Opportunities In Using New Technology

By Jim Prevor, Editor-in-Chief, Produce Business

There is little question that marketing becomes more effective as it becomes more specific. That a group such as “baby boomers” spanning almost 20 years should not be homogeneous is hardly surprising and that marketers who don’t segment are bound to be less effective than those who do is almost surely correct.

It is not even clear that age is the most important segmenting that can be done. After all, Bill Gates is a boomer and so is some unknown African-American welfare recipient living in the projects in downtown Philadelphia. One doubts the key variable between these two people is that they have a 10-year gap in between their birthdays.

An even bigger issue when it comes to produce marketing may be the common assumption that because people express an aspiration — healthy living, weight loss, long life, etc. — they will be receptive to marketing messages focused on these issues. Without a doubt, some subset of the population will be influenced by such messages, but our experience is that many will not.

You can see this in other industries as well. Take travel. A correlation of this aspiration for a healthy life would be exercise and fitness, yet resorts and cruise lines find it useful to promote a promise of indulgence and a hint of sex appeal, rather than a strenuous workout.

The question is this: When people say they want to be healthy, do they mean they want to diet and exercise to keep their cholesterol down or do they mean they would like to take Lipitor so they can eat and exercise as they like? Judged by the millions on Lipitor and similar drugs, the weight of evidence leans toward the latter.

Fresh produce marketers have another dilemma; even if marketing for health reasons is persuasive to consumers, it is not clear that fresh can really get the benefit here. Under its purview, the Fruit & Veggies — More Matters program includes fresh, frozen, canned and 100 percent juice. This is because the relevant government authorities have refused to declare fresh more beneficial than alternative forms of produce when it comes to health.

As the quality of frozen food has improved, household sizes have gotten smaller, and everything from world travel to The Food Network has diversified the types of produce people eat. Consumers of all ages are interested in having produce of all types available day after day — without the risk of it going rotten. This leads to increased interest in a frozen product.

We would be cautious in accepting survey results at face value when it comes to consumption. Consumers know that vegetables are the Gold Standard when it comes to healthy eating and so may ‘guild the lily’ in reporting consumption.

One area where Steven Muro is clearly correct is that the produce industry needs a new, more targeted marketing approach. For all of living memory, the primary marketing tool for the produce industry has been the weekly retailer best food day ad or circular.

Yet as newspapers have gotten weaker and more expensive, this tool becomes less effective. Many younger people don’t subscribe to newspapers at all, relying instead on free content on the Internet. Clearly, both retailers and their suppliers need new ways to reach consumers.

In some cases, this is just a matter of switching media — advertising on popular Web sites and blogs in addition to, or in place of, the traditional newspaper ads. With new publications springing up every day optimized for PDAs such as the iPhone or tablets such as the iPad, these opportunities are ever expanding.

Another powerful tool is to use social media such as Facebook and Twitter to interact with the community. Each retailer and vendor can, and should, also have their own Web sites to reach out directly to consumers.

Technology today, though, is creating opportunities that simply didn’t exist before. With the correct code on the produce, the wave of a PDA can bring the consumer into direct contact with a producer and with the producer’s story. Frequent shopper cards become a much more powerful tool when the data gathered leads to special e-mail and in-store offers.

It is silly for produce vendors to try to be Coke or Pepsi, but new technology is allowing individual vendors and their retail partners to reach out to consumers more consistently, more effectively, with more personalized offers. Instead of advertising “all you diabetics out there,” now we can gather special needs information when people sign up for a frequent shopper card and target offers specifically to families with a diabetic or a school-age child living in the household.

We also can far better judge the effectiveness of our promotions if we go to those baby boomers participating in a frequent shopper program and do a controlled experiment. Offer half just a fruit and a lecture on health; give the other half a fruit and some dark chocolate dip with a promise of indulgence — we won’t know the results until the study is done but, survey results notwithstanding, we can’t recommend betting against chocolate.