We are living in very unique times for food and beverage brands. In years past, brands could simply keep producing and selling the same old “go-to’s” year after year. Sometimes decade after decade. And maybe come up with a new twist, flavor, or product extension every few years.
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There’s lots of great things happening in the world of food. Innovation is at an all-time high. Brands are working hard to clean-up their labels and ingredients. Sustainability is top-of-mind. And, better-for-you, healthier foods continue to grow.
A look into what brands have done and can do on the new video platform
By now, you’ve probably heard of TikTok, the hot video editing and sharing channel that’s been covered in The New York Times, Business Insider and Cnet, as well as featured on the Ellen DeGeneres show (Ellen now has her own TikTok channel). Grubhub used it for a takeover to download the Grubhub app (1.4 billion downloads). This spring, Jimmy Fallon used TikTok to kick off his new Tonight Show Challenges segment with the hashtag #tumbleweedchallenge, where viewers made videos of themselves rolling around like tumbleweeds (8,000+ submissions and 10M+ engagements in under a week).
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Snack-naming trends
Consumer attitudes toward snacking are changing, driven in a large part by the millennial audience. Where older generations viewed snacks as guilty pleasures, millennials’ insistence on socially aware, better-for-you food has created cross-over snacks requiring no discretion.
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I see soooo many food and beverage brands just pushing out the same old content on social media…nice food pic, talk about how great my brand is, more food pics, maybe a happy kid, throw in a packaging shot or two…predictable, boring, and most importantly …UNEFFECTIVE!
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It’s no secret that a wave of brands have hit Twitter and Instagram in recent years to build their audiences. The big question is, why? Facebook once dominated this space. Brands joined in droves, creating pages and amassing likes. Although it’s still a corporate monolith with advertising dollars that easily outperform every other platform (besides Google), it’s lost nearly all media attention and hype. Facebook has become the rejected childhood toy of the bunch. Everyone still has one, but no one wants to play
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The new IRI New Product Pacesetters report is out. And although their findings indicate mass market is still in decline overall, it seems that smartly targeted markets are growing. And that has more to do with how accurately the opportunity has been forecast than the size (and depth of the pockets) of the company bringing it to market. Small Companies (annual sales under $1 billion) are doing a better job of understanding how consumer wants and buying practices are evolving, targeting an opportunity, then moving quickly to deliver the right product to the right audience at the right time.
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