Everyone has a different relationship with food, and the smartphone has created an unparalleled opportunity for marketers today to help their potential customers understand the many ways their food can fill a void.
When I walk down the grocery aisle or use my phone to figure out what to order, I crave not only food to satiate my hunger, but information to help me make my food buying and eating decisions easier. I might be looking for something right now. Or I might be thinking of what I want to eat in the future. Either way, consumers like me expect to find the food we’re looking for no matter what moment we’re experiencing.
The empowered consumer
At Facebook, we say that people no longer go shopping. Instead, people are always shopping. And when it comes to food and restaurant industries, people don’t just go out to eat anymore. Smartphones have made it so that people are always thinking about food.
That’s because technology has created consumers who are completely in control and crave product variety at their fingertips. If they see something that’s not relevant to their life, it’s filtered out. And if they’re hungry now, the smartphone makes it so they can move from awareness to purchase in an instant.
Unlimited choice = a new path to your next meal
So how do marketers understand what’s relevant for the empowered consumer? It’s about placing more emphasis on moments beyond when a customer is hungry. To drive loyalty, it’s about creating curated experiences around life’s moments.
Moments like these can align with when consumers are at the early consideration phase. A McKinsey study found that brands in the initial consideration set were two times more likely to be purchased than brands considered later in the decision journey.
And other moments are based around where consumers are at in their own life journeys—millennials becoming parents, Gen Zs in the college dorm or Gen Xers facing an empty nest. Consider who needs to eat your food the most and treat your product like it’s a utility in that person’s life. Crave the need by filling that void.
Phones before forks
From what we’ve seen at Facebook, food marketers in CPG and in the restaurant world who successfully steal share of stomach adapt to today’s mobile-first consumer in three ways:
1. They know what’s important to customers to create relevancy and demand.
2. They use new formats like Facebook and Instagram Stories to help consumers crave in a highly immersive environment.
3. They use evolved marketing strategies that speak a consumer’s visual language.
The food industry isn’t changing; it’s changed
The CPG industry created the entire idea of brand preference, but it’s changing as consumers evolve. If marketers want people to crave a particular food on the grocery shelf or on the menu, it’s time to think about what happens in that short moment between awareness and transaction.
Facebook is the connective tissue in this path. Our platform connects real people at their various life stages to the experiences they want, and the food they crave. Taking advantage of this highly visual platform drives the crave and reaches people during life’s everyday moments, from figuring out what to eat for dinner, what snacks to serve at a celebration or what to stock in their pantry. It’s food for thought that’ll drive your next campaign.
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As head of industry, CPG Food, Matty de Castro builds partnerships with the world’s biggest retail and CPG brands, including Walmart, General Mills and Nestle. He has also led some of Facebook’s earliest shopper marketing programs, laying the groundwork for what most retailers consider table stakes for digital marketing. He joined Facebook in 2008.
