In my previous blog article, we introduced the concept of Mindset-Driven Marketing. It’s a marketing strategy that gets right to the heart of the matter: Properly addressing your customer’s current and very specific mindset is what is going to drive your sales. As I was preparing these articles, I came across a fantastic example of “Mindset Immersion”—where everything that the company is doing addresses the customer’s very specific mindset. Let’s take a look.
The company is Vital Farms, which recently started selling their eggs in the local market here on our island.
I confess to being a foodie, due in no small part to my husband’s three separate battles with “fatal” cancer. Over the last 15 years or so, we have fought together to keep him healthy, and good nutrition for both of us has always been my responsibility. So when I saw this egg carton in my local grocery store recently, I was intrigued. I share the concerns of many who believe that free-range food animals are happier, healthier, and better for us to eat. That is a very specific mindset, one that this package addressed in spades.
But as a marketer, the more I examined this unusual packaging, the more intrigued I became. I realized that these guys had made the best possible use of the space they had to work with: the egg carton. And they even managed to build interactivity into the mix. Let’s see what they did right.
First, how many egg manufacturers take advantage of their carton real estate to address the very specific mindset of their customers? Most just say Jumbo Eggs and put their logo on there. What a waste. Using hand-drawn illustrations and a stiff cardboard cover (“100% recyclable and biodegradable,” of course) over an environmentally friendly non-plastic base, Vital Farms takes full advantage of all space available to them. On the cover, illustrations and copy literally immerse us in the main idea:
- Pasture-Raised
- Ethical Eggs
- Happy Hens
- On Green Grass
- Under Open Skies
- Freedom to Forage Outdoors Year Round
- Made with Fresh Air and Sunshine
- Tended by Hand on Small Family Farms
- Certified Humane Raised and Handled
Wow. This cover is packed full of what we want to know. But there’s more. You can actually “See a Farm Where These Eggs Were Laid,” by going to the farm listed on one end of the carton. What a great idea. Take a look: go to vitalfarms.com/farm and type in Oak Grove. You will see lots of hens roaming around a very large enclosure.
Talk about full transparency. So different from companies who claim that the chickens are free-ranging, but, as Vital Farms says on their website, “We require our partner farmers to allot at least 108 square feet per hen, giving our girls plenty of room to roam and giving our land time to rejuvenate naturally, without pesticides or herbicides. We believe foraging is an essential part of our hens’ diets. We believe less outdoor space, like the minimum 2 square feet allotted to a free range hen, is far too little for roaming.”
When you go to VitalFarms.com/farm, and enter the farm name, you see this video, and can do a full 360 to see the whole enclosure. It’s super cool.
But wait! There’s more. Open up the package, and you’re treated to more happy messages. They reinforce the “See A Farm Where These Eggs Were Laid” concept, giving very easy-to-follow instructions for anyone who is computer-challenged. And the usual necessary nutrition facts are there, along with more information about how they meet the Humane Farm Animal Care Program standards.
There’s also something I’ve never seen in another egg carton: a small flyer, which reinforces all of the messages on the carton, but also explains that each egg is unique (which is true, each egg is a little different than the others, unlike many other brands):
The Vital Farms Website
The website is just as inviting and immersive. The home page sliding banner shows the chickens busy doing what chickens naturally do:
Including closeups, so you can see how healthy they are. A far cry from the horror pictures shown on sites that expose inhumane chicken-raising methods.
As with the cartons, they devote a lot of the site’s space to restating their mission and core values:
The About Us page has a button for the Leadership Team. They all look like nice folks, including Jason Dale, the COO and CFO.
This is true Mindset-Driven Marketing hard at work. If you cared about how your egg-laying chickens lived their lives, you’d fall in love with this company and would never buy those boring, corporate, seemingly uncaring brands ever again.
What is Mindset-Driven Marketing?
In our previous blog, we showed this diagram:
Now that you’ve seen what Vital is doing, you can understand better how a company can base everything it does on the mindset of its customer, and how different that looks from a campaign driven by the company’s mindset, rather than the customer’s mindset.
“We’re the best! Look at what we’ve accomplished! Don’t buy from anyone else!” That’s what most campaigns are saying to the customer. It’s all about the company, and what the company wants. If you start there, you’re doomed. All of your campaigns will struggle to generate leads; no matter which channels you use, the messages will fall flat. Customers will decide, “That’s not it, they don’t get it,” and keep looking.
By the way, if you do a search on “mindset” and “marketing,” you will find a lot of information focused on YOUR mindset. How you can’t give up; how you have to be persistent; how the most successful entrepreneurs just keep dialing for dollars and make it, in spite of the odds. That’s why people are still making cold calls. That’s their mindset, hard at work. But customers are so over those methods. They have moved on, and are perfectly capable of finding what they want, and learning a whole lot about it, before they ever talk to a salesperson. Don’t waste your time on those methods.
What is your customer’s mindset when they go looking for your product or service? How can you find out? Read chapter 3 of my book, Roadmap to Revenue: How to Sell the Way Your Customers Want to Buy, so you can learn the truth, quickly and cost-effectively.
Then focus all of your efforts on that mindset, addressing it very specifically in everything you do. No matter which channels you use or how much you spend, your efforts will start to pay off.