CBX

Brands for Social Change

CBX — Fri, 07 Feb 2020 19:37:17 +0000

In light of the midterm elections, we sat down with She Should Run founder and CEO, Erin Loos Cutraro, for some straight talk. We gathered key insight from Erin about today’s rocky political climate, the movement to get 250,000 women to run for elected office by 2030, and the importance of leveraging strong brand messaging and visuals to create legitimacy for her cause.

Straight Talk: The Catch-22 of Big

CBX — Thu, 21 Feb 2019 00:08:31 +0000

In a recent study from CB Insights, global food and beverage funding since 2012 has added up to $5.9 billion across 1300 deals. Take a look around your grocery store and you’ll see hundreds of new brands with about $2 billion in fresh funding that didn’t exist 5-10 years ago. Unicorns like Sabra are on their way to $1 billion dollars in revenue while Chobani, heading towards a cooler $2 billion, is barely a decade old and currently sitting as the top yogurt company in the US. Retail channels like Trader Joe’s, Lidl and Aldi continue to disrupt the traditional supermarket and grocer category while eye-raising mergers and acquisitions such as Amazon and Whole Foods deal promise to profoundly impact brand and consumer behavior and expectations.
As an agency that has worked with brands, big and small, up and down the shelf and aisle, we couldn’t help but wonder how these radical changes are affecting them. Whether you’re a legacy brand looking to evolve or a start-up looking to scale, the new landscape of seemingly limitless choices, new shopping platforms, and endless competitors encroaching your product and category territory, the old ways of maintaining and growing your companies are being challenged at every turn.
In our first Straight Talk Live! we invited Noha Waibsnaider, founder of Peeled Snacks, for a discussion about the future of mass CPG food and beverage and the conundrum of how to act small when you’re big…and how to get big when you’re small.
Enjoy.

Brands for Social Change

CBX Strategy — Mon, 05 Nov 2018 22:01:59 +0000

Plant-based Brands Are Their Own Animal

Christina Papale — Thu, 27 Sep 2018 21:16:32 +0000

Recently, the New York Times ran a piece it referred to as the “existential debate” that rages over what plant-based beverages should legally be called. The definition of “milk” is at the heart of the issue, and while the dairy milk industry continues to drive a separation of a category by product defining language, other plant-based categories and brands embrace their unique difference through normalization. The fervor over whether or not plant-based beverages can indeed be called “milk” aside, one thing is clear — plant-based products and brands are their own animal.
Meatless. Dairy Free. Alternative _____.
The advent of plant-based anything started as “the other,” denoting absence of the animal-based ingredient to establish meaning. Forty or fifty years ago, brands not only incorporated category based nomenclature like “dairy, milk or meat,” but the understanding of their product, and its survival, relied on that meaning. Over time, as more plant-based brands launched and established themselves, the category alt language became essential. Think tofu or tempe — what brands come to mind? It took the eponymous “veggie burger” and the first big mainstream brand success of Boca Burger to really break the category. Veggie brands were understood as imitations of an animal-based prototype.
Contrast that to today, when 90% of homes have both plant-based milks AND dairy milks, language like “plant-based” champions the strength of a broad based ingredient category that needs no explanation.
A culture Embraces Plant-Based Strengths
The success of plant-based categories (almond milk is forecasted to reach 3.3 billion by 2022), and the saturation of products and brands within these categories, is proof that a sizable consumer appetite and future growth potential exists.
The growth is based on a culture of consumers who are re-discovering their humanity and their effect on the planet and who love the options that science and technology have provided them. They are driven to plant-based food and beverage categories for a unique experience, particularly in taste, more than to merely replicate what they know. Consumers that were born with soy milk always in the fridge normalize options as being a taste alternative, not a dairy alternative.
Brands Making A Choice To Be Different

With nearly every food category now promoting a non-animal option, from yogurt to pasta to spirits, we are witnessing an evolution of brands in those categories that mirrors the journey niche cultural ideas take from margins to masses. While the non-diary movement started with an unmet functional need (I can’t drink milk!) and broke through to mass as a “dairy alternative,” its growth lies in the normalization and mainstream adoption of plant-based foods.
Critical mass

The evolution of plant-based milks offers a crystal ball view into other category watershed moments. Brands that go beyond a functional point of view (Silk, So Delicious, Daiya) and champion a purpose and reason for being (Forager Project, Good Karma, Califia) are riding a cultural wave that puts brand first.

How brands name and define their reason for being helps set the stage for growth. We’re seeing brands that opt for unique and more meaningful names. Abstract or suggestive brand names are on the rise and poised for broader category growth and expansion. And while we still see suggestively descriptive names like “Oatly” hitting the shelves, this ingredient-focused strategy feels far more limiting (even risky?) today with the potential to handcuff future growth and innovation for the brand.
Through this massive explosion of opportunity, as some brands build whole portfolios on plants and others extend offerings to options with plant-based ingredients, we only see the world expanding further. We look forward to the day when ownable plant-based terms like tempe or tofu are the norm, when brands devise and invent their own unique category terminology, where products we can’t imagine are inside our fridges, all driven by a brand purpose with aspirations beyond deprivation or imitation.
The seeds have been planted and the climate has never been more ideal. The time is ripe to cultivate this category with copious amounts of inspired creativity.
Related: Weird Science: Crazy Times At Expo West