December 36, 2020 – Adapting in This Continued Year
I woke up today and it still doesn’t feel like I am in a new year. It feels like I just got an extended 2020, and I have a feeling it’s going to be like that for a while, so I better get pretty comfortable with a very short 2021 and a very long 2020. December 36th it is!
Yesterday I interviewed two superstar powerhouses for Facebook and Advertising Week’s What Matters virtual conference. Debbie Lee is the chief marketing officer of a company called 4moms. They effectively market and sell tech-based baby equipment and supplies to parents. And Jessie Becker is the SVP, Marketing at Impossible Foods, which develops plant-based substitutes for meat products.
A lot of the topics we talked about were around the realm of innovation – who do they think got innovation right this past year, what have we had to face, what have we learned, what are they threatened by, and how do we think about innovation moving forward. Something that was really interesting was a couple of the same key words and ideas kept coming up: authenticity, communication, connection, and the concept of how can we disrupt the existing way of doing business. While we’re not adding a new product, instead it’s about adapting.
When you look at a company like Impossible Foods, what’s really fascinating is you’ve got a company that really sells itself based on in-person experiences to sample the product, and they can’t do that now. They can’t sell plant-based burgers in person anymore, so how do you sell to a consumer and build the trust and relationship in the same way?
The same thing could be said for 4moms. They’ve got this levitating, cradled baby carrier that’s automated, and they’re showing that the baby feels more nurtured and soothed in this levitating, virtual environment, which allows the parent at home during these times to be more effective and still have that connection to their child, but they don’t have to be too far away because they are still in the realm of performing at work while also looking over and knowing their baby is being taken care of. And so expressing and communicating to the consumer that they care, and doing so in a way of targeted advertising for each unique consumer, it helps embrace that need, want, click, must buy process.
It was really interesting and insightful to have that conversation around how the way they we leverage the power of technology can be utilized to our advantage when you’re talking about these big brands. While the world is accelerating and moving rapidly, at the end of the day it’s the simplest of human traits that we tend to rely upon and lean on. Those things are front and center again in the marketing world.
I think innovation comes with simplicity. In a world full of distractions where we’re all over the place, we seem to keep coming back to the human elements that haven’t changed that much over the past few thousand years. They haven’t changed that much; we’re just slightly tweaking and maneuvering the existing toolsets around us to make fire, to make fire more efficiently, to make it so that everyone can see it, to make the right type of fire for each individual – but we’re still making fire at the end of the day. That was really interesting to me as we navigate through the next part of this year.
