Writing for Humans in the GEO Era, Believable Claims & Partnerships with Shaina Kandel

My name is Shaina Kandel. I currently run marketing at Ora Cacao, a direct-to-consumer e-commerce brand focused on sharing ceremonial cacao and disrupting the chocolate industry. I previously founded and ran a company with CBD products for period relief, and I also have a background in sustainable sourcing with fair trade certification, and an MBA in sustainability. That’s a little bit about what I’ve been up to.

The great thing about Ora is that we’ve never taken outside investment, so we’re not beholden to any investors. The thread of what I’ve done before has been about improving environmental health and societal health. When we’re growing the business, we think about it the way we source cacao, from cacao trees. We think about how the trees grow. We’re going at a steady, sustainable clip, not overblowing it, and we’re able to match that with a healthy lifestyle.

I see the whole thing as an ecosystem. Every business has a responsibility to operate with integrity, in their supply chain and in what they tell their customers, and different solutions work for different business models. A big third-party certification like Fair Trade has rigorous standards, the farms are third-party audited, and there’s good consumer recognition. It’s designed to support larger companies in moving toward more sustainable solutions. Then there are models like Ora’s, which is direct trade with regenerative organic farms, where we’re showing that the model is scalable. It’s a different model, with more transparency and more storytelling from the supply chain. When we make claims, we’re on the farms, telling firsthand stories of our direct experience of what we’re seeing. People really crave that level of transparency and understanding of where their food comes from, who the people behind it are, and what the conditions there are.

People can feel when claims are being made just to make a sale. We all know that focusing on long-term relationship building is what really wins in business. It happens to create a good CAC-to-LTV ratio, but that’s not why we do it. We do it because we care about the people purchasing from us and want to do right by them.
Only make claims that you have peer-reviewed scientific studies to back up, or that you’ve personally verified with lab tests, or that you have enough customer reviews or feedback surveys to share. Make sure you can back up what you’re speaking to. And don’t be afraid to admit when you’re wrong about something and change your mind. That creates even more trust, when you say, “We used to think this, then we learned this piece of information, and let’s share that and tell the story of it.”

I’d love to unpack this question a bit, because I have a different philosophy and frame on it, and I think it might help to take a few steps back. When we think about business as a platform for change and disruption, we look at where there are deeper societal needs. Our current model of unconscious consumerism doesn’t work and is unsustainable. It creates instant gratification at the expense of environmental degradation, and it feels soul-crushing. No one really enjoys it. So there’s an underlying need in Western capitalist society for connection to something that has deeper meaning, a deeper sense of purpose, and a sense of belonging.
That’s not something to exploit with manipulative tactics. We don’t want to do that. The question is how I can create change, how I can serve and meet an unmet need, and what my personal background, experience and story are to do that with. I personally have a long history of working with ritual, and I see it as an antidote to this unmet need we’re experiencing culturally. But I would never set out to create a ritual because it’s a wellness trend to sell something, which we’re seeing a lot of. It feels icky, and everyone can feel when that’s the marketing tactic being used.
So I’d talk about heart-led storytelling rather than education-led marketing. A founder or head of marketing gets underneath the hood and understands the deeper current: why is this business doing what it’s doing, what’s the origin story, why did the founder create it in the first place, who is it serving and benefiting, and how can my explanation of where it comes from and how to engage with the product uplift people’s lives? That process takes original thinking, introspection, reflection and a level of truth-telling. I know there’s a lot of ritual bandwagon going on in the wellness space, but it’s going to lose steam and fizzle out, because everyone will start rolling their eyes at it. The question is, what’s really true here, what is the unmet need, how are we helping people, and how is business being used as a platform for the change our hearts are longing for? That’s what people connect with when it’s true and authentic.

This is funny, because it’s something I wanted to share. In traditional marketing you create a customer persona and build all your storytelling and marketing materials toward that persona. That’s a good place to start, a good hypothesis. But I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve looked at the data on who our customer is and found I was wrong about who I thought our customer was.
For Ora, there are a few different psychographics we connect with. One is people who want a deeper connection to the earth and want to feel that what they support with their dollars has integrity in the supply chain and with the people it comes from. They want to see all the lab testing data, the radical transparency we offer. We also have customers who come in for health reasons, and the more we share about the health content in pure cacao, the more different types of customers we bring in. We have a lot of customers in their fifties and sixties, and we’re often surprised by the types of customers we have. So I’ve learned to challenge the belief in customer persona building and instead go in with an idea but be really responsive to what you learn about who your people are, and how that changes as the company grows.

The world of influencers can be very daunting. It’s like finding a needle in a haystack, and there’s a lot of BS out there, honestly. Where we’ve created partnerships that really move the needle is, first, with industry thought leaders, like a doctor or a psychologist, someone with a following where there’s an overlap between their audience and the product we sell. Sometimes that’s just building a relationship, getting on the phone, having a conversation, and creating an affiliate partnership. Or we’ve stumbled across amazing creators with their own personal brand and channel, more niche lifestyle, educating about homesteading or doing van life, who somehow hit a note with our audience. So sometimes it’s throwing spaghetti at the wall and seeing what sticks, and sometimes it’s more deliberate.
Another piece is attracting partnerships. The more a brand stands for a specific set of values, communicates that clearly and has heart-led storytelling, the more it continues to amaze me how people find you, and the right partnerships come into your orbit because they resonate with what you’re saying.

That’s a big question. There are AI-enabled tools we’re learning about and testing, more on the back end, under the hood of our tech stack. And of course there’s GEO, which is basically the new SEO. You need to keep doing SEO, and GEO is a list of tactics to implement: writing articles that answer the key search terms people put into AI chats, formatting them so the bots prefer to scoop them up, being referenced and cross-linked from other websites, and making sure you have a lot of FAQs. These are just tactics to make sure you come up in search results.
One thing I want to flag for marketers is the line between writing your website for a bot and writing it for a human customer. If we’re all optimizing our websites for GEO, what’s the long-term unintended consequence for how humans read and digest information, if we’re all being trained to think like bots? My personal desire and request is that, unless things shift drastically and we’re all outsourcing our decision-making to bots, we keep writing our websites with our primary audience as humans and being human-centric. Then put the tactics in place and make sure everything is solid so you’re discoverable with GEO, but be mindful of who your primary audience is.

Honestly, I don’t think much has changed. I think I just left the rooms where that was the case. I left corporate, I left the startup scene in San Francisco, and I’ve never really worked in tech. For women leading marketing and founder-led organizations, my advice is to be careful about who you work with, check your network, and try to understand each person’s psychology.
From what I’ve seen over the years, I really do think everyone, men and women included, has a bias that holds male voices as having more weight and credibility than women’s voices. It’s societal conditioning and programming, and we all have a responsibility to unpack that within ourselves and shift it, and for women to support, uplift and elevate each other’s voices. It’s important for all of us to check ourselves internally, and that’s the only way real change is going to happen.

I once heard a great framework for the three pillars of a really good brand: excellent product, powerful community and excellent content. The product is a whole world in itself. On content and community, you need to do a full-court press on both at the same time, and I think partnerships roll into community building. For each founder, it also goes back to their individual gifts and where they have the know-how to get things going. The co-founder of Brooklinen had a background in PR, and that company leveraged PR to launch the business and was very successful. I don’t have a background in PR, so I’ve leaned more into partnerships and community, and that’s worked well for me. So lean into content and community building, and understand how to leverage your network, your gifts and your background to make the most strategic decision for yourself.

At Ora we’re leaning into something I’m excited about. Over the years we’ve continued to double down on our lab testing. The brand has always sat at the intersection of science and spirituality, so we put a lot of energy into being rigorous with any claims we make, sharing extensively the research behind them, and educating and bringing our customers along. We do all the safety lab tests and publish them publicly, with that radical transparency piece.
Beyond that, we’ve recently lab-tested for polyphenol and flavonoid content and can share some interesting data on what that means in terms of specific health benefits, so we can say exactly what you’re getting. We’re also testing, on a more granular basis, for theobromine content. We’re continuing to lean into this, and I think that level of credibility and transparency will support us as we continue to grow in the mainstream.

The website is ceremonial-cacao.com. We also have quite a big wholesale footprint, and we have a wholesale finder on our site.

Thank you, Stephen.