ORIGINALITY

Unlocking the Ability to Think Boundlessly

Once KIND Fruit & Nut bars gained traction, we began carving out a new competitive space within the nutritional bar category. Because of our products’ uniqueness, there were no true competitors on the market. Consumers who wanted a whole nut and fruit bar came to our shelves. Our marketing work was centered inside the stores—“in the trenches,” as we say—and emphasized the quality of our ingredients. We built case-stack displays of our products at the end of the store aisle and sought to place racks and temporary displays near the checkout area. Other snack bar companies mainly watched from the sidelines.

Then, a few years later, companies large and small started launching products to try to compete in the new subcategory we had created. They emulated our ingredient combinations, our use of whole nuts and fruits, and our use of clear wrappers. But somehow none seemed to register in consumers’ minds. Whether the imitators came from a leading retailer, a major manufacturer, or a small start-up, we were blessed that consumers stuck by us.

In 2011, yet another competitor launched a fruit and nut bar designed to mimic KIND. This new entrant also claimed their bars had 60 percent less sugar than the leading fruit and nut bars.

There are three ways to lower the sugar in a whole nut bar: use less fruit; use fillers; or replace the honey-based binder with artificial ingredients. This company was using a combination of tactics, using sugar alcohols like maltitol or sorbitol that can cause bloating and feel and taste artificial, as well as relying heavily on processed ingredients in lieu of nuts. To further bolster their comparative claims, they pitted the nutritional information from the “leading” bars that contained fruit against one of their bars that contained no fruit. In other words, they were not comparing apples to apples. Had they compared their bar to our Nut Delight (which contains no fruit and also no maltitol and sorbitol), the sugar content would have been practically the same.

The competitor’s flagship product promoted itself as “zero sugar” and “all natural.” But we knew that you can’t make a zero-sugar snack bar from all-natural ingredients. Real food has some sugar. Nuts naturally contain a little sugar. Fruits contain sugar (even breast milk does). But like a plethora of companies that were trying to make money on America’s obesity epidemic and consumers’ fears about it, this company was trumpeting silver bullets that contained “zero sugar” by making products with artificial compounds.

Limiting sugar intake is something consumers are increasingly mindful of, and for good reason. And at the same time, a lot of articles were describing sugar as “the” evil to avoid at all costs, creating exaggerated fears and obsessions to avoid any sugar intake, even if part of a nutritionally rich product.

We were faced with a serious dilemma. Was the absolute fear of “sugar” something that would harm us? Should we launch a line with “natural sugar alcohols” like erythritol and cut our sugar count in ways similar to our competitors? Should we introduce a zero-sugar product?

Early on at KIND, I had made a commitment never to have sugar as the first ingredient in our products. At the same time, KIND was built around respect for ingredients found in nature. We would no longer be able to say we used “ingredients you can see and pronounce” if we added sugar alcohols or other compounds to deliver on the “zero sugar” fad. This betrayal of our values would alienate our customers. I came to the realization that it would not be true to our brand to substitute artificial ingredients. We would continue to deliver wholesome solutions by focusing on real food, not lab food. We did not want KIND to become a functional diet product. We wanted to remain a healthy snack that is part of a healthful lifestyle.

We weren’t prepared to compromise, so we decided that we had to design a new product that would let us compete in an honest and transparent fashion and address the valid consumer concern of reducing sugar content. It took us a year, but in 2012 we launched our KIND Nuts & Spices line. These bars had less sugar because we removed the fruit and replaced it with spices to boost the flavor. We worked incessantly to bind our nuts with the minimum amount of honey and glucose. We reduced the sugar in our dark chocolate coating. This way we were able to deliver only five grams of sugar or less per bar while keeping our brand promise.

Rather than go to the mat with our “zero sugar” competitors, we decided to change the conversation. Naming the new line Nuts & Spices allowed us to refocus consumers’ attention on what our bars do have (nutritionally rich nuts and spices) while being true to our brand. This decision allowed us to play to our strength, which is ingredients you can see and pronounce, instead of positioning our products as diet foods.

The strategy of letting our ingredients be the heroes paid off for us. Our KIND Dark Chocolate Nuts & Sea Salt bar, which debuted in this line, is the #1 best-performing bar in the entire nutritional bar category on a same-store basis, according to Nielsen and IRI data.

By staying true to our principles and thinking with AND, we leveraged our competitors’ actions to strengthen instead of weaken us. In retrospect, I find this episode a perfect example of the need for innovation that is still true to a brand promise. We were appropriately apprehensive about our rivals’ actions, but we used competitive threats as opportunities to reaffirm our company’s values. This strategy not only helped us define even more clearly who we were and what we stood for, but it helped us out-innovate and outflank the competition.

INNOVATION THAT STAYS ON BRAND

An added benefit of staying on brand with the introduction of KIND Nuts & Spices is that we didn’t unwittingly undermine our original line. It may seem quite simple in retrospect, but there are many recent examples of brands that have failed to protect their core products when introducing new lines: Consumers saw the marketing for the new lines as evidence that the brand’s original products had been superseded, and they stopped buying those core products. For example, you may have a beverage that has 240 calories. When you introduce a new ten- or zero-calorie version, you inadvertently highlight the high calorie count of your original product. Brands that are most vulnerable here probably started with a problematic feature, but all brands can damage themselves if they are not careful when they launch new lines.

When you’re starting to innovate past your core product, you constantly have to remind yourself what your brand stands for. You run the risk of confusing consumers by giving them conflicting messages. This is the time to evaluate what your brand means to consumers and what you want it to represent. It’s a tough question: Who are you as a company? The key, before you expand, is to know the answer.

To innovate is to do something that is truly different and disruptive, that takes you into an area where you have not been before. But effective innovation must stay on brand and make sense to those who know what to expect from you. There has to be a common thread, a consistency, an underlying premise or set of values, so that there’s credibility to your efforts.

You can transcend your origins but you need what marketers call brand permission to succeed. That means that you need to get the consumer to sign off on the direction your new products are moving your brand. If you’re a candy bar maker, will a consumer trust you to make healthy snacks? Probably not; you’d be well advised to start a new brand because your candy brand has negative brand equity in the space of healthful eating. If you have a sugary beverage brand that’s fun and irreverent, everybody assumes your ingredients are artificial. Trying to make a natural version of your product may actually hurt your parent brand because it’s going to create friction. People won’t believe your new product is natural, and they’ll question why you felt the need to create it. Maybe your core consumer may not care about wellness-promoting drinks since they’re choosing to buy a fun soft drink.

Sometimes companies stop understanding what their brand represents as they grow bigger. A gigantic conglomerate often hires an entry-level brand manager who inherits a small brand and wants to make a mark. This can have disastrous results for the brand.

Consider Balance bars. Two decades ago, the Balance nutritional bar was launched with a unique value proposition, promising a balanced “meal” of 30 percent protein, 40 percent carbohydrates, and 30 percent dietary fat. This formula was linked to a popular diet at the time, and immediately gained traction with consumers.

While the company was guided by its founders and stayed focused on its mission, it grew to more than $100 million in sales from 1992 to 1999 before being acquired by Kraft in January 2000.

Then the well-respected brand lost its way. Over the next ten years, every time a trend appeared in the nutritional bar space, the Balance-Kraft team seemed to want to pounce on it. When organic felt like it had legs, they created an organic version of Balance bars. When KIND pioneered whole nut and fruit bars, they created Balance bare. Among the dozen trend-driven variants were Balance CarbWell, Balance Organic, and Balance 100-calorie bars, each launched to capitalize on fads sweeping the country.

The strategy made no sense. The original Balance bars were functional products. Their whole brand was about achieving balanced meals through a specific formula and appealed to a particular consumer segment that coveted that functional feature. All of a sudden, the newly anointed brand manager looked at sales trends and tried to follow brands that were growing faster. The brand shepherd did not consider whether consumers would trust Balance to make an organic bar. But the Balance brand had no brand permission to go to some of those places. Plus, every time the company launched a new product, it implicitly provoked friction, questions, and confusion about the original product. The consumer was left to wonder if the changes meant that the original was obsolete. At Balance, I believe that the brand manager didn’t stop to think, “How can I credibly defend and grow my core?”

Consequently, Balance faltered; by the time that Kraft offloaded the company in 2009, Balance had lost its leadership position and credibility. Kraft sold the brand at a loss to a private equity firm.

Whether you’re a small company or a division of a large one, if you have been given the responsibility to grow a brand, the first thing you must do is understand what that brand stands for. This is not an easy exercise. Different people see brands differently, and brands evolve. But it’s important to comprehend why people are buying your products and what they expect from you.

Someone once told me: “A brand is a promise. And a great brand is a promise well kept.”

KIND’S SECOND ACT

Once KIND Fruit & Nut bars had been on the market for five years, we felt it was time for us to start expanding beyond our original category, balancing the natural tension between authentic innovation and authentic branding.

Normally when you’re innovating, as U.S. Ambassador Thomas Pickering once told me, it is wise to move just one square over on the checkerboard. You are more likely to understand the adjacent spaces and your consumer is more likely to see the logical progression of your brand.

Our common thread could have been making “bars,” expanding beyond nutritional bars and adding granola bars to our assortment. Or the use of “nuts and fruit” could have been our common denominator, moving into fruit and nut trail mixes. But we felt if we stayed in bars as our second act, people would know us as a bar company; and if we launched a fruit and nut trail mix, we’d be seen as a fruit and nut company.

We took the risky strategic step of moving a couple of squares over—beyond fruits and nuts, and beyond bars—because we wanted to send the message that KIND transcends those boundaries. We concluded our most distinctive value proposition was using healthful ingredients that were minimally processed.

And thus, in October 2011 we introduced KIND Healthy Grains Clusters, a granola-like product that can be eaten as a snack on the go or with milk or yogurt in a bowl. We wanted to signal to the consumer that the common denominator of KIND products is nutritionally rich ingredients that you can see and pronounce. We felt we had a responsibility to live up to the potential of this concept and to forge a new path at the same time.

Because of my experience with the teriyaki pepper spread and other early debacles, I also knew we could not even think about selling a product that wasn’t 100 percent as good in every way as our core bars. With KIND Healthy Grains Clusters, we felt we had a great product that distinguished itself and provided a different value proposition from other granolas. It introduced the use of five super-grains, as opposed to just oats: millet, amaranth, quinoa, and buckwheat, plus gluten-free oats. We made the product in versatile clusters. We were confident that the clusters could represent the KIND brand, and we were proud to bring them to market.

To get real-world feedback, we took the expensive step of creating small runs of Clusters in real packaging (“live” product in fully designed and produced packaging). This experiment cost us tens of thousands of dollars, which for a small company was a big investment. We tested the products in stores to see how consumers reacted. We internally insisted that the new products would need to exceed the store’s minimum sales thresholds if we were to actually launch them in the marketplace. Rather than promoting the granola with ads or signage, we let it stand on the shelves by itself, to make sure it could win on its own merits.

The Healthy Grains Clusters took off rapidly. Inside each bag from the test batches, we included an invitation for feedback. The results were clear: Consumers loved it and let us know that they understood that the product was much more nutritionally rich than the other granolas for sale at the time. It was gluten free, non-GMO, tasted delicious, and was nutrient dense. We officially launched the line in collaboration with Whole Foods, which partnered with us to showcase the product and celebrate its innovative features and great taste. Three months later we rolled out the line across the nation. KIND Healthy Grains Clusters is one of the fastest-growing product lines in the granola category, garnering over 10 percent of all granola sales after two years on the market. At one major retailer, the line represents upwards of 40 percent of total granola sales.

Despite our obsession with quality, we did falter along the way. Early on, we received some customer complaints, which was a fairly new experience for us: We sell tens of millions of bars per month and get a handful of complaints. We try to tend to every single one of them, both to make things right with any consumer we disappointed, and to see if we can identify broader lessons for constant improvement. But all of a sudden, we were receiving over one hundred complaints for every million Clusters we sold, which, while modest perhaps for an average company, was quite unusual for us. Tony Celentano, the head of our consumer relations team, flagged the problem as soon as these dissatisfied customer reports started to come in. In November 2012 we received a record 202 complaints per million on the Clusters, and it really alarmed me.

It became clear that a couple of the ingredients we were using—buckwheat and amaranth—were more fragile than we had understood (they go stale quite easily). These complaints prompted us to check on the freshness and quality from our suppliers and to perfect the conditions for storing these ingredients at our end. Our team dove into the issue at headquarters while Bob Rhodes, our head of manufacturing, and Brian Lutter, our lead on the Healthy Grains production team, camped out at the factory for weeks, sacrificing many weekends with family to swiftly correct the issue. Within five weeks we had instituted a number of changes to optimize freshness. Today, we log fewer than 0.35 complaints per million Clusters units sold.

Two hundred and two complaints per million might not seem like a very big number. But for every person who takes the time to complain, there may be thousands that just give up on your brand. Every single one of those consumers is a human being that we had let down. At least for those who reached out to us, we could sincerely apologize and send them replacement product. But it broke my heart that perhaps thousands of others were disappointed and lost to us.

Complaints are a rare opportunity to get feedback and do something about it. Listening to your consumers and creating systems to ensure that you incorporate their feedback is extraordinarily important. We love the overwhelming praise we get from consumers—including unsolicited testimonials about how someone lost weight, or how a KIND act made someone’s day, or how delicious our products are. But because we don’t want criticism to get lost amidst all the love, we instituted a system where our weekly feedback reports must first list any and all complaints. A dozen team leaders review these reports on a weekly basis to ensure their respective departments are acting on them.

INNOVATION: YOUR SECRET WEAPON

No matter your business, you want to make sure you have a product or a service that distinguishes you from the crowd. A central part of American culture is celebrating original products and ideas that make this world a little better.

In the consumer products world, there is a pejorative term for items that are not innovative: me-too items. Me-too items proliferate a few years after a trend takes hold and/or one company puts out an innovative and winning product. You see this again and again if you look at any recent food-industry trend: the coconut-water craze, the low-carb craze, the gluten-free craze. But you also see it across other industries, from apparel to digital apps.

From the retail buyer’s perspective, why should they give shelf space to a derivative item? The me-too item is not doing anything for the category or bringing in new shoppers. Without offering consumers something new, it’s just going to cannibalize sales in the category. The whole idea of blindly copying a product is also bad for the company doing the copying. Consumers don’t really go for the umpteenth brand of coconut water or gluten-free granola and supermarkets don’t have the shelf space to hold them all. Consumers don’t have any reason to trust the #5 or the #20 brand, unless they provide a differentiating proposition. Lower-performing brands eventually get discontinued from the shelves. If you’re not playing to win, my theory is, don’t even play. Pick a different game where you have a chance to lead.

The AND philosophy thrusts innovation and creativity. Innovation is what makes our world go round. It’s the key to a venture’s success. And it’s an equalizing factor. You don’t need to be the largest company out there. If you are the most creative, you can level the playing field (or, as I once said to my team in my semi-intelligible Mex-English, “The leveling field is your creativity”). This is why start-ups and entrepreneurial companies—innovative by design—often win against big corporations.

QUESTIONING THE WAY THINGS ARE

Every morning, millions of men wake up, get dressed in suits, and put on a tie. They spend their whole day at work with a piece of cloth wrapped around their necks and hanging down to their stomachs. They accept as a given that this is normal business attire. The vast majority of them will go through their entire adult lives without ever questioning why they wear this thing around their necks, or how this fashion even came about.

Why does it make sense that this long piece of cloth should represent elegance or professionalism? How did this custom get started? Certainly when we observe “strange” customs from other cultures—like the large wooden rings that some African tribes use to elongate their necks—we marvel at their foreignness or oddness. But we take for granted that our own customs are perfectly normal.

The most credible explanation for the origin of ties that I have found is that in the early seventeenth century, Croatian militias visiting Paris marveled at a Parisian fashion of wearing colored scarves around their necks. They adopted these as their uniform, wearing neck scarves “à la croate,” which then morphed into the “cravat” or modern-day necktie. But there’s no logical reason why, five centuries later, we should still follow this fashion, when our society has had no compunction about tossing out so many of the other customs that were accepted back then. We live our entire lives taking so much for granted, and we tend to accept as givens many assumptions that are ripe for a challenge.

It is in the daily routines of our business and personal lives that so many opportunities for creating value exist. The more entrenched the practice or custom, the more that it’s possible it may no longer be relevant. Critical thinking can help us question whether it is still (or ever was) an optimal way to do things. The AND way of thinking and methodology can help you quickly analyze those underlying assumptions and question whether they are valid, or whether you can introduce a better way to do things.

I spend a lot of time thinking about the assumptions behind any decision I make, and evaluating whether other options are available or need to be created. It is not a decisive style of leadership, and it can paralyze an organization if it is not complemented by swift and decisive leadership, which in KIND’s case is provided by our president, John Leahy, whose mantra is “speed to market.” But this contemplation can unlock value for important strategic opportunities.

There’s a way to incorporate rigorous thinking into our lives. You can also teach your team to run a formal brainstorming process in which you think with AND. Over the years I believe we have become good at doing both at KIND. There’s still a long way to go; on a scale of 1–100, I think we’re at 10.

You have to ask yourself continually: “What are the underlying assumptions that are limiting me?” Sometimes those assumptions will be valid, but that’s how you have to start. You just need to make it a practice to talk to yourself. We’re so busy that we tend not to even find that time.

Whether it’s lying in bed before you sleep, or consciously choosing not to make phone calls while you’re commuting to work, give yourself time to mull over whatever you’re dealing with. I happen to use showers as a venue for unstructured thinking and for talking to myself.

One of the biggest dangers of smartphones and other digital devices is that we don’t get a chance to talk to ourselves as much. We’re constantly getting stimulation, reviewing email, voicemail, and social media. We don’t give ourselves the time to let our minds go where they want to go. You need to block out time. If you can, structure your work life to have one hour during which you let your brain go every day.

THINKING BOUNDLESSLY

And what are you supposed to do during these free-form think breaks? When there’s an issue you want to solve, use this time to play with it. Frame the question differently. Try breaking it down into smaller pieces and then just start tackling it that way. Set this as a dedicated agenda for yourself: What am I going to think about as I’m showering, or walking down the street?

Or maybe there is no burning question with which you are grappling. Letting your brain wander and meander can be healthy and lead to great ideas. First you need to empty your mind of trivial concerns, and let it fill itself up with whatever comes to you. Let your thoughts wander in any direction your consciousness takes you. You’re creating space for ideas to come to you.

A lot of the best ideas—including business opportunities or creative ways to confront social problems, or just ways to make your life more fulfilling—can come from a totally unstructured process in which you let ideas flow freely through your mind.

Surprisingly, as far as I know, this is not something that we are taught as kids or as adults. If anything, we chastise kids for drifting off and we prescribe them medications to help them stay focused. Creative brainstorming and conscious drifting should be encouraged. American creativity and ingenuity has propelled our success. Fostering it should be at the center of our educational system.

As a child, I had a lot of time to myself. I spent most of my afternoons doing what today would be referred to as unstructured “free play.” I wasn’t overscheduled with activities, quite the opposite. The garden behind my bedroom was a theater where all sorts of different worlds were created every day. And at night, before I fell asleep, I spent a lot of time daydreaming that I was a magician with supernatural powers, which I deployed to thrust Arabs and Israelis to make peace. The power to dream—to imagine new paths that challenge conventional wisdom—was exhilarating.

BRAINSTORMED IDEAS: A CAMEL IN NEW YORK CITY

In 1996, when PeaceWorks finally had some distribution of our Mediterranean spreads in New York City, we decided to do a splashy launch event. We timed it to coincide with a meeting of our advisory board, a slate of luminaries who were coming in to discuss business strategy.

At the time I had two recent college grads working with me. We sat down to brainstorm ideas on how to best promote the brand. One of them threw out a silly idea, suggesting that we have a camel walk down the streets of New York to generate attention and garner media mentions. New Yorkers get used to seeing the most bizarre sights on the street, and it’s difficult to jolt them out of their reveries. We thought we could get people to notice us with a camel.

At first, we dismissed the idea as ridiculous and kept brainstorming. When we came back to analyze our options at the end of the exercise, we revisited it again.

“That camel thing is so irreverent and so insane, maybe it could work,” I said.

We decided to try it out. The first place we called had already rented out their camel for the day. I didn’t realize there was an active market for renting camels in Manhattan! We eventually found someone who could rent us a camel for $1,000.

To go along with the camel, we needed actors to play Moshe and Ali, the mascots of our brand. We couldn’t afford professional actors so I walked up to Spanish Harlem and spoke in my native Spanish with two nice guys from the Dominican Republic who were standing on a street corner. I convinced them to take the job for $150 each. One dressed as Ali, the magician, with a robe and Arab headdress. The other, who had a beautiful full beard, which we made white with talcum powder, wore a chef’s outfit and a big white hat.

The invitations were fancy printed ones, tucked inside pita bread for extra effect. We were breaking all the rules because we had nothing to lose and no reputation to protect.

We asked Ben Cohen, who was a member of our advisory board, if he would lead the camel toward a restaurant to which we had invited a hundred people, all food industry names. He agreed to do it, and he wore a shirt that said, “Moshe & Ali’s: Cooperation Never Tasted So Good.” Every time Ben tried to give someone a sample, the camel snatched it from his hands. So there was Ben Cohen, of Ben & Jerry’s fame, walking down the cobblestone streets of TriBeCa as a camel ate from his hand.

This stunt won us a ton of press coverage. We were in The New York Times, and that evening I turned on the TV and discovered we were on Fox’s Minute, the local news channel’s minute-long roundup of the day’s news. That was a big thing for me. Sales inquiries followed.

None of this would have happened if we had shunned the crazy ideas up front.

KIND’S BRAINSTORMING PROCESS

At KIND, we have a practical process for brainstorming and filtering new ideas. First, we carefully think about the ultimate goal we are trying to achieve, and make sure we are not confusing that goal with tactical objectives. Second, we exhaustively list all the assets and tools at our disposal. Third, we start ideating. We allow ourselves the use of existing assets and tools, as well as our stated goals, to help trigger ideas, but we remind ourselves that these are not there to limit us but to get the creative juices flowing.

It is vital to separate the creative brainstorming process from the analytical evaluation process that will follow it. During the ideation process, we don’t allow any filters to stand in the way. For example, we never allow cost considerations or other practical constraints like manufacturing efficiencies to be up-front filters on our creative process. We remind ourselves not to criticize any contribution, nor to start analyzing why it may not work. The words “no,” “that won’t work,” “let’s be realistic,” “that makes no sense” and all other put-downs are banished from this phase.

Once we’ve exhausted all creative ideas, we list the appropriate filtering criteria: feasibility, cost, expected impact on the intended audience, adherence to the brand, time, likelihood of success, the ratio of inputs to execute relative to intended outputs, and so on.

We use the filters to prioritize the ideas that best accomplish the goals. Typically, after we complete this process and come up with a broad concept, we then repeat the process and start brainstorming with greater specificity within the concept or idea that we chose. It is not uncommon for us to go through three to four rounds of brainstorming with increasing focus to yield the best idea.

WHY YOU NEED FILTERS

You need to be comfortable brainstorming and daydreaming, but thinking critically, about yourself and about your ideas, is a vital corollary. Allow yourself to be naïve when you come up with ideas. Then use filters to protect yourself from your own naïveté.

Sometimes you may not be able to recognize which ideas won’t work. This is where you have to rely on your team and your advisers. In the early days of my business, I was lucky enough to have my team talk me out of one of my more impractical ideas. I wanted to launch a PeaceWorks café in New York City where patrons could invite homeless people to dine at their tables. The concept centered around allowing diners to meet the homeless and have conversations that would lead to a better understanding of what they endure—to foster empathy.

My team pointed out that, although my heart was in the right place, there was no way this would work, practically. How many customers would want to pay money to sit down to eat next to a stranger, let alone a homeless person? And how would we find homeless people who wanted to have dinner in such a patronizing situation? It was doomed to fail. Idealism is a good thing, but too much of it can be self-defeating.

That’s also why boards and investors are a valuable filter to help test your ideas. One friend of mine, Martín Varsavsky, is a successful serial entrepreneur who has started over fourteen ventures, and created billions of dollars in value. Yet he won’t start a new business without attracting outside investors. I once asked him why. “Because their participation validates my idea and decreases the risk that I am deluding myself,” he explained. “If I can’t convince others to put their money behind a new concept,” he added, “it probably is not worth my investing my own.”

That’s not to say that you always need to take no for an answer. I am not as disciplined as Martín, and I certainly believe in the courageous inventor who challenges all naysayers. But there is something to be said for Martín’s filtering process. You have to look at why people are saying no to your ideas. The rule of thumb is to not override your board, but sometimes you can if you are able to answer the vast majority of their questions in a serious way. Without some creativity and naïveté—and the ability to listen to your gut and challenge skeptics—you won’t be truly innovative.

THE VALUE OF WACKINESS

When brainstorming, every idea must be jotted down and celebrated. Every new idea can then be a springboard to others. Unless you are coming up with wacky and silly ideas, you are not truly testing your assumptions.

Some of our wackiest moments can lead to valuable breakthroughs. After months of calling the buyer of Stew Leonard’s, a specialty foods institution, I realized I needed to come up with something creative to get him to call me back. As I left my umpteenth voicemail, I randomly offered to wash his car if he tried my products and they didn’t sell. “That is the first time someone has offered something like that,” he chuckled when he finally returned my call and gave me a shot.

I learned the value of wacky ideas in Japan, where I spent the summer after my college graduation working at Japan Counselors, a company that advised American clients on how to gain more market share in Japan. I was in charge of translating and editing their “English” materials and teaching English to their Japanese employees. To this day I wonder what happens when some of those staffers show up speaking English with a thick Mexican intonation.

My Japanese-American boss taught me a lot about Japanese culture and about public relations. Japan Counselors was known for its hilarious stunts: They orchestrated a public contest for the loudest screamer, sponsored by Halls Mentho-Lyptus cough drops, and one for the most exotic beard, sponsored by Schick razors.

My favorite was when they ran a campaign, sponsored by Raid insecticide, to find the biggest cockroach in the country; one room of the office held a collection of the most horrifying cockroaches that readers had mailed in. The crazier their campaigns, the more media coverage they would get. The job opened my eyes to the power of media and creativity to help you tell your story.

Naïveté is important to creativity. Sometimes it’s better not to know that a plan is impossible, impractical, or otherwise unfeasible. Without these mental limitations, you can get around the problems and find a way to make your idea possible. After all, if something is immediately obvious, then others are probably doing it already.

An illustration of the triumph of creative thinking over practicality was our marketing effort at the Natural Products Expo West, our industry’s biggest trade show. KIND attends this show every year, and these days we have a big presence, but when we first started out we had only one small booth.

When you’re small, you have to think of guerrilla marketing hacks. What we did was convince the entire community to become our partners in the marketing effort. The idea was to get people to wear T-shirts with the KIND logo at the expo. We made up thousands of shirts and gave them out to everyone we could, on the condition that they wear the shirts to the trade show. We came up with fun challenges, like scavenger hunts, for show attendees. Participants had to try KIND products and do a kind act for someone else, and if they collected enough stamps, they would win a T-shirt and be entered to win other prizes, including the opportunity to make a Big KIND Act of their dreams come true. We also gave out logo bags for people to collect all the samples and materials they accumulated as they walked the show floor. So even when we were tiny, our presence was felt, partly because of our disruptive products and compelling brand, but also because of our guerrilla marketing efforts.

This worked frighteningly well and became a tradition. Every year, thousands of avid fans flood the convention hall wearing our gear and acting as KIND billboards.

I can’t overestimate the value of crazy ideas to my work. All our best ideas were considered bizarre at the time: a bar made from whole nuts and fruit; transparent wrappers; the idea of bringing Arabs and Israelis together through commerce. My thesis adviser thought I was bonkers when I suggested economic cooperation between Israelis and Arabs. Every one of the major things I’ve done started out as a crazy thought. Only once we pulled it off did it start seeming obvious in retrospect.

UNLEASHING PERSPECTIVES

After many years of questioning assumptions, my team teases me about my method of relentless probing into a particular issue; they call it the Mexican Inquisition. It’s my way of being the devil’s advocate for every challenge. Team members who don’t know me well may think I’m arguing for a particular perspective. In fact, I’m just trying to get at the truth by questioning all sides and uncovering any false assumptions, to discover where the juiciest opportunities for adding value lie. The ideal is to build a culture of healthy discussion where everyone is comfortable challenging my or anyone else’s ideas without ever feeling or making someone else feel that the questioning is a personal attack.

We try to foster an authentic culture that celebrates everyone’s contributions. To do that, I constantly highlight situations where I was wrong and point out how my team members changed my mind or had a better idea that I initially rejected. For example, when Facebook was on the rise, my marketing-team members Erica Bliss Pattni and Elle Lanning insisted that we should more prominently recruit fans to join our Facebook page. My initial instinct was “Why should we be building somebody else’s network? Why don’t we just build it on our own website? Why put our future in somebody else’s hands?”

I was wrong about this. In our efforts to build the KIND Movement, I discovered that Facebook authentication—validation of your identity from your community—added enormous value that we couldn’t manufacture on our own. Today, you can join the KIND Movement either by authenticating an email, or through your Facebook account.

CRITICAL REINVENTION

One always thinks about new product development and marketing campaigns as the areas ripe for innovation. Companies often underestimate how important thinking outside the box and questioning assumptions can also be for day-to-day operations. That’s particularly true because these are processes that your company has followed for years. People become accustomed to doing things the same way every day. Many changes in technology or society or even in your own business may warrant new ways of doing things but you will not realize it unless you take the time to evaluate those practices.

Critical reinvention—which builds on the permanent start-up culture that I’ve described—is as important as original invention and innovation in a company. Our objective at KIND is to continuously question every aspect of our operations so no obsolete practices get carried over through inertia. We’ve instituted a practice of reviewing what has worked and what hasn’t worked in every department for the prior six months. This helps everybody constantly question our strategy and tactics and recalibrate their efforts based on earnest analysis.

A good example of process innovation is how we launched our online sales. Back when we founded KIND, online sales of food products were practically nonexistent. Some food brands’ websites had e-commerce engines, but they were more of a curiosity than a real driver of sales.

While I was somewhat skeptical of how far online sales could go with perishable food products, I was completely convinced that online sales of shelf-stable foods, particularly ones that were not too expensive to ship—a function of cost relative to weight and volume—would dramatically increase. Most important, I knew by then that KIND was the type of product that became a habit. People who tried KIND bars would repeat purchases at a frequent rate. Our most loyal consumers ate a couple KIND bars a day, and many ate a handful a week. Enabling them to receive shipments automatically would be efficient for them and would help us ensure they continued to integrate our products into their lifestyle.

I initially faced a lot of opposition from board members whose perspective I deeply respected. Mike Repole, who had built Vitaminwater in the off-line world, felt I was wasting my time and company resources trying to chase online sales that he thought could never be more than 1 percent of our business.

I persevered. I wanted to create a platform that would make it easy for our most loyal consumers to receive automatic orders with a customizable degree of frequency. KIND Advantage offers the ability to get product in bulk from our website, KindSnacks.com, at significantly lower prices than the suggested retail. It provides free shipping. We’re constantly innovating to offer more flexibility, including rotating flavor choices, the ability to send gifts to friends, and incentives for introducing new customers into the KIND community. Most important, at least for me, is that KIND Advantage members receive free products from us as a surprise. We occasionally send them shipments of our newest products at no cost to thank them for their loyalty. We rely on them for feedback and consider them our most important KIND ambassadors.

Our perseverance paid off, and online sales—through our own website and through third-party purveyors on the web—became a key channel for us. For the last few years, online has greatly outpaced our strong overall growth and now represents close to 10 percent of our sales. Today, Amazon is one of our top twenty customers, and “KIND” is consistently among the top ten most frequently searched terms for food on Amazon over the past two years, according to executives there.

THE ORIGINS AND ORIGINALITY OF KIND’S TRANSPARENT WRAPPERS

I am often asked how we elected to pack our products in see-through wrappers. Why had no one used clear packaging for nutritional bars or healthy snack bars in the United States at the time? What were the assumptions underlying the status quo, and how did we come to realize they no longer applied to KIND?