“Do you know about apples?” Sam asked during our weekly planning session, completely derailing a conversation about fictional brand campaigns based on mushroom poisonings. What started as an offhand question about his discovery of Envy apples (“I fucking love them”) led us down a rabbit hole that blows the gaff on one of commerce’s most fundamental challenges.
Anyway, as much as we can’t believe we’re writing this, welcome to the apple issue. It does actually have a point, a fact that surprised all of us.
Sam had been a loyal Royal Gala devotee until he randomly picked up Envys at our local Woolworths Metro. He’d never thought to try them, given his blind faith in the Gala. No marketing campaign had reached him. No influencer had endorsed them. He simply took a two-dollar gamble on an unknown variety because a bad batch of his usual choice had let him down. And it changed everything.
Sam’s unexpected embrace of Envy apples crystallises the unique challenge facing apple growers, skincare formulators, microchip manufacturers, and myriad other companies selling product that a lot of people regard as commodities (low interest, even lower product differentiation): how do you build a brand around a product that customers can only truly evaluate after purchase? You can’t taste an apple through the plastic bag. You can’t test how retinol will affect your skin from reading the bottle. You can’t benchmark processor speed from a sticker.
Yet somehow, Intel built a multi-billion-dollar brand around invisible components. Hyaluronic acid has become skincare’s most trusted ingredient despite being scientifically incomprehensible to most consumers. In just six years, the Cosmic Crisp apple became the fifth most produced brand of apple in the US, available globally.
These successes are underpinned by a sophisticated set of communication strategies that solve commerce’s trust problem. When differentiation isn’t obvious until after you’ve got the customer to invest, brands need to build pretty significant belief systems that guide purchasing decisions. It’s not easy to transform commodities into trusted choices, and it requires seriously heavy lifting via expertise, education, and expectation management.
Welcome to the ultimate communications challenge: selling what you can’t objectively prove.
Act
It’s not a smart conversation if there’s nothing to talk about.
Start with the right strategy and execution to prove you can walk the talk.
Thirty years ago, most apples were sold by colour and price – red or green, cheap or expensive. Today, varieties like Pink Lady, Honeycrisp and the aforementioned Cosmic Crisp command specific premiums based on meticulously crafted brand identities.
Pink Lady is, of course, the queen of this sort of brand affinity. Originally bred as Cripps Pink in Western Australia, the variety became a managed “club apple” when growers realised they could extract premium pricing through tight brand control. The Pink Lady trademark requires specific growing conditions, harvest timing and quality standards. Higher colour mutations of the original variety have since been found and gained Plant Variety Rights, which extend the protection. Two of these, Rosy Glow and Lady In Red, have been accepted by Apple and Pear Australia Limited to be marketed under the Pink Lady brand.
By guaranteeing consistent characteristics, Pink Lady solved the fundamental apple problem: you can’t know what you’re getting until you bite it. The brand becomes a promise about flavour profile, texture and eating experience. But like any promise, you need to garner trust from your audience before it means anything.
The Cosmic Crisp apple exemplifies the power (and cost) of this trust architecture. Developed over 22 years, the rollout involved Washington State growers investing half a billion US dollars in infrastructure, plant licensing and marketing. The launch campaign was the largest for any apple variety in history, coming in at a cool $US10 million. It’s now a top-produced apple in the US and has spread globally, including here in Australia and across Europe.
Aside from having more Instagram followers than most people, the Cosmic Crisp transformed a handful of orchards into a global brand using marketing that elevated apples from fruit to cultural capital. As is usually the case with new fruit varietals, it didn’t rely on shelf placement alone but instead leveraged brand storytelling – through ambassadors, pop ups, digital buzz and even theatres – to build that trust before people took the first bite.
And it’s not just limited to fruit. McCormick evolved from spice manufacturer to become, what they call, a “flavour expert”. With $US6.5 billion in annual sales across 150 countries and territories, it makes, markets and distributes herbs, spices, seasonings, condiments and flavours to the food and beverage industry. Its CEO, Brendan Foley, frames the differentiation clearly: “Our business is differentiated from others in the industry as we do not compete for calories, we flavour them.”
Get the point? It’s asking people to buy into expertise before they buy into ingredients. Competitors sell oregano or garlic powder, McCormick sells culinary knowledge. Its packaging includes recipe suggestions, usage tips and flavour pairing advice. It’s in the business of selling cooking confidence. This educational approach builds trust by demonstrating an understanding of customer needs beyond the basic product.
Still in the commodities aisle, let’s talk about pepper. Despite what one of the SKMG partners reckons, 99.9% of people think pepper is pepper is pepper.* So, how do you differentiate one brand from another, if taste isn’t a factor and proving alleged product superiority to first time buyers is impossible? The answer is simple: packaging.
Consider Pep. OK, it’s website is a bit cringey: “Grown in Cambodia's beautiful Memot region, Pep black pepper has depth of flavour, aromatic complexity and kick. We think it's the best” is a tad over the top but the packaging is stunning. Red. Yellow. A kicking donkey. A short, sharp name. A funny but not laugh-out-loud slogan (“It’s got kick”). Pep makes rival pepper brands look dowdy and dour. Smart work by some smart marketers. (Full disclosure: the packaging was designed by our uber-talented friend and occasional colleague Benny Moore, but that doesn’t make it any less impactful.)
*That one SKMG partner insists you read this if you think pepper is just pepper.
Breaking out of food, there’s Intel, who perfected this trust-building model through “ingredient branding”, that is, making invisible components “visible” to end consumers. Intel realised that it needed to enter the mind of consumers, and that could be done only through branding. The challenge was massive: the product was a commodity component and not visible to the consumer.
Intel’s solution involved multiple trust-building mechanisms. It built a premium positioning by showcasing that the world’s best PCs used Intel chips. It simplified communication with “Intel Inside” – findable, memorable messaging. Most importantly, it invested in sonic branding, using consistent audio signatures that created positive associations at the moment of experience.
The strategy worked because Intel understood that trust requires both rational and emotional components: the rational through demonstrating superior performance partnerships with respected PC manufacturers, the emotional through creating familiarity via consistent branding touchpoints that reduced purchase anxiety.
Intel is not alone. Evian positions water as youth and purity. Dulux sells optimism rather than paint. Tata Steel created Steelium to move beyond commodity pricing in construction materials.
Each brand solves the same fundamental problem: when customers can’t evaluate quality before purchase, brands must provide evaluation frameworks. The frameworks combine expertise demonstration, expectation setting and risk reduction to guide decision-making. It’s Branding 101, but writ large because of the nature of the product.
The most sophisticated brands create what behavioural economists call “experience goods” positioning: framing their commodities as specialised solutions for specific needs rather than generic alternatives to be chosen by price alone.
Explain
How big ideas are translated into words that resonate, build identity and set the context for a smart conversation.
The skincare industry perfects trust-building around invisible benefits. Unlike apples, where taste provides immediate feedback, skincare results can take weeks or months to appear. Yet consumers routinely pay premium prices (super premium in some cases) for products based entirely on technical ingredient lists they barely understand.
So if one strategy to sell goods you can’t objectively prove before purchase is to build a brand framework around them (as per the section above) how the hell do you explain something like hyaluronic acid?
Searches for technical ingredients – like hyaluronic acid – on Net-a-Porter are up by almost 700% since 2020, says Net-a-Porter’s ex global beauty director, Newby Hands. “Customers now prioritise tried and trusted ingredients over the big brand name.” You got that right, it’s the exact opposite of the above. The difference here? Hyaluronic acid itself has become the brand.
Hyaluronic acid demonstrates how super technical ingredients can have meaning imbued in them if they fit into the right moment of the zeitgeist. The popular ingredient absorbs moisture and draws it into your skin to hydrate it, dermatologists say. Although it’s especially useful for dry skin, it’s a great hydrator for all skin types. Despite its intimidating chemical name, hyaluronic acid has achieved mass market recognition through comms campaigns that emphasise universal benefits and expert endorsement.
The ingredient’s success follows a specific trust-building pattern. First, dermatologists provided credible expertise. For dry skin, experts favoured unglamorous but effective ingredients like petrolatum (85.5% consensus), hyaluronic acid (79%), ceramides (82.1%), and urea (79%). Professional validation creates the foundation for consumer confidence.
Second, brands invested in education rather than mystification. Instead of positioning hyaluronic acid as a proprietary secret, companies explained its mechanism: it holds 1,000 times its weight in water, plumping skin cells and reducing fine line visibility. The technical transparency increased trust by demonstrating brand expertise.
Third, the ingredient became a quality signal across price points. Premium brands and their cheaper rivals both prominently feature hyaluronic acid, allowing consumers to identify “smart” choices regardless of budget. The ingredient functions as a trust shortcut where its presence suggests the brand understands effective formulation.
The educational trust-building appears across commodity categories facing the same challenge. Korean beauty brands (yes, we’re talking about Korea, again) built global credibility by emphasising specific ingredients and multi-step routines that suggest a sophisticated understanding of skin science.
Looking to another category – and to another tactic – wine is perhaps the best for demonstrating how language itself can create purchasing confidence when quality can’t be demonstrated until after consumption. Unlike tech products that can show performance benchmarks, or cars that offer test drives, wine requires customers to buy entire bottles based purely on descriptive language, branding and trust.
Wine critics have developed an elaborate vocabulary to communicate invisible experiences: “minerality” describes everything from chalk and crushed rocks to wet stones, slate, talc, limestone, gravel, flint, oyster shell and petrichor (the smell of rain on dry surfaces). As Wine Spectator’s Dr. Vinny explains: “Minerality is one of the hardest wine tasting notes to explain, and it’s tricky to communicate because it falls under the category of things that we recognise in wine but that we don’t typically put in our mouths.”
By the way, this isn’t pretentious nonsense. There is a precise method to the madness. Wine professionals use terms like “gunflint”, “chalky”, “sanguine” (bloody meat) and “saline” because these specific descriptors help consumers predict experiences they can’t sample. The more precisely critics can articulate flavour profiles, the more confidence they build in purchase decisions.
Sure, no one likes to sit at a restaurant while one of the table has a 15 minute conversation with the somme, but wine terminology serves multiple trust-building functions. It shows expert knowledge through specificity that casual consumers couldn’t fabricate. It provides evaluation frameworks that help customers categorise preferences and make future choices. And it creates shared vocabulary that allows wine enthusiasts to discuss and recommend products confidently.
Trust-building strategies share common elements: expert validation, educational transparency and consistent quality delivery. When it comes to explaining the product through brand and tone, businesses succeed by positioning themselves as knowledgeable guides rather than mere product providers. And, perhaps more importantly, successful brands create what psychologists call “fluency effects”: the more familiar consumers become with specific terminology or evaluation criteria, the more competent they feel making purchasing decisions. Hyaluronic acid, single-origin, Intel Inside. These terms become shortcuts for informed choice-making.
Amplify
A conversation means someone has to listen and respond. Cleverly amplifying the message to the right audience, at the right time, is the final piece of the puzzle.
The ultimate amplification happens when third-party curators (not brands themselves) become the source of trust and meaning. When seemingly mundane products achieve massive success through external validators, it reveals the extraordinary power of trusted recommendation systems.
The Stanley Quencher tumbler’s transformation from discontinued product to cultural obsession illustrates this perfectly. Stanley, a 112-year-old company, had been marketing to “green, male and hot” outdoor workers using thermoses for coffee. The 40-ounce Quencher was selling poorly and appeared headed for discontinuation in 2019.
Enter The Buy Guide, an Instagram shopping account run by Taylor Cannon, Ashlee LeSueur and Linley Hutchinson. They discovered the Quencher and became obsessed, gifting one to Emily Maynard Johnson, a social media personality from The Bachelor and The Bachelorette in the US. When Johnson posted about it, a Stanley executive noticed and offered The Buy Guide the opportunity to buy 5,000 cups directly.
“We were telling all our followers, ‘Hurry, get your hands on any cup that you can find. We’ve heard that this is going away. Please tell Stanley that you don’t want it to go away, that you love the cup so much’,” Hutchinson recalled. The urgency created by trusted curators transformed a commodity water bottle into a must-have status symbol.
The Buy Guide’s credibility came from product testing and genuine enthusiasm rather than paid partnerships. Its followers trusted its judgment precisely because they weren’t being paid to promote products. When they said Stanley was discontinuing something great, people believed them.
Oprah’s Book Club represents perhaps the most powerful example of trusted curation driving a serious impact. Publishers estimate that her power to sell a book was anywhere from 20 to 100 times that of any other media personality. When Toni Morrison first published The Bluest Eye in 1970, it sold 2,000 copies. After Oprah featured it in her book club in 2000, it sold 800,000 copies.
Oprah solved the fundamental book problem: readers can’t evaluate quality before investing time and money. Her curation provided evaluation shortcuts that reduce purchase anxiety. Readers trusted that Oprah-selected books would reward their investment, even if they can’t sample content beforehand. Of course, for a more contemporary example, we need only look to Dua Lipa perhaps reviving the entire literature industry.
Curator power extends beyond obvious tastemakers to specialised experts who develop authority in specific categories. Back to apples. Brian Frange’s Apple Rankings website (formerly the Tumblr known as The Appleist) demonstrates how passionate expertise creates community engagement around products most people would consider boring, droll or interchangeable. His detailed apple reviews generate fierce debate because he provides specific evaluation frameworks that help customers articulate preferences that are often more ingrained and sub-conscious than they realised.
When products can’t be evaluated before purchase, trusted curators become more powerful than brands themselves. The most valuable amplification strategies focus on identifying and supporting credible third-party validators rather than creating traditional marketing campaigns.
Successful brands understand they can’t create trust directly, they can only provide products worthy of curator endorsement and systems that make curation easy and rewarding for advocates.
Picks & Recs
The Childhood Food Allegiances Edition (With One Exception)
Some products we chose. Others were chosen for us, somewhere between the schoolyard and the tuckshop. This week’s Picks & Recs are for the irrational loyalties we will defend to the grave – not because they’re good, but because we grew up with them or, more likely, our parents placed them in our lunchbox.
Sam: Chicken Crimpy Shapes
What I consider the apex predator of the Shapes universe. Tasty. Crunchy. Crimpy. Chicken is the Barack Obama of flavours: versatile, reliable and charming every darn time. They have the best surface area and aerodynamic engineering of any Shape; being as perfect for throwing as they are for eating. People will bang on and on about Pizza Shapes, but these people are transient fools. Us Chicken Crimpy folk, we gotta stick together. We’re gonna make something of ourselves one day.
Neil: Tiger Gruyere Cheese
Small triangles of cheese, wrapped in silver foil with a yellow label featuring a red tiger, sold in perfectly round packs. Long before Laughing Cow swept into Australian supermarkets and our hearts, Tiger Gruyere Cheese ruled the cheese jungle. Sweet, nutty and firm to the touch, each triangle was pure joy. Eating 13 in a row bordered on ecstasy (trust me). And then, about 20 years ago, they vanished from stores. Gone. Never to return. The tiger wasn’t just tamed; it was tamed and deported. Amazon sells them online but will not ship them to Australia. So we are left with the pale imitation (the aforementioned Laughing Cow) and sweet lingering memories.
(Footnote: the Tiger Gruyere Cheese triangles never appeared unannounced in my lunchbox; I went to my local supermarket and bought them with my pocket money.)
Tess: Curly Wurly
I’ve got a lifelong relationship with the Curly Wurly. My mum used to buy them because they were cheap but still only bought them occasionally, making them a real treat. She’d often hand them out to my friends when it was her turn to do the carpool, some of whom had never come across the variety before. My friends and I will still give each other Curly Wurlys in moments of happiness and grief, like tiny edible hugs that stick to your teeth. Now, decades later, I still find myself reaching for them, even though they’ve definitely gotten shorter (or maybe I’ve just grown taller). One even ripped out a filling once, but I choose to blame my dentist for that, not Cadbury.
Andrew:
Between recess and the tuckshop I was talking about one thing and one thing only.
It wasn’t food:
Dunkaroos went hard too though I guess.