Seth Waite talks about...

Behind every purchase is a stack of motivations most founders never see. Uncover them, and the path to demand, loyalty, and scale becomes far more predictable than it looks from the shelf.

Coming out of law school, I knew I didn’t want to be a lawyer. I landed at Sam’s Club working on grocery, building early digital marketing capabilities, managing email and ads, and evaluating CPG brands.

I wasn’t the target customer, so I had to learn why people cared about 10 pounds of grapes or 20 pounds of chicken breasts. My first “aha” was realizing that the membership itself shaped behavior: people expected deals, exclusivity, and limited-time value. And they were buying in bulk.

For a while, the highest-grossing online item was a 2,000-pound pallet of emergency food. That’s when it hit me: every consumer brand has a place if it can differentiate, because the customer base is incredibly diverse.

At Schaefer, we kept seeing that great creative didn’t matter if it wasn’t built on the right strategy. We needed to move earlier in the cycle. That’s where the biggest shifts happen.

Marketing teams weren’t digging into research, and research teams weren’t translating insights in a way marketing could use. Many founders look at a 200-slide deck and think, “What am I supposed to do with this?” We try to close that gap with research grounded in marketing reality.

What we do more than anything else is segmentation. Who is my customer? And more importantly, who isn’t? If 100 people walk into my store, it's never 100 for 100. It's usually seven or eight or nine who are ready to purchase.

We move past broad buckets like “millennial moms” or “Gen Z,” because each contains hundreds of different types. We look at three layers: motivations first, behaviors second, demographics last. We bring in analytics, sensory testing, and taste/texture work to support the behavioral insights. Demographics just help with targeting.

There are really three triggers:

- Pre-revenue: “I’m about to launch and I’m scared. I want confidence in who my customer is.” We do segmentation, packaging validation, and messaging clarity to make a big world feel actionable.
- Post-launch: “We launched, it didn’t go as planned, and we think we targeted the wrong person.” We help tighten assumptions and focus.
- Capital: “We’re raising or selling and need to prove the market.”

So it’s about to launch, just launched, we need cash.

Once you know who your customer is and why they buy or don't buy, that influences three things.

- Positioning: How you show up in the market. Think Dunkin vs. Starbucks; same category, entirely different promise.
- Offer: Is your price truly premium or just high because your costs are? We use tools like Gabor-Granger and Van Westendorp to understand willingness to pay.
- Messaging: Which drives packaging, campaigns, and creative.Positioning: how do we show up in the market, like Dunkin versus Starbucks. Wildly different for different customers even though they both sell coffee.

Masstige works in the right retail environments. Whole Foods can pull it off better than Walmart. You benefit from the company you keep on shelf.

If you're trying to be a premium brand in a low-value category, it's more complicated because it comes back to expectation. What are your core customers expecting?

But overall, premium is growing as people redirect discretionary income toward food and beverage instead of homes or cars. They're shifting spending toward premium CPG because it benefits their day-to-day lifestyle.

* A marketing term combining "mass" and "prestige;" relatively inexpensive goods marketed as luxurious or prestigious.

People usually start with demographics, but demographics don’t explain why.

Our framework starts with motivators.

- Functional needs: Taste, texture, satiety. If it doesn’t taste good, nothing else matters.
- Emotional values: Nostalgia, identity, perception. Carts and baskets are open for a reason. One, to put things in. But also, everyone sees what you're purchasing. We absolutely care about how we're perceived.
- Personal growth: Better cognitive health, weight goals, muscle gain. These are major drivers behind functional foods today.
- Beyond self: Community and connection.

Most brands have a mix of motivators. Nostalgia alone isn’t powerful, but nostalgia plus two other motivators can be a superpower.

You're essentially building your own pyramid because you're not going to have all 30 motivators. Value brands won’t feel indulgent; luxury won’t trigger value cues. It’s about finding the right combination for your customer.

Fishwife is a great example. The product itself isn't unusual, it's canned fish. But they’ve elevated it. They've taken a small, older, dusty category and said, "Let's add some flavor profiles that don't exist."

They've convinced people who've never bought sardines to be all about it. Their packaging is gorgeous and instantly recognizable. They tell a beautiful story about who a Fishwife is. They move from basics to indulgence and into personal growth with "Hot girls eat tinned fish." It's an identity item and they're selling millions of dollars of merch because they've built a community beyond what's on the plate.

We start with the outcome: Are you trying to find product–market fit? Understand who wants this product and what jobs it's doing? Decrease cost of acquisition?

Then we draft a research brief that aligns the entire team: founder/CEO, brand, product, marketing. Getting everyone aligned on that is the most time-consuming part.

Next, we design survey questions, do interviews, sometimes sensory testing and in-home usage testing to see how products are actually used once they get home. We check off every hypothesis and question your team has.

The work usually takes week and a half to three to four weeks. We deliver all the data, walk through key storylines, prioritize, and then deliver a full report on every segment so you know who your customers are, who they aren't, why they buy, how to reach them, and how to adjust packaging and other elements.

You don’t need massive samples. For national brands, 2,000 to 7,000 respondents is plenty. For regional or local brands, 500 to 1,000 works. The numbers should fit the circumstances and the economics.

Our average projects are between $20,000–$40,000, but we have projects at $7,000–$8,000 and others from $150,000 up to $400,000–$500,000. Our goal is to meet you where you are and help you get to your next milestone and outcome.

We worked with a company that was absolutely certain their customer was a 35–45-year-old male with a household of three or four and a high income. But our segmentation revealed it was actually a 65-plus woman on a fixed income of $50,000–$60,000.

They'd been messaging to “grill bros” with $3,000 grills. When they shifted to helping this woman create an indulgent experience she'd been aspiring to, everything changed. In six months they 4x’d sales, decreased churn, and every metric went through the roof once they realized what customer they were really serving.

Better-for-you is not a trend anymore. It's shifting out of a fad status, and is no longer just for weirdos buying from specialty stores. Big food brands are making shifts and retailers are demanding changes, all because consumers are demanding them.

Last year, there was a boycott against Kellogg's for using artificial dyes. We did a survey of consumers buying those specific cereals and about 25% of consumers said they would change the brands they buy. At Kellogg's scale, that's massive.

We'll keep seeing this play out in a mass way. The challenge for specialty stores is staying on the cutting edge without drifting into extremes.

Customers aren't dumb. They have experience and good intuition, but psychology still drives decisions. Our job is to educate them and treat them as intelligent individuals, while recognizing that psychology will always play a role. Hence, why we do what we do with packaging design, product testing, and everything that comes with being a founder.

Seth Waite is a partner at Schaefer, a buyer psychology firm that works with food and beverage businesses. His obsession? Understanding the invisible forces that make someone choose Poppi over 20 other soda brands, or why they'll pay $12 for artisanal ranch dressing.