Empathizing with consumers allows you to get to know them better, and as a result, better understand how to give them what they need. Don’t underestimate the impact that this kind of consumer kinship will have on your brand going forward as you poise yourself for growth. Ryan Pintado-Vertner is the founder of Smoketown LLC. He joins Elliot Begoun to talk about why you should give priority to empathizing with consumers. Human beings are extremely complicated, but with empathy, you may just be able to peel back the layers further and gain a more complete understanding of who it is you’re serving.

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Listen to the podcast here

Empathizing With The Consumer With Ryan Pintado-Vertner

I want to make one very true compliment and comment. I feel like Ryan is one of the best brains in the business. Since the first time I met him, it was like a kindred spirit. I think he is brilliant and he has a unique approach to strategy. If no one else reads this, this is still going to be a great conversation because I love riffing and talking about this stuff with you. Thanks for coming on and I’ll let you go ahead and introduce yourself.

I appreciate that so much, Elliot. I’m super honored to be here. My name is Ryan Pintado-Vertner. For the audience who know me and who don’t know me and are trying to figure out what the story is with the handlebar mustache, here’s the story. I have a seventeen years old daughter. She introduced me to making TikTok videos and it all went downhill from there. I went into a blur, I woke back up and I had a handlebar mustache and that was the TikTok video. I’ll leave you with that little bit of tidbit.

Let me tell you a little bit more about me and about Smoketown. It is a boutique consultancy that is built to help early-stage brands and emerging brands across the natural product ecosystem reach their full potential, get stronger marketing ROI and support their overall development as they scaled and thrive. In particular, one of the things that we focus on is empathy. We are all about understanding where the consumer is coming from. We’re all about understanding where you as founders are coming from, where your retail partners are coming from and we build marketing and sales strategy from there. That is who we are in a nutshell. I’m sure we’re going to get into more of it, but that’s the gist of it.

I mentioned at the onset that we are kindred spirits and the biggest place we align of many is around this concept of empathy. Empathy truly is a superpower. I’ll tell you a little bit about how I view it and then I’ll ask Ryan to do the same. First of all, just to define it, there’s a big difference between empathy and sympathy. Empathy is the ability to see things through the eyes of those that you are in contact with. It’s to be able to walk a mile in their shoes.

It’s to understand the motivations, the inherent fears, doubts, things that excite them, things that motivate them. To have that understanding and ability to view your consumers in that manner is critical because that’s why consumers buy brands. They buy brands emotionally and emotively. It needs to be leveraged now more than ever, given where we are in the state of the world. Ryan, share your perspective on empathy and how it can be used? How you try to leverage it with the brands that you work with?

We think of it at two levels. The first level and the most important one is we believe in building brands with purpose. We believe in changing the world and leaving a better planet that’s just more vibrant and more likely to support all of us in the future.

You set the bar low. There are no grand dreams or thoughts?

All we want to do is change the world. The motivation for that is we care about our brothers, sisters, neighbors, and everyone around us. That’s actually where empathy for me starts most foundationally. To make that more pragmatic, it’s a fact that in the business of CPG and consumer brands, the bottom line is that we’re solving problems for people. We have a way of talking about this that anytime a consumer buys something, and this is not consumer theoretically, this is you, this is me, this is my seventeen and my fifteen-year-old, anytime any of us buy something, we are hiring it to do a job for us.

Probably 90% of the time, we’re firing something else. We are either firing it forever or we are firing it just for that occasion. What makes what we all do so difficult and the reason that it’s stressful and that you need a whole ecosystem of partners to help you build a brand is that that job description, the reason that someone has to hire your product or fired your product is not posted anywhere. Human beings are super complicated. We say one thing and do another. We are not very articulate and even in touch with why we make decisions because so much of it is subconscious. Because the job to be done that our brands are doing for consumers is so difficult to figure out, the absolute most important thing that every brand builder has to get good at is empathizing with the consumer. It’s through the process of empathizing that you can start to deduce, “What is that job description and how do I nail it?”

I do think that the majority of the audience have started their brands for exactly that reason. One is because they want to change the world and two, because they’re trying to solve a problem or fit an unmet need. The better you understand that problem, the better you understand that unmet need from the lens or from the perspective of your consumer, the more effective you can be in helping them understand how you’re solving it for them. I’m going to put you on the spot here. Tell me about a brand that you feel is nailing it with their ability to empathically connect with their consumer.

There’s actually quite a lot of brands in the audience who were getting it done. The one that I’ll talk about in part because I spent a lot of time in a conversation with them, we’ve got a podcast that featured him, is the OLIPOP team. OLIPOP is a soda alternative that, in addition to tasting exactly dead-on like soda, it’s high in fiber, low in sugar, and incredible net carb profile. They built a fantastic business. One of the things that David and his cofounder and the balance of their team have done in over the course of the last couple of years is they get clear about what the job description is and he will use that exact language himself.

What they sorted out was they actually are not a health beverage. Of course, it’s healthy. It’s got a ton of health attributes that are reasons that consumers wind up loving it and choosing it, but the most fundamental thing that it does is replace soda. What that has meant for that brand impacts everything from the amount of time and energy that they invested in R&D to get the product to taste like soda. It informs the way that they go to the market. It informs where they’re shelved and informs the packaging design. In fact, if you look at the 1.0 version of OLIPOP and the current version of OLIPOP packaging design, the pivot wasn’t almost entirely informed by an intention to be more a soda alternative. Not only have they nailed it at the foundation of what that brand is about, but I’d also say there’s another thing that they’ve picked up on that’s more subtle around listening to their community and leaning on their community managers who run their social media platforms to pick up on cues.

As COVID-19 became clear that the level of change we were all going to go through was enormous and that was difficult for lots of people. It was like a single moment in their Instagram feed, but I remember. They pivoted a post from their typical look, feel, benefit emphasis, and lifestyle imagery. They had a text-only letter from the founders to their Instagram audience. It says something to the effect of, “This has been hard for everybody. We’re finding our feet. We’re getting our balance and we know that you’re doing the same thing and we appreciate you.” It was a moment where they broke from their traditional voice. They recognize that the whole country is in a grieving process that they themselves had even been thrown for a loop with how serious the shelter-in-place situation was going to change everyone’s lives. They took a moment to acknowledge that. That’s another very subtle way that OLIPOP team has dialed in on empathy.

That’s a great example and a great lesson too. Vulnerability comes alongside of empathy. It’s okay as a brand to show it. In fact, I was thinking about it this way. We choose the people we hang out with because they’re there with us for the good times and they’re there with us in the bad times. The relationship we have with many of our brands, especially the brands that mean the most in our lives. We want and expect the same thing. We want them to be with us when things are great and when things are bad.



You don’t want to be outside of what seems to be your brand personality. For example, if your brand is edgy and snarky to be overly emotive and emotional and soft is going to potentially resonate as disingenuous. If you are somebody that talks that way, it’s absolutely fine to lean into it and understand it. I’m going to flip it around the other way. Can you think of an example of a brand, a campaign, or communication where empathy was completely absent?

One of the things that we do with Smoketown is to provide outsourced marketing leadership. If you’re at a stage where you don’t have a CMO and you need an extended marketing team and you can’t afford it. That’s one of the things that we do. As a result of that, my curse is that when I experienced what a brand is up to, my empathy meter is dialed up because I’m envisioning myself in that brand’s shoe and imagining how certain decisions got made. I’ll choose another Instagram example because I know so many early-stage companies are leveraging Instagram as one of their critical vehicles for one-on-one communication with consumers and for marketing.

This particular brand, I’ll use the COVID-19 situation again, nothing about the story that they told had addressed and acknowledged how radically life had changed. Let’s say you’re a brand that’s all about backyard parties and beach barbecues, that’s where you show up in your space. For obvious reasons, that’s not been a reality. Not only has that not been a reality, but it’s also a source of a certain amount of pain that’s not available to us. In this particular example, they didn’t find a way to reflect the moment at all.

The way that likely landed with their audiences is felt like the brand is out of touch with reality. That’s a communication-based example of how not keeping track of what’s happening in your consumer’s lives, how they’re likely interpreting, integrating what it is that you’re saying and doing can ultimately destroy brand value. That might feel a little tactical and I can certainly come up with examples that are way more strategic and sophisticated than that one.

The reason those small tactical things matter is that for those of you who were founders who intend to exit at some point. You’re in this because you’re building a brand that you are going to sell to a strategic or go public with some number of years from now. There’s a very important line item in the balance sheet and part of what you’re building that’s called goodwill. That is ultimately the brand equity. It’s the fact that your brand stands for something. It’s got meaning and it’s got value well beyond the line of widgets that you sell.

Ultimately, the multiple is driven by the brand equity. Brand equity is built one communication at a time. When you get disconnected from the consumer, when your empathy radar gets turned off. One of the implications of that from evaluation standpoint is you’re not effectively building brand equity such that you can point to a brand some number of years from now that stands for something more than just the line of products that itself. It winds up being a critical mistake that that accumulates with time.

I’m going to say that 95% of the reason anybody acquires a brand is because of the brand equity, because of the goodwill of the brand. There are very few products that can’t be replicated. There are very few things that can’t be done. It’s the brand and the tribe that your brand has collected and the relationship that the brand is built. That’s why so many of them struggle post-acquisition because of that authenticity, that ability to have that real meaningful two-way empathic conversation with the consumers because it’s lost in a corporate machine. The equity you’re building in your brand is a hard thing to measure. There’s no easy metric.

You can look at things like aided and unaided awareness. Don’t measure on how many followers you have. That’s not relevant. It’s how engaged those followers are and how meaningful you are to them and they are to you. I’ll give you a couple of examples that come to my mind. Both from the travel industry that has been decimated by this. One was an email that I got saying, “Book now your trip to Europe. It’s a great time to book your travel.” It’s totally tone-deaf. If they wanted to do something that could have been, “Let’s support our world communities. Book now and we’ll guarantee it. If you need to cancel it, you can have it.” That sends a signal that when the world opens up or something like that. It was as if nothing had happened.

Another came from the airline I fly a lot and it said, “You’ve been a great loyal customer. Things are tough right now, but we wanted to let you know that since you can’t be flying and you aren’t flying, that we’re going to hold your status for next year. Don’t worry. We want you back when things open up again.” That was two different approaches. A big part of marketing is it’s not necessarily the moment to transact in marketing, but it is a moment to stay top of mind. If you can stay top of mind by saying, “I get what you’re going through, I’m here with you. I feel your pain, we’re going to get through it,” that is a marketing win.

One thing we’ve been writing and thinking a lot about with our clients is the importance of repeat and loyalty at a moment like this. Let’s take the use case of those of you in the audience who actually are lucky enough to have been in a category, in a situation, or on an eCommerce platform where you saw an unprecedented amount of trial and growth. You didn’t even have to do anything from a marketing standpoint to get transactions. It came to you.

One of the things that help with repeat loyalty to this point that you made is the authenticity and empathy with which you relate to new consumers. Also, with what you relate to even consumers who are loyal to you. Those small things like the email that you got from your airline matter a lot. I’ll give you two more examples as you were talking occurred to me. One of them was a conversation that I had like a lot of you have been trying to figure out how to manage our way through the financial hit as a family. I was in a conversation with our mortgage company. The woman that I talked with in customer service was so over the top concerned for me in a way that couldn’t have been faked. She was channeling some level of well of empathy for me, even though she’d never heard of me. That came through so authentically that I reconsidered whether or not I should refinance that mortgage because I am so thankful to have a bank that has a staff person that could treat me with that level of kindness.

That’s an example that occurs to me deep in the weeds of customer service and what’s in the script that your customer service team or your community management team is working off of. It’s a detailed nuanced choice to make. That small choice deepens the details of running their customer service organization had a big impact on me. The second example that I’ll give because you mentioned travel is Airbnb. Here what I’m going to link to is another part of what building empathetic brands.

Another critical element of that is when you build an empathetic brand, you cannot avoid or you can’t help but help other people in the midst of a difficult situation. Your impulse as a brand is to want to do something to help address the pain that you see. I personally have been incredibly impressed with the way that Airbnb has handled the COVID-19 crisis. The amount of money that they’ve set aside some of it out of the founder’s own pocket to help make some of their Airbnb hosts poll.

The way that they’ve embraced their core mission and their core purpose around making it possible for you to feel welcome anywhere or for you to feel like you belong anywhere. I feel like they have been leaning into and living through that brand ethos. My hunch is that they’re going to sustain a ton of economic damage at the end of this, but many of their community of hosts will be very grateful for them and ultimately that’ll be the key to helping that business make it through.

We’ve done a great job of talking very high level, deep, and spiritual. I can see that we’re both ironic. We’re talking about empathy. We both have singing goals behind us. Let’s start talking about some tactical things that the brands can be doing to understand, first of all, how empathetic are they? There are a lot of brands who I think they are and aspire to be. How do you do a real check to see that you’re doing a good job of that? That it’s not your own narrative that your consumers view you as a brand that gets them? What would you suggest to some of the brands to validate that?

There are quite a few things that I recommend and that are all accessible too. The thing is that being empathetic is nothing more than being a good listener and paying attention. What you want to do is empower your brand and your team to be great at listening. There’s a bunch of ways that you can listen. You can listen quite literally on a regular basis reaching out to random consumers in your ecosystem and your consumer base and inviting them to have conversations with you. Maybe you have to incentivize them, maybe you don’t.

A second way to do it is to read every single thing or at least the large percentage of the things that consumers are saying when they send you emails, respond to your social media activity, post comments reviews on your product. Another way to do that is to use Instagram as a source of polling. You put out the occasional, “What do you think about X, Y, and Z?” or “Comment on you take on whether we should do this or do this other thing.”

Those opportunities to listen, all inbound communication is your best ally in being empathetic. There’s a second important step here and I’m a founder too, so I completely get how hard it is to do what I’m about to say. You have to set aside enough time that you can make sense of what you’re learning and hearing. Take in a bunch of data but never give yourself the time and space to actually sit. I don’t want to go so far as to say it’s not worth going because probably listening in all respects is better than not, but listening and giving yourself the time and space to think and make sense of it is critical.

The question that we challenge our clients with that you can challenge yourself is what problems do I think my brand is solving in people’s lives? What you do is you push yourself week on week, month on month to get to a more and more refined and nuanced understanding of what that is. Not because you’re guessing at it, but because you increase the amount of listening and the number of inbound sources of communication and tell from your consumer base so that as you move forward, your ability to answer that question with bigger, more confidence and with more sophistication goes up.

Empathy is the cornerstone of human-centered design. It’s design thinking, which came out at Silicon Valley of this concept of being able to quickly iterate, innovate, get the product out there that the number one foundational block, the first step in that is empathy. I would encourage anyone reading to a great resource is to go to Stanford d.school website. They have an empathy hack or empathy blueprint and you can download it. A good thing is to begin to build into part of your normal routine as a founder in your team this concept of doing empathy interviews. A little bit more difficult as the world is somewhat cloistered, but you can even do it on Zoom.

As you begin to have interaction with consumers, have this empathy interview script, which has a lot of questions that begin with, “Why?” or “Tell me what this means to you?” or those types of things. You can learn so much about perception, about what your consumer is seeing, thinking, or dealing with at the moment that they’re making decisions. The closer you can move that empathy interview to the point of decision, the more you’re going to learn about the motivations behind that decision.

It’s understanding your consumers and being close to that and not being afraid to hear, you’re going to hear things that you don’t want to hear, but that’s okay. Brands in the audience that maybe recognize that they’re being to one way in their communication or they’re focusing too much on features and benefits, how did they begin to pivot to have an eye more towards empathy? When you have a brand new to Smoketown and you’re trying to begin to help guide them having a more empathetic relationship with your consumers, how do you start that process for them?

One of the simplest things that we do as an early exercise that anyone in the audience can do is to obsessively read the consumer reviews of every single one of your competitors. Go to Amazon, read dozens of reviews across what you understand to be your competitive landscape. The value of taking that step is it changes your orientation from, “I’ve built a brand of X, Y, Z because it’s solving a problem that I have,” to “I’m building a brand of X, Y, Z that needs to solve problems better than what my competitors currently do.” That is a treasure trove of data that is one of the first steps that we often take with teams when the team does not have a deep well of consumer feedback within the brand itself.

That’s one thing. Part of what your question is, if I’m a brand that doesn’t have that many sources of dialogue with my consumer, how do I shift that? This is going to sound almost cliché, but the bottom line is the value of email marketing, having a consistent, reliable way to expand your email database, taking community management, comment responses on social media very seriously. Frankly, they’ve been critical for a long time, but the level of importance of having that in your toolbox couldn’t be higher.

I love starting at a high level. It’s developing a true avatar of who your consumer is. For you and your entire team is being able to put a name to that person and describe what their life is, where they live? What kind of car they drive? The stressors that they deal with, the things that excite them, the things that worry them, all that stuff to the best of your ability. It’s a good internal dialogue to always have is, let’s say that you name that avatar Ryan and you give him a kick-ass handlebar mustache. You will always question your communication, you are on package messaging, and your marketing campaigns.

What would Ryan think about this? Does this align with what he thinks? It’s good to have that as a guardrail. I would encourage everyone on this to develop that. It feels weird at first. You should have a picture of that person. It should be in your mind’s eye at all times and then you want to continue to evolve that because like real people, your avatar, those things change, and both your brand changes in people’s needs, wants, fears, and things that excite them adjust over time. You need to do the same. We’ve got a question from Marco, “How do you make time to absorb what you’re learning when business continually pushes you to go?” How do you slow down enough to build the discipline and to absorb this?

First of all, that is the challenge. Everyone is capable of doing what Elliot and I are doing. The question is being able to set aside the time. There are a couple of suggestions that I have. There’s a tool that when I figure out how to multitask. There’s a very simple framework that we challenge our clients to work themselves through that takes at the most about an hour. What we’re describing does not have to be hours of time. As I first start, it can be as straightforward as taking an hour to do this.

The second thing is to incorporate these empathy steps into the decisions that you’re already needing to make. One approach that you set aside the time, quite literally, you could set aside the time. The other way to do it is you simply fold these empathy exercises into your day-to-day decision making so that your orientation is external even when you’re making fundamental choices. For example, as you’re figuring out what your next round of email content is going to be from marketing standpoint.

The way to incorporate empathy is to take a moment and see, who was it that opened the last rounds of email? What do I know about them? How does that inform me on the way that I should articulate or what I should focus on now? If you’re thinking in terms of revisiting packaging design. It’s challenging yourself to ask 3 or 4 people before you write the creative brief for your agency and get feedback on whether or not your current brand articulation nailed it. That would be another suggestion to just fold those empathy steps into each of your discreet as many of the thousand or so decisions that you make on a day-to-day basis.

I’m going to give you a very tactical one using a bit of empathy. One of the challenges that we all face and that I know that you face that everyone on this show faces is, how do I lift my head up to work on my business when I’m so busy working in it? There isn’t a moment of time that is on an unspoken for that isn’t being consumed. When you do have that moment of time, it’s usually needed for other aspects of your life. One of the things that I would tell you to do is actually build in that time in your schedule, physically book a time that is focused on, “Work on my business time,” and one of those work on those business times should be listening tour.

Going through everything that you’re seeing feedback both online and offline. That’s the tactical thing. You have to build that muscle, you have to build that discipline into your schedule. The second thing that I would do is going back to that avatar, and we use this regularly, I have that in front of me. I have that in a window on my computer that I can open as I think through a communication that I’m about to send out or reading communication that I’m getting in.

Use that to make sure that you’re putting that filter on and using the empathy filter for both inflow and outflow. That’s what I would recommend on top of Ryan’s suggestion. I’m going to go a little bit deeper in terms of the tactical stuff. There’s a lot that’s changed. The reality is consumer preference, consumer behavior has been shifted because the fact that you have an empathy lens in general and as you apply that lens to your own clients, what are you seeing as changes that are going to stick, that brands need to better react to?

The first principle is that changes that were already in progress have simply accelerated. There was already a significant move toward eCommerce and that’s simply been cemented and it has reached a new tipping point. Interest in focus on immunity-related benefits. Basically, answering the question, “How can I stay healthy and avoid getting sick?” was already a big part of what many of you were benefiting from in terms of the increased focus and wellness.

It will continue, I would say in particular, as long as it’s clear that there’s not an immediate solution to COVID-19 in terms of a vaccine or a cure. Those are a couple of things that are definitely meaningful shifts. There are some other things that I hope will stick, but I’m not yet completely sure it will. One of the things that many of us have learned is that there is a value in being able to work from home, operate in a way that’s flexible and move in and out of, “I’m going to work at the office now. Tomorrow I’m going to work from home. My kids need me to attend X, Y, and Z, so I’m going to flex today.” There’s a level of flexibility that’s been introduced to our lifestyle that very well could stick.

If it sticks, here’s the critical thing for those of us who were in the food and beverage space. Some of the things that were foundational trends could start to evolve a little bit. For example, on the go snacking, Grab and Go. Those things start to shift if people are not on the go as much as they used to. Figuring out how to reframe. If you’re in a category like granola bars or something that was super dependent on portability and mobility as the core of the job that you do. Figuring out how to anticipate, “What happens with people are less mobile?” It could become an important consideration.

There’s another piece to this that could become a shift that sticks that it’s a little too soon to tell around, which is the amount of energy that people invest in cooking at home. This is a once in a generation shift from food service to cooking at home. None of us are any less busy. I think that the pendulum will swing back pretty close to where it was. Another possible outcome is that people realize, “It’s easier to prepare meals at home than I thought,” or “It’s easier to pack my lunch and take it with me than I realized.” We may see some of the categories that benefit from meal preparation get a sustained bump. That’s one that is a little bit of a question mark until we get to the other side of this.

There are a couple that I think and one of them is uncertainty. There are a lot of people who felt like life was somewhat certain or predictable who have had the rug pulled out from underneath them and now are dealing with uncertainty. Uncertainty is going to be something that is an accompaniment of our preferences and our bind. Understanding how uncertainty impacts consumer behavior is going to become in my mind, a study worth study. The other thing that is going to change is discovery. How discovery takes place of new brands? For a lot of reasons. From SKU proliferation and the burden and the pressure it’s put on both distributors and retailers to consumers, shopping more prescriptively and shopping less frequently and shopping more to some of the reasons you said were impulse and on the go is going to be potentially shifted.

If you’re a brand that’s dependent upon discovery, which every brand is. A lot of that discovery was being done in more traditional means, you’ve got to start rethinking that. You’ve got to start thinking about what other forms of discovery you can generate. I wrote about this because I feel strongly that this is a tilt and that is we have talked forever and ever about channel strategy. I feel like you have to look at it differently. You have to look at it like a consumer travels down a continuum of purchase.

There are all these different waypoints in which they have an opportunity to engage in brands and make purchase decisions. That’s in and out of various channels, eCom, brick and mortar, alternative channels, work, etc. As a brand and as a marketer of a brand, you need to start thinking about what waypoint, which of those interactions or potential intersects are you best suited to transact discovery and trial? That includes what offers you the right connection with the right consumer, but which also works from a route to market and capital efficiency because you can’t be reliant upon the old ways of discovery.

That comes from empathy. The reason I say that is I think about it as I was standing in line queued up to go into the grocery store with a mask. The pleasure of treasure hunting in the store for looking and exploring, that’s gone. It probably will be for some foreseeable time. Retailers are going to reflect that, build out their perimeters more so. If that’s the mindset I’m thinking through the lens of consumers, then I need to figure out how I get found.

For all the benefits of eCom, which is massive and I’m a huge believer that that too has been a sea change. When you look at bricks meet cliques at about 4% to 6% pre-COVID of grocery sold online. During this, it’s 40%. They’re estimating somewhere between 20% and 25%, even if it’s settled at half of that, it’s a massive change. Driving trial, depending on the product you are online is difficult because the unit economics online require investment by the consumer at a higher level than they would in store. That’s one of the things where I think the lens of empathy can play importantly.

When you can’t try something yourself, the second most powerful motivator for trying it is that someone, you know and trust says it’s amazing. That was already true. It’s not that that’s a new insight. It’s that it becomes now a more critical way to drive discovery. There are a couple of implications to that and I’ll get tactical here again because that’s a great part of what Elliot has going with the show. In some of the most successful brands that I know, one of the things that they doubled down on was customer reviews.

If they were an eCommerce business or digitally native, they hired an agency to actively manage their review process. They didn’t take it for granted that they were going to have four and a half stars on average across hundreds of users. They took ownership of that and drove it. They were already experiments happening with this at Walmart and some other channels, but that never did get scale. Imagine a world in which, as you’re walking down the grocery store, you can see how many stars of a given brand got from a user review standpoint right there in the store.

You can hit a button or scan a QR code and it takes you to an actual review of that product that you can listen to or view. I think that we’re going to get to a place where influencers and I don’t mean influencers that you pay them $5,000 and they’ll rep your product. People who genuinely think you’re the shit. People like your Tia Lupita who genuinely think what you’ve made is amazing. Finding ways to mobilize that, to scale that, to put that in front of people more often. That’s where this is going to go.

To Hector’s specific question is, “In the age of COVID-19, how do you guys see brands connecting with consumers by sampling food? What would be your recommendation or approach if you had a food brand that has a polarizing ingredient that tastes awesome? How would you convert a shopper without them trying the product?” One of the most powerful marketing tools for years was talk radio and the reason why it’s a no different influencer, it’s social proof. Social proof remains one of the most powerful.

I believe that a lot of brands miss other social proof opportunities. Influencer marketing than the digital side is still effective. I would argue that micro-influencers geo-targeted around specific areas may be more so, but there are also physical influencer opportunities. For example, finding a few restaurants, a few chefs that you could give product to have them take it when things open up again, but even now they could be playing with it and talking about it. They can take the tortillas and be able to create some recipes that they can feed their consumers. That’s going to be social proof in a physical way.

There’s so much celebrity chef following, there’s so much awareness around that, but if you could find a few of those around key retailers that you’re expanding or key markets, that could be a great way. The same as if you’re a wellness product. Finding a yoga studio that has an influential instructor is a great way to tie things in. Having an eCom enabled B2B capability so you can target influencers that are physical locations to drive trial. I think it is going to be a must. Taryn had a question, “Is there a suggestion on how you can utilize the community who are themselves expressing their wants to support small and/or local businesses and leverage the entire topic of empathy?”

I’m going to talk a little bit about the stages of grief. At a very real level, the entire country is grieving. We’ve all lost something. Some of us have lost something very dear to us. Others have lost something like the neighborhood, a grocery store, or their favorite yoga studio. As these losses accumulate and we work our way through the stages of grief, one of the powerful parts of that and we hunger for is being able to do something about it. Being able to be an action and impact someone else’s life in a positive way because we see all this suffering around us. It’s an impulse.

Part of what you’re getting at is that there are examples all over the country, including my town right outside of Chicago, that consumers are deeply motivated to rally around the little guy, to rally around the small business that didn’t get its PPP loan and is on the cusp of going under. To rally around the mom and pop that was their go-to for pizza that they’re worried may not be there anymore. You don’t want to exploit the situation. If you have an authentic way in which you are a local company with a true local following and a real story, there’s a deep emotional need amongst a significant percentage of the population to do something to help you survive. That’s a way of coping with the scale of loss that’s unprecedented in American history.

Being visible in your community and talking to your community is key. They want to rally around you, they need to rally around you for all the reasons Ryan said. Phil was talking about a counter to what we were saying about discovery. He has this weird ingredient that no one’s ever heard of and they’re rolling out nationally in Whole Foods. People are buying it at a great pace. Maybe inspirational shopping isn’t dead. It’s not dead. Don’t get me wrong at all, but this is an important highlight and consumers will always eat stories.

The story and compelling why behind your business is even more important. Discovery will happen at retail. It’s not that I’m saying it’s a binary. It does or it doesn’t. I’m saying it’s going to get harder. The stronger your why or point of differentiation or your ability to cause people to look or think differently, the more likely you’ll still be able to drive that discovery. If you don’t have a mechanism or I’m suggesting, you don’t rely completely on that going forward. For you, Phil, you have such a great culinary background with your cofounder, continued opportunity there.

I’m going to play the bad cop to your good cop, Elliot. I think that discovery in-store has fundamentally and potentially irrevocably or at least for the next couple of years, it is radically more difficult. Of all these small things from the pressure that we’re under to shop more quickly because we’re queued up outside too. Part of our mental space is chewed up with, “Am I 6 feet away from the person next to me? Can you touch something?” You decide you don’t want it and put it back, “Have I contaminated it? Have I contaminated myself?”

We’re looking at many months with that. I would challenge the audience to do a couple of things and this is going to feel painful and real straight talk. You need to do a detailed analysis of your velocity levels every single week to have a database rationale for whether discovery has started to change for your business. If you’re continuing to see velocity growth and velocity strength that matches pre-COVID levels, I reserved the right to be wrong. I would go deep into the math to validate the assumption that inspiration hasn’t been greatly curtailed.

The second thing that I would do, there’s an important part of discovery that we actually somehow didn’t get to, which is your packaging design. It’s the highest ROI investment you will ever make, even if you spend a solid five figures on it. It’s the most efficient spend you’ll ever make because 100% of the people who ever bought your product or consider it will see the packaging, which is not true for any other marketing vehicle you’ll ever invest in. One hundred percent of them will see it.

In a time where discovery is more difficult, where inspiration in the aisle is more difficult to achieve, one of the things that you need to do is be extremely clear and telegraphic about what your product is and specifically what problem it solves for people. How do they use it? Give them a way when they’re 3 feet away from the shell to figure that out in 7 or 8 seconds without having to touch the product. That was always great advice from a packaging standpoint, but that winds up being critical because people are less likely to grab something and consider it than they used to be. That would be the other way that I’ve pushed pretty hard on that question around, “What it takes to continue to be discovered?” especially if you’re an unusual product.

I don’t think it’s going away. First of all, I think discovery retail was already very hard, monetized, and capital inefficient. It’s gotten far worse. If it’s your only vehicle for discovery, you’re screwed long-term. You are building it beyond that. Ryan, where do people find you and learn more about you and connect with you?

I shared our website SmoketownStrategy.com. There’s a bunch of free stuff there. A second way to interact with us and to hear more of our thinking around what it takes to build a great brand, we have a podcast called Brand New Blueprint. You can find it on all of your podcast platforms. We have great conversations with people at OLIPOP, Bread SRSLY, 4th & Heart, and a whole host of brands. You can shoot me a note. My email is Ryan@SmoketownStrategy.com or you can follow me on LinkedIn. I’m pretty active there. I’d love to continue the discussion. Elliot, I truly appreciate you giving me a chance to hang out with your crew here.

It’s my pleasure. You are one of my favorite brains in the biz. Anyone who has an opportunity to spend any time with Ryan will find that out very quickly if you haven’t already discovered in reading this. Thanks for joining me.

Important Links

• Ryan Pintado-Vertner

• Smoketown

• OLIPOP

• Stanford d.school

• Brand New Blueprint

• SmoketownStrategy.com

• Ryan@SmoketownStrategy.com

• LinkedIn – Ryan Pintado-Vertner

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