Italy - UK Partnership

IN FOCUS | 07 www.italchamind.eu from the crowd has become really challenging. The Centre for Research on Customer Relations in the Food Sector from Denmark elaborated some marketing practices that can be followed to differentiate one’s offer from the mass. 1) Collecting consumer insights in order to understand people’s needs and wishes and getting there before competitors. 2) Connecting products with emotions and feelings. In the case of healthy food, this means associating food with images associated to well-being, nature and peace. 3) Creating endorsement by involving brand ambassadors, who have already consolidated authority on this specific field. It could be therefore useful to engage some professional nutritionists or chefs, but also food bloggers who have a big follower community. 4) Activating the community. It is important to interact with the users because it is possible to get feedback and consumer’s insights. The best way is to encourage conversations around specific topics related to functional food that one’s target cares about. 5) Extending the marketing campaign involving different media channels. It is important to align all the different channels towards a common goal in order to reach the users with the same message from different directions. Looking at the healthy food business, it is important to involve social media, but also sectorial magazines, events, television and other offline means as well. 6) Clear, beneficial and achievable messages. Especially with health and wellness, the content of the message must be clear and not misleading, it must stress the benefits that one can gain by consuming a specific product that, most of all, must be achievable in order to be credible. This is especially true when a new product is inserted in the market and consumers have little knowledge about its benefits: clear and accessible messages are the key to reach the end users, avoiding many scientific terminologies. A successful marketing campaign on functional food will motivate the consumer to pay a premium price for a product because it holds certain advantages. As shown by a research from Professor Menrad (Market and marketing of functional food in Europe), consumers are more willing to pay a high price for products that can benefit their life in the short term rather than in the long run. Keeping this in mind, taste and price are still two major drivers in the consumer’s choice in the functional food sector and therefore food companies should always consider them as priorities. The most successful companies are the ones that can position their products in the mind of the consumers as unique alternatives, and this is possible only through focused branding and communication strategies. ·