Gerry’s Insights: Meaning… What?

“If you’ve got it, flaunt it,” goes the old expression. Hey, that worked for Madonna! But maybe not so much in beverages, where the path to success often seems to point to downplaying your most distinctive attributes rather than playing them up. Sounds crazy, I realize. That’s likely why it took me so many years to realize it myself. But please bear with me here.

In a category overflowing with me-too items, this seems completely counterintuitive. Surely, if you’ve got a meaningful differentiator, then shouldn’t you be banging the drum about it as loudly as you can? Well, yes, up to a point. But that point may come a lot earlier than you expect.

In the face of skeptical retailers and distributors, it certainly helps to be able to make a case that your brand represents a breakthrough, one that can cut through the clutter and perhaps disrupt a major category or brand, with all the sales upside that implies. Among the early adopters your premium brand is likely to cultivate at first, heralding your unique ingredient (acai! Aronia berry! ube!), nutrient category (probiotics! prebiotics! antibiotics!) or process (cold-brewed! dog-chewed!) can generate that crucial first try.

After all, these are the label readers who desperately want to be first in their social circle to bring news of life-changing developments like – I don’t know, yaupon tea in a bottle?

That’s in the earlier stages, for sure. What seems to happen, though, is that as a brand broadens enough to start to cultivate more of a mass audience – that large “total addressable market” that investors crave these days – those kinds of messages start to fall on deaf ears. As the brand migrates from the natural and specialty channel to conventional grocers and mass merchandisers and maybe even c-stores and dollar stores, it starts to reach shoppers who aren’t into label-reading so much. Maybe not into reading much of anything, for that matter. Suddenly, your brand’s unique properties can start to become confusing, irrelevant or even intimidating.

That might be the point at which you need to dial back the messaging a bit. It certainly doesn’t mean you abandon your recipe, but the messaging might need to move more into the background in favor of benefits that resonate with Walmart, Kroger and Terrible Herbst shoppers. It’s a tough call, because you’re talking less about the very concepts that changed your own life and got you excited about launching the brand in the first place.

Hey, they’re still there on the back of the label, on the website, and in the discussions your sampling team can have with passersby in Aisle 8. Just not on the front panel and bus-shelter ads. Sometimes, that’s the key to getting to the next growth plateau.

What evidence do I have of this? It’s anecdotal, for sure. Come on, I’m just a journalist! (Our low bar is reflected in jokes like this one: What’s the definition of a trend? Two facts and a deadline.) Still, anecdotally speaking, a brand like Bai never seemed to truly ignite until it stopped talking so much about the coffee fruit at its heart, and the benefit to growers of offering an ancillary income stream to the actual coffee beans, and just started describing itself as an antioxidant infusion. (A secondary motive was to dispel any impression it was a highly caffeinated drink, though it did contain some caffeine.) Consumers might not have known too much about antioxidants either, but they knew enough to know they were good, and that messaging gave them psychological cover to drink a delicious beverage that was very low on calories and somehow good for them.

In doing so, Bai was merely reprising the marketing of Vitaminwater, whose very name conferred its benefit, granting users license to drink a highly sweetened beverage that, by the letter of the law, really shouldn’t have been allowed to go out labeled as a water. This hunch seemed to be confirmed by one incident long after Vitaminwater’s acquisition by Coca-Cola, when Coke’s marketers undertook a flavor tweak that didn’t go over well with loyal users. On social media, aggrieved drinkers posted complaints along the lines of, “Look, I know that Vitaminwater doesn’t really have vitamins. I just drink it because it tastes good. And now it doesn’t taste good anymore.”

At the recent Natural Products Expo West, there were abundant signs of beverage marketers taking a step back from what had been core parts of their identity for the greater benefit of bringing more shoppers into the franchise.

Take the Good Sport sports drink brand, whose unique selling proposition was that it harnessed the nutritional content of milk in the service of offering an ideal hydrator. These days, you’re hard pressed to spot any reference to the ultrafiltered, deproteinized milk anywhere but in the fine print of the nutrition panel, even though that’s very much the secret to its efficacy. Too complicated and confusing. Naturally sourced with three times the electrolytes, is what you’re told. Since the brand is partly funded by a dairy company, this must have been a hard decision to make. But if it unlocks a new bout of growth for an excellent, natural product, it will be worth it.

Or take Guru, in the market two decades now as a rare energy brand boasting organic credentials. A recent rebrand downplays the better-for-you and organic qualities of the brand in favor of putting a more overt emphasis on its robust energy delivery and flavor. Flow Beverage similarly has concluded recently that, while the sustainability cred derived from its Tetra Pak cartons still is core to its identity, it’s better off flagging that it’s mineral-infused water that tastes good. Let me stress that none of these brands has abandoned its core concepts. It’s just that the messaging hierarchy has changed.

Of course, there are other, sometimes less savory, reasons for downplaying a key part of your identity. One is the area of claims, explicit or implied. As your brand gets more established, the target on your back with regulators and, more importantly, class action lawyers gets larger and brighter. Once your brand’s superiority has been seeded with those all-important retailers, distributors and early adopters, it may be time to start dialing them down in favor of a more generalized positioning that marketers love to describe as “lifestyle.”

I saw that pattern at Essentia, which evolved to a generalized, and in some ways meaningless, “overachieving H2O.” Did that hurt the brand? Not judging by a test I conducted that I’ve written about here before.

When I came into a wad of free-bottle coupons, I dispensed them to anyone I saw cradling a bottle of Essentia, whether in a Whole Foods café or the New York subway. You seem to really like this brand, I would say as I pressed a coupon into their hand. How come? Several dozen coupons in, I’d yet to encounter a consumer who said anything about rapid hydration or even alkalinity. Tastes good, some said. I know it’s good for me, others said. It soon exited to Nestlé for a nice premium.

Sometimes that evolution is forced. Years ago Penta Water got its hand slapped by the government for the smoke it was blowing about its special molecules, or whatever. (Pre-Internet, Penta actually hung CDs from the necks of bottles so shoppers could learn about its unique structure when they got home.) So Penta dropped that messaging, to no discernible effect. Its better-for-you identity had already been seeded.

And what if your proprietary functional ingredient has been demonstrated in court not to exist? That’s what happened with Bang Energy under legal assault by Monster Beverage over its core “super creatine” ingredient that long was emblazoned on every can on the way to becoming a billion-dollar brand. No such thing, Monster’s lawyers proved. Totally fictitious.

So, the brand duly scrubbed the phrase off its cans (and after some further judicial prodding, off its website and other marketing vehicles). But by then the message about Bang’s special efficacy had long since sunk in, and in any case most buyers no longer were gym rats obsessed with muscle-building. So – whatever. The change didn’t seem to meaningfully weaken the brand.

True, it was spiraling downward in the face of its various legal, distribution and other problems, but its new owner, Monster, shows no signs of doubting that Bang’s prominence can be restored.

In some ways, this is all a disappointing aspect of beverage brand-building. One would prefer not to have to make these compromises. Why hide your light under a bushel? But there comes a growth stage where they may be necessary to get more consumers to pick up your life-altering product.

Longtime beverage-watcher Gerry Khermouch is executive editor of Beverage Business Insights, a twice-weekly e-newsletter covering the nonalcoholic beverage sector.