The most exciting and successful brands are imbued with this sense of mission, personality, and personal values. More recently, Hampton Creek, which creates mayonnaise and other foods out of only plant-based ingredients, is taking the food industry by storm. Founder Josh Tetrick is a human- and animal-rights activist who is committed to remaking our food system to be free of animals. Thrive Market, founded by Gunnar Lovelace and Nick Green, is democratizing healthy food by bringing Whole Foods–quality products, with a Costco membership model and delivered like Amazon, to average consumers and so-called food deserts at low prices, so everyone has access to affordable healthy living.
These founders are clearly and honestly proud of their businesses; they were almost badges of honor not only in terms of the specific products but also in terms of the brands. Roxanne Quimby, behind Burt’s Bees, was evangelical about the efficacy of all-natural products. Tetrick takes out Wall Street Journal ads encouraging young entrepreneurs to compete with him to offer more plant-based foods. Thrive Market gives away one free membership to a low-income family for every one they sell. These entrepreneurs are on a personal quest not just to get rich, but also to change culture and to try to make the world a better place.
All of these brands have something to teach the new entrepreneur but none of them are possible to mimic. They are as individual and unique as a great piece of art—their uniqueness is what creates their authentic feel. You can look to these successes for inspiration but you can’t look to them to find the thing that you have to offer.
I didn’t have a particular set of traditional skills to begin with but nevertheless, I still wanted to display that same pride of ownership and personal connection to whatever we created. I wanted my brand to be a badge of honor: for me, our family, our eventual team, producers and suppliers, and consumers.
In thinking about how to create an authentic brand, our only hope was to employ the same logic that got us to the idea of coconut water in the first place. It had to be a brand that appealed to Maura and me first and foremost. We had a commitment to our personal health, and the health of others and the environment. We led active lifestyles and loved adventure. We aspired to live a long, interesting, and healthy life and see the world become a better place for the next generation. We liked to have fun, party, and let loose. I assumed there were millions of people that were very much like us. But thinking about a group that large was an abstraction. I realized our best chance of creating something authentic was if we focused on the values and drive behind the idea, and kept ourselves, the people closest to us, and our hopes, values, and desires in mind at every turn.
SEED CAPITAL
In my research of successful upstart brands in the beverage industry, I learned that they all needed money: lots of it. Some years earlier, SoBe had supposedly built its brand for under $8 million in total capital raised. By 2004, Glacéau seemed to be raising that amount of investment every few months. Maura and I certainly were not going to finance anything close to that ourselves. We were going to need plenty of OPM—other people’s money—and need it fast, before we took any further steps.
By the second half of 2003, I had done enough research and had enough confidence to begin telling people about our big idea. Up to that point, I had kept the concept just between Maura, Mary Beth, and me. Many entrepreneurs stay stuck in this spot for too long, guarded about talking about their idea for fear of someone stealing their brilliance. The downside to trying to protect your idea from being copied, however, is that you miss out on learning from people who can help in critical and sometimes surprising ways.
My approach was to talk about my idea to anyone with ears. In retrospect, I see how this approach helped me avoid many pitfalls, allowed me to make critical adjustments early, and maximized the serendipitous good luck that was crucial to our success. The truth is, you don’t know where the most help will come from. The guy sitting next to you at the hotel bar might be a hungry young executive of a distribution company, a successful serial entrepreneur, a venture capital bigwig, or have a good friend who is a buyer for Whole Foods. Talking to literally everyone about your idea increases the odds you’ll experience that magical moment where someone says, “Interesting, I actually know someone you should talk to . . .”
And that’s exactly how I found all of our earliest investors. I wasn’t just looking for those willing to write a check; I wanted investors who believed in me and the project, who shared my values and could add knowledge, insight, and connections. Finding these types is not easy but by telling my story to anyone and everyone, they started to appear.
I was fortunate that my International Paper job had brought me into personal contact with many Central American businesspeople. Over a business dinner, I laid out the idea to two of my top customers in my day job, Mario Carvajal and Hernan Bravo. Hernan had been a marketing executive for Coca-Cola in Central America, and together he and Mario owned and operated a beverage company that owned a brand called Kapo, which they distributed through Coca-Cola Central America. I would typically never discuss something like this with customers but we had become close friends. I admired them, wanted their advice, and never directly asked them to invest. They both loved the idea of coconut water and had a barrage of difficult questions about how I would go to market. Before dinner was over Mario said he wanted to invest. Hernan was helpful with advice and was interested in investing but wanted to see more before he would commit.
At the end of the dinner, Mario wanted to know how committed I was. What would I do, he asked, if IP gave me a big promotion while I was still getting the business off the ground? “I’d turn them down,” I replied. It was a prescient question. In the next year, I would be offered two substantial promotions, one in Brazil and the other in Belgium. I was far from certain this coconut thing would work out, but I believed in it enough to turn both of them down.
Next, I talked about the idea with the minority partners that were on my board of directors for International Paper El Salvador: Ricardo and Joaquin Palomo, Carlos Patricio and Francisco Escobar Thompson, and Pedro Apostolo. At Ricardo’s birthday party the previous year, they all gathered around me and Maura and said they knew I would leave IP someday and start something on my own, and whatever it was, they wanted to invest. Now that their prediction had come true, I told them I was not expecting them to invest but wanted to give them the chance to follow through on that offer. They were true to their word.
I found two other critical early investors very close to me. My sister, Mary Beth, and my college friend Mike Lorenz both saw I was passionate about this idea when I talked to them about it. Though they didn’t know anything about beverages specifically, both were savvy and successful businesspeople in their own right. I never asked them to invest and in fact discouraged it. I didn’t want to put anyone close to me in the position of worrying that they might be letting me down by not investing. Mary Beth and Mike both told me they knew there were risks but believed in me, liked the idea, and wanted to invest.
Over the entire trajectory of Zico, and after raising tens of millions of dollars, my experience was that my best success in raising money was not to ask people for money, at least not directly. I would simply tell my story, believing I was giving everyone a great opportunity, and anyone who was even a potential investor would inevitably ask if we were raising money, which would open up the conversation. If they didn’t ask, they were probably not a sophisticated enough investor to be making this sort of bet anyway or perhaps not the right fit. All of my investors knew and accepted they could lose (and could afford to lose) all of the money they offered. If you feel an investor can’t, you don’t want them.
For those with whom I had a deep personal connection, keeping the relationship intact was—for all parties—vastly more valuable than the money on the table, but at the same time no one likes to lose money. Taking money from “friends and family” is a mixed bag. If everyone goes in eyes wide open and the financial c
omponent is clear, well documented, and the risks accepted by all, then friends and family capital can be a critical and important place to start. If not, it’s bad news, and I’ve seen it split families down the middle. Having Mary Beth, Mike, and eventually other friends, my own parents, other siblings, and even my mother-in-law as investors provided an additional layer of personal motivation for me: I did not want to let them down and deal with the resulting tension at holiday dinners.
SPROUTING THE ZICO BRAND
Now that I had commitments for at least some capital, it was time to dive in. We had a lot to do, including refining the business plan; determining the growers, processor, and distributors; deciding when and how to launch; planning and figuring out the right sales and marketing tactics; and building the right team. But first, we needed to build the foundations of our brand. We decided to start with the brand vision architecture: a single graphic that captures in as few words as possible what the brand is about and who it’s for. Second, I knew we needed to get the right brand name. Third, we had to nail the visual branding: the look and feel of everything from T-shirts and hats to our website to point-of-sale displays, but especially the packaging itself. I believed these three elements would form the foundation of a great brand and the basis for the best and most authentic representation of what we wanted that brand to stand for.
Between Maura, Mary Beth, Jose, Roberto, and me, I was confident we had the right team to nail these three. To give the team direction, I created a sort of mini-manifesto, a one-page statement written in simple, clear, but passionate language outlining what our mission was, why we were doing this, and what we were all about. I wanted to make sure that everyone on the core team understood what I thought the brand should stand for before heading off to tackle these three first branding elements.
The brief reiterated the core mission: In twenty years, we wanted to see kids drinking coconut water, regardless of the brand, instead of high-sugar, artificial beverages, as part of leading healthier, more active lives. We hoped to catalyze economic growth in developing countries so tens of thousands of people could benefit from well-paying jobs in a healthy, sustainable, and growing coconut industry. Our brand would stand for healthy, natural, active living. Everyone involved with our company would have the opportunity to earn, learn, contribute, and grow to their fullest potential. The story we told about the product through the branding needed to honestly match the natural ingredients in the product. It would be a brand designed to have a long-standing and meaningful role in a cultural revolution in health and wellness.
After some back and forth, we came up with the image of a house, with the foundation representing “refreshment” and “replenishment,” general attributes that any consumer would expect and the fundamental reason to drink coconut water. Next were three house pillars: “naturally pure,” “unexpectedly healthy,” and “authentically original,” meant to describe both the physical and emotional attributes of our coconut water. The roof of the house was that the brand was “amazingly balanced.” Not only was coconut water a well-balanced beverage readily absorbed by the body, but we also felt the brand should reflect living life in balance: finding the medium between the physical and spiritual, mental and emotional, family and business, doing and being. Both Maura and I loved this brand vision and knew it was consistent with our values and was something we wanted to be associated with and promote.
What’s in a Name?
The next step in the process was coming up with the right name. We wanted a simple, bold, and memorable name. We wanted it to reference coconuts but be unique enough that we could create the meaning. If the whole word “coconut” was in the name, then consumers would bring their preexisting cultural meanings to the product. We wanted to tell our own story.
Mary Beth took the lead. She created a spreadsheet listing all the adjectives that we thought the name could elicit: pure, authentic, fresh, tropical, hydrating, replenishing, and more. We decided that one option was to include the syllable “co” of coconut in the name, so Mary Beth and her team began putting together a list of every possible two- or three-letter combination that might match that criteria and was catchy or graphically interesting: kico, soco, zoco, cozo, on and on.
Because we wanted our brand to have global potential, we checked our short list with people who knew other languages. You have to be fully fluent in another language to pick up on linguistic landmines, like the famous Chevy Nova, which, not surprisingly, fared poorly in Latin America. Who wants to buy a car that “no va” or “doesn’t go”?
We had English covered and mostly Spanish but we wanted to make sure in Mandarin, Cantonese, Hindi, Arabic, Portuguese, Japanese, Italian, French, and German we weren’t insulting someone’s grandmother or worse. After that, Jose and Roberto set up small focus groups in New York to make sure that the connotations of the name were the ones we intended, or at least were neutral.
Next up was a legal review. So few names are available. Even when products are not on the market, lawyers and others have taken to “squatting” on names, claiming to be planning on launching a brand while actually only hoping to sell the name.
Finally, Mary Beth did a rough mock-up of how each name on our shortlist might look graphically and on the packaging to make sure we were comfortable with how it would read.
In the end, we narrowed it down to Vida and Zico. I’d love to tell you I chose Zico, but I was leaning toward Vida (“life” in Spanish). With Mary Beth, Jose, and Roberto all pushing me, I caved and went with Zico. Plus at this time, a “coming soon” website showed up online for another coconut water brand: Vita Coco. Vida would just be too similar. Another stroke of luck came when our publicist, Jon Osmundsen, called me and said, “Mark, isn’t one of the names you’re considering Zico? I just saw that the URL www.zico.com is for sale on eBay.” Roberto waited until the bidding period was just about over and bought it for a thousand dollars.
Zico was a simple word and had an appealing look, especially in all capital letters. It meant nothing and was non-offensive in all major world languages as far as we could determine. The fact that the word wasn’t descriptive—if you just saw the word, you wouldn’t have a clue what the product was—we saw as an advantage. We were making a cultural play, not a strictly functional one. This would allow us to build the meaning behind the word ourselves. I always loved the letter “Z” for some reason and the “K” sound clearly had a strong track record with brands such as Coca-Cola, Kleenex, Clorox, Cartier, Cadillac, Spanx, to name a few.
We also thought it would be an advantage that people wouldn’t immediately know how to pronounce the word. Part of the branding and marketing would have to teach consumers that it was “Zee-co” not “Z-eye-co.” Correct pronunciation would delineate the consumers in the know. I felt like such a loser the first time I learned as a kid that the brand was “N-eye-k-ee” not “N-eye-k,” but sure felt cool when I could point out the correct pronunciation to even less in-the-know friends.
Over the years, people have asked to learn the significance behind the name Zico. My answer—that we made it up—is always a little disappointing. But at the same time, that gave us a blank canvas that was an opportunity to create something new and hopefully disruptive. You don’t want to limit your brand by picking a name with no flexibility or one that has only momentary cultural resonance. As long as you pick something unique and memorable that you can trademark in your space (and hopefully others) and that you won’t tire of, you should be fine.
Design by Nature
Coconut water brought a lot of visual imagery to work with for packaging: the coconut itself, palm trees, beaches, a blue ocean, and pretty much every other tropical image imaginable. Unfortunately, many of these images were clichés that would need a great graphic designer to create something that looked new and not just a riff on Corona Extra beer. Thankfully, my sister Mary Beth, an architect and designer, had some serious cred in the design world, such as designing
the corporate offices for mega-advertising firm Ogilvy & Mather.
Mary Beth and I always had a special bond. She was seven years older than me and protected me (most of the time) from our older brothers’ fury, and as payback I let her girlfriends dress me up. (I’d have done just about anything to be around her beautiful friends.) Later, she taught me the important things in life, like how to sneak your own booze into a concert to avoid the lines and the proper etiquette for doing tequila shots. Though she had never designed a beverage package before, I trusted her more than the dozens of packaging designers I knew from working with customers at International Paper, who all seemed to do the same conventional packages with minor tweaks. I wanted something bold, something unique, and I couldn’t imagine anyone better to do that than Mary Beth.
Mary Beth showed us what she had come up with when she visited us in El Salvador in 2003. On our dining room table, she set out a dozen Tetra Pak 330-milliliter Prisma packages with various versions of what the product might look like (we knew by then this package was the best available at the time to keep coconut water in a natural state, with no additives or preservatives). The prototype containers that Mary Beth had created represented a whole spectrum of ideas ranging from urban tough with gang tattoos to Brazilian Carnival to relaxing blue sky, palm trees, and coconuts. We looked at the choices and discussed who the imaginary customer might be and what we wanted to tell them—a commodity story or one of aspiration? If you are selling a commodity, like orange juice, the best thing to do is to put a big beautiful orange on the label. If you are selling an aspiration, you can be a lot more creative in your visual branding.
High-Hanging Fruit Page 6
