The Brand Shepherd Podcast

Brand Shepherd
The Brand Shepherd Podcast

Each episode of The Brand Shepherd Podcast focuses on a topic connected to or part of getting your products to your people. A wasteful go-to-market strategy is why great products never reach their intended people. Brand Shepherd helps brands get their products to their people with simple and efficient strategies. These brands thrive because their products get to their people and the people love them. Brand Shepherd wants to guide, grow, and protect your brand to help you get your products to your people! This podcast is hosted by Daniel Crask, Brand Shepherd's co-owner and brand strategist.

  1. 11/14/2023

    'Force-Fitting' Purpose to Brands Is No Longer Wanted

    Let’s connect some dots about the role of world-changing, altruistic purpose in product branding and positioning. First, let’s hear from the new CEO of Unilever, who recently announced that they will stop ‘for fitting purpose’ into their brands: “But we will not force fit this [purpose] across the entire portfolio, for some brands it simply won’t be relevant and that’s okay,” he added. Now let’s connect Unilever’s decision to the likely reason why they don’t see ROI in force-fitting purpose to products: GenX women. In a piece from 2021 titled, “Why GenX Women Will Not Be Aging Quietly,” which I have shared a few times for the wealth of info within, we learn about the powerhouse demographic that GenX women compose. More specifically, “40 million 50+ American women represent over $15 trillion dollars in purchasing power and are the healthiest, wealthiest, and most active generation in history.” The last connection I want to make is how these two are connected: GenX is not out to change the world. Among the generations alive today, Boomers, Millennials, and GenZ share one - and maybe only one - belief: to change the world into a better place than they found it. They embrace big concepts that they see as world-changing actions and ideas. See, if we go back to when GenX were youngsters, it was the Greatest and Silent Generations that were the elder adults and while GenX’s Boomer parents were out of the home chasing careers and wealth, it was the Greatest and Silent Generations who co-parented GenX kids. And the one attribute Greatest and Silent Generations shared was that they did not set out to change the world. The Greatest Generation is called so because they answered the call to enter a war they didn’t want to be part of. When WWII ended, the headlines read of how the war was over, not of how they won. They were happy to just get back to the quiet life they wanted in the first place. And the Silents were the logical outcome or next step from the Greatest, in that they just wanted to live a quiet/silent life that was enjoyable for their little sphere of the world. I’m a visual guy so I see visual patterns when I learn stuff like this. If Greatest/Silent/X = 🟠 and Boomers/Millennials/Zoomers = 🔵, then the pattern would look like this: 🟠 🟠 🔵 🟠 🔵 🔵 Greatest / Silent / Boomers / X / Millennials / Z Half do not want to change the world, half do. (GenAlpha is TBD. They’re too young.) So if the “the healthiest, wealthiest, and most active generation in history,” GenX Women, are not out to change the world, then it makes sense that force-fitting purpose to brands won’t work. In short, the demographic with the most power and wealth doesn’t care about the world-changing, altruistic purpose of brands. Enjoy this short break because while GenX is currently powerful, it’s also very small and with Millennials already in their early 40s, they will be bringing a strong interest in purpose to brands back in force in just a few years. You can use this time to strengthen your brand and the value it offers its customers so that when adding purpose to brands is back in favor, adding it to your brand won’t diminish its core value. We can also see this as a strong reason why paying attention to broader generational preferences is vital to reading the room and gaining a basic understanding of what your customers want, especially if you struggle to gain clarity about customer wants in this current confusing era of economic chaos. === Sources: https://www.marketingweek.com/unilever-ceo-stop-force-fitting-purpose-brands/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/amyschoenberger/2021/10/07/why-gen-x-women-will-not-be-aging-quietly/?sh=3c29a7d02b6b Not GenX. Definitely not GenX Women.What can we learn and use from this?

    17 min
  2. 01/24/2022

    AgLaunch • Interview with Lilly Tench • The Brand Shepherd Podcast

    Agriculture, as an industry, is experiencing the most radical transformation, disruption, and innovation of any industry out there right now – and has been doing so for several years. Agriculture is our food supply, but it is much more than that. It impacts our planet's soil, water, and air. A massive number of jobs are directly and indirectly involved with Agriculture (Ag). Our health is impacted by Ag, due to what products are used to grow food, and so Ag has a big role in public health and healthcare itself. The scope is sweeping and the stakes could not be higher.  Everyone involved wants what's best for Ag, including the people behind an org like AgLaunch. AgLaunch is "bringing startup culture to agriculture" by drawing smart, innovative people with Ag business ideas to help them get to work. In this episode of the Brand Shepherd Podcast, Lilly Tench is our guest. She is the Entrepreneurial Programs Lead and does a masterful job of making AgLaunch's work digestible and informative, no matter if you're a seasoned Ag pro or just learning of what's happening right now. Brand Shepherd's managing partner, Daniel Crask, is also part of AgLaunch's Mentor Network, and so we are on the frontlines alongside these very exciting Ag startups, helping them develop their brands and products. This compliments our years of Ag brand work. If you have an Ag startup idea and want to learn about AgLaunch's accelerator programming, please contact them today.

    24 min

Ratings & Reviews

5
out of 5
3 Ratings

About

Each episode of The Brand Shepherd Podcast focuses on a topic connected to or part of getting your products to your people. A wasteful go-to-market strategy is why great products never reach their intended people. Brand Shepherd helps brands get their products to their people with simple and efficient strategies. These brands thrive because their products get to their people and the people love them. Brand Shepherd wants to guide, grow, and protect your brand to help you get your products to your people! This podcast is hosted by Daniel Crask, Brand Shepherd's co-owner and brand strategist.

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