Being CMO of Feastables – the chocolate and snack brand created by MrBeast – is unlike being CMO of a traditional brand, says Bryan Waddell.
“Our brand founder is so well known,” explains Waddell. “His audiences know intimately what Feastables is, what we stand for in the chocolate industry, and our innovations, but many families do not, because only roughly about 10% of the globe’s population have seen one of his videos.”
MrBeast, a popular YouTuber with 420+ million subscribers, launched the chocolate brand in 2022 with the mission to end child labor in the cocoa industry. The products are available at Walmart, 7-Eleven, Target, Kroger, Sam’s Club and Albertsons. Their challenge is to stand out in a crowded market. “We just happen to be a blue chocolate bar that looks a little bit more vibrant and punchy,” explains Waddell. “The goal here really was to help establish the brand and give it footing beyond MrBeast.”
Waddell’s challenge is to translate MrBeast’s unique personality into playful marketing activations, as well as communicating the work that brand is doing to tackle child labor in the cocoa sector. “We deal with some pretty heavy stuff in the cocoa sector and we need to translate that information in a way that’s very digestible and authentic, but also interesting,” explains Waddell.
Prior to joining Feastables, Waddell held senior marketing positions at Nestle. Brand Innovators caught up with Waddell from his home office in Cleveland to talk about breaking out as a challenger and the marketing innovations he is seeing in the business. He is speaking at the upcoming Brand Innovators Evolution of Commerce Summit: The Future of Shopper Engagement. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
As a challenger brand, how are you trying to reach consumers in a crowded marketplace?
In today’s attention economy, the younger generation has grown up with handheld devices and the internet connectivity at their fingertips. They view authenticity and storytelling so differently. If we don’t show up the right way on social media from our founder down, it’s going to be really hard to keep that line of credibility. We’ve pushed a lot on what frequency looks like for us in a meaningful way, how does the right message lead and land in a way where we do get strong organic results and performance. I come from a school where brand marketing and storytelling was often product first and you wanted to lead with appetite appeal and branding.
It’s an interesting challenge because we have to think of being one part entertainment organization and how to make a candy brand think and act like an influencer. But at the same time we have to avoid the influencer’s lack of credibility. Since the pandemic, some people expect creators and influencers to push product versus tell a story. We are focused on story by trying to find storytellers to take the brand and make meaningful content. Because otherwise people will say, it’s just chocolate. If it doesn’t taste good, I’m not going to buy it.
Can you talk about how you’re navigating the brand within culture?
Culture itself can have many different meanings. Being relevant means getting views, clicks and comments faster than before. The contextual relevance to the moment matters. If something is trending online from a content format, all the way down to the type of story or the creator that’s producing it. Do you have the courage to lean into those individuals and let them be a part of the moment and not be a vulture? It is about taking the moment and then running with it within your own DNA and blueprint. Our founder loves to see the work that we are doing because he wants it to be a part of his ecosystem. With him being a godfather of content creators, it has to pass his marks before we put things out there.
I always enjoy watching individuals as they come from big CPG companies enter our domain. They have to think differently. Big corporations want measurement data to prove the effectiveness based on their spend but you just want to do stuff that matters to your consumer. It can be very tough. The amount of courage I’ve seen from this team lean in, react to things, to really move at the speed of what’s happening, even as we know that the next big trending piece of content can drop and completely change the algorithm and have every creator scrambling. These things happen in seconds. So many of what brands have to do today are really made in weeks and months. It’s been awesome to see our team react, maybe not in seconds, but in less than 24 hours to make things happen.
What is your retail and commerce strategy?
It’s really hard to ship chocolate, especially during melt season, right in between Memorial Day and Labor Day. When you want growth, you’re going to start talking to the Walmarts, Targets, Krogers of the world to figure out what works. Often what they want from us is the audience and the relevance that some of the brands struggle to attain. Certain commerce channels have very structured and rigorous rules in which we have to play. I’ve asked my teams to look at what the intent of the channel and the purpose is because we are driving so much awareness in the upper funnel. We are really trying to parlay that to the right consumer segments and then understand the goal by channel.
The retailer might want people to come to their digital storefront and have awareness vehicles like dedicated brand landing pages or the seasonal promotion. Those systems are built for scale that sometimes a startup brand, like us, can’t afford to play within. We have to figure out the right role to interject ourselves. That’s been a challenge for us to set up the fundamentals simultaneously and do the stuff that over delivers in the right way. Instead of looking at bannered wide deployments, let’s look at our company wide deployments. Let’s look at a regional approach, maybe to a division of Walmart or Kroger for example, and figure out how having displays in stores can work.
Just by showing up and breaking out of the aisle, Mom actually goes, ‘Oh, my kid was talking about that.’ Most of the time she is not going down the chocolate aisle to purchase. It’s actually one of the least visited aisles in the store. If we are courageously having those conversations to insert ourselves in a way that is disruptive, we can’t then have them thinking of us in a different way.
Can you talk about how having worked at Nestle helps you in this current role?
It’s a deep understanding of the structures and the history and how the world works based on where food, grocery, and frankly, CPG has gone. Because the money has been so big, because the opportunities are so scalable and massive in historic brands, there’s deep ruts and roots to how these things are done. If you’re trying to take shortcuts, you need to know where those roots and ruts are and where you can jump over and move some things around or you remember some of those pain points you’ve heard from other shoppers.
A lot of it just comes from being able to talk the language while being mindful enough to insert that disruptive behavior or mindset in an empathetic way, one that is not like, ‘hey, we’re just going to force this on you, but come back a little bit. My hand’s held out here. You can come along and walk with us. Let’s talk about what’s going to be different.’
It doesn’t always work but if brands like ours aren’t pushing and trying to redefine what’s being done, then things are going to stay the same. Consumers have more access to everything now than ever before. I can go to the Amazon storefront or buy right on Instagram. They’re trying to get you to move to purchase faster. We know that grocers, Walmart and Target are trying to do this with Meta and keep people native in these experiences.
We have to courageously insert ourselves into the spaces and take risks. It’s okay if something fails. We’ve just got to understand what the key insight was and apply that quickly. You can’t sit on that insight forever. A lot of other categories will wait for six, nine months for the data to come back on something they deployed almost a year ago to then make a decision that influences something in the next six months after that. We have to act within 24 hours. We have to make decisions in minutes and moments and really courageously lean in whenever we have the opportunity to do so.
What are the big marketing trends that you expect in the rest of the year?
The inclinations that Unilever was going to start spending really aggressively in creating the creator space irked a lot of eyeballs. It has more to do with non-food brands and anything else. Watching what Ryan Trahan has done with St. Jude’s to drive awareness and meaningful influencer content for them and raising $10 million has been awesome. A lot of people are also paying attention to the amount of media they’ve deployed on his channels, on YouTube, on these platforms where people are going to watch his content. They’re starting to evolve their thought structure for what marketing and advertising campaigns look like.
We’re going to see a lot more influencer and creative work being done. We’re going to start to hear a lot more about brands that are giving more of that creative power and structure almost like agency level input in their hands. This is where so many of us are spending our time and attention. As brands and marketers, we have the foresight to recognize if they expect you to be in these channels, how are we going to be discernibly different? We’re going to start to see more brands start to do things that are a little bit more breakthrough like Astronomer working with Gwyneth Paltrow after the Cold Play infidelity scandal. That’s what I want to see. We’re going to see a lot of spending on marketing and advertising and I hope to God it’s not a bunch of just beautifully produced agency content and stills that just swipe right.
