Posts tagged "insight"

Guidance on 2024 stratgies

2024 Trend Forecast: Consumers Seek Truth Amplified by Transparency

January 4th, 2024 Posted by brand marketing, brand messaging, brand strategy, branded content, Consumer trends, Healthy Living, Higher Purpose, Insight, storytelling, Strategic Planning 0 comments on “2024 Trend Forecast: Consumers Seek Truth Amplified by Transparency”

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.

Bob Wheatley is the CEO of Chicago-based Emergent, The Healthy Living Agency. Traditional brand marketing often sidesteps more human qualities that can help consumers form an emotional bond. Yet brands yearn for authentic engagement, trust and a lasting relationship with their customers. Emergent helps brands erase ineffective self-promotion and replace it with clarity, honesty and deeper meaning in their customer relationships and communication. For more information, contact [email protected] and follow on Twitter @BobWheatley.

Brand differentiation is better than being better

Leveraging “Better” is a Trap

November 15th, 2023 Posted by brand advocacy, Brand Beliefs, Brand differentiation, brand marketing, brand messaging, Brand preference, brand strategy, Differentiation, Insight 0 comments on “Leveraging “Better” is a Trap”

Don’t play in someone else’s sandbox

What we’re about to discuss here is vital to brand marketing best practices and sustainable business results.

Most of the time brands and businesses focus their marketing on being better than X. When you are better than X your brand identity is linked to a competing brand. This is a trap. Being better is actually worse. Being different is better than better. Why? Because superior products often lose to brands that dare to be different.

When better silently runs the show, your storytelling is always focused on features and benefits. Some may even strive to be the best – which is really “better” dressed in a suit. Example of a “better” expression: “more” is a slippery slope to feature selling. More control. More perks. More of magic ingredient X. You’ll find hidden under every feature benefit message there is a “better” snare.

  • It’s a misguided, if all too common, principle that inevitably focuses the conversation on competitive benchmarks and comparisons. It is an endless cycle that leaves real consumer traction and engagement unattended – because the story always makes the brand the hero and not the consumer.

Better brands are never about product features and benefits, and consumers no longer buy them anyway. That’s table stakes. Instead, people are attracted to deeper meaning, aligned values, higher purpose and are magnetically drawn to different. Your brand should offer a point of view, express opinions and bring a vision of the future.

Rule number one: in compelling brand storytelling the consumer must always be the hero of your narrative. Your brand should avoid competing with the consumer for the hero role. Every consumer, every day wakes up believing they are the hero of their life journey. Your brand’s proper messaging role is as coach, guide and empathetic enabler of their journey.

Stronger brands always focus on being unique, not better

Strategic brands say and do things differently

They hew a unique tone

They often carve a controversial path

They see the future through a different lens

They operate with a belief system

The belief is the benefit

Great brands are always founded on beliefs

You may think that users care about better. However, you just haven’t given them something greater to believe in. Shifting the story spotlight takes the glow off of your competitor – who incidentally really doesn’t matter to your future prospects and growth.

It isn’t easy to be different. It takes incredible discipline and the support of your leadership team not to fall back into feature/benefit selling. Strategic strength springs from a well-defined understanding of who you are as a brand and company, and what you want to become over time.

Following the path to different

Here are some examples of how you can embrace different in your strategic game plan.

1. Create a new category

Historically and traditionally skincare and make-up brands conveyed that beauty is always applied. It exists on the exterior as an aspirational expression of status seeking and attraction. More enlightened brands have arrived to flip the script by attaching a broader vision of what beauty is and how it manifests. Instead, real beauty comes from within.

Beauty evolves as a coalescing of better health, fitness, spiritual growth and is inclusive of different body types, ages and lifestyles. The brand voice morphs to focus on wellbeing, happiness and growth rather than the singular application of a product. This different view authors a unique voice that carries added relevance and value to its audience of believers in a more validating life view.

Category creation is the ultimate move to inject different into brand strategy and positioning.

2. Move from product utility to lifestyle association

All too often product communication is devoted to specific technologies, formulation superiority and benefits of same. The product and brand are always the authoritative voice. Instead, moving to a lifestyle brand strategy enables personal authority. Great lifestyle brands insert themselves into important moments and experiences sought after by users. These are often situations and memories that echo the brand’s deep belief system – it’s “why” rather than what or how.

Yeti is an iconic example of a brand enrobing itself in a cloak of lifestyle experiences that celebrate outdoor adventures and enable the freedom of the soul in nature. Yeti is not selling coolers and tumblers. It’s singular devotion to breathing life into the emotional experiences of lifestyle association endears itself to its audience of evangelists and ambassadors. Yeti’s deeper meaning separates and elevates it from other brands who offer similar products.

3. Change the story focus

Most brands talk up themselves incessantly. It’s always about who we are and what we do. There is self-reverence and promotion. All about me. Instead of revealing yourself to the customer, how about revealing the customer to themselves. Stop expressing who you are and start talking about the customer – their aspirations, interests and needs.

Most hotel brands focus on their properties to extol design, amenities, services, architecture and location. Here are our features. Frankly the entire conversation is nearly generic brand to brand and separated mostly by price class.

Along comes Airbnb to completely violate the rules and tropes of travel brand communication. Rather than say look at who we are, they flip the lens around to say I see who you are. It comes from a different view of what travel is and how it can be experienced. Belong Anywhere is a unique concept that makes the customer and user experience paramount. The brand becomes an enabler of a unique experience – a coach and guide on a different and more human way to experience travel and destinations.

4. Change the reality

Disruption can be a useful tool when it reorients what people take for granted. The goal is to help people find and accept a new reality. Everything we thought we knew about __________ is wrong. This is how to do it (understand it) right.

The emergence of sustainability strategies and a new understanding of the role our food system plays in climate change is a reality-changing condition. Most people don’t think of food as a contributor to global warming. A brand that steps fully into conscious consumption and the commitment to improving sustainability bona fides creates a game changing story for consumers – and potentially a transformational view of how food should be created.

Similarly, what we think we know about health, wellness and aging is ripe for a makeover. Creating a new reality is a road to difference, uniqueness and sought-after guidance. The new paradigm of belief positions your brand as arbiter of a new way of thinking, doing and believing.

Different is the Holy Grail, let’s look for it!

It is time to back away from being better or best to refocus your marketing and messaging energy on radical differentiation. Best practices in this area inevitably leads to refinement of brand belief systems and adding deeper meaning to who and what you are as a brand and business. Collectively, if you can do it and stick to it, your brand will benefit from a new era of transcendence and value to users who come to you for better and more lasting reasons than a product feature.

If this discussion stirs some thinking and questions in your mind, and you’d like to get those ideas on the table to ponder with some like-minded thinkers, let us know. We’d love to think with you about how this thinking can be applied to your brand and business. Here’s a link to start an informal conversation.

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

Bob Wheatley is the CEO of Chicago-based Emergent, The Healthy Living Agency. Traditional brand marketing often sidesteps more human qualities that can help consumers form an emotional bond. Yet brands yearn for authentic engagement, trust and a lasting relationship with their customers. Emergent helps brands erase ineffective self-promotion and replace it with clarity, honesty and deeper meaning in their customer relationships and communication. For more information, contact [email protected] and follow on Twitter @BobWheatley.

Street racing victory snatched by NOS

Why your “why” is vital to brand competitive advantage

July 6th, 2023 Posted by Behavioral psychology, brand advocacy, brand marketing, brand messaging, Brand preference, Brand trust, Emotional relevance, Higher Purpose, Insight, Strategic Planning 0 comments on “Why your “why” is vital to brand competitive advantage”

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.

Bob Wheatley is the CEO of Chicago-based Emergent, The Healthy Living Agency. Traditional brand marketing often sidesteps more human qualities that can help consumers form an emotional bond. Yet brands yearn for authentic engagement, trust and a lasting relationship with their customers. Emergent helps brands erase ineffective self-promotion and replace it with clarity, honesty and deeper meaning in their customer relationships and communication. For more information, contact [email protected] and follow on Twitter @BobWheatley.

Andrea Coffman validates Champion brand promise

Third-Party Experts Drive Brand Trust

June 16th, 2023 Posted by brand marketing, brand messaging, Brand preference, Differentiation, editorial relevance, Influencers, Insight, media relations, media strategy 0 comments on “Third-Party Experts Drive Brand Trust”

The influential role of respected voices in building credibility

Risk-averse consumers now look to brands to provide credible validation and verification of the promises they make and assertions about product performance and benefits.

No surprise brand trust is at an all-time low among consumers, and also at an all-time high as a front-end requirement for any authentic relationship between consumers and the brands that matter to them. Trust is elusive, hard to win and has a short shelf life. It stands to reason why trust should be a critical fixture in the brand go-to-market strategy. Goes without saying, trust cannot be invoked or claimed, it must be earned through tangible actions.

Strategic deployment of respected and credible voices

Repeatedly Emergent has found significant benefits for client brands and their trust equity when we involve outside, respected, trusted third-party experts to help bring added credibility to messaging, media and content. Here are some remarkable examples of this in action.

Exposing the presence of fake Italian cheese

I was seated in a small conference room next to Neil Schuman’s office at Schuman Cheese corporate headquarters in Fairfield, NJ – there at Neil’s request to discuss a shocking revelation about the U.S. Italian cheese category. It’s important to note Schuman’s father invented the U.S. Italian cheese industry in the late 1940’s and since then this family-owned company has grown to be, by far, the dominant market share leader in the business.

Neil guided me through a thorough and vexing download on the presence of fake, mislabeled, fraudulent and adulterated Italian cheese in the category his company created. As category captain, Schuman believed his organization had a responsibility to shore up the integrity of the business, but was frustrated at every turn by intractable industry practices that worked to solidify the hold of adulterated cheese makers. For 10 years he had attempted to rid the category of these shameful practices but to no avail, so he turned to us for help.

I explained there would be no way to carve out the cancer of mislabeling practices without serious leverage that created risks for the companies, about 10 of them, which were doing it. I talked at length about the power of a media spotlight shined on this dark practice, as a path to creating substantial risks for those involved. If enough retail buyers were concerned by “outing” the fake products on shelves, then and only then, would buyers shut down the purveyors of cheap, adulterated versions of favored Italian stalwarts like the King of Cheeses, Parmesan.

This couldn’t be a trickle of attention. It meant a big investigative story on a global platform reaching a wide audience. To get there, a fact-based, well-researched case had to be presented in a highly credible way.

We launched an Italian cheese industry integrity tour in Wisconsin, the center of the nation’s cheese industry, to bring in the validation of the Wisconsin Milk Marketing Board, the Wisconsin Cheesemakers Association, the state Dept. of Agriculture, food science experts and others to form a coalition of third-party voices who could lend their perspective on why the presence of adulterated products was bad for consumers and bad for the industry.

We broke the first fake cheese story in the Milwaukee Journal business section, and then moved it to industry verticals for their reinforcement of the Italian cheese category blight. That portfolio of intense and consistent coverage was repurposed to support a credible conversation with Bloomberg News about launching an investigation of fake cheese conditions and the impact on unknowing consumers.

Bloomberg agreed on the merits and conducted an independent study and test that corroborated the presence of fake products on grocery shelves. When their story broke, we moved it to Buzzfeed and from there syndication touched off a global media tsunami about the presence of mislabeled, adulterated cheese. The outcome was abrupt – with retailers turning away from those making cheap knockoffs. Critical to success of the media strategy was the trusted, respected voices of third-party expert sources who validated and substantiated the story premise.

Helping re-position a restaurant chain from smoothie shop to healthy lifestyle brand

Jamba Juice invented the fruit smoothie restaurant business at scale. Due to the emphasis on real fruit ingredients the chain enjoyed a form of healthy halo. However, truth be told some of the recipes were steeped in sugars and the nutritionals were hardly a hallmark of truly healthy beverages.

After providing an analysis of shifting consumer trends towards healthy living, we convened the leadership team to reimagine a different course for Jamba. Our mission to help the brand re-position itself as a healthy lifestyle choice, with a new slate of better-for-you products around a new story of nutritional contributions from fruit, veg and added protein ingredients. This was as much a cultural shift for the company internally as it was a refashioning of their brand position, menu board and brand voice.

We went to work identifying and recruiting a team of the most respected outside, third-party experts in the nutrition and dietitian community, to join the Jamba Healthy Living Council as both advisors to the organization on product reformulation, and also creating content and communication that positioned the brand as a coach and guide on healthy living best practices.

The team also conducted workshops internally to help key headquarters staff fully understand and appreciate the value proposition for change and improvement through a move to embrace healthy living. The Council was also engaged to help the company navigate to a new channel, providing secondary school foodservice operators with a menu of better-for-you beverages. The drinks envisioned would be a tasty, kid-friendly vehicle for delivering mandated daily serving of fruits and vegetables in a form young people loved. It was a strategy to burnish brand reputation while helping develop the next generation of Jamba customers.

The Healthy Living Council members participated in online video creation, editorial media, social channel content and other platforms including conventions to spread the news of change and healthy product bona fides now taking root at Jamba – a remarkable transition for a company intent on creating a new future for itself based on higher purpose and deeper meaning.

Bringing transparency to the pet food industry

Pet food can be a mysterious journey for consumers with the constant drumbeat of imagery invoking steaks, beautiful salmon filets and whole chickens on product packaging. The marketing implies that a small brown nugget is in fact a stand-in for the same proteins people consume at the family dinner table. However, how pet food is actually made and the ingredients sourced have, for the most part, remained obscure behind the factory curtain.

Champion Petfoods, makers of the superpremium Orijin and ACANA brands, was unique by virtue of its long-standing commitment to source proteins from local farms and fisheries within driving distance of its kitchens. Champion in fact used fresh and frozen meat or fish in its formulations and claimed such on its packaging.

We felt this story was under-leveraged in an environment of growing consumer interest in transparency. We believed this could be leveraged in a proprietary way for Champion. Working with their marketing team, we created the Champion Transparency Council. The Council was designed as a consortium of outside respected voices in the Veterinary community along with real pet-owning brand fans who were also knowledgeable about pet nutrition.

The Council members were given full access to Champion’s U.S. manufacturing facility to see and witness every aspect of pet food creation from ingredient intake to package filling. Additionally, Council members toured the nearby farms and met with the farmers and ranchers who raised or fished the proteins used in Champion’s recipes. Indeed, they even went fishing to secure the catch that would later go into the pet food.

  • We asked them to create content and report on what they had witnessed, without filter or interference from Champion. The goal: an honest, eyes-open transparent assessment from their observations. The candid reports on the company’s practices and operations provided personal validation of Champion’s claims in real-life, tangible terms.

We facilitated interviews across the spectrum of relevant pet media to give Council members a forum for sharing what they had seen and heard. They were featured speakers at Champion’s trade show activations. Social channel content based on their observations was produced and amplified. The Transparency Council became a dominant voice in pet business trade media extolling the commitment to full transparency in an industry with a decided lack of that form of candor and openness.

Proof, verification and validation of promises distinguished Champion among consumers and retailers as a truthful, mission-based company in a category where quality claims go mostly unsubstantiated.

The role of third-party experts in brand communication

You want consumers to trust you, to believe you, to accept the assertions you make. Yet the world at large works against this with near daily reports of obfuscation, half-truths, misstatements, recalls, and outright lying that demonstrate some businesses’ lack a moral high ground and customer-first ethos.

In this uncertain environment with entrenched skepticism, strategy demands a conscious drive to create trust. Trust is earned not claimed. The role of outside expert voices works on two levels:

  • To observe and validate what you want people to know about how you do what you do.
  • To provide guidance, coaching and education to consumers on their journey to betterment and self-improvement from those with the respected bona fides to offer credible, useful help.

This is equally powerful in the earned media arena as a quote-able source engine for top level press which, on larger stories, must check the veracity of story details and scope with knowledgeable experts.

Are you intrigued by how this approach might elevate and enhance your brand’s reputation and credibility? If so, use this link to ask questions. We’re happy to provide perspective on how this strategy can be successfully deployed to earn greater trust for your business.

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

Bob Wheatley is the CEO of Chicago-based Emergent, The Healthy Living Agency. Traditional brand marketing often sidesteps more human qualities that can help consumers form an emotional bond. Yet brands yearn for authentic engagement, trust and a lasting relationship with their customers. Emergent helps brands erase ineffective self-promotion and replace it with clarity, honesty and deeper meaning in their customer relationships and communication. For more information, contact [email protected] and follow on Twitter @BobWheatley.

Strategy: the art of different

The Most Misunderstood Concept in Marketing: Strategy

June 7th, 2023 Posted by brand marketing, brand messaging, brand strategy, Brand trust, Differentiation, engagement, Insight, Transformation 0 comments on “The Most Misunderstood Concept in Marketing: Strategy”

How to use strategy correctly for over-the-top success and growth

The word “strategy” frequently shows up in marketing plans, yet all too often actual strategy is missing in action, misapplied or simply misunderstood. Here we will clear the air on building the right strategic foundation. It is the difference maker in creating successful business outcomes.

Ultimately you want to build the brand standard that other companies benchmark against.

  • The brand consumers talk about
  • The known innovator
  • The one referenced in best practice case studies

Note: we’ve created a one-page summary of Emergent examples of strategy in action you can view or download at the end of this article.

In the absence of a strong strategic platform, a business will inevitably drift. Due to this constant state of uncertainty, all marketing “bets” will be consistently hedged. Competition is fierce and in the absence of real strategy companies are often relegated to tactics consisting of endless rounds of episodic cost reductions and various kinds of profit sapping price promotion.

Frankly it’s all too common…

Many businesses

  • End up contending with positioning confusion
  • Struggle to stand out resulting in higher levels of media spend
  • Realize uninspiring profit margins
  • Users don’t really care about the brand proposition that much
  • Hence switching on deal is rampant as adjacent brands are seen as interchangeable

What is sound strategy?

Strategy describes what you do differently. It is instruction and a guide on separating and elevating your business in a new category you create while authoring new rules to govern.

Sound strategy –

  1. Enables bravery
  2. Commands an emotional response
  3. Delivers clarity and passion
  4. Because it is grounded in a sense of conviction
  5. Focuses on where you are going and especially why
  6. Provides evidence of how you are different
  7. Informs every action you take

Higher purpose and mission are ultimately a path to differentiation

Forever and a day we’ve been advocates of deeper brand meaning, values and purpose, for the very reason it is a solid path to improved strategy. After all, what is business but a system designed to deliver value. To increase the value you collect, you increase the value you give. A unique value, such that consumers aren’t getting it from anyone else.

Our job at Emergent, as strategic guide and coach, is to help you define what that “why” is while pushing the edges of differentiation outward. Strategy is creating “different” because your systemic enemy is sameness.

Myth #1: Strategy is never about being better than X

You don’t compete.

You don’t compare.

You don’t define your bona fides against the other guy’s offering.

You’re not pursuing the same customers with a similar product and a similar story, a recipe for declining profit over time due to ever-present commoditization. As we’ve said, sound strategy is creating difference. Better isn’t different. Better is the same, “but we try harder.” This is not a sustainable path and is a slippery slope to similarity. Instead, your goal is to provide value that “competing brands” don’t.

Myth #2: Sound strategy is complicated, sophisticated and data driven

Strategy is NOT a cold-blooded scientific download.

Some believe the path to improved strategy is served through dense technical analysis in an attempt to “manufacture” rightness. Great strategy is steeped in meaning, passion and conviction. This is the fuel that pushes great brands to go further, harder, deeper and braver than others. Their goal to always over-deliver on their promises.

Myth #3: Strategy is actually improved marketing communication

A tendency in our field is to conflate strategy with messages, tag lines and ads. Strategy isn’t a message, rather it’s guidance and statement of what the business does and why.  Communicating a similar offering more creatively isn’t a lasting proposition and forces media spending levels upward to maintain baseline awareness of same.

“Different with a strong why” is naturally alluring and attracting. A great strategic platform inspires meaning, belief, membership and advocacy. In the end it is a blueprint for how the business operates top to bottom – springing from your “why” – founded in deeper meaning and differentiation. This will help you better define the right product mix and inform a compelling brand narrative.

Charts and graphs can’t replace imagination

Strong strategic ideas are more like life in general, rewarding boldness and distinctive concepts over reductive reasoning. Here’s a connect the dots moment: ultimately, people are the consumers of your strategic concept. Just remember people are irrational. Decisions are never made based on consideration of analytical, fact-based arguments.

That’s why you want to go with the strategy that gets your heart racing. It will impact what you do, how you organize the business and inform communication that engages and inspires others to join you on the adventure. If it just seems “sensible” it’s probably wrong.

You are looking for the unique value only you can deliver.

We’ve assembled Emergent examples of strategy in action in a one-page summary available for you to view or download from here.

If you believe it’s time for fresh strategic thinking, use this link to ask questions or open an exploratory conversation. It is an important discussion to have and one that ultimately can help transform your business.

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

Bob Wheatley is the CEO of Chicago-based Emergent, The Healthy Living Agency. Traditional brand marketing often sidesteps more human qualities that can help consumers form an emotional bond. Yet brands yearn for authentic engagement, trust and a lasting relationship with their customers. Emergent helps brands erase ineffective self-promotion and replace it with clarity, honesty and deeper meaning in their customer relationships and communication. For more information, contact [email protected] and follow on Twitter @BobWheatley.

Founders personify brand purpose

Is Your Brand’s Soul Strategy Your Sole Strategy?

May 11th, 2022 Posted by Behavioral psychology, Brand Design, brand marketing, brand messaging, brand strategy, Brand trust, Higher Purpose, Insight, storytelling 0 comments on “Is Your Brand’s Soul Strategy Your Sole Strategy?ďżź”

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.

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

Bob Wheatley is the CEO of Chicago-based Emergent, The Healthy Living Agency. Traditional brand marketing often sidesteps more human qualities that can help consumers form an emotional bond. Yet brands yearn for authentic engagement, trust and a lasting relationship with their customers. Emergent helps brands erase ineffective self-promotion and replace it with clarity, honesty and deeper meaning in their customer relationships and communication. For more information, contact [email protected] and follow on Twitter @BobWheatley.

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