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10.07.2009

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Culture of Food: Zones of Quality

Consumer culture will always redefine your categories

Manufacturers and retailers no longer have exclusive control over the definition of their product categories. This is even truer in industries that are more foundational to human cultural activity (e.g., food, clothing, housing, grooming). Consumer culture ultimately owns the forces that define quality and industry players are but one force among others cooperating in this collective process. While industry has a powerful role to play in establishing quality perceptions within even mature industries and categories, it will always be negotiating among a larger host of players who define what quality is or is not.

The broader host of players (e.g., cultural apparatus) who end up negotiating and transmitting what “quality” means in categories include:

• Mass media
• Specialized category media
• Specialty retailers
• Experts/artisans in a category
• Ordinary consumers
• Manufacturers
• Small-scale entrepreneurs/tinkerers
• Web-based information flow around a category

Hard lessons: Even the megabrand can fall when it believes that it controls culture

The power of historically more recent consumer categories, like cell-phones or personal computers, to generate brands seemingly capable of defining quality for us (not with us) is seductive but not applicable to many consumer-centric businesses today. Apple is an over-used example of this marketing fantasy: the fantasy that brands, on the basis of their trademark alone, can get people to buy almost anything in a category. In reality, analysts make far too much of the Apple trademark today; it is merely a pretty flag on a ship full of breakthrough product experiences.

What is driving Apple today, and what will drive it forever, are compelling product experiences that redefine very immature tech categories (e.g., iPod for the portable music/video player; iPhone for the cell phone/PDA). When Apple failed to produce these kinds of breakthrough innovations in the early to mid-1990s, the trademark suffered, and the company stumbled very quickly. The level of betrayal by Apple enthusiasts was astounding and swift. This was after 15 years of outstanding brand equity, built on the basis of a unique user experience in personal computing. Steve Jobs’ current, ruthless attention to culturally grounded innovation is testament to the painful wounds of this overconfident episode in the company’s history.

As Apple learned the hard way, strategies for growth require constant attention to how the broader consumer culture is continually redefining your categories or, how broader consumer culture is opening opportunities for category redefinition and evolution. Apple came to recognize that consumers buy their innovative products such as the iPod or iPhone to explore their potential as a cultural experience.

Consumer product categories today live within broader cultural categories that continually redefine what quality means or, more importantly, could mean in the mind of creative innovators:

• Cheese is a category in the Culture of Food
• Pants is a category in the Culture of Fashion
• Massage is a category in the Culture of Spas

If you let your face-off competition define what quality cheese is, you’ll never innovate in the cheese category. Or, when you do, it will likely be little more than a me-too innovation in hot pursuit of your competitor. Today, not only do you need to have a firm handle on the product category in which you play, you need to understand it and the cultural apparatus that affects it. Knowing what is happening in the culture of food, for example, is what will give a cheese manufacturer the strong competitive edge to reimagine its portfolio of product experiences.

Understanding food categories through Culture of Food model

Building on our pioneering work in the food category, we have developed a generalized approach to innovation that applies to virtually any consumer category or delivery platform: CPG, retail or service experience.

Our Culture of Food Model is not a generic marketing formula. It is a customizable strategic framework based on a higher order understanding of the general social dynamics of today’s consumer culture. It morphs itself according to the cultural category (or major industry) in which a brand lives. If there is one take-away from this approach, it is that there is no one definition of quality in most consumer categories. Instead, there are multiple Zones of Quality that tend to get redefined over time. Their definitions shift as trends take off from higher Zones of Quality and move outward.

Our proprietary Culture of Food Model consists of three basic Zones of Quality that consumer culture has sanctioned and differentiated in the food category: Instrumental Eating, Savoring and Inspirational Eating.

The three occasions are not mutually exclusive consumer segments. The same consumers often orient themselves differently to food based on the occasion. These occasions are themselves grounded in the culture of food.
Instrumental Eating Eating to get things done	Savoring Engaging in food for the sake of pleasure or entertainment	Inspirational Eating Epicenter of trends; incubator of things to savor in the future

“Instrumental Eating” is when enjoyment originates from the social context of eating rather than the food itself and where quality distinctions external to food categories drive quality perceptions (e.g., nutrition).

“Savoring” is when quality distinctions internal to the category (e.g., fresh) really matter and when enjoyment derives from comparing food experiences within a category.

“Inspirational Eating” is when nuanced quality criteria related to how food is produced dominate (e.g., local, artisanal) and when enjoyment originates from creating or discovering new quality distinctions.

The higher the Zones of Quality a product or brand designs itself for, the more its competitive advantage over its utilitarian rivals. The key here is that our cultural model approach is both modular and customizable to adapt to the true complexity of consumer culture.

Most of us participate in each Zone of Quality depending on the occasion. A lucky few, or unlucky depending on your metric, spend a lot of time in the Inspirational Eating Zone. The Savoring Zone is where, today, many consumers make things from scratch and buy ingredients to do so. And, it is also the Zone where they go out to nice restaurants to enjoy food for its own sake, explore new kinds of food/new ways to cook their own favorites. Savoring, after all, is a lot easier when you haven’t had to slave over the meal.

Our Culture of Food model approach is best seen as a strategy generator for competitive advantage. Today, the fact that most CPG packaged food sales lie in the Instrumental Eating Zone is an artifact of historical circumstance: the relationship between CPG companies and their retail customers. We believe many of today’s food retailers are several years behind the quality desires of their core customers. The opportunities for innovation across categories are astounding but require extensive, creative collaboration between consumer culture, retailers and manufacturers that is not typically part of today’s strategic platforms.

To learn more about how the Culture of Food approach can be applied to your brand, please visit our World of Occasions website: http://www.occasionbasedmarketing.com/

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