This Week in Business and Brands: Tasty Tactics, Scrumptious Strategy, and More
Consumer Cuisine: Feeding the Millennial Appetite
If you needed a sure sign of consumers’ changing tastes, look no further than Mondelez’s fresh menu: with their new brand Véa, Oreos are making way for veggie crisps and quinoa crackers. Developed under the lead of our friend Barry Calpino, the brand is now prepared to serve the millennial palate – one that’s seeking healthy snack choices made from real ingredients. That means trading sweet for savory and GMOs for all-natural flavoring. Sprinkle in a dash of marketing that focuses on diverse backgrounds for “a cracker inspired by the world,” and you’ve got the perfect recipe for targeting the youthful culinary consumer. And while their ingredients might follow a more organic growth rate, the brand itself went from farm to table in just 18 months. Built “from scratch,” the new label has Latin roots and big plans for global reach, with marketing strategized toward the same millennial taste, harnessing social media influencers on Instagram and Facebook. Time will tell whether the new dish becomes a staple or is a mere flash in the pan…
Talking Tactics, Tete a Tete: Platforms on the Rise
When it comes to the future of business and brand strategy, it looks like the platform model is catching on down under: just ask Mark Reinke, CMO of Australia’s Suncorp Group, who shared a number of insights in his talk at Sydney’s CMO Momentum event. Here are a few:
- On being huge and nimble: “You’re constantly challenged to balance between investing and spending time for incremental change, versus quantum change…we’ve had to develop some techniques for managing that, otherwise we’d end up in the polarity, we end up doing nothing, or we just wheel spin.
- On the challenge of constrained thought: It’s that inability to think differently, the pattern that exists that we just can’t break free of. We need some different tools, as chief marketing officers and chief customer officers, we have to do something different to change that patterning.”
- On the move from vertical business to platform: “What that means in reality is we design one customer experience, rather than an experience per product, and we remove the barriers to a customer getting the services and solutions they want.”
Facing the Future: Heads Up on AR
From fueling fun in our physical world to enhancing professionals with live data streams, augmented reality certainly has a wide range of applications. But its latest use may be most beneficial to brands themselves, as the hi-tech system makes for a flashy marketing tool across industries of all kinds. Acura took the heads-up-display for a spin in a virtual race through ice fields and a jungle (with the actual driving on a closed course), and IKEA will soon help aspiring interior designers see furniture in their homes before they buy, right through the screen on their phones. Of course Snapchat filters abound, but they’re much more than fun and games, as brands can buy one-day takeovers for hundreds of thousands of dollars to expand their reach with sponsored content. And L’Oreal’s AR lipstick try-on platform provides more than beauty tips – it also gives the brand a trove of data and insight into trends and real-time consumer preferences. Not to mention the potential for elevating the in-store experience, it looks like brands in all categories can start to see more opportunities through a whole new lens…
Marketing Methodology: How to Spread the Word
Every brand wants to have that one campaign (or ideally, several) that magically goes viral. But it turns out there’s less mystery and more science behind curating the contagious, as Wharton professor Jonah Berger has identified in his six principles behind “why things catch on.” First on the list is social currency, since everyone wants to look sharp for sharing savvy material – and the more emotional, the better, since “when we care, we share.” But it doesn’t have to be all for flashy fun – offering practical value in the form of how-to videos and life hacks makes for greater share-ability, bringing out the helping hand in everyone as they pass along useful fact and function. Finally, moving the messaging tone from sales to stories helps to hook your audience and keep them coming back for more – hence the power of blog posts and earned media. With these (and more) powers combined, your upcoming strategy might just be the next big share…
Marketing Munchies: Mickey D’s New Duds
That’s all for this week! We’ll leave you with this look at McDonald’s fashionable friendship with UberEATS, giving you the savory sartorial selection you never knew you needed…
