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11.11.2009
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StumbleUponCatalyst for Change
Disrupting Markets is About Being an Active Cultural Change Agent
As a market research firm specializing in understanding culture and cultural change, we often marvel at how much evidence (and cash register sales) it takes for major food companies to recognize that a change is worth responding to. Then there is the question of the typical response to trends in food culture.
Often, the response is simply to hire management consultants and acquire an emerging brand once it has sustained profit-generating revenues well in excess of $200 million a year. But this is long after these emerging brands have already established a foothold in the mainstream marketplace. While this approach saves the company the expense and stress of being innovative internally, it does little to strengthen a company’s own umbrella trademark, since the acquired "innovation" is usually a brand consumers will never associate with them.
What we rarely see is established food industry players investing in strategies that make their established trademarks active agents of cultural change in the marketplace. For the most part, we see companies reacting to cultural change, not causing it to spread. The difference does matter.
The most powerful brand-building advantage that has ever existed in consumer culture is to be a brand that drives change from the cultural margins to widespread acceptance. Most legacy CPG brands built all their key equities by convincing us to buy things we didn’t really need, but nevertheless became captivated by. For a long time, the critical cultural margin the food industry was able to leverage was a "scientifically enhanced future." We marveled at the technical wizardry that makes certain iconic brands work: Cheetos and Kraft Singles.
Driving change from the cultural margins isn’t much different today, except that the source of innovative ideas must now come from existing raw material of consumer culture, not the technological wizardry of patented food processing if it hopes to resonate with today’s consumers. Brands that have done this successfully are Kashi, Starbucks and Activia. Each began with a niche consumer base disregarded for years by the mainstream food industry as on the outside and largely irrelevant. Now, they are enormous businesses, due in no small measure to their lack of fear in taking the “fringe” into the mainstream.
Activia is perhaps the most successful example of driving cultural change rapidly. Within four years they have transformed “probiotics” into a household word when, not so long ago, the notion of yogurt with billions of added bacteria was repulsive and irrelevant to most American consumers.
The key for large food companies to be an active cultural change agent involves researching the cultural margins of the present, but not for crystal ball visions of the future. The cultural margins are where "weird" things (consumers, products, services, ideas) are challenging cultural conventions and producing the raw material of broader cultural change. Sifting through the cultural margins for something with potential to grow a business is where good research-driven trends analysis can lead to disruptive innovation. This is not about directly asking a random sample of consumers about their unmet needs. And it’s definitely not about talking to your loyal consumers. If a consumer isn’t challenging convention in a category then they have little to add to a company’s innovation efforts even though they may be the eventual audience for long-term innovation (they just don’t know that today). Much of traditional new product development market research focuses on the wrong consumers with the wrong mode of inquiry. Unleashing the power of the cultural margins to make brands active change agents requires the subtle indirection of ethnographic analysis.
But the biggest hurdle to being an active cultural change agent is not methodological at all. No, the greatest obstacle is projecting the impatience of the brand manager onto a brand new venture. Driving cultural change doesn’t always work at the pace of Wall Street, even when, down the line it yields enormous rewards. If food companies want to find a way to create breakthrough innovation internally, not by checking out at the Mergers & Acquisition cash register, becoming active agents of cultural change is unavoidable.
