Marketing Strategies of Food Service
Food service businesses have the marketing advantage of offering a product that virtually everyone uses every day, several times a day. But consumers are inundated with ads and information about food products, making it difficult to stand out in a crowded field. Successful food service marketing strategies first engage customers through the senses, grabbing attention using taste, smell or color, and afterwards providing customers with additional reasons to buy, such as price or healthfulness.
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Sampling
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We experience food first and foremost in terms of flavor, so effective food service marketing strategies involve encouraging customers to taste product samples. Grocery stores regularly stage or host product demos, offering customers small samples to taste. Farmers' market vendors reach customers in a similar way, and manufacturers of wholesale food service products offer samples to restauranteurs at trade shows and wholesale shopping outlets. Mrs. Fields, the cookie mogul, launched her cookie empire by feeding samples to pedestrians on the street outside her store.
Display
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The better food looks, the greater the chance that customers will buy it. We experience food viscerally, so it is far more effective to present a picture of a food service item or display the item itself rather than to simply describe it verbally. Food uses a wealth of colors and textures that can engage customers visually and tempt them to taste. Food service marketing uses this strategy by using packaging that enables customers to see the product, and also arranging the food attractively inside that package.
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Aroma
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Aroma can weigh as heavily as flavor in a food item's appeal. Food marketing uses aroma by cooking items on site whenever possible in order to draw customers through olfactory stimuli. The sandwich chain Subway deliberately used this strategy when choosing to bake bread at each of its locations rather than bringing in bread that was already baked. The coffee chain Starbucks scaled back considerably on marketing its breakfast sandwiches after discovering that the smell of the food sometimes overpowered the smell of coffee.
Other Benefits
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Many types of food offer benefits that are not specifically sensory, but nonetheless provide valuable selling points. Natural foods stores specialize in marketing foods with health benefits, and even many mainstream food companies enumerate health benefits on their products' labels. Other food manufacturers market their products by appealing to the ethical or environmental sensibilities of their customers. Organic and locally produced products are marketed on the basis of all of these selling points, and Fair Trade products promote the higher prices that Fair Trade wholesalers pay to producers.
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References
- Photo Credit food image by Ergün Ã--zsoy from Fotolia.com
