The Art of Brand Innovation in Today’s Market
Join Molly Baker, Founder of Indie Consulting and Dena Wimette, Marketing Director at Lawson's Finest Liquids as they discuss the art of brand innovation in today’s marketing industry, considering the importance of creativity in efforts to stand out in this business. Dena reflects on the earlier parts of her career, and the transition from a large ice cream company to a local brewing company. She also delves into her process of building a team from the ground up, and supporting them in the same way that she felt she was supported by her peers in the beginning of her career.
Molly Baker (MB): So what are you thinking about professionally today?
Dena Wimette (DW): Today, I've been bouncing around a number of things. You know, it's July. So, I’m straddling this year, trying to figure out what the second half is gonna look like, and then planning and strategizing for next year. Three year planning is something we're working on too. It's sort of bouncing between the everyday and what I'm doing in the moment and then thinking about where I wanna be next year and where we're gonna be three years from now. It kinda becomes a mental juggle on a regular basis. We just talked yesterday about what new items are coming up for the back part of this calendar and feeling like that's done. It just keeps rolling. Never stops.
MB: Speaking of that, how do you define brand innovation today?
DW: Brand innovation, you know, it can take a lot of different twists and turns. But I think there's also the world of what your brand looks like and its evolution of how it shows up to the consumer, how you market, how you communicate. I think all of that starts to wrap into brand innovation because things are changing and moving so fast that very little feels static anymore.
MB: What do you think is the biggest innovation lever?
DW: Product often comes first in people's minds. It's the thing that gets people excited. It's the thing that allows you to be relevant in the moment with the consumer, to get that PR, or check a really important strategic goal. Most people think about product when they think of innovation.. You can see it. You can taste it. You can feel it. You can experience it at some point versus saying “we're going to try these new techniques to target consumers.” It's just a harder thing even to sell in an organization about why it is innovative or unique. Especially if you're talking cross departmentally or in senior leadership, those that are not in the details of some of those pieces of marketing. However, product innovation, everyone really gets it.
MB: Can you think of a certain type of brand that you have noticed are just doing an amazing job innovating today?
DW: I follow certain types of categories because of where I've worked, and I see a lot of partnerships. I feel like this is what a lot of folks are doing. They are finding other like minded brands that are hip and cool, and trying to smash the brands together as a way to leverage synergy.
MB: Do you think it works?
DW: Depends on the partnership you pick. I think they're not easy. I think they come out looking easy, or they can look like they make a natural fit. But you're now smashing two brands, companies, and sets of values that need to fit into one product. And so I think sometimes they're the hardest ones to execute. I love when you smash up different categories to some degree too. I saw a sneaker company and a beverage company kind of smashing up together. And so that seems neat. I think it was Olipop too. They did the Minions can. I love when people sort of play outside their space in a way.
MB: Some partnerships like what Mattel did when the Barbie movie launched. I can only imagine the partnership's budget for that project, but they crushed it. It was kind of incredible, honestly.
MB: So from your perspective, what inspires product innovation?
DW: I think product innovation can be inspired from lots of places. My favorite place is, of course, the consumer to start there. Helping the consumer understand where they may have problems they don't see in their lives and helping to solve those is a real benefit that you can provide. I think in the end, there's business needs. So, how do you find that Venn diagram of business strategy and inspiration in either changing consumers or changing the territories that you're selling in, And then I just walk to the grocery store. I've lived most of my life in CPG. I love to walk around a grocery store. I love to look at packaging and product claims and see what other people are putting out there from the super small like disruptor brands to the super massive, like CPG, multi billionaire companies.
MB: How do you know as a brand when you should be following a trend versus leading a trend?
DW: I'm gonna answer, but not answer because who knows? If it was a true science, I'd probably make a lot more money.But I think it's in part your risk tolerance as a company, or how much you are willing to fail? Because that's what you're probably gonna do most often if you're trying to set the trend. If you're not willing to fail, or you don't have the budget, and you really need it to be a safe bet, then you're probably going to want to be a close second or third follower. It's a crowded space that we operate in. There's a lot of players and a lot of innovation. How do you stay relevant, and stay at the forefront of people's minds when they're going out to make a purchase? Innovation does show up, so we do innovation that can be small scale, and it could be on the broad regional scale. So there's always elements of the brand and managing sort of how it shows up and does something for a consumer somewhere that we're always sort of thinking about.
MB: I am thinking of a TikToker, and I can’t remember her name right now, that has this whole thing about how brand marketing has lost the plot today, and that we've gotten so far away from Marketing 101. And I hear the point, but I don't know if I don't know if the plot has been lost, necessarily. It's just changed a lot. I'm curious. What do you think?
DW: I was you know, when I think about marketing back in the day, or even before everything seemed to be online, before we walked around with mini computers in our hands on a regular basis. You as a company would create the one big brand message for the year. Companies spent all of their ad dollars and all their research dollars on one big message, or 3 big moments throughout the year, and one major innovation drop. I do think things were more clever and a little bit more creative at times in that world. And now you have to be creating that big message every day. What is your social post? What is your ad gonna look like? How do you maximize your impressions, your views, and your reach? And you're just always sort of thinking about how to change what you did the day before. And that's a big scramble. I think then you start to follow just trends. We don't do a ton of that, but that's the one thing I think people sometimes forget the rule book of the way their marketing used to be done if they're always just chasing the TikTok trend. But then everyone's doing the same dance with their products online. Content creators are working their butts off on a daily basis to try to think about “How do I tell the story of the same product to the same people in a different way multiple times a week.” Whereas, again, it used to just be we're gonna run the campaign, and it's gonna be in magazines and on billboards and maybe TV. And then we're good to go.
MB: What relationship would you say has had the most impact on you throughout your career?
DW: I've been lucky to work with great people. I think the people who were part of my project teams or worked in support of the work that I was doing. Those were people who helped to build my confidence, helped to build my skills, helped me see what I was really capable of. I think those instances working with cross departmental teams was one of the big things. I still have certain peers that I meet and have coffee with every other week when possible, and I like that peer mentorship sort of level. Those are the ones I think I've found a lot of value in. Whereas, senior leaders that help you have always been valuable relationships, but it's those peers too that you can come to with a problem, and not be embarrassed about what they're gonna think, and then you find out that they've been dealing with something similar and you can help each other. Those are the relationships, I think, that have really helped me out.
MB: Yeah. It's very important. I agree. Amazing. So tell us who you are, the big reveal.
DW: I am just so excited! So, I am Dena Wimette, and I am the marketing director at Lawson's Finest Liquids. That's me.
MB: Let's talk about Lawson's.
DW: It's an amazing, craft beer company. We're based in Vermont. We're most known for Sip of Sunshine, which is an amazing IPA and a beautiful yellow can with a huge sun on it. And it's a founder driven company, started by a husband and wife, Sean and Karen. What I love about it is the beer because it's delicious, but, also, they're values based B Corp, really community focused. And so it makes it really easy to do marketing for a company that you believe in all throughout. I love the product. I love the values, the people, all of it.
MB: What's the high and the low of your current role?
DW: I do think the high is being able to just get in on all the things. It's the kind of role that I get to go to one meeting and talk about social media and look at posts that we're thinking of doing, and then talk about posters for events at bars, or go into a planning meeting and talk about the three year strategic plan and help sort out goals. So I get to sort of get to see all of it in many ways. Whereas in other roles I've had, you live in your pillar of the organization and you do amazing work in your pillar to support sort of the greater good for the whole. So that's a big high.
MB: What about the low?
DW: Low? There's never enough time in the day. I find that some days you're just in back to back meetings. Which is not the culture of the organization per se. So I'm so used to having space and time because so much of what we do is sort of ad hoc and collaborative work so that when I'm in a full day of scheduled back to back meetings by the end of it, I'm just exhausted.
MB: So how did you get to Lawson's? Talk about your journey.
DW: So before I was at Lawson's finest, I was at Ben and Jerry's for fifteen years and served in that organization, brand management, advertising, and the bulk of it was really innovation. So, I spent a long time doing new product development and sort of heading up that team for the US business and for even some of the new markets. That was pretty amazing. That's the bulk of where I spent my marketing life. I was at IRI for a little while doing marketing research. I got my MBA at Northeastern in Boston. And before that, I swore I was gonna be a psychologist. And then I was lucky enough to get a job working at, like, a startup tech company right before going back to school and fell in love with business and found myself on a totally different path.
MB: Talk us through the process. It sounds like you came from a big organization into a smaller organization. We were talking before we came on that you built your team from scratch. What was that like?
DW: It was exciting and scary all at the same time. I came on board when they were in a pause. They hadn't really had marketing leadership for about a year. So everybody was in leadership, and doing marketing for a little while. And the team had turned over. This was coming out of COVID and just this sort of churn that comes with the difficulty of how that world works. So I started, and there were 2 interns that they had brought in the day before I started. These two folks were amazing. So I joined this fresh team, and my job was to build the rest of the organization.
MB: How do you keep creativity in your team or inspire them?
DW: I love creativity. If I had to choose what happens at the end of this career, I wanna do a whole thing on creativity. That's the psychologist in me. I would be totally stoked to do a whole thing on human creativity. It's my new thing. But I think, you know, my role as the director is to like support and to foster. And my team, they're very creative folks. And what they just need is to know that there's a safety net. And part of it is explaining and showing that failure is gonna be part of being creative. You're not gonna nail every social post. You're not gonna nail every piece of content. You're gonna totally suck on some of it. And that's super cool. You know, it's how you learn from those issues. So that's the first thing.
MB: How do you stay creative?
DW: I watch a lot of the videos, and I just love to surf through Instagram or other people's content. I love to read articles. I like to paint and when I feel the need to spark my own creativity, I'll tend to pick up a paintbrush and do some watercolor. I like to learn.
MB: How has the beer industry been different from your previous CPG Ice cream?
DW: The cool thing was that Lawson's Finest Liquids being values driven, B corp, and when it's cold. Always being kept cold. Those things felt really familiar to ice cream. It was amazing to have conversations that started to sound very similar. The brands are both pretty whimsical. I have a lot of illustrations. Even that felt comfortable, which was great when you start something new. Beer is a little more dynamic than ice cream or at least at the tier of Ben and Jerry's. There's always something new. Breweries are constantly launching new things, and it's about how you stay on top of the competition, but not really focus on the competition, and stay focused instead on the internal side of the business. It's definitely faster moving in terms of churn and innovation.
MB: Have you struggled with the regulatory restrictions with marketing?
DW: It's been okay. Because at the end of the day, we're all about responsible consumption and, interestingly, with full fat ice cream you also are focused on making sure you're marketing responsibly. So that never felt like a big difference. But the hard thing with the regulations is they change by state. As we look at ourselves in ten states and think about growing even beyond that, it's about knowing what you can and can’t do in each one, and having to tailor to that.
MB: At 23, when you were working at IRI, did you think you would be doing what you're doing today?
DW: I don't think so. I just don't think I understood it. I thought marketing equaled advertising when I really first got into it. And I just didn't realize you have to be analytical and you have to be number centric to really succeed because you're helping to manage big budgets, and figure out where to spend most efficiently. You have to understand the consumer and how to effectively talk to them and connect with them. You have to be able to relate to people and work within an organization across every department. I just don't think I understood how many skills you have to flex to be a marketer. So, I just thought I would crunch numbers. I like numbers. I love marketing research, learning about the consumer, and data. So I figured that would be my impact on marketing. I have nieces and nephews that are now in college and we hear about their marketing major and my next question is; What do you like about marketing? Because each marketing position can look so different from the next.
Trendy or Tragic
Taylor Swift
DW: I do love Taylor Swift. She is pretty trendy, and I hope she doesn't become tragic. But I do love her music and what she's been able to do. How she is changing economies by showing up. It’s pretty phenomenal. She is crushing it.
Spiked seltzers
DW: This is a hard one because of my industry. I don't like spiked seltzers for the most part. I find it difficult to find one that I like. A little too sweet. I'm gonna go tragic. I'm trying to find a good one because I'm nice. I just and I think they were super trendy, and they're becoming tragic. I prefer the cocktail version where you can throw a little vodka in and it’s less like a malt beverage. I would rather have a Lawson's finest beer. A Sip of Sunshine.
Maple flavored things
DW: Depends on the thing. I do put maple in my coffee everyday. Maple syrup is delicious in coffee. It cuts the bitter so I do like it as a sweetener, or a substitute for sugar, but I am not about to go douse my pancakes in it. Maple creemees are good, but I prefer a chocolate vanilla twist
Check out Dena Wimette on LinkedIn and Lawson’s Finest Liquids at lawsonsfinest.com.
As for us, follow@namedrop.pod on Instagram & LinkedIn and@molbakes on Instagram for all future episodes and insights.
