The moment my path became clear

After promoting consumer products for nearly 30 years, a layoff helped bring clarity to how brands should interact with the world - and how I could help them do it. #provenance #proof #trust #blockchain

For 29 years, my career path has been that of a corporate salaryman — marketing and pitching primarily consumer products. Whether potato chips, toothpaste, an antihistamine or a new shampoo, for over 80 major brands I was the guy writing the business strategy, the brand strategy, crafting the go-to-market approach, designing the website, optimizing it for search, creating the social strategy and ad campaigns, training internal teams, pitching the clients, and/or managing the teams to do all of the above. Earlier in my career, brands could ride on the power of brand equity and their marketing investment, and there was a symbiotic relationship: consumers would generally trust the brand and buy the product, and in exchange, the brand would ensure it was reliably safe and met a high standard of quality. Everyone won.

In a world of alternative facts, consumer trust has shattered

Fast forward to July 2018. The world is a crazy polarized place, many corporations have placed shareholders above customers, and consumer trust has been shattered. According to the 2018 Edelman Trust Barometer, trust in business, the government, media and NGOs has dropped more among Americans than any other country. And two of the three largest sectors losing trust are Food & Beverage and Packaged Goods - some of those same brands I used to work for.

(Source: 2018 Edelman Trust Barometer)

It's easy to see why trust is plummeting. Incidents of contamination and counterfeit products are appearing in the news every week — and the frequency is increasing. Salads at your local fast food restaurant. 207 million eggs. Rotting, expired beef being bleached and then canned and sold into the US. Even crackers! Food, beauty and pharma brands are running up against counterfeiters who sell fake products into your local drug store. Questionably deceptive labelling. Stunningly shameless people are even counterfeiting insulin and heart meds, copying the packaging so perfectly that only an expert would notice.

And that carefully-built and expensive social compact between brand and consumer? It's dissolving as we speak, and as the recalls and whistleblowers escalate, so will consumer distrust, and the reputational and financial risk to brands.

Getting laid off was my personal Moment of Truth

For the past couple of years, I'd been a senior exec at an iconic technology company. I was on my way to the airport to keynote the Global Blockchain Summit in Denver when the call came: my team and I were being downsized as part of a merger.

I had enjoyed working at the company, and of course, getting that call was a disappointment. I hung up, unsure of how to proceed. I couldn't represent my former employer at the Summit...should I just apologize and bow out, missing an incredible speaking opp? If I went anyway, who am I representing? Would I have any credibility as an unemployed executive? Should I just chase a new job that might bring some vague security in the form of a paycheck, or go off on my own?

In that moment of uncertainty, my path became clear.

I completely rewrote my keynote, and gave one of the best talks of my career, conveying the story of my abrupt departure and how it was a personal wakeup call. How I wanted to work for consumer-facing brands that cared enough about their customers and partners to prove their claims. To give fellow execs the courage to become transparent and trustworthy using blockchain technologies, and I outlined a path for them to do so. As I left the stage, companies from the US, Canada, Australia, Italy and Bangladesh approached me, wanting to know more and speak further. The organizer later told me it was the best presentation of the day — feedback confirming I was on the right path.

"You want me to trust your brand? You'll need to prove it."

The time to sell solely based on brand equity has come and gone. The time for me to start helping brands recognize and deal with this shift has arrived. Management teams can't simply rely on marketing budgets or whipping their sales teams to sell anymore. And glossy brochures, press releases and shotgun blog posts just don't work like they used to. Why spend money on these things when you can spend money proving brand trustworthiness? The opportunity for brands is to prove they have customer intentions at top of mind, to prove they are not merely self-interested. "CEOs, CMOs and brand managers will need a Trust Strategy. A Proof Strategy," I thought. "They will need demonstrable data proving to their customer bases that their products are safe and their marketing claims are valid. This is something I can help them with."

In our new venture, my partner Mark Kurtz and I are building proof systems. A combination of IoT sensors, on-the-ground certification, and blockchain-based product and logistics information will empower consumers and deliver that proof. By automating data input, we can improve data integrity going into the chain (solving for the inherent "Garbage In, Garbage Out" threat to ledger-based data). By certifying what's happening on the ground at the point of origin, we can reduce fraud. By storing cold-chain and logistics data on-package, we can increase granularity. By opening up product and logistics information to all the participants in a supply chain, we can build trust amongst partners and provide more data to wary consumers.

In a complex, global supply chain, who's to blame when something goes sideways?

A refrigerated shipment of beef leaves a certified organic farm. The tired truck driver stops to rest in Tempe, Arizona and forgets to turn on the refrigeration unit. Temperatures soar to 140°F in the container and the meat begins to spoil. The driver wakes up, thinks "whoops," turns on the unit and drives on. The compromised meat cools down and arrives at the warehouse, and no one downstream in the supply chain has any idea there was a hot load issue. Later, some kids get sick and efforts begin to try to trace the contamination back to the source. It took the CDC two full months to trace the source of e. coli in the recent Romaine Lettuce scandal that killed five and sickened 210 people across 36 states. According to clients in the supply chain profession, this kind of logistics slip-up happens all the time. Whose reputation is most damaged — the shipper, the cannery, or the warehouse? Nope, it's the brand - to the tune of an average $10M cost per recall.

And what if the carrier picked up product that was already compromised? How can that carrier protect themselves and prove they hit their SLAs?

With a blockchain-based provenance system, we can intercept the issue in real time. Everyone in the chain can know what happened and where. By sharing performance data among supply chain players, we can bake good behavior into the system by rewarding transparency. Distributed ledger technologies will allow us to become participants in a more transparent supply chain without giving away competitive advantage.

Hell, in a distrustful world, transparency IS the ultimate competitive advantage!

Creating a "trust consultancy"

Today Mark Kurtz and I launched Transparent Path, a management consultancy and system integrator guiding brands to regain and retain consumer trust. We're working on agreements for the IoT sensors and the on-site certification with some like-minded partners (announcements coming soon!), and we've chosen Perth-based Blockhead Technologies as our first official technology partner. We're also partnering with the University of Oregon Blockchain association to work with us on these projects.

Our personal passion is to save lives, prevent sickness, reduce fraud and help stop the current slide into marketing ineffectiveness and reputational chaos. If you manage a brand or work in supply chain, need to demonstrate innovation to your customers or shareholders, and understand the financial upsides to transparency, we'd love to bring that passion to your brand.

This is our new path — a very worthy path for 2018 — and I hope you'll join us on it!

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ERIC WEAVER has advised executive teams at over 80 major brands across 13 countries on digital disruption and transformation. He speaks globally and has been quoted in AdAge, Brand Republic (UK), BusinessWeek, Campaign Live (UK), Cemiyat (TK), Forbes, Fortune, Hoover’s, Inc. Magazine, InformationWeek, MediaWeek, the Seattle Times, and the Washington Post.