Gerry’s Insights A Simple View

The Simplicity Strategy

Seen those Spectrum Mobile ads with the “$29.99!” guy? At least in my neck of the woods, they’re airing with such frequency as to seriously stress-test the wear-out factor even of well-cast ads with clever copywriting. (Though in a period of hyper-infl ation I wonder, do you really want to surgically implant the notion of $29.99 service in the occipital nodes of millions of viewers?) Still, I liked a recent execution that riffs on the complexity of our daily routines, where the $29.99 guy visits a café and tries to order a coffee, only to be bombarded by choices. So he switches his order to water. “Still, sparkling, babbling brook …?” the waiter asks.

Ah, the tyranny of choice. Some economists say there can’t be such a thing as too many choices, but some interesting experiments at retail have suggested that shoppers at a sampling table, say, will buy less if the array of fl avors gets to bewildering proportions. By and large, though, we seem to be heading to a place where the imperative of CPG marketers is to get to a point where they can customize their products to a market of one. You. And you can decide whether that represents greater simplicity or complexity.

Is there a countertrend unfolding to this? In beverages lately we’re seeing the arrival of a fl ock of new and restaged brands that are of the utmost simplicity, be it in their ingredient lists, package graphics, their names, their core premise. In my New York base, the retro-sounding Brooklyn Best seems to be making a splash with straightforward teas and lemonades in conventional 12-ounce cans, for instance. It’s barely in the market, but storekeepers I ask say consumers spot it and buy it. Also around New York, a non-alcoholic beer called Al’s has been popping up that dispenses even with identifying a style like lager or pale ale. Classic “near beer” is all it has to say. Some more established brands with momentum would fi t that premise too, along the lines of Calypso Lemonade, Joe Tea and Milo’s Sweet Tea. I’ve long had a soft spot for brands like Boylan’s that offer a straightforward proposition in a clean, uncluttered package. The entire category of fl avored sparkling waters like La Croix would by defi nition fi t in here too. Enough so that some restaging brands like Sound Sparkling Tea have found it expedient to become Sound Sparkling Water.

How real is this trend? Who knows? In the early days it can be hard to tease out sustainable trends from the unending stream of thousands of new items headed to retail. If this is indeed a trend, it may be drawing support from several factors.

At the consumer level, there may be enough shoppers who, like the $29.99 guy, would like their beverage choices to represent a respite from, not an intensifi cation of, the complexities entangling the rest of their lives in areas like – well, cell phone service, for one. This impetus may well have been reinforced by the pandemic-era triage that left consumers confronting a narrower set of choices, often just staples, at the shelf. Shoppers may have decided they’re OK with that. There can be a kind of anti-badging statement involved too, kind of in the way that PBR and Narragansett beers offer younger drinkers a rejection of boomers’ persnickety craft preferences. There’s that retro appeal. And this all nests neatly with the vogue for short, understandable ingredient lists.

From a business perspective, we all seem to be learning from some of the excesses of the past where entrepreneurs conjured groundbreaking beverages that, if they lasted long enough to fi nd an exit, ended up dumbed down as the only way to attain sustainable scale. From a production standpoint, at a time of supply chain stresses, why not just procure a handful of straightforward ingredients and employ processing techniques that are in relative abundance, like hot-fi ll? Lately, too, entrepreneurs are learning to have a ready answer to queries about how big the TAM (total addressable market) is for their concept. That’s a way for investors to gauge the potential upside. Working to become a leader in a modest-size category (like kombucha, or maybe mushroom coffee or nutropics) no longer is as appealing to investors as playing in a massive category where success can yield a billion-dollar brand. So the gut-pop makers can argue with a straight face that their TAM is no less than the multi-billion-dollar CSD space. That’s a compelling enough argument that most of the kombucha marketers themselves are avidly plying their own gut pop offerings.

Then there’s marketing. A lot of us have learned the hard way that it’s hard enough to educate the consumer on one novel element of a new brand, let alone a half dozen. So, while I happen to be a fan of those mushroom coffees that have been coming down the pike, it’s a challenge to try to explain an entirely new segment using ingredients like reishi and lion’s mane shrooms that may be alien to many consumers. (Some of them have CBD as a component too!) If your package represents your main vehicle to tell your story in a couple of seconds on the shelf, that’s a diffi cult burden. As a rule of thumb, I’d suggest that if you’re having a lot of trouble settling on the right hierarchy of messages on your package, that could mean there are too many messages to begin with.

Likely the most compelling case history that bears out this thinking is Body Armor. It started as a “super drink” with dozens of arcane ingredients that were expensive to procure, unpleasant to the palate and diffi cult to explain. It attained success as a stripped down isotonic that has ignited a burst of premium growth in a category locked up by two highly promotional players. Others are following a similar playbook. Take L.A. Libations, which has participated in its share of abstruse new products at the bleeding edge. Lately it’s been trying a different strategy of focusing on established brands in established categories that are susceptible to disruption with a cleaner, lower-sugar version that’s in synch with the trajectory of the consumer. After its Arriba brand didn’t work out as a Latino-focused energy drink, L.A. Libations repurposed it to offer a clean version of Clamato called Chelada (no artifi cials, including MSG) and a clean version of Jarritos Mexican soda called Fresquitas. Those entries need little explanation and could be worth a home on the beer trucks of its partner, Molson Coors, sooner rather than later.

There are some conundrums I can’t fi gure out yet. For instance, if your brand is the essence of simplicity, does that mean the strategics will be less likely to want to buy it? After all, their thinking may go, how hard can it be to just knock it off themselves? Dunno. Still, I fi nd this trend – if it really rates as a trend – to be refreshing. It’s a little bit like when the punk rock bands came along to do a reset on a rock & roll genre that had become bloated and pretentious. Will some of these new brands prove to be the Ramones or Clash of beverages? Even the ones that burn out early could have a lasting impact.