast majority of consumers, where does that leave restaurants on the better-for-you lifestyle bandwagon?

Could regulation make it rain?

The regulatory requirements may have issued a super-sized opportunity to reframe the restaurant menu story around a greater variety of healthier menu options. Then advanced with new technology that allows patrons to configure their own more informed, personalized menu choices ahead of arrival or on site with mobile friendly apps.

Reformulation through culinary innovation

But first, is the product itself. Restaurant meals can be made healthier without sacrificing taste by applying some of the more enlightened thinking now fueling the growth of new, emerging packaged food brands that are mounting a supermarket shelf takedown. Novel ingredients, cooking techniques, new forms of sweetening using natural sugars or sauces made with vegetable broths; meat alternatives formulated from nuts or pea protein – a cornucopia of new innovation is circling the food industry with an offer of improved nutritionals while delivering the indulgent flavors and textures of chef-inspired food.

There’s simply no longer any reason why menu items can’t be made healthier while retaining taste. It may add cost per serving but then we’ve also have seen repeatedly seen that consumers are willing to pay more for healthier fare if it can be verified as such – assuming taste is not sacrificed on the alter of improved nutrition numbers.

California Pizza Kitchen (CPK) and MyMenu Tech

San Diego-based digital foodservice player HealthyDiningFinder.com, originally stepped into the restaurant marketplace to curate a search-able database of restaurants offering healthy menu items. More recently, they’ve rolled out their new MyMenu platform at CPK and Mexican cuisine specialist Rubio’s Coastal Grill, an algorithm driven business that offers restaurants a plug-and-play solution to their regulatory obligations, but served in a more user-friendly experience. It also brings a compelling add-on benefit: personal menu customization.

California Pizza Kitchen’s MyMenu pages open the door to new reasons to visit: With a few short clicks using a sliding bar selection tool on desired nutritional limits, the platform automatically sorts menu choices according to these preferences while calling up attractive photos and detailed descriptions of each dish or beverage. It reveals what’s in them and what they impart in terms of nutrition impact (calories, fat, sugar, etc.).

The Rubio’s MyMenu page also offers a pre-set list of menu alternatives created by Healthy Dining’s dietitian experts around lifestyle preferences such as Energy, Fit Lifestyle and Weight Control. Each choice rolls up special menus based on these specific interests.

The tool’s flexibility creates the option to customize a dish with ingredient swap-outs or to build a full meal while each dish and drink selection repopulates the overall impact on nutrition outcomes, so you know immediately how many calories and fat grams are involved.

• In a soon-to-arrive platform enhancement, Healthy Dining says guests will be able to save selections for future use, and there will be options for purchase on-site, for pick-up or delivery. Then patrons will be able to build and retain their own personal menu for a variety of their favorite eateries using the tool  ̶  all based on individual dietary preferences and healthy dining interests.

Of course, the key here is to actually have healthier choices available, and in doing so, solve the dilemma of perceived nutritional sacrifice that restaurant eating might entail. The goldmine is simple: remove the friction from healthier choice at out-of-home eating by offering more healthy choices.

Then look to software platforms like MyMenu to allow patrons to examine, sort and retain their healthy meal preferences ̶ and with it creating an opportunity to forge foodservice brand preference.

For those restaurants that get this right, it could be an equally compelling do-it-for-me dining offer that rivals the siren song of home cooked healthier meals.

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Marketing and the day’s main meal

Cultural shifts and changes impact how consumers treat eating occasions. This condition becomes even more important as people no longer build their schedules around mealtimes. The script has flipped and thus mealtimes are arranged to facilitate the daily schedule.

In this new world order that puts time and where it’s spent at a premium, distinct functional requirements have surfaced around the consumer’s objectives for breakfast and lunch. Breakfast now orbits the purposeful necessity of energy needs and is often governed by habit and routine. It’s also subject to elimination at times. Whereas lunch often falls victim to another evolving behavior – snacking. Like the start of the day, lunch serves as another fuel-stop to drive the personal engine, often while navigating a complex schedule and a fluid set of time priority constraints.

The dinner bell singularly chimes as a culinary and social oasis…

Dinner continues to hold steadfast as the clear winner in time devoted to food thinking, planning and engagement – offering a unique opportunity for brands to become enablers and participants in a personal and social culinary journey.

• Dinner is a food-forward rite where the meal and menu serve as a means to elevate enjoyment, self-esteem, creativity, exploration and social engagement.

Breakfast, lunch and snacking reside in a practical, efficiency zone. The consumer’s brain-time investment is just different than dinner. In the evening, according to The Hartman Group’s Transformation of the American Meal report, the experience around food and preparation takes on a higher level of priority and added meaning.

What does the consumer aspire to do with dinner?

Hartman reports to fulfill their expectations for:

1. Good food – nutritious and delicious
2. Good cooking – skillful, personalized and often from scratch
3. Good company – enjoyable moments and warm conversation

So, the logistics around dinner are on another level entirely for food sourcing, creativity, time spent and energy invested by home cooks and their helpers. Simply stated, dinner is less routine, not snack-ified and works to satisfy the yearning for shared food adventure.

As a marketer could you find more fertile territory for engagement than the one meal occasion where inspiration and help are clearly needed?

Dinnertime is a clear pathway to relevant engagement

Dinner is rich connection territory and we’re not just talking about flavor profiles. Dinnertime is an open field for resonance exploration and relationship building for both CPG food and foodservice.

When the day has been too mentally and maybe even physically taxing, outsourcing the evening meal is on the agenda. That said we know from secondary studies that people prefer home-cooked meals when they can do it and believe those meals are universally healthier – as home cooks are able to control ingredients, preparations and portions.

However, when scheduling overload collides with evening mealtime needs, restaurant and other “do it for me” solutions hold sway. Meal kits sit in an interesting position as low-risk enablers of culinary exploration, while also making it easier to deliver a high-quality meal with less effort mentally and at the stove.

Ordering food for delivery or visiting a restaurant shifts the balance of time investment from culinary work to social interaction – an important component of the evening mealtime experience.

The eco-system of needs and requirements for the evening meal is a place where brands can play a pivotal role. Key direction: help make dinner meal planning and execution more enjoyable.

Areas to leverage strategically:

• Health and wellness – key to lifestyle preferences across the board. What’s the bulls-eye? Helping people bridge their interests between healthy ideals and indulgent desires. Now that higher quality food experiences have become the new healthy, the door is open to blending these two universal human needs.
• Palate planning – for the most part dinner has increasingly become a just-in-time mini-shopping event as people, often coming from work, stop at the store to shop for menu ingredients. Right there is a moment of uncertainty that can become more purposeful with the right menu ideas and curated shopping lists.
• Social connection – the social milieu around dinner is an interesting pastiche of enlivened senses, warmth, close attention and enjoyment that enables sharing and conversation. The dinner table is more than a piece of furniture. It’s a place where memorable moments and personal connection are served right alongside the main course.

If effective brand communication is dependent entirely on its relevance to consumer interests and passions, then imbuing your brand with greater meaning becomes paramount in making marketing investments work.

Knowing this, dinner is an important moment and opportunity where need and fulfillment are open territory for brand helpfulness. Also vital to note is the significance that food culture informed strategies play to secure consumer engagement in social channel and content marketing outreach programs.

• Said another way, it is often the absence of cultural resonance and connectivity that dooms brand communication to the vast pile of ignored messages.

It’s our job here at Emergent to monitor these cultural and consumer-insight conditions so we’re able to respond strategically and creatively for the brands and businesses we represent. If your strategic plan isn’t feeding and exploring these important moments of real-life consumer connection…then you’re potentially skipping the marketing meal that offers the greatest opportunity for engagement and brand growth.

Is it dinnertime yet?

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Harnessing the power of humanizing differentiation

When we first started working for Serta® mattress brand, our wonderful client arranged for us to tour the mattress factory. We saw firsthand the great care taken to arrange the inner combinations of coils and surrounding layers of material to create the right balance of comfort and support when sleeping. They were proud of the efforts made to study spine alignment, blood circulation and how pressure points impact the quality of sleep.

Naturally, they wanted to highlight that understanding, material expertise and tech in marketing communication.

For our part, we also invested heavily in studying the purchase experience and shopping environment: the sleep products store where mattresses met the people who will ultimately spend a third of their lives atop their selections.

We were struck by the commoditized conditions at retail; an environment we referred to as the “Sea of White Rectangles.” Brands and models all looked the same, were presented in similar fashion with similar claims regarding what existed below the fancier furniture-like case fabric. Equally, we learned that consumers loathed the experience of bed shopping, and in some cases described it in used-car dealer metaphors.

Together with our client, we fashioned a new roadmap based on what happens on the other side of improved sleep. The emotional benefits and real-world lift related to getting more out of a good night’s rest. The impact that improved sleep has on creativity, work productivity, personal relationships, mental attitude and general happiness. Yes, sleep quality and sleep deprivation hits you in ways you may not even realize.

We worked to cast this in real human terms – real people stories – and how better sleep also improved your day, your happiness and your life. It wasn’t the nighttime rest imagery so typical in the bedding business – it was the next day’s improved experience that truly mattered.

Rather than the coils or support-giving design or temperature-regulating materials, Serta’s brand differentiation was elevated through the tangible, human outcome when sleep quality is markedly improved.

Commoditization can command the business – until disrupted

Sameness exists in so many product categories because we’ve come to a place where technologies and formulas are often very near parity. The real distance between one product and another in its category has been narrowed, slimmed down and parsed.

Pet foods are a great example of similar formulations, comparable language, packaging approaches, and claims around nutritional efficacy. The passion, love and relationship with pet parents and pets, and the desire to add value to the quality of their lives (mutually beneficial) is another matter entirely.

And others:

• Car designs and features within their utility, performance or luxury classes.
• Mobile phones and their screen tech, cameras and apps.
• Foods and their labels, ingredients and nutrition.

In virtually every product category you find, the capabilities and technologies are within close proximity to one another. But still companies fall in love with the efforts they make to install quality at every level, to source ingredients with great care, to craft solutions that deliver on taste or user experience. Yes, all of this matters, however, when looking to mine true differentiation…

Consideration must be given to humans, and their personal experiences with the product. It’s a vital part of the strategic discussion, often punted in favor of showcasing the latest tech wizardry. That’s great if you’re designing ads *for* the company’s engineers (but even they need a good night’s sleep). Each and every one of us is an emotional being who thinks with their heart first and mind second. As we’ve conveyed before: People are feeling creatures that think, not thinking creatures that feel.

Communication, brand, experience, shopping environment must be viewed through the lens of how people feel; and the changes that can occur in the quality of their lives when your brand gets the opportunity to be involved with them. It’s here where the entire brand proposition will be separated and elevated from everything else competing for share of mind, stomach or wallet.

Casper Casts a Different Story

Meanwhile back in the bedroom, sleep category disruptor Casper came along to reassess every aspect of bed marketing, including the retail sea of white rectangles retail paradigm, by-passing it entirely.

With an eye towards disrupting the current go-to-market model, Casper made changes in product design, e-commerce sales, extensive guarantees, and communication founded on lifestyle help over hype. Casper pushed community building and social conversation rather than the normal efforts to market “at” people.

Casper’s highly topical e-zine, VanWinkle, and investment in social channel engagement are examples of building relevance with their core customer base. They cultivated brand ambassadorship and harnessed incredibly powerful consumer reviews to influence purchase. Casper is humanizing the bed business, and in doing so, came out of left field to capture significant share.

At Emergent our approach to client businesses begins first with an effort to understand category conventions and behaviors. From there we work to enhance uniqueness and differentiation based on blending essential product truths with insight to consumer passions and interests.

Are you ready to take on the battle against sameness?

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Fresh is the final frontier…

We believe that consumer insight should inform strategy. So we place a great premium around here on monitoring behaviors and cultural trends in the food business.  Even more so now that food retail is at a crossroads with e-commerce accelerating rapidly to compete for more shopping occasions.

Emergent recently examined a series of reports from the Food Marketing Institute and research company The Hartman Group, profiling shopping trends in the grocery retail business.

We’ve identified 10 developments worth watching as the food retail business continues to transform amid the growth of consumer preference for higher quality, more authentic and real-food products.

1. Of millennials, 43 percent are now shopping online for groceries at least occasionally, up from 28 percent in 2016 – a 15-point climb in one year!

2. Most of this growth is coming from households that shop online routinely, and thus are already comfortable with e-commerce transactions.

3. Important to note millennials are more likely, however, to buy packaged products online rather than fresh and perishable items.

4. Gen-Xers with kids are more likely than other cohorts to actively use grocery store apps.

5. Millennials with kids are more likely to participate in grocery store social networks.

6. Millennials are more concerned about CPG and retailer:

Honesty

Openness about animal welfare

Ingredient sourcing

Social responsibility

They are apt to make judgments on the basis of ethics and sustainability practices.

7. Twenty-three percent of grocery shoppers claim to avoid GMOs, mostly for health related reasons, ‘naturalness’ and a desire to know exactly what’s in a product.

8. Top three reasons consumers prefer locally sourced products:

Fresher –                               72 percent

Support local economy –   65 percent

Better taste –                        54 percent

9. Seventy-six percent of grocery shoppers think a home-cooked meal is healthier than out of home meal options.

10. Households with kids have the highest adoption rates for retailer prepared meal solutions; two out of three households purchase them at least occasionally.

Most impressive is the speed of change we’re observing in the food marketplace, and the need for retailers especially to work smarter. This is done by embedding uniqueness and differentiation in their banner brands, and creating immersive experiences for shoppers in both online and bricks and mortar environments.

For retailers and CPGs still vying for transactions, it’s critical to realize that consumers have changed the rules. Those brands and banners that embrace connecting to shoppers in ways they find more helpful and meaningful will earn the business and their loyalty.

More specifically, the path to consumer engagement is shifting and healthy lifestyle is driving this transformation. Emergent is a specialist in leveraging this insight to grow food businesses. We bring the latest insights and innovative strategies to help food businesses navigate the new consumer landscape.

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