Food and drink branding in 2021: 5 trends to watch

In today’s fast changing economy, marketing has taken a new dimension completely. Combined with the rapid leaps in the use of social media on one side and an economy thats unstable and challenging, brands have to adjust to the new landscape and adopt a new strategy that remains effective.

The first step is to look around and accept the reality of the challenge at hand and then begin to create marketing plans to grow the business.

Let’s take a look at the challenge at hand for today’s brands and businesses when they make their marketing plans.

1. The fast changing digital landscape

The digital landscape alters itself everyday and businesses have to ensure they stay abreast of the trends. It is an opportunity to connect directly with the consumers. Your website and social mediums become a direct bridge to the consumer and without a clear strategy you may be losing a major opportunity to get valuable ROI on market spend and effort. In a place where today 250 billion pictures get uploaded on face book and 100 hours of video content is uploaded onto youtube on a daily basis, it’s equally challenging to cut through the clutter and stand out amongst the 2.3 billion active social media users.

2. Instant Customer reactions

It is now equally important that content that bears your marketing message is engaging and emotionally connects with your consumer. Content that has virality can potentially reach millions in minutes and at a fraction of your traditional marketing mediums reach targeted consumers. You can make your consumers your brand ambassadors and allow them to get the message of your brand out. Knowing what connects and what is the voice of your brand that stays consistent is equally as challenging. Remembering that your consumers can now have a voice to express themselves can be a double edged sword that needs a clear plan to counter negative sentiments as well. Brandwatch statistics says 78 percent of people who complain to a brand via Twitter expect a response within the hour.

3. Finding talented marketers

Companies today require personnel who can roll their sleeves and get deep into their consumers mind space to create effective strategies. Finding the right people who can think emotionally, keep a close tab on trends, convert these to plans and execute them seamlessly, then monitor and change tact if the landscape changes is difficult to come by and then retain. The average age of a new age marketer has dropped significantly and understanding that typical Cvs need not uncover the talent needed today is a challenge to be considered. Companies today need marketers who can think out the box and not opt for traditional medium only.

4. Knowing the ROI of your efforts

With fast shrinking budgets and reducing profitability, companies are always looking at ways to cost cut. Typically marketing tends to take a hit in these scenarios. The challenge is to be able to balance and remember that customer acquisition and retention need to be one of the most important agendas for an organisation. In the hurry of budget slashing, its important that companies understand that marketing is an investment and not a cost. Traditional mediums cant be ignored and need to go hand in hand with new age digital mediums.

5. New disruptive business models 

Organisations have to remember that marketing is as much about reinventing yourself as a business and creating demand. When companies feel they are on autopilot and let go of looking from a consumers mind set, new disruptive businesses can make you go belly up. Airbnb has over 50 million users and has changed the way people travel. Consumers are changing how they stay when they travel and the business doesn’t own a single property. Uber has rapidly changed the taxi businesses creating a challenge for traditional companies, What’s app has eaten into the share of texting revenue from telecom businesses. Netflix, Amazon, Apple music etc are examples of new business models that are shaking up traditional businesses.

Marketers need to study the pain points of consumers and question if there’s an easier way to fulfil solutions for these.

Here are a few interesting facts that marketers need to keep in mind while drawing out plans for their brands. These examples provide ideas for opportunity for marketing. There are many more mediums like these. 

Fact

Google processes over 100 billion searches every month.

Opportunity 

SEO, ad words etc, trend analysis,

Fact

Facebook adds over 500,000 new users every day and 6 new profile very second. There are over 40 million active small business pages.

Opportunity 

A community to directly reach end consumers and target them specifically to tastes and demographics and engage

Fact

There are over 1.3 billion twitter accounts and the average twitter user has 280 followers. Instagram has over 3.5 billion likes very day.

Opportunity 

To create influencers who can become your voice and endorse your brand further

Fact

Here are 3.25 billion hours of video watched each month and only 9% of small businesses use it.

Opportunity 

An under utilised medium to market your brand through a preferred format for users.