Archives for Packaged Goods marketing

Making Friends Across the Aisle in specialty food marketing

It may not make you popular if you’re a congressperson, but if you’re in specialty food marketing,  take a tip from Nielsen’s report on snacking: crossing the aisle to create promotions across the store is the path to success.  They measure and rate correlations on ‘high connectivity” purchases: for example, fresh chicken breasts, which have strong positive correlation with 133 other
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Trend Convergence For the Food Marketing Industry

We see three threads coming together that could spell opportunity for food marketers. First, IRI MarketPulse Survey Q4, 2014 came up with this prediction for 2015 CPG shoppers: 43% of Shoppers plan to buy large packages to get the lowest price per serving. 43% is a big number, but so what, you say? Bulk is nothing new to the likes
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Specialty Food Marketing Meets Special Delivery

30 years of specialty food marketing teaches you that food people are a breed apart.   The passion for great food, delight at a clever new idea, and the compulsion to share our discoveries with others are the hallmarks of a group unlike any other. So for my fellow hopeless addicts, here’s great news: two really smart services that are taking
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140 Bites – Trendwatching at the Fancy Food Show

Who wouldn’t love the New York Fancy Food Show?  Walking around eating in the name of specialty food marketing is something I look forward to every year.  The other treat? Trendwatching.  There was the year of mustards, the year of salsas, the year of artisanal chocolates, the year of tea.  This year? Quick high-impact bites.  Brownie Brittle  delivers just the
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Budgeting for Small Brand Marketers needs Marketing Effectiveness

2015 is coming.  Time for ambitious brands with limited budgets to make really tough choices.  We’ve just won our second award for Marketing Effectiveness, for a project that came in under $350,000.  So we hope you’ll find this helpful: Two things to know about changes in Social Media Be aware that an algorithmic change will drastically reduce your Facebook exposure:  Facebook
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Specialty Food Brands – David versus Goliath battles

  We worked with Rena through the creative food company she founded in 2000 with Tom Eckerle, Soup to Nuts.  Together they created and photographed over 200 recipes for our agency client, Arla Foods. Rena’s expertise in every aspect of food, from recipe creation for the home cook to food service design to the taste preferences of individual markets, was
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Pinterest Marketing Matures for CPGs

Boris is the keeper of the data around here and he called me over the other day all excited.  I looked over his shoulder at the client’s website analytics and he pointed to where Pinterest had surpassed Google as the number one driver to their website.  This is huge, people. With 70 million users – 80% of them female, Pinterest
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Food Marketers for CPGs Seeking the Secret Weapon – News from the Food Aisle

Part of our job (the fun part) as food marketers is to keep up with digital and mobile innovations.   Some clever solutions are in beta with major brands, and if they can train consumers to use them, they’ll do magic: enhance the shopping experience and help brands make noise at point of purchase. Overcoming Point Of Purchase Block Point of
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Where to Coupon for Maximum Response

Given the multiple ways consumers can get coupons – through events, in-store sampling, store affinity card programs, etc…we are always curious about what’s most effective for redemption. We discussed it with Associate Professor Leonard Lee of the Columbia Business School, who, as it happens, did his dissertation on “Shopping Goals, Goal Concreteness, and Conditional Promotions.”  The findings are fascinating.
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When Shopper Marketing Backfires…Or Does it?

Brands spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on in-store promotions, often with results that are hard to measure. The provocative title of a new study out of Columbia University suggests that those efforts may not only be ineffective, but actually have a dampening effect on sales.  In the study, titled When Shopper Marketing Backfires, the team coined their findings the
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