Healthy Food Marketing: Personalization Is Key
What all consumers, but especially the valuable health-conscious ones want most these days is personalization. They want to feel like marketers understand them, and more importantly listen to and appreciate them. But attaining this aspect of personalization is growing more and more difficult for healthy food marketing as the health food category grows. So, how do you make a product feel personal, while still appealing to the masses? There are some companies that are doing an incredible job, and are really leading by example in showing us where brands are headed.
Two MIT grads, Richard Yau and Joe Laurendi started the company Bright Cellars. It’s a wine club that matches each consumer to a wine they are sure to love, based on answers they give about their taste and lifestyle preferences. The ten-question quiz determines of what kind of wine will be sent each month. The club not only feels exclusive but also feels incredibly personal because Bright Cellars gets to know their consumers very well at the outset of the relationship. So not only does Bright Cellars know what kinds of wine their consumers would like, they have clues into what other kinds of ways they can deepen their connection.
A great example of this kind of personalization in healthy food marketing are the health and wellness subscription boxes that are popping up everywhere. Anyone can get the latest and greatest in wellness, with a very personal touch, delivered right to their doorstep each month. Health-food snack subscription boxes like Graze, are incredibly popular right now. Graze was originally founded in London, and since launching in the U.S at the end of 2013, it has already doubled its U.S. subscriber base. How has it become so popular? A huge part of that is how easy their website Graze.com is to use, and how personal it feels. There are lots of very specific categories to sift through so you can choose your own snacks, plus, you can rate snacks Graze has sent you, which helps the Graze team understand your preferences. Consumers like this so much that according to an article on Market Watch, more than 15,000 new ratings are generated per hour! Beyond these ratings, you can ”trash” certain ingredients on the website, so Graze knows if there are certain things you can’t or don’t wish to eat. And if that weren’t personal enough, Graze has a whole section on the snacks they think you’ll like that you have yet to try.
Delivering personalized products to a consumer’s door is certainly a way to make them feel special, but that’s just scratching the surface. Companies like Bright Cellars and Graze that are really trying to get to the point where they can anticipate what their consumers will want. And that explains why these brands have been so successful at their healthy food marketing. They are giving consumers exactly what they want…not just to feel special, but more importantly, to feel understood. That is the heart of every relationship, after all – so why should marketing be any different?
