AUGUST 7, 2008

Yippy Skippy!

Blame it on my Italian-American upbringing where family wine is made to our liking in my grandfather’s garage and using Prego is like using a four-letter curse word, but if there’s one thing I take seriously, it’s food.  I realized this on a deeper level when it came to food shopping and making decisions on buying generic versus brand name products.  No matter the cost (to an extent) I rarely compromise when it comes to food products.  For example, lunch meats and cheese always come from the deli counter, never prepackaged, and I’ll only buy the Skippy brand of peanut butter.

For most consumer products, I never considered myself loyal to any particular brand.  I can’t tell you what kind of toothpaste I use other than it starts with a “c,” I buy clothes from stores with sales and the right fit, and I purchase gas usually from the most convenient station.

But food, food makes a difference.  For me, food more than serves a nutritional purpose.  Preparing it can be an art and eating it (especially around the holidays) can bring much joy to your life.  And when it’s unsatisfactory the experience of food and the activities surrounding it are spoiled as well.  Any food marketer who knows this and reaches me on this level may have a chance of selling me their product.  The key here is the ability to know these small individual details about a consumer’s buying preferences.  Sure, Google can track my searches and Facebook can record my applications and border my email and profile pages with related ads, but identifying what I’m interested in is only half the battle.  Why I’m interested is the more important question to answer.  This requires what we at TMG Strategies call Deep Listening. 

Want to know what consumers really care about?  It’s going to take more than tracking their search histories.  There are personal, tangible, reasons why I purchase what and how I do and those reasons exist for every consumer – getting to the bottom of them, making the extra effort to truly listen to what consumers want and why they want it will ultimately sell the product.