Artifice falls away, replaced by a tour behind the product creation curtain…

Much of what unfolded in 2023 has laid down a runway for how your strategy should evolve in 2024. Over the last year we’ve seen a distinct rise of consumer uncertainty, a decline in feelings of control and increasing uneasiness over extraordinary climate change impacts, a chaotic political environment, see-saw inflation, raging wars and other forms of personal and societal disruption.

• According to Kantar, 43% of Americans experienced mild to severe anxiety, up from 26% a year earlier, while half of millennials now rank their mental health as part of their well-being they are most concerned about.

It has authored a distinct premium on the desire for authenticity, truth, honesty, values, belief – all of which, incidentally, are desirable human traits. So how should brands respond in an environment where consumers crave honest, respectful relationships between themselves and the brands they care about? By adopting more human-like qualities and behaviors.

• In a recent story on viral engagement at Fast Company, Clinique Global VP of consumer engagement Lucy Burns said, “Gen Z can smell ads a mile away. They are the first generation that really wants brands and creators to authentically speak to them. And what does that mean? You don’t create an ad. You create content that they would want to engage with.”

This will be the year of yearning for discernment of the real and true while working to avoid the artificial and questionable. As reported earlier this year in the Emerging Trends Report, consumers have turned inward to themselves for guidance. Why? People have become increasingly skeptical and wary of less credible independent sources and therefore what they perceive to be unreliable and not-so faithful recommendations about products and services.

• Key insight: Further probing on this condition, we find consumers moving to seek a deeper level of discovery and understanding about the products they care about.

Know more, want more granular info

Emergent has been crunching the consumer insight research reports and studies, as we lean into our predictions for where CPG food, beverage and retail marketing is headed in 2024. The overriding theme and guidance for the coming year is an advancing consumer interest in securing more details about how products are created, manufactured and what’s inside them.

• In short both retail and CPG marketers will have a lot of explaining to do as consumers demand truth and transparency from the brands that matter to them.

What this means: consumers want to understand what the food and beverages they ingest consist of. They want their expectations to be fulfilled and this requires brands to take consumers behind the curtain and reveal more substantive details about formulation, ingredient sourcing and production methods.

Truth: consider the credibility of the content source and how the story is packaged

Transparency: take them behind the scenes to see how you do what you do

Here are six specific food/bev industry trends that remain common across generational audience segments:

1. Less Processed

Consumers do not believe that ultra-processed is a positive attribute. Brands with ultra-processed products should consider investing R&D energy to create less processed versions of products, with simpler labels and emphasis on the nutritional density of ingredients used. Plant-based brands should bear in mind this applies to how products are created and presented. Plant-based used to automatically convey an item is better for you. Not so much now. Some plant-based categories are seen as overly processed. Consumers know more, so Show Me is the operative behavior in brand communications.

2. Upcycled

We’re seeing a growing interest in upcycled ingredients used in product creation. Consumers perceive this as less wasteful and more sustainable. Plus, it’s a great story to tell in product creation narratives.

3. Sustainable

Consumer attitudes on sustainability has shifted due to greater knowledge and understanding of the environmental impact of our food system. It is no longer just the use of recyclable packaging, efficient energy sources and water management. Consumers have connected the dots between supply chain and emissions performance. They want to know what brands and retailers are doing to advance policies and standards related to regenerative agriculture and use of less carbon-intensive ingredients.

4. Nutritional Density

Consumers believe there is a connection between what they eat and their overall quality of life and health. Alongside the redefinition of what aging looks like and how lives can transform over time based on taking better care of yourself, brands can position themselves squarely in the bulls-eye of lifestyle partnership. This is accomplished by delivering products that provide functional ingredients designed to enhance delivery of vitamins, minerals, proteins without added sugars, the wrong kinds of fats and high sodium content.

5. Energy Reduction Plays

Previously, refrigeration translated to fresher, higher quality. That said, consumers increasingly see these as a hidden cost tradeoff to the planet on energy use. Development of more shelf stable versions of products will enable brands to talk about ways they are helping reduce energy signatures in how their products are distributed and merchandized in-store.

6. Disguising Fruit and Veg

Lingering in the back of consumers’ minds is a fundamental consideration that more fruit and veg in the diet is a good thing. How those better-for-you servings are acquired and consumed presents an opportunity for brands. How can you bring the nutritional benefits of these ingredients in a form consumers will find simple, easy and delicious to consume? Some smoothie beverage brands are great at this.

2024’s megatrend – healthy living, aging and self-care

People believe that what they consume has a direct relationship to the quality of their lives. This impacts health, wellness and helps answer their desire to slow down or even reverse the effects of aging. How can you partner with consumers on their healthy living journey? How can your brand proceed as guide and coach on helping them realize their goals and ambitions? Think of your brand as a true, reliable friend. What would a real friend do to help?

Tactics: what’s behind the thirst for information?

Consumers want to know more about how you create your products and what’s inside them because it helps re-establish their sense of control and ability to create customized solutions for themselves. With so much environmental noise causing people to believe they are losing control, giving it back to them is vital in your relationship. More information puts them in the driver’s seat while you supply the grist for their own lifestyle consideration. This should be reflected in your content creation plans.

Primacy of emotion, best served

As we’ve said before, decisions and actions originate in the limbic area of the brain, and our subconscious (dictates actions we take) is heavily influenced through emotion. This is best seen by emphasizing the joy of cooking alongside the joy of eating and drinking – no matter the category, this rule remains true: celebrate the experiences of cooking, consuming and their related social interaction benefits.

Emergent’s role refined for 2024

We believe that strong brands win so we’re obligated to help strengthen client brands by driving towards greater uniqueness and differentiation. Well-positioned brands say and do things differently than others in their category. They bring a different tone, see the future differently and have a clear point of view.

Our role: to help clients refine and package how they show up in the world. To that end, we work to build brand reputations, credibility, belief and transcendence. We believe the foundation for this work lies in refinement of brand purpose, deeper meaning and values. We know that conveying your brand’s “why” – its true purpose – is a more effective tool to win hearts and minds than the typical feature/benefit story. People are irresistibly drawn to brands that share a vision and reason for being they believe in. We connect this story to the brand users through stories – content and earned media.

Final guidance for 2024

Brand optimism. Through all of the doomer conditions people are confronted with on a daily basis, smart brands can be a safe harbor for an optimistic outlook based on progress and personal fulfillment. Your brand’s role as coach, guide and enabler can help people envision a better, brighter and more meaningful future.

If these observations and possibilities strike a chord for honing your 2024 plans, use this link to start an informal conversation about your questions and concerns.

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

Deploying the biology of effective communication

For a brand message to have any real impact, to influence behavior and seed advocacy, it requires more than awareness and publicity. It must advance a relevant higher purpose, cause or belief system that people who share your values will immediately resonate to. Only then can your message create any lasting marketplace impact.

It is not the quality of your products that causes the category to tip your direction. Absent a refined brand WHY, new innovations and technologies will rapidly find themselves playing the circular and commoditizing price-and-feature game. Your competitive advantage gets real traction when you are crystal clear about the human-relevant purpose and mission you exist to champion.

An identifiable cohort of consumers exists who share your beliefs and then want to integrate your ideas and products into their own lives. It is their ability to understand and embrace your purpose, your WHY, that causes them to embrace your brand. They view what you make as a tangible path to reflect and demonstrate their purpose and beliefs to the world around them.

Beliefs are powerful and can be enlisted to change the trajectory of brand growth

It’s important to remember that “consumers” are first and foremost real, human three-dimensional people. As such, we are hardwired to gravitate toward people, places as well as things (products) that reinforce what we believe about the world and ourselves.

• Beliefs influence our behaviors and how we see ourselves
• Beliefs are emotional and rise from deep within us to inform decisions
• Beliefs run underneath our cognizant, analytical radar to impact our feelings and decisions
• Beliefs help people understand, connect and engage with your brand
• Beliefs are respectful of human biology and how we’re wired to take action (through feelings not facts)

Yet we find that belief systems are largely undernourished in business strategy because of a flawed assumption that a better mousetrap is the motivating tool that draws in consumers. Ultimately, products in any given category will be more similar than they are unique. Frankly, there isn’t any proprietary tech advantage that can be sustained over time without competitive dilution.

Instead, people are magnetically drawn to leader-type brands that communicate what they believe. This unique approach helps consumers feel safe and special – like they belong – and are inspired to align with the brand because the story and mission resonates so personally.

Future of food brands are often mission oriented

Emergent works with emerging food brands who are reinventing how food is created with a vastly improved sustainability story. To a one, the founders and leadership teams believe they exist to improve the health and wellbeing of people while measurably improving the impact of our current food system on global warming.

Their technologies are instrumental in changing the greenhouse gas paradigm. But that is not the reason they will be successful or that people will be drawn to their offering. It is the inspiration they provide to help enable consumers in exercising their conscious consumption wishes. To improve their wellbeing with healthier food choices and create a safer future for themselves and their families. These brands understand that taste, eating experience and proper price are all table stakes and not the real reason for marketplace success. Empowering consumers to experience ‘making a difference’ is the real brand elevator.

Thus, why conveying values, mission and purpose are so vital to success rather than relying on historic tactics that attempt to leverage features, lower price or the more subtle tactical manipulations of persuasion, fear, vanity, status, shame, peer pressure and social acceptance to close a sale.

One big example: we live in a nation founded on inspiration of a better future for people

In July of 1776 the world was forever changed with the emergence of the United States, the first-ever constitutional republic – a democracy ‘of and for the people’ – now at 247 years of age the oldest of its kind on earth. A new nation founded on ideals and principles that espoused freedom of speech and press, an elected representative government, the rule of law and a promise of a better future for people.

These ideals form the foundation of an inspired sense of opportunity and the expectation of an individual’s ability to pursue their own goals and aspirations. Despite the enormous flaws and inconsistencies that dogged the nation through a Civil War 84 years after its founding, the resilience wrapped in these beliefs and sense of purpose have stood the test of time.

America is one of the most powerful examples of “Why” culture and the influence of deeper meaning writ large. It is embedded in our American attitudes, thinking and distinctive behaviors. These principles and aspirations have spread around the world, yet most of these new democratic governments are less than 70 years old and still evolving.

• We have unique stories to tell about our nation’s founding
• Symbols abound about the American legacy of freedom
• It is inspirational to how we think and see our lives
• Our societal beliefs are founded on the concept of greater good

Yet for all of the evidence of how a nation founded on beliefs and values serves as an inspiration to a brighter future over time, and the power of values to impact attitudes and behavior – this POV hasn’t rubbed off as fully as it could on business and brand development thinking.

When brands become symbols of values and beliefs we hold close

Health, wellbeing, achievement, creative exploration, better relationships, education, love, serving others – there are so many places a brand can live to inspire users and improve their lives. It is in this moment of unselfish thinking that an environment of trust is created.

The process to explore and refine a brand’s “why” begins with consumer-centricity and works backward from there. It is formative insight into your customers’ interests, concerns and desires that informs a creative exploration around brand beliefs – which should reflect and mirror your users’ aspirations.

Emergent has developed a proprietary process for this evaluation we call Brand Sustainability Analysis – in this case the word sustainable refers not to environmental concerns directly but to sustainable brand growth over time.

The six primary components include:

• Core beliefs that are consumer centric and address how the brand contributes to improving users lives and the world around them.

• Based on those beliefs, Why the company exists, its core mission and higher purpose.

• How the company will fulfill its belief-driven higher purpose and mission.

• Therefore, What business the company is truly in and assets required to fulfill that promise based on the brand purpose.

• The company BrandStand that expresses the business’ true north and becomes an embedded guide for decisions on strategy, policy, employee policy and recruitment, innovation and marketing going forward.

• Implications of the BrandStand on company operations and marketing strategies.

If you agree that inspiration is a stronger path to influencing consumer decisions than passe’ tactical manipulation, and that an optimized purpose and mission – your why – can lead to brand advocacy and evangelism, then we should talk. Use this link to begin an informal get-acquainted conversation.

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

Divining the formula for consistent engagement and growth…

Are you aware of the remarkable chain reaction that will unleash powerful forces to immediately increase your brand’s salience, relevance, resonance and traction? Significant brand dynamism and energy are released when this singularly vital key unlocks engagement with your intended customer audience.

• This is a law of marketing physics that creates trust and enduring relationships with consumers who will join your brand as supporters, believers, advocates and evangelists. Read on…

The theory we’re working to change…

Marketing has been hamstrung for decades on a recurring, reflexive default to using various forms of manipulation as the primary currency for purchase motivation. Chasing consumers with messaging that pushes status seeking, vanity, peer pressure, fear or social acceptance, alongside a devotion to amping product features and benefits often goosed with a price incentive. All of these tactics won’t deliver on the requirement of consumer trust and relationship. Brand business built on a foundation of transactional thinking is passé and expensive. Over time these all-too-familiar tactics inevitably commoditize your brand while forcing a continuous, elusive pursuit of incremental differentiation.

• It’s a hamster wheel of strategic misfires that springs from a misunderstanding of how human beings are wired to make decisions.

Let’s take a collective timeout, step back and consider more deeply the human condition. New insight on how our minds function can indeed lead your brand to create trusted consumer relationships.

This requires moving away from a perception that consumers strictly buy “products” – and the only message that resonates is repetition of feature/benefit selling.

People aren’t buying what you do anymore, they’re buying why you do it.

Inspiration vs. manipulation

A reliable formula for repeatable, predictable results founded on brand mission and purpose is fundamentally more effective.

People are on a continuous search for deeper meaning. They innately resonate to values and beliefs that are aligned with their own views. When your brand reflects their values, you offer them a symbolic flag they wave as evidence to the world around them of who they are and what’s important to them.

In reality, this is human biology at work. Two important areas of the brain govern how we operate – the limbic and neocortex. The thinking, rational side of the brain (neocortex) governs learning, analysis and language. The limbic area informs our decisions and behaviors. It is driven by emotion. Brands want to find a home in the limbic zone that influences our decisions. It’s only there, that a brand will truly matter to the user beyond its functionality.

We know the sheer volume of data the limbic side can process per second is vastly superior to the learning area. Simply stated the limbic brain is far smarter than we give it credit for – thus, why our “gut instinct” can be so immediate and important to informing behaviors. This explains why the neocortex routinely defaults to the limbic part of the brain for our actions.

Inspiring consumers with your higher purpose, beliefs and mission – your “why” – is the pathway into the limbic brain. If you want to have a deeper relationship with consumers, then imbue your brand with deeper meaning by focusing on your why.

• Brands that fail to focus on an emotive sense of “why” end up forcing people to make decisions with only empirical evidence, reluctantly burning precious mental calories in the neocortex. This explains why those decisions often require more personal commitment of time and energy, leaving us feeling taxed and uncertain.

This is what we mean when we talk about winning hearts and minds. The heart represents the limbic feeling part of the brain, and the mind is the rational, language center. Most brands are quite adept at attempting to win minds; that usually requires a comparison of product features, benefits and price points. Winning hearts, however, takes more effort and in the long run is far more rewarding.

• Products with a clear sense of “why” give people an emotional pathway to trust them. Their purchase of your product serves as another way to tell the outside world who they are and what they believe.

In his book, Start with Why, author Simon Sinek provides a salient example:

“WHAT Apple makes, serves as the tangible proof of what they believe. It is that clear correlation between WHAT they do and WHY they do it that makes Apple stand out. This is the reason we perceive Apple as being authentic. Apple’s WHY, to challenge the status quo and to empower the individual. It is a pattern that repeats in all they say and do. Apple, unlike its competitors, has defined itself by WHY it does things, not WHAT it does. It is not a computer company, but a company that challenges the status quo and offers individuals simpler alternatives.”

There are lots of ways to temporarily manipulate people to do things – lowering price, for example. However cultivating long lasting brand advocacy is an outcome of inspiring people with your mission and beliefs. Only when your brand “why” is clear and people believe what you believe can a true consumer-to-brand relationship unfold.

It’s hard to make a case that your products or services are important to someone’s life if your efforts are founded on analytical facts and arguments the brand deems as valuable. However, if your “why” corresponds with consumers’ beliefs, they will see your products as a tangible way to help them express what they believe.

This formula for success shows up in messaging

Your brand narrative and story are either founded on your “why” (inspiration) or on what you do and how you do it (features and benefit selling). Inspiring consumers to join your brand as advocates and evangelists begins with embracing your mission and higher purpose. At Emergent we’ve created proprietary messaging process designed to refine and articulate brand higher purpose and how that manifests in characterizing the company’s mission, products and business strategy.

• We’ve learned that the journey through this experience can be enlightening for company leadership. The outcome produces a clear foundation and anchor to help inform strategies, decisions and business investments moving forward.

Importantly, the real magic here is the shift a refined “why” creates in resonance and relevance of brand communication. By replacing the outmoded manipulation selling tactics and its requisite higher media costs to generate traction, this new modality of inspiring consumers will open doors to sustainable engagement and improved relationships with your brand’s user base. This is how communities of believers are created and brand trust is secured.

If you are inspired to further investigate and optimize your company’s “why” use this link to open an informal conversation on how this can work for your business.

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

Doing business in the era of higher purpose and beliefs

As a brand builder focused on burnishing your organization’s most vital asset, your business goal isn’t to convince and persuade customers to buy. Consumers, weary of persuasion tactics and overt brand promotion, quickly dismiss those efforts with a simple click. To pass through the gatekeeping gauntlet, brands need to understand what consumers really want from you – and it’s not more of the same. Rather, your brand marketing goal is to inspire. You might agree motivating people isn’t easy. Thus, why you can’t build a community of committed users and devout brand evangelists by promoting improved formulations and recipes.

Yet so often we find brands preoccupied with their slightly better product mousetrap, thinking enhanced features and benefits comprise the alluring magnet to fuel growth. Not so. Instead, you are navigating in a mental and emotional ocean between the rational and the heart.

Giving people a sense of purpose, deeper meaning and belonging lie at the foundation of every sustainable brand-to-consumer relationship.

The incredible power of “why”

In the early editions of The Fast and The Furious movie franchise we witnessed the recurring testosterone-amped challenges of street racing. Inevitably, as our hero races neck and neck towards the finish line, a canister is activated next to the console that injects Nitrous Oxide into the engine. Boom, an incredible burst of horsepower slingshots our intrepid protagonist across the finish line, literally blowing the competition away.

The NOS (Nitrous Oxide System) is a secret acceleration amplifier that supercharges engine output, thus burying the other racers in a cloud of oxygenated dust. Today similar competitive advantage exists for brands that tune their value proposition with an advanced power generator of relevance and resonance. The NOS of brand marketing is a different kind of “air and fuel” chemistry, founded on an emotional alchemy of mission, meaning and values.

Just like engines of a certain size generate similar levels of horsepower, food and beverage brands focused on claims of superior taste cancel each other out because great taste is table stakes. On a technical formulation level, products in most categories are nearly identical. Competitive advantage based on assertions of technical wizardry isn’t sustainable because everyone brandishes the same wand. Literally everything we eat or drink can be reverse engineered to deliver comparable taste and texture performance.

“Why” is the catalyst for authentic relationships with your users

Here’s the news: the consumers’ worldview has changed – and relating to a brand is now fundamentally the same thing as relating to a person. When you refine and invest in brand purpose and mission, it creates an opportunity to achieve transcendence – the state of being admired – where consumers “join” your brand as members, not merely customers.

Meaning, in order to secure significant financial premiums, sustainable brand relationships must be built first on their admiration and trust of your brand. As evidence of the shift, brand advocacy is now a more important and relevant goal than loyalty.

Of note, this representation of goodwill can be isolated as a component of business value. It can result in higher margins or traffic. Moreover, deeper relationships with consumers will ultimately help reduce the cost of promotion, improving ROI and bottom-line performance. This happens because you are no longer relying on a constant (expensive) drumbeat of self-promotion to refire fleeting, fickle attention spans.

Businesses built on “why” understand that brand relationships work best on the basis of true, authentic reciprocity and humanity. Consequently, they are not superficial, opportunistic or purely transactional. In order to mine the advantages of sustainable brand relationships, marketers have a responsibility to push added meaning, trust and belief to the forefront of the relationship. This insight forms the basis for sound strategic planning.

• Consumers expect premium food and beverage solutions to meet their great taste requirement. Competitive marketplace leverage isn’t found on the factory floor. It is discovered in the hearts and minds of consumers who now care more about why you do what you do than either what you offer or even how it is made.

Mining the influence of cultural shift

Operating in tandem with a refined value and belief system is the wider influence of cultural shifts on preference and behavior.

Purchases today are largely symbolic gestures. They are flags consumers wave to inform the world around them about their lifestyle priorities – an expression of who they are that is in many ways a mirror of the cultural context swirling around them. For consideration: to what extent have you embedded symbolism and flags of meaning in how your brand story is packaged and presented to help consumers signal those values-based belief statements through purchasing your products?

Larger issues now influence food culture precipitating changes in what consumers are looking for in brands. The store checkout lane today has evolved into a form of voting booth where consumers cast their ballot in favor of a better life and world.

What do they want? Are we helping them with what they want?

More sustainable choices:

One of the most powerful cultural influences of the era we live in is the emergence of conscious consumption – a realization that our eating and purchasing decisions have a consequence. People are learning about the relationship between food production and carbon emissions impact.

• Climate change is upon us and with it comes a sensitivity to what goes on behind the curtain of our carbon-heavy food system.

Recently in Chicago, for five straight days a grey haze and smoky odor blanketed the city, sending air quality to “worst in the world” status – all due to Canadian wildfire smoke that traveled south and wouldn’t dissipate. Wildfires are occurring at record breaking levels now. These global climate events are a recurring theme.

People were advised to stay indoors. To avoid breathing the outside air given its hazardous particulate content. Meanwhile unrelenting heat waves in the south impact farm and crop viability while helping sponsor conditions that encourage deadly tornados. All of this serves as real-world evidence to everyone that climate change impacts are among us.

The outcomes of these environmental incidents and increasingly erratic (dangerous) temp and weather conditions is a cultural shift towards preference for eco-responsible and sustainable choice, although in many cases brands haven’t made it any easier to identify what is a credible carbon-friendly option.

Health, wellness and a desire to reassert personal control:

Latent pessimism reinforced by daily media reporting has most people believing the future is less certain and that conditions beyond their control may impact future quality of life. Humans resolutely look for ways to add control when everything around them appears chaotic. This has served to amp the importance of investments in personal health and wellness. This is a move to create physical (and emotional) resilience in the midst of events that suggest the environment is suffering at the hands of policies and behaviors which inflict various forms of climate damage.

No longer just a weight management motivation, healthy living is a lifestyle and “survival” choice that helps people reacquire a sense of control over their wellbeing. Gym visits, the explosion of Pilates classes, cycling exercise studios and online therapists. Similar to how consumers increasingly see the connection between food choice and sustainability, efforts to improve personal and mental health are cultural mandates increasingly embraced by a wider swath of the population.

Experiences over consumption for its own sake:

Culinary and environmental tourism, chef-inspired food and wine events, even dangerous expeditions to the deep ocean floor, serve as reminders that experiences offer a form of expectation magic that has surpassed the former thrill of the consumption economy.

We have managed to pack and stack storage facilities with the worn-out treasures of “buying stuff” – evidence that years of acquiring has left families with mountains of extra clothes, furniture, equipment and credit card debt. “Things” as evidence of elevated status and success no longer hold the same allure.  We have exhausted materialism and replaced the void with interests in adventures that reward our emotional desire for transcendent and novel experience.

Modern brands as coach, guide, advisor and enabler

All of these evolutionary changes in behaviors and desire provide one of the most positive, significant and vital opportunities for brands to acquire a valuable role in their consumers’ lives. Your brand’s number one job is to help your users on their life journey. To provide value that extends beyond the utility of the product you sell.

• How incredible is it that consumers have arrived at a place where advice and guidance are key to achieving their goals. Can we help provide it? Can we step into the breach to be an enabler of their wishes and interests? Can we impart wisdom and tools they can use to improve their lives?

Yes we can! If we finally decide that improved relationships are key to business growth more so than product feature/benefit selling. This is the challenge of the age and one, if you choose to accept it, that can result in a deeper relationship with your users founded on delivering deeper meaning and value.

• Here is a link to our one-page overview of these shifts and changes. Please take a moment to click the link to read. It may serve as inspiration for a deeper conversation with us about ways to map an improved future for your brand and business.

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

Awareness drives preference for sustainable choice

After 15 months of collecting data from a wide variety of companies that participated in our Sustainability Readiness assessment questionnaire, we can confirm the most common area of shortfall and weakness in sustainability performance is communications.

We’ve consistently encountered a disconnect between yeoman efforts by companies to improve their environmental and emissions outcomes, but too often without the integrated communications strategies that effectively tell that story to consumers and stakeholders.

It may be due to pervasive silo conditions where sustainability teams work separately from marketing, or the more intentional ‘greenhushing’ out of fear any sunlight might expose sustainability practices to criticism. However you slice it, without a robust, integrated communications strategy, it is virtually impossible to convert sustainability investments into related sales and share growth for the very reason people aren’t aware of what the brand has accomplished.

Building sustainability awareness

Without top-of-mind awareness your brand’s sustainability story isn’t considered. Awareness is also elusive and fleeting. It can be here today and gone tomorrow; thus, why continuous investments are required to keep your sustainability story front and center with the audience most likely to resonate to your environmental mission.

To be clear, aggregating eyeballs as the ultimate (and only) goal could overshadow some of the most important principles governing consumer engagement and consideration. Your brand’s higher purpose should inhabit every strategic decision you make when organizing an effective awareness-building strategy.

Note: be sure to check out the best practice example at the end of this article.

Earlier in my career while at Ogilvy & Mather, we always considered awareness purely in mass media terms, balanced with the twin towers of reach and frequency. In those days it was about hammering home a message in as many channels as budget would permit, as many times as the available media dollar could acquire. Tonnage in media spend was a thing and the share-of-voice advantage went to larger spenders. Hangover from this era of brand message carpet bombing still, unfortunately, exists.

Mass media is a relic. We have clear digital advantages today that level the competitive voice playing field for smaller brands and budgets. Social channels also enable a much closer, deeper relationship and dialogue with specialized consumer tribes. We can accentuate the best practices of audience focus and message customization because broadly targeted appeals in mass channels no longer apply.

Here we weigh in on Ten Steps to Better Sustainability Awareness to engage and endear your stakeholders.

1. Be where your audience is

Sounds a little like water is wet, but we often find that insight research doesn’t get the respect or attention it deserves. It’s how we get underneath the media consumption habits and preferences of a brand’s most prolific users. Hunches and assumptions here can divert outreach priorities down the wrong channels. Your goal is to emphasize the media they consume most often. You have to probe to know what that really looks like.

2. Show why you’re committed

The relationship you are trying to build with people is based on solving sustainability challenges and operating as a mirror to their beliefs and values on the journey. Your brand should be positioned as an enabler of their sustainable lifestyle aspirations, as well as an educator focused on helping them determine sustainable choices. Relevance to their environmental concerns is key to engagement and it will always be about them and not brand self-promotion, touting good corporate citizenship accolades.

3. Create “useful” branded content

Every time you solve a sustainability barrier or enable an aspirational activity people care about (you have to study to know what those activities might be) you earn trust, the most important component of any brand-to-consumer relationship. The litmus test for your content is its usefulness in helping or enabling your audience on the path to a sustainable lifestyle. Your consumer is always the story hero and the role your brand plays is always as coach and guide.

4. Take advantage of the publishing platforms

You should be present early and often in the right channels, depending on your category and audience priorities. YouTube, Instagram, LinkedIn, Medium, TikTok and Facebook can be addressed in optimized content that best fits the format of each platform. How you show up ought to be distinctive of your brand voice and personality – and focused on engagement, not re-treading old mass-marketing and self-promotion tactics.

5. Humanize your brand sustainability story

No corporate-speak or science-driven dissertation please. Instead present a human, conversational voice. If you’ve done your homework on brand archetype and narrative, your highly differentiated persona will shine through. Emotion is imperative and sustainability is an emotion-driven subject. This is a time to amplify your beliefs, values, commitments, standards and informed opinions on relevant sustainability performance goals and its value to your users’ lives.

6. Be a mirror

People like to see themselves in your stories, so hold up a mirror to them. Employ language they use (you have to know them to speak to them effectively). Your goal in storytelling is to generate a reflection of their concerns and motivations. It’s easier to talk about yourself, but that’s almost always going to lead to a disconnect because it means they are no longer the hero of the story. Determine what their sustainability concerns are, then speak to those priorities.

7. Storytelling

Stories are 22 times more likely to be remembered than fact telling. We love stories because we can see ourselves in the characters. We can relate to fears, struggles, challenges and triumphs. Wrap key messages inside stories where people can see themselves. Fact-based downloads won’t have the same stickiness and emotional staying power.

8. Focus on social media channels

Proof. Validation. Verification of what you want people to believe. Social media can be a rich trove of shared experience and advocacy. The voices of users carry more credibility than what your brand claims. You should encourage and facilitate sharing in the social platforms your customers use most often. Brand-created content should focus on education, help and emotion ahead of promotion.

9. Leverage your expertise

As a subject matter expert, you have a forum and a platform to be the knowledgeable guide. Elevate your voice and perspective on the larger more compelling sustainability issues your audience cares about – and then weigh in. Podcasts can be an excellent channel for this type of communication.

10. Harness editorial credibility

Beyond the digital paid advertising platforms of pay-per-click and paid social, editorial media placement is a powerful tool to deploy because it is inherently more trusted and credible. It stands as a form of education and information vs. straight promotion. Editorial requires focus on the problem solving and thus newsworthy aspects of what your brand has accomplished.

The Promised Example: sustainability awareness and education in action

Putting some of our Ten Steps to Better Sustainability Awareness to work, Emergent recently produced a sustainability education and information forum for food industry stakeholders.

(Read on to learn how this valuable content will be available to you.)

Here’s how it worked:

Current reports on the progress of the food industry’s sustainability transition planning show a gap between intention and measurable outcomes. To help bring the food and beverage industry further along the continuum, we recruited a panel of experts from some of the most influential organizations leading sustainability readiness and improvement.

Our theme: “Sustainability and the Future of Food” began as a live presentation at the Food Marketing Institute’s industry executive gathering, the MidWinter Executive Conference in January 2023. Here senior food industry leadership teams, both CPG brand and retailers, gathered to focus on key issues facing the industry in the year ahead.

Our experts included sustainability executives and senior executives from the leading organizations mapping the future of sustainability performance including PepsiCo, ADM, Change Foods (an emerging new technology player in precision fermentation tech), The Good Food Institute, the alternative protein’s industry association, and the team at Boston Consulting Group that produced landmark studies on the growth and potential impact of sustainable food technologies.

The sustainability messaging focus:

• Elevate understanding of the foundational reasons why the global food system is a significant contributor to climate threat (not sustainable), and the innovative, novel solutions that will forever shift where food comes from (future of food) and how it is produced.

• Reveal the foundational elements of sustainability best practices. Discuss how organizations can address the complex requirements for new standards, policies and systems required to decarbonize their businesses while offering consumers healthier, better tasting, affordable and sustainable food solutions.

• Introduce the face of new food production technologies now taking shape that are not dependent on carbon heavy, inefficient and vulnerable legacy supply chains to create the proteins necessary to nourish a growing global population.

• Inspire a path forward for evolutionary change that will maintain the U.S. food industry’s historic global leadership in bringing new solutions to the most challenging conditions the food industry has ever faced; addressing a sustainability mission that must be achieved to avoid the economic and societal impacts of future climate damage.

Emergent then extended the panel discussion to editorial media, with the speakers recently reprising their stories on readiness best practices and emerging technology for a two-hour, four-part video on best practices and the future of food. The series was produced in collaboration with Food Navigator. The videos will air in weekly installments early this summer at Food Navigator’s website.

The food industry’s sustainability concerns and activations are ramping up as consumer sentiment and interest is already steps ahead.

What are your next moves?

If you think it’s time to refresh your sustainability awareness- and engagement-generating strategies and investments, use this link and let’s talk about how best to design improvements.

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

Often undernourished and under-served, strategic weaknesses create disconnects…

Every dollar invested in marketing is precious and ideally should be delivering a 10x return. Yet disconnects abound; engagement is often elusive and sales outcomes look more like getting lucky at the gambling table than a sure bet.

What’s wrong?

Most often the story isn’t right because the strategic game plan underneath is sub-optimal. It isn’t crafted to achieve consumer relevance and resonance. We discover the brand’s higher purpose, mission and values – what it stands for – isn’t fully leveraged or properly dialed in as a core strategy. Moreover, the brand story often isn’t really about the consumer – their needs and aspirations. Instead, it is focused on self-promotion of product features and benefits.

What happens when you put sub-par messaging into your communications channels?

• Your marketing investments begin to operate like a dice roll.
• Business outcomes curiously mirror the fate of the category’s rise or fall.
• Breakout advances in market share and velocity are more difficult to secure and so it’s back to the drawing board for further contemplation.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Investing time and thinking on the fundamentals of strategy and how your brand is packaged and positioned within the frame of its purpose – your “why” – can serve as a strong strategic guide for everything that comes after it in the marketing plan. Your top goals are to…

1. Tell the right story (mission-driven brand as coach, guide and enabler).
2. The right way (always heart over head to consumers as hero).
3. To the right audience (targeted to potential brand advocates and ambassadors).
4. In the right places (social, content and editorial).

The drawing board always owns the outcome

In the absence of world-class work on strategic thinking and refinement of what your brand is about, how it is positioned, defining what’s your unique purpose is and how you’ve accounted for radical differentiation – the brand communications effort is going to inevitably be more focused on “activity” – hitting singles and grounders rather than home runs.

Higher Purpose is magic

Simple Mills, an extraordinary higher quality brand of better-for-you crackers and baked goods, began its ride to fame by blending health and nutrition with taste using better ingredients. More recently the brand has found its higher purpose via a deep dive into sustainability readiness, commitments and performance. Their investments in regenerative agriculture are an iconic example of how food brands can establish themselves credibly as the sustainable choice.

Aqua Cultured Foods is pioneering the transformation of the sustainability challenged seafood category with products that replicate the seafood eating experience, but no fish involved in their creation. It isn’t a plant-based play to “mimic” fish, rather the deployment of precision fermentation to create an authentic analog to seafood without the fish. The environmental story here is remarkable and married to culinary experience. It is a compelling narrative.

Bond Pet Foods (client of Emergent) is about to transform the pet food industry with precision fermentation made proteins that come at a fraction of the environmental impact of animal-based ingredients. Meat, meat and more meat play a dominant role in most premium brand recipes throughout the pet industry. The story of feeding Fido without inadvertently damaging the environment is a significant shift for an industry with an intractable greenhouse gas emissions challenge. Sustainable pet food is about to become a reality.

Pepsico moving left and right throughout its system to address regenerative ag practices across its supply chain, while simultaneously making commitments that 100% of its packaging will be recyclable, compostable and biodegradable by 2025. The company understands the role of supply chain in emissions performance and is working to address challenging issues there. In a recent interview Denise Lefebvre, Pepsico senior vice president of R&D said, “we are prioritizing, investing in and expediting projects to build a more circular, inclusive economy.”

The path to sound strategy

Asking and answering better questions leads to improved thinking about strategy and brand mission.

Here are ten examples we use in planning:

1. What do you stand for?
2. How relevant and differentiating is it?
3. How compelling and credible is it?
4. What promise are you making?
5. Do you have the right products to deliver on that promise?
6. How are they positioned to deliver on your promise?
7. Are corporate goals and objectives aligned with the mission?
8. How does this impact your most important sources of business growth?
9. Based on this, who are your most valuable customers?
10. What should customers believe to help you achieve your goals?

Sound strategy can be served from a seemingly crazy idea

At one point in time Molson beer, Canada’s largest domestic beer brand, was suffering greatly in the U.S. import beer market. Molson had sold distribution rights to another U.S. brewer who proceeded to park the brand in its import portfolio and let it flounder there unsupported. Share declines were inevitable. The Molson leadership team stepped in and repurchased the distribution rights, formed a joint venture with Coors for distribution, and created a new company, Molson USA (MUSA), to handle marketing and sales.

Having formerly represented Molson’s chief competition, Labatt Blue, we pursued Molson and won the assignment to help MUSA rebuild the brand. Improved strategy came into play as we worked to enhance brand relevance and awareness. It’s important to note that in the beer business, distributors and wholesalers play a decisive role in the fortunes of any brand working to refuel growth, especially one with an uninspiring report card.

• Molson did more than 80% of its US volume in nine markets close to the Canadian border. To gain momentum the brand needed to extend its footprint in other high velocity import beer markets. To do that we needed to do something dramatic that would capture the attention of distributor decision makers in other key import beer destinations.

Molson Chiller Beach Party in Miami

Want to demonstrate brand legs and relevance? Move 1,400 miles south of your core territory into one of the nation’s most important import beer markets and generate traction. Molson Chiller Beach Party was an event concept built around iconography of snow and ice, with a heavy helping of an electronic music concert (The Chemical Brothers). But how could we capture the imagination of the industry while engaging young adult import drinkers in Miami?

We did something a little crazy but informed by a sound strategic mission: We wanted to generate awareness across the nation with a modest budget, and then push that effort directly to distributors. Stay with me on this – we put 270 tons of snow on Miami Beach in July. Surprisingly the machinery to do this exists. We rented a satellite video production truck and brought a video crew to the beach. Using large hoses and cameras pointed skyward, we filmed what appeared to be a freak snowstorm on South Beach. We asked young people (the target audience) nearby to join in the fun and make snow angels and snow men while attired in their bathing suits (proof its real snow).

Meanwhile we edited a 60-second video news package in the truck entitled “Freak Snowstorm in Miami.” At 2:15 pm we released a story and photos to Associated Press on the project. At 3:00 pm we uploaded the video package to satellite distribution ahead of 6 pm newscasts. Molson signage existed in the footage. Our goal to secure voiceover that the snowstorm was staged by Molson Beer as part of a concert event. The video news package was unique enough to get aired in over 100 markets. We quickly assembled a highlight reel of the news coverage around the U.S. and moved it to distributors as part of an on-premise promotions incentive package.

Molson’s business results turned around in the US supported by a novel move to generate news coverage a beer brand would normally never receive. We helped demonstrate how the brand was working to attract attention (among prime consumers of import beer) in a market far from its traditional home turf. What may have looked like a one-off consumer facing event strategy was in reality a move to gain investment priority from distributors.

Strategy, purpose, mission – and results

Asking the right questions, looking at the brand and business at its fundamental foundation of what it stands for and how best to elevate and differentiate it from others in the competitive set, can lead to outsized business results.

Oh one other thing, the Molson video and AP photo package was gobbled up by Miami news media. The resulting wave of attention drove thousands to the Chiller Beach Party and accounts nearby who were all featuring Molson products – happy distributor.

If you think it’s time for an evaluation of your strategic game plan and brand outreach, use this link and let’s connect.

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