A Look Inside Enjoy Life Foods
Enjoy Life Foods Chief Sales and Marketing Officer Joel Warady is responsible for developing and executing the sales and marketing strategies for the company and its brands, while working closely with the innovation team on developing new products. In this exclusive interview, Warady divulges the marketing mantras unique to the company, as well as the technologies needed for successful marketing initiatives.
Q. Can you provide background on the mission of Enjoy Life Foods?
Warady: At Enjoy Life Foods, for the 13 years that we have been in existence, we have been focused on producing and selling great-tasting products that are both gluten free and free of the top eight allergens. This allows us to be enjoyed by the 100 million Americans who live their daily lives with food allergies, intolerances and Celiac Disease. Over the years, while that foundational promise has not changed, we have added to our promise by making certain that all products are verified non-GMO, all products are both Kosher and Halal certified, and we don’t utilize any artificial ingredients in the manufacture of our products.
With the recent acquisition by Mondelez International, we are pleased to report that nothing will change with respect to our brand promise. Mondelez recognizes the unique relationship we have been able to build with our consumers, and the strong loyal following that the Enjoy Life brand commands, and it was one of the reasons that they were interested in our company. The last thing they want is for us to change; with their resources and expertise, and our passion for our consumers, we believe that the Enjoy Life brand will continue to gain additional distribution and awareness, resulting in our products becoming increasingly ubiquitous to all of the consumers seeking our better-for-you solutions.
Q. What is your leadership style?
Warady: It is an interesting question, because the answer won’t be one that is on trend. It is difficult to manage a brand as a democracy; at the end of the day, a Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) has to own her/his decisions as to the direction the brand takes. If the CMO is wrong with the direction, the solution becomes simple — companies make a change in the CMO. That said, I try and lead by example; I never ask my team to do something that I am not willing to do myself. I go to the trade shows, I attend the consumer shows allowing me to engage directly with our consumers, and I’m at our experiential marketing events engaging with participants. I am a hands-on manager and I hope that never changes, no matter how large the company and the brand might get. Many times I am asked why I still do the things that I do when I have such a strong and capable team. The answer is simple: The minute we lose touch with our customers and consumers, we lose the ability to truly hear how people feel about the brand, and the fact is, it is not our brand. It is their brand, the consumers who are devoted, and we are the caretakers of their brand. I love being on the Leadership Team of a company, but to me that means being out of the office as much as possible as opposed to sitting in strategic planning sessions. The closer I am to the action, the better leader I can be.
Q. How is technology being leveraged for marketing initiatives?
Warady: We live in interesting times as it relates to digital and mobile. Years ago I used to have the mantra, “think digitally, but act analog”. I have updated that a bit now that we live in a world where the “digital layer” exists. Let me explain. Uber is a great example of how the digital layer works. Think about what Uber is; it is a driver (analog), a car (analog), that you order via your smartphone (digital). This is how we at Enjoy Life look at the world as well. How can we make the path to purchase work more efficiently utilizing the digital layer? It can’t be all digital, and can’t be all analog. We constantly look at how we can integrate digital and mobile as part of our overall marketing strategy. We look at what Mondelez has done with some of its social initiatives, and we are envious. At the same time, our community engagement is strong on its own. We will certainly look to incorporate their best practices into our overall strategy as we enhance our technology initiatives.
Internally, we continue to adopt technology as part of our daily processes. Cloud solutions have become part of our everyday existence and we have recently incorporated additional productivity software on both our sales side as well as within our inventory management process. This has allowed us to improve our in-stock percentages, enhanced our on-time delivery percentages, and provide an overall better customer satisfaction rating.
Q. How does Enjoy Life Foods handle business process change?
Warady: While we are a 13-year-old company, we still think of ourselves as a start up. We work hard on not losing that start-up mentality. We want to remain nimble with the ability to act fast, and as we grow, that becomes more of a challenge. We increase the size of our team, and we bring expertise from the outside, but we have to balance that against bringing in the “that’s the way it is done” attitude. With technology and continuous improvement, we always want to look at how we can incorporate experience with innovation, and consistently be looking for new ways in which we can accomplish our goals.
Q. Is there a particular project that you can highlight as a major win?
Warady: We are very excited about the work that we have done on our product locator service that exists on our recently re-launched web site. Working in conjunction with a cloud-based solution named Destini, we are able to provide our consumers with a product locator service that lists our product availability not simply by retail chain, but by actual retail store location down to the specific SKU utilizing actual scan data in relatively real time. This service is indicates to our consumers where our products can be located based upon actual sales through the register. For a growing brand, this is truly a game-changer and has resulted in increased velocity through a more effective path to purchase. It has been instrumental in driving our double-digit velocity growth.
We are great believers in borrowing from the best. Rather than mention a specific campaign that we have tried to emulate, it is more of a culture we look to adopt. We love the culture of transparency and allowing our consumers to see inside our company, primarily through the use of social and digital platforms. We love the idea of storytelling and story sharing, and we encourage our consumers to utilize our various platforms in helping them execute this sharing. Most of all, we truly believe in community; it is not simply a buzzword for us. Each and every day, we work on facilitating a community of passionate users and look to build devotion through passion and loyalty.
Q. What advice can you offer peers who are looking to make investments in sales and marketing strategies?
Warady: Many of the companies with whom I come in contact will ask how digital plays a role in our overall marketing strategy. When this question is posed to us, I encourage them to look at it completely differently. All companies today need to take a “digital-first” strategy. Traditional marketing strategies need to play a role in the overall strategy, but we need to understand the importance of digital and mobile and how prevalent this is in our world today. The fact is, tomorrow’s consumers don’t think of it as digital, it is simply the way they live their life. To them, it is simply living. As marketers, we need to look at it similarly and think of it as simply marketing. Those companies that do so will be the ones who not only survive, but also thrive.