Trust Transcends Everything.

A sobering, directional study from Mintel again confirms that trust issues drive purchase and govern brand relationships – retail or product – for the influential Millennial generation.

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“The table is a meeting place, a gathering ground,
the source of sustenance and nourishment,
festivity, safety, and satisfaction.
A person cooking is a person giving:
Even the simplest food is a gift.”
– Laurie Colwin –

Imagine a grocery retail business that fully understands and embraces this thinking, then translates that down to the store aisles in how the business is organized to operate in service of the experiences and outcomes people associate with food.

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Part 2: Reimagining Food and Beverage in America

Let’s start with defining what brand means. CPG businesses have been building temples to brand strategy for decades. The brand is supposed to be the emotional bridge and equity vessel that supports a premium price and drives preference at the shelf.

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How focus and pruning leads to growth

Since the Industrial Revolution, bigger has been viewed as better in the food and beverage business.

Bigger usually suggests more powerful – more capable of dictating the behaviors within a product category plus an ability to unleash a torrent of assets that work to overwhelm smaller competitors. In marketing, the common denominator in media strategy – even in the era of fractured and splintered audiences – is the lure of cobbling together scale. The motivation for scale might be the sheer balance-sheet magnetism of dramatic market projections driven from a belief that “all things to all people” is still a workable business model.

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