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By Dustin Longstreth,
Manager, Business Development, Wallace Church, Inc.
Thanks to the success of diets such as
Atkins, South Beach, and the Zone,
the term “lowcarb” has become synonymous
with “good for you.”As a
result, food and beverage marketers are
scrambling to redefine their brands in a
more healthful context. Every food and
beverage category imaginable, from
bread to beer, now has a low-carb alternative.
Entire retail chains, such as
Totally Low Carb Stores (TLC), have
been created around the low-carb benefit.
The noise emanating from low-carb
violators has reached deafening levels.
In this frenetic environment,marketers
must be extra careful not to confuse
product benefits with brand identity.
Perceived health benefits may be highly
relevant for some brands, but they will
never be sustainable points of differentiation.
Brands that fail to recognize this
important distinction risk alienating their
core consumers by hopping aboard a
“benefit bandwagon” that may be contrary
to their brand’s emotional experience.
Recent studies show that an increasing
number of Americans are monitoring
their carbohydrate intake. The large
and affluent group of aging babyboomers
continues to demonstrate a
growing interest in health and wellness.
And with childhood obesity on the rise,
parents are on the hunt for nutritional
products their kids will enjoy.Wall Street
analysts estimate some $1.5 billion in
revenue is up for grabs. Leave no doubt,
there is a tremendous market opportunity
here. However, while providing lowcarb
products may be the right thing to
do, it needs to be done right. Confusing
a hot new product benefit with a brand’s
emotional connection to the consumer
can lead to myopic brand strategies that
erode meaningful differentiation in favor
of the latest fad.
History provides us with some great
examples. Remember the dot-com era?
Businesses everywhere were repositioning
themselves for the “new economy.”
Popular window dressing
techniques such as adding
an “e” prefix and a “.com”
suffix to company names
seemed to be a surefire way
to win “mindshare” and fast
track market cap to meteoric
heights. Those who jumped
on the bandwagon were
touted as forward thinking,
visionary, on the pulse of the
new economy… until things
changed. The bubble burst
and suddenly anything “e”
or “.com” became instantly
associated with failed business
models and overpriced sockpuppets.
Four years after the
announcement of the $106
billion AOL/TimeWarner
merger, AOL Time Warner’s
board members have recently
elected to drop AOL from the company’s
name (the ticker symbol has returned to
TWX and is currently trading at a fraction
of its pre-merger value). The dotcom
era has become a pejorative term,
and the brands that sought to define
themselves solely based on the digital
benefit have suffered or gone out of
business completely.
Some of these same shortsighted
brand strategies are in play today. Food
marketers are rushing to define their
brand experience purely in the context
of the low-carb benefit. Brand names
like CarbRite, CarbSmart, Carb-You-
Name-It have become ubiquitous. But
just as attempting to add a digital halo
has never created meaningful brand differentiation,
neither will wrapping a
brand in a low-carb flag.When the lowcarb
diet craze cools, so will the brands
that hitched their wagon to that single
benefit. Staying focused on your brand’s
emotional relevance must always remain
the beacon for all strategic
brand identity decisions.
For other brands, the
low-carb benefit may simply
be emotionally irrelevant.
There’s no question that
consumers are seeking
healthier choices but that’s
not all they want. Research
has consistently shown that
while consumers want to eat
better there is one critical
element they will not forgo:
taste. Despite much-publicized
concerns about overeating,
consumers continue to get their
fill of junk food. One need look
no further than the local
doughnut shop. Krispy Kreme is
one the hottest brands in the
market today, enjoying a 5-year
annual growth rate of 65%. At
the Texas state fair, fried Twinkies, served
in a paper boat with powdered sugar and
chocolate sauce, were all the rage (along
with fried Oreos and fried Snickers
bars).While demand for nutraceuticals
and low-carb product offerings may be
on the rise, great taste will always drive
business.
Despite their typically low nutritional
value, comfort foods still manage to
elude the barrage of criticism from con-cerned consumers. No one is out to
demonize macaroni and cheese or Rice
Crispie treats. That is because comfort
foods by definition have established
strong emotional connections with consumers
that serve as an inoculation from
the whims of the latest diet fads.
Nutritional benefits are easily trumped
by the feelings of love, security, and optimism
associated with comfort foods. For
many brands, speaking to the heart is
much stronger than speaking to the
waistline.
Answer: Stay focused and be true to
your brand experience.Make sure that
your brand’s identity is relevant to your
product, provides meaningful differentiation,
and conveys a message that resonates
with consumers emotionally.
Product claims such as “low-carb” and
“zero trans fat” are only claims—not
brand drivers. Claims are easily imitated
while strong brand identities provide
sustainable points of differentiation. And
Good for your brand
continued from page 8
tion, it seems to me that this book points
out how lacking design education has
been in preparing us for taking leadership
roles within the corporation where
often “…the greatest contribution of
design is not visual…” There is also the
need to remove vague aspects from the
design discipline by formulating and validating
the intuitive, and developing
more rigorous documentation similar to
the research done that provided the
input and framework for this book.
Overall, this book is a wealth of information
and is an excellent resource for
directing and developing design management
strategies and practical approaches.
Corporation and design practices that
apply the theories in this book are definitely
more likely to succeed.
while it is clear that a large group of consumers
are choosing to eat better, healthy
claims and positioning are not equally
relevant for all brands.
We eat the foods we crave; the foods
that taste good and make us feel good
both physically and emotionally. “Good
for you” does not necessarily mean “good
for me.” Find out what role, if any, health
claims play in enhancing your brand
and then incorporate them only within
the context of your brand’s unique emotional
experience.
Dustin Longstreth manages brand strategy
and business development at Wallace
Church, Inc., a strategic brand identity
consultancy and design firm. Dustin is a
frequent speaker at Columbia Business
School and the Institute for International
Research. He holds an MBA from
Columbia Business School. For more
information: dustin@wallacechurch.com.
This article appeared in the March 2004
issue of DMI News.
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