Unlocking Customer Loyalty: The Surprising Insight Behind Taste and Health in Marketing Strategy

In the last 24 months, you know, we, like I said, we are on, uh, constantly doing, uh, research, and that's, that's the good news about, uh, this organization. We believe in being a data-driven, uh, group and Uh, my, my background, uh, you know, my first degree is in Management Information Systems. I was, you know, I, I, I'm a logic and data guy to begin with. You know, the, the, in the last 24 months, you know, the, the, the number one thing I would say is that You know, The consumer as it pertains to this category, it's gonna be more of a category answer than a brand answer. The consumer as it relates to this category is open to um uh consuming uh and achieving uh. Uh, we'll say higher states of consumption. But the positioning of that, uh, the, the rationale to drive that is very narrow. It's, it's much more narrow than one might believe the casual observer might believe because of the, the, um, the social hype that, that avocados has certainly achieved over the, over the last several years. You know, at the end of the day, we need to be very, very focused functionally and again, I've got a job emotionally to drive that. But they're very, very focused on the health and wellness, uh, tailwind, um, and that's effectively why they try, why they, they enter into the trial stage, and, um, it's become very, very clear that why they stay is for the taste. So what that means is our approach has to be refined a bit, uh, in terms of when we're talking about the functional, um, uh, drivers for trying to create demand. You know, it starts with A and it continues with B, and that's the biggest, it's not that, it's not that those two. Nuggets weren't known. 7 years ago, we had data that said health mattered, nutrition mattered, and taste. Those are the two biggest drivers. But what we just learned in the last, I'd say not even 24 months, I'd say the last 12 months, frankly, is that the order and uh positioning with which it matters to the consumer is the new information. Right? So, so that means that uh depending on who we're talking to, depending on uh the uh state in which we're talking to them, you know, food service versus retail, are you a consumer that is a light consumer versus a heavy, that will help to determine using those consumer insights how we actually approach our messaging, uh, and then what type of a cadence, if that makes sense.

Let me, let me try to make myself a little clear, so it's my fault. What the most interesting thing that I've learned, I, I think what you fed back was my attempt to try to say what I'm doing with it. Um, the most interesting thing I've learned is, is the simple point that The consumer is Only interested in trying or entering the category from a nutrition lens for the most part. So, so the exception to that would be in the food service category in which they're trying something like guacamole, but generally speaking, in the retail space, which is where we drive most of our sales in terms of fresh avocado. The biggest nugget is that Functionally, nutrition is how you get them to try it. If you're trying to grow the pie, functionally, that's how we're going to do it. Before, we were thinking about it as a kind of a mix of things. We thought about it, well, it's, it's a conglomerate. Uh, it's not only nutrition, we kind of knew that, but there's taste as well, you know, and people love the taste. Well, for tryers, for trial, no, it's about, it's about, let me try this. I've heard there's nutritional facts that You know, can can help me achieve my goals. So, so that's the number 1 learning, the number, the, the 1 B to that would be, they tend to stick around, however. For the taste component. So, if you're talking to repeaters, that's not the angle you want to go with the nutrition space. We haven't had that level of nuance. We've sort of had a more scatter shot or scatter plot approach to this thing, uh, taking all of these functional benefits and throwing them out there. I think with this new, um, insight, we're able to actually put some, some finer touches on how we're going to market and hopefully be more successful. Hopefully, that was a little more clear.

Yeah, you bet. So, uh, the biggest thing I would tell you in terms of the, the changes that we're making is ongoing right now is, uh, a resegmenting of our market basically. So, uh, instead of going and looking at consumption and looking at psychographic as the segmentation model, uh, that we're using, we're, we're also overlaying sort of where they are in the consumption funnel. And so, Uh, and also we're looking at, uh, some qualitative information that we've got related to, um, experience in the category. And so what we're doing is I'm starting to buy media differently than I did before. Whereas, whereas now, I'm asking the media team, I need to see data related to our segment and their uh consumption habits. And where are they consuming data, uh, consuming media. So, one of the things that I used to do is spend a lot of money on TV. Well, I'm gonna do that, but what I found was that very surprisingly, The trial group is more of an over the top platform player versus a linear TV player. We didn't know that. And so now I can direct my uh my, my communications that are specifically trying to get folks to come into the category. In the OTT space versus what I have been doing, which is a linear space. So, that's just a basic example on the media side. We could talk about the creative messaging and some of the things we're doing differently there, but, uh, you know, more salient example may be exactly that. It's literally changing my media by based on the fact that I've been targeting people in the wrong place, in the wrong way, in some cases. OK.