Yay, you! You’ve just read steps 1-4 about the importance of surrounding yourself and your product with the best in the business of selling food. You have planned your CPG photoshoot, and you are now armed with the perfect photographer and food stylist to make your product shine on the shelf and stand out in the crowd!
You have arrived!
FIFTH: Have a Team Meeting
Now that everyone is on-board with the agenda and goals, start with a quick review of what you’re doing. Review your shot list and make sure everything is gathered for efficient photoshoot success—props, food items, backgrounds, etc. Have your best products—and by best, I mean choose products that look good—at the ready. If you’re selling bacon, choose the most glorious pieces of bacon from the bunch. Have more product than you think you need available for the shoot. You don’t want to be forced to use any “rejects” you might come across in your stash.
SIXTH: Sit Back and Watch the Professionals Work Their Magic!
However, this doesn’t mean you get to slack off. You are still in charge of making the most of your CPG photoshoot (you, along with your art director if you have one). But, you do need to let the photo team take the reigns and create a masterpiece on the set. It is truly magical to watch your product come to life. Be there for any questions your team may have. Give direction on the shots’ specifics to ensure you get the best, most authentic representation of your product.
The culmination of your shoot should reflect the best your product could ever look. However, you don’t want to mislead your consumers with an ‘impossible to achieve’ image of your product either. What they buy vs. what they get can sometimes turn the consumer off. Be aware of the realities of what your product looks like and make it as appealing as you can while keeping in mind what the consumer will find on the inside of the package. In a market where brand transparency is so important to consumers, you don’t want to disappoint or mislead.
SEVENTH: Reap the Rewards!
Yay, you… again! You have now completed your CPG photoshoot and you have a full photo archive of the best-of-the-best representations of your product(s). Now go get them out into the market. Whether you use your photos for packaging, social, digital advertising, print, web, or all of the above, use them! Go forward knowing you have just invested in the growth of your brand.
At Newpoint, we do the heavy lifting for our clients—choosing the right photographer and food stylist with experience in capturing products similar to yours. If you have any questions or would like to learn more about our food marketing firm, please reach out to the NewPoint team. If you are interested in more food brand marketing topics, please visit our Food for Thought page or check out NewPoint’s Patrick Nycz’s book: Moving Your Brand Up the Food Chain.
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.