Indulge yourself: Own your truth in food brand marketing.
When it seems like the whole world is made up of gluten-free-keto-vegan-organic-paleo healthy, good-for-you foods and your brand – which will never win any health food prizes – is a sweet, sugar or fat-laden treat, my advice is to embrace it. You don’t need to advocate folks eating sugar all day long, but no matter what the state of the snack food market (it’s doing just fine) you need to grab your market share. Go big with messaging around “treat” and “indulgence” and emphasize the truth in food brand marketing.
Trends toward healthy eating being what they are it can be hard to see that while all the reports (like this 2018 Food and Health Survey Report by the IFIC Foundation) are pointing toward a more health-conscious consumer, a lot of food purchases occur without reading a label.
The sweets, snack and junk food markets are flourishing.
…consumption went up with family income. Forty-two percent of higher-income adults (those with household incomes above 350% of the federal poverty level) ate fast food on a given day, compared to nearly 32% of those whose families earned 130% of the national poverty level or less.
Flip the script: Own it, embrace it and challenge conventional thinking.
It turns out Jamie Ducharme, the author from the fast food article above, published another article: Can Eating Dessert Be Good for Your Diet? I highly suggest reading the article and looking for all the research-based arguments for having sugar as a part of a healthy diet. Then bake that message into your marketing message.
If you have clean label ingredients, own it. If you are locally grown or gluten-free, own it. The same goes if your brand isn’t “healthy” food. NewPoint advice? Marketing and branding are all about identifying and embracing what differentiates your brand from the competition. Don’t just own it, speak the truth in food brand marketing and flaunt it as your main selling point!
To identify and isolate areas for improvement in shopper marketing program strategies and tactics to further your CPG brand growth against set KPIs:
Maximize the economic performance of your CPG brand shopper marketing investment
Increase velocity at retail and consumer brand affinity
This shopper marketing audit will detail and contrast your CPG brand shopper marketing and messaging versus that of industry standard competitive practices and will include, but not limited to:
Target market reach, integrated retail marketing support, promotional continuity & awareness, offers and incentives, and tactical execution timing
Go-to-market launch strategies, timing, and tactical execution
Deliverables
Marketing Communication Audit Report
The deliverable will be a white paper with NewPoint Marketing findings and recommendations related to marketing activities in one retail partnership or DMA/market as defined by the client.
Brant brings 20+ years of experience to NewPoint as chief brand communicator and marketing-plan contributor.
Brant’s specialty is bringing an outside, investigative perspective that can feel alternately “rigorous” or “exasperating” depending on your point of view. Yet, he never fails to uncover a business’s unique selling proposition—one which can serve as a brand foundation for marketing that is compelling, creative and “sticky.”
Throughout his career, Brant’s applied his skill set to a broad range of business applications along the food supply-and-service chain. His services have provided vital clarity for all types of operations, from the more conventional food and food equipment manufacturers to the adjacent enterprises that partner with them, such as the Purdue University College of Agriculture.
Stephanie Bossung
Food industry marketing expertise—from retail to food-service and food-service equipment— is a natural outcome of having deep knowledge in every facet of a business’ operation. With 10 years in branding and business development, preceded by 15 years in mass media and promotions, Stephanie is an FMI Emerge mentor, holds an executive-level expertise in sales, marketing, media, and production management.
This exceptionally diverse skill set adds value for NewPoint clients by providing a full complement of perspectives on food-industry brand management endeavors.
Wired for a hawkish attention to detail while also maintaining a high-resolution view of the big picture, Stephanie is uniquely able to provide astute branding direction and simultaneously apply the business principles necessary to squeeze more bang out of every marketing buck.
Patrick Nycz
A member of the Forbes Agency Council and quoted in the New York Times, USA Today and Adweek, Patrick Nycz is the author of Moving Your Brand Up the Food Chain: Marketing Strategies to Grow Local and Regional Food Brands. He is an FMI Emerge mentor, an American Advertising Federation’s Silver Medal Award winner, and the Founding President of NewPoint Marketing, a full-service food industry marketing firm focused on food industry brands On a mission to grow.
Patrick’s vision for NewPoint emerged from his team’s success using this proven model for food industry clients and is fueled by NewPoint-funded food buyers and food manufacturers research around tracking consumer, industry, and ongoing food trends.
Kristy Blair
Since starting her 20-year career in commercial graphic design at one of the foremost catalog retailers in the world, Kristy’s visual branding skills have organically narrowed into the food-industry niche.
In that time, she’s directed graphic identities for snack food and restaurant startups, print materials for multiple agricultural seed companies, display graphics and merchandiser signage for major food-equipment manufacturers and everything in between.
Today, as one of the key brand architects for NewPoint clients, she continues to lead our visual research & development team, always working to find the innovative median between the best practices worth honoring and the accepted rules worth breaking.