The Mind of TCHO

We’ve been talking about this for a while. This is from an email exchange I had with Erik and Susanna:

Until we put together target audience, positioning, and marketing strategy, all we have are pretty designs.

We have one more thing to do with regard to target audience—understand who we are talking about. We both have rooms full of Millennials, and we can listen to them, and they might think they know who they are, but actually we need a deeper understanding.

I am trying to get a historical-social prospective on this. There’s a book we used at Wired called Generations: The History of America’s Future, 1584 to 2069 which I think is crucial. It’s the history of the United States by generation. The Millennials are a precise group, born of the Boomers and Gen Xers, arriving at adulthood now. In reality, they are too young to be the group we are defining as 18 to 35. But because the previous group was so weak (X-ers), the Millennials will be defining the whole cohort, and will pull along those Boomers who are not totally brain dead, or who are seeking heat.

The Millennials are not little Boomers. They aren’t opposed to Boomers. They are different. They grow up looking at their self-absorbed and hypocritical parents, they witness the rubble of the social institutions tumbled by the technological revolution, and their response is not more of their parents’ me-me-me, but us-us-us—let’s fix the problems and re-invent civil society for the 21st century. They are looking back to find out what’s worked, and they are looking forward to build a better future. They are simultaneously more traditionalist and future-forward.

The book How Brands Become Icons: The Principles of Cultural Branding is fascinating. The central point it makes is that each era’s iconic brand answers each era’s fundamental social angst. The original DDB Volkswagen campaign responded to the conformity and mass marketing of the 50s. The Coca Cola ad with the kids on the hillside joining hands about how they wanted to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony responded to the social disintegration and atomization of the anti-Vietnam and civil rights protests of the 60s. The Corona campaign that turned a cheap, mediocre beer into the leading imported beer in the US with the commercial of the dot com couple on some deserted beach, the guy lazily skipping stones on the still water, and when the beeper goes off, picking it up and skipping it too talked to the need for people who were working 80 hours a week needing to completely decompress—Change your latitude.

I’m not saying that we are building VW, Coke, or Corona. But this kind of thinking provides us with an analytical framework on which to set a brand direction.

We are focusing on the Millennials because they are not being focused on by the chocolate industry, because they are going to be the next generation of chocolate consumers and we might as well become their brand, and because they are, by definition, modern. What is their mission, and their angst? Their mission is to join together and rebuild the civic space, how we live together as human beings. Their angst is the deep divide we find ourselves in, both in the US and around the world—a divide that is altogether understandable given that it separates eras of policy, politics, culture, religion, development, civilization. And a divide that millennials are yearning, and will ultimately be responsible for closing.

I propose that the overall thematic message, the core of the TCHO brand, is connection. We have already talked about how we are connecting the consumer to the producer by making the supply chain transparent. I want to generalize that: TCHO chocolate connects us to the land, to the producers, to each other. Chocolate as a ritual of sharing. The brand as a message of unity.

So imagery of connection, sharing, embrace: a handshake, an arm around a shoulder, an arm around a waist, a passionate embrace, people working or playing in groups—a football huddle, kids playing with each other, listening to a teacher, soldiers sharing an embrace or standing with a group of kids, brainstorming at the office. The symbols could appear on our “magazine cover” bars, it should appear in our promotional materials, it should be a conscious/subconscious theme in all the media we generate—if we have a video of Timothy visiting a farm in Ecuador, when he steps out the small plane at some remote airfield, the camera should show him greeting his contact, literally focusing on his handshake or embrace.

Unity, connection, sharing, embrace.