It’s an inside joke among branding agencies that we’re great at advising clients on stewarding their brands but not so much at minding our own.
Cliché aside, we recognized without a doubt that we were due to update our brand and refresh our website. Call it taking our own medicine.
Like the clients we work with, we recognize how important it is to have a mission — a flag-in-the-ground cause that the brand represents in the world. It’s the focal point the organization rallies around and like-minded customers gravitate toward.
For 15 years, Retail Voodoo’s mission — the pursuit that entices every individual on our team to come to work every day — has been to change a broken food system by supporting purposeful brands that offer products that are better for people and the planet.
Today, we’ve largely achieved that mission. More and more food and beverage brands embrace clean ingredients, sustainable sourcing, healthful products, and meaningful engagement with their communities. We’ve brought strategic, big-picture, CPG-influenced thinking to an entire generation of better-for-you brands. We’ve helped mainstream what used to be fringe-y product concepts.
What Happens When a Brand Evolves?
Now, with that goal in sight, we’re aiming higher: to connect “better-for” brands to everyone and make sustainability the norm, not the exception.
The global Covid-19 pandemic and the civil unrest of 2020 solidified our thinking and flared our passion. Racial, social, and economic disparities mean that not everybody has equal access to whole, clean-ingredient foods. As an industry, we’ve always had blinders on, seeing only consumers who look like us and charging premium prices for niche products.
At Retail Voodoo, we are adamant that every consumer, no matter their background or status, deserves food and beverage products that will help them live better lives. Our work is now about helping every brand — from Mondelez to the woman starting a business in her home kitchen — bring healthy products to every household.
Over the past year, we’ve been using our brand platform to begin advancing this new mission. As we’ve worked to hone our point of view, we’ve reached out to learn from other leaders in the food and wellness industries. And so Diana launched the Gooder podcast as a mode of sharing conversations with supremely talented women leaders in food and beverage. Gooder has explored some pretty challenging topics — such as what it takes to thrive as a woman in a largely male business, how leaders bring expertise from other industries to F&B brands, what brands are doing to meet consumers’ needs.
And last year, we introduced Brand Slam, a six-episode series designed to help entrepreneurs in food, beverage, and wellness reduce their struggle with brand growth in the face of Covid-19. Using the auditing process models created by Retail Voodoo to develop Brand Ecosystems, (featured in David’s book Beloved & Dominant Brands,) we benchmarked each small brand and shared results and advice in a webinar, so others could learn from the experience.
The final significant piece of our brand refresh is our newly launched website. (Talk about taking your own medicine!) Website renovations are never fun, and this project really stretched our team. We recognized that we needed an outside expert who could guide us just as we guide our clients. We took our new passion and vision and used it as rocket fuel to optimize everything in our system and ditch anything that was getting in the way — hence an entirely new website, not just a content refresh.
We’re Passionate and Committed. Need Some of That?
We have regained a startup mentality because of the new fight we’re picking with the status quo — to help brands change the universe through communication, transparency, and inclusion. This new opportunity has relit our fires and we’re stoked out of our minds.
And we have plenty of energy, enthusiasm, and expertise to share. (It’s contagious, in all the best ways.) We’re looking for brand leaders with a similar aspiration to change the world. Can you imagine a society where all humans have equal opportunity to pursue health and well-being? Where what’s good for our selves and good for our planet go hand in hand?
You want to make a difference. We can amplify your impact. Let’s rock this.
