Marketing Against Evolution
Every entrepreneur starting a food or beverage business faces similar struggles around production, distribution and of course, raising capital. But in creating and growing Honest Tea, a line of Just A Tad Sweet® tasting and unsweetened beverages, we faced an additional obstacle: human evolution.
Since the dawn of time, the survival of the fittest was often determined by a creature’s ability to efficiently capture food, process the calories and convert them into energy. However, over the past hundred years, high calorie foods have become much easier to access, and, if we’re not careful, our evolved taste for sweetness can lead to excessive calorie consumption.
Indeed, the United States now faces a crisis of our own making. Even though we are the wealthiest nation in the history of the world, with unprecedented knowledge of science, medicine and nutrition, when the United Nations released its 2015 ranking of average life expectancy, the United States was ranked #42. We know the reasons for this dismal ranking are complex, but clearly the dietary choices we make as a population are a factor.
When we launched Honest Tea in 1998, my co-founder (and former professor) Barry Nalebuff and I were thirsty for drinks with a less sweet taste profile — we hardly expected to be waging a battle against evolution.
We knew we were going against the dominant market preference for sweeter drinks, because our teas contained 20 calories per 8 fl. ounce serving compared to the tea category market leaders at 100 calories per 8 fl. ounces.
From an evolutionary perspective, we were ahead of our time. Thankfully, through the powers of persistence — some may call it nagging — we made it onto shelves at a few natural food stores and began convincing consumers to choose a less-sweet tasting (in our opinion) option. Luckily for us, consumers were already starting to pay more attention to nutrition facts panels, so our product (and our message!) started to resonate with these consumers.
Finding the right message and the right taste profile was a bit like groping in the dark — when we launched our first five bottled teas, they carried the words “Freshly Brewed & Barely Sweetened”. Most people thought the label said “Barley Sweetened”, including one distributor in Denver who printed those words on his truck. Though we did include honey, maple syrup and agave in our recipes, we didn’t have any barley, so we went back to the drawing board. We then shifted to “Real Tea. Real Taste. Honest.” While these words were an accurate representation of what we were selling, they were not very enticing, and didn’t exactly give potential shoppers a sense of what our drinks tasted like. Then we made the drinks a bit sweeter (30 calories per 8 ounces) and Barry came up with the phrase “Just a Tad Sweet”, which both created a taste expectation and had enough personality that it sounded like someone a person might actually say. With the launch of our Just a Tad Sweet line, our drinks finally started to gain some traction in mainstream stores.
Perhaps even more surprising than the success of Honest Tea has been the growth of Honest Kids, our line of Honest Kids organic juice drinks. I have yet to meet a child who wasn’t born with a sweet tooth, so the idea of marketing a less sweet juice drink for children seems like a recipe for failure. However, with a little help from my son, Elie who suggested the idea, we designed Honest Kids to hit that sweet spot, or rather “sweet enough” spot. With kids drinks, it’s the parents who do the shopping but the kids who do the drinking, so we knew we needed a formulation that would win parents over (40 calories instead of 100, which was where most of the market was in 2006) and would not be rejected by the child. The success of Honest Kids has demonstrated that, as we had hoped, children are able to adapt their palate to the less-sweet taste profile.
It’s important to point out that both Honest Tea and Honest Kids would not have been launched if we had only relied on market research. Focus groups usually fail to test respondents in context — so instead of asking a mother to drink a full bottle of tea over the course of 90 minutes, she might be served a 1-ounce serving alongside eight other samples — this approach usually favors the sweeter/stronger sample. Market research has its benefits, but when it comes to launching new categories, an entrepreneur’s insights and instincts are usually more relevant.
As Honest Kids celebrates its tenth year, the line continues to see strong double-digit growth, with sales of more than $100 million through outlets as diverse as Whole Foods Market, Target, Costco, Wendy’s, Subway and Chik-fil-A. Just as exciting, we see our competitors across the rest of the youth drink category shifting toward our lower-calorie recipes. We have realized a goal I first heard from the CEO of Patagonia, Rose Marcario, “Make it uncomfortable for your competition not to follow you.”
As we continue to urge consumers to fight their evolutionary sweet tooth, the market practices its own form of evolution too.
