| Negative branding is the major factor holding back the food movement’s ability to move beyond the marginal “early adopters,” and keeping it from becoming the “early majority” that can carry through on good food transformations. This negative branding comes in large part from the triumph of fake news in misshaping public opinion. But if negative branding is the Achilles’ heel of the food movement, ignoring it is even worse. That amounts to us shooting ourselves in the foot. |
| Two weeks ago, the dynamic team at HealtheConnections in Syracuse, New York, asked me to offer a workshop on tweaks and tricks of the local food advocacy trade. You can see some of the team in the picture above, right after our successful meeting with almost 150 people from food organizations active throughout the region. My sponsors knew that food leaders at the conference didn’t have the time, budget or resources for major and comprehensive organizational overhauls. People need quick and quirky tweaks and tricks they can do off the side of their desks and the back of their minds, I was told. That’s a perfect way to frame an introductory workshop on my first and most important of six tricks — branding. Comprehensive brand overhauls are better postponed until people have digested their experience from working on a bucketlist of quick and quirky tweaks and tricks. (Free, readable and helpful introductions to more comprehensive approaches to branding for social purpose organizations are here & here & here & here & here & here & here & here and here.) HOW I GOT INTO BRANDING It so happens that quick and quirky tweaks and tricks of branding have been an obsession of mine for 25 years. When I wrote a manual on green economics in 1995, I wanted to replace the green image of doom and gloom, nuts and berries with an image of hope and joy, nuts and bolts. Likewise, when I started as manager of the Toronto Food Policy Council in 2000 – the dark ages, when nutrition and agriculture, not food and the food environment, anchored food policy – I set myself two major objectives. I wanted to see food covered in all sections of media programming, not just in the family (cooking at home) and entertainment (restaurant reviews) sections and segments. In the same vein, I wanted to see food discussed during local elections because food was recognized alongside police, parks and pavement as preeminent issues for local governments. For that shift in the general understanding of food to happen, I reasoned at the beginning of my professional food organizing career, all departments within the media and government needed to see all of food as their beat and jurisdiction. Food needed to be covered by the news, business, social and health reporters. Food also had to be in the mandate of all local government departments, including planning, job creation, works, recreation and community development – not just public health. To capture both goals, I extended Laurette Dube’s assessment of food as a many-sided experience to include “whole-of-government/whole-of-society/whole-of person.” Branding needs a big picture. The two goals of being newsworthy and city-relevant at the same time forced a change in what we now call “the food conversation.” These goals are strategic and therefore require re-positioning in the mental placeholder people put food in. That scale of a rethink, I figured out, meant both food and food advocates needed rebranding; otherwise, food matters would continue to be sidelined and pigeon-holed as largely personal issues, not public policy ones. Because of this successful experience, I no longer have much patience for cultists who work to scare people off branding efforts by warning that branding is only for slimy corporations and their ilk. Here is one rant that makes the anti-brand case: “Brands as they exist today are inherently dishonest,” it insists. “The modern brand, as opposed to being seared into the skin of an unlucky cow, is instead a collection of qualities designed by marketers in order to give a product or service a ‘personality’.” Given that almost everyone gives off branding messages – indicators of what they are like beneath the surface – it’s inevitable that some very bad dudes will try to create a brand for themselves that doesn’t match their reality. However, such bad apples in no way prove what branding is about, any more than a few bad Christians or Hindus prove what Christianity and Hinduism are about. WHAT IS BRANDING? I want to see people in the food movement jump on the brandwagon so they can be more effective at getting their messages across to others. I understand branding as influencing the way the unconscious and emotional spheres of another person’s brain “sees” and judges a person or organization. The conscious and rational spheres of the brain rely on information, but the unconscious and emotional spheres rely on cues given off “between the lines” of formal messages. In the same way that a skilled writer knows how to “show not tell” (shows the heroine acting with great integrity rather than saying she has great integrity), a skilled brander knows how to “show, not tell,” and make the point in a deep-down way. Branding results from the habit of intelligent beings with intelligent sub-consciousnesses occupying 95 percent of their brain making deductions about others based on messages beyond and beneath the official messages that these people put out. The ability to brand is a survival instinct. “This person says he want to help me, but something tells me he’s up to no good,” the branding part of the brain advises. “He’s just trying to manipulate me; I can feel it from the look in his eyes and the way he talks.” (For the superior intelligence of the unconscious, see here.) All people at all times give off formal and informal messages that create “branding” impressions on the consciousness and unconsciousness of other people. All anyone can control is the ability to modify cues that send the wrong message. A young woman who fears not being taken seriously because she is a young, pretty and doesn’t have a deep voice can adopt make-up, clothes and mannerisms that send a message to all and sundry that she is a confident and competent professional. (See one woman’s reflection on this here.) A young man worried that his speech won’t be taken seriously if he’s branded as a radical may decide to wear a suit, shake hands instead of fist bumps, and speak biz-talk about disruptive innovations instead of radical change. As a person who shows all the signs of my 74 years, I try to trim my eyebrows, ears and nose hair as a way to manage stereotypes that might otherwise lead people to treat me as mentally and physically feeble. In these kinds of ways, we all show our understanding of the below-the-radar cues that form our personal brand and influence the way people see and treat us. BRANDING IS CONSCIOUS ABOUT THE UNCONSCIOUS Such efforts deserve recognition as methods of building human or social or reputational capital. If you don’t have to spend half an hour demonstrating to people that the stereotype they have of you is wrong, you’ve just saved a valuable half an hour. If that happens to you with 80 people you meet while lobbying, fund-raising, networking or collecting signatures on a petition, you just covered the cost of a week’s salary spent on brand-building. If that seems like a long time for payback on your investment in branding, you need to think of your organization as a vehicle to achieve certain goals, and liken your vehicle to any other $20,000+ vehicle sold off car lots. That’s how to figure out that branding pays off most for big ticket items where reputations for being trustworthy, reliable and high-performance really count. Food advocacy is for big ticket items too – long-term gains through legislation or major gifts – and also comes from consistent work on the food organization’s reputation. (The Return On Investment (ROI) for branding is presented in a balanced way here.) When food organizations don’t bother with proactive branding, they pay a high price in the short-term too. They don’t attract the people they want to attract. They do attract the people they don’t want to attract. Restaurants don’t throw fund-raising banquets for organizations that have a reputation for being strident and partisan. Civil servants don’t raise an idea with politicians if the sponsoring organization is associated with being negative or yuppy. Service clubs won’t invite a speaker who’s thought of as a naysayer. If you doubt that context (the terrain of branding) can trump content in very expensive ways, consider this story about an experiment sponsored by the Washington Post. The newspaper sent Joshua Bell, one of the world’s best violinists, out to busk on the streets, a location where people could only judge his music, not his name. He made $32. Two weeks earlier, people had paid one hundred dollars a seat to hear him at Symphony Hall in Boston. Context signals relevance, argues the author, a leading expert in branding. JUMP ON THE BRAND WAGON I make a big deal about branding because I think food advocacy organizations suffer terribly from negative branding. My read is that food advocates are commonly seen as some unholy combination of self-righteous busy-bodies and do-gooders, yuppies, food snobs, thankless complainers, flakes, eggheads, spoiled brats, city slickers, and head-in-the-cloud dreamers who don’t know about budgeting public or private dollars. Some of this negative branding comes from the food movement’s incapacity for “reputation management.” But to be fair, the view of food advocacy organizations also suffers from many people’s confused and contradictory views about food. Being angry at “foodies” is a version of shooting the messenger. This is especially so in North America, where food is often associated with burdensome chores, gluttony, sinful temptation, overcooked and tasteless vegetables, over-processed and tasteless grains, overly expensive fruits, crazy diets, fear of chronic disease and overly zealous nutritionists. And let’s not forget that global corporations know how to stir fears about “the nanny state.” It’s a quick and dirty way to deflect attention from their profits based on low-cost pesticide-intensive agriculture, processing that features salt, sugar and fat, and marketing that targets infants and children. Whatever the cause of these negative impressions about food advocates, there’s no denying that having such a reputation precede us makes it much harder to make progress with politicians, donors to good causes, volunteers, or the general public. In my view, negative branding is the major factor holding back the food movement’s ability to move beyond the marginal “early adopters,” and keeping it from becoming the “early majority” that can carry through on good food transformations. (To put these terms in context, see this.) This negative branding comes in large part from the triumph of fake news in misshaping public opinion. But if negative branding is the Achilles’ heel of the food movement, ignoring it is even worse. That amounts to us shooting ourselves in the foot. Good food advocates need to unite in common efforts to change any behaviors that lead to negative branding, and change their branding so they are seen as solutionaries, problem-solvers and thought leaders, bridge builders, job creators, defenders of local farmers and farm workers, good stewards of public finances, and champions of food security for all. These views are central to what we already work on; it’s time to put the values behind these views in the centerpiece of our brand. I can’t help but close with breaking news from Europe, that local and ethical foods are winning “the battle for hearts and minds.” It’s a brand new way of making progress! CALL TO ACTION CHECKLIST FOR FOOD BRANDING Here’s my quick and quirky checklist for doable, side-of-the-desk, back-of-mind, low-cost measures that can be taken up by individuals and social purpose groups. Don’t let this list distract you from the need for a brand overhaul. On the other hand, make sure you whet your appetite for what branding can do by trying some beginners’ basics: |
- Add followers on whatever social media outlet you’re on. The social media aren’t just for connecting with friends or building awareness of your existence or advertising your views. Social media are brand builders. They invite people to read between the lines of your message and see how down-to-earth, mature, caring, careful and responsible you are – even if all you post are pictures of you and your cat. Food organizations are in the business of people-serving, and their daily practices need to breathe peopleness.
- In social media posts and elsewhere, talk up the value proposition for job creation and environmental conservation proposals by citing reputable business sources such as Triple Pundit, Verge, Green Buzz and the B-corp movement
- Support local food purchasing by public institutions as a way to encourage neighborly city-countryside relations while creating rural employment and preventing rural depopulation; on social media, post links to farmer-friendly publications such as Modern Farmer and Civil Eats
- Make “the business case” for food security interventions as self-financing programs that save taxpayers more in treatment for chronic disease than is spent in disease prevention
- After a meal out, use Trip Advisor and Yelp to congratulate chefs who make efforts to provide healthy, local, sustainable and affordable food options
- In advocacy statements, ensure that arguments address both the metaphorical “right” and “left” side of any reader’s brain (For explanation of these terms, see here and here.)
- Buy business casual clothing to wear as a costume when attending public meetings or meeting public officials
- Be a name dropper, and fly below polarized radar by making full use of respectable names and terms that can substitute for names and terms that turn people off simply because they don’t sound right. Disruptive innovation and creative destruction are establishment economics terms for radical change; equity is the professional public health term for equality and justice; system thinking doesn’t sound as flakey as holistic; creative class appeals more to planners than weirdo, except in Austin; business case sounds cuddlier than class struggle analysis; human capital investment sounds better than welfare; social capital makes more sense to more people than subsidies to help the poor; physical capital sounds more hardheaded than environment; management guru Peter Drucker (discussed here and here) is as provocative in his thinking about the status quo as John Kenneth Galbraith; George Washington, who could not tell a lie, championed hemp as much as any pothead.
- Every other day or so, send out a thinkpiece about food, health or equity that suggests you’re on the leading edge of new thinking. (Here are two places (here and here) to find such pieces, if I may be so bold. The thinkpieces can be sent out on social media or appended to your email signature.
- Ensure that at least one board member and one senior management team leader is respected as a thought leader and influencer. Food policy is a central function of all food organizations, and every organizations needs to have, show and strive for capacity at this level .
- Ensure balance, diversity and inclusion in leadership boards, conference panels and delegations by including farmers, workers and start-up entrepreneurs are as represented as any of the underserved people food organizations insist on featuring.
- Show that you do your work with gratitude (rather than a complainer standpoint) by congratulating at least one organization or person a day; if you’re having a hard time finding a corporation to congratulate, here’s a place to look.
- Talk up your own successes, so you become know for results, not complaints.
- Be a “connected critic.” (Oops, I’m getting ahead of myself; this topic is so important, I’m going to devote the entirety of my next column to it! Stay tuned!)