Jose C. Carrillo

I created Harken Insights Collective to bring brands closer to consumers through listening and innovative brand strategies. This time around, we successfully redefined a traditional 'Brand Workshop'. Luis Brignoni and the team at The Tank Brewing Co. were amazing collaborators in building out this time of discovery. This opportunity allowed me to work with the team to first understand their goals for our time together and unlock their eagerness to understand consumer behaviors and opinions. We layered in similar research for the internal team to compare learnings and set a course for the brand strategy work ahead. It was energizing to see cross-functional leaders come together around common goals. I'm incredibly grateful for the opportunity and proud of how this went. I look forward to applying similar successes with more brands eager to build something great, together. I welcome you to follow us on this journey as you continue to see the value that consumers, and the ecosystem that supports them, bring. Most importantly, why they should occupy a valuable seat at the decision-making table. NPS: 100% Quotes: "I thought it would be boring and horrible. It inspired" (My favorite..keeping it real!, ha ha) "Dan does a great job in making every attendee feel comfortable which helps everyone speak up and get involved in the conversations which in return helps the business gather valuable information to use." "I thought the willingness to be fluid was huge." "It was all done great and smoothly and with great energy and the information was 100% on point" Have an idea you want to talk through? Email me and let's talk about it. It's free. If for nothing else, it's a chance to brainstorm what's possible, which is always fun in itself. Thank you in advance for following, sharing, and liking Harken Insights Collective as I continue to chalk up the wins. 🙏 Dan [email protected]

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🚀 Walmart Connect has officially launched in Mexico! 🚀 For brands and advertisers this is a massive opportunity to tap into Walmart’s customer base in a growing market. First movers will have a huge advantage, with lower advertising costs and competition. If you’re looking to get ahead of the curve and capitalize on this arbitrage opportunity, now is the time to act. Early adopters will establish brand visibility before the competition catches on - right before holiday. 💡 Ready to launch your Walmart Connect campaign in Mexico? Let's talk about how I can help you maximize your ROI and leverage this new platform effectively. #advertising #WalmartConnect #digitalmarketing #Mexico #firstmoveradvantage #arbitrage #marketingstrategy #growth #retailmedia #crossborder

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There is an evolving relationship between brands and employee-created content. It's crucial because it underscores how companies can harness or hinder the authenticity and reach that employees bring as natural brand ambassadors. Chick-fil-A's loss is Shake Shack's gain - and illustrates how embracing employee influencers can enhance brand authenticity, engagement, and market reach. This approach reflects a shift towards a more open, employee-inclusive brand strategy that can drive significant marketing benefits.

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THe debut of Bettergoods marks Walmart’s largest private-label launch in the food and beverage category in 20 years. The items fall under three category pillars: 1) Culinary experiences: Items with “innovative” recipes, elevated ingredients and trendy offerings, such as a hot honey seasoning for $3 and a line of jar soups, including a creamy corn jalapeno chowder for $4. 2) Plant-based: Products feature distinct green branding, such as oatmilk non-dairy frozen desserts for $3.44 a pint and a $4 cheese alternative. 3) “Made Without”: Products that cater to different dietary lifestyles, such as gluten free, or made without artificial flavors, colorings or added sugars. Takeaway: Rising grocery prices in 2022, drove cost-conscious consumers to shift to private labels to save money.​ However, the reasons now extend beyond price - consumers continue to buy private brands for their quality, taste, and ability to meet their specific dietary needs. #walmart #privatebrands #commerce

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Do consumers know CPG companies? This is a trend we’ve seen on the rise for the past 5 years, that I don’t think would have occurred if not for the digital shelf. However, I often wonder if the consumer looks at these as weird or doesn’t care? A couple thoughts… - Big Costco guy of course and still desperately waiting for Scan & Go. - P&G is the largest of the CPGs by market cap, but there’s a lot of undercover brands over the years that they have bought that don’t get rolled under these “line drives” - this is obviously a great basket building promotion (drives AOV up) but given the limited competition in some of their categories, this pits the shopper in a weird divide in my mind because so much of big CPG has been, up until this point, about the BRANDS. - building off that, if I’m a Cascade guy, that doesn’t translate to the same company that produces my laundry detergent or paper towels? Thoughts? Does this drive any LTV or HH penetration?

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WE ARE IN A GLOBAL ECONOMIC FUNK, BUCKLE UP! When Stalwart Brands Like PepsiCo Trim Revenue Expectations We Should Pay Attention. We are still ducking Covid, two wars, inflation (prices remain high) as do interest rates. Asian markets have slowed down as have their factories. Oil prices are on the rise again. And one report says consumers plan to spend the same amount of money on Halloween (for example) as they did last year. One of the reasons PepsiCo and others are trimming revenue. Consumers are getting less for their money. Which means everything else is expensive and they will not buy more than they can afford. The grip of higher prices and keeping a roof over one’s head and food on the table is a bigger priority than splurging. Retail therapy today is more akin to balancing the home Economics budget and taking care of necessities. #retailing #strategy #ceo #technology #innovation

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If you've been waiting to dig into the Startup CPG Retail Sales Tracker - HERE IS YOUR SIGN. 🚨 It's a full list of all the national retail chains, by channel, mapped to DCs, store counts, whether they anchor, and even has CRM tools. Honestly the best resource I've ever made. We did a really fun Q&A / demo of the tool last week showing you how to make the most of it. Check it out below, and please tag anyone you think should be using the tool. Reminder - IT IS FREE (no email capture even), thanks to our friends from Cultivate, I really hope every early brand interested in retail checks it out. A tool like this would've put me miles ahead to figure out my strategy and then start submitting to retailers.

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High school seems like forever ago, but I still see it play out all the time as an adult, especially in the CPG space. Brands/founders who want to be “popular” so they: > Chase trends and always try to be on top of the next diet/lifestyle craze. > Care so much about what people think that they never take a stand and say everything without saying anything at all. > Have lost their own authenticity to chase being what they think people want them to be. > Only want to befriend/partner/collaborate with the other “cool kids”. > Always act like they have it all going on and things are perfect, even when they’re not. > Sell their soul for “success” (or what they think others will define as successfull). But, just like in high school, it’s the kids [brands/founders] that know who they are (and aren’t afraid to be who they are), keep their heads down doing the work that matters (regardless of how much attention it gets them), stick to their opinions (even when it's unpopular), and would rather live a meaningful, authentic, and purposeful life than be a high school hero (industry darling) that are the most impressive. Your $30k trade show booth or eight-figure fundraise will never impress me nearly as much as the authenticity that you can bring to the world to help make the world a better place, regardless of how many people notice. To the admirably "unpopular" ones… No need to tag you here. You don’t need that kind of validation anyway. You know who you are. The world needs you. Know that you’re the ones that impress and inspire me the most. Please keep being you. Don’t let this world influence you otherwise. Sincerely, me.

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🏢 Let's not forget about in-store retail which is still a huge part of a brands overall retail media strategy. Peter Crosby & I sat down with Jeffrey Bustos from the IAB and Michael Wessel Esq. from Kroger to talk about the latest in-store media playbook! Be sure to listen 🎧 #digitalshelf #content #retailmedia #instore #omnichannel

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🎁 How’s your holiday shopping—or buying—coming along? As Kevin Dunn highlights in the latest episode of Here’s the Deal… every interaction we have with brands and retailers during the holiday season is an opportunity for valuable insights. What companies do with that consented data can make all the difference—turning those insights into better experiences for customers and stronger results for businesses. Highly recommend taking 3 minutes to watch! And share it with the retail marketers in your network!

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DTC/Digital Native Brands struggle to achieve scale. CPG portfolio's are stagnating. Consumers are trading down, and retailers owned brands are disproportionately growing. Target, Costco, Trader Joes, and Aldi owned brands are winning. Now Walmart has launched a formidable new elevated basics brand, BetterGoods. The best way to beat the Amazon/Temu/Shein/TikTok marketplaces is to sell products they don't have.

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🙋🏻‍♀️ I think this partnership is brilliant. Impossible Foods is a brand that’s selling fake meat to meat eaters. They chose the poster child of meat-eating as an ambassador. Essentially: “Hey look, Joey Chesnut is the 👑 of eating meat, even ✨HE✨ eats fake meat.” 🍔First, Impossible positions themselves as a healthier option for meat eaters. (Whether or not it is—that’s for another side of LinkedIn). This positioning is unlike other fake meat brands that primarily target their foods to vegetarians and vegans that “miss” the taste of meat. 🌭Second, consumers perceive Impossible Foods as a “crunchy,” vegan food. Hence the uproar! But… With Joey Chestnut at the helm, this could break the perception. ➕Bonus, Nathan’s could take full advantage of this instead of choosing to ban him. 🤨Curious… What do you think? #brand #branddeal #partnerships #brandstrategy #personalbrand https://lnkd.in/erHh4qws

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Walmart needs to be careful and not lose focus on their main business engine. See more below: MediaPost has a story about how Walmart "is poised to become a non-retail powerhouse." Not that its retail business is taking a back seat to its other initiatives, but the story says that a new report from Deutsche Bank says that Walmart is "gathering steam from alternative value streams, which are boosting revenue and pumping up profits. Specifically, Walmart is doing well in five pools of opportunity within the ecommerce world, including Walmart Connect, its retail media network, membership fees, marketplace transactions, fulfillment services, and data monetization." Advertising, MediaPost writes, "is a significant component" - a $3.4 billion business growing as much as 25 percent annually and contributing 70 percent to margin. Krisztina Katai, an analyst who follows Walmart for Deutsche Bank, writes in an investment letter that management has defined these five new value streams as "key drivers in the underlying transformation of the business."

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In case you missed the WSJ article the other week on the impact distribution has on retail grocery prices, I did a quick follow-up on The Journal podcast. It's a quick 15min and worth a listen. Shout out to Jesse Newman for the assist. To save you time, here are the main highlights (spoiler, none of these are things you all haven’t heard from me before): 1️⃣ Distribution is financially extractive for emerging brands. Always will be until something changes. You need to know that going in and be prepared. 2️⃣ The model of scaling grocery retail presence through distribution will NEVER be profitable for a small, emerging brand (hard truth, but still very much a truth). Many retailers have equal blame here. 3️⃣ When you are contractually obligated to not talk bad about a distribution partner in public (yes that is written into your contracts), you kinda just have to laugh when asked what those relationships are like. 🤷‍♂️ 4️⃣ Consolidation across our entire food system (from processing, to Big CPG, to distribution, to retail) is a major problem and the main reason why it's so hard for small and emerging brands to make it and the main reason why our food system is filled with so much junk. 5️⃣ If you don't have money, come from money, or have easy access to money, you probably shouldn't start a CPG brand today (with hopes of scaling in retail anyway).

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For CPG brands, transparency with buyers is critical. You need to be transparent about what your capabilities are, as well as what they ARE NOT. Promising a buyer you can do something and then not delivering on that promise is the surest way to lose their trust forever. I was reminded of the importance of transparency by the latest of Ryan Holiday's books, titled, "Right Thing, Right Now." It's part of his Stoic Virtues series, and it focuses on the value of doing good in this world. One quote from the book on this topic really stood out to me: "How many marriages would survive our spouse looking at our phone? Or our boss seeing what's in our email? How many reputations would survive a lawsuit that made it to discovery? If we are inclined to hide it, we probably shouldn't do it. If we dread the publicity, maybe we are not living or doing right. " We should strive for the opposite. We want people to see what we are doing. We want to be the city on a hill. We should be the kind of person [or brand, in this case] who the more they hear about us, the more they respect and admire us." Can your company survive being an "open book" to your buyers and consumers? If not, perhaps it's time to take a look inward. #business #smallbusiness #cpg #retail #ethics #ecrmrangeme ECRM RangeMe

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Starbucks isn’t like Chipotle Mexican Grill nor more than Walmart is like Target Similar Retail species but survive differently in the consumer market. And they have different operating strengths and weaknesses. But there are retail predators ready to take back share from Starbucks. Starbucks App isn’t the problem; it's their business model. The majority of their business is Drinks, which are very high volume and cost less than a meal at Chipotle. So they are overwhelmed. A simple answer would be to add more staff and equipment or upgrade the App technology. That is like adding another highway lane; it will work until it doesn’t because of increased traffic. They have a longer-term problem that will require continued innovation. Starbucks has an operational bottleneck due to growth and a high-demand product, mostly coffee. But this bottleneck is, as I said in yesterday’s post, their Achilles heel, which is also mentioned in this article as a metaphor. When your store's production facilities are maxed, delivery times become a problem. Add more stores nearby, and you split volumes and increase costs. Add more automation, and you kill the artisan experience. They have to simplify their coffee-making further without losing what made them successful. I’ve read some calling for ghost kitchens. This will not help Starbucks; they need to fix this from within and bring back their in-store retail coffee culture. Starbucks is not Chipotle, but they did cut in on Tim Hortons and McDonald's breakfast and coffee business. They are competitors who will do all they can to take advantage of Starbucks' weaknesses. #retailing #strategy #ceo #technology #innovation #CoffeeStrategy

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