brand territory is dead

Shaken up by consumers’ demand for transparency and better eating, the food industry has every interest in seizing on CSR as a lever for marketing differentiation. This is what pleads, in this forum, Benoit Chaix de Lavarene, general manager of Team Créatif.

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Within agrifood companies, CSR (corporate social responsibility) has gradually taken over new territory, the territory of engagement. For a long time the prerogative of Comex, industrial departments and supply chains, CSR has become an unprecedented field of expression and opportunities for marketing teams of national brands (20th century brands).

New agribusiness landscape

Marketers often find themselves struggling with credit and heckling under the combined effect of three distinct events:

• The successful launch of what are known as small brands (some of which no longer are). Uninhibited brands, strongly promoting their product, their production method, their short list of ingredients, their ‘no baddies’ (preservatives, artificial flavors, pesticides, additives …), their eco-design and very often their creators (the brand Michel et Augustin is one of the most emblematic);
• The opportunity for distributor brands, in search of valuation and appropriation of these product proofs, easy to put forward to reach an ever wider audience;
• Increased consumer interest in food that is better for the planet and more balanced and nutritionally more suitable for themselves. Interest all the more real as it is facilitated by access to information via the internet and applications such as Yuka (giving the composition of products) or Siga (processing of products).

Back to the roots, to the land, to production to seduce the consumer. With this new context, marketers have adapted – tribute to them! – by digesting the changes in the world, by understanding (with more or less sensitivity) the new deep expectations of consumers, and by discovering for some or rediscovering for others, the path of the product and its production. Upstream agriculture, recyclability, location, recipe and even eco-design have become their new playground.

By reinventing itself, marketing, once criticized or treated as a faker, has been transformed into adopt a responsibility and a key role in the company. It is deployed with an appropriate tone of voice underlying all of the brand’s specific societal or environmental commitments. His intention? Once again seducing the demanding and sulky consumer. In fact, the brand emerges stronger, haloed with pride embodying the values ​​of its commitment.

Agri-food brands are multiplying experiences. Bonduelle, driven by the conviction that “nature is our future” unveiled last January, the “B Pact ! “, a concrete commitment to the planet, food and people. It is also the Volvic mineral water initiative that created a new packaging, the 8-liter fountain, reducing the amount of plastic per liter (always recyclable) as well as the number and quantity of printing inks. BEL again, supported by the start-up Too Good To Go, which promotes the post-expiry date consumption of its famous cheese portions to fight against waste food. So many experiences that put facts and evidence back at the center of marketing discourse.

Success now revolves around the ability of companies in the agri-food sector to capitalize on this new meaning carried by the product, by tinting it with an exciting, distinctive and sincere story-telling. What could be more boring than a monolithic speech of evidence delivered identically by all offers and competitors! Let’s count on the inventiveness, sensitivity and creativity of the teams so that marketing puts the church back in the center of the village, and restores its image damaged by years of brand-stretching and over-segmentation.

Marketing à la papa is dead, long live the brand engagement territory!