As a marketer and consumer, you understand the modern grocery store woes. Gone are the days when simple grocery store visits required minimal effort and thought. Now cereals have a designated aisle, and just scanning the hundreds of cereal options alone can quickly consume your evening. Low-fat, fat-free, or gluten-free? Weight loss or protein-packed? The options are endless, and no product decision seems clear-cut.
Most food purchases are trivial choices, which makes the decision-making process so much harder. Whether consumers choose the flakes, puffs, or clusters doesn’t really matter, and there’s not always a clear advantage to buying one over the rest. And the contemplation cycle continues.
SEE ALSO: Rebuilding that Emotional Connection with Your Consumers
“Choice choke,” or the paralyzing effect of too many options, has not only created a problem for consumers, but also for food marketers. Customers try to make a product decision but they become so lost and overwhelmed that it turns into a confusing self-esteem issue. To avoid the negative, choking feeling, customers skip the purchase altogether or make an irrational game-time decision out of fatigue.
Fortunately, you can dissolve customer anxiety and lead shoppers to your product faster without resorting to expensive aisle endcaps or a loud product design. You just need to tap into customers’ desire for context by creating a sense of place.
Override Choice Choke With a Sense of Place
Choice choke happens when customers have too many sensible choices. But when you build on your product’s sense of place, you create context that validates its quality and authenticity and differentiates it from the others. This powerful connection is evident in the rise of local food’s popularity. A sense of place establishes a personal attachment that helps consumers explore flavors and tastes in a productive way, instilling confidence in their decision and the anxiety melts away.
On the surface, food marketing might appear to be about the product, but it’s all about the context. Here are three ways food marketers can use a sense of place to relieve customers’ anxiety and channel that energy into a positive association:
1. Leverage your geographic equities.
Every product has some kind of regional equity — something that connects it to geography and maintains an emotional connection with the local population. Take the New England clam chowder soup, for instance. When a manufacturer who’s loud and proud from Arizona markets his clam chowder soup, it won’t lend the same credibility as a can from Boston touting an authentic 100-year-old recipe. When consumers see these two side-by-side at the grocery store, they associate the Boston version with longstanding quality and trust, and the right choice becomes obvious.
2. Advertise regional ingredients and flavor profiles.
Beyond regional associations, you can also set your brand apart with unique ingredients and flavor profiles. Just look at the marketing and development of wine brands in the U.S. Thanks to advertising and community efforts that present its best face to consumers, Napa Valley wine has grown into a highly desirable and unique product. This long-term effort has given Napa Valley grapes and wineries a brand by association, defining a clear sense of place for wine consumers. “Wine from Ohio” simply doesn’t have the ingredient reputation to make the decision easy for a customer.
3. Create urgency with seasonality.
You can take ingredient advertising a step further by playing up your product’s unique seasonality. For example, in parts of Texas in the late summer, you can’t spit without hitting a Hatch chile stand somewhere along the side of the road, but because of this chile’s limited seasonality, it’s incredibly popular during those certain months. You can go into a Whole Foods Market during this season and find Hatch chile anything — smoothies, cakes, and pasta — providing a spur-of-the-moment, short-lived choice that consumers are relieved to make.
SEE ALSO: Strengthen Brand Equity through Transparent Label Communications
Every advertiser understands the role emotion plays in consumer decisions. Establishing a sense of place can create positive associations and authentic emotional connections to your product, giving it an instant stamp of approval. Make the decision simpler for consumers by embracing your product’s regional ties, ingredients, and seasonality, and they’ll thank you with repeat purchases.
Images: Alan Strakey