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02.01.2006
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For more Hartman Group articles on FOOD CULTURE, click here...
04.14.2005 "Emerging Trends in Parenting the Healthy Eater: Our Evolving Food Culture"
03.24.2005 "Convenient...and Fresh?: Evolving Food Culture in America"
11.11.2004 "What's for Dinner?: Understanding Meal Fragmentation as a Cultural Phenomenon"
09.23.2004 "Asian Dinner Mixes & the Family Meal: Evolving Food Culture"
08.05.2004 "Snacking Our Way Through the Day: Food Culture in America"
For more Hartman Group articles on SHOPPER INSIGHTS, click here...
02.25.2005 "Moving Beyond 'Need States' and 'Trip Types'"
02.03.2005 "Understanding the At-Home Shopper Experience"
01.06.2005 "5 Myths of Consumer Shopping Behavior"
Click here for an archive of past HartBeat articles
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Subscribe »Brand New Inspiration From The Culture Of Food
...Hint: Zagat Can't Help
In recent years, we've pointed out a disturbing fact facing the brand managers of major companies in the broader food industry: the continued efforts to foster tightly reined relationships between consumers and branded food products and services is leading many into stagnant growth and/or eventual ruin. Clutching tired brands, emblems of a bygone era of eating and drinking, many of these companies can not shake free from the doctrine that consumers somehow "believe" in brands.
In the highly commoditized, highly crowded, world of food and beverage products and services, brands have an enormous difficulty gaining anyone's attention or building much meaning or loyalty at all. Newer niche brands have done a much better job at this but certainly not through "branding" efforts. Most have employed little to no advertising or promotion dollars. They have succeeded, almost entirely, by tapping into ongoing shifts in the cultural landscape of eating at the grassroots...in America's kitchens, car seats and cocktail parties. Often, these upstart brands have focused on small circles of cultural resistance to mainstream eating and drinking practices and have become the focal point of counter-cultural movements (e.g., organic). Successful niche brands have also adapted to mainstream criticism (e.g., "organic food tastes awful") and have even secured a foothold in mainstream grocery stores (e.g., Kashi).
STAY TUNED FOR...  Shopper Insights IIStay tuned when we announce our newest study, Shopper Insights II: How Cultural Occasions Impact Your Business... |
But how can established food companies innovate best to ensure growth and relevance in the shifting landscape of American eating? While innovation by mere acquisition is probably the easiest way, this strategy will never allow established food players to develop the wisdom and insight within the core of their organization. How much has Ford really learned from Volvo?...Minute Maid from Odwalla? Can you see any connection between these trendy acquisitions and the core of the company who executed them?
The key to ongoing innovation in the food industry lies in the humble, ongoing study of everyday life, where food and beverages get consumed, get shared and get talked about. Food is so much more than bundles of nutrition or fuel. Nothing kills a food company's innovation process faster than to view product development like a righteous nutritionist or dietician. The lens of the latter may help some consumers but is ultimately soul-less and detached from the rich experiential signs and symbols attached to food at the site of its everyday consumption. Our myriad approaches to eating in the United States live interwoven with our family lives, our celebrations with friends and colleagues, our work life/pace, our various culinary experiences at home and abroad, our position in the life cycle and so much more. This is what we mean by the culture of food: the panoply of cultural forces impacting the everyday production and consumption food by ordinary folks. Far from the vaunted realms of elite restaurant kitchens in Soho and Seattle is where one finds this humble realm, this realm where so many food brands live or die.
Since the ways we work, raise children, play, seek out new taste experiences and grow old are all undergoing titanic, rapid changes, so the everyday culture of food is also shifting. There are literally hundreds of potential opportunity spaces waiting to be discovered in the everyday dilemmas of food consumption and sharing in America's diverse households.
The obsession with brands in the CPG food and beverage sector, however, leads often to a distracting obsession with products conceived as overly rational delivery vehicles for clear "benefits." How often do you think about the "benefits" of food you eat every day? Eating is not a 401K plan or a medical service...it's sensual...it's real...it simultaneously reflects how we relate to others and also sustains those relationships. Diving deep into the rich cultural and social context of eating in America today can help food industry executives move beyond products and product attributes so that they can develop food experiences that are actually new while helping people solve emerging problems no one in a corporate boardroom or an R & D lab could imagine.
What "problems" are we talking about? They are the food-related problems generated as larger cultural forces shift how we shop for and consume food at home.
- Problems such as the trend toward meal fragmentation due to the increased authority given to children over their food choices
- Problems such as keeping up with childrens' evolving, fickle food and product preferences in working families where parent-child face time is shrinking
- Problems such as provisioning one's car with fresh, health snacks for kids so that they don't have to "wait until dinner" like generations of children before them
Ultimately, it is the detailed study of everyday eating practices, the culture of food, that will yield these and other unmet needs of today, creating latent opportunities for the innovative insertion of food and beverage into everyday lives.
But we don't just cry for change in the food industry and remain rooted in our own past. We too are changing, changing our research methods and adding new tools through which to understand the evolving culture of food in America. We recognize that traditional market research is good for tweaking existing portfolios...but a whole new approach to the business of food requires a whole new approach to research as well.
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