Prepared for Liz Kang by Christina Ra, Raconteur Strategies
Mamame has product-market signal at Erewhon — a story most CPG brands would envy — and a U.S. retail expansion landing across roughly 1,000+ doors between August and October. The brand wants to feel like what it already is to the people who love it — comfort, belonging, food as care. The marketing job is making that ambition operational at retail scale. It has three load-bearing layers, and these together create the job ahead of us.
Most U.S. shoppers will not recognize tempeh at the shelf. Fewer than 1 in 10 come predisposed to try it. The opportunity is not to convince everyone; it is to find the people who are already halfway there and give them the language to close the gap. That person is the mom who wants a school-lunch addition her kids will actually open. It is the 30-something reading ingredient lists at the shelf. It is the gym-bag snacker who is done with seed-oil-laden options and looking to upgrade without sacrificing convenience. Each of them is reachable, but only if the brand speaks to what they already care about. Trial begins with recognition, and recognition begins with language that feels familiar.
Costco LA, Whole Foods Northeast, Wegmans, Hy-Vee, Albertsons, and Save-Mart all come online between August and October. That is roughly 1,000 doors in a three-month window. The opportunity is real, but the window is unforgiving. Retail buyers watch velocity in the first 8 to 12 weeks and make ranging decisions based on what they see. A brand that arrives at the shelf without a trial mechanism puts its ranging at risk. For Mamame, the right trial mechanism at this stage is sampling and in-store moments, not promotions. A coupon does not solve the "what is this" problem at the shelf. A sample does. The job in this window is to give shoppers a reason to reach for the product, a reason to come back, and enough visible proof of demand that buyers feel confident expanding rather than contracting.
The default CPG playbook spends heavily on trade and performance for products consumers already understand. Mamame is at a different stage, and the approach has to reflect that. Today's demand engine for a snack brand runs on three connected layers. The first is a quantitative segmentation that identifies who the buyer actually is and the specific language that moves each segment to act. The second is earned visibility in the places modern discovery happens: AI search results, trusted creators, and content that fits naturally into the cultural conversation around fiber, protein, and clean ingredients. The third is trade and shopper support that converts that awareness once someone is standing in front of the shelf. Each layer feeds the next. Segmentation sharpens the creative. The creative builds recognition with the large share of future buyers who are not in market today. When those buyers encounter Mamame at Wegmans or Whole Foods, familiarity does the work. Trade and performance spend scale what is already working rather than substitute for it.
A marketing lead is the structural answer to a moment like this — one accountable owner who holds strategy, execution, and resource quality together, and serves as the brand steward. For Mamame, that role would be held by Christina Ra, with Erica Lovelace as her tag-team right hand. The role is calibrated to the moment of moving from breakout product-market signal to national retail scale.
Most marketing leaders hold one or two of the capabilities below. Christina holds all of them in one operator. The combination is what the moment requires.
Full-stack marketing and communications, hands-on in every function. Brand, narrative, positioning, segmentation, go-to-market language, PR, organic and paid social, email and lifecycle, AI search — Christina has personally built and shipped every one. Strategy and execution come from the same hands.
The downstream consequence: her oversight of every workstream and every specialist on the Mamame team is grounded in having done the work herself. She can spot a thin paid social brief, a soft PR pitch, an off-pitch creative, an email sequence missing a beat — because she has personally produced every form of the work successfully. Most marketing leaders direct work they have never done. Christina's oversight is uniquely qualified, and in this configuration, unparalleled.
Equally fluent at building from zero and scaling what works. The marketing operation Mamame needs first is different from the one Mamame needs in 2027. Christina has built both, multiple times.
Bleeding edge of the field, paired with the durable craft. AI tools for content, segmentation, search visibility, and operational leverage on one side; brand, storytelling, and positioning on the other. Both compound — the new tools amplify the durable work.
15+ years of acumen. Built and led marketing operations inside startup and wellness companies before founding Raconteur.
Mamame is creating a category. The U.S. tempeh-chip aisle does not yet exist, and the brands that name a category get to define it for everyone else. This work has no blueprint. It requires pattern recognition built across other category-defining engagements, and the trusted counsel to battletest the thinking before it goes live.
Christina is a category creator. The pattern recognition is hers. The counsel that stress-tests it is built around her.
— The board of advisors. A trusted, hand-built circle of world-class DTC CPG marketers blazing trails, and operators who have scaled category-leading brands to dominance. The counsel Christina turns to when the call is hard or the move is novel. We collectively battletest the thinking before it leaves the building.
— The specialist network. Fifteen years of relationships across brand and creative shops, paid and performance specialists, food and wellness operators, retail and trade veterans, PR and earned-media partners, lifecycle and CRM builders, AI search practitioners. When a workstream needs to scale, swap, or accelerate, the right specialist is known, vetted, and reachable — no search committees, no agency RFPs, no six-week onboarding for a vendor who turns out to be the wrong fit.
At the end of the day, the thinking and the strategy are Christina's. The board battletests. The specialists execute. Liz hires one operator with both layers built in.
Christina is the primary and consistent presence — strategy, positioning, and orchestration come from one hand. Erica's presence scales that leadership with deeper time investment and a complementary set of capabilities.
One accountable owner. Two sets of hands. Liz gets continuous coverage without losing strategic continuity.
This is what scales fractional leadership to match how fast Mamame is moving.
A common consideration at this stage is whether to bring a marketing leader in-house. My recommendation is Option A, and I am ready to move immediately. That said, both paths are genuinely viable depending on where Mamame is headed, and I can support either one. The two configurations below lay out how I integrate with what Mamame is building and what each path is right for.
Christina holds the entire marketing operation, hands-on strategically and tactically. Every workstream in this deck is held to standard by one accountable owner. Erica scales that capacity. A curated set of specialists comes in where a workstream needs more specialized execution, sized up or down as the brand grows.
This is the right configuration for Mamame right now for three reasons. First, the retail surge is 6 to 12 weeks away, not 6 to 12 months. There is no time to recruit, hire, and ramp an in-house leader before the critical window opens. Second, the full-stack range this moment requires — brand, segmentation, PR, demand generation, AI search visibility, retail trade — is not a profile most first marketing hires carry. Third, the specialist network is already built and vetted. Mamame inherits it from day one rather than waiting for a new hire to build it over their first year.
The right path when the priority is hyper-efficient leadership and execution before the brand has the volume to justify a full in-house team.
Liz hires the in-house leader. Christina and Erica wrap around that hire as the senior counsel layer the in-house team cannot be on day one. Four structural reasons this matters in Mamame's window:
— Ramp time. A new in-house marketing leader takes 6–12 months to ramp into the role. Mamame's retail surge is 6–12 weeks away. Christina arrives with full operational fluency from day one.
— Range. Most in-house marketing leaders are brand or growth, strategy or execution, traditional or AI-native. The first hire chooses a center of gravity, and the gaps appear at the seams. Christina is full-stack — the seams close.
— Network. An in-house leader has to build the specialist network themselves over the first year. Christina arrives with it built, vetted, and on call. The in-house team inherits it immediately.
— Counsel above the role. An in-house leader reports to Liz. Christina serves as senior thinking partner to both Liz and the in-house lead — the third voice in the room when the call is hard, the experienced eye on the work before it ships, the operator who has done this multiple times before.
The right path when Mamame's stage and budget support a full-time hire and the goal is to accelerate that person's first year — and to give Mamame a senior counsel layer the in-house hire alone cannot provide.
Christina dials each workstream up or down based on what the brand needs, month-to-month, and at times week to week. Research & Segmentation comes first and informs the other five — every paid, organic, and shopper decision downstream gets sharper because of it. No workstream operates independently. The value comes from how they coordinate ongoing.
(Foundational)
Quantitative segmentation that maps target segments — beliefs, behaviors, the language each one responds to, where they shop, how they learn about new products, and how to win them one by one. The segmentation informs every paid, organic, and shopper decision downstream. It doubles as evidence for retailer conversations on shelf placement and front-of-pack.
Brand work begins from where Mamame already lives — comfort, safety, belonging, food as care. The positioning ('a snack, period'), the cultural-time wedge — fiber, clean ingredients, no seed oils — and the narrative architecture that translates the brand's emotional territory into every external surface. Includes a Phase 1 deliverable: propose a category term Mamame can credibly own and the broader market starts using.
Shopper marketing, shelf-placement strategy, retailer-meeting preparation, in-store sampling tactics, and the trade-marketing toolkit calibrated to the August–October landings.
Organic social, paid social, and email & lifecycle — the awareness-to-trial-to-repeat funnel that converts a new Whole Foods Northeast shopper into a Costco rebuyer.
Founder narrative refresh, fiber-conversation entry, clean-ingredient storytelling and Asian heritage storytelling that avoids the pigeonhole
Visibility in AI search results for product-discovery questions, content engineered for AI discoverability, and niche-community programs — creators, RDs, fiber-curious audiences — that compound trust.
Every dollar of marketing spend runs through two tiers that stay tightly coordinated. The strategy layer is always on. The specialist layer scales to meet the work.
Every workstream gets calibrated independently, as needed. The spectrum below applies to each one — lean and scrappy on one end, full-service on the other — with the right mix chosen workstream by workstream.
Raconteur's team handles strategy and execution directly. This is not a compromise option. It is the right configuration when the work calls for it, and it is where we start. Lowest cost, fastest to deploy, and fully accountable to the same standard as everything else we ship.
Specialists carry execution under Christina's direction. The right call when a workstream needs more hours than the core team can absorb at the speed the brand is moving. Balanced cost and quality. The default configuration as Mamame scales.
A specialist agency for a specific workstream, selected because they are genuinely world-class at it. This end of the spectrum exists for one reason: when the work demands iconic-brand execution and the timing justifies the investment. Chosen deliberately, not by default.
The lean end — Raconteur's team handling channel management and day-to-day copy — lands around $2,000–$3,000 a month depending on volume of channels and posts. The full-service end — a lean but world-class social partner specializing in wellness-breakthrough and food-brand social — lands around $8,500 a month. The spectrum exists for every workstream.
The honest answer on cost is that Raconteur's team can execute every workstream in this deck. The question is never capability. It is scale and speed. When a workstream needs to move faster or at higher volume than the core team can absorb, that is when a specialist comes in. The spectrum exists to match the right resource to the right moment, not to fill slots on a vendor roster. At the lean end, the brand gets principal-level execution at the lowest possible cost. At the full-service end, the brand gets the kind of specialist that builds iconic brands. Most workstreams will live somewhere in between, and that mix will shift as the brand grows. The savings in this model come from one place: one leader who holds strategy, quality, and orchestration across all of it. Conventional setups distribute that work across three or four vendor relationships, and the coordination tax compounds.
Mamame's ~$10 retail price is a strategic asset. Erewhon proves it. The marketing job is finding more of the right shopper across the new doors and holding the price discipline through the launches. Pricing power is the financial expression of brand strength.
Transparent staffing throughout. Every workstream shows what is powering it and what it costs. The mix shifts as the brand grows.
The decision structure is designed to keep Liz informed without slowing the operation down. Every workstream starts with a clear point of view and full visibility into the trade-offs.
For each workstream, she leads with the option she believes is the strongest strategic fit for the brand and the stage Mamame is in. Every recommendation arrives with the reasoning attached.
The recommendation sits alongside what each option does well, what it costs, and what it sacrifices. Liz always has the full picture before a decision is made.
We explore the full spectrum whenever the decision calls for it. If a workstream needs to shift mid-year — because the brand's needs change, the market shifts, or the data says so — it shifts.
Christina is the accountable owner of the marketing operation and the standard. Specialists rotate. The leadership stays. One throughline — from week one to year one.
A national retail-expansion year requires the founder and the marketing lead to move in sync. Here is how that looks week to week — structured enough to hold accountability, flexible enough to match the speed of the business.
A standardized report or standing call with Liz covering strategy, performance, and decisions. Slack / email ongoing, as needed.
One view of what shipped, what is queued, what is blocked, and what needs a decision.
The marketing plan, budget, calendar, and performance read — all in one place, always current.
Winning looks different at launch, at 30 days, and at 90 days. Each horizon sharpens the picture and tightens the decisions — from the urgency of the retail surge to the compounding evidence of a maturing engine.
Segmentation findings deployed first — into retailer conversations, front-of-pack decisions, and the language that wins each priority segment. Investment skews brand-first at this stage: positioning, messaging, and language do their work before paid channels scale. The cultural-time wedge — fiber, clean ingredients, no seed oils — showing up in PR, organic social, and LLM-search results. The early version of the demand-generation engine tested and live. Sampling and in-store moments active as the primary trial driver. These are the right tools for this stage because they convert without requiring prior brand awareness. A shopper who tries a chip at a Whole Foods demo does not need to know what tempeh is beforehand. The sample does the translating.
First read on velocity at the new doors. First reads on which messages and which channels are converting. LLM-search visibility verified for the priority discovery questions. First full round of optimization complete across every active workstream. The next 30 days run on what the first 30 actually showed.
Velocity patterns visible by door, by region, and by SKU. Channel mix tuned to evidence. Email and lifecycle deepening repeat purchase. The bullseye next ring identified — who comes after the first wave of adopters. The engine is running on evidence.
At each horizon, the picture sharpens and the decisions get more specific. Christina holds the line of sight from week one to year one.
Fractional marketing leadership for the year Mamame goes national