Consumers Brands Can't Afford to Ignore: Rethinking America's New Heartland

Speaker A: Welcome to Mintel's Little Conversation. Real conversations with actionable insights into what consumers want and why. I'm your host, Andrew Davidson. Based in New York. The New Heartland is America's missed majority, A cultural segment spanning 26 states across the Midwest, south and Southeast, representing 7 to 8 trillion dollars in buying power. What's different about New Heartlanders is not who they are demographically. It's how strongly values like family, community and faith show up decision making and daily life. Many brands don't understand those cultural differences, and that can prove costly. Today, I'm delighted to welcome Paul Jankowski, founder and CEO of New Heartland Group, a strategy firm whose clients include Visa, Pepsi, BlackRock and Starbucks, and is the person who first identified the New Heartland as a distinct cultural segment nearly two decades ago. He's also a longtime friend of Mintel and author of the New Heartland Speaks A Marcus Guide to Reaching America's Most Powerful Cultural Segment, as well as other books on the topic. Paul, welcome to the pod. Where are you joining from today?

Speaker B: Great to be here, Andrew. Thanks for having me. I'm right here from Nashville, Tennessee, right in the intersection, the heart of the New Heartland.

Speaker A: Excellent. Um, well, you've spent your career building brands across music, entertainment and culture. I mean, when you look back, what were the patterns you were seeing that eventually led you to the New Heartland idea?

Speaker B: I think from the beginning till today, the pattern I keep seeing is where and how culture actually moves people before marketing does. M so when you work in music and entertainment, you learn really quickly that people don't fall in love with a marketing plan or a media plan. They have this emotional connection to whether it could be music, it could be a CPG campaign. How does that brand emotionally connect with this group? Especially with this group.

Speaker A: Was there a moment when you realized the industry was fundamentally misreading this huge swath of the country?

Speaker B: You know, it really wasn't in a lightning bolt type moment. It was this series of rooms, these brand, uh, strategy rooms, these client rooms, that I was hearing the same kind of dismissive assumptions. I'd be with really smart brand teams or agency folks and hear things like, you know, heartland consumers are really behind or they're not our growth audience. That's if they even accounted for the New Heartland, which pretty much has been no. 1 up to this point. Um, they would think they're just this rural, conservative market. That's just not the world that I know. So I finally got tired of trying to explain this. I said, how can I convey what I know is in my heart but do it at scale. I can't go to a brand and say this one guy thinks this. So the only way I knew how to fix that idea was to get in my f, uh, 150 and drive 2,500 miles through the middle of the country armed with a Sony Handycam. And I'd speak to anyone who would listen or have a conversation with me. And the questions I would ask were things like when you wake up in the morning, what's important to you, what motivates your life? And the answers I got back were just fascinating. I still reveled in those answers because those answers still continue to this day. Things like, uh, uh, loving where I live, keeping your word, hard work, uh, those kinds of things. But what really rose to the surface was this idea around my faith, not my religion, my connection to my community and my definition, uh, of family, which is pretty different than the heartland.

Speaker A: Sounds like a fascinating experience. What were some of the states that you hit on that journey?

Speaker B: I hit all the states in the middle of America that 2,500 miles would get me to. So think of the Midwest, the Southwest and most of the Southeast.

Speaker A: Yeah, I mean nothing like sort of getting on the ground and really hearing directly from uh, consumers for sure.

Speaker B: Because none of this is being reflected in data. It's really in the conversations from this group. And this group isn't always going to show up in polling. Uh, we have a few examples of that over the last 10 years. Especially we where polls thought the heartland or the new heartland was going to vote a, uh, certain way. And they were very, very surprised. And the reason for that is because folks in the new heartland aren't really going to always tell you what they believe. They may tell you more what they think you want to hear.

Speaker A: Yeah, that's so, it's so fascinating. I mean you first, so yeah, you first identified it back in said 2008. I mean how did you originally then define the, the new heartland? And then uh, this is sort of, I guess a two part question. So what's changed then since then? Because we're nearly sort of two decades on.

Speaker B: So we, we started with the, the geographic barriers or boundaries and, and the way I did that, I looked at the 26 states that were what I represent, what I believe represent the new heartland. So heartland, heartland traditionally was considered Midwest. So anything between the Hudson river and the Pacific Ocean was kind of flyover states or filler in a lot of people's minds, especially on the coast. But I thought it was bigger than just the Midwest. And as I started doing more research, looking at more data, census data, and just from my own lived experience, I said it's way bigger than that. So we started with the 26 states. It's a very, very big, very diverse group, but it's woven together by this core line of culture, values and lifestyle passions.

Speaker A: Uh, and you say, I guess has that changed over time?

Speaker B: So it's growing and it's evolving. So While it represents 60% of Americans and you mentioned in the intro, this really is a missed majority. What's also missed is the impact of the 7 to 8 trillion dollars in buying behavior or buying power of this group. But since COVID an interesting thing has happened. Uh, this great relocation from the mid, from the coast to the middle. And that was driven by affordability and just this idea of aligning with these new heartland values and lifestyle.

Speaker A: Yeah. So I guess the ranks of the new heartland have uh, swelled as you had, as you say, as you had folks moving from the coast into uh, into the new heartland. Potentially that could impact values, I guess over, over time.

Speaker B: It does. It impacts values. It impacts a lot of things. And what we're finding is the folks that are coming from the coast to the middle typically share, uh, they're coming for that reason. I think they share, they're aligned with those values, as I said, but they're also bringing some different perspectives. And it's a cool thing to watch how this middle is evolving.

Speaker A: Yes. What do you think marketers still get wrong then about this audience?

Speaker B: Well, there's many things. So the first, the first thing I see is this treaty, uh, like a. Well, first of all, they don't look at it at all. So that's number one. Number two, they look at it as a demographic, uh, or, and, or they look at it as political category and it's just wrong. That's a great way to start off, uh, on a wrong path to building a strategy for New Heartland because it's really more of a mindset, I think, uh, a few more mistakes they make is they confuse faith again with religion or politics. And faith in this context really isn't about your religion. It's about meaning and grounding and humility and believing in something bigger than yourselves. And second, they reduce family to kind of this stock photo nuclear household. Whereas in the new heartland, family is much broader. It's parents and cousins and your chosen family. And you know, I'm Uncle Paul to 5 non blood related people. Um, and the third one is that they think community is a location and community is Not a location. Community is something you do. So those are, that's more than one, one mistake. There's several mistakes that kind of leave, they compound.

Speaker A: I mean it's such a compelling message. Why do you think it's not, or do you think it's just not resonating with marketers or, or why? And if that is the case, why is that?

Speaker B: I think it goes to a cultural bias. I think it goes to, I don't know that group. Therefore I'm going to look at the data and let it tell me what this group is. I'm not comfortable going to this group. I think brand teams go into planning sessions with a cultural bias and it's not um, it's not on purpose, it's not meant to happen. It's just ah, kind of a human uh, positioning. So they go to this devolt, this default position. They say all the stereotypes that you know, that I mentioned earlier, well, I

Speaker A: mean that's, at the end of the day you've got a, I mean it's. Marketing 101 is like knowing your customers, isn't it? And really understanding who your customers are. I mean I. Do you find that brands ever sort of push back on this idea? I mean is any sort of, what are sort of the most common objections you hear?

Speaker B: I think what I hear mostly is we're a national brand and we need a national campaign. And we're like absolutely, you do pretty much every campaign. The brands that we work with are national in scope. But being national doesn't necessarily mean you're culturally relevant. So you can have a national message. The message doesn't need to change. Perhaps though, you reconsider the channels in which the message is being delivered, uh, the influencers you're using and the context of where that message is being delivered. So I have many examples where a national brand with a national campaign will do local radio or TV spots and mispronounce the local community. Um, and that's just lazy. It's just terrible. It's lazy. It immediately exposes you as, you know, a carpet bagger or someone who doesn't really care enough about our community to talk to us. Right.

Speaker A: I know it's kind of almost shocking because like we live in an age where people talk about one to one marketing and personalization and you know, so the fact that market is missing this and obviously they, they clearly are, is quite, you know, it's quite shocking to me in many ways. And also obviously it's a huge wake up call. What you're, what you're saying, um, I mean, perhaps could you, I mean, who's getting it right? Is there. Could you give an example of a brand that's, that's getting it right?

Speaker B: Sure. I think, I think there's a few. I think, uh, Fritos has done a really good job in the last campaign they came in with, you know, Fritos has been around forever, right? So, um, we helped them take this iconic brand and dust it off a little bit. And they looked at it as, um, how do we, how do we reintroduce ourselves to the new heartland? So they leaned into nostalgia. And a lot of times nostalgia is, is mistaken for old and tired. But actually nostalgia in the new heartland is really about influence. So it's not just looking backwards, it's how did nostalgia influence these current traditions and these recipes and family trips and those kinds of things. So we helped them bring in. They created a it's called down for Anything campaign. We worked with a country artist called Thomas Rhett. And the reason Thomas Rhett worked is because he was a self proclaimed Fritos fan and the campaign really connected to his fan base. So it was a really wonderful strategy around a very iconic New Heartland type brand. And another example is Mountain Dew. Mountain Dew was all about action sports for, gosh, 25 years. So after we started looking at their sales, we started, you know, really trying to understand what they were trying to achieve with that. Uh, we said, what if we align more with the lifestyle passions of your current consumer? We call it dance with who brung you. So you're, you're kind of stiff arming these folks and you're saying, hey, aspire to be cool skateboarder and snowboarder, but the folks that are drinking your product are heading to the deer stand or to the lake to hunt and fish, right? So that's where we um, that's where we help them realign to this outdoors pillar, which is working really well for them because it's more about the lifestyle and the culture that they were already in. They just didn't realize it. And, and it's working really well.

Speaker A: Yeah, it's so interesting. And do, are, uh, you, do you find that the, the brands that sort of embrace it are, uh, are they generally New Heartlanders themselves, the folks that you're dealing with?

Speaker B: Well, New New Heartlanders, New Heartland brands don't get a pass, number one. Number two, the people in the room. There's two types of brand people that I found, uh, that I've worked with over the years. One is really forward Thinking and taking themselves out of being marketed to and looking at how do we look at culture differently. And they're not from the heartland, they're just really smart.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: The other one is, hey, I grew up there. I hadn't lived there in forever, but I kind of remember that. Maybe we should take a look at that. So I have two folks that kind of get us into the room and then they start. They're the ones who we look at. Uh, we help them kind of assess where they are, what we call the visibility gap. So most brands are not accounting for the right signals. So the loudest signals aren't necessarily the best signals. So there's a visibility gap with how brands are measuring and what they're looking at to measure and what's actually happening. So it's how you think this cohort is living and how they're actually living. That's the gap. The visibility gap. Yeah.

Speaker A: Oh, that's. Yeah, that's so interesting. I mean, so that's interesting. A couple of good examples of brands doing it right then. I mean, I, I noticed there was a, an article, uh, in Ad Age that, where you were, uh, talking about some of your work, and I, you know, you called Cracker Barrel, the restaurant chain cautionary tale. So maybe could you tell us what went wrong there and what should they have done differently?

Speaker B: And this is purely, as, you know, someone looking at from the outside. We have not worked with Cracker Barrel. And as I said, you know, the fact that you're in the, uh, new heartland does not give you a pass. They happen to be headquartered in Lebanon, Tennessee, which is outside of Nashville. So the lesson for Cracker Barrel is not never modernized because brands need to evolve. So that's not what it is. But Cracker Barrel wasn't really about a logo change. It just became kind of this visible trigger. And it's been things that have been building for years. I call it. You've heard death by a thousand paper cuts, it's declining service, inconsistent food quality, menu changes. The idea of what people really loved about the brand had been eroding over time. So that's the danger. A brand rarely loses trust in one big moment. And I'm sure you can think of brands where you go, you know, they're just not kind of, they're just not how they used to be. Uh, and so the logo change was something people could point to. And what they did is they just under. Under misunder. They underestimated what the brand meant to people. And I need to point out a lot of folks who haven't been to Cracker Barrel and that are weighing in on this are talking about the food at the restaurant. Half of their experience, more than half of their experience is this country store nostalgic. You know, old types of candy and all this stuff that's, you know, stuff. Just stuff. A lot of stuff you definitely don't need, but they sell a ton of it. So it's this country store browsing while you're waiting for a table. And so once that got out of kilter and then the core restaurant piece fell out, the logo was just. Was just the opportunity for brand, for people really to speak out and go, what the heck?

Speaker A: Yes. So, I mean, I guess if you're, um, sitting in a brand team right now, where'd you start?

Speaker B: I think you've got to look at where you're showing up in people's lives. It's. It's not. What is our message? Who are we targeting? I think you got to start with real life. It's. It's kind of like, I know we're under pressure. I know every. Every brand marketer sitting there going, okay, I've got to get, you know, 18 months ahead of the next strap plan and my annual planning session, and I've got to, you know, everyone's under pressure, so we're going. We're becoming very systematic in how we're building brands. And I. And I submit. I get it. I mean, it's. It's tough. It's. It's moving at a velocity. Brand planning is moving at a velocity is hard to keep up with, but if you don't stop and, And. And to me, it's kind of more of a lazy approach. It's like just keeping doing, you know, being very systematic. I think you got to slow down and just say, where are we? Showing up at the dinner table, at the tailgate, in the family routine, at work. Where is our. Where do we want to be with this group? And I think that's the number one challenge that brands, uh, need to assess. Uh, this is also a good spot to talk about the visibility gap. And so when brands are starting out, I would look at the gap between what. What you're assuming people or how you're assuming people in the new heart live and how they actually live. And that's by looking for the wrong signals. Things I talked about earlier.

Speaker A: Yes. I mean, it almost suggests to me that marketers aren't really getting to grips with who their customers are. Is that. I mean, are we. Are we worse at that These days as marketers or. I mean, you'd think we would be better with all the technology and everything available to us and all, all of the reams of data and access to data. Um, are, uh, we just not as good as we should be?

Speaker B: I think the data has extracted us from lived experiences of the people we're trying to appeal to. Data is great. It goes back to what I said just a minute ago about the velocity of planning. Data gets us, gives us the rationale or the perceived rationale or the checkbox rationale to say, we know this computer, this can, this consumer. But I submit you don't know this, this, you don't know this consumer. If you look again back at elections, you look at some of the backlash that has happened for brands over the last 10 years, you don't know this consumer.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: And it comes down to, if you're personally not comfortable going down to a tailgated University of Alabama and you feel out of place, then you better get somebody who knows how to, how to navigate this culture.

Speaker A: I remember, you know, obviously covering financial services for many years and, um, you know, mbna, the credit card company that is now part of bank of America, you know, all of their employees had to. Some, uh, I think they had to do a certain number of hours listening to customer, answering customer calls, you know, actually speaking one on one with the customer. Um, I actually had somebody on this podcast last year who brought a customer in to their sort of, uh, you know, team off site who would talk about their lived experience. Like you say, it's so important to really get that sort of anecdotal, the feeling, to understand the real feeling and the context and the nuance behind some of the data.

Speaker B: You use such a great word. Nuances is such an important and powerful term and concept when it comes to understanding this, because what we do is we help brands understand what I call between the lines of the data or the nuances of the data. Uh, data is only as good as the questions you ask, who you ask it of, and then how you use that data. And those three things are not independent. They have to work together. So we are really interested in, we are developing a new, a new, uh, platform called lived qual. It's the live qual intelligence where we go into fairs and festivals and we set up, we intercept and we talk. We listen to people more than we talk to people. We just want to know what's happening, man, what's going on in your life. And the stuff we hear is, um, it's fascinating.

Speaker A: I was Going to say, is it if, you know, if you were just starting out and you had no idea, if you're say on the coast and you were thinking about this from a brand perspective, it sounds like probably quite a good idea would be to hit a fair or a festival. Would you say that's a good.

Speaker B: Yeah. And I'd like to be there because I'd like to video your reaction. I'd like to see when you see fried, but deep fried butter at the Texas State Fair or deep fried, literally anything. Uh, but that's, that's, that's the beauty of this, of this new heartland consumer. It's so, there's so much beauty to it. It's so layered. But you know what the heart of it is, is the heart, the heart of it is people caring about people. You know, at the beginning of the settling of the new heartland, this agrarian is rooted in agrarian lifestyle. If you did not work with your community, you didn't live, you know, you weren't able to raise a barn, build a barn, or have beef or milk or whatever, vegetables. So this idea of community still, I think is the underlying, uh, foundation of how this group operates. And the other thing is the expectation. You know, a handshake is your bond. Your word is your bond. You have an expectation from each other. Therefore you have an expectation from brands to do what you say you're going to do. You know, don't think that because we talk funny or we're from, you know, not a major city or uh, an urban center that we don't know what's going on. You will, you will, uh, you will learn quickly that if you, uh, stereotype or overlook or dismiss this group, and you've seen it, what, what has happened to several brands, it can cost your brand significantly.

Speaker A: Oh, sure. No, I can, I can see that and I. And it also seems like a huge opportunity for I guess regional or other players to compete against national brand brands if they're. By doing the right type of marketing in the new Heartland.

Speaker B: Yeah, it gives you, it gives you a little more permission, but as I said earlier, it doesn't give you a pass. You still have to do it. Right?

Speaker A: Yeah. How was the term the new Heartland? Was that a term that was around before you populated it or made it more popular rather?

Speaker B: No, that was a. It was the best I could do creatively is to come up with the new Heartland because it was just trying to, like I said, um, uh, show this expanded idea of how this massive and diverse culture is bound together. So it went from the Midwest to this larger geographic area and then has grown into this mindset.

Speaker A: Yes, I love it. It's a good phrase. I mean, of course, and the way you're using it then to talk about the heart in New Heartland, it obviously plays out very, uh, very nicely with some of the values that you're describing. I mean, uh, so how does the new heartland evolve? I mean, does it, as we look sort of ahead, is it something that marketers should expect, that it has a bigger influence on American culture going forward?

Speaker B: I think the heartland, and we've seen it evolving, as I mentioned, kind of since COVID and this great relocation, but it continues to evolve in influence, whereas it was, um, may have been behind in, uh, trends. I don't know that the new heartland is, um, behind in trends anymore, especially with the ubiquity of the Internet now. So everyone for the most part has high speed Internet. It's been this great equalizer. So the evolution from you look at music, if you look at food, uh, you even look at fashion. I mean, camouflage has been on the runways for the last 15 years. Where did camouflage come from? You know, things like that. So it's no longer this, this, uh, you know, only a follower, but it has definitely evolved in all these cultural views.

Speaker A: Oh, ah. Are you saying or suggesting that it's starting to have more of an influence than culturally?

Speaker B: Um, outwardly, I would definitely say it is. I mean, again, let's look at. So we talked about fashion. Let's look at, look at music, for instance. You know, music has become this great collaboration of country. Look at Beyonce's last record. Look at Post Malone's last record. They're country records. Country has become this mainstream genre, not the George Straits of the world necessarily, although a lot of the older music has been discovered. 90s country has become a big thing. If you look at jelly roll and you look at folks in Carrie Underwood that have crossed over and become pop artists. Kelly Clarkson, uh, so there's a lot of, uh, a lot of crossover and key cultural pieces such as music. Look at, look at food. Barbecue. Barbecue cultures exploding everywhere you go. Uh, and that obviously is rooted in the new Harlem.

Speaker A: How interesting. How interesting. All right, well, I guess last question for you then. I mean, I, uh, asked you to get your crystal ball out and look ahead. I mean, what, what would you say is the most important thing that you expect to see impacting marketing over the next, say, five years?

Speaker B: We all know the answer to that has to be some form of AI. So we know that the next biggest change, especially in marketing to the new Heartland, will be how is AI addressing this cultural fragmentation and this overall declining trust. So AI has made it easier to make content faster. It has also made it easier to make bad content faster. So it still comes down to rooted in this human truth and this human understanding of the type of content and the channels in which it's delivered. So AI is phenomenal. But I would watch that as marketing evolves, relying so much on AI, and I think what's going to happen, we're going to start watching this disconnect for brands that don't pay attention to relying so heavily on AI that they don't bring in and account for this human truth. So it's really moving from targeting to belonging. And that's where AI kind of misses, I think, a little bit of the belonging piece.

Speaker A: Yes, yes, indeed. Well, yeah, m. So much going on in that space. Well, you know, thank you, Paul. This has been a great, uh, and, uh, fun conversation where, where can listeners find your work if, uh, they want to look up your work on the. On the New Heartland.

Speaker B: New Heartland.com I'm, um, on LinkedIn at Paul Jankowski, and that would be the best places to contact me. And I'd love to. I love to have conversations, as you can tell. So reach out to me anytime. Paul. Newhartland.com is my direct email.

Speaker A: Excellent. Well, thank you, uh, once again. Well, you know, the New Heartland, uh, clearly isn't a niche. It's 26 states and 7 to 8 trillion dollars in buying power. Get it wrong and you pay for it. Get it right and the upside is significant. And as Paul has shown us today, understanding the consumer is that critical first step. The conversation doesn't end here. Head over to Mintel's LinkedIn and Instagram. Let us know what you think. We'd love to hear your, your thoughts. You can also check out my Lightbulb Moments blog. And if you want to know more About Mintel, visit Mintel.com and sign up to become a member of our free Mintel Spotlight community. Make sure you never miss an episode by subscribing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, wherever you get your podcasts. Goodbye for now and we'll catch you next time on Little Conversation.