Unlock Growth Through Strategic Branding with Fred Hart

Fred Hart is a Brand and Design Consultant at Hart Brands, a creative consultancy helping CPG brands unlock growth through strategy, design, and packaging. Over the past decade, he built a 30-person branding agency, transformed more than 137 CPG brands, and partnered with founders, growth-stage companies, and Fortune 500 teams. Fred brings a research-informed, principle-led approach to crafting brands that stand out on shelves, connect with consumers, and move businesses forward across competitive categories.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

[1:45] Fred Hart’s background in branding, design, and the CPG industry
[3:10] Fred’s experience building and scaling a creative agency
[5:44] How design supports growth at different stages of a brand’s journey
[8:12] The evolution of agency models and client needs
[15:04] Why retail presence still matters for CPG brands
[20:10] How brands can balance consumer needs, founder vision, and retailer expectations
[23:40] The role of research and testing in better design decisions
[33:11] Why clear messaging is essential for stronger brand communication
[45:46] Common brand naming mistakes and Fred’s advice for avoiding limits on future growth

In this episode…

A product’s brand can shape the buying decision before anyone ever opens the package. In a crowded CPG aisle, how do brands earn attention, build trust, and turn design into real business growth?

According to Fred Hart, a design strategist and branding consultant focused on CPG, the answer starts with clarity. He believes strong brands know what to emphasize, what to simplify, and what to leave off the front of pack. Whether he’s talking about retail visibility, product hierarchy, naming, or packaging strategy, Fred shows how thoughtful design can help brands stand out without overwhelming the consumer.

In this episode of The Missing Ingredient, CJ Bruce is joined by Fred Hart, Brand and Design Consultant at Hart Brands, to discuss unlocking growth through strategic branding and design. Fred covers how design fuels each stage of growth, why retail context matters, and how simplification strengthens brand communication. He also shares insights on research, AI, naming, and building brands with room to evolve.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

Quotable Moments:

“If you test early on… I like to have my clients test three concepts.”
“What isn’t seen isn’t sold. If you’re an entrepreneurial brand, you have to find a way to be visible.”
“Brands should always be mindful of how trends and categories shift.”
“Just because you have all of these things you can talk about doesn’t mean you should.”
“All designers and all creative agencies are trying to design for people and understand, you know, how to connect dots.”

Action Steps:

Focus messaging on key brand attributes: Highlighting only the most resonant elements ensures consumers easily understand and remember your product.
Test concepts early with consumers: Early qualitative research uncovers insights that prevent costly missteps and inform more effective design decisions.
Consider all stakeholders in design: Balancing founder vision, retail buyers, and end consumers helps create packaging that performs across contexts.
Plan for brand evolution: Strategically designing for future product lines provides flexibility and supports sustainable growth over time.
Simplify in order to amplify: Reducing clutter in communication strengthens brand perception and improves engagement at the point of sale.

This episode is sponsored by The Missing Ingredient, a food and beverage marketing agency that believes a better future starts with food. They partner with purpose-driven brands to drive growth through smart, results-focused marketing — without the “set it and forget it” approach.

From brand awareness and paid media to content, influencer partnerships, and loyalty programs, they act as true strategic partners invested in your long-term success.

To learn more about how they help food and beverage brands grow with impact, visit themissingingredient.com today.

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Full Transcript

Introduction and Guest Background

Intro: 00:01

Welcome to The Missing Ingredient podcast with CJ Bruce, where food and beverage founders, operators and experts share the real strategies behind building successful brands. Let’s jump into today’s show.

Cj Bruce: 00:15

Hey, I’m CJ Bruce and welcome to the show. This is the podcast where founders and leaders of high impact food and beverage brands who are serious about scaling. Each episode, I sit down with the people who power the food and beverage industry, brand operators, agencies, vendors, creators, and retailers to uncomplicate the strategies that take brands from early traction to serious scale.

This episode is sponsored by The Missing Ingredient, a food and beverage marketing agency with over a decade in the industry. We take a different approach, starting with your business goals, looking at the full picture and building a marketing strategy that actually ties back to growth. From content performance marketing to influencer partnerships and AI powered workflows. We’re an extension of your team, not just another vendor. Learn more at themissingingredient.com.

Now for today’s guest. Fred Hart is a brand consultant, creative director and design strategist obsessed with building and studying CPG brands. Over the last decade, he’s built a 30 person branding agency, transformed over 137 CPG brands, won an industry record six design effectiveness awards in the last five years, and been entrusted by visionary founders and fortune 500 companies to craft strategic design that moves business forward. Welcome to the show, Fred Hart.

Fred Hart: 01:26

Good to be talking with you again. And mom, if you’re listening, I love you.

Cj Bruce: 01:31

I love it. All right. Let’s start from the beginning. So you’ve been, you know, over a decade obsessing over CPG brands. And I want to just go back, you know, how did you first get into branding and design? And you know, what got you excited about the CPG space?

Fred Hart: 01:45

Yeah, I fell in love with branding design before I knew what it was. As a kid growing up obsessed with basketball, actually, I was a big fan of the NBA and all of my favorite players had really cool shoes. And so shoe design was actually how I kind of fell into graphic design and thus branding and the CPG world. I went to the school of the Art Institute of Chicago to start my sort of collegiate career. I thought I wanted to be an architect at first, realized it wasn’t the right field for me, but then spent four years at the University of Arizona in Tucson and studied visual communications, aka Fancy Talk for graphic design.

And it was an internship. My summer year. My summer, my junior year, excuse me. That led me to an agency called McLean design, where I really cut my teeth and learned about the power of packaging and CPG. And it’s I’ve been obsessed ever since.

Cj Bruce: 02:43

And yeah, bear down for all the all the Wildcats out there, you know.

Fred Hart: 02:47

Yeah, tough final four. But it’s the most recent.

Cj Bruce: 02:50

Yeah exactly. Overall good. All right. It. So let me go a little bit here.

You know your experience building the design agency. So, you know, building, you know, up to 30 people, pretty serious operation. So just could you talk us a little through that journey? Like how did that start? And what could you kind of learn about from that?

Fred Hart: 03:10

Yeah, I was 27 when I moved from San Francisco to Boulder, Colorado, where I live now, and moved in order to join a business partner and kickstart our agency called interact. And we started with three people, mostly working with emerging brands. So like Vive Organic, which is now owned by Suja or Kettle & Fire Bone Broth Company doing, you know, 70 plus million revenue in a year. Or Koia, which is a plant based protein drink that you can kind of find nationwide. Those are very early, early stage clients, people that were looking to punch above their weight and really kind of like crack into the sort of natural products movement that we’re all seeing and feeling today.

So, you know, we started with really humble ambitions. We just wanted to do great design and, you know, learned a lot of lessons along the way. But over time, we continued to get really good at working with founder led brands, which I think is a particular skill set because you’re working with visionaries and there’s a lot of interpretation and kind of educating that comes with that. Had some early traction, as I said. And then we, we managed to scale that into like growth stage businesses, companies between 10 and 150 million that had product market fit and now needed to evolve for one reason or another.

And as we continue to do more of that work, our team just slowly continued to scale. We brought an account team. We brought on a full time strategist, we brought on lots of designers, all sorts of different and wonderful people, part of the process. And then the last maybe five years that I was a part of the business, we really started working with large strategic. So like Nestle and ConAgra and Kraft Heinz and Mondelez and General Mills.

And that was interesting because it’s the complete opposite end of the founder led spectrum. But, you know, we brought a lot of emerging instincts to the large strategics, and we tried to extrapolate and learn as much as we could from working with the large guys and bring those principles and philosophies to the people that needed to punch above their weight and kind of disrupt. So yeah, did that for, for ten years and exited that business coming up on two years ago. I’ll pause there.

Cj Bruce: 05:22

Yeah, no that’s great. I think the before we get into, you know, kind of what you’re what you’re doing now and your current setup, I’m curious, you know, you were working with brands at all different stages. Like are there, are there commonalities and, or, you know, key differences that you saw in, you know, how you approach that and, and kind of, you know, what works for us?

Fred Hart: 05:44

I think we saw no matter where you were in a brand’s life cycle or stage, that Design had the power to fuel and push a business to its next stage. And so again, that was kind of a universal truth. If you’re an entrepreneur just trying to sell into your first retailers or get into your first region of Whole Foods, like design was a big part of the presentation that either gave a buyer confidence or not. When you are, then, you know, maybe a growth stage business, you found traction. Oftentimes like branding and design is probably a little underdeveloped.

So the reinvestment and that is pretty good. But there are problems that you experience as you grow that you couldn’t have foreseen. For instance, like portfolio management, you start with maybe with one product, you get so successful at it and now you have money to do R&D, you want to innovate and do some product sublines, but all of a sudden you have to ask yourself, oh, well, how do these brand equities apply over here? Or how do we create segmentation so that consumers understand the difference between this product and this product or we’re crossing aisles for the first time, we’re not going to be near ourselves. How do we think about brand recognition and consistency when also, we need to be flexible to different categories or competitors that we might have?

So lots of kind of interesting nuances along the way. And then when you’re a large strategic, like you’ve reached scale, you’ve got massive distribution. It’s really about how do you use design to regain relevance as well as like create things like ease of shop ability and either deposition, you know, some sort of growing force or just be more of your own unique self. I think a lot of big brands eventually get so disconnected from their consumer base that they need folks from the outside to bring them back perspective and kind of tap them back into what’s happening and, and how to reach their audiences or lapsed audiences or bring new people into the fold.

Cj Bruce: 07:46

I’m sure many, many things that we could double click on and go deeper there. But having that, you know, those high level differences I think is super, you know, interesting to think about. So pivoting from interact to, you know, where you are today. So now more, you know, you moved more into this, this fractional model as I understand it. And so I’m curious, you know, what, what made you kind of think about that transition or what changed or.

Yeah, what made you move to what you’re doing now?

Fred Hart: 08:12

Yeah. You know what, what we built to interact was really special. And the folks that are continuing to do some great work, ultimately, my business partner and I kind of wanted different things. And so we sort of agreed that it’d be best to part ways. So I did that.

And I still have the hunger to kind of build an agency. But I think that what clients are looking for in an agency has shifted as well as the underlying business model. I mean, talk about AI, we can talk about all these great, you know, freelancers and contractors. We can talk about flexibility and speed. So I wanted to really spend my time thinking through what is the future of the agency model, particularly within branding and design?

The world that I know, advertising is different, shopper marketing is different, etc. and the model that I’m sort of working on right now is, is a creative consultancy that does a lot of project based work with clients. So they come to us and, you know, they entrust us with sharing what their problems are. And I have a small team of three now that I sit at the center of. And we basically build teams bespoke to a client’s needs. So we, you know, from being in the industry for so long, have a pretty deep Rolodex and great relationships with folks, but every client needs something different.

Rather than just relying on the talent that we’ve already paid for that sits on our bench full time, and we’re just focused on how to utilize them to maximize their capacity and investment. We bring in freelancers, and we’re very transparent with that, with clients. And we tell each client, we’re bringing this freelancer for X, Y, and Z reasons. And that’s been great. And we’ve had a lot of success working in that fashion.

So it’s an agency like engagement. But then on the other side, there’s just a lot of, to your point, either fractional work that myself and my team are doing or just outright kind of consultative work where we come in for a particular phase. Maybe an example is like, we recently worked with a large juice brand. They wanted to go through an RFP process and do a redesign. They needed to know though, why, like, how should we change and why and what should the parameters for this brief be?

So we came in, did a bunch of brand work, category work, stakeholder interviews, all this stuff, put it together in tight briefs. And then because I have no sort of ego or agenda about me having to do the work, I helped facilitate a lot of agency partnership meetings. So talk to these five groups. You’re looking for evolutionary style. I think these are the people that do it best.

They picked and then kept us on to sit on the client side of the table for the process, in part because CMOs or directors of marketing, a lot of them don’t have a specific experience in design and packaging. And they also want to ensure that, like, they have someone that can help them think through their feedback, think strategically with them as they receive work, help amplify that of the partner that they have, and just in general, make a smoother project out of things. So that was a really fascinating one. But other times, there’s a lot of large CPG clients that have in-house internal creative teams, but they need some outside perspective. So we’ll kind of bolt on for any form of engagement, push them, push the thinking, bring some fresh ideas, kind of make an accomplishment, and then kind of extract ourselves and let them kind of continue on.

So I, for me, it’s all about flexibility and just providing value where possible.

Cj Bruce: 11:47

Yeah, I think that’s great. And I think it’s, you know, it echoes things that we see on, you know, on our side of the agency as well. It’s like we’re evolving the service offering, being more flexible, being coming up with, you know, project based things and, you know, tailored executions and especially, you know, things are just changing very quickly. So being able to adapt and meet clients where they’re at is really valuable. Yeah.

That’s cool. So talk a little bit about, yeah, typical engagement. Can you talk a little bit about the, the types of brands that you’re working with today? And you talked about kind of the evolution with interact. So are you and you touched on a little bit there, but you still, you know, working with both like the emerging, the growth stage, the strategics or is it more what does that look like today?

Fred Hart: 12:27

Yeah, it does look like the full gamut. You know, there’s a founder out of Los Angeles who was formerly Liquid Death. He wanted to start a hydration brand called HY.Q built it from scratch with him, you know, was Pre-revenue. So got involved very early, in part because I believed in both the founders person as well as the space that they were going after and the product. And so, you know, it’s not our biggest pain clients or budgets, but it’s work that we want to be a part of because we believe in what it’s doing and it will pay other types of dividends down the road.

Most of our time is not spent working with kind of like early stage entrepreneurs. I’d say it’s mostly in that growth stage. Businesses 10 to 150 million. That being said, though, we do have a couple of clients that are, you know, fortune 1000 companies that we’re working with. And I think honestly, working at all ends of the spectrum keeps myself and my team fresh.

You have so many agencies out there, and we’ve seen them like they fall into a particular playbook or what we experience to interact. The more overhead you have, the more you’re forced to kind of go upstream and work with a particular size of client that can afford you. And I think what we want to be able to do is pick and choose based on the right opportunities, holding to the value that we bring, but not being dead set on always having to have X margins or things of that nature or, you know, a floor limit on a client if we really want to get invested with them. So it is, it is, you know, pre-revenue to billion dollar status right now with clients, which makes things pretty unique. But again, I think keeps us sharp to like what is everyone’s pain points and how do we take learnings from this project over this guy and vice versa?

Cj Bruce: 14:15

Yeah. That’s cool. Yeah. I think that, you know, those, those cross learnings at different stages seem like really valuable and being able to bring that for both, right? There’s, you know, you kind of see where they could be potentially going and being able to solve those problems early for an emerging brand.

And then the opposite, right. Being able to bring the kind of, you know, more forward thinking, riskier stuff to to larger brands.

Fred Hart: 14:35

Exactly.

Cj Bruce: 14:36

Yeah.

Fred Hart: 14:37

Yeah. You sum that up very well.

Shelf Strategy and Packaging Design

Cj Bruce: 14:39

Awesome. So I want to get into some, you know, some specifics about branding design and like takeaways for brands that might be listening. So I think getting into, you know, thinking about where, where the product actually lives, like where are people sitting on the shelf and how design kind of connects to the category. And so how do you think about, you know, where the product lives on the shelf and how that connects to like design strategy or your thoughts on that?

Fred Hart: 15:04

Yeah. I mean, ten years ago, DTC was so hot and everyone was like, it’s the future and retail is dead. And the truth is, though, the best brands in the world are all omnichannel brands. But what works online does not work in retail and retail. At the end of the day is where the rubber meets the road, where the distribution is, and where the the business gains really lie.

For instance, we used to do a lot of work with Doctor Squatch, which acquired by Unilever. I can’t remember what the price tag over $1 billion. Something very impressive for, you know, soap for men, basically. We worked with them when they were pre retail. They only existed online.

I think they were doing 150 million revenue, just e-com, which was so incredibly impressive. But they knew that the way that they operated online was not how they could show up in a competitive environment. And part of what I love about our industry is particularly packaging design. It’s the only form of competitive design. When you go to retail, you’re on the shelf with all of these other choices.

And it’s not just like, oh, you know, the same kind of product, but product occasion, share of stomach share of moment, like there’s, there’s all of these things and you really get into the psychology of how consumers think and shop and use their hard earned money to buy things. So design, packaging design has the power to move the needle, to create trial, to shift consumer behavior. One of our principles is what isn’t seen isn’t sold. And so you, if you’re an entrepreneurial brand, you have to find a way to be visible because consumers aren’t expecting to look for you or they’re not always in environments where they’re looking to just. Trial different things.

You know, you go to the store, you kind of pick, you have your favorites, you go in. And so design can be a powerful disruptor there. That means taking into account how many SKUs are facings do you have on a shelf? What are the different design codes and semiotics? One thing I love to talk about is like color strategy and philosophy.

Right now, if we talk about beverages, like everyone loves to change the color of their packaging per flavor, it’s the poppy effect, right? That you use the whole rainbow. And that works really great. As the pendulum swings away from these monolithic large brands and companies that feel really constrained or talk about Google’s Mac and cheese versus a Kraft blue box like Kraft blue box feels really kind of just old and stodgy and inflexible. And suddenly Google Googles is fun and playful and flavor forward and all of these other things.

But at the same time, you’ll find categories where, again, they hit a tipping point. They’re all filled with color, and you actually need to own a singular brand color strategy. So those are just like some some crude examples of how those things work. I think also just understanding how to challenge a category without challenging the consumer is another principle of ours that we preach essentially, like, what is it that all brands are sort of taking for granted and no one’s doing differently? And it’s, it’s easy to use the example of like liquid death, you probably couldn’t record an episode without mentioning it.

Otherwise. It’s not a podcast. But, you know, in the water bottle category, it’s all about, are you from a mountain? Are you from a spring? Are you from an island?

Like it’s just all terroir based. And there was nothing really interesting about any of that playbook. Liquid death comes in and obviously they don’t even talk You don’t even know where the water is coming from for the most part. It was attitudinal. It was lifestyle oriented.

And it’s just an example of trying to find something that’s long been ignored and using design to tell a new narrative that doesn’t disrupt. Now liquid is highly disruptive, and it took them forever to crack into retail. They were an on premise brand for a long time. But you can talk about Banza Pasta as another example or or Graza. Right you go.

You look at Graza and the olive oil category. Everyone’s in glass bottles. All the labels feel like these imported products overly precious. No one even knows what extra virgin means. And they put it into a plastic bottle that’s squeezable, that feels approachable, that makes you more comfortable with the idea of buying olive oil to cook with.

And it’s got a whole different kind of personality. And to me, it was a perfect example of challenge the category and all the stuffiness that’s going on without challenging the consumer. Consumers were looking for something easier. They just didn’t know how to ask for it. So it showed up.

Stakeholder Perspectives in Design

Cj Bruce: 19:28

Yeah, I like that. The challenge, the category I thought challenge the consumer is interesting frame that come up with. Yeah. See a lot of ideas come out of that. That’s really yeah.

Yeah. That’s really interesting. I want to shift a little bit to talk about, you know, different stakeholders in the design process. And so as you’re, you know, you’re, you’re building it and I guess I’ll put three out there. You can, you know, adjust this however you see, but you’ve got, you know, you’re working with the, you know, the, the brand lead or the founder.

And then thinking about, you know, the buyer in terms of let’s focus on retail for a minute, right? So the retail buyer and then the end consumer. And so when you’re going through that process, yeah. How do you, how do you think through those different stakeholders and maybe some tension that comes up in those decisions?

Fred Hart: 20:10

It’s a great question. I mean, ultimately, what we tell all of our clients is we’re designing for your consumers. We’re not designing for you. In the early days, a lot of founders start their brands because they experience some sort of problem that there was no solution to, and they figured there were other people like them with that same problem, right? So they sort of designed to find that white space.

But as a brand scales, you need to consider how audiences start to shift or what becomes your primary audience versus your secondary audience. So anytime you’re working with brand founders, I think it’s getting ahead, getting to know them, building relationships. I always argue that the best work comes from the best relationships. So building trust and understanding, like how participatory they want to be. For some founders, it’s very, very personal.

And so they have either creative instincts or taste that they need to see embodied in whatever we’re designing in order to feel comfortable holding it. There are other founders, though, that are much more like operational or business oriented, and they’re like, whatever works best for the consumer. So I think you need to understand first and foremost, who’s in charge of the business and what’s their philosophy? Because you have to ladder those things up a little bit and meet them where they’re at. You mentioned retail buyer.

I think that’s such a smart one that really gets overlooked by most design firms, in part because it feels like it’s just a middleman that doesn’t really matter. I’d say for most retail environments, if you go to a buyer and you tell them you’re going through a redesign, and here’s why we’re doing it, and here’s why consumers like it more. If you’ve done some either qual or quant, they’re usually satisfied. But Costco is notorious for having buyers that have a perspective on what works in their store and how you need to conform to their needs. Always interesting.

You know, and you do need to understand the environments in club. It’s like big product quantity call out because consumers are doing quick math and like brand is secondary or tertiary even in some instances. And so a design designer or design agency needs to understand when that context shift, how design needs to adapt to that and not just have sort of like one, you know, absolute way of, of doing any of that work. But ultimately, I really do believe in the consumer. I know a lot of agencies hate doing research because they feel like it muddies the work or dilutes it or takes the edge off.

I’m just a believer that you test to learn in order to win, and testing should happen in the very early stages on a more qualitative qualitative level than quantitative. I think agencies hate validation because it happens at the very end after you’ve put all this time and work, and if you don’t get the green light or it’s like a mixed thing, then all of a sudden you’re going to go back to the drawing board and like do some other things. And this happens more with large strategics that are trying to mitigate risk. But if you test early on, you know, and I like to have my clients test three concepts after we do our concept presentation. We’ll learn something about each.

There will be learnings that we can cross pollinate. And if they’re qualitative in nature, we’ll be able to read between the lines and pick up on patterns and build something that I think is meaningful. And at the end of the day, all designers and all creative agencies are trying to design for people and understand, you know, how to connect dots. So research gives you more dots to play with. And I think we’re all creative problem solvers.

So we, we want a good challenge. It just needs to come in the right form and fashion.

Cj Bruce: 23:40

Yeah. That’s great. I mean, I think the yeah, the stakeholder piece is super interesting in thinking about those. And then you just brought up the research piece, which I think is also super interesting. And that comes up with us a lot.

And obviously we’re, you know, we’re kind of the other end of the spectrum. You know, we’re out there, we’re testing things that are already. It’s already established, but curious just as much of personal curiosity as anything else. But within that, like the, the research testing piece, you know, you mentioned the large strategics come in at I’m curious, like the resistance from the designer design agency, like we’ve seen some resistance on, you know, maybe in the growth stage or definitely in the emerging stage of the budgets in doing research at all. And how could you talk a little bit about that and how you think about that?

Research and Testing in Branding

Fred Hart: 24:23

Yeah, I mean, testing is expensive. That’s a that’s very much a reality. Sometimes you have founders with such conviction that they don’t care. And if the business is of a certain size, I think that’s totally legitimate. But, you know, once you start to get 20, 50, 100 million, you kind of want to know if what you’re going to do is going to be a positive thing on the business, or if you’re going to give yourself a Tropicana and tank things, alternatives.

You know, I think we’re having more brands building community early, particularly if they have some sort of e-commerce footprint where they have access to at least brand loyalists. So being able to like pull some of them or find your superfans do surveys that way is typically inefficient. You just have to make sure that you’re cognizant of the inherent bias that comes with talking with your loyalists, right? Like not a lot of people love change. I think it’s also it’s usually always great to just talk to category buyers in general rather than loyalists, because you’re, you want to most oftentimes, you want to think about how you continue to grow the brand rather than protect the base that you’ve built again.

Size dependent store intercepts. I mean, sometimes I’ll just, I’m sure like you, CJ, you and I, we both go to a grocery store and we’re there for hours. And our our wives are not so happy about that. But I’ve stopped people in aisle when I’m either doing research on a category and I’m kind of just doing my audits, or I’m trying to get a sense of the retail shelf and someone comes up and naturally picks something, I will be like, excuse me, do you mind if I talk to you for a second? And usually like, you know, as long as you’re not bringing creepy vibes, they’ll talk to you.

Those are more informal ways, but there are lots of ways to get smart. It it all doesn’t have to be quantitative, right? It’s ultimately, it doesn’t come down to the numbers. It’s, it’s a lot of like a feeling thing. It’s art and science.

And so typically with early stage brands, I’ll, I’ll try to help guide them with finding scrappy ways to just stay connected to what we’re doing.

Cj Bruce: 26:20

That’s great. I think those are the literally go to the store and see what people are buying and ask them is is a great, scrappy way at the beginning. And, you know, we’ve, we’ve done similar things with like an email list survey and, you know, just to try to get something in there. Those are yeah, those are great takeaways.

Fred Hart: 26:37

Demos are also great, right? Like if you’re a young founder and you’re out there hawking your products, what do people say? What are the reactions? And also reading between the lines, what are their facial expressions? They’re going to tell you nice things in person, but like, you know, what are the other subtleties or codes?

Or what’s your retailer telling you at the demo? You know, you’ll also get feedback and what are your turns? What are the category norms? What’s your velocity like compared to everybody else? There’s going to be all sorts of signals.

You just have to be smart about interpreting them.

Cj Bruce: 27:06

Yeah. That’s great. Let’s move into talk about brand hierarchy. You touched on this earlier, right. As brands grow and they start with the hero product, and then they start to innovate and they bring out other things.

So how do you think about, you know, working on that? Or maybe maybe more specifically, kind of bridging from, you know, your hero product to, okay, now we’re going to have multiple SKUs and what does that, how do you think about that?

Brand Hierarchy and Portfolio Strategy

Fred Hart: 27:31

Sometimes in the early days, all you can do is think about that hero SKU because if you don’t find success there, you never live to see another day to innovate or these other things, right? So I think there’s some recognition of that. And you can’t build the perfect playbook from day one, but what you can do is be considerate of what might future innovation look like as a brand. What do you stand for and what does that mean in terms of where you go? A lot of founders will start, I think, with a kind of narrow idea of what they’re building like, particularly when you get into the ingredient space, like, oh yeah, you know, we sell matcha beverages, so we’re a matcha company or like, you know, our first product is a coconut water.

So we’re just a coconut water company. That’s always, I think, dangerous if for many reasons. You box yourself in, there’s no flexibility in R&D long term. Like we found this with one of our old clients, Bobo’s oat bars. They were all about oats and like, that was great.

It was even embedded in the brand name. But we said, you should one shorten your name to Bobo’s two oat bars is a product attribute, not a brand attribute. Because what if someday you want to go play with sorghum or, you know, bran or whatever else you can dream up that your audience may be open to? So I think focusing on brand strategy in the early days just gives the client a little bit more flexibility in their mind and less rigidity. And then, yeah, you know, once they, you know, usually what happens is you get one product, several flavors, oh, maybe I should come out with a protein line, right?

Which is happening a lot right now. It’s like, okay, why are you putting protein in? Just because you can doesn’t mean you should. And there’s a lot of that going on in the industry. And then if there’s a real relevance there, okay, how do we create segmentation?

How do we make this one feel unique as opposed to this core line that you started with? And it’s tough because every example requires different parameters around it. So I don’t want to talk too much in the abstract, but ultimately, you know, you’re trying to build out a brand universe. And what I always love to do is I love to look at other examples, both in category and outside of category. Okay, how are other people managing their portfolios?

Because there’s a lot to learn from looking at others. And then you can decide, oh, I think this would lay lay over on top of our brand nicely. And we just did this with a client where we showed them like several different brands and their different segmentation strategies and like, which one feels like you and they’re like, oh, this one does. It’s like, great. You may not know how to think about it, but when you look at someone else, suddenly you get more objective and less subjective about what you’re building.

And I think that’s helpful.

Cj Bruce: 30:12

Yeah. It’s good. It’s good takeaway for that framing of it.

Brand in Hand vs. Brand in World

Cj Bruce: 30:16

I think I know you’ve talked about this, these concepts of brand in hand versus brand in world. Can you tell us a little about, you know, what that means and, and how you think about that?

Fred Hart: 30:27

Yeah. So brand in hand for Coca-Cola, it’s like it’s always red. It’s got a white stripe that runs through it. There’s certain things that you just feel when you’re interacting with the product physically. But when you think about Coca-Cola, that’s brand in mind, you think of happiness.

And then when you think about brand in world, well, how do they activate it? I think of polar bears. I think of Santa Claus, I think of summertime. So there’s all of these things that a brand like Coca-Cola has built over, what, 150 years? Like it’s a little unfair to use, but it’s an example we can all relate to.

So oftentimes entrepreneurial brands only have the brand in hand moment. That’s all they get. Consumer sees them on shelf. They maybe purchase a. And they’re looking at what’s happening on the front.

Turn around to the side maybe. And like that is the brand experience. Maybe I love what I bought. I want to go find it on socials. Now I’m getting content from them.

I’m starting to get a peek into the world, but the world only happens if you kind of double click in and most consumers don’t see the world. I mean, there, there are so many. Points of media and things that are fighting for attention, right? So branding is critical to win at shelf and drive the business forward. Brand and world is critical to kind of cast a wider net and bring people into your universe.

And then eventually, which all of what you’re trying to do is establish the brand in mind. What do when I say, you know, brand Brandon, what are the associations that you have? What do you think of and the best brands in the world all understand the power of that Apple, Starbucks, Nike, you know, the list goes on, McDonald’s, etc. and they’re very controlled about those things. So there’s kind of a natural progression of how we think about those things and making sure that entrepreneurs that we work with have the right prioritization of those things. Some, some, some founders are very visionary and they want to start with the world.

And Liquid Death is a prime example of that. It was never just a can, and they were always doing all these things. But if that’s not what a particular founder or group’s skill sets are, then you kind of need to start with the the brand in hand. And going back to like your points about how important retail is.

Cj Bruce: 32:43

Yeah. And build it from there. That’s yeah. That’s cool. Appreciate you digging into that.

Another one that I pulled up that you’ve talked about this, the six tennis balls idea And, you know, again, this is research I did online.

Fred Hart: 32:59

So yeah.

Cj Bruce: 33:00

No, you want to take this, please do. But the talk a little bit about what this idea is and maybe if there’s any, you know, any example you could pull in of where you actually use this.

Fred Hart: 33:11

Yeah. So what you’re alluding to is this, this principle of simplify in order to amplify and, and brands typically have an embarrassment of riches. There’s all these things that they want to talk about and get credit for. So let’s use the example of Banza. Banza chickpea pasta protein pasta.

But did you know that they’re also like vegan, non-GMO, gluten free, plant based like list goes on and on and on, right? But on the front of their box, the only thing they talk about is protein content, fiber content, and then a whisper of chickpea. They’ve purposely consolidated the number of things that they tell you up front. And then there’s all these things you’ll find out after the fact. That is what strategy is.

And so if you know, if I were to toss you a ball up a tennis ball right now, you’d catch it. If I toss you two, you could probably catch it. But the more balls I start to throw at you, the more you’re going to miss all of them. So if I throw you six, you probably won’t catch a single one. And that’s that’s what we try to teach our early stage clients is like, just because you have all of these things you can talk about doesn’t mean you should.

You need to find the ones that are the most resonant with the largest audience that matters to you and own that up, because otherwise you’re just creating a distraction. And the NASCAR effect, where there’s 50 different sponsorship logos on the front of pack and now you no longer look premium, you no longer look confident as a brand. You look like you’re begging for things. I mean, I hate it when I see a brand like have seven different certifications on the front. It’s like, my goodness, to me, it’s a signal that the company doesn’t know who they’re actually marketing to.

They’re just throwing everything against the wall and hoping something sticks. And that’s not a recipe for success when it comes to communication.

Cj Bruce: 34:54

Do you see it as something that can be established upfront early on, or something that kind of comes as an evolution of the brand or a combination?

Fred Hart: 35:02

I think it’s it’s both. Brands should always be mindful of how trends and categories shift. Bonds, I think is actually historically done a really good job of like modifying things. At one point they were talking about number of vegetable servings in their pasta. Then they switched it to fiber because fiber is more prominent now.

Protein has always been the thing because they understood. Most of us want to eat pasta several nights a week, but we feel guilty. And knowing that there’s high protein in it creates the sense of permissibility. So it depends on what you’re trying to establish and what’s the the motivation or the driver for the consumer. But yeah, start with something and then you’ll learn from it.

The market will give you feedback or you’ll see the competitive field around you starting to either shift or follow your strategy. And those are signals too. But over time it should adjust because to your point earlier about like innovation and other things, well, your brand might begin to stand for more things than just any one singular macro or product benefit. And it’s important that you don’t pigeonhole yourself into that. Because what if you, you know, all of your products are protein, then you do a non protein and people like what, what is this?

Like, I don’t want that. You’re a protein company. It’s like, oh, actually we weren’t, we just didn’t set the table right for people to see the bigger picture.

AI in Branding and Design

Cj Bruce: 36:21

Yeah. Interesting. I want to shift gears to talk a little bit about AI. So AI, you know, impacts on obviously everything. But specifically for you, I’m curious on, you know, like drill in and one like, how do you think about it?

How are you seeing brands think about it and then, you know, impact both on, on the strategy side as well as the design side.

Fred Hart: 36:44

Yeah, it’s kind of fascinating because depending on the type of client you’re working with, you’ll find different camps. The large Strategics fortune 1000. They’re very conservative from a governance perspective, making sure that they’re not going to get sued, etc. so there’s, there’s a an intense curiosity internally, but externally, there’s very little that they want to sort of use with AI. And you see a lot of big companies get flack for AI. I mean, Coca-Cola, was it their second Christmas now with their AI Christmas commercials and like, people are shitting on it.

And then you have Apple, you know, do some sort of crazy color motion graphic with their logo. And it’s like all done like manually with glass and people are like celebrating it culturally. So it’s a touchy subject. But for entrepreneurial clients, a lot of them are like, Fred, I don’t want to do a photo shoot. I want to do an AI like generate a thing.

And I’m like, all right, well, let’s start with the question of like, is that right for you if you’re a natural product? Talking about simple ingredients in nature, and you want AI imagery like is that aligned? Like, should we be doing that? Should we not? You know, do we, should we at least shoot source imagery and, and work off of that?

Like there’s all sorts of different things. I use AI a lot with our company call notes, synthesizing strategy, helping generate ideas, etc. but I think at the end of the day, true creativity, if done well, is really coming from unexpected places and things that are not repetitive of patterns that already exist. And so we want to, we want to be fresh and, and look at interesting things and get outside of the, the hamster wheel that sometimes AI can just put us all on. You know, I’d be lying if I said I had it figured out. I don’t, and I’m working through it with a lot of different clients that again, see different uses and want different things for it.

But it’s here and it’s coming, and it’s only a matter of time before those tools are put into founders hands, and they can start generating more novel expressions of their ideas. I actually have a pet peeve, and it’s something I want to write about on LinkedIn of like founders that send me AI generated packaging to me. I actually think that’s like the worst use of their time because it creates these sort of blinders and they get wed to the thing that was given to them. Those, those, you know, outputs should be seen as tools, not deliverables. And I would actually rather have the time that a client spent trying to talk to AI and find the perfect thing and actually just build like a custom mood board or something, or give me a bunch of swipe imagery.

You’re hiring me to sort of like read between the lines and like solve a creative problem. But AI generated packaging to me just like tightens the guardrails and limits long term vision. And now we have to fight to get you to unsee the thing that you made and have you see other potential. And I think it doesn’t benefit either party long term.

Cj Bruce: 39:48

That’s super interesting. Yeah, I think I mean, I think it speaks to this, this something that we’ve seen too, and we use AI heavily and we have a lot of workflows that we’ve been doing and figuring out what that offering looks like for clients. But one of the things that always comes out is, you know, if you’re a subject matter expert and you’re working with AI in that subject matter, you have a better sense of where the edges, what how to steer it, what to take in as you know, a good idea or a good framing and not. And I think that’s something that, you know, we often see in working with clients where it’s like, yeah, if you’re going and you’re just asking a generic question and it comes back with something and you think like, wow, this is amazing. Look at what it gave me.

And then I look at that and I’m like, yeah, this isn’t exactly what to think about.

Fred Hart: 40:27

100%.

Cj Bruce: 40:28

Market strategy, you know?

Cj Bruce: 40:30

So what you yeah, yeah yeah yeah. Good in good out. Bad in bad out. Yeah. Yep.

Cj Bruce: 40:37

Yeah. And I think some part of the way we’ve been thinking about is as educating clients also on like, if you are going to go to do that, you know, here’s some guidance on how to do it in a, in a productive way, right? Or like what would be valuable to kind of come back to us from an AI output, you know, a conversation that I think can.

Cj Bruce: 40:53

Be, yeah.

Cj Bruce: 40:54

Could be useful.

Cj Bruce: 40:55

Yeah.

Emerging Brands and Industry Highlights

Cj Bruce: 40:56

All right. I wanted to kind of getting on time here, the ask you about some brands. So like we’ve mentioned a bunch of brands in the conversation, but I’m curious, you know, do you have any, any brands, people you’re working with or not that you think in food and beverage that are doing some great work now that deserve more attention?

Fred Hart: 41:16

Yeah. I mean, I’m fortunate to go to, gosh, 12 food and beverage trade shows a year and then pet industry. So I see so much stuff and meet so many incredible people. I’ll give a couple names. One I met at Expo West, a brand called Muzi MOOZY fifth generation dairy farmer who’s trying to make milk cool.

He’s putting milk into sleek 12 ounce cans. The branding is awesome and he has like whole milk, 2% milk in a 12 ounce can, and then also coffee, milk, horchata milk, like different flavors of milk just presented in totally new and unique and novel formats. And there’s so little innovation within fluid dairy. This is really, really cool and presents so well. So that’s one you’ll definitely have to kind of look at.

There’s an amazing founder out of Canada that I met at the Canadian Health Food Association trade show last September, and she actually just sent me product, the brand’s called Tofu Go. It’s trying to make tofu more like a convenient like protein bar. So really unique on the go. We think of tofu, all this prep, all this flavor stuff that we got to do and mix it with other things. And like, here she is trying to reframe people’s perceptions of tofu and what tofu can be and the role that it can play in almost like give the snack ification of tofu.

So I think that’s really cool and novel. There’s another founder I met noon NOON they’re all like adaptogenic sort of mushroom powered supplements. So there’s three gummies. They have a chill line, a sleep line, and a focus line. The gummies themselves are really beautiful.

If you check them out on the website, the packaging is really interesting. It’s kind of all like opaque packs with silver type and gradients. And just again, there’s so much going on in the gummy space. Gruen’s just got acquired last week. LinkedIn can’t seem to talk about anything else right now.

And you know that format before them, it was goalie with the apple cider vinegar gummies. And like, you know, that whole world is really, really fascinating and interesting. And it’s only going to continue to accelerate. And so you see some really interesting things from founders. And then, yeah, You know, I’ll just give another shout out to this brand out of La HY.Q that’s building like a better sports hydration beverage in a can focused on kind of run club culture.

And it’s really about audience because in a category like that, there’s so much hydration, it ultimately comes down to like, who are you going after? And how is it that you are expressing your unique point of difference? Because they’re a dime a dozen and there’s great Miles Davis quote that I love to use, which is 20% is the note, 80% is how the motherfucker plays it. You may need to go back and beat me on that. But all that to say, like, you know, CK, you and I can both pick up a saxophone.

We can try to play a couple chords, but like, the swagger and the style that you bring are going to make those chords your own. It’s like the national anthem, right? And so sometimes differentiation does not come down to a product level. It comes out in an expression level, liquid death. It’s still water in a can.

It’s the most ubiquitous commodity in the world. And so anyways, I just think IQ is doing something cool.

Cj Bruce: 44:42

Yeah. That’s cool, that’s cool. All right, Fred, one last question before I get there. I wanted to point people to connect with you. So point people to your website, Fred Hart and that’s hart.com.

And is there other places you’d recommend people connect? I know you’re active on LinkedIn, but yeah, anywhere else you’d point people.

Fred Hart: 45:01

LinkedIn or any upcoming trade show. If it’s if there’s a show in samples, I’m there. Usually I’m a glutton for trade show stomach punishment. And yeah, and I’d say in the next 3 to 6 months, I’ll be launching like a formal site for the creative consultancy that we’re building. But right now, LinkedIn is probably the best place.

Cj Bruce: 45:22

Okay, perfect.

Cj Bruce: 45:23

Yeah. We can follow up with that. The site when it’s, when it’s ready to go. All right. Before we, before we hop off, I wanted to just ask one more question about common mistakes.

So like mistakes that you see, you know, brands get wrong. If there’s, you know, 1 or 2 things you can think of that you see over and over again, what is it and what would you recommend brands do instead?

Fred Hart: 45:46

Brand naming. It’s the thing I love to like talk a lot about, and I think a lot of founders are way too literal or descriptive with their brand names, and eventually it creates some real tension as the business tries to grow and stretch out of boundaries. We talked a little bit about it on this call with Boba bars. You know, sometimes you come up with a name that people don’t know, like Guayaki too hard to pronounce and, you know, big giant business known for the yellow cans. Thank God they created visual recognition, not verbal.

And they just rebranded to Yerba Madre, which I think was a masterclass in stroke of genius, to name something so close to yerba mate. But yeah, I work with a lot of founders. I mean, anytime there’s a big trend, when we look back at the keto movement, five years ago, there were so many brands like called Keto Pint or Perfect Keto or like all these derivatives. When that trend like becomes a fad or moves on, you’re stuck with this name that doesn’t tell a bigger story. One of my favorite examples is Siete.

You know, the kind of grain free tortilla and chip company which Pepsi bought started out as must be nutty tortillas.

Fred Hart: 46:59

And to me, it just.

Fred Hart: 47:00

Yeah, it’s so funny. It was a punny name. They were made with almonds, right? Almond flour tortillas. So it must be nutty.

But like, what if they make a product that isn’t nut focused? Or what does that tell you about anything else? Siete the number of people in the family like a much bigger story, so much more interesting, so much room for innovation and meaning over time. So I’ve done a lot of renaming for clients. It’s a fun art and a practice.

It can be a painful one too, but I think that’s the number one thing that I would tell early stage founders is like, changing your name is not an admission of failure, but recognition that there’s untapped potential for you to move into. And so people always think it’s so painful. I can point out any example of like a company bigger than yours that’s probably done a rename and gone on to have more success as a result. So that’s the one I’ll stick with.

Fred Hart: 47:54

I love that. I love that it’s a.

Cj Bruce: 47:55

Great, great way to end. So we’ve been talking to Fred Hart, creative consultant design strategist at Hart Brands. Sure to check them out at FredHart.com. And soon to come his consultancy, which we will link as well when it’s ready. And you can connect with Fred Hart on LinkedIn. Fred, thanks so much for being on the show.

Fred Hart: 48:11

My pleasure. Talk to you soon, bud.

Outro: 48:14

Thanks for listening to The Missing Ingredient podcast. We’ll see you again next time. And be sure to click subscribe to get future episodes.

Unlocking Growth Through Strategic Branding and Design With Fred Hart