Challenge the category, not the consumer- Fred Hart's branding principles

0:16Hello and welcome to the Tomorrow Brands Podcast, where we explore what it takes to build a brand of tomorrow. I'm your host, Ruth Vitock, and today's guest is Fred Hart, brand strategist and CPG obsessive. In this episode, we dig into what makes a good brand refresh, how founders can avoid costly design mistakes, why influencers are rewriting the brand building playbook, and Fred's five principles of better branding. Let's get into it. We're very excited to have you. I think you've actually already been on the podcast. You got mentioned in an episode. It's a great track record, and nothing makes my mom happier than hearing that.

0:50So before we get into it, I'd love to hear a bit more about your background and how you got to where you are now. Yeah, I started as a designer and cut my teeth in the Bay Area, working for some great firms there, a small boutique and then a slightly larger one. And 10 years ago, moved to Boulder, Colorado, where I currently live, and started a branding and design agency with a former business partner called Interact. That nine-year period we were together, we went from three people to 30 offices in multiple locations. It was a great ride. A year and a half ago, I exited the business and have just been independently consulting since.

1:26And while I started my career as a designer, I don't do any designing today. I really focus on the strategy of design and really working to understand the future of CPG. I attend probably 12 trade shows a year, some international. I am obsessive about going to stores and just understanding like where's culture going, where consumers going, what's innovation looking like, what is happening from a design and packaging perspective and just nerding out on all things CPG. Yeah, and you share some great updates from all of these shows. And I know you've been to some quite weird and wonderful ones, right?

2:01I've just went to a pet food show. I've been to private label manufacturer show. I've been to supplement supplier shows. I'm about to go to Toronto in two days, actually, to my first natural product show in Canada. And we'll be speaking at that conference, which I'm pretty excited about. You've mentioned you've had a long history of design. What was the first project that made you fall in love with branding? It was before I even knew what branding was. I fell in love with design because of basketball. I still play a lot of basketball personally. And it was always the shoes that my favorite players were wearing that I learned to love.

2:34And you dive into the world of Jordan and Tinker Hatfield and the massive brand that has been built around athletes and performance and style and all this stuff. And that, I think, was my first entry point into this world. But I fell in love with, I think, CPG when I was a junior in college. I had an internship at a small design firm in the Bay Area called McLean Design. And their claim to fame was they created Monster Energy Drink, the billion-dollar energy drink brand that disrupted what Red Bull had created and Rockstar. And it was then that I learned the power of brands, particularly outside of the home, things you carry around with you, and how they act as status symbols and forms of identity.

3:18And I also loved that packaging was like what I saw as the only form of competitive design. You can design a book or a website or a billboard, beautiful corporate identities. But in packaging, everything is fighting for the same occasion, share of stomach, share of wallet. And I love the chess match that ensued. And that's where I think I found my love of design. So let's talk about trends. Obviously, as you just said, you go to a lot of shows. So what are your headlines for trends in 2025? Or maybe we should look ahead to 2026 because we're almost done with 2025 now. Yeah, it really depends on the industry.

3:56I've been to candy trade shows and the trends there are completely different than with the natural product trends versus, of course, pet food. And then I was lucky right after Expo West earlier this year to go to London for the International Food Expo and to see the two very similar sort of markets be vastly different in terms of what was trending in products is fascinating. It's hard to say here are the top line trends, but I think that protein is undeniable. It's being pushed into everything from pasta sauce to sprinkles to ice cream pints to soda. It's getting wild out there. And it begs the question of when will the protein bubble burst?

4:37But also, who's actually building around protein with consumers in mind? Just because you can put it into something doesn't mean you should. And I thought the Kardashian brand, Khloe Kardashian's brand, Cloud, that came out earlier this year, that I think was designed by Turner Duckworth, was a pretty fascinating and interesting one bringing popcorn and protein together in a unique way that actually felt appropriate. I think the rise of influencer-led brands is undeniable, and it is disrupting Big Food in a lot of ways because they figured out how to build massive audiences first and then leverage that.

5:11But I had the luxury of working with Jimmy, a.k.a. Mr. Beast, on his Feastables chocolate brand several years ago. You get a front row view of just the kind of demand that they can create. And you're seeing it everywhere pop up now. Unwell and Nestle with what Alex Cooper is doing. Name a big name celebrity. And they have some sort of products at this point. I did see that J-Lo had brought out a range of RTD cocktails, but she's the famous teetotaler. Yeah, she doesn't drink. Things like that just feel so forced. And I think the large problem with celebrity-backed brands versus influencer brands, there's some nuances.

5:51Celebrities don't need these products to sell. They've already made their money. And so there's just a lack of authenticity oftentimes or misalignment. And for every one celebrity brand that's successful, I'd say there's probably 10 that failed that no one mentions. It's like all the PR comes out when they launch it and then it's all quiet when it goes away. But influencers, they focus on building audiences first. And I think they have a little bit more longevity. But how long do they have is the big question. I feel like for a lot of the influencers, they're so tuned into their communities in a way that celebrities perhaps aren't.

6:24And they're getting those sort of, we just actually had a call with a creator who's created a range of sources. And you get to spend a lot of time testing and learning with the audience, getting feedback, doing little drops and listening and creating feedback loops. and because that's how they're used to working with creating content anyway. They're applying it to product development and they're directly speaking to their consumers, which anyone who works in CPG would say to do. That's as a celebrity. I don't know why I haven't thought of this sooner. They're like the genius founders. Yeah, imagine that, a feedback loop.

6:58Wow. Yeah, that's what makes so many entrepreneurs so special is they find a white space or a problem that they have that hasn't been addressed. And that's also why the large strategics, the Nestles, the Canagoras, the Mondelezas of the world end up acquiring brands because they've lost that ability to stay rooted to real world problems and such. And so it'll be interesting to see how can influencers over time continue to scale and do they hold on to that because of their unique platforms? Or at some point, do people sour on influencers the way they have with celebrities or sometimes athletes too?

7:33yeah prime has been talked about to death here but it was an amazing example of creating a bubble and then the bubble popping and not necessarily related to it being a creator-led brand necessarily or just that hype like what like the hype everybody wants but can easily become your undoing because it's too faddy yeah i mean how long can you keep a hype train going can it always grow that's a big challenge. Interesting. And how can we go a podcast without mentioning liquid death? I had this realization talking with some friends the other day that the genius of liquid death is they're basically an influencer brand, but the brand is the influencer, not an individual.

8:14It's massively more scalable as a result, right? They have the characters and then they have the funny ads. And it's just like really smart that they've managed to figure out that influencer playbook without having the influencer involved. That is smart. We also had Nick, one of the founders of Midday Squares on the pod a while ago, and he talked about making, celebritizing themselves as founders rather than using celebrity. That is absolutely true. If you hop on LinkedIn today, everyone is building out in the open. And they are trying to build audiences at the same time they build their brands and have the two sort of connect one another.

8:51Because if your retailers and brokers and all of the people that are gatekeepers within the industry are online watching you do this, then there's already greater familiarity and they feel like, oh, you've already done something. It's quite smart. sometimes it can be a little noisy on the platform as a result sometimes it's more beating their chest than it is providing insight or knowledge but look there's an audience for everything i think it works when people are genuinely authentic we have a few founders in the uk who do it really well as well but they share the highs and the lows but like genuine lows not the sort of like humble braggy lows or the kind of glossy lows and i think that's what people will then feel emotionally invested in it doesn't work if you just yes yeah yeah yeah posture posture and don't show the roller coaster that is the entrepreneurial lifestyle let's talk about refreshers interested to get you the other thing that we talk about is good founders seem to know the difference of when to stick and when to twist and like when to pivot and when not to pivot and sometimes these things are only clear in hindsight as we know anyway and it's all very easy to say down the line when do you think is a good time to brand refresh and when is absolutely not i think a good time for brand refresh is you're getting a lot of feedback from either your customers or your retailers that there are issues with the perceptions of the brand or that there's a lot of questions that consistently swirl around it other times though because it's all about where are you at in your brand's life cycle.

10:27Sometimes it might be you're going to launch a new product line of innovation and you didn't set up the original brand identity or packaging to encapsulate something beyond. Oftentimes, I think entrepreneurs make the most straightforward decisions possible in the early days, not thinking super big and they can put themselves in a little box. I find this happens a lot with brand naming, actually. They put the product name in the brand name and what happens if they want to move away from an ingredient that's in their brand name or I actually just posted a little case study today on a company called Hodo that we'd worked with that just got some big investing from a large Asian snacking brand called Calbee and Hodo is a tofu company they used to be called Hodo Soy and when we worked with them to do a significant brand refresh for them we said you need to drop soy from the name it doesn't do anything what if you want to use ingredients other than soy at some part Hodo is the narrative so drop that and then You know, the other parts were like, they had won in kind of the natural channel, but they were looking to win over more.

11:27So there was an audience shift and they wanted to win over more mass consumers or start to play in convention a little bit more. So I think anytime there's a lot of questions that swirl around the brand that are misconceived perceptions, anytime there's a shift in audience or who you're going after, maybe you've won the first stepping stone and now you need to get the second. Sometimes maybe it's moving out of natural and into conventional or moving from convenience into grocery. So there's a whole lot of things. I try to ask as many questions early because I think, Ruth, you're leading me a little bit with like, how do you know when to tell them no?

11:58And I think telling people no is a very powerful thing that earns you a lot of trust if you earnestly believe it. And it's in the best interest of their brand not to do anything. Larger companies, they get a new CMO and they want to put their thumbprint on it and they want to change things. And that can be really dangerous too. Yeah. It's the brands I've worked on. We've done some pretty big refreshes and they've always been so nerve-wracking because the one I see doing a dozen on LinkedIn, and I've never been behind anything like this, but the Tropicana rebrand just gets real bad. Cracker buying?

12:34Yeah, saw that one too. And I feel for the people behind that because it's so public as well, isn't it? Yes. yeah and it it it creates incites fear for those that do need to make change which is tough i'm a big believer in testing to learn and using research early on in the creative phase i think where the issue comes in a lot of times is especially with these larger companies they do validation testing at the end maybe you've got one concept and it doesn't hit all the metrics and now you're frankensteining things at the last minute because you have print deadlines and all this stuff and things just like you lose the perspective of what you're trying to do in the first place, or you simply never tested early concepts just to see what you could learn from consumers and bring them into the creative process.

13:20I'm also a big believer that people don't read, they recognize. And if you're going to evolve a brand that has product market fit and has scale to it, you need to inherently understand what consumers recognize about the brand and figure out how to maintain that. And sometimes you can move too far, as we've seen. Sometimes it's on the structural design side of things. Sometimes it's on the imagery and visual equities, or it's just politicized, which doesn't help either. I think it's such a good point about what consumers actually associate with your brand. Remember at Popchips, we did quite a dramatic change.

13:50It went from being like the dark to white and the swoosh. And it was being driven by the US and we had to roll it out in the UK anyway. And I remember we tested it with some consumers and lots of people didn't even notice it had changed because they just recognized the logo. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Completely different. it's quite humble once you understand what is the thing that they recognize then you know oh i can pull all these other levers and it's like a counter-balancing situation like the one you're just talking about we move from back to white as long as the logo is there it's a fixed asset yeah don't touch the logo red flags when you're speaking to brands when you know a project's in trouble when subjectivity is just leading everything we all bring ourselves to the table our past experiences.

14:39As designers, we have certain tastes and acumen. That is why I do getting early qualitative feedback from consumers early in the process to hold everyone accountable to what we're seeing and hearing. Other issues, there's always the budget part of food photography. I think sometimes first-time entrepreneurs who are investing in food photography are shocked by the price tag. But at the end of the day, taste is king. And the best way to communicate flavor and appetite appeal is through world-class photography. And there's a cost of velocities and adoption and trial if you hold back on that side of the equation.

15:15And then I think just maybe sometimes not thinking big largely or broadly enough about what the brand could be can sometimes be limiting. But what we do is brand therapy. You know that as much. We did it with a prominent jerky brand here in the United States called, now it's just called Archer. At the time when we worked with them, I think in 2019 to do a refresh, they were Country Archer Jerky. And we said, okay, first off, you make more than jerky. Let's take that out of the brand name and place in provisions, but provisions will be small. And then Country Archer, most people knew, like most people wanted more of a shorthand.

15:51So we're going to make Country super small and Archer big. And we'd sold them in that presentation in 2019 of like, hey, what if you just did Archer? They weren't ready for it, but it planted that seed. And then they just did that in their big refresh. and it's just awesome to see brands getting smart and thinking about the future and setting themselves up for success. Long-term thinking is what we'd like to see. What do you think the fastest way for a small brand to stand out is? We should pick a category really, shouldn't we? Because like you said, they're all so different. Why don't we choose soda because it's just such a tough category?

16:23Ooh, soda. Yeah, soda's exploding. And what soda means, the lines are being blurred now with the rise of olipop and poppy and all these other companies one of my mantras is challenge the category not the consumer it is easy to be different for different sake so i could take a soda brand today and i could say hey we're going to own one brand color across all flavors it's going to be bright magenta it's going to brand block you're going to see it's going to disrupt itself but it may alienate male drinkers or it might have navigability issues with flavors etc so i think ultimately you have to look at the semiotics and the design codes with the categories and spaces and ask yourself, what's taken for granted and what can we flip?

17:02I had seen actually a point to a brand that's been around for a long time, Jones Soda, if you know it at all. It's always a black and white label with a piece of black and white photography on it and then a big kind of colorful hit. I think if someone were to take the aesthetic vibe and ethos and bring it into Soda, it could be really different because everything today is now, every can's a different color and it's all this rainbow Skittles effect on the shelf. I think we're going to see the return of brand blocking within Soda. Xevia, interestingly enough, in the United States, has rolled out two limited edition flavors now.

17:36And they're vastly different in design than the core portfolio. And I think it's going to be the long-term strategy. And it's always green up at the top. They've cut the can in half architecturally, always green up top for the brand, and then flavor down at the bottom. And I think what it's going to do is help them accrue a visual billboard at shelf that'll help them get consideration because what isn't seen isn't sold in retail and you can't afford to get lost. So I think that's a big thing for entrepreneurial entrants into the space is to find a way to be different and disrupt. This is also making me think that for a while now, I think that this food water or vitamin water, let's call it the launch of, and this was years ago and you can't find it in market here anymore.

18:20I just think it was ahead of its time because A, it was a functional beverage, which has now come back in again but also it had that amazing rainbow but then with the massive black and white label yep i think it's time to bring it back yeah it's they just did a refresh here in the states they got rid of that half and half architecture it probably got way too complicated with the amount of skews that they had and now black is just full sugar white is zero calorie where i think in the beginning the core product was white on the top for full for full calories so for sugar they had so much success but they had some baggage and the category language started to change and then they got out of it yeah you're totally right vitamin water was ahead of its time there's a brand called soylent here in the u.s that was also highly functional and very differentiated visually i think the issue there is like it changed hands and then they tried to bring it to mass consumers and it just lost its vision unfortunately yeah if you were launching a challenger brand today and he had 100k in your pocket where would you spend the first 20?

19:26Bitcoin. If I had where would I spend it? I would spend it on the product. I tell clients all the time the fastest way to kill a brand is to have a great design and horrible product because you'll get trial and no repeat purchase and they have to make sure that what's inside of the can the box the bag gives itself the best chance to win with consumers tastes you can have horrible packaging and slowly grow as a brand because you have a great product because people will share it via word of mouth and you'll be skeptical and it creates hurdles because they won't have organic trial to it but there's trust if someone tells you to try this thing and it exceeds expectations the worst thing is undermining expectations great packaging you're like this was horrible i'm never spending my money on that again.

20:15I did experience quite a lot of that last time I was in the US actually. I feel like there's, I was in like a narrow one and I bought some like collagen protein and I was really excited about it. And I was like, this is disgusting. I had to keep it on shelf because it tastes so bad. It feels like the kind of barrier, taste barrier to entry is a little bit lower there than it is here. I don't know how brands get away with it. Yeah, fortunately, Erwin is not most people's reality. I love it for seeing what innovation looks like and things. But I think there's so many bleeding edge entrepreneurs that sometimes the story of what's not in the product or who's bringing it to market or what trendy no seed oil things they've got going on trump the product itself.

21:04And I think you also have people in Air One that are shopping more for lifestyle. And so there's a bit of posturing of, oh, yeah, I love this product. And you love it because maybe it's trendy and it's influencer lad and this and that. But I think try to go to the middle of America with something like that. It's your point. No, no one's buying it. Yeah, I did. I did also go to North Carolina recently and stopped at a gas station. And I was like, I can't find any of the brands that I see on LinkedIn in here. Yes. I love the flyover states. I went to the Iowa State Fair. It's like a big event here in the United States.

21:39It's all fried food on sticks. And it's just a healthy dose of reality of what the majority of the U.S. looks like and also what innovation looks like there. So I guess you did early on ask me about innovation. Innovation in the middle of the states is like pickle lemonade, pickle pizza, spam burgers, fried bacon on a stick. it's more about flavor and like a mix of novelty and comfort simultaneously that tends to win formats that people are familiar with and interesting flavors on top pickle flavors there was a lot i love pickles there was a lot of pickle going on i bought a bag it was like that was the snack it was just a giant pickle in a bag it's great i'm not sure it wouldn't work here speaking of which you've said before that you have a lot of love and respect for uk CPG in the design world here?

22:28Why is that? I think there's just such a cleverness and sophistication to branding and design that comes from the UK. And if you think about a lot of the agencies that are most admired in the States, it's Pearl Fisher, it's Turner Duckworth, it's JKR, it's Bulletproof. Where did all of their founders come from or where did their first shop start in the UK? I think that the US just provides much more scale for work. There's cultural differences so those things have to adapt but as a young designer growing up and being in san francisco some of my favorite agencies also had london offices and i would look at the work coming out of london offices and just be so impressed and also felt like so refreshing because there's a lot of use of like character both in the literal sense of characters but also just personality through design and command of typography and color palettes i've been fortunate to go to the ife show twice now every time i go it's just it encourages me to try to continue to learn as much as I can from the UK and try to practice that in the States.

23:26Obviously, we all love to hear that. As you guys should be the best at it. Reputation on the world stage is so strong in one area.

23:39You've mentioned a couple of them already, but you have five branding principles, which I love. I think they're on your LinkedIn header, aren't they? And I've seen you talk about them as well. Yeah. So I'm going to go through them. And for each, I'd love for you to build it out a little bit, give us a bit of definition, and then also a real world example of where you've seen it play out and it can be good or bad. So the first one, which you have already mentioned, is people don't read, they recognize. Yep, all the time. I'm just a big believer in this because people don't slow down and a picture is literally worth a thousand words.

24:12As human beings, we've evolved to look at symbols. It's why you can drive down a highway in the US and if you see a golden arch, you know exactly what it is. Or a sports commercial can end with just a swoosh and no name. Or I can walk around holding a green cup and you know that I went to Starbucks. That's the ultimate power of branding. Coca-Cola does it the best. If I tell the audience now I've got a small box in my hand that's teal with a little ribbon on it, most people know that's Tiffany. The fact that you can do that just based on the general description is remarkable and a testament to, I think, what we all ultimately want to build, which is distinctiveness and recall.

24:51And I think the food and beverage industry is rife with very conventional design that's mostly typographically led. Most entrepreneurs, it's just, okay, write out my logo and then big photography and then lots of claims. And it's all just like alphabet soup. and I try to tell people, what are we building that people are going to recognize, not have to read? Because if I have to say I'm cool, I'm not cool. But if you look at me and you think I'm cool, then that's the ultimate sort of litmus test for things like that. I think the other thing people don't understand about that is that you built those brands, have built those distinctive assets over many years and years of consistent, smart investment in the brand, in brand building, not just like performance marketing that has this like one-to-one row.

25:42That is not, that is not, you know, they've earned like - They've earned it, yeah. They've earned it. Commitment to assets and elements. But depending on the category you enter, you can create a lot of disruption. Bonds is a perfect example in the States. That orange box completely broke up all of the blue, white, red, and green Italian kind of colors of the category. Or I remember when Hippies launched at Expo West, which was done by JKR and I think the London office, that yellow bag was so just powerful that every time you saw it afterwards, you're like, oh yeah, the yellow bag, the yellow bag.

26:20And so it's just also, you create such great shorthand for the brands. And to your point, it only gets more powerful the more you invest in it. Hippies did a really good job. when they launched in the uk we all thought they were a californian brand and then when i think they launched yeah i thought they were a british brand and i'm still not entirely sure it was like california and give peace a chance aesthetic now they're and now they're not really here anymore and they're really big in the us that's that's another story okay so number two the opposite of bravery isn't cowardice it's conformity so this is something i tell a lot of entrepreneurs in part because their strength is the ability to take risk.

27:01It's why they're starting their businesses in the first place. But oftentimes, young entrepreneurs look at whoever the category leader is and wants to replicate that playbook. And what I have to remind them is you will turn yourself into a two-bit player, a fast follower, a commodity, a generic version of something if you try to do that. What you need to do is find your own voice, be your best self. And that's where I think it's reminding Clarence, like look it's not easy it's not comfortable for everyone but there's there is a formula to most epg brands and the ones that can figure out how to break it we already talked about liquid death we just talked about bonds and we talked about hippies they all had their own unique formula and that's what i try to get entrepreneurs to do and understand at the outset of their creative journey i guess it's learning which rules to follow which is yes they work and then which ones to break.