SprintToSuccess S1E2: Strategy Process

Speaker 1 [00:08] And we're back. Welcome to Sprint to Success, Season 1, episode 2. Now, if you're with us for episode one, you know that we talked a little bit about what Sprint to Success is as a model, who we are as an agency, Interact Boulder, and most importantly, who we're working with, which is Melissa Martinelli of Superfrau. Now, getting to know Melissa over the last week and a half, we've understood a ton of great things about her as an entrepreneur, and most importantly, her biggest challenges. She's got this amazing electrolyte hydration beverage, but it's simultaneously made from upcycled whey, or the food waste part of cheese making. So, what does a cow have anything to do with hydration? Well, these are some of the questions and challenges that have been posed to us that we're gonna be working through in this episode. Episode 2 is all about strategy. So you're gonna really see our strategy team take over. This is the likes of Whitney Siegel and Katia Lee. The two of them are going to be leading us through this episode, talking through all of the foundational pieces that are so important for entrepreneurs to understand before they start any creative. So, understanding why you exist, what is it that we believe in? What is our mission? How do we do what we do? Who is our consumer audience? All of these pieces have to line up because that then allows for even more creative work to be done. Let's get over to the good stuff.

Whitney Siegel [01:44] Hi, I'm Whitney Siegel, and I'm a strategist at Interact. Um, today we'll be walking you through our strategy for Melissa, and we've condensed it to make it hopefully something you can use for yourself. OK, are you ready to do this thing? Let's do it. OK, so Melissa, we're super excited. We've been jamming on this all week. And we have lots to take you through because of the nature of this and wanting entrepreneurs. To have snippets to help them as well. We've, um, spent some time breaking down how we do what we do, um, so I'll, I'll walk you through how we got to where we are, um, your workshops a little more like thought through in that sense, um, because we wanna be able to empower other entrepreneurs to, um, maybe do this for themselves. So we always say we're an agency for people. Our craft is centered around a brand's humanity. Um, and we like to build brands that feel like they are people. Keeping human nature at the forefront of our process creates brands that more easily interact and relate with the actual people they're designed for. You'll see a lot of that today and more so at the end, we'll get into some of the persona around your brand because at the end of the day we want your brand to feel like it's a human that people know how to interact with. I think our overall goal that we want to start with is reshaping the conversation around hydration. Our challenge is pretty big. It's pretty unique. There is a bit of a cognitive dissonance around dairy and hydration. There are some runner forums out there that are talking about milk being the most hydrating beverage, but other than that, most Americans don't think of dairy as hydrating or when they're. Needing hydration, they don't immediately think, I want some dairy. Then we have the whey protein Association, which you already discovered, uh, when people see whey, they think protein. They don't think about anything else. We also want to obviously educate consumers about this great weird product. It's pretty awesome. And we have a lot to do. Um, and then of course, we want to drive trial because if we drive trial, we'll be able to maybe solve some of these things. And then lastly, hydrate the people. I think in getting to know you, we spent a lot of time getting to know hydration. Uh, I think we've all learned a lot about how we need to hydrate too. But one thing I learned that is just such a scary statistic is 75% of Americans suffer from dehydration, chronic dehydration. And I'm not sure how many people actually even really know that, but we're going to get into this. First, we're gonna take you through what the strategic process looks like. Again, this is designed for other entrepreneurs as well, so we want them to know what we do and how they could possibly do it themselves. So, um, the first thing we do is create your brand context. Um, we're gonna synthesize, decode, we're gonna uncover everything we can uncover and then we're gonna distill. And in that distilling, we're gonna figure out who your target is and then get to know them, and we mean like really get to know them, um, and we'll show you what that means. Then we're gonna figure out the tension, and again, we want to figure out how to meet them, not talk at them. So that's where that tension comes into play. What are their need states, how can we help them, and then the positioning territories are our way of doing that. Another way to show anyone out there who's visual, these are all the out the inputs here on the side. So we do research, the 4, the typical 4 C's, um, looking at your, your consumer and culture and competitive, all of those pieces, uh, we do interviews, obviously, we spoke to you, then we do a client intake. Uh, we're continuing to look at you like your research, anything you found, like what, what happened at the farmers' markets, we got to get all of the inputs together. We do a bunch of social listening and then also interact. All we do is food and beverage. So we have a lot of learnings that we can apply as well. So that creates this overall um context. And then within that, we're going to figure out who's your target and then within that, your tension so that everything sits within not just the category, but really our consumer. And if you look at hydration, it kind of falls into 4 overall buckets. Obviously, there's a whole lot more, uh, because hydration is like literally every beverage, um, except for the extreme amounts of coffee I'm drinking right now. But if you narrow down, um, we're looking at hardcore hydration. So, you know, your, your Gatorades, your Powerades, we've got a whole bunch of natural and plant-based hydration, so coconut water, maple water, um, everything on that. Bandwidth, then we've got extreme medical function, we think of like Clear Fast, which used to be used in hospitals, but now it's like a chic beverage. There's Pedialyte, you know, all those things that are pretty intense as well, and then water and waterlike products, and obviously there's juice and all other kinds of things too. So with Melissa, we went through the full competitive in depth, but that would take forever. So, here's a quick slide of everything, the full broad competitive that we looked at with her. And next, we're just going to skip ahead right into the takeaways that we walked Melissa through.

Speaker 3 [06:50] Moving on to the next slide, we have some key takeaways from all of this competitive. I know this is a dense slide, so we'll walk through each of these. Four takeaways. So just starting on the left top, the hydration message is dichotomous. Um, from what we can see with those four categories, hydration products seem to either be speaking to a hyperfocused, high function use case or this lower function kind of any day, anytime use case where the actual benefits of hydration sort of fall to the wayside of the conversation. Moving over to the right, high function design is largely low personality. So a lot of the competition that we've seen, um, the category design isn't really speaking to the consumer as a human, rather to the consumer's goals. So there's this aspect of the whole person that's missing. Why must goals be serious, intense, and divorced from lightness and personality? Over to the bottom left, the competition's design across the high function and low function is largely literal and objective. So from displaying a coconut to signal coconut water, employing a minimalist design system to indicate cleanness, or the use of simple ingredient illustrations, the the competitive set design themes are largely straightforward, so we're missing a little bit of that evocative, expressive energy that I know is already underlying your brand in a lot of ways. So essentially something's missing in the competitive. Why is the hydration use case so limited? Where is the energy when it comes to design and why are we assuming that hydration must equal athletic or upscale?

Whitney Siegel [08:23] So at this point we're gonna switch and start looking into culture. This is something that you can easily do yourself. Um, for us, we try to find insights by digging into everything we possibly can. So taking your competitors and then looking at the people using them and digging up insights on social from. Um, those consumers and their behavior and culture. And in this instance, uh, we even dug up a newspaper from 2012, um, and so you can utilize Google and all of these pieces to your advantage and start finding trends and behavioral, um, trends that you can utilize to start plugging in all of the pieces. Taking all of this, um, is a lot. And so, you know, where do we start? You actually already had a great hunch, and we loved it and have actually, we completely agree, um, hydration products, as Katia said, are very much into two groups. Here on the left, you see the more masculine leaning hardcore super athletes. Um, you get some of the female hardcore as well, those. packs, you get more towards your yogi type female athlete, but millions of us don't fall into either of these categories. So, um, we, we love where your hunch is at, you're spot on. And we know there's a serious need. I already told you 75% of us are chronically dehydrated. And we're not talking about dehydration after a workout. We're talking chronic, like all day, all the time, which is insane. And the second that, NPR cited 80% of Americans don't drink enough at work, either because they don't have time or they have to pay for water, which kind of blew my mind in and of itself, but it just, all of this goes. To show that like our dehydration sports focused, it's focused. We're dehydrated just in life. Um, Americans need sustained hydration and not like a quick hit burst after a tough workout. So from a product standpoint, we kind of believe we're perfect for what we've nicknamed the middle. We're not really a hardcore quick hit of calories and sugar that's gonna last you an hour, um, and we're certainly not as simple as water. So from this viewpoint, like the life or all, all, all the time hydration, our closest competitor is probably coconut water or light electrolyte drinks like basis. And so the most notable difference is this. Uh, uphill battle we have with taste from a communication standpoint. Coconuts obviously are very visual. I'm sure looking at this, you're thinking of vacation, um, but they instantly make a consumer think about islands and sipping out of a coconut. You don't even have to say refreshing. Communication for us is a different story, and it's a, it's a reality we just have to. Uncover and talk about. So visually, we don't have anything as strong as a coconut. We have a cute little cow. And verbally, uh, taste is a difficult thing to describe. The team has had a really hard time describing it to me. And we have back and forth tried to correct each other on what it really tastes like. And we're communicating. ating so, you know, on pack you've got like 0.0 seconds. So the flavor profile truly is unlike anything else. There's really not a comparison for US consumer. And then lastly, we want to keep in mind that we're early stage. We can't do huge education or like trial efforts. So these are realities that we always take into account when we're looking at where you belong. And because we can deliver this sustained hydration, unlike a lot of the big competitors, we believe we should prioritize competing on function, not taste. And we've already outlined how much taste is going to be difficult. It's not that we won't do it, we obviously will. We're just saying function needs to probably be the priority and something we really lean into hard because it's somewhere we can win. And then we also feel the upcycling component and the accessibility of the products give us a really added unique edge. There's so much discarded way, we just love so much about the story and the upcycling, and we know consumers will too. So I'm sure you're wondering this is a whole lot, so where does all this come together and where, where do you belong? We kind of go through this whole process and this is also for the entrepreneurs out there who may or may not be watching this. We go through a process of looking at your competitive, figuring out um who your consumer is, and we really want to understand why, why are they drinking it, what are they doing with it, and we want to know that need state and know how to meet it. And so what we've done here, mainly because we wanna help um other entrepreneurs in this crazy time. Uh, is we've kind of summarized the process that we did to get to where, uh, your, uh, positionings are, and we don't always do this with clients. This is a little bit of like a sort of under the hood. But as we already reviewed, we examine every segment in your category. We've already gone through all like the types of parts and pieces and who their consumers are from there. What we do, which we already talked you through is look at where, where can we have the quickest adoption from like a consumer standpoint. So, it's not that we can't compete against Gatorade. I actually think we can lay all day, any day, but we're narrowing in on like our consumer and where we think we can prioritize a quick adoption because it's a closer use case of the product. And so, from there, looking at this specific subsegment, we started to identify consumer needs states and we do this via social listening. We look at what are people saying because, yes, a lot of our, you know, a lot of big clients love to do consumer research. And there's so much value in that, but when you're trying to be scrappy, you can also learn so much about consumers, um, just by reading what they say, and honestly it's non-biased. So here you will see a quote for basically every single one of these need states. These are why people are drinking coconut water. So what we're trying to do is cross compare why do they need it and what can our product do best. And these are the places where we can win and succeed every day, all day. With pure function though, we don't wanna go after the hardcore athletes. We're, we're interested in hydration for um people who aren't, who don't need that like quick hit right after a serious sports thing, um, and it doesn't mean we don't compete in that space, that's just not who we're going after from the get-go. Feeling good, the super frail feeling. Dehydration symptoms are like people are drowsy, sluggish. I even read that um it makes it hard to concentrate. So all these people who are dehydrated at work, it it impacts short-term memory. Um, so there are some serious feels. Then upcycling and helping the farmers, we're creating, um, we, we are creating a market for something that's being thrown away. So, um, we have a great story and hopefully a story that's gonna continue to grow and get even more awesome. And then we're calling this hydration plus, um. We're actually much bigger than hydration. We talked about this on our early call with you. Um, going, and I learned this from a newspaper, uh, from 2012, going into the hills and drinking whey for a few days was called the Milk Cure. Literally the title of this article in this 2012, uh, newspaper was called The Milk Cure, and it cured digestive and eczema and all these other kinds of skin problems. And honestly they weren't wrong. Like we have a product that can compete with mineral water. We have high B6 and B12, and in doing research, B6 alone has antioxidant, anti-inflammatory properties, and it's now linked with the function of your immune and nervous systems, um, plus our electrolyte content and our lactic acid content for your gut. We're like a literal superfood, um, so there's definitely something there. Yeah, I'm with you. It, it's, it's so cool to see all of the stuff that you put together. It's like, the last 2.5 years of work, and I, like, we talked briefly and then you guys put it all together in this beautiful package. So it's, it's really, it, I feel heard. It's really, really cool to see what you came up with here. Taking um those pieces and just pausing for a second, I just want to say that in parallel, we were using social listening and understanding this consumer on a deeper level. So in social listening and looking at hydration and um rehydration, dehydration, all these conversations, uh, we learned some two things that are sort of mirroring some other things we're finding. So, One thing that I thought was interesting was, um, there are females that are very educated in hydration for their skincare regimen, and this is after I did some negative key searches on like face cream and faces, so they're still talking about it and I'll show you how they're talking about it. But it's part of their like life wellness and like skin regimen. They care about their bodies and their complexion, and we're not talking about just the stereotype stereotypical like yogi girls. Um, we're talking about women who do everything from like kickboxing to like chasing their kids to like babysitting, and they're having really intelligent, already educated conversations about hydration. That's what we care about. And then 2, we're seeing these other conversations around hydration, equally male and female, that are not as clued into solely fitness. So this is 100% backing up everything, you know, your hunch of people don't really fit into these two perfect categories that sports drinks and hydration have set up. Um, and you can see here they're talking about like fatigue, rejuvenation, like fitness is just one thing. So I think it's interesting to see that the conversation is more diverse than fitness. That's really what I'm trying to pull out here. So at this point we're going to move into our consumer and who our actual target is. Uh, when we do this, we, we like to identify the broader target as well as the more specific niche, um, tribes within it that will be our super consumers that we can. Really hone in on to begin with, so now we're going to start with the broad consumer. Meet our normal alts, so you've seen all of these pictures, um, these are the same alts. Um, so sports beverage companies have made us think hydration is for intense athletes. But we know 75% of Americans are chronically dehydrated. It's clear to us that they need hydration for their daily busy lives too. We feel strongly that hydration should be more accessible. Sorry, water, you're not cutting it. We want to focus on the alts, the ones who are severely underrepresented by the market. This includes alternative athletes, AKA all motion counts, although we prefer, if it's fun. Um, as well as just normal everyday life, because we know that whether it's playing with kids, gardening in the hot sun, or dancing with friends, life requires great hydration. So our broader alt target versus the category, you've seen this before too, we're sort of in between these two extremes, the alt space, a deluge of marketing that tells them to look, act, and consume in one of two diametrically opposed ways, the fem yogi or this like hardcore athlete, um, yet neither of those groups, groups remotely represent them. Um, so here's where we started to sort of break them out a little bit. We really liked where your head was at, and Ideally, um, all of our brands would have some niche targets to go after and really dive into, because it creates such a strong core, um, and it gives you some really like tangible ways to talk to them, if you know exactly who they are. And so we agree there really are 3, we're calling them sort of super alts. Um, it doesn't mean that you don't talk to this broader target, um, it's just that we believe these 3, Our groups that will be like our core drive, we anticipate them being early adopters and or super consumers, and we'll focus heavily on them as we get off the ground, um, and we've got a slide for each of them, and then I'll sort of pause, um, so these are the ones in the alternative sports and sports and hobbies, um, we just broke them out separately. We know that Gatorade and Powerade. Um, are just not what they need, does create a crash, and these people are more just like living life, and yes, there's like exercise in it and motion in it, but they need more sustained hydration. And then we've got the skin hydration. This hasn't changed much because we still feel like these women are, would be so on board with Super Pro. Um, they're moms, we love that they're boss ladies, uh, go-getters. They don't feel like this like ultra fem yogi products, like really markets to them. Um, especially Sophie, she's so all about the boss mom. Um, so I think it's important to say, like, you know, they're very diverse, and they all have different passions and focuses, but the common denominator of these women is that they believe hydration is super important, and I mean like daily. And then these are our alts that have this like upcycling, sustainability or way waste uh knowledge. So, um, these alts are experts in their own rights, either through experience in the dairy or cheese making world, or through a personal passion for upcycling and sustainability. These consumers would obviously be drawn to our story. Um, they're attracted to the way our product makes positive change in the world from an environmental sustainable and supply chain POV. At this point we've gone through all of the pieces, we've teed everything up. What we're now going to look at is the solution, the actual positioning. Um, in the real presentation, we showed Melissa multiple positionings. For the sake of links for this video, we're only gonna show the, the winner, the one that's moving forward, um, but it's basically taking all these pieces into account and now how the brand can actually meet the consumer. That's what we look for in this positioning. So instead of the brand marketing to the consumer, consumer or talking to them, um, what we're looking for is how they can really, um, interact and, and be at the consumer's level. All right, so moving into positioning, um, we have, we, we're different. Truth and insight is still there are a whole lot of active humans out there being ignored by the hydration market. It focuses on typical high intensity sports, but typical is boring. Not many humans are typical. We're certainly not. The opportunity here is to create a product that is atypical from product through all the way to design, a product that doesn't try to force anyone into any type of bucket. Um, a product that shows alternative sportsters and lifesters that they're understood, that for once, there's a product designed specifically for them. So, we're way out, we know, but sometimes you got to dance to your own music. Ours is the sound of music. When you think of hydrating coconuts, we think of hydrating alpine cows. We're OK being different. It's actually what makes us extra great. We're an alpine best kept secret, a hydrating super beverage, and we're typically thrown away in the US. But whey, not the protein you're thinking of, is a light, refreshing beverage naturally packed with electrolytes, minerals, gut beneficial acids, and B vitamins that help you have a happy mind and a happy gut without all the added sugar or artificial ingredients. So our brand persona and tone, who is super proud, you've always had this like unique look and feel to you, um, this like quirky, uh, way quirky. Unique, accessible, down to earth, transparent, super, and lighthearted. Most importantly, we're alternative ourselves. I think that's first and foremost for us and our persona. Uh, we love our alts because we're just like them. So from our name to the nature of our product, we're different, quirky even, um, but we're confident in that quirkiness, and we know that others will love us for it too. And I think secondly, we're honest, humble, and down to earth. We come from a sort of humble background. Mulke nourishes farmers. We always aim to be accessible and we wanna be there for those who need it most. And then we always wanna be transparent. I know we're gonna try and be transparent with our supply chain, so anywhere we can be transparent, we want to be. And then we're funny and pun me, obviously. Uh, we really like cowbells and way puns. Life would be really lame without a little lighthearted pun. This is at the core of who we are, and we're always going to be down with, we're always going to be down all the way with our humor. Sorry, totally messed on up. We're having so much fun. Um, so obviously we hard puns and like, we're calling it mom dad humor because humor is one of those things you can dive into with entrepreneurs and like create cool slides around, um, and we'll, we'll frequently talk about like. Who's the right person because humor is just so broad. So I think giving it a little more context, and you actually said this first, this like dad humor-ish feel, um, it's so good. And um it's really important. So we're focused on some pretty serious issues. And you talked about this too, like, big time hydration. I think there's lack of accessibility to great hydration. There's great accessibility to some pretty bad products with a lot of sugar, um, but not to better products. Then there's the massive food waste in our country and even the plight of our dairy farmers, um, but we know the way to a US consumer's heart and the way to create change isn't by making life more serious or more difficult than it already is. We actually have this conversation with brands all the time when they're in something like regenerative agriculture. Anything to do with the climate or things that are pretty depressing, it's kind of hard to talk about and it shuts a lot of consumers down if you talk about it from a really serious or depressing place. So you're totally spot on and coming at this uh with the tone that you've really kind of brought out yourself. Um, so we're here to hydrate, educate, and have fun doing it. We want to be lighthearted, funny, use as many ponds as humanly and callly possible. And bring light to these issues in a way that has action and positive change behind it. Nothing depressing, we'll leave that to the news. Plenty of that out there right now. Um, we are also targeting alternative hydration consumers and alternative sportsters, so our tone is slightly quirky, dare we say, mom, dad humor-esque. It keeps these serious issues and our brand down to earth and lovable. And I saw these pictures on your Insta and I love them because I felt like both represent this like awesome personality that we have. We're just kind of badass like these two women.

Speaker 1 [26:57] Well, I think it's fair to say that our strategy team deserves a nap after that sprint. Now that we've established the brand foundation for Superfrou, identifying its place in category, culture, the consumer's life, and how to represent itself, all tied into a singular positioning, we'll start the task of creative. The first thing that we're gonna do is start with mood boards to set the visual tone for the brand, now that we've just set the verbal tone for the brand. So tune in next week and see how we put pen to paper.