Branding Magic: Turns Out Factor And HelloFresh Are The Same People

HelloFresh is by far the most annoying company I have dealt with in the last few years.

At least the most annoying company when nothing bad actually happened. I will never forget the fiasco when Nissan’s Financial Services department toyed with my life for a minute. That being said, HelloFresh's relentless assault of advertising at you aggressively is annoying.

I’m pretty sure they offered me free breakfast for life recently (with the purchase of a box of food), that wasn’t enough to make me want to deal with them.

HelloFresh sent aggressive salespeople to my building to bully people into signing up. I went through the pitch, mans was a slick motherfucker and HelloFresh lost a customer for life. Tried to get me to put my credit card info, into his phone, on the signup page, on the spot. He was training a little homie and the mans made my difficult ass an example of how to deal with people calling bullshit.

Anyway now that I know Factor is HelloFresh, it’s completely off the table for me, which sucks, because people I know love Factor.

I think HelloFresh recognized a new brand and some different strategies would help

HelloFresh will call you, email you, send people to your door, somehow appearing in a checkout flow when I’m buying things for other companies & more. 

Factor on the other hand is just going HAM with YouTubers and paid ads. I know it’s super delicious, made with fresh ingredients (this is not a flex in 2024, it’s a minimum requirement), and I can throw it in the microwave for a couple of minutes. These YouTubers eat it in my face and then I go hmmm, do I want this? Turns out some of my friends did in fact try it and they liked it.

Everything about Factor looks fire to be honest. They’ve never hit me with corny advertising. They’ve never tried to get my credit card info on some slick shit in my face.  

But their corporate overlords did all that and I’m super down to vote with my dollar.

While they are separate services I believe the choice to keep the brands separate was reputational

I’ve worked in scenarios where we have similar products under different names to serve different audiences.

I know for a fact, having looked at hundreds of thousands of support cases from people in about 10 countries regularly, that colours and packaging do influence decisions. I have been on calls where people trashed one of our brands and praised a different one, both virtually offering the same product. 

The branding was clearly everything. 

One brand would be very clean, focused on businesses. The acquisition strategy was lighter and focused more on businesses. Other brands may be more regular end user focused, and then the marketing changes entirely as the tactics focus on conversion rate optimization.

Different people get sold in different ways and white labelling products, or separating ideas into unique brands, is a great way to leverage an ecosystem to serve a larger number of people. 

The HelloFresh strategy will attract one type of person. Unfortunately for them, they have a lot of competitors, of equal value, using strategies to get the other folks in the market.

Despite popular belief, people require specific labels to describe behaviours and the products that satisfy them

Working in marketing teaches you to think in demographics, which makes you sound like a bigot, despite the fact that they can psychologically profile you from a cigarette brand purchase (it’s a long podcast but an ex FBI agent was describing it).

Science and shit uses labels in abundance. About all kinds of things. Some of them are tied into social political movements, others are arbitrary. All of them matter. People prefer the organization of clear labels that describe life around them. 

Some even like pretending that ambiguous labels are actually ambiguous. 

That being said when naming and branding your products, the words matter. 

HelloFresh is a good name for a brand that gives you food to cook. Ready to cook meals are not exactly fresh in the same way. The HelloFresh part happens and then you get the end result in a container, which for some reason is called Factor.

Maybe HelloFresh had different reasons for separating the brands, but I think it was a way to take the lesson they learned and apply them on a new brand they hadn’t tarnished.

Pay attention to the world out there, you can steal all kinds of ideas for your art.

Live Long and Prosper Everyone