Stretch Marks

A few weeks ago I wrote about a branding difference between the UK and the USA, identifying the relatively low presence of Celebrity Chef food brands here.

Last week I read that while Chefs might be missing a trick, other appeals to a higher branding authority clearly weren’t.
Martha Stewart, fresh from stamping her name on new housing communities and home renovation products, is planning her first line of food products.
That seemed like a pretty wide portfolio for any brand, Housing to DIY to Food, and did raise for me the question of what constitutes a brand stretch too far.

Barb Stuckey recently wrote in The Morning Cup about Shell selling energy drinks and I’ve seen their brand on Ice Creams in Holland. At first sight, two completely crazy brand stretches, but given that Shell is also a retailer with thousands of gas station shops, perhaps the intention was just to launch own label foods. Retailer brands do have powerful stretch capabilities.

It’s frequently stated that 9 out of 10 new product launches fail. What’s rather less well known is that 1 out of 2 brand stretch launches fail also!!! The odds are better but you might as well bet on heads or tails – clearly brand stretch is not the low investment, low risk idea that many companies seem to believe. The key, as always, is simply stated and yet terribly difficult to achieve.

We really need to understand our brands and our consumers with searchlight clarity, and most important of all we need to be honest with ourselves about their real strengths and weaknesses.

Brand Stretch development is no place for the corporate over optimism so often used as a substitute for true brand insight. Failure here can damage the parent brand as well as kill the extension.

Me, I’m thinking of stretching my consultancy from innovation to climate control. After all, with a name like Rapid Ice, we must be OK on global warming.

Lets tell it like it is

“We pressed 9 Apples, we mashed 2 Bananas, we crushed 50 Raspberries, we squeezed 2 Oranges, we squashed 247 Cranberries”

That’s the ingredient list on the back of a very successful UK brand of Fruit Juices and Smoothies. Innocent (do have a look at their web site too, http://www.innocentdrinks.co.uk/) have broken the mold of their market with their innocent approach.

Given the growing mistrust that consumers have about too much of the food industry, wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could all be like Innocent. But, I hear many of you saying, “It’s easy for them. I have an ambient long life product which needs its preservatives, colorings and flavors…..”

Maybe …. or maybe like a friend of mine in the industry, you might find that changing as many as you can from artificial to natural gets you a better taste, a cleaner ingredient list and surprisingly even a lower cost.

And why stop there? Aren’t many food factories really just giant kitchens?

In kitchens, we have recipes not ingredient lists, we use natural products, we’re careful about the ingredients we buy, we check the quality of meat, vegetables and grains and reject any that aren’t good enough for our family.

In kitchens we keep things clean and if we’re really good we keep washing our hands and making sure that we don’t drop hair or our watches into what we’re cooking.In kitchens we keep our raw meat away from our cooked foods.

In kitchens we’re proud to say “I cooked that”

In kitchens we are almost as good as the food industry is in factories.So how about we start talking about our industry a little differently.

Let’s be proud of our great big kitchens, our obsession with hygiene, our rigid buying standards.

Let’s tell our family consumers how we’re not so different from them.

Let’s tell them who was the cook on the shift that made this product.

Let’s even let them look into the kitchen. Whenever they want. After all a web cam is pretty easy and we’ve nothing to hide – have we?

Food snobbery ...

The term “junk food” seems to be journalistically used in a way which is at best lazy and at worst sheer snobbery.

Despite its wide 21st Century use, the expression dates back to the early 1970’s and Michael Jacobsen, Director of the CSPI.

Most current definitions suggest a food is junk if it is high in fat, salt or sugar and of course the words “junk food” are rarely seen without “fast food” in close association.

Government, celebrities and food writers look down their noses at Franchise Burgers, Chain Chicken and Delivered Pizza. Suggest “fries with that” and the 5 grams of fat are part of a global conspiracy but Duck a l’Orange at a rather exclusive little restaurant where the Maitre D’ knows me well, and the 20 grams of fat are just fine!

A super chocolate dessert recipe in a foodie’s magazine is only 549 calories per serving – and 23 grams of fat, 15 of them saturated, but that’s fine if it’s for a Dinner Party dear!

European nutrition analysis shows many fast food outlets serving lower fat and calories than their trendier restaurant equivalents and I bet it’s the same here too.

It gets called junk because it’s fast, because it’s urban, because it’s cheaper. Pizza in a fashionable, minimalist Italian style restaurant with other young families is real food, attractively served with a hint of just like “Mama made”, but have a pizza delivered to an urban apartment and eat it from the box whilst watching TV, and its junk.
It’s the price not the nutrition that frequently determines the description.

This is snobbery not commentary.