For several years, the business press and business books have promoted the idea of resilience. The notion of a resilient enterprise or a resilient brand has been bandied about one of the goals of business management and leadership. Resilience is now beyond a buzzword: it is a critical and desired characteristic. 

Resilience is important. The ability to recover fast has been especially important in the Covid-19 environment. Flexibility, learning on the go, elasticity are essentials for corporate and brand endurance. Toughness and grit are considered exceptional qualities for C-suite executives. 

However, the political, social, institutional and environmental challenges of the past few years show that accountability is now more important than ever. Increasingly, people are expecting businesses, their leaders and their brands to be accountable. Not only do people expect businesses, leaders and brands to justify their actions, people will hold businesses, leaders and brands accountable for those actions. Customers do not go around asking about resilience; they do focus on accountability. To be customer-centric, accountability must be prioritized.

In the recent Deloitte Global 2021 Millennial and Gen Z Survey, the researchers point out that these two cohorts expect “institutions” to “drive change on the issues that matter to them the most.” The report concludes that it is going to be imperative that businesses “take actions and be accountable for activities that will help build a more equitable, sustainable world.” According to the Survey among 14,655 Millennials (b. 1983 – 1994) and 8,272 Gen Zs (b. 1995 – 2003), “… young adults are pushing for accountability … on issues including racism, the environment and wealth inequality.”

Brands are at their best and are most compelling when they align with the values, concerns and hopes of their customers and prospective customers. In our changing world, there is a growing and vocal audience expecting brands to stand up for what they stand for. And, young adults are savvy enough to know when a brand is talking appropriately but not acting appropriately.

For example, there is a difference between Tesla’s vision and that of General Motors. Tesla states:

We are designing and manufacturing a complete energy and transportation ecosystem that is fully vertically integrated. By doing so, we are creating affordable products that work together to amplify their impact, leading to the greatest environmental benefit possible. We seek to achieve this through our research and software development efforts as well as through our continued drive to develop advanced manufacturing capabilities.

General Motors recently announced that is wants to be “a growth-focused technology company.” General Motors wants to be the Apple of automotive. Where is the promise of a sustainable future? Where is the accountability?

Corporate America has tended to focus on making money for shareholders. This has spawned all sorts of financial finagling that at best lines executives’ and shareholders’ pockets at the expense of all other stakeholders and brands. At, its worst, a focus on making money for shareholders has an unpleasant relationship with the amorality of greed.

As former Unilever CEO, Paul Polman said in an interview with Financial Times, “The social responsibility of business ultimately is to ensure that we have a healthier planet. If businesses cannot show they’re making a positive impact on the world, why should we let these businesses stay around? You should put the interests of your children and your grandchildren ahead of your personal greed.”

We are now witnessing the beginning of an era of goodness. The Wall Street Journal pointed out in September 2021, that for a handful of branded organizations seeking IPOs, the underlying mission is not greed, but “do-gooding”. These branded enterprises are focusing on profitable operational and organizational global good as their goal. These branded enterprises recognize that their customers are their customers because of an inherent provenance of accountability on critical social and environmental issues. Patagonia has been a leader for decades. Patagonia has consistently managed with a belief that everything they do should have a positive impact – resulting in using less energy, not wasting water and creating less trash. Patagonia has added to its history of being an environmental leader to being a leader in social issues. Its website informs you that Patagonia is learning to become an anti-racist company. Readers can review Patagonia’s commitment.

Branded enterprises such as Allbirds have been built on the premise that sustainability and clothing are not oxymorons. Allbirds’ website not only points out that the fashion industry is one of biggest contributors to negative climate changes, but that it is time for people to hold these businesses accountable. Further, Allbirds promises to hold itself accountable for its impact. In the name of transparency, Allbirds lists its “Better Business” vision and offers its sustainability report to download.

The Wall Street Journal also highlights branded enterprises such as Chobani, Warby Parker and Rent The Runway as “do-gooders” focused on profitable operational, organizational global good. For all of these companies the underlying idea is that doing good is the pathway to enduring profitable growth. From the perspectives of these companies, there is value in values. 

In his Financial Times interview, Mr. Polman tells us that new food businesses based on sustainability are value creators. For example, food companies such as Beyond Meat, Impossible Foods and Oatly are highly valued – all of the value creation is there. On the other hand, Mr. Polman notes, “The value creation for the big companies, even Unilever, has been fairly dismal.” Mr. Polman’s opinion is that businesses should “… aim to do more good rather than just aim to do less harm.” He thinks this should require businesses “… to focus on their stakeholders’ long-term interests and taking responsibility for their impact on the wider world.” 

Of course, resilience is a nice-to-have factor, but resilience while wrecking the planet is woefully perilous. Resilience that is empty of moral accountability is bad for business and bad for brands.

Corporate mission statements that articulate generic thoughts will go nowhere. Mission statements such as “being the best fast food company” or “being the easiest to do business with“ or “generating happiness” or “being the Apple of automotive” pale in comparison to ideas such as Chobani’s, “‘transforming our food system for the betterment of our planet, our people and our communities, from cow comfort on dairy farms to responsible manufacturing practices.”

Many enterprises have used and may still use a RACI system to clarify management strategies and actions. With the RACI chart, managers list who is responsible for a plan or program; who is accountable; who is to be consulted; and who should be kept informed.

The future is not about separating responsibility, accountability, consultation and information. The future is a business that has in its soul the idea that the entire business must be responsible, accountable, consulted and informed. As the Deloitte Study showed, Millennials and Gen Zs are buying brands that connect with their personal values. ADWEEK supports this claim as well, stating that people are “increasingly citing purpose as a factor in buying behavior.”

To its credit, McDonald’s has committed to making its Happy Meal toys more sustainable by 2025. Reporting indicates that the fast food giant is shifting production of Happy Meal toys to plant-based materials. Each year, McDonald’s buys something like a billion toys for its Happy Meal children’s’ meals. This makes McDonald’s the largest toy company in the world. According to McDonald’s, this will “… be equivalent to more than 650,000 people eliminating plastics from their lives each year.”

This is a good step. But, at its heart, McDonald’s needs to have a vision of doing good that is closer to what Ray Kroc imagined when he said that doing good business was good for business. 

A focus on accountability as part of a brand’s reason for being is increasingly necessary. Focusing on profitable operational, organizational global good means only making money if the business is doing good across all functions, strategies and tactics.

Accountability must be the first step. Resilience makes you flexible. Accountability makes you forceful. Resilience defines behavior now. Accountability defines the basis of the future.

The coronavirus pandemic is forcing brands to raise prices. General Mills, Chipotle, P&G and others are planning for or already implemented price increases. With fraught supply chains, climatic distresses and overall uncertainty, brands face hits to profitability as important parts and ingredients are less available. 

Raising prices can be problematic. If a brand raises its price too high, customers will reassess that brand’s value. Is this brand really worth what I will have to pay? Is this brand a good value? Or, is this brand not worth the money? Is my second choice brand a better value now?

In order to make create and implement the correct pricing strategies, businesses must calculate their brands’ Trustworthy Brand Value. This is an imperative.

When it comes to value, customers have a mental value equation. This mental value equation kicks in when making a purchase.  This customer value equation is not math: it is a mindset. It is a mental process where customers evaluate a brand’s benefits relative to its costs. As a mental construct, this value equation has a denominator (bottom) of costs and a numerator (top) of benefits. 

Over decades, the basic understanding of customer value has been and continues to be the same: value is what you expect to receive and what you do receive (benefits) for what you expect to pay and do pay (cost). However, how business specifically defines benefits and costs has undergone an extraordinary evolution. Brands must be cognizant of these changes in order to satisfy customer needs profitably.

In the 1950’s, business understood the value equation simply as features for the money. But, in the 1960’s, the numerator’s definition changed to reflect the fact that customers do not actually buy features. Customers buy the benefits (needs) of these features. Marketing’s purpose became the way in which brands profitably satisfied customer needs.

The social upheaval of the 1960s also gave brands permission to not only focus on functional needs but to make choices based on emotional needs. The customer perceived value equation’s numerator was now more than just features and functions.  Emotional benefits were also relevant. 

In the 1980’s, with the proliferation of two income families and the beginning of busy, over-scheduled lives, the value equation’s denominator changed. Price was no longer the only cost that people considered when evaluating value. People looked at time as a cost. The denominator of the value equation evolved to include both money and time. 

By the turn of the 21^st Century, there was again another evolution in customer perceived value.  In addition to money and time, consumers added a third cost: effort. Customers started assessing a brand’s costs in terms of money, time and effort, where effort means the physical and mental energy cost. Even if I have the money and the time, this purchase requires too much effort on my behalf.

Technological and social changes including the seismic changes from coronavirus have forced the value equation to evolve again. Consumers now look at the numerator of the value equation as a total brand experience defined in terms of functional, emotional and social benefits, such as sharing, belonging, self-image, status and respect. 

This means that customers now assess a brand’s worth based on its total brand experience (functional, emotional and social benefits) relative to the costs of money, time and effort. 

However, there is now a very important new component to the value equation. It is a value multiplier. That value multiplier is trust. 

Trust is the customer’s belief that the brand will deliver the experience relative to the costs in a quality manner. Trust is the customer’s evaluation of the future experience with the brand: How confident am I that this brand will deliver this experience for these costs? 

The new customer perception of value is total brand experience relative to total experience costs all multiplied by trust. This is the new Trustworthy Brand Value equation.

If trust in the brand is high, then as a multiplier, the perceived brand value is increased. If trust in the brand is low, then the perceived brand value is decreased. If there is no trust in the brand – if trust in the brand is zero – then it does not matter what the promised brand experience is relative to the costs. Anything multiplied by zero is zero.

Brand trust significantly affects consumer commitment. This influences price tolerance. Brand trust is a critical piece of the decision process. If you want a strong, enduring, loyal relationship with a customer, you must have brand trust. Trust is essential to the calculative process of brand acceptance. It is not enough any longer to be just a good price; your brand must be a trustworthy value.

If your customers perceive your brand to be a trustworthy value, they will increasingly opt-in to share personal information. But they will do this in exchange for the brand’s ability to deliver on its promise. This exchange of information will enhance the relationship. And, research shows that the stronger the relationship, the stronger the preference and this drives revenue.

Recent research from Deloitte indicates that 62% of people who report highly trusting a brand buy almost exclusively from that brand over competitors in the same category.

Understanding value is much more than asking people whether they believe your offer is good value. Asking customers if your brand is a good value is a hopeless quest for a useless answer. Trustworthiness is incredibly multi-dimensional. Adopt an analytic metric that assesses each of the components of the Trustworthy Brand Value equation.

As an analytic construct, the Trustworthy Brand Value equation integrates all the elements that customers expect to receive – functional, emotional and social benefits and the costs they expect to pay for this experience: money, time and effort. Research from as far back as 2004 indicates that total brand experience and cost characteristics and qualities of the brand have meaning and add value for the customer. Brand value is more than satisfaction with the functional performance of the brand. Brand value is a function of the customer’s relationship with the brand. Trust is one of the most critical components of this relationship.

Value is not absolute; it is relative. Calculate Trustworthy Brand Value for each brand in the customer-defined competitive set. A specific brand’s Trustworthy Brand Value is indexed to the average of the competitive set. This is the Relative Trustworthy Brand Value. 

Recent research indicates that as Relative Trustworthy Brand Value increases, the willingness to pay more also increases, as long as the price is perceived to be fair value. This is common sense. Building Trustworthy Brand Value builds preference, loyalty, sales and profit margins. And, Trustworthy Brand Value is the basis for enduring profitable growth.

The essential imperative for marketers today is to incorporate the Trustworthy Brand Value equation into brand management. Trustworthy Brand Value is a critical tool in the 21^st Century-marketers’ toolbox. Trustworthy Brand Value is not a mere marketing theory, it is major management metric. 

Today’s biggest marketing challenge is to build Trustworthy Brand Value, in every market in which your brand chooses to compete.

Marketers: if you have not already reread your copy of Aldous Huxley’s, The Doors of Perception, now is the time. The trend of using planted-based psychedelics– that is, mushrooms – is once again a desired experience. That 1960’s “turned on, tuned in” experience of opening one’s inner doors to greater personal perceptiveness and universal understanding is now increasingly desired.  Jim Morrison must be looking down and smiling with an “I told you so” grin. 

The need for self-knowing, perceptual experiences that help us be better people is real. And, this deep desire to understand ourselves and the world is changing the concept of personalization. Some CMOs describe this as the more emotional component. Actually, it goes beyond emotional to spiritual.

For several years, personalization has been a desired brand benefit. Personalization still is desired. We appreciate products and services designed to satisfy our individual needs in ways that might not work for someone else. Brands can address you personally with recommendations, specific promotions and worthwhile information. Hotels can remember how you like your mini-fridge stocked. Airlines know how frequently you fly and how you want to be rewarded. Personalization is a status symbol. Personalization is part of our external image of success and our internal image of achievement. This is because personalization delivers an individualized recognition of who we are. Personalization is powerful because of the use of real time digital responsiveness and data collection.

Brands delivering data-driven personalized experiences are valuable brands. Brands offering personalized experiences reinforce respect and uniqueness. All of this is good. The ability to factor down messaging to an audience of one across millions of users and viewers has been profitable. This type of personalization, all pervasive in today’s world, can also, unfortunately, be seen as self-centered and somewhat superficial. It generates an “all about me” sensibility.

So, in our slightly dystopian, worrisome world, weary people are looking for a different type of personalization, something with more meaningfulness. People want more connection, not so much with like-minded others although that is still a huge desire, but with one’s inner self, with the truth about who they are while gaining some sort of existential understanding about the world.

More than mindfulness (an awareness of something), research shows meaningfulness is associated with life satisfaction, happiness and positive wellbeing. Meaningfulness is intensely personal.

Marketers should be expanding their definitions of personalization to include the meaningful pursuit of connections with the more “spiritual, soulful” side of their customers’ sense of self. Many people are seeking true self-perception. This dimension of personalization is about empowerment, healing self-transformation and personal resetting. Think of this as yoga on steroids.

This need for self-enlightenment goes beyond the commercial wellness industry as highlighted in Bloomberg BusinessWeek, “This Vacation Is a Real Trip: Psychedelic experiences are beginning to play an integral role at luxury resorts.”  Bloomberg points out that spas designed around opening one’s doors of perception are big business. Additionally, the “shroom boom” as some call it, is also playing an important therapeutic role in treating a variety of medical issues including depression, PTSD and other trauma, substance abuse and pain.  

Increasingly, what used to be regarded as a recreational experience for hippies, dead heads, festival goers and the EST set (Erhard Seminars Training, the new age awareness groups held from 1971 to 1984) is seen as a respectable personal pathway for achieving heightened self-understanding, personal development and taking responsibility with physical and emotional relief. As Timothy Leary famously said, “You have to go out of your mind to use your head.” 

The state of California, Denver, CO, Oakland, CA, Santa Cruz, CA, Grand Rapids and Ann Arbor, MI, Cambridge and Somerville MA have all passed legislation to decriminalize possession of the active ingredient in “magic” mushrooms – psilocybin, as well as LSD, mescaline and DMT, the active ingredient in ayahuasca. 

And, although psilocybin is still a powerful Schedule 1 drug in the US, there appears to be some universal recognition that people want help understanding themselves and their individual purpose on earth. Faced with the pressures and difficulties of life in today’s coronavirus world, people are seeking critical insight into how to be the best human being they possibly can. 

Some brands are actually delivering on the inspirational, personal perceptual experience.

For example, Silo Wellness describes itself as a “legal psychedelic and functional mushroom company focused on your mind, body and spirit. Silo Wellness cultivates psychedelic mushrooms and offers retreats in Jamaica and Oregon and products”. Most recently, as stated in The New York Post and other information outlets, Silo Wellness has launched a brand called Marley One. Marley One is a brand of psychedelic mushroom products.

Medicinal mushrooms are appearing in beverages and wellness products, similar to the proliferation of CBD edibles, tinctures and creams. 

Research from Mordor Intelligence highlighted in Financial Services Monitor Worldwide indicates that in 2020, the global functional mushroom business was US $12,415.12 million. Mordor Intelligence estimates that from 2021-2026 the business will register a CAGR of +8.4%. Mordor Intelligence reported expectations of functional mushrooms seeing growth beyond healthcare and pharmaceuticals but into the food and beverage sector.

Not all brands are or should be peddling the magical. However, the broadening of personalization is more than a mere fad. People want to open doors to new self-awareness. For brands and marketers, this additional intensely spiritual dimension to personalization means there is work to be accomplished now. Brands need to take this into account. Technological and digital connections alone may not help brands accomplish this. Marketers need to pay attention.

• Knowing the prime prospect should include more than opinions, attitudes, buying habits and demographics. What are your prime prospects’ intentions regarding actions to improve self-understanding and experiences? How can your brand support this? Who do prime prospects think they are and what do they wish to become?? How does that affect the brand? Does the brand’s personalization efforts sync with the users’ current self-assessments?

• Knowing problems that the prime prospect may have with the brand should be examined on functional, emotional, social and “spiritual” levels. Problem detection can run to the more functional. 

• When thinking about the brand’s ease of choice, ease of use and ease of mind, marketers should put more effort into understanding how the brand affects the customer’s ease of mind. People put a lot of emphasis on self-perception, open-mindedness and insight. 

In a recent column for The New York Times on neuroscience, holistic brain research and how we construct our realties, David Brooks quotes a neuroscientist from the University of Sussex. Professor Anil Seth stated, “Perceptions come from the inside out just as much, if not more, than from the outside in.”  

Along with how people perceive brands, marketers must now start understanding how people wish to perceive themselves. These insights will be crucial for engaging customers with truly personalized experiences.

Learn more about paradoxes like this one: Navigate how to satisfy conflicting needs, and look beyond single-minded solutions with the insights and guidance in The Paradox Planet.

Recent reporting from The Wall Street Journal indicates that Amazon is considering opening a few department stores in Ohio and California. One of the key reasons for the decline of department stores is now opening department stores. The online mega-department store is investing in building physical department stores.

Amazon is about to leverage its retailing expertise at a time when consumers are returning to physical stores and malls. Barron’s, the financial weekly published by Dow Jones, recently noted that department stores are actually making a comeback. The doom and gloom of the death-of-retail predictions seem to be fading away. Closed stores, empty malls and bankruptcies are no longer haunting the retail landscape. In fact, stores that were about to fall off the planet are now reappearing. For example, Toys R’ Us is scheduled to put small versions of its stores within Macy’s stores. Even without its new toy offerings, as Barron’s points out, Macy’s as well as Kohl’s, Ross Stores, The TJ Maxx portfolio (TJ Maxx, Home Goods and Marshalls are all showing increased traffic and profitability.

Amazon, is taking advantage of the moment. 

This would not be the first time Amazon has added brick-and-mortar stores to its retailing portfolio. Amazon has bookstores and self-service groceries in New York and Seattle respectively, Amazon 4-Star in New York (featuring products receiving 4-star ratings and an Amazon Fresh grocery store in Woodland Hills, California. 

In 2017, Amazon purchased Whole Foods, the organic and natural foods grocery chain.  As pundits puzzled over the whys and wherefores of this purchase, Amazon viewed Whole Foods as an extraordinary runway for doing retail better. By leveraging its expertise in data collection, loyalty, supply chain, delivery and digital creativity, Amazon saw enormous opportunity. 

Since the Whole Foods purchase, Amazon has been using Whole Foods as a laboratory for grocery retailing. Amazon’s changes to Whole Foods – some great and some abandoned – helped to transform Whole Foods’ perceptions as Whole Paycheck. Amazon has accomplished this significantly by rebranding and fashioning its 365 brand. If you look closely at the 365 logo, you see that it no longer says “Everyday Value.” Now, through a wide variety of offerings, a shopper can purchase high quality, affordable organic and non-organic products that compete in taste and ingredients with the more high-end brands on its shelves. 

Soon after Amazon’s Whole Foods purchase, in a far-ranging interview with The Wall Street Journal, Jeff Wilke, the then chief executive of worldwide consumer at Amazon, spoke about the benefits of having Whole Foods in the Amazon tent. Mr. Wilke said, “I hope we’re going to learn about how physical stores work. They (Whole Foods) know a lot about food, produce – supply chains at a very large national scale. We’re going to learn with them how we can efficiently – and in a very high-quality way – deliver groceries to our customers.” 

Now, Amazon sees an opening to work the same kind of reinvigoration with department stores. Basically, a department store offers a wide range of products and services across multiple categories. This is what Amazon already does online. Having a physical option allows Amazon to showcase particular offerings that may be overlooked on its website. The Wall Street Journal’s latest news states that Amazon will be stocking its department stores with its private-label fashion brands and its other private-label offerings across categories such as household items, electronics and other merchandise. 

Building department stores, Amazon will have the opportunity to go to school on non-food retailing. The customer knowledge base will be extraordinary. Amazon will learn about those shoppers who actually prefer to purchase clothing when the clothing can be tried on. Amazon will learn why these customers behave in this manner. Amazon will learn about the power of touch and feel in retailing. As with Whole Foods, department stores will provide pricing information allowing for experiments with alternative pricing strategies.

While existing department stores are breathing new life into their brands, including balancing killer online offerings and physical stores, Amazon will not only be educating itself on the future of department store, brick-and-mortar retailing. Amazon will have the chance to completely remake shopping in a physical location. Amazon’s department stores will be incubators of ideas that have the possibility to change the underlying concept of department stores.

Amazon has the opportunity to transform the concept of the department store. In a review on five new books about retailing in Harvard Business Review, “Getting Back to Business: The future of shopping in the post-Covid World,” Juan Martinez writes, “The thriving stores of the future will be driven by data, technology, and even a little theater.” 

As Mr. Martinez points out, the five books on the future of retailing all concur that thriving stores will rely on an optimization of data, technology and the experiential. Success in future retailing will undoubtedly require expertise in e-commerce, customer service, knowing the customer and digital prowess. These are all things that Amazon can do. Although Amazon does not face an empty field, Amazon can redefine an industry as it did with books, grocery, delivery and merchandise. 

In its recent earnings call, Beyond Meat, the brand of plant-based burgers, “meatballs”, “ground beef” and sausages, announced that its third-quarter sales forecast would be somewhat gloomy. Executives reported lower revenues suggesting that the company’s success might be cooling off the grill.

Beyond Meat reported that its guarded outlook is due to “… losses of distribution and operator challenges due to labor issues.” Additionally, there are growth, expansion expenses such as increased hiring, marketing, freight and legal. Beyond Meat’s CEO stated that he is optimistic about the future. But, the company is wary of being too upbeat as Covid-19 waves could once again impact negatively.

Aside from its growth plan costs along with current and potential disruptions, there is the problem with Beyond Meat’s brand. Beyond Meat is not articulating a differentiating, compelling message to consumers. Its message is almost identical to that of its main competitor, Impossible Foods.

In the beginning, Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods actually had two different messages about the future of food. Beyond Meat’s proposition was focused on its closeness to nature. Beyond Meat focused on the purity and simplicity of simple, raw, protein-rich, non-GMO ingredients as the better way to the future. Beyond Meat’s ingredients were ones that we could recognize. And, this is still its position. Basic cooking techniques using plant-based ingredients with no antibiotics, no cholesterol and no hormones.

Impossible Foods emphasized a scientific, lab-based approach.  The brand touted its signature element Heme – this is what makes the burger “bleed” and taste like beef. As described on the Impossible Foods website, “Heme is what makes meat taste like meat. It’s an essential molecule found in every living plant and animal — most abundantly in animals — and something we’ve been eating and craving since the dawn of humanity. Here at Impossible Foods, our plant-based heme is made via fermentation of genetically engineered yeast, and safety-verified by America’s top food-safety experts and peer-reviewed academic journals.”  

Impossible Foods CEO, Patrick Brown stated: “Start with the hard fundamental research required to understand the basic principles and molecular mechanisms responsible for the flavors, aromas, textures and juiciness that make meat delicious and craveable; then, discover scaleable plant sources of the specific proteins and other nutrients required to reproduce the magic of meat.”

Originally, the two brands relevant differentiation were Made by Chemists or Made by Nature; Food Science or Food Authenticity, Scrumptious by Science or Scrumptious by Simplicity.

But now, both brands’ websites offer the same message. Beyond Meat states that the shift to plant-based choices will have a positive impact not just on our health but on the welfare of animals and the wholeness of the planet. The reason for buying Beyond Meat product is that innovation and simple non-GMO ingredients combine to make delicious, protein-based products. And, these delicious products are produced in a sustainable. Beyond Meat’s message stresses the naturalness of its offerings and the nature-forward approach to production. 

Impossible Foods’ website also touts the sustainability and naturalness of its products. The brand asks us to be good to our taste buds and the planet. The ingredients are also ones that we recognize. As with Beyond Meat, Impossible Foods stresses its nature-forward manufacturing.

Both brands not only have the same message.  Both brands have a rather generic message. Many plant-based food brands have messages about “better for you-better for the planet”. Kite Hill, producer of non-dairy alternatives, has a similar proposition, while stressing its innovative “blue-sky” approach to making new products.

A brand is a promise of a relevant, differentiated experience. Without a relevant, differentiated brand experience, you have a product not a brand. 

A brand promise summarizes the special contract that exists between a brand and its customers. It describes what the brand is intended to stand for in the mind of a specific group of customers and/or prospective customers. By consistently living up to and consistently delivering the brand promise, a brand will be relevant and distinctive. A brand promise is something that a brand continuously strives to achieve. It is a future-focused description because it states what the brand will do for its customers.

A brand promise is multi-dimensional. It defines the brand. It defines the parameters for all development, communications, innovation and renovation on behalf of the brand. It must be a motivating, relevant, differentiated description of the brand experience that you want the brand to deliver. The brand experience is the consistent, trustworthy delivery of the brand’s functional, emotional and social benefits relative to its costs (money, time and effort).

Consistently living up to the promise of its experience is the way customers perceive the brand’s quality.  

A brand promise defines the total brand experience.  

Beyond Meat can address its logistical, labor and legal issues. The enterprise can put more money into marketing. But, both Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods will need to relevantly differentiate themselves within the marketplace. Both brands must figure out just what makes them special and important to customers. 

Now that the retail landscape has changed due to the pandemic – with delivery of groceries more ingrained than ever – these two brands must develop and then communicate what it is that makes the different and relevant from each other and in the minds’ of customers.

Want to learn more? Navigate how to satisfy conflicting needs, and look beyond single-minded solutions with the insights and guidance in The Paradox Planet.