Recipe for brand communication

LET’s admit it. We are all in some ways ‘a foodie mindset’. We tend to form a subliminal relationship with what we eat and drink, that form into eating habits. Food and drinks have varied meaning to our lives which may differ from product to product, brand to brand and person to person. Every day, we are bombarded by messages from marketers and their advertising. Why do some register in our memory, whilst others don’t make a mark?

Because my work involves advising companies on how to build better and lasting brands, a lot of them being food and beverages, it came to a point where I wanted to find out the recipe for food &  beverage  brand  communication. Decode what marketers are doing to make consumers choose a certain brand of dessert or get drawn to certain brand of energy drink or particular soup brand.

Just as the preparation of a meal requires a recipe, marketing food and beverages brands have their own. Broadly, the ingredients fall into three layers – the functional, the emotional and  the expression. Like cooking is an art, the brand-marketers need to evaluate their ideal ingredients, ascertain the interplay between them, and finally figure out the best way to present the product.

Taste/experience
The most fundamental expectation and ingredient for food & beverage brand communication is taste. In many ways, it is one of the basic category expectations. Taste/experience can also translate into the sensorial elements like crispiness, smoothness, sweet, sour, mellow, slow-effect, rapid action, etc. Having said that, the experience is not just physical or purely consumption based; the brand owners seek to bring that experience much before the consumer actually buys it from their retail shelf, creating the desire and in many ways, craving to have one.

Most communication from the H?agen-Dazs’ and Galaxy chocolate ads are largely about an extraordinary surreal world of drool appeal. Oreo does it by ‘Twist-lick-dunk’ attracting kids, and KFC talks about ‘finger licking good’. Snack brands like Doritos & Lay’s do it with their many and new flavours. Irrespective of brand positioning, explicitly or implicitly a food & beverage brand cannot escape creating a drool appeal.

Human connection
Food & beverage brands are as much about the people as it is about the products. It’s certainly a category that has so much of the human truth and the cultural truth attached to it. Take lives of the homemakers, for instance. What she creates in her kitchen  with her  brands shows her love and affection, an opportunity to explore and display her creativity. It’s also her secret weapon at the same time her personal self-indulgence, a source of motivation, agony, and so on. And again, it has varied meaning, emotion and degree of significance to everyone, like bonding, love, affection, empowerment, relaxation, liberation, release, fun, hospitality, even status and social pride.

F&B brands have leveraged these emotions in form of consumer insights and many have established deep emotional affinity with their brands. Take Coke with the ‘open happiness’ brand platform. Their friendship-machine activation is perhaps one of the best examples of people bonding. Knorr empowers women by telling them that ‘every meal is an opportunity’ to eat together; Nescafe is about little everyday moments, whilst Red Bull ‘gives you wings’.

Purity
Purity perhaps is one of the most important attributes that people consider, consciously and subNike Air Max 2017