So our shopper has decided to buy the product, but now they will actually use the product, hence the consumer experience stage in our shopper marketing journey. Food brands can help ensure a consumer has a positive experience with their products. Doing so means helping consumers have a positive experience by providing stellar customer service; beyond what is expected by consumers.
The Fourth Shopper Journey Stage
If you recall from our earlier additions in this series, the consumer has become aware of products, considered them, decided to make a purchase, and is now ready to try out and experience the product. Let’s go back to our holiday shopping trip from our previous blog… Our consumer decided to purchase a private label turkey with less sodium. Yikes, that less sodium label reminds our consumer that the recipe they typically use has a lot of salt in it. This year, they want to try something new. Where would they go first? More often than not, the internet!
Website Experience
Your website will be one of the top places your consumer will look for recipes; since it’s your product they’re cooking! Having recipes on your website is a great way to encourage use of your products. It also encourages consumers to experience your products in new ways, hopefully leading to repeat purchases.
Social Media Experiences
We’ve discussed many times the importance of social media, but we haven’t yet discussed social media as a method of customer service. You could include giveaways in your social media content, host a Question + Answer session, and offer new ways for your audience to experience your brand and the products you offer. Giving consumers more than they expect is a great way to ensure a positive consumer experience with your brand!
Social media also provides a personal, and quick way to remedy any issues consumers have. Unfortunately, negative consumer experiences may happen and someone may message you asking for a solution. By listening to the consumer, actively trying to find a solution, and engaging with the consumer, your food brand can help turn a negative consumer experience into a positive one. Remember, people remember how you make them feel.
STAY TUNED for Part 5 of our Shopper Marketing – Shopper Journey Stages series!
If you have any questions about shopper marketing, 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.