“Want to have a more meaningful relationship with your users, then imbue your brand with deeper meaning.”

Ten years ago a culture shift reached the tipping point and changed the dynamics of brand building forever. Consumers acquired full control over brand engagement and became serial avoiders of overt self-reverential and promotional marketing outreach. Selling in its traditional form was no longer an effective path to interaction with users. Analytical messaging about brand recipes, ingredients and technology would not be enough to draw consumers close. The path to purchase irrevocably changed.

In the wake of this transformation in how brand-to-consumer relationships are created, emerged a new and more enlightened platform to drive brand marketing effectiveness called Higher Purpose Brand Building.

No longer is the marketing best practices game plan to be grounded solely in promoting product features and benefits. Still as 2022 draws near and strategic planning is in high gear, we still see vestiges of old-school thinking that follows the “if you build it, they will come” marketing methodology. Higher Purpose brand strategy remains underleveraged in CPG and retail categories.

Here we will provide insight into purpose-built brand practices and how best to define this anchoring platform that will positively impact every aspect of how your organization does business and how you communicate in the marketplace.

What happened, why purpose matters

It is the intersection between need and passion where people will find affection and the basis for a relationship with your brand. It is expressed this way because the world has changed and relating to a brand is now fundamentally the same thing as relating to a person.

The digital environment we are doing business in abruptly ended effectiveness of interruption-style marketing. At the same time, consumers evolved as purchasing motivation moved closer to a symbolic act and signaling of what people want the world around them to know they care about, their values and beliefs.

As such sustainable brand relationships are now built on admiration and trust – and that insight, properly executed, can deliver significant financial premiums.

• Purpose-built brands represent goodwill that can be isolated as a component of business value.
• They can deliver higher margins, traffic.
• They also work to reduce the cost of promotion, improving ROI and bottom-line performance.

How? Because real purpose creates the opportunity for transcendence – the state of being admired – where consumers “join” your brand as members, not merely customers.

In order to build a more sustainable brand, you have a responsibility to push added meaning, trust and belief to the forefront of the consumer relationship. Said another way, you have to stand for something important in your users’ lives. A higher purpose defines your business’ true north and reason you exist. It should be a deeper and more lifestyle relevant concept that reaches beyond making or retailing high quality products.

Goes without saying maximizing business growth and profit is not a purpose. A real, human-relevant, and unselfish purpose is a purpose – and in the long run devotion to it will indeed maximize financial outcomes.

How to create a purpose-informed brand

This is an effort to codify your brand’s inner self. It’s vital to invest in this process because the marketing game has shifted completely from command and control (persuasion around overt feature/benefit selling) to the Relationship Building Era.

The goal of higher purpose planning is to anchor your brand in a new and deeper understanding of its mission – and in doing so provide a cohesive guide for all go-to-market tools and strategies.

Mapping brands on the relative strength or absence of Purpose bona fides can help bring added context to evaluating what best practices should look like in the competitive set. Here are four primary conditions that inform where brands might exist on strength of their Purpose plan.

Limited – province of brands that struggle with flat to declining sales, and who command little respect or trust from the consumer.

Reluctant – brands that have limited respect and generate little emotion, but whose pricing strategy or competitive advantage trumps consumer reticence.

Emotional equity – brands that maintain respect in spite of concept limitations, transactional marketing behaviors, higher prices or other competitive disadvantages.

Sustainable – more enlightened businesses that understand brand relationships work on the basis of true, authentic reciprocity and humanity – and are not superficial, opportunistic or purely transactional.

The depth of your brand mission and purpose can range from obvious and somewhat superficial to something altogether deeper and more engaging. To help you strive for the latter consider this basic premise:

• If your brand were to disappear from the face of the earth tomorrow, would anybody but financially-interested parties truly care? Said more succinctly: is brand advocacy now a more important and relevant goal than loyalty? YES it is.

The further along the ‘help over hype’ continuum the concepts gets, the more transformational. If we’re looking at how best to leverage core purpose, then it will of necessity become the heart of everything your company does, informing marketing, hiring, sourcing, operations and communications.

The primary components of higher purpose thinking include:

Why (does your company and brand exist):

• We exist to help people ___________________________________________________.

How (you deliver on our mission):

• We deliver tools, guidance, insight and education to ____________________________.

What (business are you really in):

• Our company and brand provides ____________________________________________.

Your Brand Stand

Out of the analysis and evaluation of why your business exists and what you stand for comes a statement we refer to as the Brand Stand. It is an anchoring expression of your higher purpose that informs company decisions and behavior. It is remarkable what happens internally when this work is done to create and codify values and beliefs. Employees and other stakeholders rally to the mission.

The principles and purpose become an anchoring lever for the organization and immediately changes the dynamics of marketplace communication to create more powerful and impactful social, earned, paid and content strategies. Your brand voice acquires more impact and emotional gravitas. You are giving users something to believe in, a deeper meaning and reason to be engaged with you.

As stated earlier the outcome of this is greater efficiency and effectiveness for your investments in brand marketing because it is not dependent on tonnage of media spend.

You are no longer competing on technical specsmanship which is more difficult to sustain and defend, instead your brand’s value proposition rises above legacy category tropes.

If you are interested in learning more about Higher Purpose Brand Building you can access our guide here: https://bit.ly/HigherPurposeStrategies

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Advantages you can plan and design for

Food culture in America has dramatically shifted during the last 10 years. People favor premium quality, higher priced products that address modern dietary needs serving health, wellness and sustainability goals. Better food experiences, fresh ingredients, more sophisticated tastes and the brand sustainability symbolism that goes along with it help complete the mission and taste adventure. This is the preference paradigm where all innovations whether from legacy brand or new player must pay homage on the road to success.

• Here are four key strategies that hold sway over your ability to succeed, to grow and gain share for food and beverage innovations.

We highlight these four distinctive growth strategies in part because they are passed over all too frequently. Eclipsed by the allure of instant scale, every-new-retail-door-is-a-good-door and ill-advised distribution moves that undercut the very brand value proposition that premium CPG solutions embody. This helps explain the high innovation failure rate or seemingly insurmountable plateaus where new emerging brands stall out, never getting a shot at the high volume homeruns of wider adoption downstream.

Want to assure your brand innovations are successful and not a casualty on the path to pantry and fridge domination? Then read on.

1. Your product concept is the marketing lynchpin (watch out for the Special Occasion Trap)

Food retailers care about velocity and monitor it relentlessly. Marketers care about scale because velocity and scale together are the flags of a winning concept; thus, why growth nirvana for premium CPG success always begins with strategic product and category design. Your innovation goal is a product that naturally, intuitively fits with frequent if not daily consumption occasions and feeds high repeat purchase behavior. Retailers understand this and look for it.

Products that are intended for niche, episodic occasions are much harder to score scaling victory for the very reason they don’t lend themselves to velocity, high repeat purchase business imperatives. If fancy jams are your jam, be prepared for the embedded difficulties that come with slow turn categories or segments with a narrow, special interest fan base.

2. Public ‘display’ categories add symbolism romance to marketing

Food and beverage purchases these days are largely symbolic. People ‘wear’ their brands as a statement, a flag, a visible demonstration of what they value and what they wish to signal to the world around them about who they are.

You know this so can you plan for it, use it. How can you enable consumers to fly your symbolic brand flag? Does your premium brand innovation lend itself to public display occasions such as barbecues, parties, taken to the office or gym and consumed in a social setting? Brand iconography, symbolism and telegraphing of same can be deployed here to help your users display and vote their beliefs and values. Too often this opportunity gets overlooked.

3. Pack strategies can ignite new occasions

No doubt you’ve heard of price-pack architecture. There is a bit of CPG magic in this strategic growth solution. It helps you lean into new and different occasions while creating higher average retail price points (more cash and flow) with a perceived embedded consumer discount, and more facings (brand billboard) at shelf. Pack architecture projects open the door to migrating your users to new consumption occasions.

Amplify Brands’ Skinny Pop brand rode the pack architecture idea to fame and fortune by creating both smaller bags and larger pack sizes of their pound-able guilt-free popcorn. The move lifted average price points while leveraging new use occasions from school lunches to birthday parties. When you offer new packs the input costs are manageable while adding exponential growth on the income side and serving the usage occasion/velocity rule at the same time.

4. The slightly uncomfortable but immutable rule of upscale zip code distribution

There’s an old but wise saying: fish where the fish are. For premium priced food and beverage innovations the distribution strategy decisions you make will have an enormous impact on your ability to gain traction and scale the business. Where you do business matters especially in the early going.

Premium innovations are home to higher quality ingredients, real food-based formulations.  These brands reflect the lifestyle symbolism embraced by consumer cohorts who in reality control the fortunes and failures of new product fame or flame out.

What do we know: educated, high earning households congregate in upmarket neighborhoods. Trial for premium priced CPG innovations will always be better served in retail doors that exist to serve an upscale shopper base. These folks not only won’t flinch at your higher price point, they are also hunters of new premium innovations. Early trial fuels their social currency of being a word-of mouth warrior.

There was a time when Whole Foods owned the early trial zone for premium CPG innovations, but other banners have caught up in their premium offerings. Now it’s a zip code exercise where your decisions are more about the education levels of the communities you distribute in ahead of other considerations.

The guidance: not every new door is the right retail door. Controlled expansion plus patience are better for building your business rather than taking distribution wherever you can get it. EDLP retailers have a different model and a different shopper base driven more by price point than your quality ingredient, healthy lifestyle bona fides. Walmart is better for mass legacy brands for this reason.

• Broader distribution and wider geographic expansion make sense when innovations become mainstream and lower income households begin to take them up. Going that route too early can create problems leading to profit-eroding price drops and even delisting if you’re not careful.

There are 40 metro areas in the U.S. where greater than 30% of the adult population has a Bachelor degree or higher. That’s a cohort of more than 65 million adults. Higher income zip codes within those metros are primed for premium CPG introductions. These higher income, higher educated households are tuned-in to the evolutionary changes going on in modern dietary preferences. They are listening to your narrative.

• In sum, you will grow in geographic areas where large numbers of people attach their lifestyle symbolism to your brand and spread it in their social circles. You should be on shelf in the banners where the shopper population is experientially primed to look for you.

Don’t forget to consider University towns for the same reason. These can be enthusiastic communities for bold, dietary alterations and innovations. Young adults especially are early adopters and influential in making new dietary shifts.

Here is the premium CPG innovation recipe for success assuming the product design fits squarely in the frequent consumption arena.

• Build visibility, awareness and discoverability in the right stores in the right zip codes.

• Increase local household penetration.

• Increase consumption rates among early-in users by adding consumption occasions.

If you have these challenges and strategic questions as you plan your innovations and launch strategies, use this link to start a conversation with us. We can help you create a roadmap to success and the brand narrative well told to go with it. We are new product launch specialists.

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Consumers are human beings, not data points

As part of our ongoing series devoted to strategic planning guidance, we bring a mission critical recommendation on where to place your planning emphasis for 2022:

Brand building has returned to the fulcrum of marketing and business strategy leadership. After a decade of holding all the cards as a budget and plan priority, digital performance marketing has lost a bit of its luster. Customer acquisition costs are on the rise. There’s also a companion decline in the supply of digital ad inventory.

The creative deployment of your brand as ultimate differentiator and emotional connector should return to the strategic planning front burner.

Rethinking the path to business growth

• Brand building: securing your position, uniqueness, values, mission and emotional equity.

• Performance spending: driving the conversion funnel and revenue metrics.

These two approaches are not necessarily fighting one another. Both can enhance the outcomes of the other. Consumers, however, are the deciders. Their behaviors inevitably tipped the scale in favor of enhanced brand building. Now over-saturated and swimming in an ocean of digital content, people have evolved looking for deeper meaning and values in the brand relationships they care about. Digital native brands like Allbirds and Warby Parker saw this coming and pivoted to focus on brick-and-mortar retail so they can create richer in-person experiences with their brands.

Brands have always been valuable – but in recent years lost their priority in the marketing plan to the ease and electronic allure of digital data ROI claims. The untold part of this story: tech platforms usurped the essential role of brand building investment, ushering in another consequence: the splintering of agency partner resources. A thousand platform specializations emerged as companies looked for the next shiny new tech Saas solution that promised glorious, algorithm and data-driven performance.

Thus, marketers also found themselves managing a disparate cadre of specialists du jour – a digital ad firm, digital media vendor, a social media agency, a PR agency, an influencer agency, a brand collaboration firm, et al. What’s the net result of all these different tactical players and layers? A soup of varying voices and fragmented messaging that increasingly sounds like a confederation of a thing, and a thing, and a thing – opposed to a unified, consistent and differentiated brand.

Time to think differently!

The transition to brand investment is being helped along by Apple’s no tracking opt-out privacy move and Google’s coming shutdown of cookies that suspends individual tracking in favor of a cohort-based system (shared tastes).

These modifications to digital stalking of user behavior are ultimately a good thing for the health and growth of your business, and here’s why: it’s time to reinvest in your brand, the single most important ownable and differentiating asset you have in an otherwise vast sea of equivalency and similarity.

• Marketers are learning the absence of real strategic investment in developing brand distinction and deeper experience is now holding them back from optimal growth results and competitive advantage.

Why?

Brands are uniqueness generators, deeper meaning vessels and trust-creating reservoirs of mission and values. You are operating in a consumer world increasingly drawn to aligned, kindred and symbol-inspired relationships – more so than transactional, follow-me-around-the-web ‘buy me now’ offers.

What dampened the primacy of brand building in the first place?

A digitally-enabled explosion of performance marketing tools pushed communications and content to a tactical model founded on conversions and revenue metrics. See you later, brand building. Hello targeting, tracking and clicks.

The great promise of infinite ROI on digital ad spending with Facebook and Google spawned a proliferation of specialist ad tech firms all looking for their piece of the eyeball pie – retargeting, digital media buying, affiliate programs –all while brand support took a raincheck.

Furthermore, the marketplace bar for entry of new brands became so incredibly low, it fomented a tsunami of digital ad content that is piling up in consumer feeds – all clamoring for a sliver of limited time and attention. Very noisy. Transactional. Less engaging and lacking lifestyle relevance.

Guidance for your brand strategy planning effort

As a general rule radical differentiation, higher purpose and emotional connection are the three legs on which to center your strategic plan.

• Differentiation is essential to separation and standing out – consumers will notice you
• Higher purpose imbues your brand with deeper meaning and values – how they trust you
• Emotion is at the center of what drives consumers to act, make decisions – humans are feeling creatures who think

The goal of your planning is to optimize strategy for greatest impact. To enhance equity and the values your brand exudes. To create attraction, allure and stickiness. To win hearts because it’s always heart-over-head.

Here are four areas of focus that will help you win with a stronger brand:

1. Aligned values

Insight research continues to reinforce that consumers’ care deeply about shared values and mission. They want to know what you believe in, what you stand for, that you have a soul which transcends commerce. They “wear” your brand as a symbol and flag to the world around them about what they value. What meaning are you giving them, and is it aligned with their beliefs

2. Experience satisfaction

Are they happy with the product-use experience, with the purchase journey, are you easy to do business with, do you put them first in ways that are both unselfish and also obvious to them? Do they learn from you? Is your brand a guide, coach and enabler of activities, experiences that matter to them? You are providing more than a product.

3. Memorable messaging

How do you stand out and engage people? The consumer is the hero of your brand story – it should be about their needs, wants and aspirations. Your brand’s role in the relationship is as guide and advisor to help them achieve their goals and ambitions. Neuroscience tells us that 98% of actions taken by consumers comes from an emotional response, not an analytical one. Is your communication informed by emotional messaging.

4. Your brand’s share of culture

What is the social conversation about your brand? What people are seeing and hearing about your brand in the micro-communities of influence that they belong to? It is critical to the ecosytem “buzz” they encounter. People respect the voices of their peers and credible experts. For the very reason that nearly 100% of the time the primary motivation in deciding what to buy is their fear of making a bad decision. You need to build a sphere of trust.

If these ideas and concepts resonate with you, now is a good time to bring some fresh thinking and perspective to investing in your brand. Use this link to tell us what concerns you have, what keeps you up at night. We can help you map the right path to brand growth, which is linked directly to your business outcomes.

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How to amplify your 2022 marketing outcomes…

We’re in the thick of strategic planning season as food, beverage and lifestyle brands and retailers finalize their go-to-market strategies for the year ahead.

• How do you ensure your plans will deliver the most benefit for every precious dollar invested?
• What are the optimal elements in a marketing plan that will secure consumer and trade partner engagement?
• What are the must-have components to deliver on your business objectives?

Here we examine the eight key elements of a marketing plan that removes risk and installs trust – a must-have on the road to business success no matter what stakeholder audience you are working to influence.

1. Business objectives assessed alongside barriers to growth

Far too many marketing plans begin with declarations of business targets served up in a manner that implies it’s simply a matter of turning on the advertising faucet to deliver on the intended outcomes. A richer and more productive internal discussion will occur if the objectives are included alongside an honest, real-world assessment of the barriers that exist to delivering them.

Mind you, there are always barriers. No one goes to market in a vacuum free of systemic challenges and threats to success. It is in this act of realism and reflection that the executive team has a useful discussion on what must be overcome in order to win in the year ahead. This works to remove what we characterize as “hope-ium” from the plan discussion and gets everyone focused on contributing to ways of mitigating or navigating around the threats.

2. Competitive analysis with a unique purpose

Intentional or not, in many categories there is a fair amount of sameness that exists among brands matching competitor moves with comparable programs, product offerings and messages. If a brand is set up from the start for radical differentiation, then the chances of stepping into the similarity trap can be averted. Resemblance is an ongoing challenge in marketing. When communications is close enough that brands could literally interchange competitor names and the key message still works, you know a problem exists.

Instead, competitive analysis should be focused on looking for unmet needs and whitespace opportunities to zig when everyone else in the segment zags. Your goal is to be different. (No, really, really different.) And in doing so, stand out in a sea of category sameness.

3. Importance of consumer anthropology

Perhaps the most important element of all in marketing planning is the right kind of research to help inform strategy. This isn’t about data crunching around demographics of shopper populations. Relevance and resonance are everything to dialing in your communications plan for optimum impact. This simply can’t be done without the kind of insight research that truly peels the onion on your best users’ lifestyle concerns, passions, interests and desires. Users are humans not data points. You will get further by imbuing your brand with deeper meaning that reflects the values and beliefs of your heaviest users. To know them, literally, is to love them.

These cohorts are often the most important to your profit plan as they usually represent those who bring the highest volume and repeat purchase behaviors. The role of your brand is as coach, guide, educator and enabler on their lifestyle journey. You can’t do that without gaining insight into how they think, behave and what they care about. This is different than pushing analytical, fact-based messaging at them on formulation or technology specs. It’s always heart-over-head. All humans are emotional creatures who think and not the other way around.

4. The ‘culture shift’ imperative

Trends are far more important than ever before to influencing consumer preferences. Media influences the crowd and where the crowd of like-minded users goes will simply attract more and more ‘followers’ (this means the social conversation that’s going on matters to your strategic game plan). Right now, sustainability could not be more important as a culture change signal.

A large swath of the consuming public is enamored with sustainability behaviors, policies and standards created by brands to help mitigate their impact on carbon contributions and the environment. It is imperative that food brands with a heavy investment in meat ingredients take this into consideration. Just be careful not to invoke sustainability as a priority ahead of having the right science-based assessments of your carbon footprint. You want to avoid falling into the greenwashing trap. Sustainability is now associated with climate impacts.

5. Brand higher purpose discovery and refinement

Purpose-built branding is not a nice to have any longer. It is a vital construct that sits underneath your organization as a true north of why the company exists. Important to note, purpose is always built around a real human-relevant insight and not a corporate axiom like increasing shareholder returns. It has nothing to do with philanthropy and cause marketing. It has everything to do with a purpose that transcends the product offering and is married to how you improve your customers’ lives and the world around you.

More often than not, we find this key strategy that informs everything the company and brand stands for is under-nourished or treated as a cause-related project. The key questions to address:

• Why are you in business (this isn’t just about business growth)?
• How do you deliver on your why?
• What business are you really in based on your why?

A Higher Purpose platform should be embedded in everything you do across the organization.

6. Evaluating spheres of influence

The internet has fractured the consumer world into micro-communities of shared interests and passions. It is in these communities where people filter, find and decide what to buy. There are influencers within these communities who are important to discovery and trial, to establishing the definitions of what is better and why.

The marketing plan should include an evaluation of these micro-communities and the leading voices within them. Here your brand should engage as a contributor to the conversation. Relationships should be built with the leading voices, not to co-opt them but gain their trust.

7. Assessment of outside third-party expert voices and contributors

Trust is harder than ever to achieve. 99.9999 percent of the time consumers are operating with one goal in mind – to avoid making a bad decision. Brands should engage the voices of outside experts and credible authorities to verify and validate what you want consumers to believe about your brand, business and Higher Purpose. These voices can add a layer of credibility to your content marketing plans and pull in a note of clout to key messages you wish to convey.

How these relationships are created and deployed is key. Be careful not to position these voices as brand promoters who come across like paid shills. They are there to validate, to deliver authentic “reports” on what you are doing. Trusted voices are essential to building belief, and trust is fundamental to your success.

8. A word about KPI’s

These days it’s standard fare to embed your evaluations with digital data given its availability across all of the social and content platforms where you deploy communications. Levels of perceived engagement are relatively easy to come by based on online behaviors. People, however, can also be fickle and unpredictable.

Creating a baseline of consumer insight research is invaluable not only to better understand what makes your users tick, but also to go back in later and assess changes in attitudes and behaviors over time.

These evaluations carry more horsepower because they dig into shifts in priorities, interests and activity on the path to purchase and whether or not your key messaging is getting traction.

All of this great work feeds creativity and informs strategy. It can lead your business to leaps in share. New users will enter the fold because your brand truly stands out for all the right reasons in a category where many players tend to blend together.

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Why Brand Education is More Effective than Selling

There’s an almost irresistible, gravitational pull in brand marketing to focus on self-promotion. It’s instinctive and alluring to talk singularly about why your product is better than others. Is your head nodding up and down? You may believe the persuasive story is your awesome tech, your incredible recipe, your authentic ingredients, your great taste, your contemporary look, your creative store design – all of the various arguments why your brand or banner is terrific and a superior choice.

• These brand advantages and qualities are now fundamental currency in a marketing game whose rules have changed.

• Yes, all of these things remain important, but should they be the leading tip of your marketing spear? Not anymore. Here’s why.

The dynamics powering consumer and brand relationships have transformed. Consumers gained control of brand engagement when the Internet and digital era handed it to them. Your users know everything, can compare anything, and quickly learn from the experiences of others good, bad or indifferent. They can turn your engagement tactics on or off with a click. When consumer relevance reigns supreme, it’s time for an enlightened approach.

Secondary research confirms most people run away from self-congratulatory messaging outreach that looks like traditional selling. For them, it isn’t trusted communication. Effective marketing recognizes that the journey brands take with their best customers is built on a foundation of reciprocity and value exchange.

Role of the modern brand is guide and purposeful voice

Instead, your brand should present itself as a guide, coach and advisor on the consumer’s life journey. Marketing becomes relevant and resonant to users when the value offered is of intrinsic benefit in helping them achieve their personal aspirations and goals. Your brand should be a partner not a seller. Key insight: the dynamic of how brand relationships are made has shifted to help over hype, so your voice and story should realign with it. How so?

Eat Just brand, the first cultivated chicken meat to win regulatory approval for sale in Singapore, recently struck a deal with a hotel-based restaurant called Madam Fan. They are launching the first home delivery menu of dishes using Eat Just’s non-chicken chicken.

Inside the food delivery container is a Google Cardboard viewer with a link to a short film. According to Eat Just CEO Josh Tetrick the video transports you to a Brazilian rainforest where you observe this rapidly disappearing climate-critical resource. You see this amazing natural carbon sink being replaced by industrial farms that raise animals for meat and the corn and soy crops to feed the animals. The goal of Eat Just’s video is to help users appreciate why cultivated meat matters to the planet’s health.

Turning the food delivery box into a portable brand experience is such a smart move.

Did the video do a typical romance of their product tech? No, it was instead an inspiring educational experience where the consumer learns about the connection between our food system and its related climate impact. This frames the Eat Just brand’s higher purpose, it informs in a way that’s consistent with changing consumer values and beliefs about food. It creates a unique teaching moment – and a powerful one at that.

This is how a community of believers and advocates is built. The video endears the Eat Just brand to its users. Of course, for all of this to work, the product eating experience still needs to be perfect. It should be an authentic analog to chicken flavor and texture – and taste should hit squarely on the crave-able and delicious notes.

• That said, in a world of common feature-to-benefit selling tropes, Eat Just credibly, remarkably rises to a new level of value exchange, where eating that nugget of chicken meat acquires a deeper meaning than it would deserve outside this context.

What’s more, the approach educates and benefits the recipient in a compelling way – an “a-ha” moment of learning that rainforest is rapidly disappearing (at an alarming acre per second). Emotion is embedded in the subject matter of the video, so it plays to what we now understand about consumer behavior and the (major) role of emotion in shaping perceptions and actions.

Marketing that’s wanted by the recipient

Your goal is to create marketing that is welcomed by its intended audience, not avoided. When the food or beverage brand helps its core customer with creativity in the kitchen, or enables wellness and fitness experiences, or communicates a higher purpose like food scarcity, the brand gains permission for a conversation. Here the brand bonding is facilitated because we’ve moved beyond transactional selling to a more relevant and powerful dialogue.

You may still wonder: isn’t the path to sales growth paved with communicating product attributes early and often? Not at the expense of failing to educate users. This has everything to do with understanding the rules of reciprocity and trust that influence purchase behavior. Trust is earned when the consumer believes you understand them and their needs and operate unselfishly to work in their best interests. Trust is the active ingredient in an authentic give-and-take relationship between brands and users.

Food and the role of crave-ability and deliciousness

Worth noting, food is an emotion-packed category. People care deeply about the quality of what they put in their bodies. They want to know the ingredients used are high quality, healthy, real, safe and also better for the environment. They especially want to avoid making a bad decision, so how food is presented with an eye towards taste and eating satisfaction helps eliminate the perceived reflexive risk of “It’s healthy so it’s going to taste bad.”

One notable caveat here: any number of fast casual restaurant brands are aware of eat with your eyes magic and advertise food that looks sumptuous and crave-able – all beautifully presented with super strong appetite appeal. Except that the stark reality of what’s actually delivered on the plate is frequently so far removed from the ad imagery that it sets the stage for massive disenchantment and trust disruption.

• Truth matters. Social channel chronicling of disappointment spells out what’s at stake with consistent over promise and under deliver.

• If you convey it’s delicious, it better be delicious.

When education is your mission

Sweetgreen is a fast-food chain that understands the role of ethos and deeper meaning in their brand proposition and go-to-market behaviors. This belief system permeates every aspect of how the brand is presented and how the business operates to demonstrate its higher purpose values.

They recently announced a refresh of their brand as they amp up their climate impact bona fides while redefining what fast food is in context of why the company exists. Here’s how they presented the values that sit underneath their new brand identity:

1. “Food: sweetgreen wants to show that fast food can be synonymous with real food. They invested in new food photography, menu designs and packaging in an effort to highlight their food ethos, which celebrates seasonality, local sourcing and transparency. 
2. Sustainability: sweetgreen believes that climate change is the defining challenge of our generation. This new identity was designed to showcase sweetgreen’s sustainability initiatives and its ongoing journey to carbon neutrality.”

Education is the leading strategy at sweetgreen. They believe consumers benefit from knowing more about how their food is sourced, farmed and prepared with an eye towards healthier and higher-quality choices that remain friendly to the planet’s wellbeing.

Why help over hype is the way to go

We have entered a new era where brands with purpose and deeper meaning attached to how they operate have an extraordinary opportunity to create lasting, deeper connections with their core users. It’s no longer necessary to compete for attention through a constant drumbeat of hard selling product features.

If you’re committed to building the best possible product experience your capable of, the consumer will recognize and experience it. Why they keep coming back, and why they engage fully in your social channels has more to do with how you help them by enabling their passions and interests and aligning with shared values.

Education is a principle move to provide added value, and while doing so, enhance your relevance. It also respects the expert guide and coach role that brands should play in effective communication.

When you create marketing users want rather than avoid, the opportunity for conversation skyrockets. The relationship, therefore, is a journey not a transaction. Educating consumers is simply smart marketing and sets you up for successful engagement across all digital platforms. It automatically leans into your higher purpose, a point and position not lost on consumers who are looking for it.

If this sparks questions about refining your strategy and brand voice around education-forward outreach, we’d love to talk with you. Use this link to begin a conversation.

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Understanding the human being you’re talking to

People are not analytical, fact-based decision-making machines. We are feeling creatures who think, not thinking creatures who feel. It’s heart-over-head every time. Yet the vast majority of brand marketing outreach is based on a rational presentation of features and benefits.

The incredible formula.

The amazing ingredients.

How it’s faster, more efficient, less costly.

The shiny new food tech underneath.

But what if I told you that conscious thought does NOT inform the decisions consumers make. “For 50 years we’ve been using the wrong model. Emotional tugs trump rational pushes.” Dr. Robert Heath, Journal of Marketing Research

Uh oh.

Doesn’t matter what the product is either. Marketers are trained to serve up what they believe is the best, most logical, defensible and factually-compelling argument that can be made about why Brand X is better than Brand Y or Z. But this is upside down.

Here’s the essential truth as we know it: “Non-conscious intention produces both a conscious thought and action,” says Timothy Wilson, a Clinical Psychologist with the University of Virginia.

Ooh Kayy? So what does that mean?

The latest Neuroscience tell us why we’ve been unintentionally mis-managing marketing for a very long time. Turns out there are two brain systems at work in every person. System 1 is an effortless, always on, intuitive autopilot side of the brain. System 2 is the effortful, learning, rational, analytical side of the brain that unfortunately is inherently lazy. System 1 makes 98 percent of our decisions, leaving 2 percent for System 2 to ponder. Yes they work in tandem but System 1 is in charge.

Here is another way to understand the difference: System 1 can process 11 million bits of information per second. System 2 processes 40 bits of information per second. Gulp. Turns out the intuitive side of our brain is a lot smarter than we ever knew. That hunch or gut feel you had is probably right!

The impact on marketing best practices

System 1 responds to emotion because it uses emotion. Here’s how to think about it.

• Acts without deliberate analysis
• Generates our impressions, feelings and inclinations
• Exerts powerful influence on choices and judgments
• Drives the options we choose and originates the actions we take

Here are six essential ingredients for optimizing marketing outreach that track with what we now know about how people really operate and handle decisions.

1. Exposure: we automatically assign superiority to what is familiar. Communicating sticky, memorable phrases and ideas is a good thing.
2. Proof: we are drawn to prefer products and brands other people like and endorse.
3. Positive feelings: if we feel good about a brand, we assume it possesses an abundance of beneficial qualities.
4. Actions: people respond more readily to what you do more so than what you say. Brand experiences can show your heart.
5. Reciprocity: we are hard wired to reciprocate in kind when faced with clear generosity. Surprise and delight is more than a catch phrase.
6. Art: we respond well to artistic expression. How you use words, visuals, sounds and style matter.

The case for deeper brand meaning

Here at Emergent we’ve been talking about the importance of Higher Purpose to brand growth for years. On one level, Higher Purpose marketing is respectful of the fact that purchases are largely symbolic these days, a form of signaling our values and beliefs to others around us. Thus, Purpose creates added value to the consumers’ perceptions. However, Higher Purpose is also part of this emotion-driven eco-system that informs how people behave and take action.

“Science now proves what brand

strategists have always sensed. We

human beings have a need to believe in

and act upon something that’s greater than

ourselves… Let’s realize the significance

of this discovery and impress upon

everyone that a brand is a belief system.

Want greater rewards? Then impart your

brand with deeper meaning…” – Emergent

Give consumers something they can believe in – advocate for – that reflects their values and beliefs. This is how you create a community of ambassadors who will spread the good word about your brand and business. Transactional relationships between brands and users are a thing of the past. Your brand value proposition should extend beyond the product itself. It also fits snugly with our understanding of how to communicate successfully to System 1.

If you have more questions about how this revelation might impact your go-to-market plans, use this link to start an informal conversation.

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