2021 will launch more innovation at one time than we’ve seen in a while. Here’s how to prepare your brand for the competition.
By switching to a brand-driven innovation strategy, better-for-you brand owners are future-proofing their business and retooling for growth.
Download this white paper to learn how to:
Understand where you are in the Brand Life Cycle.
Capitalize on the innovation boom in food and beverage.
Prioritize consumer-facing communication to increase brand relevance for your best-performing products.
Identify two types of innovation and decide what makes sense for your brand.
Get this exclusive report brought to you by Retail Voodoo, the branding firm who has helped Essentia, KIND, Russell Stover, Sahale Snacks, HighKey, and Starbucks build brand-driven strategies that create meaningful, sustained growth.
David Lemley
David was two decades into a design career with a wall full of shiny awards and a portfolio of clients including Nordstrom, Starbucks, Nintendo, and REI. His rocket trajectory veered when his oldest child faced a health challenge of indeterminate origin. Hundreds of research hours later, David identified food allergy as the issue and convinced skeptical medical professionals caring for his child. Since that experience, David and Retail Voodoo have been on a mission to create a cleaner, healthier, more sustainable food system for all.
This week on the Gooder Podcast I had the pleasure of talking with Perteet Spencer, the co-founder of AYO Foods. Using her spidy SPINS senses and her desire to create a brand that celebrates the ingredients, flavors, and culture of the West African diaspora, Perteet takes us on her journey of transition and joy. Along the way we learn how her Liberian upbringing and heritage inspires her new venture and how this cultural view naturally embraces a more inclusive food production system.
In this episode we learn:
A little background about her brand AYO Foods.
Why Perteet thinks North American consumers are ready for African flavors, textures, and ingredients.
What food trends shape AYO Foods innovation.
Why she thinks Chicago has become THE place to watch for food innovation.
How to use data as an indicator, and not simply validation, to uncover new innovation platforms and opportunities.
Pereet’s thoughts on how to shrink pre-production food waste through product and manufacturing innovation.
When Blue Ocean, the Joy of Food and Food Waste Collide featuring Perteet Spencer, AYO Foods
About Pereet Spencer:
Perteet is thrilled to be able to bring all of her passions into her role as co-founder of AYO Foods. Seeking to build a more inclusive food system that reflected her experience growing up in a Liberian family, Perteet launched AYO with her husband Fred last summer with the vision of creating a platform brand that celebrated the ingredients, flavors, and culture of the West African diaspora.
Prior launching AYO, Perteet held brand, sales, and consulting leadership roles at LEGO, General Mills, and SPINS.
When she’s not actively working on AYO, you can usually find Perteet spending time in the kitchen with her two girls or advancing the issues of food equity through her involvement in the Food Recovery Network, a non-profit focused on eliminating food insecurity through food waste recovery.
Moonboi Project – In Kpelle, “Moonboi” means prosperity. At AYO Foods, we believe that we have a personal responsibility to enrich the communities that inspired our products.
General Mills, Inc. – is an American multinational manufacturer and marketer of branded consumer foods sold through retail stores. It is headquartered in Golden Valley, Minnesota, a suburb of Minneapolis.
SPINS – transforms trillions of retailer data into performance solutions to accelerate growth, and deepen loyalty with shoppers.
Food Recovery Network – a nonprofit focused on eliminating food insecurity through food waste recovery.
Whole Foods Market, Inc. – is an American multinational supermarket chain headquartered in Austin, Texas, which sells products free from hydrogenated fats and artificial colors, flavors, and preservatives. A USDA Certified Organic grocer in the United States, the chain is popularly known for its organic selections.
Girl Power Africa – an organization that was founded a few years back, really in service of women who were victims of civil war and are trying to get back on their feet in Liberia.
Imperfect Foods – Shop affordable groceries and exclusive items that went from unwanted to wish for. Reducing food and retail product waste, one household at a time.
PepsiCo – is an American multinational food, snack, and beverage corporation headquartered in Harrison, New York, in the hamlet of Purchase. PepsiCo has interests in the manufacturing, marketing, and distribution of grain-based snack foods, beverages, and other products.
Betty Crocker – is a brand and fictional character used in advertising campaigns for food and recipes. The character was originally created by the Washburn-Crosby Company in 1921 following a contest in the Saturday Evening Post.
Lego – is a Danish toy production company based in Billund. It is best known for the manufacture of Lego-brand toys, consisting mostly of interlocking plastic bricks. The Lego Group has also built several amusement parks around the world, each known as Legoland, and operates numerous retail stores.
Diana Fryc
For Diana, a fierce determination to pursue what’s right is rooted in her DNA. The daughter of parents who endured unimaginable hardship before emigrating from Eastern Europe to the U.S., she is built for a higher purpose. Starting with an experience working with Jane Goodall to source sustainably made paper, she went on to a career helping Corporate America normalize the use of environmentally responsible products and materials before coming to Retail Voodoo.
Generation X: What a boring title for a group that ushered in the use of cell phones, home video games, microwaves, and cable TV. Gen X is that “old generation” now, creeping up into their 50’s, and uncool (clearly) to the younger generations. And in many marketers’ eyes, Gen X is even less relevant. In fact, most marketers do not even target this age group any longer. Our youth-obsessed culture is overlooking one of the most obvious targets.
Well, I’m here to say, we’re going to change that right now.
I’ll be honest, when I first started researching this article, I was pretty darn sure I was going to be searching for days to find data that supported Generation X’s spending muscle. How surprised I was when data point after data point surfaced, disproving my hypothesis. In fact, most research I found states that (at least for now) Generation X has the greatest spending power of all other generations – generating 31 percent of all U.S. income with only 25 percent of the population.
Generation X is a group of big spending tech fiends who were taught to break the rules.
Picture this: my friend’s basement in 1981, MTV comes on the air, blows our minds seeing artists transform music over the airways, and creates a visually-obsessed culture that legitimizes cable television as a new marketing platform.
The 1980s helped shape Generation X into people who are comfortable pushing boundaries, quick at adapting to innovation, and willing to spend their money to get the goods. Yes, Generation X spends more than any other generation. Home-based video games, MTV, cable TV, and microwaves brought a new definition of easy family living and entertainment, as well as access to lifestyles many had never seen before. Keeping up with the Joneses went up a level. We had a whole world of things we could buy.
Technology: While not digital native, innovation and technology became keys to their life (think cell phones, email, and personal computers).
Cultural revolution: More women going back to work meant women had power and money. We saw families on TV with moms that worked high-paying jobs as the new normal. Claire Huxtable (The Cosby Show), Maggie Seaver (Growing Pains), and Angela Bower (Who’s the Boss) were different moms than we had seen before. Characters like an African American lawyer and a single mom advertising executive with a male nanny created a generation of people comfortable pushing boundaries and cultural norms.
Independence: An increase in single and working moms created a new, more independent youth.
Hope: As the first generation unrestricted by the cultural norms of the past, they believed they could have it all; and subsequently came crashing back to earth wondering about work-life balance and wellness.
Rebellion: Stuck between two large egocentric generations, Gen X revolted by creating grunge rock and popularizing dystopian novels like Shampoo Planet, by Douglas Copeland.
Materialism: A strong relationship with materialism meant Gen X was hit hardest by the Great Recession of 2008.
Career length: Despite the fact that Gen X currently holds a significant percentage of high-level jobs, the Great Recession, appetite for spending, and longer life expectancy means they need to remain in the work force longer to pay off mortgages, their children’s tuition, and save for retirement.
Age: America is a youth-obsessed culture and Gen X is no longer the youth.
What marketing trends does Gen X influence?
Better-for-you and wellness: While Millennials rank evenly with Generation X in their love of mission-driven brands, Gen X-ers spend significantly more on today’s do-gooder brands. Thus, making organic, ethically produced, and sustainable products a viable marketplace for everyone.
Email marketing: As the first group that opted out of print catalogues, email marketing became the norm.
Convenience: Online shopping’s confluence with social media: They are busier than heck – leading their companies, running kids around, and trying to stay healthy. Online shopping, social media, and on-demand services (such as streaming services like Netflix and meal-kit delivery systems like Blue Apron) are ever-popular with this generation.
How does all of this affect marketing to Gen X?
They are skeptical: They learned the hard way. These folks have been through two impeachments. They gave the world grunge music and modern marketing. They are today’s power brokers and executives. They don’t fool easy. They give trust to those who earn it. This is the generation who will research your brand in detail before committing to parting with their money. So, don’t try to win them over with glitz. Show them your true colors and they’ll respond. Gen X has a history of loyalty when it comes to authentic, transparent brands.
They are currently the parental generation: The youngest Gen X-er is just now entering into parenthood and the oldest have begun shipping their kids off to college. Almost every sale to a child is a sale to a Gen X-er too. If you’re targeting kids, you’re targeting their parents too.
They are premium focused: As professionals and parents with hard-earned money to burn, Gen X-ers put a premium on quality. They want to know that a brand is reliable, that a product is hardy, and that media is sophisticated.
Generation X is a true hybrid when it comes to marketing. As a brand owner, you are playing the long game. Simply put, ignoring this generation puts your bottom line at risk for the foreseeable future.
Diana Fryc
For Diana, a fierce determination to pursue what’s right is rooted in her DNA. The daughter of parents who endured unimaginable hardship before emigrating from Eastern Europe to the U.S., she is built for a higher purpose. Starting with an experience working with Jane Goodall to source sustainably made paper, she went on to a career helping Corporate America normalize the use of environmentally responsible products and materials before coming to Retail Voodoo.
Our experience with clients has shown us that when it comes to consumer data, there are two camps. Some organizations can’t make the simplest decision without tons of research to back it up; some disregard research entirely and go with gut instinct.
Of course, the reality is that Beloved & Dominant naturals brands make the best decisions with the right combination of data and “feels.” Research without analysis is just a bunch of statistics. And decisions without data are just guesses.
To use research properly—whether it’s a Usage & Attitude study, trend research, syndicated retail sales data (SPINS), or focus groups—you need to overlay the findings with your brand’s mission and vision. Analyze the data through your brand lens—that’s where you’ll find actionable, “decisionable” insight to guide everything from channel expansion to product development to messaging.
When to Lean into Consumer Data
One of the greatest decision-making vulnerabilities in our naturals category is our collective tendency to assume that our consumers are just like us. Especially in brands led by a creative founder who innovated a special product and grew a business around it, leadership believes that the brand’s tribe consists of like-minded and like-lived fans. Practically speaking, consumer insight can be a daily reality check against our biases.
Brands often don’t seek insight without a pain point. When one of these challenges starts to emerge or there’s a pattern, you should seek it out:
You’re not getting the velocity you predicted, want, or used to have.
You’re losing ground to competitors that are more trend aware and innovative.
Retail partners are less enthusiastic about your offering and are shelving your products less prominently.
Store brands are eroding your traction.
You’re seeking to widen your audience beyond the consumers you currently serve.
Major disruptions like the current pandemic are also ideal times to procure consumer insight. For example, The Hartman Group is publishing research on how Covid-19 is affecting grocery shopping habits.
What Data Can Tell You—and Can’t
Generally, we don’t conduct focus groups with our clients. There’s a time and place for them, but they’re not relevant for developing the big brand strategy that we work on. Focus groups and other primary consumer research yield a small sample size of opinions that can help you make tactical moves like line extension or packaging design messaging hierarchy:
the general look and feel (e.g., I like that photo, logotype, colorway)
I would tell my friends about this product
I may prefer vanilla vs. chocolate
the benefits claims would influence my decision to buy the product
Consumer feedback and syndicated data can’t offer wisdom about how people connect with your brand on a deeper level:
how your brand fits into their lives in a cultural context
how they behave when your product is one of many in a consideration set
where they would expect to see your brand
what is the best sequence for your innovation pipeline and channel strategy
When you’re developing a brand strategy, it’s essential to bring intuition and expertise to shopper research; often, that takes outside consultation. You can ask consumers all the questions you want, but they can’t do the critical thinking for you.
How to Manage Data
If you’re a data-driven organization, your opportunity is not to gather more, but to organize and rationalize what you have so it’s useful. Often, brand teams have so much information that they’re paralyzed. To better manage existing consumer research:
Get it organized. Take inventory of the consumer data you have, and in what format it exists. Identify key performance indicators (KPIs) for your business and see if your IT team can build a dashboard that aggregates multiple reports.
Keep it current. As we like to say, data is like in-laws and fish—really good fresh, not so much after a week. Consumer research generally has a 12-month shelf life before it becomes outdated. If you’re relying on three-year-old data to make decisions, you’re immediately behind the curve.
Spread it around. Your sales team has data, your marketing team has data, your retail partners have data. Share it across the organization and take key decisions out of business silos.
Consumer Data Plus Brand Insight
Beloved & Dominant naturals brands combine information with insight to make the right decisions. It takes overlaying the brand mission and vision to create analysis in order to inform those “gut” decisions. Without the strategy, the understanding of the consumers, the point of view—you can’t prioritize options and make decisions.
Research alone is just a set of numbers; its power emerges when you gain clusters of nuance within the data that takes a strategist and marketing team to translate and respond to. Ignoring data would be foolish—but to know what to do with it, that’s the magic.
Think of those “hidden picture” games you had as a kid, where you’d have to lay a sheet of red acetate over the page to see the full image. Analysis—ideally from an outside advisor with tons of expertise and zero bias—is the red acetate that reveals your brand’s path. If you are ready for that external eye – or maybe just thinking about it – drop us a line and let’s talk.
David Lemley
David was two decades into a design career with a wall full of shiny awards and a portfolio of clients including Nordstrom, Starbucks, Nintendo, and REI. His rocket trajectory veered when his oldest child faced a health challenge of indeterminate origin. Hundreds of research hours later, David identified food allergy as the issue and convinced skeptical medical professionals caring for his child. Since that experience, David and Retail Voodoo have been on a mission to create a cleaner, healthier, more sustainable food system for all.
In this episode of Gooder I had the privilege of interviewing Natalie Shmulik, CEO of The Hatchery, a food incubator just outside downtown Chicago. The Hatchery is a powerful initiative that brings a community of innovators along the entrepreneurial path and launches the dreams of owning and running a business to communities that have not traditionally had this access. We learn about the resources The Hatchery provides and how we as a community can provide our expertise, in big and small ways. And why Natalie believes in the power of community.
“Whenever speaking with an entrepreneur, you should always make sure that if you are going to provide feedback or input or a suggestion, that you coach them to believe that the idea was their own.”
In this episode we learn:
* The genesis of The Hatchery and why it is fast becoming a beloved innovation partner to the food and beverage industry. * The common challenges of budding and small entrepreneurial food and beverage brands. * Why exciting innovation comes from under-represented entrepreneurial brands. * About the symbiotic co-learning traditional CPG’s and entrepreneurial brands share in their journey with The Hatchery. * How coach-ability is a make-or-break trait for leaders and how to vet for coach-ability in your recruiting process. * How to become a Hatchery brand or partner. * About Natalie’s trend forecasting super-powers and how it supports The Hatchery’s entrepreneurs.
Food and Beverage Innovation, Begins and Ends with People featuring Natalie Shmulik, The Hatchery
About Natalie Shmulik:
Natalie Shmulik is The Hatchery’s CEO, and go-to resource for everything food business related. Along with an M.L.A. in Gastronomy from Boston University, she has a wide range of experience working with supermarkets, culinary publications, consumer packaged goods companies, and food service establishments. After successfully operating her own restaurant, Natalie was hired as a specialty consultant for one of Ontario’s largest supermarket chains where she enhanced consumer experiences through educational initiatives. Discovering her passion for innovation, Natalie was brought on as a brand strategist for the first cold brew tea company and later moved to Chicago to run The Hatchery Chicago.
With over six years of food incubation experience, Natalie has gained a unique perspective on the industry and what it takes to launch and grow a successful business. Natalie is a regular contributor to Food Business News, was recently featured in the Chicago Tribune’s 10 Business People to Watch in 2020 and received the Specialty Food Association’s award for leadership in vision. She continues to play a valuable role in branding and marketing for food businesses around the country, with her specialty in trend forecasting.
The Hatchery: A non-profit food and beverage incubator dedicated to helping local entrepreneurs build & grow successful businesses.
ICNC: Industria Council of Nearwest Chicago offers entrepreneurs an innovative community to grow small businesses through incubation, workforce development, neighborhood planning, and business advising.
ACCION: A nonprofit microlender providing small businesses with loans at an early stage, particularly to support those that aren’t bankable yet.
Diana Fryc
For Diana, a fierce determination to pursue what’s right is rooted in her DNA. The daughter of parents who endured unimaginable hardship before emigrating from Eastern Europe to the U.S., she is built for a higher purpose. Starting with an experience working with Jane Goodall to source sustainably made paper, she went on to a career helping Corporate America normalize the use of environmentally responsible products and materials before coming to Retail Voodoo.
Every demographic group has faced its own set of challenges during the COVID-19 crisis, from health concerns to economic hardship to personal stress. But experts suggest that millennials have been hit especially hard.
So what you think you know about this demographic group—and how to reach them—may have changed in this unprecedented time.
First, let’s do a quick review of the generational breakdowns:
Gen X (born between 1965 and 1980) are the children of the Baby Boomers; the U.S. Census Bureau estimated that Gen X would peak in population in 2018 with 65.8 million people. The youngest Xers are 40 this year.
Millennials (born from 1981–1996) are now the largest adult population in the U.S. They range in age between 24 and 39.
Gen Z (born from 1997–2015) ranges in age from 6 to 23; as of 2019, there were 67 million Zers in the U.S.
The Paradox of Millennials
The millennial generation has been heralded by marketers for its spending power. This cohort’s collective annual income is estimated to exceed $4 trillion worldwide by 2030. But these 20- and 30-somethings have always been a tricky bunch to market to, because they’re a giant walking paradox.
They consider themselves to be tastemakers, but they’re extremely price-conscious.
They want the finer things, but they’re putting off major purchases like cars and homes (preferring instead to lease or rent).
They’re interested in health and wellness, and are heavy consumers of natural food and beverage products, yet they’re more concerned about the results of those products than the products themselves. In other words, they’re willing to accept artificial sweeteners in pursuit of a keto lifestyle.
They want brands to uphold values they share, but they’re not willing to sacrifice convenience and price.
Just 30% say they feel loyal to certain brands, but that loyalty tends to be longstanding and powerful. We describe their loyalty as a slow burn—they fall in love with brands gradually over time; in the meantime, they’re willing to “date around” and try out other brands and products.
Millennials are Getting ‘Walloped’ by the Pandemic
Financial analysts and demographers suggest that millennials are being “disproportionally walloped” by the COVID crisis and its fallout, particularly related to employment.
“With this current recession, millennials — especially younger millennials — were more likely to lose their job than were older generations. And since millennials are more likely to rent than older generations, the looming eviction crisis will be worse for millennials, too.”
“The oldest millennials lived through the 9/11 terrorist attacks and entered the labor market in the recession that hit around the same time. They spent their early years struggling to find work during a job recovery, only to be hit by the Great Recession and another recovery. And, of course, yet another recession.”
Furthermore, millennials (particularly women) are assuming responsibility for managing school at home for their children. And they’re more likely than other generations to be returning to their parents’ home to live during the pandemic.
Is Your Pre-COVID Understanding of Millennials Still Relevant?
The short answer is, probably not.
Certain influential aspects of their buying behavior remain: They’re the first digitally native generation, so they’ve always been comfortable browsing and buying online. That preference has solidified during the crisis. And their desire for curated, personalized products and experiences hasn’t changed.
The key to increasing (or maintaining) your brand’s relevance with millennials in the new normal is this: Don’t go back to business as usual. This is the time to understand some new truths.
Millennials want brands to be more human—but still highly curated and well designed. (There’s that paradox again.) In other words, they want brands to reflect their own reality: put together on the outside, but also honest, real, and authentic.
As they’re tightening their belts, millennials are becoming even more price sensitive, even as pre-COVID research indicated that they were cost-conscious to begin with. They’re more inclined to buy private label products than before. And they have become more likely to join a loyalty program or use coupons (a 30% jump compared to pre-COVID habits). Previously, millennials shunned those discount programs because they were something their parents did. Now is absolutely the time to review your pricing, promotion, and loyalty strategies to respond to these changing consumer needs.
And if we combine the previous two points—outward appearances and value consciousness—we get a third change in millennial shopping habits. They’re still willing to pay a premium for technology, fashion, and CPG items that they believe help them to look or feel better even in these trying times. And they are cutting corners where they can on the stuff that nobody really sees—like pouring low-shelf booze into the empty bottle of premium vodka or wearing a designer shirt with sweatpants for a Zoom meeting.
As COVID has driven shopping online, it has forced brands to get savvier about delivering a great online experience to consumers. Millennials always had high expectations, and now that we’ve all been exclusively buying online for the past 8 months, the bar has been raised.
Brands must figure out how to reach all consumers—and especially to overdeliver for millennials. COVID has added friction to everything they do in their lives, from fitness and fashion to friends and family. Millennial women in particular are bearing the brunt of managing education for younger kids and sacrificing their productivity or career or self-care in order to keep the family solvent. The key to wooing them and winning that valuable long-term loyalty is to reduce the friction. Make it easy for them to find, choose, and learn to love you.
Your brand can’t afford to overlook or miscommunicate with this cohort, because the efforts you make now have a long tail with millennials. Let’s talk about how you can connect with them.
David Lemley
David was two decades into a design career with a wall full of shiny awards and a portfolio of clients including Nordstrom, Starbucks, Nintendo, and REI. His rocket trajectory veered when his oldest child faced a health challenge of indeterminate origin. Hundreds of research hours later, David identified food allergy as the issue and convinced skeptical medical professionals caring for his child. Since that experience, David and Retail Voodoo have been on a mission to create a cleaner, healthier, more sustainable food system for all.
We’ve been percolating on this topic for several weeks now, and we’re guessing that you have, as well. The Black Lives Matter movement is impossible to ignore, and it has raised persistent truths that are uncomfortable to reckon with.
One of those truths is this: Natural food, beverage, and wellness brands — mission-driven brands with aims to improve people and planet — are doing a lousy job serving customers of color.
A recent virtual meeting on “The State and Future of Natural & Organic” presented by New Hope Network and WhipStitch Capital brought to light several trends that have developed in light of the COVID-19 pandemic. But what caught our eye was two slides citing a bigger, longer-term issue plaguing our category. Slide 40 in the leave-behind deck reads, “We are currently missing the opportunity to serve more diverse consumers,” followed by a subtitle that reads, “Natural and organic consumers are mostly white.”
And the next slide points out the foundational problem: “This is a reflection of our current industry leadership.”
In other words, the natural and organic audience is mostly white not because there are no Black, Indigenous, or people of color out there to buy our products. It’s white because that’s how we market, not because there is no demand.
The lack of diversity in brand leadership has built up over time, and it won’t be resolved overnight. We’re not suggesting that hiring practices alone will pivot natural brands toward more diverse audiences. (Diversity is also a function of product innovation, distribution, pricing, marketing, and other business disciplines.) In fact, our goal with this article is to spark dialog about this issue, not to propose concrete tactics.
Why Natural Brands Aren’t Serving Consumers of Color
Let’s begin by talking about how this institutional bias affects the products we make and the ways in which we talk about our brands.
For naturals brands, marketing is about seeking their tribe: people who buy the product not just because it tastes good (its features and benefits) but because they believe in the mission. They feel the brand supports their lifestyle and self-identity. As brand leaders, though, we assume the tribe looks and thinks like us. That’s always a flaw, and especially so when we’re reaching out to consumers of color.
In the same vein, our industry’s definition of health is inherently white. We prize an aspirational level of fitness, we aim for a certain body type, we idealize Instagram-worthy dewy skin. But consumers of color don’t necessarily share that definition.
Working with actress and influencer Tia Mowry on her new You Are the Anser! brand of supplements was an important educational opportunity for us. Through extensive consumer research and deep-dives with Tia’s team, we gained insight into the community she was seeking to reach. For the Black woman, health and wellness mean that she feels confident and good about herself, not in comparison to others. She has a million other things to focus on in her life and doesn’t care about keeping up with white culture’s definition of fitness or wellness.
The University of San Diego School of Business researcher and associate marketing professor Aarti Ivanic, who studies racial differences and the impact on health and nutrition habits, puts it like this: “When looking at exercise habits, research shows that African Americans see working out in a gym as primarily a ‘white person’ activity. That’s why Michelle Obama’s ‘Let’s Move’ campaign was great, because she was a role model for minorities and exercise and healthy nutrition was now seen as accessible to everyone, including minorities.”
Better-for-you brands are highly attuned to solving their consumers’ problems. After all, many of these products were developed by a founder who set out to overcome a dietary challenge or meet a lifestyle need. But collectively, we are not actively looking to solve the needs of anyone of color who doesn’t subscribe to the aforementioned definition of “health.” We impose our needs without understanding others’.
What’s more, the naturals industry as a whole defines consumers based on who can afford their values — values that come from a place of privilege. That perspective overlooks a whole other group of consumers who need your organic and natural products that can help them live better lives. Marketers are not talking to them at all; not even looking at what they need (and we’re pretty sure it isn’t a $7 kombucha).
As brand marketers begin to reach out to nonwhite audiences, there’s an initial tendency to be “colorblind.” That’s safe and allows us to feel good about checking boxes. But in fact, all people want to be seen and honored as complex individuals with a culture that makes them special. To deny color because you’re trying not to be racist is a way of perpetuating the bias. A willingness to see and respect color is the first step in creating a community that’s racially diverse.
Greater Diversity Comes through Baby Steps
So how do we begin to reimagine the audiences for our brands?
Here’s what gives us hope: Better-for-you brands are hard-wired to serve. We’re really good at articulating a higher calling and innovating products that improve lives. We’re determined to make the world a better place. We’re also great at educating consumers about how they can be their best selves and why that matters.
When we worked with Tia, her mantra for her customer was, “We see you.” People of color don’t feel seen or spoken to. We’re not even giving them a chance to connect with our brands.
Can we start to observe and understand what a more diverse group of fans might want from our brands? Can we reach out and listen? Can we find greater ways to serve?
It starts from within: The only way to have visibility is to have marketers and innovators in top positions who are people of color, to establish mentoring programs within our companies and across the industry that elevate a new generation of nonwhite leaders.
And it will take hundreds of baby steps to make lasting changes — not just in response to headlines. We have a saying around our office: “An oasis begins with a puddle in the desert, so start spitting!”
We’re ready to get to work. And we want to hear from you about efforts to serve a broader group of consumers. Let’s talk!
Diana Fryc
For Diana, a fierce determination to pursue what’s right is rooted in her DNA. The daughter of parents who endured unimaginable hardship before emigrating from Eastern Europe to the U.S., she is built for a higher purpose. Starting with an experience working with Jane Goodall to source sustainably made paper, she went on to a career helping Corporate America normalize the use of environmentally responsible products and materials before coming to Retail Voodoo.
In most marketer circles, it’s not sexy to talk about marketing to the Baby Boomer generation: they seem too old, stuck in their ways, out of step with modern ideas. Instead, brands chase millennials — the on-the-go tastemakers who are all over Instagram — and Gen Zers, whose world views align with mission-driven BFY brands.
Each of these cohorts has distinctive demographic and psychographic characteristics. And growing a brand with a Gen Z or Millennials is tough, as they tend to be price sensitive and fickle. So are you missing out by overlooking Boomers?
Why Brands Overlook Boomers
The “OK, Boomer” meme sparked by Gen Z to diss their elders might as well apply to marketers, too. Why do brands dismiss these consumers?
It’s human nature that we’re always looking for the new and next. In a business sense, marketers think they already understand all they need to know about the customers they’ve been talking to for years. And many companies mistakenly think that the path to growth moves beyond their current demographic into others.
In addition, millennials were just so difficult for marketers to figure out (in part because most of those marketers were likely Boomers themselves until fairly recently). Millennials are disillusioned and pessimistic: they came of age during an economic downturn and are overloaded in debt and technology. Marketers were initially taken aback by this cohort because they were so different, and it took so much research to understand them.
Here’s What Marketers Should Know About Boomers
Your brand may not be actively communicating with your existing Boomer audience, figuring you’ve already got them in the fold. Or you may not see them as a growth opportunity. Worse, your startup BFY brand may not be targeting them in any way, at all. We’d suggest that all of those strategies are misguided. Here’s what you need to know about this generation:
They’re not old. First, let’s remember who the Boomers are: Born between 1946 and 1964, the youngest of them are now in their mid to late 50s. They’re hardly old. The Greatest Generation was old at age 60; there’s a bias about Boomers—but they’re incredibly active, they’re big spenders, they’re traveling and going to the gym and even still working.
They’re the original “naturals.” Remember: Boomers launched the conscious consumerism movement in the 1950s and ’60s. At that time, teens and young adults were concerned about pesticides, animal welfare, and Big Ag. They read “Silent Spring” and started the first natural foods co-op stores. They embraced whole foods and vegetarianism. Their children, the millennials, took the movement mainstream. But if you’re a BFY brand, Boomers are your first-line audience.
Boomers are redefining aging. Nutritional supplements, expensive skincare products, gym memberships, cosmetic procedures — Boomers are embracing everything at their disposal to look, feel, and behave like their younger selves. Just as they did in the 1960s, Boomers are disrupting culture; this time, they’re disrupting age. They’re reinventing their lives so they can live another 30, 40, or 50 years on their own terms.
They are big spenders. Baby Boomers account for more than half of U.S. spending. They take between four and five leisure trips a year. They’re renovating the family home or furnishing new downsized condos. In addition to spending on health and wellness products, they’re big snackers — as empty-nesters or solos, they don’t prepare big dinners at home anymore and tend instead to snack heavily.
They value experiences. Boomers favor brands that deliver great experiences that align with their interests. And they’re willing to pay a premium for products that deliver.
Finally, Boomers behave like younger consumers do — more than you may think. The difference is that they’re not building the platform they’re going to live their life on; they’re looking to optimize the lives they’ve built. Boomers are influenced by the younger generations of their kids’ and grandkids’ age. They’ll bring home those products their kids and grandkids like, and then they’ll sample and adopt those products. Too, Boomers behave more like Gen Z on social media: They’re more plugged in because they have time, but their preference for personal interaction vs. digital mirrors Gen Z’s habits.
How to Market to Boomers
As with any demographic, you need to understand how to talk to and persuade Boomers. Here are some smart tactics:
Appeal to their caregiving nature — having raised kids, they’re still looking to nurture, whether it’s a pet or a relative or a neighbor. Brands can leverage the fact that Boomers are used to spending money on others.
Don’t call them old — Boomer consumers don’t want you to start talking to them like an older person, i.e., “Hey, Boomer, we know you need these comfy shoes …” While their Greatest Generation parents saw themselves as old at a relatively early age, Boomers don’t think of themselves that way. Speak to them honestly, but appeal to their sense of younger self and their appetite for staying forever young.
Play up the premium — Remove obstacles to a premium experience, even if you don’t have a premium brand. Take the friction out of the process of buying and using your product. They’ll remain loyal to brands that deliver the experience they expect.
Remember: Boomers aren’t going anywhere anytime soon. They represent 20 to 30 more years of sales for brands that can catch their attention and stroke their youthful egos. Does your brand need to take another look at your target audience? Let’s Chat.
David Lemley
David was two decades into a design career with a wall full of shiny awards and a portfolio of clients including Nordstrom, Starbucks, Nintendo, and REI. His rocket trajectory veered when his oldest child faced a health challenge of indeterminate origin. Hundreds of research hours later, David identified food allergy as the issue and convinced skeptical medical professionals caring for his child. Since that experience, David and Retail Voodoo have been on a mission to create a cleaner, healthier, more sustainable food system for all.
It’s the singular, make-or-break moment for a better-for-you brand: The consumer has browsed the category, scanned the shelf, and picked up your product. Now, will she buy?
Ascertaining whether she’s likely to buy — and if not, why not — is the essence of package testing for consumer goods. Package testing helps new brands form a visual presence in the retail environment and helps existing brands as they restage or line-extend. It helps marketers answer the question, “Is this package better — better than the old version, better than the competition, better than these 5 other variations we’re considering?”
But package testing is tricky. Often, it asks consumer panels to evaluate a box or bag not in the crowded retail space but rather in an idealized setting. And marketers tend to populate their test groups with people they know already like the product and are likely to buy anyway, regardless of which package winds up on the shelf. Run the test in the wrong way or ask the wrong people, and you’ll wind up with faulty results that don’t accurately predict future sales. And that’s a dumb way to spend marketing dollars.
Why You Should Test Your Package Design
Consumer package testing is about trying to create a quantifiable data point that shows increased purchase intent. And that’s it. Don’t try to extrapolate any further than that.
Consumer testing is hot among BFY brand marketers because the landscape is so competitive — more and more organizations want confirmation of a new package design before going to print. It’s a smart piece of due diligence for of any rebrand or packaging refresh. It’s also important if you want to go to your retail partner or investor or distributor to talk about a new product — you can back your pitch with data that demonstrates that consumers are likely to buy.
How to Run Package Design Tests the Right Way
Consumer testing brings value to the design process, provided you run it the right way. Here are five things to know as you engage a testing partner to evaluate new package designs:
It’s about content more than design. Design is so subjective, and consumers will have a hard time judging the difference between text in different point sizes and logos in slightly different shades of blue. Instead, focus your querying on messaging. Use consumer testing to validate which front of pack messaging (within your packaging architecture) will create the highest purchase intent. What product attributes, features, and claims resonate, and what words should you use to communicate them?
It’s about the package, not the product. Consumer package testing won’t tell you whether people like your strawberry flavor better than vanilla, or whether they’ll embrace your new peanut butter version. It won’t, frankly, tell you much about whether they like the product. It’s about how they respond to what they see on the label or box.
It’s important to ask the right questions. It’s happened to us more often than we’d like to think: A client takes a package we’ve developed to testing, and focuses on the wrong issues. Make sure that the same keywords you use in your consumer testing are the same ones you have in your design brief. When the testing company designs the test without the input or feedback from the design team, they risk querying on keywords that don’t sync with the brand’s positioning and strategy. Even the most effective packaging system can “lose” a consumer test if the test asks the wrong questions.
You have to know what to study. And when you don’t get all stakeholders on the same page regarding the language used to develop the questions and criteria, you’ll spend a lot of time and money to generate flawed results. So make sure your testing criteria map to the brand strategy.
It’s a function of the test group. When gathering consumers for your panel, make sure you have the right balance of:
current loyal fans
fans of your competitors’ products
people who currently don’t purchase your offering but might if the messaging and value proposition were compelling enough
It’s essential to look at packaging in context. One of our clients had conducted consumer testing on previous packaging and got a positive review. But we discovered that the testing process involved having consumers look at digital images of the package on a white background on a computer screen. And that’s hardly an actionable study because you don’t get a realistic competitive set or a realistic view of the retail environment. Make sure your research partner places the package in context, whether a virtual scene or in a room with a live shelf set.
Even the best tools for gathering marketing insights can yield fragmented and incomplete data if they’re deployed incorrectly. And a packaging system is too big an investment to hang on data you can’t trust. Consumer package testing’s true role is as insurance — an important part of the design process that ensures that the package wins that 3-foot battle in the grocery aisle.
If a new packaging system is on your radar, we’d love to partner with you. Drop us a line.
David Lemley
David was two decades into a design career with a wall full of shiny awards and a portfolio of clients including Nordstrom, Starbucks, Nintendo, and REI. His rocket trajectory veered when his oldest child faced a health challenge of indeterminate origin. Hundreds of research hours later, David identified food allergy as the issue and convinced skeptical medical professionals caring for his child. Since that experience, David and Retail Voodoo have been on a mission to create a cleaner, healthier, more sustainable food system for all.
While some people use astrology and tea leaves to predict the future, we prefer to employ a more reliable method: trend analysis.
Trend analysis gets you out of your own mindset, your conference room, and your current market landscape to anticipate what your future audience—and their needs and desires—might look like.
While it’s a necessary tool in many categories, it’s especially so in better-for-you food and beverages, where new products are constantly coming to shelf. Eating and diet habits are so susceptible to social influence that consumer preferences for food and beverage products shift with the breeze. One moment we’re all about the protein; the next we’ll be all about the carbs.
A trend analysis is important for repositioning a brand in a competitive space. It offers leadership a glimpse into the cultural zeitgeist occurring beyond their bubble.
There’s a huge difference between following trends, a short-term strategy, and analyzing them, looking deep into the future to align your product innovations with your future audience and their needs. Analysis enables you to make investments today that will deliver sales two, five, even 10 years down the road.
What a Trend Analysis Looks Like for Food & Beverage Brands
A trend analysis is like a unicorn: Everyone thinks they’ve seen one. Here’s our foundational definition:
A competitive market audit plus myriad syndicated consumer data, analyzed through the brand’s lens, and pointed toward solving a specific business problem.
There are three key components here: reliable consumer and market research, the brand (meaning, your purpose beyond making and selling product), and your business goals.
Furthermore, a trend analysis:
Starts with the category, not the brand.
Before we undertake a trend analysis, we do a category audit; it’s the kindling that sparks the campfire we’re roasting marshmallows on. This review covers your entire competitive set and your space in it. We look at how your brand is marketed from top to bottom and channel to channel, and then we benchmark that against your competition. This helps us identify holes in the marketplace, both now and many months from now.
Identifies megatrends that will affect your business over the long term.
When we conduct a trend analysis for a client, we seek out the megatrends on the horizon that will influence the future audience for the brand. These megatrends aren’t just constantly shifting consumer preferences for product attributes like flavor and ingredient, but rather deep-seated issues that affect how modern humans behave in their super busy lives.
Future-gazes through your brand lens.
Once we’ve collected information from a bunch of different sources about your customers and your marketing efforts, and we understand what competitors are doing and what demographic shifts are at play, we filter this input through your brand. That’s where the analysis happens. And through that lens is a look at future. But without a strong, well-articulated brand promise, that view is hazy, a guess. Your brand provides the clarity.
Paints a picture of your next audience of loyal customers.
We start with what the data tells us about your current customer, then envision how these megatrends will influence them. We build a straw man — a hypothetical, representative consumer persona—that allows the brand team to see into the future. You can then innovate with that customer squarely in mind.
Answers bigger questions than product iterations.
You can use near-term trends to make near-term decisions like flavor extensions or formula upgrades. But forward-looking analysis can guide you through the entire decision making process to identify what business the brand should be in. Where should you invest, or not, in product pipeline? What business are you currently in that should you exit? What product offerings create opportunity for us?
Requires expertise.
Anyone can buy a trend report. But the insights, the slicing and dicing and passing it through your brand promise to build a new audience of loyal customers—that requires expertise.
Yes, you could do it internally. But we wouldn’t recommend it; it’s like a dentist can’t fill her own cavity. An objective, solution-agnostic, research-driven partner is essential to create meaningful insights.
Trend Analysis: A Case Study
How can a trend analysis reshape a brand’s business? Our client Russell Stover was hoping to ride the better-for-you (BFY) trend of sugar-free/low-sugar chocolate. But their sugar-free product formula contained artificial sweeteners that didn’t appeal to the BFY buyer seeking healthy, natural chocolate. Sales weren’t what they’d hoped.
Our analysis revealed that they were talking to the wrong audience: People who choose sugar-free chocolate because they have to were fine with artificial sweeteners. BFY buyers who choose sugar-free chocolate because they want to were not. The fitness-minded BFY buyer would rather spend more on a quality product and treat herself occasionally than consume a lesser product every day.
We coached their leadership team to reformulate the product to remove artificial ingredients. Then we rebuilt the product line on Russell Stover’s brand promise: America’s favorite chocolate. The result? The brand reversed a three-year sales decline in less than a year.
If your company is marching along well, it makes sense to conduct a trend analysis every few years. But if your brand is being disrupted by competitors, your company would benefit from conducting a trend analysis every 12 months until you are ahead of the pack again.
David Lemley
David was two decades into a design career with a wall full of shiny awards and a portfolio of clients including Nordstrom, Starbucks, Nintendo, and REI. His rocket trajectory veered when his oldest child faced a health challenge of indeterminate origin. Hundreds of research hours later, David identified food allergy as the issue and convinced skeptical medical professionals caring for his child. Since that experience, David and Retail Voodoo have been on a mission to create a cleaner, healthier, more sustainable food system for all.
