Would your CX get a stamp of approval?
When it comes to buying a new computer, there’s a checklist we use to see if it’ll work for us. We think about all the different components that come together to build the final product and figure out if it has the right CPU, processing power, and RAM. But at the end of the day…does it really matter if you’re just using it to send emails and watch cat videos? Well, Andy Grove and Dennis Carter at Intel think so. When they launched the “Intel Inside” campaign in 1991, suddenly people started caring about microchips and what their computers ran on. And that ingredient branding campaign continues to influence buying decisions today. Can our marketing campaigns do the same?
Today’s episode features an interview with Kimberly Shenk, Co-Founder and CEO of Novi Connect. She works to make brands more transparent with their customers and is a champion of ingredient branding. She shares all the secrets of why in order to have a successful brand you need to be more open with your customers. Click ‘play’ and find out how.
--------
"Telling authentic stories to your consumers isn’t a trend—it's a requirement." - Kimberly Shenk
--------
Time Stamps
* (0:00) How ingredient branding changed how you burn the midnight oil
* (8:53) The story of Novi Connect
* (10:34) The secrets to getting your customers to trust you
* (12:41) The data behind ingredient marketing
* (14:24) Novi Connect’s customer journey
* (17:42) Why you need ingredient branding
--------
Sponsor
This podcast is presented by Oracle CX.
Hear more executive perspectives on CX transformation at Oracle.com/cx/perspectives
--------
Links
Connect with Kimberly on LinkedIn
Narrator: It’s almost midnight on a dreary Monday in February. A bleary-eyed CEO sits hunched at his desk, sluggishly making his way through the day’s endless pile of emails. Heavy is the head that wears the crown. Almost as heavy as his eyelids straining against the brightness of the screen in front of him. He doesn’t dare turn on the light, for fear of waking up his wife and infant son in the next room. Running his own small podcasting agency is not always glamorous. Sure, during the daytime he’s the big boss man. But when all his employees are fast asleep, he often finds himself hammering out contract details and paying invoices late into the night. In those lonely moments, the CEO has no one else to rely on. It’s just him and his trusty computer.
His computer never even breaks a sweat. (And it doesn’t need to fan itself down at the volume of a leaf blower either.) But with so many laptops and tablets on the market to choose from, how did he settle on old faithful– this particular computer? Well, it was that little blue circle in the corner that sealed the deal. Intel Inside. That’s all he needed to see, and he was sold. Did he even understand what it meant? Not really. Does he know the inner workings of how computers work, or even the internet? Not exactly. But he knows what that blue sticker conveys: power, speed, quality, reliability– the top of the line, best of the best, cream of the crop. Since 1991, consumers have known that if you want the best processor money can buy, you get Intel. Either that or you’ll end up running a second-rate podcast production company. And of course, for our intrepid CEO, that was never an option.
You see, in the late 1980s, personal computers were starting to become more readily available. With the PC market on the rise, companies had to figure out how to differentiate themselves in a sea of CPUs. The everyday consumer wasn’t the most technologically sophisticated buyer. Their mental checklist when it came to computers was based on price and meaningless features. As famous as Intel is now, back then, they were relatively unknown. Their 386 microprocessor was a major technical breakthrough in personal computing. But despite its technological prowess, it lagged in sales. So what do you do when you know your product is better than the competition, but consumers keep blindly choosing the established brand names?
Intel co-founder Andy Grove and marketing specialist Dennis Carter decided to do something that at the time was considered hopeless. They wanted to communicate technical information to the unsophisticated buyer in the simplest way possible. Up til that point, marketers tended to focus heavily on technical jargon designed to appeal to industry insiders. But in order to get their product to appeal to the layman, Andy and Dennis decided to pull a 180.
The first step was putting together an uncomplicated logo to easily grab the attention of consumers. They landed on a simple blue font reading “Intel Inside” within a disconnected circle. They put it on all Intel products as well as all products made by other manufacturers that ran on Intel. They made a bold $250 million dollar bet on the new campaign. They ran ads that attempted to make the “Intel Inside” logo synonymous with “How to spot the very best PCs.”
In case you’ve been living under a rock, I’ll spoil the ending for you: It worked. Soon, customers were demanding Intel products. Even if they didn’t even know what a microchip did, they knew that if they were going to invest in a computer—if it wasn’t Intel, it wasn’t worth it. Intel became a dominant force in the market, and today boasts a market cap north of $210 Billion. In hindsight, Intel pulled off one of the most magically brilliant marketing campaigns of all time. When you really think about it, Intel managed to get customers to believe their products were superior by simply adding a sticker. Don’t you wish it was always that easy? Well, if you follow Intel’s playbook, sometimes it is.
Because today we’re learning about the power of putting the ingredients front and center. And how that one simple trick–thinking from the inside out– can change everything.
Welcome to Often Imitated, a podcast about remarkable experiences from the past, and how they inspire people to create great customer experiences today.
This episode is all about ingredient branding. How Intel turned the computer industry on its head with the “Intel Inside” campaign…and how you can do the same in your industry today. In this episode, we’ll hear from Kimberly Shenk, Co-Founder and CEO of Novi Connect, about how they take the concept of ingredient branding far beyond what Intel ever imagined.
Often Imitated is brought to you by the generous support of our friends at Oracle. Make every interaction matter with Oracle Advertising and CX. Connect all your data and empower your entire business to deliver exceptional customer experiences from acquisition…to retention…and everything in between. Hear more executive perspectives on CX transformation at oracle.com/cx.
How many marketing campaigns can you point to and say they single handedly invented a new marketing strategy?
You may not have heard of ingredient branding, but I’m sure you recognize some of the most famous examples. You probably even own a few. You might have cooked dinner tonight on a Teflon pan. Or filled up your tank on Chevron with Techron. If you’re going to the movie theater this weekend, I hope they’ve got Dolby surround sound. Ever go to buy a truck and find yourself asking, “That thing got a Hemi?”
Ingredient branding aims to take one component or ingredient of a product, put it squarely in the spotlight, and give it it’s own identity. It creates a key point of differentiation, and even more importantly, it forces a difficult question on the competition. Because if this Chromebook isn’t powered by Intel, what the heck kind of cut-rate processor am I getting?
Intel’s ingredient marketing campaign brought attention not to the computer as a whole, but to one small component: the microprocessor. And In the eyes of the consumer, that microprocessor alone made Intel’s products far superior to anyone else’s on the market. Even today, whether or not we understand what having the latest Intel chip means, we know that sticker means we’re getting quality ingredients in our products.
These days, we take for granted that as we shop, we’re constantly examining what’s inside the things we buy. Vegan, sustainable, organic, Non-GMO, fair-trade …the list is endless. For CX leaders, this means that every element that goes into your product matters. Every link in the supply chain makes a difference. Consumers are paying attention, and they care about the ingredients. If brands aren’t making conscious choices about how their products are made, they stand to pay an enormous price. Today, we’re talking to someone who’s helping businesses navigate the system with honesty and transparency like never before. Kimberly Shenk is the Co-Founder and CEO of Novi Connect. She’s built a platform that allows companies to build their products with an unprecedented level of care and concern at every step of the process.
Kimberly: Novi is essentially an end-to-end product development platform. So all that means is that we help brands find and buy transparent and sustainable materials so they can build better products for consumers.
Narrator: The truth is, pretty much every manufacturing brand is in need of a service like Novi. You might be surprised to hear it, but most companies are completely in the dark about where their products actually come from.
Kimberly: A lot of brands do not know where their materials are coming from. And I think that was pretty shocking for me to uncover. I didn't really realize that I, I thought at least brands knew what they were putting into their products before they put them in market.
But a lot of brands are just marketing engines. They slap a label on a product and out the door. It goes, they tell an amazing story. And I mean, we can put the fault on the brand, but they don't have the tools to do it. And the industry has just been set up in that way. Yeah. It's everything from, you know, the mattress that you sleep on to the paint on your walls to we found formaldehyde aldehyde carpets.
I mean, it's everywhere, uh, electronics. Um, but then of course food and, and personal care products and household cleaning goods. So it's pretty immense market.
Narrator: In today’s consumer landscape, the ingredients are a huge part of the story, and the customer experience. It matters to people if it’s organic, fair trade, and conflict free. And if you can back up those claims, consumers are willing to pay a premium. But many brands don’t care. EIther that, or they simply don’t know enough about how their products are made to give consumers that kind of confidence.
Kimberly: So the product is basically solving for this layer of, um, we kinda like to call it trust, uh, trust throughout the industry. And so the trust actually starts with the consumer. They want to be able to trust what the brand is putting out there as true. And we've operated in a world in the past. Um, that is.
You know, unregulated brands can make claims, um, and nobody's watching and there's a lot of greenwashing that's happened and consumers are waking up to that. So what that means is the brands are actually looking for legitimacy and want to trust that the materials, um, that they're using actually can have the data to back up the claims that they're making.
Um, so when they go, when they think about putting a product in market, a lot of times they're trying to take a landscape of what consumers care about. So this could be something like. I want to make sure my products vegan and I'm using responsibly sourced Palm oil and it's cruelty-free and it meets whole food standards for clean.
And, and so what they're basically doing is, um, on Novi. Setting those requirements and searching for materials that have been pre-vetted to meet those requirements. Um, but the hard part about it, if you think about a way a brand brings a product to market is they might set those requirements from a business go to market standard, but they've got to have those funnel down to the.
Who is actually formulating or making the good, and that's an actual chemistry activity. Um, and so it's working very closely with the product designer. Who's actually gonna find the materials, um, and then source them. And then of course you have the person purchasing it and that's a whole finance activity.
So it covers a lot of the different areas, um, in a business that brings a product to market, but it all is, you know, the thread that's consistent throughout. The whole thing is the data.
Narrator: The data is the key. Of course the whole idea sounds great on paper. I want to make a product that’s toxin-free, upcycled, sustainably sourced, with compostable packaging. Great, but if you can’t tell me what all those things are going to cost, for example, it all falls apart.
Kimberly: the data is now becoming super important to understand. Not only what we want to put into our products, but how the things that we're putting into our products from. But that is just the surface level. And the next step is, um, you know, how much am I going to pay for it? And how long is it going to take me to get that material?
And that's all a consideration set as a product, a brand is bringing a product to market. And unfortunately that data is very hard and not transparent in the industry. And so what you see is a lot of off table negotiations and as brands getting much different pricing all over the place, I'm not having reliable shipping.
Understanding of when they're going to get their products. So a lot of this is just when we think about data is important across the whole thing. It's not just the, how the makeup of the product or the ingredient where it came from, but it's also everything down through the transaction to make things more accessible and fair across the industry.
Narrator: Now you see how Novi is taking ingredient branding and flipping it on its head. It’s not just about spotlighting one small part of your product at the center of your marketing campaign. It’s about reverse-engineering the product itself, creating it entirely out of meaningful components that you can then highlight in the marketing. Think about that again. As a CX leader, it's your job to understand what your customer values. Novi lets you align every single part of your product with the core values your customer cares about most. That creates an opportunity to engender brand loyalty on a whole nother level. Kimberly told us exactly how it works from start to finish.
Kimberly: So a company that comes to us and is excited to start using us to develop products, they start by. Building a product, honestly, they understand, Hey, this could be a face wash. I'm going to, I'm going to build a shampoo, a chapstick, you name it. They just have an idea of the product they want to take to market.
And then the next phase of that is understanding the requirements that they want that product to meet. So this can be. I want it to be vegan. I want to sell in target. I want to sell in the EU. I want to be plant derived. They have a bunch of different things that they want to meet. They actually use us use the Novi platform to, as a playground, to discover all of these different requirements.
We do mystify the whole thing. Our play as they all can be, you know, Dakota down into zeros and ones at the end of the day, it's just data. And so we do that with, uh, uh, with the navigate, we navigate the complexity of the industry. Um, but then, uh, through that, the product designer now comes into play. And so they'll start searching on the platform like you would think on Amazon, but it's to find materials that meet their.
So there are now searching for a surfactant or a Mo mullions, but the beauty of it is we've done the business work to make sure that, um, the, the material is compliant with what they're needing. And this could be. Obviously an ingredient. This could be a fragrance. This could be a packaging component. Um, there's lots of different things.
When we think about materials, um, that, uh, that a brand would want. Um, and so the only difference here though, that I would say from a traditional e-commerce like experiences. Now, when you're doing this, you're developing a physical. So you have to test everything by hand. There's a physical component to this.
So we'll have lots of options for them. And so the order is actually a sample border, and that is so that they can start testing and iterating on a bench is what we call it, but they go into the lab to find that product final product design and. Um, that's offline. That's not done on the platform. Except when you think about, um, building the final state of the product, you are working with a combination of materials and that combination is either going to meet a standard or not, and there's interdependencies there and that's a data problem again.
And so they're able to use the technology to facilitate. Iteration and design. Um, and then once that final combination of materials is decided on, they order everything. And the beautiful part of that is they have complete transparency from all the materials when they're going to show up. Um, and it's also just navigating.
Sometimes it can be 30 to 50 different suppliers that you would traditionally negotiate price and do manual purchase order. Um, you can just do that in one place. Um, and then from there, obviously it's, it's little more like a transaction. That you would typically experience as a consumer. Um, the logistics are handled.
Shipping is handled, uh, and then you send that product to your manufacturer and, and the, you know, that's off platform and they go from there.
Narrator: Okay, so you’ve built a brand new product from the ground up with your core values in mind. Now the challenge is taking those values and communicating them to the market. So like-minded consumers can find you and support the conscious choices you’ve made. Remember Intel’s little blue sticker with the disconnected circle? The sticker: Ingredient branding’s best friend.
Kimberly: the data is showing that 85% of consumers out there are now demanding transparent products. Um, but the definition of transparency is pretty gray and it's really hard for a consumer to navigate on their own. And so what the industry is, you know, gravitated towards are these badges and the badges are basically a way to prove that you meet a certain.
Part of the transparency sustainability story. And so some of the badges are very focused on health. Um, and you know, EWG would be an example or a USDA organic and some are very focused on environment. And so that might be FSC certified or whatever. And so as part of telling them new marketing stories, Um, in a new world where consumers are much more skeptical, you know, you can't just go out there and make a radical claim, um, without having any data to back it up, these badges are a way to essentially.
Prove that you meet a standard because there's been some smart, scientific body that's put together something that helps define part of your transparency story. Um, and you meet that and you've gotten that badge of honor. And so the reason there are really important though, is consumers are looking to them to make decisions and to be making, buying, purchase purchasing decisions.
And so brands are constant. Trying to understand which one is going to drive more revenue. And so some of it is, um, brands will go after as many of them as they can sometimes they'll understand that the certain customer segment they're going after cares about one badge, more than the other. Um, but, and all in all what we're finding.
Badges or equaling revenue at the end of the day, that's just the, you know, the simplest equation to come down to. And so that's the marketer's most important objective, uh, to get products out there that meet those as they sell.
Narrator: Driving revenue with a sticker. Andy Grove would be proud. For some brands, it's about building the product with your core values in mind, and finding customers who align with those values. For others, it’s probably just about the bottom line. But either way, Novi is driving transparency and sustainability forward, as more and more companies see the dollar value in putting the ingredients front and center. There’s proof that the model works, which means the space is only going to continue expanding.
Kimberly: the most interesting part of what we have seen as an output of, um, brands using the platform and what they've been able to deliver to their end user and their customers is, um, honestly, they've, they're able to achieve sustainability metrics and health metrics and, and, you know, whatever you call clean, uh, or define as clean in a way they never realized they could do before.
Um, and that's largely just because if you. If you really looking at what they had as options before to select materials, it was just a small subset of what they could get their hands on. I mean, when you do this manually and you like back in the day when we all just showed up to Walmart or whatever, and that was the only store we shopped at, that was all we thought that was available.
Um, and so now they're able to tell really, really incredible, authentic stories. And do that with an immense amount of information, like back to the, they know, you know, what farm it came from, or they just had, they know what country is manufactured and they can tell a more compelling and authentic story to their consumer.
Um, and in doing so catcher, a whole new, um, traunch of consumers, and that's usually, you know, younger millennials and gen Z, who, it's not a trend for them, it's like a requirement. Um, and so that's the thing that I think has been most interesting as these brands are. Are creating products that we never knew could existed before.
Often ingredients we never knew could exist have existed before, because we're doing this just like in a more scalable way where we're driving and we're using data to drive innovation and it's pushing, what's really cool about it is it's pushing it all the way down the supply chain. So now the creators of the materials, they're the ones creating the thing that the brand is going to purchase are actually innovating on what they're putting out there for brands to this.
Narrator: We’re no longer living in the early 90s, in a time where customers were largely uneducated about their purchases. Nowadays, consumers are passionate about sustainability and transparency. Plenty of brands have learned the hard way that one wrong step can unleash the wrath of Reddit and TikTok.
Conversely, plenty of smart CX leaders understand that it’s more crucial now than ever to identify what your customers care about, and reflect it back to them as a core part of your brand. After all, your competitors are now putting those ingredients front and center in the minds of your customers. Which means your customer is wondering what’s inside your product too. And these days, if you don’t tell them, they’re probably not buying it.
So if you’re just as excited about all this as we are, Kimberly has a final thought for you.
Kimberly: we are definitely hiring. We're growing like crazy. We're looking for folks that have a passion for, uh, sustainability, um, and to drive a change in, in the world and consumer goods. So would love to, to bring anyone on that wants to be part of that category.
Narrator: When Intel did it, it was purely a marketing decision. But modern day ingredient branding is based on the idea that consumers care how things are made. And this level of accountability is a one-way street. We’re not going back to the days when no one cares. Transparency and sustainability are only going to become more important. And more profitable. Today, marketing the ingredients inside your products makes ethical and financial sense. But if you’re going to market them, you better have the data to back up the claims.
After that, the rest is easy, all you need is a sticker.
This podcast is brought to you by the generous support of our friends at Oracle. Make every interaction matter with Oracle Advertising and CX. Connect all your data and empower your entire business to deliver exceptional customer experiences from acquisition…to retention…and everything in between. Hear more executive perspectives on CX transformation at oracle.com/cx.
This is your host, Ian Faison, CEO of Caspian Studios. Thank you for listening to another episode of Often Imitated. If you like what you’re hearing, tell one friend. This podcast was narrated by me, Ian Faison, and produced by Mackey Wilson, Ezra Bakker Trupiano, and Jon Libbey. You can learn more about our team at CaspianStudios.com