Maintaining your marketing edge means keeping up with – or at least being aware of – consumer buying trends. So, short of doing your own consumer study, a costly and time consuming proposition, where can you get consumer trend information? On-line, of course.
Several websites designed for the grocery industry offer some good up-to-date consumer trend information, much of which can be applied to farm marketing with a little creativity.
Supermarketguru.com features news and information for anyone interested in the food industry: consumers, food producers and marketers alike. Of particular interest is a section specifically for marketers (click on the link on the left-hand navigation bar). This section includes downloadable industry trend presentations, links to free food industry e-newsletters, and other resources.
The site, which is run by national consumer television reporter Phil Lempert, also includes new product reviews and gives visitors the opportunity to rate products. Farm marketers producing or considering producing value-added products, might be able to glean some ideas here and learn what has worked or hasn’t worked for others.
The Food Marketing Institute’s website – http://www.fmi.org/ -- offers some free consumer trend information and industry facts and figures. More in-depth information is available for members only, or can be purchased. The best offering by FMI, however, are two free e-newsletters which digest industry news and trends.
The FMI Daily Lead e-newsletter compiles food related news stories from around the country and overseas. The newsletter, which can be received in either HTML or plain text format, gives a brief synopsis of the news story and a link to the particular newspaper’s website.
“Facts, Figures & the Future” is a monthly e-publication produced by FMI and edited by Phil Lempert that delivers the latest consumer data and trend information. The newsletter can be read on the website or by e-mail subscription.
The United Fresh Fruit and Vegetable Association (http://www.uffva.org/) also offers an e-newsletter, the UFFVA Smart Brief, which is very similar to the FMI Daily Lead. They are both, in fact, produced by a third party service called SmartBrief, Inc.
While the FMI Daily Lead includes news on all aspects of the grocery industry – products, management, labor, non-food items – the UFFVA Smart Brief tends to focus more on produce marketing, though not exclusively. Many of the same news stories appear in both e-newsletters.
The Produce Marketing Association website (http://www.pma.com/) includes plenty of news and information on produce marketing topics and issues. PMA offers an e-newsletter as well. According to the website, the e-mail newsletter is only for employees of PMA member companies, but anyone can read it on the website.
So, now that you know there is plenty of consumer trend information out there, two questions remain: will you have time to read and digest it all and what will you do with the information once you have it?
Finding the time has to be the biggest challenge, but it’s got to be a little easier today with these electronic resources that summarize information and deliver it quickly.
Unfortunately, none of these resources are targeted specifically to farm marketers so it will require weeding through any irrelevant information and being creative in finding the trends that can apply to fresh produce sold on the farm or at a farmers’ market.
But shoppers are shoppers no matter where they shop, and if they are looking for convenience or variety or unusual products, why not find a way to offer them what they are looking for to stay in the marketing game.
Copyright 2004 by Diane Baedeker Petit
This article originally appeared in the August 2004 issue of Growing magazine.
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