How Services Companies Can Effectively Empower Employees on Relevant Social Media at Scale

It is 4:45 in the morning at a regional hospital outside Charlotte.

Marcus has been on site since 2 a.m. The boiler that heats the surgical wing went down overnight, and the first procedure starts at 7. He traces the problem to a failed ignition module, swaps it out, fires the system back up, and checks the pressure twice.

At 6:10, the heat comes back on.

The nurses and doctors walk into a warm building. Nobody knows anything was wrong.

That is a job done perfectly. And nobody saw it.

Marcus works for a company I’ll call Keystone Facility Services. Twelve thousand employees. Commercial cleaning, HVAC, and building maintenance across 30 states. They specialize in hospitals.

Its marketing department has nine people, and every quarter they scramble to find fresh case studies.

Meanwhile, Marcus has a phone in his pocket and a story that would sell Keystone better than anything in the sales deck.

Multiply Marcus by 12,000, and you start to see the problem. You also start to see the opportunity.

The Math Most Leadership Teams Miss

Here is the uncomfortable math. Nine marketers are trying to describe work they rarely witness. Twelve thousand employees witness it every single day and rarely talk about it.

Every facilities company says the same things on its website. Responsive. Reliable. 24/7. Those words have stopped meaning anything because everyone uses them. A prospect evaluating a new facilities partner can’t tell one claim from another.

But a 40-second video of a technician explaining how he got a hospital’s heat back on before the first surgery? That isn’t a claim. That’s proof.

This is what employee-generated content, or EGC, really is. It is not employees reposting corporate press releases. It is the people closest to the work showing what the work actually looks like. Buyers trust people more than they trust brands, and they trust the person holding the wrench more than anyone.

Why Service Companies Need This Now.

I spend most of my time with food and beverage brands, and they have a built-in advantage. They have something to photograph. A package. A shelf. A plate. A customer can see the product before they buy it. Employee-generated content can help them – but it is a bigger need in the service industry.

Service companies often work behind locked doors, after hours, in mechanical rooms, and on rooftops. Clients often only notice the service when it fails.

That changes what EGC does for you. For a product company, employee content is usually about culture and behind-the-scenes color. It’s nice to have, and most CPG firms can improve it.

But for a service company, employee content is the product demo. It makes invisible work visible.

In a service business, your employees are your packaging.

They need to show their work so the world can see the value they deliver and the benefit of reliable maintenance.

Training at Three Levels

You can’t train 12,000 people the same way. The CEO, the account executive, and the night-shift technician each have a different role, so each needs a different kind of training.

Executive and HQ: Go First

Nothing happens until leadership models it. A memo encouraging employees to share content gets ignored. A CEO who rides along with a technician for a morning and posts a 60-second clip about what she learned sends a signal no memo can match.

The executive team has three jobs. First, explain the why in plain language: we want the world to see the work you already do. Second, align legal, HR, and communications on one set of guardrails, approved once, not post by post. Third, show up. If senior leaders aren’t willing to share, nobody else will believe it’s safe.

It also helps to name one owner at HQ. Usually that’s marketing, paired with a field operations leader who knows which stories are worth telling.

Sales: Turn Field Proof Into Pipeline

Sales teams are the connectors. They hear about great work from clients, and they need proof to win new ones.

Train them to ask two questions after every strong client moment: “Who on our team made this happen?” and “Would you be comfortable with us sharing it?” Then give them a simple shared library of approved clips they can drop into follow-up emails, proposals, and LinkedIn posts. A rep who sends a prospect a real video from a similar building is having a very different conversation than one who sends a brochure.

Over time, that library becomes one of the most valuable sales assets the company owns.

Field: Make It Easy and Safe

Field employees don’t need marketing training. They need permission and a simple routine. At Keystone, it might be three steps: capture, explain, share.

Capture a before and after. Explain in 30 seconds, in your own words, what the problem was and how you fixed it. Then choose your path. Post it to your own LinkedIn, or submit it to an internal channel so marketing can use it. Some people love being on camera. Some never will. Both should have a way to participate.

Give them a few prompts so the blank screen isn’t intimidating. What was broken? What did you do? What would have happened if you hadn’t?

Video Is the Training Tool That Scales

You can’t fly trainers to 400 job sites. And nobody in the field is going to read a 22-page social media policy.

Short training videos solve both problems. Three to five minutes each, shot on a phone, featuring real employees rather than actors. Practice what you preach. If you want people to create authentic phone video, train them with authentic phone video.

Keystone could build a starter series of five: why we’re doing this, how to shoot a good 30-second clip, what to keep out of the frame, how to ask a client for permission, and where to submit. Each one is short enough to watch in the truck between jobs. Add a three-question check at the end of the guardrails video, and you have a record that everyone posting has been trained. That’s exactly what legal will want to see.

Video is especially powerful for teaching the guardrails a senior leadership team cares about. Show a clip with a client’s logo clearly visible on the wall, then show the same clip reframed to avoid it. That five-second comparison teaches more than a paragraph of policy ever will. Here is what a solid set of guardrails might cover.

The dos:

• Show the work and explain the problem and the fix in plain language.
• Give credit to your teammates.
• Wear your safety gear on camera, every time.
• Ask permission before filming at any client site.
• Be yourself. Polish is optional. Honesty isn’t.

The don’ts:

• No client names or logos without written approval.
• No faces of client staff, patients, tenants, or the public.
• No screens, badges, documents, or addresses in the frame.
• No pricing, contracts, or complaints about clients or competitors.
• Nothing from sensitive areas, like patient floors or secure facilities, without clearance.

Notice what isn’t on that list: pre-approval for every post. The goal is guardrails, not gates. If every clip needs three sign-offs, the program will die in a week. Train people well, trust them, and handle the rare mistake when it happens.

Voluntary Is the Whole Point

I’ll admit I was skeptical of employee advocacy programs for a long time. Most of the ones I saw amounted to HR emailing pre-written posts and asking everyone to share them. That isn’t employee content. That’s a press release with more signatures.

Mandate this work, and you get compliance content. Stiff, forced, and easy to spot. Make it voluntary, and you get pride content. That’s the kind people actually stop scrolling for.

So recognize it instead of requiring it. Play the best clips at company meetings. Name the technician. Feature a story of the month. Let people see that leadership notices.

And don’t worry about participation rates. If just 5 percent of Keystone’s employees take part, that’s 600 storytellers. That’s more than 60 times the size of the marketing department, and each one has firsthand proof.

There’s a bonus most leaders don’t expect. This content recruits. The next great technician is far more likely to apply after seeing Marcus explain his work with real pride than after reading a job posting.

Three Key Takeaways

1. Your workforce is your proof. Every service company makes the same promises. Employee-generated content replaces claims with evidence from the people who actually do the work.
2. Train by level, and train with video. Executives model it, sales turns it into pipeline, and the field captures it. Short phone-shot training videos teach the dos and don’ts faster and better than any written policy.
3. Guardrails, not gates, and always voluntary. Approve the rules once, then trust your people to follow them. Recognition builds momentum. Mandates build eye rolls.

Marcus will keep fixing boilers at 4:45 in the morning whether anyone notices or not. That’s who he is.

The only question is whether your company lets the world see it.

Connect with Jeff at The Marketing Sage Consultancy. Interested in setting up a call? Use my calendly to schedule a time to talk. The call is free, and we can discuss your brand, marketing needs, and challenges.

Feel free to email me at jeffslater@themarketing sage.com or text 919 720 0995. Thanks for your interest in working with The Marketing Sage Consultancy.

The post Employee-Generated Content: How to Train Your Workforce to Become Your Best Marketing Team on LinkedIn appeared first on The Marketing Sage.

A founder called me last month with a good problem.

Her spicy sriracha dipping sauces were selling out at every farmers’ market she showed up to.

Line out the tent. Repeat customers. The kind of validation that makes you feel like you’ve cracked it.

Her question was simple. “Should I go after Whole Foods next?”

My answer wasn’t simple, because that wasn’t the right question.

The real question isn’t which channel sounds like the next logical step up. It’s which channel she can afford to build, given the cash she has and the margin her product throws off. Get that wrong, and the farmers market win turns into a chain store disaster.

Founders treat channel like a ladder. That’s the wrong metaphor.  Farmers market, then independent retail, then chain, then maybe DTC on the side. It’s not a ladder. It’s five different businesses, each with its own capital requirements, margin math, and timeline to a check that clears.

So before you pick one, run it through four questions.

Four Key Channel Questions To Start

Before you chase a channel because it sounds impressive, sit down and answer these four questions honestly.

1. Capital. How much cash can you deploy before you need to see a return? Every channel asks for money in a different form: a tent and a card reader, a slotting fee, an ad budget. The honest answer here rules out more channels than any branding decision ever will.

2. Margin. What’s your true gross margin after trade spend, freight, and labor? Not the number on your cost sheet before you subtract those. The number that’s actually left once a case ships and sells.

3. Time. How much of your own time can you give to selling, and how much do you need to pay someone else to do? Some channels run on relationships a founder builds personally. Others run on capital that buys someone else’s time instead.

4. Shelf Life and Temperature. Is your product shelf-stable, refrigerated, or frozen? Does it last for months or days? Temperature and shelf life change your freight costs, your storage costs, and how much room a retail buyer has to be wrong about how fast you’ll sell.

Start Here

Farmers Markets: Cheap Data, Slow Scale

Farmers markets are the best low-cost lab a founder will ever have. You talk to real customers, watch faces when they taste the product, and quickly learn whether anyone will pay full price. The capital required is close to nothing: a tent, some product, a card reader.

The tradeoff is that farmers’ markets don’t scale on their own, and you can only be in one place at a time. They build a small, loyal fan base, not a distribution business. I’ve seen founders stay at the market stage two years too long because the weekly cash felt good and the growth felt real. It wasn’t growth. It was a very loyal, very small audience. Great for recipe testing, pricing, and packaging feedback. Not a revenue plan.

Independent Retail: The Long Apprenticeship

Independent grocers, specialty shops, and regional chains are where most food brands actually learn the business. Margins are more forgiving than big retail chains. Buyers are more accessible. You can walk into a store, talk to the owner, and get a yes in the same conversation.

I think about Don Sazon here, the seasoning company I profiled earlier this year. They built their business one independent Hispanic grocer at a time, meat market by meat market, before they ever had a national retail conversation. Their Taco Truck seasoning line is a hit in independent stores today, and every account along the way taught them something that prepared them for what came next.

The catch is that independent retail takes people. Someone has to deliver, merchandise, and manage relationships store by store. That’s a founder’s time or a broker’s fee, and neither is free. Without a route to run or the cash to pay someone else to run it, this channel eats your bandwidth faster than it grows your revenue.

Chain Retail: The Velocity Trap

Chain retail is the channel every founder secretly wants, and it punishes the underprepared fastest. Slotting fees, minimum order quantities, and trade spend show up before a single case sells. Then buyers want proof of velocity, meaning proof the product is already selling well, before they’ll commit real shelf space. You need sales to prove you deserve the shelf, and you need the shelf to get the sales.

If your margin can’t absorb slotting costs, demos, and the markdowns that come with a slow-moving SKU, a chain deal can damage the business even while it looks like a win on paper. I’ve watched founders celebrate a big placement and quietly go underwater six months later because nobody ran the math first.

Chain retail rewards founders who’ve raised real capital or built a margin cushion in independent retail first. It punishes founders who mistake the door opening for the finish line.

DTC: Control at a Cost

Direct-to-consumer flips the equation. No buyer to convince, no slotting fee, and you keep the customer relationship and the margin that would otherwise go to a retailer. It is hard to make money without AOV (average order value) over $50-75 dollars and an LTV (lifetime value) of at least two years.

But DTC has its own tax, paid in marketing dollars instead of trade dollars. Customer acquisition cost on Amazon or a branded Shopify site has climbed steadily, and the fees each platform takes on every sale have to get baked into your pricing too. Organic social is a good place to start, but you’ll want to test paid ads and a TikTok store once you’re ready to scale reach.

I know a shopper, my own wife, who buys one flavor of Kate’s Bar on Amazon and nothing else. She sampled it once, during some consulting work I did with the brand, and now the relationship lives entirely on a screen. That’s the DTC dream. But for every customer who finds you and stays, you’re paying to find someone new, over and over, without the foot traffic doing that work for free.

DTC suits founders with a real digital marketing skill set, a product people repurchase, and the patience to build a customer base one paid click at a time.

Foodservice: The Underused Shortcut

Foodservice gets ignored by first-time founders, and that’s a mistake. Selling into restaurants, food trucks, and institutional kitchens usually comes with lower trade spend, better per-unit margins, and a faster path to real volume.

Don Sazon again is the example. Millions in annual revenue came through foodservice before the retail side scaled. That volume built the manufacturing discipline and cash flow that made the retail conversation easier later, not harder.

I have some helpful information on Foodservice for CPG brands here.

Shelf Life and Temperature Change Math

Question four from the framework deserves its own explanation, because it quietly overrides everything else.

Don Sazon’s seasonings are shelf-stable, and that does a lot of work you don’t see. A jar can sit in a warehouse for a year, ship anywhere in a cardboard box, and land in a chain retail conversation without asking a buyer to solve a cold chain problem. Shelf-stable products carry the fewest constraints of any product type. They can move into every channel at once.

Refrigerated products carry a different set of costs before a single unit sells. Brands like Mid-Day Squares and Perfect Bar live in a different part of the store, reached by a different shopper in a different mindset, and every step of getting there costs more. Reefer trucks, refrigerated warehousing, a shorter runway before markdown. That usually means a refrigerated product needs a higher price point or a fatter margin to make the same channel math work.

Frozen sits in between. Freight and storage costs are real, but shelf life stretches out much further, sometimes six months or more. The tradeoff shows up in freezer case fees and lower foot traffic through the frozen aisle.

And short shelf life is its own constraint, separate from temperature. A two-week window, chilled or not, isn’t built for a sales cycle measured in months. That pushes short-shelf-life products toward local, high-touch channels: farmers markets, DTC with fast shipping, foodservice with frequent reorders, and independent accounts you can restock personally.

Other channels to consider include mass (Walmart/Target), but they are rarely a great starting point for a startup food brand. And of course, convenience stores may also be part of the conversation if your product fits that impulse-snack category too. And there are others – but I would start with the 5 discussed above.

Put It Together

Run your product through the four questions honestly, then look at the start here table again. The channel that sounds most exciting is often the one least matched to the capital, margin, time, and shelf life you actually have. Founders who build durable businesses start with the channel that fits today and earn their way into the next one.

Three Key Takeaways

1. Channel choice is a financing decision first, a marketing decision second. Before picking a channel, know your available capital, your true gross margin after trade spend, freight, and labor, and whether your product is shelf stable, refrigerated, or frozen. The channel that looks most prestigious is often the one least matched to the resources and the product you actually have.

2. Foodservice and independent retail teach the business before chain retail tests it. Building through independent grocers and foodservice accounts builds manufacturing discipline and cash flow first, and that foundation makes every later opportunity less risky.

3. DTC trades trade spend for ad spend, not for free. Selling direct keeps your margin and your customer relationship, but it requires a real marketing budget and the skill to run it. Without both, a grocery aisle will find you customers for free in a way a website never will on its own.

My Advice

You need a clear strategy for what you want to achieve, the time frame, and the financial resources. One of my clients, Lid Lickin’ BBQ Sauce, started year one to get into 100 independent stores across North Carolina. They wanted to do everything right, and that meant demos and sampling in as many locations as possible. They hit the goal. In year two, they set out to add another 100 stores, and they’ve already reached that goal. But they are focused on indepedent retail and doing most of the distribution themselves. This coming year, they experiment with DTC to learn.

By growing slowly through independent retailers, they built a more predictable business that fit with their finances and their business objectives.

If this feels overwhelming and you don’t have much experience making this call, schedule time to talk with me through my Calendly link. That first conversation is free, and it might be exactly what you need to get off to a strong start.

Connect with Jeff at The Marketing Sage Consultancy. Interested in setting up a call? Use my calendly to schedule a time to talk. The call is free, and we can discuss your brand, marketing needs, and challenges.

Feel free to email me at jeffslater@themarketing sage.com or text 919 720 0995. Thanks for your interest in working with The Marketing Sage Consultancy.

The post A Founder’s Framework for Choosing Channels: Where To Sell First? appeared first on The Marketing Sage.

Every Sunday morning in the early 1960s, I sat in a classroom at Temple Sha’aray Shalom in Springfield, New Jersey, learning Hebrew. 

I don’t remember much about those lessons anymore. 

But I do remember Mrs. Asher giving us halva as a treat. It showed up on a plate somewhere between the alphabet drills and discussions about the Ten Commandments.

I believe the brand was Joyva, and it was a crumbly, sweet, sesame block that tasted like nothing else in my kitchen at home. I have no idea who brought it or why, but I think it was Mrs. Asher’s way of motivating us to pay attention. 

And then, as far as I can recall, I ate it only one other time in the last sixty years, when my wife and I traveled to Turkey, and it was everywhere from the spice market to the restaurants and small shops. That product tasted different, and I recall it having pieces of pistachio and other nuts in it. 

Halva is one of those foods that lives only in memory, filed away next to Hebrew school and a temple that sadly doesn’t exist today. 

It took a meeting with an entrepreneur named Eric Hebel to bring it all back.

Eric, and his brother Scott, runs Hebel & Co, a Los Angeles halva company, they co-founded with Scott’s wife Katie. It started at a farmers’ market in 2017 and is now in more than 1,000 stores. 

I spoke with Eric to learn about his growth strategy, and the more I learn about his business, the more I think halva’s story is really a lesson in how you introduce Americans to something old and turn it into something new.

The oldest snack nobody knows

Halva is one of the oldest confections in the world. Historians trace it back thousands of years to Mesopotamia, Ancient Egypt, and Greece. It’s a staple across the Mediterranean and the Middle East today, sold everywhere from corner markets in Tel Aviv to bakeries in Athens. Yet in the United States, almost nobody has heard of it. Awareness sits somewhere between one and three percent. Hebel & Co may be one of only a few companies in the country actually manufacturing it. Everyone else imports. And Eric’s is organic, vegan, gluten-free, and non-GMO. 

That combination, ancient pedigree and total obscurity, is rare in food. 

Most category openings involve inventing something new. Eric’s opportunity is different. He’s not creating a snack. He’s opening a door that’s been closed to American consumers for generations. 

Open sesame, if you’ll forgive the pun. 

Because that’s literally what halva is: ground sesame seeds, or tahini, transformed through a slow, hands-on cooking process into something between fudge and cotton candy. Crispy in places, silky in others, and completely unlike anything most Americans have ever put in their mouths. Their six flavors are scrumptious and a joy to enjoy. 

And they use Soom tahini, which is the finest quality tahini available. I wrote about Amy Zitelman and her sisters here in 2021.

From farmers market to 1,000 stores

Eric grew up eating halva and loving it. And like me, he hails from New Jersey. So extra credit for his Jersey roots. 

Years later, the three of them asked a simple question: why isn’t anyone making really good halva in the U.S.? 

So, they started making it themselves, first selling it at the Hollywood Farmers’ Market in 2017. Word spread. Today Hebel & Co is family-owned, made entirely in Los Angeles, and the only organic halva producer in the country. 

It’s also vegan, gluten-free, and kosher, which gives it a shelf story that fits neatly into how modern grocery shoppers actually make decisions.

Manufacturing in-house turns out to be a real advantage, not just an operational detail. And I shared with Eric that my wife and I took the same path in the 70s and 80s with our brownie business. 

There are no halva co-packers in the U.S. 

If you want to make halva at scale here, you have to build the capability yourself, the way Hebel did. That’s a hard thing for a competitor to copy quickly, and it’s part of why Hebel & Co have been able to gain distribution in 1,000 stores, mostly on the West Coast.

The problem hiding in the price tag

Here’s the challenge. 

Hebel & Co’s core product is an 8-ounce tub that retails for about $15. 

For a shopper who already loves halva, that’s a fair price for a handcrafted, organic product. But for the majority of Americans who have never tasted it, $15 is a steep price to pay to try something they can’t picture, don’t know how to eat, and have never seen a friend order. 

Trial is the whole game with an unfamiliar product, and a $15 price point is a wall most people won’t climb over on a whim.

Eric learned this the hard way. 

Tests in conventional grocery chains like Harris Teeter and Publix didn’t work. 

Price sensitivity killed it. 

What has worked is placing the product in natural and organic retailers like Erewhon and Whole Foods, where shoppers already expect to pay a premium, and positioning it in specialty sections like the cheese counter or the premium chocolate aisle rather than burying it in an ethnic foods aisle where it gets compared to cheap imports instead of appreciated on its own terms.

The fix is a smaller, cheaper door

The real unlock, though, is something Eric just launched: a $5, two-bar mini pack designed purely for trial and impulse buys. 

It’s a small enough investment that a curious shopper will take the risk. It launched last week with no marketing behind it and has already earned a re-order. Costco and Whole Foods in California have both expressed interest, although Eric knows he isn’t ready for Costco-size volume.

Eric expects this mini pack to eventually drive the bulk of the company’s revenue, because it opens entirely new channels that the $15 tub never could, places like airports and convenience stores where people buy on impulse, not out of loyalty to a category they already understand.

This is a pattern worth remembering if you’re building any brand in an unfamiliar category. 

You don’t convince skeptical consumers with a bigger message. You lower the cost of curiosity. 

A $5 mini pack does more to build a category than any amount of advertising, because it lets the product do the convincing. 

At some point, I expect that a single-serve bar will be his hero product, driving growth and revenue by being seen as a better-for-you, plant-based bar that is distinctive and delicious.

But like most smart entrepreneurs, Eric is taking things one step at a time. 

Slice it, spread it, scoop it.

Once someone tries halva, the next challenge is figuring out what to do with it. 

This is where Eric’s marketing gets smart. Instead of leading with the name halva, which research suggests may actually be a barrier to mainstream adoption, Hebel & Co leads with how people use it. 

• Slice it and eat it plain, on its own, the way you’d eat a good piece of fudge. 
• Spread it on a baguette, a bagel, or a warm crepe. 
• Scoop it straight from the tub with a spoon. 
• Sprinkle it, crumbled, over ice cream, yogurt, or an açaí bowl. 
• Bake it into cookies, brownies, or bread. 

It even works beautifully on a charcuterie board, sliced next to cheese and dried fruit, where its texture and sweetness make sense to a palate that has no idea what halva traditionally is.

That’s a smart pivot. 

You’re not asking someone to learn a new food. You’re asking them to add one more ingredient to things they already do. Nobody has to understand the word halva to put a crumbly, nutty, not-too-sweet spread on their morning yogurt.

Saying no to easy revenue

One thing that stands out about Eric is his willingness to walk away from sales that don’t fit the strategy. Hebel & Co is scaling back on Amazon, a channel that looks like free growth on paper but has caused real problems in practice. 

Halva melts if it isn’t handled carefully, and Amazon’s fulfillment network doesn’t treat a delicate, handmade product the way a specialty grocer does. 

Unauthorized resellers have also been buying and reselling the product outside of Eric’s control, which undercuts pricing and quality at the same time. So, the plan is to shift Amazon listings to fulfilled-by-merchant and pull back from Amazon’s own warehousing during the hot summer months. 

Direct-to-consumer sales through Shopify may be paused too, because the cost of acquiring a customer online has gotten too expensive to justify for a product this new to most shoppers.

It would be easy to chase every channel that offers a sale, but Eric is a fast learner and is staying focused on the channel that makes sense today – specialty retailers with organic and better-for-you brands.

Eric is doing the harder thing, choosing the channels that protect the product and the brand, even if it means smaller numbers in the short term. That discipline matters more in an unfamiliar category than in an established one. 

A bad first experience with halva, a melted bar, or an inflated price from a reseller might be the only experience a new customer ever has with the category. Eric seems to understand that the cost of losing that first impression is higher than the cost of turning down easy revenue.

The bigger swing

Eric’s real ambition goes beyond growing distribution. 

He wants to reposition halva entirely, away from a small ethnic category and into the $12 billion better-for-you confection market in the U.S., competing for shelf space with premium chocolate bars and protein snacks. 

He’s thinking through several strategies toward that opportunity. 

To fund the next phase, Hebel & Co is raising funds from angel investors to prove out the mini pack and de-risk a larger raise for national scaling and automation down the line. 

The company is also working with Hatcheri Foods, a food industry accelerator, to help make the jump from current revenue to 10-fold growth. 

What this means for anyone building a category

Eric’s situation is a useful case study for any founder sitting on a product that’s genuinely good but unfamiliar. The instinct is usually to explain the product harder, to tell its history, to lean on authenticity. 

Eric is doing something smarter. 

He’s lowering the price of trial, letting the product’s versatility do the talking, and rethinking whether the name itself is helping or hurting.

As for me, I finally had halva again a few weeks ago, sixty years after that Sunday school plate in Springfield. It tasted better than I remembered, and this time I knew exactly what to call it and exactly what to do with it. 

Open sesame indeed. 

Three Key Takeaways From My Conversation with Eric

1. Lower the cost of trial before you try to change minds. The $5 mini pack will do more to open up halva as a category than years of storytelling ever could, because it lets curious shoppers take a small risk instead of a big one. 
2. Let the product’s uses sell it, not its name. Nobody has to understand or even like the word halva to reach for a spread that works on a bagel, a bowl of yogurt, or a charcuterie board. His phrase spread it, slice it, sprinkle it “ will help consumers see usage occasions. 
3. Protect the brand experience even when it costs you sales. Walking away from Amazon and pausing DTC wasn’t about giving up growth. It was about making sure a new customer’s first bite of halva is a good one.

Put those three together, and you get a simple playbook for launching anything unfamiliar. 

Make it easy to try, let the packaging explain itself through everyday use, and guard the experience closely until the category shows the momentum necessary to accelerate growth. 

It has taken 3,000 years to get here. A little more time can’t hurt. 

Connect with Jeff at The Marketing Sage Consultancy. Interested in setting up a call? Use my calendly to schedule a time to talk. The call is free, and we can discuss your brand, marketing needs, and challenges.

Feel free to email me at jeffslater@themarketing sage.com or text 919 720 0995. Thanks for your interest in working with The Marketing Sage Consultancy.

The post Halva, Reimagined: How Hebel & Co has Reinvented a 3,000 Year Old Snack appeared first on The Marketing Sage.