Beyond Meat’s Akerho “AK” Oghoghomeh on Impacting Consumer Behavior Through Purpose-Driven Marketing
The CHief marketing officer Opens Up About His Professional Shift from Engineering to Marketing and Shares the Rewarding Challenges of Marketing a Disruptive Product Line
Akerho “AK” Oghoghomeh joined Beyond Meat as Senior Vice President, Global Marketing in February 2023 and has served as Chief Marketing Officer since January 2024. Recognized as a growth-oriented consumer marketer, AK has a diverse and impressive background in B2C and B2B marketing and brand management. Before joining Beyond Meat, AK held senior marketing roles with Red Bull, Amazon, and Campaign Monitor. He is a decisive leader with proven success in strategic planning, establishing impact with consumers, and identifying market growth opportunities.
The Continuum sat down with AK to discuss his unexpected journey from chemical engineer to CMO, as well as the challenge of marketing a product that is attempting to disrupt the diet most humans have had for millennia.
Let’s start by talking about your career. Were you always planning to be in marketing?
No, I’m actually an engineer. My mom is from New Jersey and my dad is an immigrant from Nigeria, and everyone in my family is a scientist or engineer. My mother is a microbiologist, my father was an electrical engineer, my sister is a mechanical engineer, and my younger brother is an environmental engineer. I got my bachelor's degree in chemical and biological engineering from Drexel University.
After college, I worked at DuPont in what I would describe as a typical process engineering role. I remember there was a meeting every single day at six o'clock in the morning. This was before Zoom or working remotely, so we were all in person that early. I’ll never forget this one meeting; it was 6 am, and the woman addressing us was talking about our business. She talked about market opportunities and spoke eloquently about what the company was doing. At that point in my career, I had no idea what our products were even used for. There were all these managers in the front of the room—my technology manager and the plant manager—and they were enthralled by what she was saying. They never listened to anything I said.
I went up to her after the meeting and said, “Hey, my name is Akerho, and I would love to learn what you do here.” She said, “Well, I'm a marketing manager over this business unit. It's my job to build out marketing materials to sell the products that you make.” And I thought, “Oh, I want to do that.”
I talked to a mentor of mine and said I wanted to become a marketer. He suggested that the best way to do that was to get an MBA. So, I started the process of applying to schools and ultimately went to Emory University and focused on brand management.
Have you used your engineering degree since?
Not officially, but I think my analytical background as an engineer made me a great fit for this industry from the beginning. I understood how to look at data and make decisions. I understood how to set up tests. I understood how to set up my hypothesis and then test that hypothesis to see if it was correct or if I learned something different.
When I approach marketing and branding, it comes from a very analytical place that I think helps drive a lot of what I do even now.
“When I approach marketing and branding, it comes from a very analytical place that I think helps drive a lot of what I do even now.”
What was your first marketing/branding role?
My first job in brand was at ConAgra Foods. They have 50 or 60 brands under their umbrella, such as Marie Callendar, Healthy Choice, and Slim Jim. I was an assistant brand manager in their Brand Leadership Development Program and rotated through the advertising and media departments. Then I worked in brand marketing for Snack Pack pudding.
I don’t know what that business is like now, but when I was there, it was this little engine that could. It did $600 million in retail sales, but nobody really thought about it. We never had an advertising budget, and there wasn’t really any branding. I would take little Snack Pack pudding cups and just drop them on people's desks to try to keep our brand top of mind for them.
I believe that brand management is a spectrum. You have those companies that are very much strategic brand companies, which is what ConAgra was. You don’t really touch the marketing. They were more focused on demand forecasting, brand strategy, and forecasting revenue and volume. Then you have those companies like Coca-Cola or Red Bull, where I ended up going next, that are almost entirely focused on marketing. And you have those places in the middle like Procter & Gamble, which really blend both worlds.
For my first three years at ConAgra, I was in their Marketing Center of Excellence, which was a strategic hub, and for my last two years, I worked directly on a brand. I learned a lot, but I really missed marketing. I always enjoyed understanding a consumer and figuring out how to encourage them to change their behavior, so when the Red Bull opportunity came along, I was excited.
What was your role at Red Bull?
Originally, I was the first of four brand managers hired. At the time, Red Bull was already doing interesting things with cool people in cool places, but my job was to bring a bit of order to the chaos by bringing the consumer to the center of it all. At the time, the brand was far bigger than the business, and there was an opportunity for us to extract equity from the brand and turn it into sales. But we could only drive consumption if we had the consumer in mind as we built the campaigns.
What kind of cool campaigns were you a part of?
There were so many across sports and culture. We had Red Bull Flugtag, which pokes fun at the brand’s fascination with flight. It’s a very whimsical event where people make human-powered aircraft. They take them up a 30-foot ramp and then basically fall into a lake. We also did something called Red Bull Cliff Diving, an event activation in Possum Kingdom Lake in Texas. There are these divers, who were typically Olympic-level or college-level divers who decide to dive off cliffs for a living. They go up 90 feet in the air and do some of the most spectacular dives you've ever seen into water that could actually crush every bone in their body if they land wrong.
My job was to build out the marketing campaign to drive awareness and interest in events like these and get people to show up on-site. The beauty of Red Bull is that the company is purpose-driven. The mission was to give wings to people and ideas. The way you do that is by taking someone's deepest ambition or desire and finding ways to turn it into a reality. As an example, before I left the company, there was an athlete activation called Red Bull Plane Swap. A pilot had this idea that two planes could go up to about 14,000 ft, start to nosedive, and while the planes were headed toward the ground, the pilots could switch planes. Basically, they would skydive into each other’s cockpits and land the other aircraft. It was a crazy idea that no one thought would work, and Red Bull said, “We want to give wings to your ambition and your ideas; let’s make this a reality for you.” The event was live-streamed on Hulu 7 years after it was dreamed up.
Did it work? Did anyone get hurt?
It was partially successful, and no one got hurt. One of the pilots was able to get into the other plane successfully, but the one wasn’t. He skydived down to the ground safely.
“It’s hard to articulate this to people, but this is not a normal marketing job. We are a disruptive company trying to unsettle an industry that has existed for millennia.”
You left Red Bull for a few years to pursue other opportunities but ended up back at the brand. What was your role at that time, and what made you go back?
I had some great roles in Nashville, including leading a team of marketers responsible for building demand-generation campaigns for Amazon’s hourly workforce. That year, we drove over 3% of the US population to apply for jobs at Amazon and ultimately hired 1.6 million people in one year. However, my mentor at Red Bull reached out to me and asked if I would come back as the Head of Brand. I moved into the SVP role and was responsible for pretty much everything a marketer can do. I was responsible for all the advertising, retail marketing, and occasion-driven campaigns. I had about 170 people reporting to me, including our customer affairs team. It was a really cool job.
The beauty of Red Bull is that it is a big company that has been around for a relatively long time, and the company knows how to do things really well. I was able to continue to drive double-digit growth, which was great. But I knew that a lot of that growth was driven by the Red Bull machine that already existed. So, when a former colleague told me about the opportunity to come to Beyond Meat and walk into a company that was looking for growth but was very challenged in doing it, I got super excited.
What was exciting about Beyond Meat, and what are the challenges?
I could not miss out on the chance to work on a purpose-driven brand that was also mission-driven. Beyond Meat is not only trying to change the direction of human health but also trying to create a better place in this world for animals and a more sustainable way for us to feed our future. That really resonated with me because when I was thinking about taking on this role, I could not stop thinking about the future generations of my family.
It's hard to articulate this to people, but this is not a normal marketing job. We are a disruptive company trying to unsettle an industry that has existed for millennia. I mean, people have been eating meat since the beginning of time. We no longer need to eat animals to sustain ourselves. Plants can provide the same amount of protein and more benefits than you can get from animal protein.
My opportunity is to help change consumer behavior. Again, most people have been eating meat since they were very young. We have to figure out how you get someone used to eating a hamburger or a steak to say, “Hey, instead of eating cows, I'm going to eat a burger made from plants.” That’s a huge change.
There are many forces that don’t want us to succeed. I’m not only dealing with competitive pressure from within my category but also with the meat producers who want to keep us small. They don’t want us to grow our share of the market or have a substantial impact on the environment, not to mention other industries that benefit from human consumption of animal products.
Plant-based meats have also been politicized. How do you explain that?
If you look at the data, we have heavy over-indexing on consumption for Democrats or people who lean liberal. In contrast, conservative people believe that we're trying to ruin this country. We did a spot called “Back to the Farm,” where we went to North Dakota and met a farmer named Steve. He used to grow crops for the livestock industry but transitioned to growing fava beans, which we use in our products. In the spot, Steve talks about why he made the switch. He mentions the benefits for his family and the environment. It was a heartwarming spot, but it was very divisive.
Surveys found the spot was in the 97th percentile for polarization; people either loved this ad or hated it. When you read the qualitative comments, they had very little to do with the ad itself. There were a lot of comments like “You guys are trying to ruin America” and “I don’t want my kids eating plants trying to be meat.” There was some really hateful stuff in there.
Typically, everybody loves farmer content because farmers are the backbone of the country. We were trying to say that we also love farmers. As a matter of fact, the crops that they're growing with us are fixing issues and making the soil better because it’s not mono-crops, and it's stuff that can be used year-round. Future generations of farmers will be able to sow seed on the same earth because of this, but that’s not what some people saw.
“We’ve crafted something that’s delicious and good for you, and we know that whether you’re Republican, Democrat, or moderate, you care about your health and the health of your loved ones.”
How do you handle that kind of polarization?
First and foremost, our food needs to be delicious. We need to make sure that whatever products we're putting out truly do taste great. Our ambition is to create something that is indistinguishable from meat, and we're pretty close. We're really close. We've got a new line of products that are rolling out that are delicious.
But there must be something else behind that because meat is also delicious. Being yummy isn't the reason why you need to make a change, right? We need to be yummy, but we also need to provide functional benefits to the user. Our focus is really on creating healthier products. We’ve been able to develop products that have 75% less saturated fat than animal protein and less sodium than our original products. We’re using avocado oil, which is nutritious and packed with heart-healthy monosaturated fats.
We’ve worked with institutions and organizations to help us create these products. Because of that, they’re endorsed by the American Heart Association, the American Diabetes Association, the American Cancer Society, Stanford University, Oxford University, and nutritionists and dietitians across the country.
We’ve crafted something that’s delicious and good for you, and we know that whether you're Republican, Democrat, or moderate, you care about your health and the health of your loved ones.
Who are your customers at this point? Are they primarily people who are already vegan or vegetarian, or are you trying to capture meat-eaters? And what about the people who are really opposed to your product?
Right. We have to weed out rejecters. We’re not trying to change people's minds if they're completely opposed to it. But if you're willing to drink plant-based dairy, you're probably willing to substitute plant-based meat every once in a while, right? There are a lot of people out there who we call flexitarians, people who eat mostly animal meat but are willing to substitute plant-based meat sometimes. They may be on a journey of transitioning to a fully plant-based diet but are not quite ready, or they may just be supplementing.
We’re really going after those flexitarians. We have research that says about half of the people who eat our product (54%) eat animal meat 80% of the time. So, we’re that 20%, which is helping them supplement their diets to provide some variety and versatility and feel good about what they're putting in their bodies or feeding their families.
You mentioned that you have many challenges from outside the category, but you also have one big competitor in the same category. How do you distinguish yourself from Impossible Meat?
We’re really following different strategies. They've recently rebranded and are leaning heavily on being meat from plants. That's what they want to do. They're very much telling people, “Hey, we are meat. We're just made from plants versus animals.” They change their packaging to be red. They're really leaning into blood. They use a product called heme that makes their product bleed or look like it's bleeding.
We’re taking a different approach. We are making our plant-based meat even more nutritious and better for you than our existing products. We are taking the feedback about the idea that we are ultra-processed seriously and are addressing the concerns of our heavy consumers and our potential consumers. We want to be a product that caters to the needs of flexitarians and those who don’t eat meat at all.
You guys have also recently relaunched. Are these new products or just new branding?
We just launched the fourth generation of the Beyond Burger. These products are wholly different from what we had on the market before. They have 60% less saturated fat and 20% less sodium than our previous version. The new products also contain more protein. It’s a different product proposition that will be found nationwide soon.
What’s next for Beyond Meat and for you?
What we're focused on right now is helping people be aware of the changes that have been made for our brand and how we position our brand to consumers. They’ll start to see more marketing campaigns that talk about the benefits these new products provide to them and their families. And we will keep focusing on being the most innovative brand in the category. We’ve got some new stuff coming that I think people are going to get really excited about.
As for me, I have a really challenging job in that my role cuts across so many different departments, and I touch so many different things. I’m involved in new product development and work with the operations teams. I love touring our plants and geeking out looking at the equipment because, remember, I am an engineer. I'm looking forward to maybe visiting some of the avocado farms we work with. But a lot of my time is spent meeting with customers, going to trade shows and events, and walking through stores looking at our products for merchandising. I love that I get to focus on the big picture.
April 9, 2024
© 2024 The Continuum
