Food Industry Marketing Strategies: Brand Reconnaissance

Food Industry Marketing Strategies Begin with Business-to-Business

Marketing is any strategy that helps your company build brand awareness and bring your brand together with customers. There are four necessary steps to developing effective food industry marketing strategies, including:

1. Know your audience and the competition.
2. Develop a brand that is relevant to your audience and relative to the competition.
3. Build brand awareness and incentivize its purchase.
4. Monitor and analyze your progress.

Starts with Brand Reconnaissance

While there is a myriad of ways to implement these general strategies, we approach it through the interwoven stages of reconnaissance, advantage strategies, growth programs, and ongoing brand management. We consider brand reconnaissance to be the first step towards developing a company’s effective marketing strategy.

Internally, your company needs not only a vision but also a stated mission and a specific set of plans and goals. Effective food industry marketing strategies start by making plans and setting goals is not only something you should want to do if you plan to grow but also something you absolutely must do simply to survive. NewPoint has helped many teams work through guidelines for planning and goal-setting from proper strategies to avoidable pitfalls.

There’s an almost endless amount of information at your disposal when it comes to external analysis, including everything from all-encompassing industry research to old-fashioned store checks. Your homework should include, among other things, quantitative and qualitative market research designed to complete the analysis of your industry, category, and competition.

Quantitative methods emphasize objective measurements and statistical analysis of data, including IRI/Infoscan and Nielsen data, in-person store checks, and strategically chosen industry associations, to understand how your company fits into the overall marketplace landscape. Qualitative methods, which often consist of interviews and focus groups, are meant to uncover trends in the thoughts and opinions of consumers.

For your company, effective food industry marketing strategies should include interviews with the following: retail stores that already partner with you, retail stores that don’t partner with you, your peers and other role players in your food supply chain, industry researchers, and innovators, and finally, consumers. The combination of your internal and external assessments will ultimately help you determine where you fit into the marketplace. Crucial information, such as cost structure, projected growth, projected profitability, entry barriers, distribution methods, and critical success factors, will be revealed.

If you have any questions or would like to learn more about how food industry marketing strategies can help your company or about NewPoint, please reach out to the NewPoint team — interested in food marketing topics? Please visit our “Intel” page or check out my book: Moving Your Brand Up the Food Chain.