Cooking With A Secret Sauce
Just as there's something extra special about your Grandma's tomato sauce, some products and services are all the better thanks to a differentiating ingredient.
If that differentiation matters to consumers, there are extra profits to be had, not just for the brand the consumers are buying, but for the B-to-B brand that makes the consumer product so desirable.
Welcome to the world of ingredient branding, a B-to-B measure where marketing to end-users can enhance partnerships with other businesses. Think Intel and Dell, Dolby with stereo equipment, Nutrasweet and sodas. Its a fascinating topic, making for one of the best presentations I saw at Mplanet earlier this year (check out my blog post from January 27th), as well as an engaging Business Marketing Association Chicago presentation earlier this year about Underwriters Laboratories' holiday season end-user marketing campaign. (I blogged about that on February 6; look for it here). Ingredient branding is also the subject for Marketing News' September 30th cover story "B-to-B-to-C." The piece features anecdotes and advice from the marketers behind Texas Instruments' DLP digital image technology, Cargill's CoroWise cholesterol-reducing plant sterols, and other B-to-B products.
DLP, you may have noticed from cinema trailers, is the technology behind many movie theaters' digital 3-D presentations. CoroWise is found in Minute Maid Heart Wise orange juice and Centrum Cardio multivitamins. Consumers can't buy CoroWise in stores, just products embedded with CoroWise, and yet the brand is featured on product packaging, on its own Facebook page and even in Centrum Cardio commercials. That's because the ingredient is marketed as the differentiator, providing the characteristic that can make a product desirable. But to get into this space, you have to really understand how your product can benefit end-users and your business partners so you don't waste your dollars in the consumer marketing arena.
You can learn a whole lot more about this topic a few different ways. First off, there's the Marketing News story -- although I don't recommend reading it while you're hungry. (We really play up that secret sauce analogy with our layout).
Second, there's a MarketingPower podcast episode featuring two sources from the story: Michael Guillory, manager of worldwide communications for DLP Products, and Kathy Hall, vice president of marketing for Microban International Ltd., which produces the antimicrobial solution product Microban featured in cutting boards, plungers, medical equipment and hundreds of other products. Click here for a listen.
Finally, there's Hall's e-book Ingredient Branding: The Secret Ingredient to Growing Your Brand, co-written by Microban CEO David Meyers. Have a read by visiting www.ingredientbrands.com.
