Osher Hoberman began his career as a financial analyst before joining Mars where he has more than 20 years working across brands. His latest endeavor is chief marketing officer of KIND.
“I came into this business that had a little bit of an identity crisis, which is not unusual for a brand that has left founder control to a different custodian,” says Hoberman. “The previous campaigns had been focused on the product and the ingredients. It was very comparative advertising. That worked well for the brand and in its early days when it was a pioneer of the category but had become less distinctive in the way that these snack brands were showing up with consumers. It is becoming less relevant as it relates to the consumers’ purchase decisions.”
When Hoberman took the reins in August 2023, the marketing team embarked on a journey to create a new distinctive platform for KIND, rooted in consumer insights to allow the brand to expand beyond healthy bar snacking. “KIND has started to move into some other health and wellness snacking spaces like granola and ice cream, so we needed something that was agile enough to flex outside of bars,” he explains.
The latest creative is All KINDs of Good, a platform that celebrates and promotes the brand as both healthy and delicious. “The brand sits at the sweet spot where it creates balance and snacking,” says Hoberman. “It allows consumers to enjoy themselves without abandoning good intentions.”
Before KIND, Hoberman was VP of mergers and acquisitions at Mars, where he led global strategy and served as CMO of Snickers, Milky Way, 3 Musketeers. Brand Innovators caught up with Hoberman from his office in New York to discuss KIND’s rebrand, kindness and the importance of working closely with retail partners. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Can you talk about the new All KINDs of Good platform?
Consumers have a constant tug of war between indulgence and intentions. One consumer said it best in our research, something to the effect of “when I go to the supermarket, it’s my smart self that’s picking out things to snack on but at night when I go to the pantry, my fat self is angry at my smart self.” What she was saying is that her stomach is craving something delicious, that’s indulgent and enjoyable to eat, but her brain is consistently telling her to be sensible, to eat better, more wholesome and less processed foods. That duality between stomach and brain and that tension between indulgence and intentions was a very rich space for the brand to play in and nobody was doing that.
There was a very clear link between the insight and the product truth. KIND celebrates this duality between stomach and brain and we do it in a very lighthearted and affirmative way. Consumers do not want to be ashamed of the food choices they make. They definitely don’t want to be demonized for something that might be in their repertoire, so we kept the creative very celebratory. We created a world called “All KINDs of Good.” Another consumer said, “When I eat well, I feel good.” There’s a very clear connection between the physical benefits of nutrition with the emotional benefit of nutrition plus enjoyment.
Can you talk about the brand’s purpose and how that shows up in your new creative?
All KINDs of Good has three verticals. It tastes good. It feels good. It does good. The connective tissue between tastes good and does good really is it feels good. There’s a feel-good element that you have from the product experience and then there’s a feel-good element that comes from when the brand does good. Kindness is in our brand DNA. Kindness really drives our vision. It’s really a belief system that compels the brand to act. It manifests itself in our behavior. Kindness determines how we show up for each other.
It shows up in the way we partner with our retailers, but also how we partner with others in the ecosystem. Then it shows up in the way that we deliver on behalf of our consumers and therefore the way we start to root kindness into the brand ethos. We operate in a world of discord and dysfunction and consumers really want a kinder approach to life. This notion of kindness has never been more relevant than it is today and it’s a very rich territory for the brand.
How does the brand demonstrate kindness?
We do it through our partnerships, donations and programming. We’re in year two of a three-year Almond Acres Initiative. It’s one of the largest regional agricultural projects for almonds. It demonstrates the way that the brand is kind to the planet. We also mirror that with acts of kindness in different communities and evergreen programs that demonstrate our kindness to society through feeding America and welfare.
This marries into the campaign when we combine products that taste good and feel good with our brand commitment to do good. That’s when All KINDs of Good tastes good, feels good and does good. The campaign has come together both from a product truth and then from a purpose standpoint.
Can you talk about how the brand shows up in culture?
One example is World Kindness Day, which is November 13th. It is a perfect opportunity for KIND to be at the forefront of that cultural moment and drive both breadth and depth of how that is expressed with our consumers. We also get involved in topical events and programs that help frontline workers, such as the recent hurricanes in Florida. A catastrophic event creates a gap in nourishment and KIND can be a very small part of the solution. There’s moments where we can plan for those, like World Kindness Day and then there are instances in culture where we need to just be spontaneous and agile and respond. We will never be the solution to catastrophic events but we can be a very small contributor in bringing kindness to someone’s day.
Can you talk about how you work with retail partners to reach consumers when they are at the point of purchase?
In my first year at KIND, I met over three dozen of our retail partners. For a CMO, it’s on the higher end of retail contact. Our retail partners see millions of our consumers every day, way more than we do. We get a lot of our best insight from our retail partners because of their high touch relationships with our consumers and data on how our consumers navigate the category.
One example is a recent launch of ours called KIND ZERO Added Sugar. We’ve always had a very low added sugar offering – our core bars include around five grams – but we heard some consumers were looking to for products with even less sugar. Our KIND ZERO Added Sugar takes three of our nine favorites and it delivers them with only one gram of added sugar. We tested it on Amazon about three months earlier than our national launch to leverage the Amazon network of assets –things like Alexa– to gather good insight around how we should speak to consumers about the product. It was a great feedback loop for how consumers were experiencing the product.
It informed the way we then went to market and the different media vehicles we chose. We spoke about the benefits of the product to consumers because we had some intelligence about what would be most motivating. It also informed some modest recipe modifications to either dial up or dial down different elements of the taste profile. That made for a very successful launch when we decided to move across other channels of conventional retail.
A second example would be our recent introduction of the KIND Savory Nut Bars. Walmart was seeing savory bars as a white space opportunity in the category and the team developed the savory nutbar line for KIND based on Walmart’s insights. Walmart was one of the very first retailers to get behind the idea and bring it into their line.
Retail media networks have been very important for CPG brands these days, is this something you are exploring?
We are seeing very strong responses in retail media. It’s probably one of the largest portions of our media mix and it’s growing next year. We continue to be very bullish about it and our retail partners are seeing the results of the investment. When we invest in retail media along with search and other types of omnichannel shopper support we’re seeing really nice topspin on our business.
I work extremely closely with my counterpart in sales, the chief customer officer. One of the things that we’ve determined is that the only way we’re going to win is if marketing and sales operate in a highly collaborative relationship, which we call a one-demand team. We’ve aligned our demand organization around quality growth. It’s not growing at all costs. It’s a growth algorithm that delivers volume and values. We’re not going to rely on prices heavily. There’s a renewed interest in growing our core business, not just innovating into new spaces. Our joint activation needs to be category enhancing not solely for the brand’s benefit and it needs to be profitable.
We’re going to continue to deepen our consumer understanding together. We’re going to look at all of our opportunities from innovation to media through both the lens of the consumer and the shopper to make sure that whatever we activate is highly integrated from the upper down to the lower end of the funnel will drive much better consumer understanding.
