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How to market a food brand when the market is competitive and the media is flooded - voila! Marketing & Digital

2023-06-04T06:40:26.256Z

Highlights: The culinary boom in the chains indicates that despite the stiff competition, the food market is thirsty for new players. Tali Osterville, Marketing Manager of Restrato, explains how to create quality differentiation. All marketing is done in-house, with almost no help from external suppliers. Taste is always first and foremost, and companies don't always prioritize taste with taste as a leading parameter, Osterville says. The consumer is looking for quality content but not too polished, and he wants the information that reaches him to be authentic, not engineered.


The culinary boom in the chains indicates that despite the stiff competition, the food market is thirsty for new players. Tali Osterville, Marketing Manager of Restrato, explains how to create quality differentiation


Visuals that attract the right audience. (Photo: Mutti)

Ostensibly, we are in a marketing boom in the food sector. Everyone wants to cook, everyone consumes culinary content, the age range of those interested in the field has expanded and marketing methods have broken quite a few boundaries. Every day we are flooded with new recipes, tips and tricks for special dishes, short videos that give us the feeling that everything is easy, fast, beautiful and delicious.

But the truth is sometimes light years away from the illusion of social media, and chefs who were once the main source of authority in the culinary field have given way to bloggers and TikTokers with no professional culinary experience. Does all this make it easier or challenging for marketers? The answer is probably both.

Proper accessibility of content, recipes and culinary knowledge

Consumers today are exposed to so much content. The consumer is looking for quality content but not too polished, and he wants the information that reaches him to be authentic, not engineered, to speak his language and to him directly.

Value-added content such as recipes, success tips and an exciting story create an unmediated connection between the brand and the consumer, but stimulating food photographs and tried and tested recipes are no longer enough. In order to truly stand out, you need to give real value to the consumer, touch his needs and difficulties and provide a response to them.

For example, launching a brand recipe book will give a place of honor to tried and tested recipes that the consumer can hold in their hand and return to again and again. In the end, every home has a limited number of recipes that go into the routine. In our case, what all these dishes have in common is their red color and the use of the most popular ingredient in Israeli cuisine - the tomato.

The recipe book of the sauce brand Mutti

MUTTI Family Foods

Another project born out of listening to our consumers is a digital cooking course we called "What do we eat today?". The course is intended for parents who face the ongoing cooking challenge for family members every day. We heard the distress from consumers, and answered the call.

Despite the abundance of content available in the field, many parents are unable to organize themselves easily and efficiently on regular cooking. The course offers a weekly action plan of red, easy and delicious recipes that will satisfy both the pickiest children and their parents. In order to provide added value to parents, we added professional content by Ayelet Barak, a cooking therapist. The course is completely free and designed to meet the needs and difficulties of the consumer.

Another example is the recipe booklet of pasta la molisana. The uniqueness of this pasta is that it is rough and therefore attaches the sauce to the pasta. With this understanding we created a booklet only of pasta sauces - 10 recipes that every pasta consumer needs at home. We added brand information and success tips to the booklet to give as much professional knowledge as possible.

Pasta La Molisana recipe booklet

Ristretto | La Molisana

In-depth brand familiarity and in-house marketing

Another important stop on the way to successful marketing in the field of food is in-depth familiarity with the product and brand. You need to know what you're marketing and of course who you're addressing, and get to know the smallest details in the products you want to market.

When a person meets an acquaintance on the street, he will ask him, "How are you?", but if you meet your best friend, you will know to ask him a more specific question about something you know happened in his life not long ago. And that's the key - if you know the product and brand very closely, visit factories and talk to suppliers abroad - know how to adapt the messages and make them more authentic. At our company, all marketing is done in-house, with almost no help from external suppliers, we operate independently from the strategy development stage to content creation and design, and this allows us to be very creative and precise.

True passion for culinary - taste first and foremost!

It's surprising to find that food companies don't always prioritize taste. Whether it is restaurants, brands or retail chains, the conversation does not always start with taste as a leading parameter and many times price or other parameters are the main considerations.

The passion we have for culinary and food is a real passion, taste here always comes first. We believe in the combination of taste, quality and price and see this in the products and brands we offer to the market. A few years ago we defined the essence of our brand using the phrase All In Good Taste, it is a sentence whose meaning for us goes far beyond just the taste of the product, it is also related to how things look, from photographing the recipes to choosing fonts. The phrase has become the company's slogan and serves as a true axis for decision-making. If it's not in good taste, we don't do it.

Start small, grow big

Sometimes when shouting too loudly, the message is conveyed in a commercial and unreliable manner and has the opposite effect.
There are situations in which it is better to start small and grow along with the market. At the beginning of our career, we focused on the professional market, where marketing is minimal and focuses mainly on transferring knowledge, hosting customers in factories abroad and participating in workshops and culinary meetings. Over time, many of our products that started in the restaurant industry spread to delis and later to the big supermarkets.

For example, the Tomato brand Mutti began its journey in Israel as a favorite product of many Italian restaurants. The affection for the brand led many restaurants to display the can of Mutti in a place of honor on the shelf as part of the restaurant's design, thus exposing the home cook to the new brand. It was a gradual process that took time, but patience paid off and today many consumers see it as a brand of professionals.

Culinary meetings and personal contact with customers

The world has become very digital and sometimes the personal connection is a bit lost. Specifically in the culinary world, the best way to convey messages out is through the plate. Therefore, once a year we hold an event in which we invite representatives of brands and their customers in the field of restaurants, delis and chefs to mingle together in one place. This is a very invested culinary event that helps expose our customers to new products and uses, provide important knowledge about brands and products, and create a direct encounter between suppliers who come from abroad and customers in Israel. The event is called Taste Inspiration because we really want and hope that customers will come, taste, and draw inspiration for their businesses.

Until now, our event was for customers only, while this year we chose to open our guided culinary tours to the general public for the first time. For us, this is another way to reach consumers and let them get to know us and the brands we bring, in an interesting and experiential way.

So where is the culinary industry headed and what will its future look like?

The culinary industry has become very tough in recent years, a lot of restaurants are closing, a lot of difficulties that restaurateurs are experiencing. Operating a restaurant today is very expensive, there is also difficulty in recruiting employees - working in a restaurant today is considered a temporary and not permanent job. The high entertainment costs for consumers force restaurateurs to choose what they focus on, and in the future restaurateurs may need to focus more on the food itself and invest less in the environment: place and service, in order to provide a good and affordable culinary experience.

Due to the high entertainment costs, it may seem that more and more consumers will prefer to invest in a good home-cooked meal. Eventually, there will be consumers with a greater culinary understanding, who upgrade their home kitchen with quality ingredients. Because when the raw materials are good, the final dish comes out much tastier.

Tali Ostrwil is Marketing Manager at Restrato

  • Marketing & Digital
  • Content & Creative

Tags

  • Brands
  • Food Market
  • Retail chains
  • food
  • marketing
  • Switching

Source: walla

All news articles on 2023-06-04

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