2021 HITS: Prioritizing Brand Messaging with Pilar Ochi of Alter Eco

Aug 10

We're re-running our most successful episodes of 2021 because there are some insights that we have to go back to. This time, we speak about brand messaging for sustainable CPG products with Pilar Ochi, Vice President of Marketing at Alter Eco, a sustainable sweet snacks company.

We leave you with the episode notes:

Making a sustainable CPG product a household name doesn’t sound as challenging as it is.

Today we speak to Pilar Ochi, Vice President of Marketing at Alter Eco, a sustainable sweet snacks company. She joined the company because this was the first brand she found that does more for people and the planet than they talk about. While this sounds like any marketer’s dream, narrowing down the messaging and the direction the brand should be taking when you have so much to say has been quite challenging. She provides valuable insight into how to build a brand by finding the balance between owning the thing that makes your product special and owning the thing that gets it into a consumer’s cart. For all this and other helpful advice on how to build a brand, tune in today!

Key Points From This Episode:

Why making a sustainable CPG product a household name is so challenging.
How building a brand is a balance between owning the thing that makes you special and owning the thing that gets you into a consumer’s cart.
The challenge of mission-driven brands settling on one key takeaway.
How companies benefit from hiring consumers because they don’t have to figure out what makes a consumer tick.
How Pilar decided on the direction the brand should be taking from many possible options.
The three pillars of Alter Eco’s brand strategy and which two they chose to focus on and why.
How Pilar’s background in economics provided a framework for understanding human behavior at scale.
How Pilar’s different experiences at Clorox and Blue Bottle Coffee Company became the perfect foundation for her current job at Alter Eco.
The difference between a brand marketer and a brand manager and how this varies across different-sized companies.
Paid media versus influencer and PR and why Alter Eco does both.
The biggest challenge of scaling now that Alter Eco’s brand has been updated.
How Pilar envisions the industry and the world evolving towards more sustainable products.
The shift Pilar has noticed away from a minimalist aesthetic to one that is more colorful, detailed, and sensorial.
Thoughts on how consumers are increasingly more interested in the simple things in life.
How Pilar hopes the pandemic will impact consumers going forward.
The marketing books that Pilar and Gage have found useful.

Tweetables:

“From a sheer business level, the world is moving towards altruism, sustainability, having more knowledge of the impact of our purchase decisions on the people and planet around us, and I want to be part of that shift.” — Pilar Ochi [0:30:15]

“Building a brand is a balance between owning the thing that makes you special and owning the thing that gets you into a consumer’s cart.” — Pilar Ochi [0:34:21]

“Sustainability is not one of the things that consumers are thinking about when they’re grocery shopping and so in order to make a sustainable brand a household name, you’re going to have to build a complex brand.” — Pilar Ochi [0:37:44]

“It’s not enough anymore just to say that you’re purpose-driven, you have to have credentials and credibility behind that, so I think that being able to point to that deeper ecosystem where you prove that you’re walking the talk will become more important.” — Pilar Ochi [0:47:11]

Links Mentioned in Today’s Episode:

Pilar Ochi

Alter Eco

Clorox

Blue Bottle Coffee Company

Decoded: The Science Behind Why We Buy

Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion

Gage Mitchell on LinkedIn

Modern Species

Evolve CPG Email