The idea distilled:
Most Australian marketers place greater focus on conversion and performance marketing than they do on brand building and influencing at the top of the funnel. Our efforts to influence through performance and conversion are creating a sea of sameness.
This shift presents a major opportunity for brands to differentiate by focusing on context and affinity rather than just product information. This report explores how food brands can better connect with consumers by understanding the key drivers of influence and adopting strategic approaches to stand out in a saturated market. It offers a guide for marketers to navigate this new food landscape, ensuring their messaging resonates meaningfully with today’s food-obsessed audience.
If nothing else, four things to fuel your growth…
There are four ingredients that create a consistent formula to optimise Influence in the emerging world of food:
- Be authentic & reliable: Being authentic makes you relevant to occasions. Being reliable means that you won’t disappoint once you’re there.
- Signal relatability: The power of Relatability lies in its ability to act as a gateway to building proximity, trust and stronger affinity with consumers
- Simplify Information: Seeking to limit the thinking people need to do, and facilitating faster, clearer decisions is the key here.
- Be Experts by experience: However, having a deep level of experience and, ideally, conveying this to situations consumers experience in their own food experiences, is highly persuasive.
Some additional food for thought…
- 55% of Australians’ agree that ‘the traditional Australian values regarding cooking, eating and food are changing rapidly’.
- Influence in food is defined by two key factors; 1) the want to create an experience of food that will be right for the right occasion, and 2) the reducing of barriers (time, effort, cost, eating) that create inefficiencies in getting there.
- Affinity is even more important in food than in general decision-making. Affinity accounts of 41% of all influence in food decisions.