An Ecommerce Strategy (and Product) To Make You Feel Good
How Mindright is breaking into the supplements and nutritional bar industry with authentic partnerships, humor, and ambassadors who beat influencer fatigue
It seems like selling a product that is designed to make you feel good should be a cakewalk. But as we all know, business is never easy, especially when you’re breaking into the supplement and nutritional bar space, which is overcrowded with industry giants. So what’s an upstart company with a solid product and good intentions to do?
On a recent episode of Up Next in Commerce, we found out when we talked to Chris Bernard, the co-founder, CEO and Chief Mood Officer for Mindright, the good mood superfood. As it turns out, there are a few ways that a small new company can make a splash, especially in the digital space. But before any kind of marketing can take place, getting the product nailed down has to be the primary focus.
To do this, Bernard said that Miindright went straight to the people to figure out what it was they needed.
“My partner, who is a very big advocate of testing and research pushed to really go out and survey a group of around 350 people,” Bernard said. “And while cognitive function was important to them, what indexed the highest was, ‘Do you have foods and ingredients that help me feel good? Happy, good mood. I want to be focused and feeling good.’ And this theme of feel good, just kept popping up and popping up and we took a step back and it was indexed so high. Like, ‘Why don’t we just lean into good mood?’”
With that decided, developing a product that actually brought about a good mood was step two.
“[Most] manufacturers have a food scientist and R&D department, and most of the time, if they’re excited about your project, they will help your R&D,” Bernard said. “You come in with a brief and your core tenants for, ‘These are the ingredients that I would like to use as superfoods. These are the outputs that we’d like to achieve, enhance mood, stress, energy. These are the functional ingredients we’re thinking about.’ And then you work with the ingredient suppliers to understand efficacy and transparency around their ingredients.”
But friendly R&D departments weren’t the only ones willing to help Mindright bring its vision to life. Bernard said that once the company had a product that tasted good and that it felt like it could stand behind, the next thing to do was to get folks talking about and invested in it — and boy did the people come running. Thanks to a partnership with Rob Dyrdek, Mindright was in a position to get in front of celebrities like the Jonas Brothers and Marcus Lemonis, and it had the investment behind it to send sample to other influencers without asking for anything in return. And all of that has paid off. Mindright has organically built a small but mighty ambassador program that screams of authenticity and fights influencer fatigue by getting customers excited about what’s to come.
What is in the future? Find out Up Next in Commerce.
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