What is the Backstory Project?
Backstory was created to solve the problem that consumers want to be more “connected to their food”. While we’ve largely solved “where does your food come from” and country of origin (not completely, lots more to do of course), it also hasn’t solve the problem.
We've created an example to show you what connection looks like that drives value for the consumer, the supplier and the brand.
1) Go to the Apple Store and download the Backstory App (coming soon!)
2) Open it and hold your phone over the image on this blog
OR
If you don't have an Apple phone, here is a video
See the boring 2 dimensional video instead of the Augmented reality experience (we promise we aren't judging)
Through the vast experience of our founder we’ve worked out that when consumers say they want more connection to their food, they want to have a “farmers market” (or what we call a short supply chain) experience from their food even if it comes from longer supply chains.
What is great about this is that a consumer at a farmers market is largely having a data informed experience, it’s just not digitised in that environment.
Backstory is digitising the food experience to capture more value, more of the time and present it in meaningful ways that help consumers adjust their behaviour to be more sustainable.
This is what we call the Sustainable Circular Economy Digital Value Chain - a supply chain that enables the consumer and the producer to be connected in ways that cause positive behaviour change towards a mutually beneficial outcome such as sustainability.
The hypothesis is based on the fact that Sustainability actions must first be biome (earth) focused, and from there food that is focused on doing the right thing for the planet will then be desired by consumers. Thankfully this is becoming increasingly true.
What is challenging is that it’s incredibly nuanced, geographically specific and contextual so a consumer really struggles to make head or tail of what is “the right thing”.
So we’ve made it easy for the consumer to build their own values algorithm, which enables brands to tell their story in a bespoke way to the end consumer with proof points that anywhere from quantitative to qualitative. (Eg .Photos of vineyard activities all the way through to third party verified independent data). We also allow the consumer to connect to all the different parts of the foods story, telling the backstory of that food. In practical terms this means we can tell you the story of the cows that the milk came from, verify their heartbeats are within normal ranges (and therefore are happy cows), all the way through to the factory workers who process and the emissions story of the transport.
It’s a data integration platform for brands that want proof points for their brand story, to create connection and therefor differentiation for their end consumer. Doing so in a digestible format that doesn’t overwhelm the end consumer, rather it makes it feasible to be a conscious consumer more effectively.
It also optimises the spend on trust marks because the value of the trust mark is often beneath the surface, by using backstory to prove a trust mark claim, this is a stickier more trustworthy way for consumers to know they are doing good with their dollars.
So what does it look like and how does it actually work?
Well we decided to take a brand with an incredible story such as All Birds and show you a taste of what is possible with the Backstory Technology.
All Birds is a brand that has pushed the envelope and created entirely new categories of footwear, and they have a lot of publicly available information thanks to their incredible radical transparency philosophy.
Thanks to JIX Reality they have brought the All Birds story to life in the Backstory format.
You can download Backstory in the iOS App Store and experience a snippet of selecting your highest values from the All birds offering and doing your own way finding through the brand story.
You can see how Augmented Reality (AR) can play a role in creating a more tangible connection for the end consumer and how other such technologies can support this, it is only limited by a brand marketers imagination...(and budget, but thankfully these technologies are more cost effective and our Prove Solution enables the cost effective capture of this sort of content)
What are the brand pillars and how do you want to prove them ?
With Backstory we enable brand owners direct connection with the end consumer regardless of the channels to market, or where you are on your sustainability journey. Telling your story directly just makes financial sense.
Prove is a solution to capture the evidence from all suppliers, which allows the brands to configure data feeds that support their claims and other proof points to tell their story.
Backstory is the plug and play brand platform which enables each of the proof points (Quality Assurances) from Prove to be reused as content and trust building blocks for the end consumer.
DISCLAIMER - This project was not done in collaboration with AllBirds, we have used only publicly available information and is designed purely for demonstration purposes as our clients have proprietary content and can not be shown.
