We’re nearly out of time to slow emissions juggernaut…

The moment has arrived for the food and beverage industry to upgrade sustainability performance and answer System 3 (supply chain) emission challenges. The incentive to act now: bottom line business growth benefits can be secured through authentic, credible strategies to fully execute a climate-responsible transition plan. Later in this post we will reveal the number one barrier to achieving business benefits from sustainability investments.

Why now?

According to the latest alarm bell report from the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, we’re on pace to burn through our remaining carbon budget (500 gigatons) by 2030, potentially placing the Paris Accords’ 1.5˚ Celsius ceiling beyond the world’s grasp. The U.N. states outcomes of unabated global warming could be catastrophic with every proportional degree of warming past the Paris Accords threshold.

The impact of our fossil fuel economy has already transformed the planet at a pace unrivaled in human history. The U.N. report characterizes carbon mitigation efforts to date as “woefully inadequate.” As such U.N. Secretary General Antonio Guterres is demanding that developed nations such as the United States eliminate carbon emissions by 2040, a decade earlier than the rest of the world.

• More than 40 percent of cumulative carbon emissions have occurred since 1990. After decades of disregarding the warnings, delaying policy changes, or making the tough choices to curb emissions from our industrial food system, the window to solve the climate crisis is closing.

Past the Paris Accords ceiling, impacts get extreme

Left on our current emissions pace, scientists claim global temperatures could rise by 3.2 degrees Celsius by the end of the century. What would follow is melting arctic ice sheets that cause sea levels to rise by several feet, extinction of hundreds of animal species and displacement of millions of people from southern hemisphere regions no longer able to sustain an acceptable quality of life.

The issues are systemic in part because the world has shrouded itself in fossil fuel energy use and a food system churning out affordable proteins that come with a hidden yet steep environmental cost. Our current infrastructure supports buildings designed to use gas for heat. Cars and trucks for the most part remain gas powered. Public policy encourages the fossil fuel energy sector while struggling politically to invest in a more sustainable future.

• Energy industries double down now on fossil fuel source development
• China is on pace to add more coal-fired power plants
• Methane emissions compound as ruminant animal populations (cows, sheep, goats) grow to keep up with rising protein demands

In short, we find ourselves on a carbon-paved superhighway in the fast lane, zooming past the 1.5˚ Celsius off ramp – hurtling towards a point of no return, even though we face irrefutable evidence about the outcomes of not applying the brakes. Chaotic weather patterns, severe storms, wildfires, droughts, dwindling fish populations, the spread of infectious disease emerging from climate-disrupted biodiversity impacts – all indicators it’s time to summon the political courage to change direction.

Can the food and beverage industry help lead the shift to a sustainable future?

Yes.

If we muster the will and mettle to execute on pledges for change required to help the world reduce emissions by 50 percent over the next eight years. A recent report from Boston Consulting concludes emerging low carbon technologies in food creation give us the best chance of measurably reducing greenhouse gas from food production. Friederike Otto, Climate Scientist at the Imperial College London, recently said “We have all the knowledge we need. All the tools we need. We just need to implement it.”

An eco-system of regenerative agriculture commitments, adoption of emerging precision fermentation food technologies and efforts to minimize consumer eating patterns that favor ruminant animal products are needed to help curtail the food system carbon footprint. To the extent companies make assurances here and monitor performance against System 3 supply chain emissions, we have an opportunity to pull back from the brink of severe economic and social shocks pouring from a hotter planet.

• Business reasons for implementing these changes are compelling as consumers increasingly want to vote their sustainability values in the checkout lane. Sustainability investments can be good for business. However, there are barriers to overcome on the path to business benefit.

Silo-ization of sustainability programming

All too often we run across organizations in the food industry that inadvertently silo their sustainability investments by treating it as a department down the hall, cut off from other areas of the organization vital to making the investment payout as a business generator.

Sustainability is a strategic initiative the organization needs to answer from the C-suite level on down, not as a “right thing to do” effort, rather a business imperative the organization embraces as a core organizational mission and higher purpose. Sustainability executives and marketing teams should be working together to close the loop and inform all stakeholder audiences of carbon mitigation goals and milestones.

The #1 deficit in sustainability readiness performances is….

Since we launched the Brand Sustainability Solution platform in early 2021, Emergent has deployed an online Self-Assessment Questionnaire to help food, beverage and retail organizations better understand where they are on the path to sustainability best practices. Our database of self-assessment results reveals one consistent weakness across nearly all  company survey participants.

To achieve business benefits from sustainability ventures, integrated communications tactics must be employed to inform stakeholder audiences of what the company is doing to address sustainability challenges. In the absence of these strategic communications initiatives, brands can’t get credit for the investments they’re making or the improvements they’re realizing.

Thus, the loop is not closed with constituent audiences. Simply stated: sustainability performance is a brand preference driver in a marketing environment where consumers seek alignment between their beliefs and values and the brands that matter to them. All-too-often the sustainability team operates in isolation, and activity there isn’t integrated with marketing programs and assets that help customers of all segments understand what the organization is doing.

• This weakness has popped to the surface often enough that we are compelled to flag its importance here as “the missing link” to creating positive business outcomes from sustainability strategies.

Sustainability programs anchored to carbon footprint improvements can’t operate successfully in a vacuum. If we’re going to make the significant moves necessary to avoid condemning future generations to the invasive risks of a hotter planet, the entire effort must be a top-level priority for the company as a whole – with all hands-on-deck to help implement and communicate.

If you think your organization would benefit from an audit on sustainability readiness best practices, use this link to launch an informal conversation on evaluating the state of sustainability in your company. The solution set will invariably tap into everything, everywhere, all at once.

Download our emerging food tech education strategy guide…

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Novel protein likely to leap ahead of other emerging food tech…

It is time for the food and beverage industry to pay closer attention to an emerging food tech category that is highly likely to change the course of how food is created. It arrives at a time when our current food system is increasingly critiqued as an actor in the climate impact drama.

• At the end of this article, download our Emerging Companies to Watch list in this exciting evolutionary story.

The next great disruption in food creation

We are about to witness a wholesale transformation of where our food comes from and how it is produced – the first major sea change of its kind in 10,000 years since animals and plants were first domesticated. What’s at stake? No less than our planet’s health, impacted by decades of obscured mistreatment from an industrial food system that contributes roughly 24% of climate warming greenhouse gases – more than all types of fossil fuel powered transportation combined. For many this is a jolting discovery.

Dawn of the low carbon food system

Advances in bioengineering have served to refine a centuries old technology we know as fermentation. A familiar process used in some form for a millennium to brew beer, craft wine and create cheese and yogurt. This evolved tech is employing uniquely programmed microbes (micro) instead of animals (macro) to create high quality, healthy, great tasting proteins like meat, eggs and dairy.

The tech leap for food lovers: these new proteins are bioidentical to the animal version. That means virtually indistinguishable in taste and eating experience, while eliminating things people don’t want such as cholesterol, lactose and antibiotics. Moreover, they come to us at a fraction of the environmental emissions impact of livestock farming and its drastic over-consumption of limited water and land resources.

Precision fermentation may also work to leap over some of the shortcomings in plant-based products that retain a higher taste hill to climb because the proteins are not identical to what they’re trying to replicate. Their recipe goal is to mimic and simulate the flavor and mouthfeel of animal versions. They strive to do this by using plant-based ingredients and other food science wizardry to recreate textures, chew, even the bloody juice of a burger patty. The plant-based industry currently chases consumers who believe the eating experience may be close but is just not a full analog of what they expect from the meat and dairy products they crave.

Consumers are changing

Most of us grew up with deeply engrained, idealized and nostalgic beliefs about food. In its most authentic and revered form, it is always sourced from the soil or raised in a verdant pasture. For eons we’ve paid homage to an impression that real, nutritious food is an outcome of things we harvest on a family farm, delivered with as little adulteration as possible.

Moreover, in the past food science was often viewed skeptically as a precursor to over-processing and manipulating food ingredients – or creating not-in-nature versions of same in the laboratory. This reached its apex in the reduced calorie and fat wars of the 1990s where food science made addition by subtraction infamous via food engineering – sugar and fat removed and replaced with other artificial ingredients as glorified in the fat-free cake and donut craze.

Sense of urgency flipping the paradigm

The historic friction between science and nature is evolving now as consumers become aware of the relationship between industrial food production and climate change, its impact on scarce resources, the link to animal welfare issues and looming food scarcity challenges as world population accelerates.

People are coming around to see science as part of the solution, not a menace to be avoided. In a recent study by The Hartman Group on the future potential of precision fermentation technology, they describe the tech as a powerful advancement. Due in part to its familiarity with consumers, more so than cellular meat technologies that require a sophisticated and somewhat complicated explanation of how it works.

• Familiarity is important to adoption and trial because it feels less risky to people who are systemically driven to avoid risk in their food purchase decisions.

According to Hartman, millennials’ (born between 1981 and 1996) openness to the idea may comprise the ideal core “early adopter” audience for precision fermentation food products.

• 67% of millennials now believe science and technology may offer the best hope to address climate change.

• 62% agree science and tech innovations can help make food more sustainable.

• 62% believe foods made this way would be healthier.

In short, they believe this new approach to food creation may transcend the limitations and excesses of the current food system. In fact, Hartman states 84% of this cohort say they would be likely to purchase precision fermentation made products, and half would be willing to pay more for them.

Part of the comfort level (easier to grasp) consumers have with fermentation is its legacy use in beer, wine and cheesemaking. Additionally precision fermentation is already in our lives, used for decades to make insulin, vitamins, and the enzyme rennet that causes dairy milk to coagulate and separate into curds for cheesemaking.

The path to market for precision fermentation

Hartman’s research revealed that 50% of consumers are already looking for products that prioritize sustainability and animal welfare in how they’re created. Further when asked about what will influence their preferences and willingness to try these new foods, safety (60%) and taste (59%) scored almost equally as top priorities followed by healthy (53%).

The study showed the top three environmental benefits they expect from this emerging food category:

1. Reducing greenhouse gas – 38%
2. Minimizing other forms of pollution – 37%
3. Merchandized in sustainable packaging – 29%

Size of the prize

Hartman forecasts a potential market of 132 million consumers by 2027, with millennials most likely to replace all or most of current products with new precision fermentation versions.

The adoption curve follows a familiar path for new premium CPG food and beverage categories:

15% are ready to go

11% will be easily convinced

14% will be convinced with clear benefits

This falls in line with existing research and numerous case studies that confirm in any emerging premium CPG food business, approximately 14% of the addressable market will be early adopters – those less concerned with risk and more drawn to being first-in to try new products. Breaching the chasm between early adoption and mainstream acceptance is the marketing challenge of the ages and requires a carefully formulated strategy of validation, verification, channel management and calibrated expansion aimed at reaching the right audience segment at the right time in the right place.

Overly ambitious extensions too early into the wrong channels, retail locations or foodservice environments can set the business up for retrenchment when audiences less enthralled with the deep sustainability story and for whom price is king, may not be ready to push aside their habitual choices. Perceived risk is a hurdle that needs to be flattened.

Emergent marketing guidance

What will be required to nurture these new brands to fame and fortune? Education, education, education and more education.

How is it made?

Will it be safe to eat?

Will it taste good?

How is it better for the environment?

Will it be healthier for me?

Is it affordable relative to the product it will replace?

What about allergens?

The narrative should be built around what Hartman calls the “intersection of good for me and good for the planet.”

Food is an emotional category – we eat with our eyes, we respond to perceived deliciousness because we crave great taste experiences. We are drawn to the familiar. Thus, the language that’s used, the narrative story that’s created should avoid descriptions that are founded in scientific and technical lingo.

The experiences of respected voices in the culinary world, the outcome reports in social media from early adopters all coalesce to provide an eco-system of credible proof of satisfaction and value. This is NOT the time for old-school CPG claims and ad tropes that glorify self-promotion of features. This is your opportunity to employ new strategies founded in generating trust, belief and a heavy lean on values and deeper meaning.

• Your story focus is the consumer and their journey, and how these new products will help support planet health as well as personal wellbeing.

This may well be the most exciting adventure to arise in the food industry since homogenous audiences and mass media created a gigantic market for packaged food and beverage in the 1950s. Importantly, it also offers a viable solution to the planet crisis we’re in and a path to correct an unsustainable food system in a manner that will also help solve how we will affordably feed 10 billion souls by 2050.

If you’re interested in launching a conversation about strategies to nurture, grow and set these new brands up for success, use this link to start an informal conversation with us. If you’re interested in our take on the brands to watch and collaborate with as this story unfolds, use this link to download our Emerging Brands to Watch list.

Why Trust is the Engine that Drives Business Growth

“Trust takes years to earn, seconds to break and possibly forever to repair.”

Stephan Houraghan

Trust is fundamental to brand success, to sustainable business growth, to forging relationships with consumers, to any hope of genuine engagement. Yet trust creation often isn’t an articulated, strategic component of the business and marketing plan.

Yet when trust breaks out, it is transformational, even monumental in terms of its impact and ability to help lift the vitality of a brand over time. Why so? Truth be told, we confide in and share attention with people we trust. Similarly, we avoid people we believe to be inauthentic and untrustworthy. No surprise we apply the same rules to the buying decisions we make and preference for the brands – CPG or retail – that matter to us.

Home Depot – a study in retail trust creation

Video is a powerful, dynamic medium because it allows us to take the viewer on location, to tell stories through the dramatic experiences of real people, to bring authenticity and emotion to the message. Home Depot produced a remarkable 16-minute video documentary about the company’s encounters with disaster. As climate change impact unfolds, more and more of these events will transpire. Thus, in many ways Home Depot finds itself on the front lines of emergency response – an essential crisis caretaker for community residents, and also its own employees.

This video is a powerful, moving treatment about corporate higher purpose that by sheer number of events filmed reveals a deep soulful and unselfish commitment to the welfare of people impacted by devastating events. The narrative unfolds an unflinching willingness to show empathy and courage, with competence and effect, dealing with the aftermath of hurricanes, floods, wildfires, tornadoes, and disruption to family lives.

It is riveting. You can’t take your eyes off it.

This is trust creation in its finest hour; a moving panorama of personal testimony to how the company navigates the pain and wreckage of devastating events. It isn’t scripted or self-promotional. It demonstrates a corporate culture that is invested in improving, rescuing the lives of its customers and associates when its needed most.

Trust is a fundamental requirement for any brand-to-consumer relationship. Yet it cannot be invoked or claimed or endowed simply because a business has been around for a while. Trust and a reputation of trustworthiness must be earned, demonstrated in behaviors and practices.

Yet all-too often brands assume trust is  plentiful. As such, strategies to further cultivate or deepen trust are seldom overt components of business strategy. Given trust’s importance to brand loyalty and business growth, we believe it should be a top priority in 2023 – especially in the environment we find ourselves.

• Brand trust is at an all-time low, according to the Edelman Trust Barometer. Why? Because people are confronted daily with real-world examples of trust factures, unrepentant missteps, half-truths, lies by omission, dishonesty and overt efforts to deceive.

Here we will examine trust, how it operates and what can be done to build it.

What is brand trust?

It is a belief the brand will –

• Put my interests ahead of its own
• Continue to work to keep me happy, safe and satisfied
• Not look at the relationship as transactional
• Help me achieve my goals and aspirations
• Endeavor to make investments in the strength of our bond
• Remain resolutely, consistently honest and transparent

What are the essential elements that govern brands people trust?

• Competence
• Honesty
• Authority
• Integrity
• Values consistent with our own
• Humanity
• Empathy
• Advocacy
• Unselfishness

Home Depot anyone? Of note these are all very human characteristics that we expect from people we value and with whom we have trusted relationships.

How often do we see these characteristics manifested in ongoing business behaviors? Not often enough given the fragile state of brand trust today. Trust is absolutely a strategic asset and yet difficult to secure.

What are the benefits of actively building brand trust?

First and foremost, you gain permission for engagement and attention with a current or potential customer. People are busy these days and make conscious decisions with where they spend time and whether or how they open themselves up to any brand interaction.

Second, trust breeds loyalty and consistent repeat purchases. By virtue of the strength and belief in the relationship, missteps are quickly forgiven. Especially when the brand has the integrity to acknowledge mistakes and own any shortcomings.

Being a trusted brand is truly such a rare condition. Brands achieving this rarified air become home to advocates, ambassadors and evangelists who join the brand’s community as members rather than users. Think Patagonia, Google, Nike and Toyota.

The three characteristics of a trusted bran

1. Refined higher purpose

Higher purpose is a trust creating platform because it automatically imbues the brand with deeper meaning and values. It serves as an anchor for corporate culture and puts the welfare and wellbeing of people front and center in how decisions are made. It is a visible demonstration of commitment to goals and endeavors beyond the expected devotion to profit and transactions.

2. Super transparency

Consumers are relentlessly curious. They want verification and validation of what their favored brands assert and claim. Brands that invite consumers behind the curtain to reveal how products are made, where ingredients are sourced from, how the operation works in service of its stated priorities, provides hope and inspiration that honesty and disclosure are more than words in a press release.

3. Active social community

Community created content and conversations are present when companies do not try to over-regulate the narrative in their social channels. Instead, they actively encourage discourse and sharing of experiences. They are also quick to respond to issues and concerns as they arise, without defensiveness and in a human, conversational voice rather than “policy speak.” The voices of community members reinforce trustworthiness through credible validation of your promises. If your social content output is more promotional than conversational you are not leveraging the medium for trust building.

The trust building toolbox

You must strategically, intentionally work to position your brand as a source of useful, valuable guidance and enablement, not just a feature/benefit promoter.

The tools are straightforward – it’s the narrative and how the story is assembled that helps bring trust to life:

• Videos
• Tutorials
• E-books
• Webinars
• Newsletters
• Lifestyle Content posts
• On-site events and experiences

If you find yourself in agreement that trust creation should be a centerpiece of your efforts this year and would like fresh thinking on how to bring it to life, use this link to start a conversation. We are first and foremost, strategic brand storytellers.

Link to Home Depot video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_cHs5UkVfxk&t=972s

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

Embrace a new paradigm for successful brand storytelling…

In the history of modern marketing there have never been more ways to reach consumers. Yet it’s also never been harder to connect and engage with them. For decades brands have reflexively relied on various forms of intrusion to confront consumers with brand self-reverential, promotional messages. This approach is now widely rejected and avoided by its intended audience. Read on to learn the antidote to engagement misfires.

• It’s truly hard to admit, but: “the unquestioned language of (traditional) marketing sabotages the stories we try to tell.” – Jonah Sachs, Winning the Story Wars.

People have changed – they want to be part of something greater than themselves. Yet even though the elements of powerful storytelling have been employed for centuries, it is largely ignored by marketing tropes preoccupied with promoting products to consumers leveraging the politics of fear, inadequacy, anxiety and status-seeking – often served with a generous helping of narrative vanity, puffery and insincerity.

It’s time to end the decades of antagonism between marketing and its audiences

• We have a chance now to step beyond interruption marketing to build lasting, a more meaningful relationship with consumers that is grounded in deeper meaning, inspiration and values.

• We are free today to build new stories that get noticed, create emotional affinity and maintain credibility in a world desperate to secure meaning and starved for transparency.

However, the drive for true engagement requires a shift in thinking and approach that initially can feel counterintuitive to the foundational principle of marketing as a sales generator. After all, aren’t we supposed to sell to earn a sale? Our tradition-bound way of thinking and operating leads us to believe the path to business growth is paved with pushing product feature and benefits at people. We just need to dress it up with some creative artifice of humor or entertainment as storyline palate pleaser – then, down the hatch, right? Sorry, but no. Consumers have figured out how to sidestep and ignore all of this.

Yet even with the self-awareness of this consumer engagement shift, like the hamster returning again and again to the wheel, the vast majority of brand outreach in CPG and retail sectors employs the same approach – now only digitized to fit into new media forms and channels. This form of selling was honed during the analog media control and persuasion era of the 1960’s and 70’s. It remains entrenched.

The electronic fake-out

Technology-led tools lead us to assume there are algorithm-based, digital solutions that virtually guarantee the selling message penetrates to the right audience in the right place at the right time simply by deploying the latest platform. We need only to flip the switch and boom, we strike marketing gold with clicks and views – even though people routinely drop out of the engagement in mere seconds and carts are abandoned by an endless river of distractions.

The essential truth about today’s consumer

We are shifting from a consumption-driven culture to one founded on a maturing view that the best things in life aren’t *things*. Instead, people want to transform themselves and the world around them. Here it is in sharp relief: we reach for deeper meaning and enablement from the brands we care about. We want to be inspired by beliefs and values that matter.

In short people are ready to embrace:

Optimism over fear

Sacrifice over greed

Citizenship over consumption

A recent advertising effectiveness study tracking the new-found marketing focus on sustainability revealed that brands producing sustainability ads focused on themselves – to tout their eco-bona fides – did not score nearly as well in engagement and recall as brands that created ads to inspire their users to join the sustainability mission and contribute to the greater good. That means substance over selfishness gains an audience.

Here’s a new value system brands can adopt as a core directional litmus test for improved communications, engagement and brand story themes addressing:

Wholeness – moving beyond self-centeredness

Mastery – learning, competence and the struggle to improve

Justice – investing in, structuring a moral center

Depth – examining life and its complexities and possibilities

Simplicity – understanding the essence of things

Beauty – recognizing and experiencing aesthetic pleasure

Truth – the polar-opposite of falsehood

Uniqueness – mining creativity and non-conformity

Playfulness – celebrating joy and life experiences

Creating cinematic, powerful brand stories

What do we know about Luke Skywalker in Star Wars? He was a seemingly ordinary young man who was drawn out of his comfort zone to follow a path that eventually led to epic heroism. He had doubts and insecurities. There were flaws to overcome. Everything he needed to succeed was already inside him, yet he clearly needed coaching to understand that.

A hero is someone who pursues higher level values, willing to sacrifice in service of others, who is pulled to adventure through a higher calling. Traumatic circumstances pushed Luke forward. Eventually he would break free of his fears. He encountered a mentor who would help him on his journey and give him the tools to succeed. Mentors act to help redirect will and strengthen the heroes resolve and confidence. Yoda helped Luke become a better person, a more skilled Jedi, a confident participant on a perilous path to fulfillment and redemption.

• Every human being wants to be the hero of their own life journey. Your brand storytelling must always position your consumer as the hero of the story, not the brand. The brand’s role is always that of mentor, guide, enabler and coach to the consumer on their journey. Your content goal is to provide wisdom and tools to help the hero succeed.

It’s important to note great stories always include conflict, overcoming failures, the presence of a villain, danger, adventure, failure, improvement, empowerment and achievement.

When your brand stands for something, employs a belief system and is driven by higher purpose, you create the opportunity for transcendence. Your storytelling can move beyond an inward focus on self-promotion and touting product features, to celebrating your customer and all they aspire to do.

• You can inspire them.
• Coach and instruct them.
• Enable tools and experiences.
• Help them embrace the greater good and building a better future.

Marketing, then, is about sharing core values. This is the secret to creating engaging stories and an improved relationship with your users.

Yes, this isn’t easy!

To create a story telling platform that works, study is required of your best customers, their lives, loves, ambitions, fears, concerns, wants and desires.

Your brand’s language, voice and story must embed your brand beliefs, values, vision and higher purpose (you need to stand for something).

How this is expressed should be grounded in a clear understanding of your brand archetype (Pioneer, Rebel, Captain, etc.) and how that translates into a narrative unique to who and what you are.

The best storytelling techniques include the fundamentals of all great tales including tension, conflict, villains, drama, and the hero’s move to overcome odds, rise to the calling and win in the end. This story arc is as old as recorded history and remains relevant today.

Emerging food tech and a drama of the ages

Consider the vast array of new food technologies emerging right now, grabbing the attention of investors in their quest to reimagine how food is created. There’s a villain in here called climate chaos alongside the legacy food system actors that help perpetuate an existential threat to our existence and quality of life. The consumer needs/wants/requires a mentor and inspiration on the path to enablement and efforts to help rescue and change the world.

• There’s just sooo much here to work with. Virtually any product category or retail business will benefit from embracing the consumer’s desire to seek a deeper truth and to be part of something greater than themselves (sustainability is a case in point).

When you do this your customers can become believers, followers, advocates and ambassadors because they embrace what you stand for and how your brand helps them participate in a profound mission.

This is the magic behind stories that work, that deepen the brand’s voice and draw people close. Or you can continue to self-promote product features and benefits to a world increasingly not interested in this for the very reason the brand then positions itself as hero of the story rather than the customer. Competing with consumers for the hero role creates an instant disconnect and a new barrier to any engagement.

If you think your brand will benefit from a refreshed approach to story strategy and content creation, use this link to open an informal dialogue with us.

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

Without careful nurturing, the deeper meaning you started with will disappear

Truth is people care more about your *why* than they care about your brand’s how or what. While they aren’t necessarily enamored with your competitive specs and formulation wizardry, what they will resonate to is *why* you do it. Your purpose – your deeper effort to do something more meaningful – a mission that transcends commerce. These are the beliefs and values that draw people in, anchor their advocacy, and make them want to be members of your brand community rather than merely users.

Yet over and over again, we observe organizations failing to see the importance of these principles and in doing so, lose the magic that resonates and attracts people to the extraordinary promise that heralded the company’s genesis.

Your *Why* matters.

The why of every organization starts in the past, informed by the life experiences and aspirations of the founder(s) –people who were motivated to do something bigger than themselves. The foundational concept becomes the secret sauce that drives brands forward. It is, however, elusive, and can disappear over time if the cultural legacy and beliefs that lifted the organization to its initial success are lost. Future management teams may believe efficiency, cost control and improved processes constitute the levers of brand affinity and business growth. Not so.

Iconic brands are not immune to this almost inevitable and corrosive condition!

Charles Lubin, a Chicago baker, established the Kitchens of Sara Lee in 1949, naming it after his nine-year old daughter and launched his first successful product, a cream cheesecake. But it was a retailer in Texas who wanted to stock Sara Lee desserts that prompted him to reformulate so it could be successfully frozen and shipped long distances. Lubin invented the frozen baked goods category. He sparked innovations in production (foil pans) and flash freezing that fueled national distribution of his “Nobody Doesn’t Like Sara Lee” brand.

He retired from the business in 1968, then owned by Consolidated Foods (later renamed Sara Lee Corporation). As is often the case when the visionary moves on, if the deeper purpose, beliefs and meaning he brought with him are relegated to historical record, the heart of the enterprise’s belief system can get usurped by process, operations and balance sheet considerations. By the early 1990’s without nourishment of the Sara Lee brand soul, inevitable decline had set in. The parent company, now called Sara Lee Corporation, began to contemplate divesting its corporate namesake baked goods business. Tough to do.

The Wheatley Blair agency was retained on a rescue mission. Could we turn the business around? It would require radical moves, marketing finesse, a complete restage and especially, soul regeneration. Our strategy: unlike so many other food brands with made-up names, there really is a Sara Lee. Could we reinstall some of the magic and meaning by bringing her in to be the face and voice of the brand?

Soon we found ourselves sitting in Sara Lee’s upper east side apartment in Manhattan talking about her dad’s legacy and how much the business needed her help. Reluctantly she agreed to get involved and so we mapped a three-year strategy to revitalize the brand around her as spokesperson and personification of a new era at Sara Lee.

What happened next was truly remarkable. To launch a new line of baked goods with a lighter formulation, we created the first International Symposia on Dessert in Vienna, Austria – the world capital of dessert and pastry.

We flew 56 top North American food media to Vienna for three days of 24/7 dessert-centric experiences, seminars and tasting events. There, for the first time we introduced the world to Sara Lee the real, living human namesake. The media were smitten. The brand garnered more media attention than it had received in its entire history. This brought a refreshing injection of tangible humanity into a brand that had lost its anchor. Within a year the business started its upward trajectory and Sara Lee Corporation credited the strategy with turning the Sara Lee brand around at its annual shareholder meeting.

“What will it profit a man if he gains the whole world yet forfeits his soul?”

Steve Jobs understood this and saw it unfold in real time.

“Something happens to companies when they get to be a few billion dollars, they sort of turn into vanilla companies. They add a lot of layers of management. They get really into process rather than results, rather than products. Their soul goes away. And that’s the biggest thing that John Scully and myself will get measured on five years from now, six years … Were we able to grow into a $10 billion company that didn’t lose its soul?” – said Steve Jobs, circa 1984, in a Rolling Stone magazine interview.

Of course, Jobs was pushed out of his own company in 1985 and we know the Scully years were not necessarily a huge win for Apple. Until, the corporate “soul” in the form of Steve Jobs returned in 1997 to reinstall a refreshed ‘change the world’ vision and “Think Different” higher purpose. That purpose has remained with Tim Cook and the company continues to follow its inspiration and celebration of creativity and empowering individuals to change the world around them.

“I want to put a ding in the universe” – Steve Jobs

Apple doesn’t sell machines. Never has. Apple Macintosh was the first personal computer to offer a “graphical user interface” and mouse. Did anyone yearn for this tech? No. It was the point and click simplicity that elevated the experience. The story around enabling creative citizen communication and putting the power of publishing in the hands of any human was a dramatic departure from everything that came before it. The emotion-driven purpose that so resonated was: Empowering Creativity. Anyone’s creativity. Everyone’s creativity. No matter what the expression of that creativity was, you were now empowered to – borrowing from another – Just Do It.

Coffee culture and experience

Howard Schultz was struck by the coffee culture he observed in business trips through Italy. The sense of community and conversation that was part of the cultural vibe around the experience of enjoying elevated and refined coffee beverages. In its earliest days Starbucks was about bean religion and ingredient provenance stories for the vast improvement they brought over the current miserable state of coffee beverages sold in America.

He created the ‘third place’ as a personification of coffeehouse culture that turned Starbucks into a destination of enjoyment around subtle European sophistication cues. In those days coffee would be served in ceramic cups. People were encouraged to stay. It was a cultural immersion. There was deeper meaning, values and lore around coffee beverages, a veritable world tour of taste sensations (now taken for granted). When Schultz left the company some of its soul went with him. In his subsequent returns some of that magic came back with him trailing like the visible tail of a comet.

• The biggest challenge any brand will face over time is how the organization continues to grow and prosper without diluting its soul. And if that happens, how to reacquire it by looking backwards, not forwards to the story and formative beliefs and values that drove the concept from day one.

Money is not a purpose, it is an outcome

Why is *why* so important?

Because it inspires trust. It reaches the heart. It is always heart over mind you know!

Nothing can be more important in the digital age when ‘anything that can be known, will be known,’ craters so many corporate and individual reputations. When the words used to describe what a company does are unrelated to price, quality, services and features, you have a clear indicator that the *why* has blossomed.

When Schultz departed Starbucks and subsequent management focused on what and how over why, the soul eroded and commoditization challenges took root.

Here is the essence of it…

When a brand clearly, resolutely communicates its *why* – its beliefs and values – consumers believe what the organization believes. People will go to great lengths to include brands with a soul in their lives. Not because of any analytical evaluation of product features, but because people hold up those brand values and beliefs as markers and signals of who they are, what they care about. Apple is a flag for creative expression. Starbucks was a statement of sophistication. Costco is not a store, it is a treasure hunt.

People form communities to be around others with shared values and aspirations. Companies can help foster those communities when the story they tell is grounded in higher purpose rather than product slogans, features and benefits.

When a company doesn’t offer anything beyond rational, analytical arguments about its product, it is attempting to force less than inspiring decisions on a purchase – and commoditizing itself in the process. The only games left to play at that point are attempts at manipulation through conventional interruption media and incentives.

• People want to belong to something bigger than themselves. Can you provide that? People aren’t buying what you do, they are buying why you do it.

If you need help and guidance in reasserting your why, or creating the higher purpose for your brand, use this link to start a conversation with a team that understands how to elevate purpose as core strategy and a business anchoring system.

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A massive leveling has commoditized advantages…

Once there was a time when world-class marketing, by definition, was expensive. Bigger brands enjoyed advantages by way of larger marketing and media budgets that smaller players just couldn’t muster. A price of entry existed for superior production values and more cinematic forms of storytelling.

Those barriers have disappeared. What do you do when anyone, anywhere can compete with you on the quality of communication? What happens when the budgetary obstacles to outreach evaporate and anyone from anywhere can distribute high quality, engaging content? What unfolds when the importance of reaching mass audiences served by mass (expensive) media vanish because markets have bifurcated into smaller tribes of consumers who elect and select the brands they care about “joining?”

Read on to understand the shift in competitive advantage and where to go when a bigger budget doesn’t necessarily author any marketplace leverage.

Seth Godin marked the change beautifully in a recent post:

“To make an album of music good enough to make it to the Top 40, it used to cost a million dollars. Now you can do it in your bedroom.

To make a commercial for network TV, a minute of footage cost about a million dollars…

And that same million was what it would cost to create an email engine for permission-based marketing in 1996.

And you needed a million dollars to build a website that could hold up under a lot of traffic, or to build a social media presence that would reach a million people.

All of these things are now incredibly cheap.”

Remarkably, many brands and businesses still operate as if these big wallet advantages exist – assuming the consumer marketplace will absorb their content before, above, beyond and more often than anyone else’s (as if repetition helps in an avoidance-enabled market). Just. Not. True.

A seed funded CPG food start-up or small footprint retailer is capable of producing a more impactful, useful and engaging web site than a large cap CPG brand or 1,000-door retail banner. Of note, capable is just that – there’s no inherent win from being small and new either. Same with video content. Same with social channel engagement. The entire competitive advantage paradigm has shifted from the few Goliaths to the many Davids.

What happens when technology and culture conflates the company size and budget advantages?

The big strategic question that must be factored into planning: what are the new rules of strategic advantage when everyone can compete with anyone?

• The stakes on uniqueness and differentiation are amped and marginal distinctions constitute nearly zero brand leverage.
• The requirement for deeper meaning, mission, higher purpose and values – your “why” – form the foundation of any strategic advantage. Based on our surveys, this foundation is more than likely under-served.
• Putting the consumer at the center of brand narrative and communication strategy is now table-stakes to any hope of engagement.
• The humanization of your brand proposition and marketplace behaviors is a prerequisite to achieving relevance and resonance.
• Your digital footprint must revolve around “romance” of the consumer’s lifestyle aspirations, needs and wants before any relationship can be successfully secured.
• Larger brands don’t own any advantages here. Smaller brands don’t get a hall pass for being “nimble” (no one owns speed) or conceptually more authentic because output looks raw and amateur-ish.

The requirement for trust is universal and bigger brands don’t inherit that quality

“We’ve been here for 40 years” does not mandate trust. Reciting reasons intended to convince people you’re trustworthy doesn’t work because trust is not achieved through data or facts.

Bigger may reduce the perceptions of any risk in purchase as a business moves to the late stages on the adoption curve. That said it can also be a slippery slope to irrelevance, too.

Importantly, any “risk” attached to what is new and innovative can be managed with the right trust-building strategies and performances.

Over the last few weeks, we’ve seen close-up exciting new product concepts and nuances of evolutionary innovation that could potentially disrupt existing food and beverage categories. Yet the truth of the matter – there are also emerging brand communication efforts that are neither emotionally resonant nor fully dialed into consumer relevance.

• We have ample proof that while a level playing field exists, guidance and sound strategy are needed no matter the size of the business from $1 million in trailing revenue to $1 billion.

The large brand paradox

Larger brands have greater challenges due to hide-bound traditions and inertia that moves against change.

“We’re too big to fail”

“We’ve always done it this way”

“Our growth is aligned with the category performance”

“We can’t (won’t) change the foundational aspects of what authored our original success”

“Wall Street won’t like it if we do anything radically different”

“We have significant costs sunk in our supply chain infrastructure”

“We already have high levels of brand recognition and awareness”

“What if we (read: I) fail”

Trust must be won daily. Brand equity dilution, decline and commoditization challenges are like laws of gravity and cannot be side-stepped. Ceding category territory to smaller creations may not feel like a contest initially because many leaders believe you can “buy” your way in. Yet we recognize that post-acquisition there will be risks of diluting the golden goose’s brand magic.

The new rules of engagement

Anyone, anywhere can outflank and beat well-funded competition on message relevance and quality communication. That means emotionally on-point, consumer-centric communication is fundamental no matter who you are, big or small.

• Higher purpose, mission and values are the foundational elements of trust creation and any player in a category is either served or hampered by this requirement.
• You have to get out of your own way.
• Size is not insulation and creates other significant challenges that operate in favor of reinvention and renewal – when change is often resisted.
• Disruption and differentiation are required when sameness is rampant everywhere and traditional category behaviors can dumb-down any perceived uniqueness.
• There are far too many bigger brands that lack humanity in how their story is packaged and presented.

The beauty of a level playing field

For larger brands, this means potential repositioning and savings on the marketing budget line because throwing “money at it” doesn’t really get you there. This forces the importance of innovation, relevance, meaning and values that are the hallmarks of competitive advantage in the relationship economy era.

For smaller brands, you are not at an automatic disadvantage based on size. You can compete. Effectively. However, the requirement for world-class storytelling and engagement strategies remains as the price of entry. Are you prepared for it?

In the famous Pixar movie about a culinary genius rat named Ratatouille, we learn the story arc’s basic premise, “anyone can cook” – provided the right inspiration, effort, energy, focus and desire to learn exist. So, too, in the era of relationship-based marketing. We can return to focusing on the consumer and our storytelling chops, knowing that we can make a difference, and we can win in the marketplace for all the right reasons!

If this story stimulates some thinking that you would like to share with like-minded brand builders who can add value to your internal strategic conversations, use this link to start an informal dialogue.

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