Transparent yoghurt - deserving of trust and loyalty

Back in October 2013 I published an article about the potential for brands to showcase product origins as digital stories. This is becoming more and more important as consumers are demanding increased transparency from brands about their product supply chains. Brands who show consumers where their product was sourced and how it is made will earn their trust. Brands who tell these same stories digitally to consumers in engaging ways to enhance the experience of the product will also earn their loyalty. 

I recently came across an Aussie brand called five:am yoghurt. An ad for them turned up in my Facebook Newsfeed and I was curious as 

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to whether their website would tell me any stories about the origins of their organic yoghurt. 

After a few clicks I had learned that five:am are Aussie owned and source the milk for their product locally from organic farms in Victoria, Australia. That isn't really a story though, well not a captivating one anyway. What five:am showcase beautifully on their website is the people behind the milk and the sorts of values these farmers hold. 

The Organic Dairy Farmers Co-op is where five:am source their organic milk and this story is told via a YouTube clip of the Director of the the Co-op herself, Wendy Wallace. Which is a nice way for the five:am brand to provide social proof of their claim. As Wendy is a farmer herself we hear her talk about why she doesn't want to give her cows hormones and how she 'just knows' when something is a bit off with one of them. We also get brief introductions to the rest of the farmers (pictures and bios) in the Co-op who I assume all have happy cows with 'smiles on their dials' like Wendy's do. I had no knowledge of this Co-op before but now having learned a bit about it, I find I really care about it and the farmers in it, and I like the fact that five:am obviously do too. My only criticism is that instead of looking at photographs of the other farmers I would have loved to hear all of them introduce themselves (and talk about their cows) via a YouTube clip. 

As far as consumers are concerned the brand must be doing something right in sharing its provenance. Five:am have over 62,000 likes on Facebook and over 2,200 followers on Twitter who are sharing inspirational quotes and delicious recipes. 

This is exactly the sort of thing any brand can do to build trust and loyalty among consumers. Consider your supply chain. How many hands go into making your product? What journey does your product go through to get to a customer? What is special about who or where you source your materials? How could you creatively tell those stories digitally to enhance your customer experience?