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HMT are always happy to help when one of our clients are in town on the hunt for the latest trends in healthy food and beverages. Whatever they’re looking for, we know just the place to start the search and can offer them invaluable trends advice from years of experience along the way.

We can guide you through:

HIGH END/ PREMIUM: be inspired by the latest and best high end products in premium department store’s food halls
HIGH END- ON THE GO (to everyday on the go): see how this high end inspiration can be translated into every day products & spot innovative ideas for new products on-the-go
COOL NEW: outrageous and inspiring. Push the limits of your imagination and think outside the box. Have fun and make it an experience
SUSTAINABLE NEW: healthy food, sustainable sourcing & sustainable packaging going towards the mainstream
NATURAL FOODS & RAW: the best of naturality, the best of whole food. how to market a product to a consumer to whom processed foods are the devil!
CLASSIC WITH AND INNOVATIVE TWIST: see how lifestyle and fashion can be used as inspiration and help you innovate a classic

London is the perfect place to spot cutting edge trends and be inspired by the wealth of imagination and vibrancy buzzing from the city. But why stop there? If you are looking a little further afield for inspiration then HMT can guide you through the absolute hottest trends in one of the most cutting edge cities in the world- L.A.- where we also offer this service

But whatever the city and whatever the trend, the best part of these days is that they can be absolutely tailored to your needs.

So if you are coming to London soon and you are interesting in an HMT Trend Safari or if you’d just like a little more information on what they’re about then get in touch with the team HERE.

Happy Hunting!

In less than four days it’s been viewed nearly 13 million times.
What could that do for your brand awareness?
What could that do for your brand image?

Chances are, you’ve already seen it. When you watch it again here, make sure you enjoy the final joke, just 2 seconds from the end.

And why does it work so well?

It distorts an everyday moment in a way that captures the imagination. While enjoying watching the action, you can’t help but imagine your own baby reflection. In this way Evian is involving you. Inviting you into its brand experience.

You see, when your product is water, regardless of it’s purity or origin, these days it’s impossible to differentiate on quality alone. No. Today, water is differentiated on brand. Brands win by engaging their target consumers and telling them stories they already want to hear. You may or may not take out a message of rejuvenating water, but you’d be hard pressed not to raise a smile and associate Evian as fun and different as the protagonists enjoy dancing with their baby reflections.

But the biggest success…

By following up their hugely successful “Roller Skating Babies” and “T-Shirt Babies”, “Baby&Me” has us all talking about Evian. The brand has yet again become a “Social Object” – the focus of a million happy conversations around the world.

So if you’re working on your brand communication, you may want to ask yourself how many viral views it is worth?
Is it selling or sharing?
Is it telling or engaging?

Evian: Baby&Me – How to differentiate and build value into what used to be a commodity!

The FourFactors® is today the globally leading best practice based model for success in food and health marketing and branding. HMT have applied the FourFactors® in 50 countries across all relevant food and beverages categories in five years.

The strength of the FourFactors® brand analysis system is that it gives our customers the benefit of a global turbo that helps them Accelerate and then Stay Ahead in the marketplace through building better targeted brands, faster to market.

The Masterclass promises you’ll learn how to apply this in just one highly interactive day.

What you’ll learn:
Find your innovation space in the mind of the consumer and in the market
Evaluate your category essence and lifecycle
Develop the right innovation from your brand
Sharpen your brand positioning
Understand how health benefits develop and how to engage consumers
Improve your next launch success rate

Key Benefits for you and your team:
Advance your teams marketing competence beyond competition
Learn proven principles and techniques and discover how to action them on your brands and projects from global and local case studies
Achieve better brand differentiation
Develop robust innovation or brand ideas that are relevant for your brand
Find out how to avoid the mistakes that cost companies millions worldwide

Secure your seat today (limited seats available):
Register HERE for only GBP £340 per participant

Date & Venue: 29th of May at the Ararat Park Hyatt Hotel, Moscow

Any questions? Please get in touch with the team HERE

We’ll see you there!

This image shows the ‘before and after’ versions of a near water drink from Coca Cola owned Innocent.

Originally “Juicy Water” (a smart name because it spoke to the ingredients in a category where people liked juice and water and were looking for an alternative to carbonated soft drinks) the first rebranding in April 2007 changed the name to “This Water” (a silly name which tried to be clever at the expense of logic and making good sense to the consumer. “This” is clearly more than water – just look at the colour).

At last…
In a fit of common sense, from April 2013 the name is reverting back to “This Juicy Water”. This is an obvious move – it helps consumers to navigate an increasingly confusing category of waters / ‘near-waters’, telling them what they are buying Juice + Water. My only question is “Why did this obviously smart move take so long?”

Of course, nothing’s perfect…
In today’s world where once-healthy juice is being vilified for its high sugar content, this option gives consumers the pleasure of the “juicy” fruit taste, in a ready to drink diluted format. This ought to reduce the sugar content… and, it would, if they weren’t adding sugar into the drink! To me there’s an opportunity here to explore how they can better support their brand promise with a natural sweetener. But before they jump to stevia, they need to ensure their choice of sweetener fits with the Innocent brand essence and the trending preferences of their target consumer.

Consumers buy benefits they understand…
When it has to compete with the strong competition from the likes of PepsiCo’s Trop50 with it’s clear “1/2 the sugar, 1/2 the calories” message… This type of beverage needs to be as obvious as possible in its brand promise and communication.

If your inbox is anything like mine, Mondays and Thursdays bring a weekly influx of (supposedly) ‘new’ trends. Call it “trend spotting” or “Cool Hunting” or anything you like, but how can you actually apply trends to accelerate your brand growth?

At HMT, we are privileged to work with many organisations in many countries around the world. And because we work only in the Food & Beverage sector, in the last 5 years in 50 countries we’ve observed what we now call “TREND FLOW” as product trends flow from one region of the world to the next. I introduced this idea in an earlier blog post which you can read here.

“Trend Flow” describes the largely predictable phenomenon of the progressive moment of new, trending ideas from locations of the earliest adoption to those areas which follow along later. It’s not a new idea. And the flow patterns differ both by industry and by category. But if businesses fail to understand their country’s position in the flow of the trend then they risk missing the opportunity to harness its power.

There are 2 critical aspects to understanding and harnessing the power of TREND FLOW: Geography and Category.

1) GEOGRAPHIC TREND FLOW
Here the key question is “HAS the trend arrived in your market?”

Of course trends and ideas originate in different places. But they flow more rapidly to, and are more quickly picked up and accepted by certain other regions and markets. In contrast other areas are far slower to embrace the trends. This is a function of marketing spend, education and levels of consumer and commercial development. But the difference is real and for smart companies it can spell huge profits.

The opportunity comes from understanding the flow and where to next ride a particular trend up the growth curve.

2) CATEGORY TREND FLOW
Here the key question is “Where is the trend in your category?”

When the trend reaches your geography it’s in your category. At HMT, we make sense of trends and Trend Flow at the category level by plotting them into 4 Innovation Spaces. It’s a simple and powerful model that overlays the well-known category lifecycle curve…

The first Innovation Space is that of Technology.
Here the idea and trend are in their infancy, often born out of need. It’s the hardest Innovation Space to commercialise because the idea is new and the awareness and understanding are low. You also need a credible technology brand and marketing system to win in this space.

The second Innovation Space is Lifestyle.
It’s the ‘world of want’ where consumers are already looking for your trending idea. They want it now and they want it first. These early adopting consumers always want to be first and individual. They talk too. They’ll be the ones who — if you show them the right story for their lifestyle — will spread the word for you and accelerate your trend to the next Innovation Space, the Early Mass Market.

The third Innovation Space is the Early Mass Market.
When the trend reaches this Innovation Space it has already been passionately announced by the Lifestylers. They have extolled it’s benefits and made it look cool in the eyes of the Early Mass Market consumer. But in order to move from the few to the many the trend needs to be picked made into simple solutions. The Early Mass Market consumer loves the ideas and trends from Lifestyle but has less time and less disposable income. They buy when the trend becomes obvious, simple and convenient. Normally, this is when the smart or cool idea is picked up by the big brands and retailers who democratise it for via their advertising spend and mass distribution networks.

The fourth Innovation Space is the Late Mass Market.
Put simply, this Innovation Space is not the home of trends. Progress and change comes very slowly to the Late Mass Market. Here consumers are most interested in low prices, favourite brands and traditional foods. When radical change is introduced to these favourite products and brands it is most often greeted by consumer anger and protest. There are opportunities for ‘appropriate innovation’ – those packaging and variant upgrades which improve usage experience. But expect resistance to big brand, ingredient or flavour changes.

How To Make It Happen For Your Brands
So successful harnessing of TREND FLOW requires first an understanding of the major global trends impacting your category. Next knowledge of where these trends have reached geographically. Ultimately, the key decision is to select a single Innovation Space in your category. Your brand already lives in one of these spaces in the mind of its consumers.

Your opportunity is to ride the growth curve as the next relevant trend arrives in that Innovation Space by building it into your concept. HMT use Wennström’s FourFactors(R) to help clients build trends into the four critical aspects of their innovations and concepts: The Need, the Ingredients and packaging, the Benefits and the Brand. Build your identified trend into all four and you could be celebrating the jackpot… Just like RedBull has done with the energy trend and just like Innocent Smoothies did with the anti-carbonated soft drink, all natural trend.

Meaningful brands would seek what matters most to their consumers to gain greater relevance and would reflect this by taking on bigger visions, missions, and values to address problems in the society. Brands should regain their original role of being that everyday companion, which provide answers and hopes to people.

Here are five rules to build better brands for the future:

Rule 1: Brand purpose
Be very clear on why your brand exists whether it has a functional or a cultural role.
Craft a simple enduring philosophy which will articulate how the brand intends to move from offering “better for you” products to helping consumers become a “better you”, from “differentiating” products to “making a difference” to consumers’ lives in an authentic and meaningful way.

Rule 2: Consumer engagement
Develop a clear consumer engagement strategy, which could start with engaging a dialogue with consumers all the way to empower them to be part of the solution to deliver your mission. For example, Innocent Drinks engaged a dialogue with a panel of mums from Mumsnet, UK’s biggest social network, resulting in the launch of Innocent kids juicy drinks. Fiat launched Eco:Drive to help people becoming better drivers and reduce their CO2 emission whilst making savings.

Rule 3: A Chain of values
Transparency and trust is key for consumers and the value chain is now part of your proposition to consumers. Sharing common values along the supply chain (which are also in line with your consumers’ values) should give you an unshakable foundation.

Rule 4: Creating value which lasts beyond your product
There is a greater opportunity in shifting the focus from products to positive outcomes for people and society. One remarkable example is Nike+, where Nike shifted the focus from better shoes to helping people to become better runners, creating a value “healthier, fitter people” which lasts beyond shoes. Nike+ is now the world’s largest running club.

Rule 5: Enable success
Brands should not only promise but also show commitment to making a difference in consumers’ lives and the society. They should think on how to develop supporting, nurturing products and services that would enable their consumers to achieve success. Benecol brand has just launched “Better Together”, a holistic programme to help consumers lower their cholesterol with the right emotional and expert support.

These days the world is a connected place. If something is a good idea in one place, it rapidly becomes popular somewhere else. Put simply, ideas travel fast. Good ideas and bad ideas.
This is how “Trend Flow” happens. And it’s surprisingly predictable. You just need to know where your brands most relevant trends are flowing from.

Of course, this has serious implications for your brand. It’s expensive to buy quality advertising and media to convey and display your message. In contrast, select and ride on the right trend, and you benefit from the equivalent of a massive media budget as your consumers willingly tell your story for you.

7 years ago, UK retailers began launching a “FREE FROM.” At the time, it was a niche idea in a limited area of the supermarket shelves. In an area of its own, in a totally separate brand design, it was clear that this was for those people with a problem. If you had an allergy or an intolerance, then this was for you. This wasn’t the real start of FREE FROM but it was the start of its “Early Mass Market” commercialisation. Prior to this, consumers with specific dietary needs had no choice other than to shop carefully and combine the foods they were safe to eat themselves.

But the FREE FROM trend was appealing. And the idea started to spread. Soon foods were labelled cholesterol free, lactose free, gluten free, etc. And not just specialist foods, but these messages began to show up on the packs of everyday products. By 2012 the trend had officially reached the “Mass Market”. Confectionery giant Mars leveraged the trend to support their ingeniously-named corporate social responsibility campaign “Raising The Bar” — Mars being replaced by the word “Free” with the message that now even the everyday man’s everyday chocolate bar is “FREE FROM artificial colours, flavours and preservatives.”

What is important here is that Mars are riding the FREE FROM trend. But they have been smart. They didn’t try to ride it in the early days when the FREE FROM idea was ‘weird’ and for ‘people with a problem’. They waited until the timing was ripe. By 2012 the idea of FREE FROM was widespread and appealing. When Mars finally told the FREE FROM story, it wasn’t educating, it wasn’t having to introduce a new idea, it was simply telling the story its consumers already wanted to hear. And in doing so, it increased its appeal in a relevant way by removing 3 “Reasons To Reject” — artificial colours, flavours and preservatives.

So back to our original question: “Are you using “Trend Flow” to build brand success?”

The FREE FROM trend has reached the Mass Market in the UK. But it’s not the same story everywhere. In some markets the FREE FROM trend remains relatively nascent. If you study “Trend Flow” you can observe where trends have reached in your category, in your market or in the world. What new stories, new ingredients, new pack types, new production methods are trending now and could be built into your brand? What will enable you to tell the story that your target consumer is already wanting to hear? If you can read the “Trend Flow” and identify the big trend for you to follow, you can save a fortune on advertising and media if you apply savvy trend-led PR. And remember, in Food & Beverage trends, it’s as much about what consumer trends are guiding you to leave out as what they are telling you need to put in.

How to read trend flow correctly…

At HMT, we encourage our clients to read the trends through the lens of the FourFactors. We encourage them to ask:

1. What’s trending in consumer needs?
2. What’s trending in ingredients?
3. What’s trending in benefits?
4. What’s trending for brands?

Too often we see new concepts fail, not because the idea was wrong, but because it arrived too soon, without enough media support and before its message trend had reached the mind of its target consumer. Mass Market brands need to pick up on embedded trends. Cool and lifestyle brands can ride newer trends and appeal to earlier adopting consumers. “Trend Flow” seems simple, but if you use it across all FourFactors as UK super-brand Innocent did when they launched in 1999 the sales impact can be extraordinary.

If you found this blog helpful and what to know more on how to accelerate brand growth with trend flow then check out Sam’s follow up blog on ways to harness global trends HERE

In Brighton UK’s New York Coffee Shop we discovered the following challenge to EFSA’s latest stifling rulings:

OHSO Good for you chocolate – not only delicious dark 53% Belgian but also “Probiotic to keep your digestive system healthy”….

Chocolate is accepted as a restorative and anti-depressant – it remains to be seen whether it can sustain a digestive health claim. HMT’s Neal Cavalier-Smith says:

Permissability in chocolate is a very fine balance: In consumer perception, as health goes up, indulgence goes down and at a certain point it drops off a cliff – even if EFSA overlook this blatant health claim, I’d struggle to believe in an ‘active’ chocolate – though OHSO certainly does a nice job of rounding off a cup of coffee with something sweet and tasty, it’ll be interesting to watch whether the UK consumer accepts it.”

Making powerful enemies

As if EFSA wasn’t a big enough enemy OHSO are taking the fight to the big dairies with the following ‘stamp’: “Good bacteria last three times longer in chocolate than in yoghurt drinks.”

The ohso website also borrows from UK Brand “Hotel Chocolat’s” postal chocolate-club idea by allowing you to subscribe for your regular dose by post.

Let’s take a look too at Hotel Chocolat’s almost opposite approach to chocolate branding:

Chocolate is a perfect food, as wholesome as it is delicious, a beneficent restorer of exhausted power…it is the best friend of those engaged in literary pursuits.”

― Justus Liebig

Authenticity backed by brand-experience

Meanwhile on the Caribbean island of St Lucia, fast-growing UK high-street chocolate retailer Hotel Chocolat have added the Rabot chocolate estate to its portfolio of 75 stores.

You could be eating chocolate from a plant grafted by HMT consultant Neal cavalier-Smith… or by a former Prime Minister…

Here the avid chocolat fan can take part in a “bean-to-bar” experience, even grafting a new cocoa plant for the estate – so a couple of years from now you can be buying chocolate in the UK, knowing it could have come from the actual plant you grafted.

This experience comes with a chance to actually make chocolate from its base ingredients – just cocoa butter, powder and sugar – wielding a warm pestle and mortar under the expert guidance of Chef Ron… you get the feeling that Hotel Chocolat chocolate is crafted by hand rather than industrially produced.

So – you decide – bravely adding active bacteria to chocolate, or sharing the story of origin and craft in a compelling “brand experience”– which of the two will lead to the more satisfying mouth-feel?

Our money is on Hotel Chocolat.

I have this theory that chocolate slows down the aging process…. It may not be true, but do I dare take the chance?”

HMT Expert Consultant Neal cavalier-Smith making chocolate at the Rabot Estate

The “Hopper Pot” as it’s called is ‘pocket sized and perfect’. When you are on the move and space is at a premium, trying to fit a pot of portable food into your bag is at best awkward and at worst dangerous!

Enter the Hopper Pot(TM) – the new way to “flat pack” your food. Both squash proof and space efficient it’s small when you need to take it with you and expands to size when you want to use it to eat your food from. It’s perfect for putting into rucksacks or commuter bags.

And it’s already been winning awards: Gold at the Lunch 2012 exhibition in London as well as being shortlisted at the UK Packaging Awards 2012.

Find out more here: http://www.grasshopper-foods.com/hopper-pot/

For more information you can contact the Grasshopper Team at: http://www.grasshopper-foods.com/contact-us/