Considerations As You Enter Planning

Recently on an episode of “Master Chef,” a home-cook contestant became emotional when presenting his dish to rave reviews. With tears welling in his eyes, he shared the backstory…his cultural heritage which influenced the flavors; the technique learned from family struggling to stretch their food dollar; the pride (and frankly, relief) of successfully honoring his family and the ingredients by coalescing all of those experiences into his dish — all on a plate, for others to enjoy — to be shared.

Celebrity chef and judge Aarón Sánchez comforted the 20-something contestant saying knowingly, “Food is very intimate.”

Intimate.

Yes, the sharing of something very personal; meaningful; even emotional.

As food marketers, many of us get sucked into the vortex of textbook “product” features and benefit-selling forgetting, or consciously rebuffing, the most important consumer insight of all. Just like our young Master Chef cook, people care deeply about food.

Understanding this powerful relationship between food and cook has moved beyond the anecdotal. Tapping into our purchasers’ emotions is no longer just one of the tactical options in the Creatives’ bag of tricks. It’s actually a new way of managing your brand and going to market.

Marketing — We’ve Been Doing It Wrong!

Most important for today’s brand managers and marketers is understanding our “consumer targets” are, first and foremost, people: who are feeling creatures that think — not thinking creatures that feel.

We’ve known tapping into emotion is an important and powerful persuasive force in brand communication. Now we know why — because it connects most readily to the sub-conscious where decision-making occurs in the blink of the eye — and with the deepest conviction of one’s own “gut feeling.”

So, if most decisions and actions are created by the sub-conscious part of the brain and in an instant, why do marketers continue to focus on analytical messaging that assumes people make considered, rational decisions? Any factual product features or benefit will be evaluated — in the end — against how the consumer feels about the brand or product.

After all, “the heart wants what the heart wants.”

It’s All About the Touch-Points

Understanding the dominant role emotion plays in decision making should have a profound impact on how we go to market — especially in the food business, which is intrinsically an emotion-rich category.

The marketing goal is to connect to what your brand and product means to your consumer and how it helps enable in their lives.

Culinary inspiration is often a great place to start because it immediately looks at food through the emotion-based lens of experience: the preparation and enjoyment of eating; and the social dynamics between people sharing time in the kitchen and around the table. For some, food might mean taking pride in being a good moms like our young contestant, honoring tradition by sharing the legacy of time-honored family recipes and techniques.

So, as you step into planning, ask yourself what are the intimate, personal and emotion-rich touchpoints connecting your consumers to your brand.

Here are some important questions to consider in planning:

1. Do we have insight into the consumer’s passions and concerns around their lifestyle and how the brand and product sits in service of their needs?
2. How can the brand be an enabler of their lifestyle desires?
3. What are the emotional links between the consumer’s self-interests and the brand?
4. How can the brand demonstrate it cares about the same values as our consumers?
5. How can we tap into the real feelings about the experience taking place around the product?

Understanding these key insights is how we at Emergent develop effective outcomes that are transformational for our clients.

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Consumer-centric strategy wins every time…

Wine is a unique business characterized by literally thousands of competing brands all packaged and presented similarly. Where marketing is often built around vineyard and winemaker stories, sprinkled with a dose of influencer reviews from a narrow cadre of respected bloggers, writers and wine-centric publishers. Unlike the beer world where some larger brands can afford to spend heavily on consumer pull, for the most part, wine is a trade push story built around trial in on-premise channels while courting volume sales in the off-premise (liquor stores, supermarkets and specialty).

Brand awareness and equity is just a completely different conversation in the wine category. Here, consumer reviews and experience are likely to be crucial to fueling word-of-mouth. In the super-premium end of the category, mainstream marketing tactics can often hurt more than help by diluting the perception of “discovery,” uniqueness and artistry.

That said the wine business is also rich in storytelling material around terroir, viticulture and oenology. Yet despite the differences in such distinctions as soil condition, microclimates and the styles of winemaking, a pervasive “sameness” exists in the presentation of brands at retail.

In the end, wine leans into a very self-reverential form of communication. We have a saying here at Emergent: the brand that gets closest to the consumer wins. If you work backwards from that premise with wine, it doesn’t take long to see the storytelling value of drawing upon consumer experience and context with these brands.

Most often, that setting is about the marriage of wine and food.

Early in my agency career, I had the honor and privilege of representing Chateau Ste. Michelle winery at the time, a boutique vintner of premium wines in what was an emerging industry in Washington State.

Baptism by wine…

For a home chef like me, working with Chateau Ste. Michelle winery was a dream assignment – an opportunity for an immersive education about wine making from the masters of this unique artisanal industry. Initially, our focus was on telling the Washington Wine Story. The wine-growing region of Washington State roughly parallels the latitude of the winemaking areas in Bordeaux, France – so we worked to draw similarities in climate and soil conditions that would favor the creation of exceptional wines, especially their Cabernet Sauvignon.

It was a form of flag wave in a business preoccupied with Napa Valley notoriety.

Then something extraordinary happened that provided a real-world lesson in consumer relevance driving business outcomes.

Ste. Michelle’s owner, the U.S. Tobacco Company, decided to grace its small winery operation with a unique and unexpected parent-company “gift.” Ste. Michelle was to become one of nine title sponsors of the Statue of Liberty Restoration, an enormous public/private partnership enlisting some of the world’s largest corporations as primary contributors.

The question came in from the management team at Ste. Michelle, what are we to do with the Statue of Liberty Restoration sponsorship among all of these Fortune 100 companies? These are organizations with deep pockets to spend leveraging the connection! How would this be made viable for the wine business? Was there any path that would net a benefit to the winery and come at an affordable cost?

The outcome of a considerable team planning effort was a unique and innovative idea to produce a cookbook based on the immigrant experience and the cuisines they brought to this country from other lands. Wine and food is already married. A culinary approach would be consistent with the brand’s imagery and resonate with the consumer’s experience.

We started to build on the concept – the cookbook could be made available free for a donation to the Statue of Liberty fund. It could be purposed as a store level promotional incentive for wine buyers to take the brand, along with displays promoting the book offer. We could use the book launch as an innovative platform for media outreach.

Chateau Ste. Michelle – “Tastes of Liberty”

To this day, I am still struck by the courage and tenacity of Ste. Michelle’s management team led by then president Allen Shoup and chief winemaker, Bob Betz. The cookbook was to be done first-class in keeping with Ste. Michelle’s premium image – so a commitment was made to coffee table quality. The risks were palpable given the book would be offered free for a $25 donation to the Restoration Fund.

“Tastes of Liberty” literally swam in gorgeous, emotion-generating food photography and began with a very human anthology of the immigrant experience at Ellis Island. While wine pairings were present, every effort was made to assure the book would not be just a brand advertisement. It was to be editorial and faithful to culinary inspiration from cover to cover.

Wine buyers loved the unique idea and execution. They were astounded at the value of the ‘free-with-donation’ offer. Equally so, editorial media were awestruck at the quality of the recipes and the way it was presented. One magazine did a six-page, center-spread story on it. It was a successful venture in many ways and the risks Ste. Michelle took were amply rewarded as the brand secured national distribution.

While a case study example of integrated execution, the light bulb moment here is wine and food’s relevance to people and to their experience with the product. Culinary wasn’t in the background, it was a primary agenda with great care taken to assure the taste experiences matched well with characteristics of each varietal.

Yet today, so many wine brands only nod to food with a recipe tab at their web site. Going deep into culinary unleashes the magic of what happens when consumer experience and brand are aligned.

Yes you can (and should) talk about your soil, your French oak barreling, but taste done within the marriage of wine and food elevates this experience to the dinner table. And to a place consumers respect and recognize emotionally.

In the end, “Tastes of Liberty” was a storybook effort by a team of collaborating players on both agency and client sides. And evidence, once again, of what can happen when imagination, consumer insight and strategy coalesce.

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Part 2: Reimagining Food and Beverage in America

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

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I’m a consumer brand-building specialist with a long history in food, beverage, lifestyle and home-related categories. Your early days indeed inform your future. Here’s mine:

Respect for the power and importance of brand building has been at the core of my professional life even before I started in the agency business with Ogilvy & Mather. Coming out of school, I found an interesting post as head of public relations for a unique political arm of county government in the Seattle area. King County Executive John Spellman established an “Office of Agriculture” as part of his public policy agenda – the preservation of rapidly disappearing urban agriculture. It was called The Farmlands Proposition. My role was to handle communications strategy and press relations.

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