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01.18.2006

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For more Hartman Group articles on FUNCTIONAL FOODS, click here...

06.23.2005 "Who Put the Function in Functional Foods?"

03.31.2005 "How Consumers Make Sense of Functional Foods"

01.27.2005 "Redefining Our (Consumer) Understanding of Functional Foods"

For more Hartman Group articles on HEALTH CLAIMS, click here...

06.16.2005 "Why Selling on Health Benefits Alone May Be a Losing Proposition"

06.02.2005 "What's on the Label?: How Consumers Evaluate Product Labeling"

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Cracking The Code Of Functional Foods?: language Is Your Key

All too often, we speak with clients who want to know how to market "functional foods" before they have really stopped to consider 1) what the phrase means to consumers and, more importantly, 2) what "functionality" they are talking about.

The first issue is easily dealt with. No consumer uses the phrase "functional food." It is purely an industry term; one often most attractive to mainstream CPG food and beverage companies trying to enter the health and wellness arena with little or no prior experience marketing to wellness consumers.

The second issue is more complicated but absolutely critical to cracking the code of functional foods. It boils down to this: the persistent misunderstanding about how consumers interpet "fortified, or nutritionally enhanced, foods" vary differently from foods/beverages that promise them a whole new kind of health functionality that neither their ordinary diet nor drugs currently offer them.<

But the most acceptable functional food concepts are ones that employ non-medicinal language to make their claims.

INDUSTRY TERM:	CONSUMER TERM:
DHA	Smart fats
Flavonoids	Antioxidants
Phenylalanine	Amino acids
Alpha-linolenic acid	Fatty acids

Avoiding drug-like language becomes tricky, because the science backing up the functionality of functional foods is linked to scientific terms and jargon - the native tongue, so to speak, of conventional (i.e., pharmacological) medicine. This scientific claims dialect has also been true in the supplement world for years, though not rigorously applied due to the lack of regulation.

But the supplement world has always had a different dialect to use, when it wants, the dialect of natural and traditional healing. This dialect is less about proof than persuasion, less about science than about faith and desire. It is also about attaching the folk wisdom of traditional cultures to the eating experience. The language of natural healing is much better suited to frame the addition of strange health substances into the diet of ordinary consumers. This dialect works best with more sophisticated wellness consumers who are already altering their diet to address long- and near-term health issues.

The Magic Bullet

The problem, we find, is that too frequently, food companies can't resist using quasi-pharmacological language and concepts to offer up a "magic bullet" functional food. The magic bullet approach to functional foods simply does not connect with how consumers think of food, although it certainly connects with how they think of pills, whether drugs or specialty supplements.

In sum, functional food manufacturers spend too much time specifying the "great function" of their functional food and using clinical, drug-like language to promote it. This sends most consumers scampering back to the OTC or supplement aisles where "things make so much more sense."

From research we've done here at The Hartman Group, we suggest two important consumer-centric operating assumptions that should inform new functional food development and marketing:

Mainstream consumers don't think of food as doing anything other than preventing hunger, offering basic nutrition, providing energy and celebration. Its relation to disease prevention and near-term health condition management - despite everything we hear about the benefits of healthy eating - is not direct in the mind of the consumer (with the exception of a few very advanced health and wellness consumers). Food simply doesn't play in the "serious condition" space in the same way that pills do. When things are going south with the body, and a lot is at stake, people run to their doctors and to heavy duty drugs.
American consumers are culturally predisposed to thinking of fairly immediate relationships between cause and effect, e.g., the hammer drives the nail. Complex notions of causality are simply not demonstrated in our everyday religious or cultural orientations. When products are positioned as drug-like magic bullets, that broad cultural predisposition translates into an expectation that is easily disappointed. If functional foods have any effect, it is usually not particularly obvious or immediate...creating a big marketing problem. Promises of the magic bullet often go unfulfilled, and product use quickly wanes. In one sense, there is a strong analogy with yo-yo dieters here.

Taking the above into account, we suggest the following strategies for new functional foods relating to market space and benefit claims:

STRATEGY 1 - Market Space:
Don't push functional foods to compete in the spaces
where pills are strongly dominant.

Food companies would do well in targeting health conditions (and regions of the body) where the more alternatives, the merrier. These are experimental spaces where there is no dominant product (i.e. NOT well-established spaces such as heart health, where symptoms are treated with prescription drugs and/or surgical procedures). In these spaces, functional foods need to be presented as unique tools for managing health and wellness, which consumers can conceptually separate from OTC, VMHS and pharmacological products.

To do this, we would suggest grounding new functional products in the domain of natural healing, something that no drug company has ever done, by dimensioning product attributes so that...

Positive health characteristics of functional additions to foods are grounded in the natural world, not chemical pharmacology (using this latter legitimizing tactic simply reminds consumers of pills and drugs, which seem odd in the world of food)
New functional products are seen as enhancing the naturally medicinal properties of existing foods - adding more probiotic cultures to yogurt); don't add probiotics to cereal - then it becomes medicinal food. (Exceptions to this are products with long history and cultural acceptance of functional additions, e.g. few will take exception to orange juice with added calcium.)

These steps would reduce the competitive set to VMHS, where there is less mainstream consumer awareness (than OTC and pharmacological products) and prices are relatively high - a far more "open" competitive space.

We'd also specifically recommend focusing on anatomical regions where OTC drugs don't work that well (or are unpleasant or inconvenient), and where experimentation is simply high, such as lower GI digestion, immune function and mental alertness. None of these regions are ones where any player has an exclusive claim to efficacy, either in the world of drugs or the world of supplements. Although pill taking is always easier, in these cases, than eating a food, functional foods targeting these health spaces could enhance the delivery experience of valuable active ingredients and add another weapon to consumers' at-home health arsenal.

STRATEGY 2 - Conditions & Benefit Claims:
Using subtle benefit claims is the way to go.

Though this may sound like an odd piece of advice in marketing, present benefit claims...vaguely. Think: "promotes heart health" vs. "lowers cholesterol." Here we are not saying to be deceptive or untruthful; what we are saying is to be utterly truthful. And here...less is more. There really is a clever art to allowing your consumers to impute functionality or efficacy where you didn't really know it existed. By being subtle, yet powerful, in one's claims language, you can avoid the risk of deceptive health claims while allowing consumers to impute benefits. The problem with scientific claims assessment is that, translated too directly into marketing language, it may narrow consumer attention too much and miss a critical touchpoint, unrelated to the science behind the functional food in question.

By being more subtle in terms of structure-function claims, companies can, first of all, relieve themselves of the legal and marketing risks of claiming too much drug-like efficacy just to get some attention. Second, this counter-intuitive approach allows them to tap into the primary symbolic driver of the natural supplement world, which is simply faith and the potent desire to find an alternative solution where none may really exist (e.g., the common cold). Airborne's rise to supremacy with their "effervescent health formula" in the world of cold mitigation is the most stellar example of this religious-like orientation. Glucosamine, chondroitin and echinacea have taken off as supplements, for example, even though studies on their efficacy have resulted in mixed conclusions. Why? Because consumers rarely do any efficacy research on supplements. They simply want to believe in the kinds of broad joint health functionality they are associated with. They see it as a way to forestall the impending doom of surgery or "giving" up their active lifestyle.

So, ultimately, we believe that it is critical that you don't over-define or over-promote the benefits of functional foods and come off pretending to compete with OTC or prescription drugs. In the world of food, consumers aren't likely to believe overly efficacious or specific claims, and won't follow recommended product uses closely enough to "prove" specific benefits to themselves. A forward-thinking company might even release a product onto the market and perform consumer research to gather imputed functionality from consumers. Let consumers, in other words, devise some elements of your marketing plan for you in functional foods, and things will go a lot more smoothly than devising a purely top-down, drug-like approach.

A Dys-Functional Food

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