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There’s so much that goes into developing and documenting the brand strategy for your food business, but if you want to pare it all down to the basics to define or refine your strategy in just a few minutes, this formula will help you get you started.

Today on the Real Food Brands Podcast, host and Brand Strategist Katie Mleziva does just that, with her V+3 C formula. That stands for Vision, Competitor, Consumer, and Company – the four things that can guide your efforts to create a meaningful point of difference for your brand so you can meet your consumers’ needs in a way your competitors can’t, or won’t.

The 5-Minute Food Business Brand Strategy Formula

Vision

Most simply, Vision comes down to a simple question: what outcome are you working towards with your business? You might have an idea of this in your head, but it really makes a difference to formalize it and put pen to paper as reminder for yourself what you’re working towards, and to communicate it to your team. You need to make sure you’re saying it consistently to employees, suppliers, customers—anyone you talk to about your brand.

You can take a Simon Sinek Start with Why approach, going through the circles of why exercise he suggests. You can also simply write a statement to articulate what problem you’re trying to solve, or what the world looks like when you’ve accomplished what you’ve set out to do. Your vision statement doesn’t need to be shared externally at this point, but it’s important to do the work to get you and your team on the same page about your vision for your food brand.

Competitors

While some business owners say they don’t want to focus on their competitors because they want to pay attention to doing what they do best and not get distracted, there are a couple of reasons you need to pay attention to other businesses in your category in the food industry. For one thing, if you’re saying the same thing as all of your competitors, consumers have no reason to choose your brand. What’s more, stakeholders like buyers and investors expect you to know the competitive landscape in your category. You don’t need to chase trends or hop on any bandwagons, but you do need to have market knowledge to show others that you know what you’re talking about and ensure your brand has an ownable, meaningful point of difference.

Consumers

Your ideal consumer audience is at the heart of everything you do—at the end of the day, you need them to choose your product off the shelf and put it in their shopping cart. The key here is to do the work of defining a specific person you’re trying to reach. Katie likes to start with defining a primary, or ideal, audience, but if you have another group of people that love your products you can identify them as a secondary audience. How do you know which is which? Do a quick mental exercise and ask yourself, if I added a new formula or redesigned my packaging, which audience do I want to resonate with the most? Once you have your ideal audience chose, give him/her a seat at the table whenever you’re making decisions.

We used to rely heavily on demographics when it comes to finding our consumers, and while demographics are still a factor, it’s also a good idea to consider psychographics: consumers’ attitudes and behaviors. Pull all these data points into creating a profile of your consumer. So the demographics of age, gender, income and geography can be considered, but often even more important are the psychographics; the things that drive them to make decisions. Where do they live, work and play? What do they like to do for fun? What do they think and how do they feel after they’ve discovered your product?

Every time you make a decision, you can ask yourself: what would my ideal consumer think about this?

Company

When it comes to your own company, you need to define your “unfair advantage,” or what sets your company apart from the rest. For starters, you can look at your product, your process, and your people to think about what combination of things might set you apart. Sometimes we don’t recognize the things that we’re really good at, so it can be helpful to get some outside perspective.

For people, do you or does anyone on your team have some special expertise that sets your company apart? For product, is there something about it like an ingredient or where it’s sourced that is really unique? For processes, maybe you make your product faster, cheaper, or higher quality than anyone else in the industry?

These are not external-facing messages at this point, but rather more of an internal exercise meant to help you understand where your point of difference truly lies. Once defined, you can also look at your brand pillars, brand personality, and brand positioning.

Katie’s #1 tip is to actually put pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard!) and write things down to clearly articulate them.

If you want more on this topic, Katie is working with the Food Finance Institute team to create on an on-demand course Building a Valuable Food Brand on their learning platform www.Edible-Alpha.org. Sign up for her mailing list at realfoodbrands.com so you don’t miss out. We’ll update this link as well when the course is available. Katie also works 1:1 with brand leaders to clearly define and document a brand strategy that will help them set their brand apart and drive growth. You can send her an email at katie@realfoodbrands.com to learn more.

Now, let’s go shake up shopping carts!

In This Episode:

  • What Katie would do if she only had five minutes with a brand.
  • The V and 3 C’s of Brand Strategy for food and beverage companies.
  • Thought starters to articulate your vision for your business.
  • Why a vision statement is so important for your team.
  • Why every brand needs to know what’s going on with its competitors.
  • How to define your primary and secondary consumer.
  • What psychographics are and why they’re even more important than demographics.
  • How to define your company’s unfair advantage.
  • The three P’s that can help you further define what you do best and communicate it to your team and other stakeholders.
  • Why it’s so important to put pen to paper.

Quotes:

“The intersection of the venn diagram where Competitor, Consumer and Company overlap represents how you meet your ideal consumers’ needs in a way your competitors can’t, or won’t.” – @RealFoodBrands

“What are you working towards with your business? This is something a lot of founders and CEOs have in their heads, but it’s not formalized or put on paper.” – @RealFoodBrands

“You want to define your primary consumer so you can figure how to reach them where they live, work, and play, and make sure that your messages and your products are delivering and their needs and pain points.” – @RealFoodBrands

“I always like to look at your Product, your Process, and your People, to think about what combination of things might set you apart.” – @RealFoodBrands

“Something magical happens between your brain and your pen when you’ve got to choose the words to put down for these things.” – @RealFoodBrands

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