Pulse Perspectives
Keep up with trends, analyses, and forecasts in the world of marketing healthy brands.
What We’re Reading, June 2021
We have spent quite a bit of time talking with clients recently about how to reach the right health professional with the right message in a post-pandemic landscape. The goal? Ensuring consumers have the information, guidance, and recommendations they need to meet their health & wellness goals.
Keyword Nutrition Revisted
In January 2020, we wrote about the growth of "keyword nutrition"—the propensity for food companies to overwhelm their packages and marketing with all of the keywords they believe consumers want to see. Natural, non-GMO, sustainable, gluten free, artisanal, and so on.
Typically, this focus on keyword signifiers comes at the expense of substance—either innovation that truly enhances the nutritional value of foods or information and education that helps consumers understand why these products may be better choices for them nutritionally.
Meeting parents’ expectations
According to a new study from the International Food Information Council (IFIC), parents are turning to their health professionals for advice. In fact, children’s parents and caregivers trust their health professionals five times more than the next considered sources, their own parents and in-laws.
You may be experiencing this yourself. For a full year now, parents and caregivers have worked especially hard to keep their children’s growth from backsliding: scholastic stimulation, physical exercise, mental health and acuity, and a healthy, balanced diet were priorities for parents and caregivers. More recently, with the ability to see the light at the end of the tunnel, parents have added their children’s immune systems, ability to readjust, hygiene, personal safety and social distancing to the list of concerns.
How are you sampling with curtailed opportunities?
One of the fundamentals of food marketing is to give customers an opportunity to experience the brand—to taste, smell, and touch it—through sampling.
With the opportunity for sampling at healthy food conferences, trade shows, and in-store demos curtailed, we are hearing from many companies that they are looking for effective ways to get their samples into the hands of consumers.
Influencing shoppers before they go shopping
This month has marked a fresh start in many ways.
In fact, now that most people have mastered social distancing and wearing masks—and are now receiving their second vaccinations!—we are seeing more people out in public, including at grocery stores.
Still, it is different than before the pandemic. People are not just swinging by the store to pick up one or two items on their way home from work. Rather, they are planning ahead for their weekly or bi-weekly shopping sessions.
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