Brand Strategy is the “North Star” to guide everything you do in your food business, but how do you actually go about using it in the day-to-day decision making that comes with leading a business?
For this episode of the Real Food Brands Marketing Podcast, host and Food & Bev Brand Strategist Katie Mleziva sits down with Maria Capecelatro and Tom Miner, co-founders of Unwrapp’d, an energy bite company based in Denver, Colorado. Listen in as they talk about how Unwrapp’d used their brand strategy to set a course, how they knew when to stay on that course and how it helped them be bold when it was time to pivot.
How Unwrapp’d Got Started
In his 20s, Tom was an environmental consultant at the EPA in Washington DC, living a fast-paced lifestyle and eating a lot of energy bars. “I was sitting at my desk one day and looked down to see a wastebasket full of wrappers,” he says, “the pack itself was pretty small—an ounce or two of food—but it came encased in this wrapper you couldn’t recycle or reuse. It got me thinking, am I doing more harm to the environment than good with my day job?” When he looked for a better option, he couldn’t find anything with more sustainable packaging.
About a year later, Tom was doing the Whole30 diet and started looking into the ingredients in all of these bars and realizing they weren’t that great nutritionally, either. “I kind of felt duped, like I was eating a lot of candy bars in disguise,” he says. He decided to move to Denver and start a new energy snack brand that would solve both of these problems, and was lucky enough to meet Maria, a nutritionist and the perfect partner in crime.
How Brand Strategy Fueled Their Rebrand
When 2020 hit, a lot of plans needed to be changed to adjust for the new normal. They planned on doing a rebrand and at first they thought they needed to raise money to do the work. However, with the uncertainty of the pandemic they decided to get started with the rebrand even while everything was up in the air, but with a willingness to do some of the work themselves.
Maria and Tom knew they needed to hire two people in order to make their rebrand a success: a great designer and a great brand strategist. “There are some branding experts out there who are great designers, and they do great work, but they’re not strategists,” Tom says. They came across Katie’s Brand Strategy Jumpstart program for food businesses and it was a big help: “We were able to do the exercises, get to know our target consumer better, and come out with a stronger brand identity,” Maria says.
According to Tom and Maria, working with Katie helped them get to know parts of their brand they would’ve never thought to have looked at, especially the Elements of Value exercise from Episode 56. “Being a ‘change the world’ brand, it’s almost table stakes nowadays for modern brands to mean more, to have these higher elements,” Tom says, “but we needed to take a step back and go to the lower parts of the pyramid and look at what we’re really selling.” This is a valuable observation, as brands often play too low or too high on the pyramid without the right level of intention about what they are really selling in terms of a the functional or emotional benefit to the consumer.
Tom shared a bold philosophy that they finally put words to during this process “we’d rather fail at being different than succeed at being a copycat brand.” And all the hard work to build Unwrapp’d their way is paying off. It turned out to be the perfect time to invest in rebranding and be bold, because in September they got their first nationwide launch at Target. You can find them in the refrigerated section at your local Target store.
Now, let’s go shake up shopping carts!
In This Episode:
- The two problems Tom observed about energy bars that were on the market.
- Why 2020 was the perfect opportunity to for Unwrapp’d to rebrand.
- Why your brand team should include a designer AND a brand strategist.
- The Brand Strategy Jumpstart exercises that helped Unwrapp’d get the most clarity.
- How Unwrapp’d worked their way up to national distribution at Target.
- How writing down your core values can help you make the big decisions, and some examples of Unwrapp’d core values.
- How their brand strategy guides and aligns everything they do, and why they wish they had looked at defining their brand strategy earlier.
Quotes:
“We were able to do the exercises in the Jumpstart program to get to know our target consumer better, and come out with a stronger brand identity.” – Maria Capecelatro
“You came in with a strong sense of your values, your nonnegotiables, and the things that you wanted to hold front-and-center about your brand.” – Katie Mleziva
“Being a ‘change the world’ brand, it’s almost table stakes nowadays for modern brands to mean more, to have these higher elements, but we needed to take a step back and go to the lower parts of the pyramid and look at what we’re really selling.” – Tom Miner
“We’d rather fail at being different than succeed at being a copycat brand.” – Tom Miner
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