Three Tips For Building Your Food or Beverage Brand

Here at Ernest, we work with a wide variety of clients and love helping them find solutions to some of their most difficult packaging challenges. This includes our food and beverage customers like Proud Source, Pizza Port and Smart Cups.

Working with leading food and beverage brands has given us unique opportunities to stretch our minds and skills, and we’ve learned a lot along the way. Here are our top three tips for building a food brand or building a beverage brand:

• Know Your Buyers and Brand to Their Desires
• Differentiate Your Product
• Listen (and Satisfy) Your Customer

1. Know Your Buyers and Brand to Their Desires

Whether you’re appealing to your consumers based on the convenience of your foods, the nutritional value or perhaps the gourmet foodie appeal, you have to key in on your audience.

The first step to building a successful brand is understanding your target audience. Who will buy your products? What are their characteristics, preferences and expectations? Start with some basic market research. You can survey existing or potential customers about their food/beverage buying habits using a tool like Survey Monkey. Demographic studies will help you identify key characteristics like age, gender, income and occupation. Doing a competitive review of your top three to four competitors to see who they’re marketing to can also help you hone in on your audience.

Business intelligence tools can help you segment customers, analyze buyer behavior and identify key trends. If you’re building a new brand, turn to the abundant customer feedback that’s freely available online. Look at customer reviews, social media commentary and other current trends for similar brands and products. Take note of who their customers are, what they’re saying and what they want.

When you have a clear picture of your target audience, you can start to shape your brand to align with their lifestyle, needs and desires, as well as their buying behavior. Making sure your brand resonates with your target audience is the foundation for sales success. This is true whether you’re building a food brand or building a beverage brand.

2. Differentiate Your Product

No matter what you’re selling, your product needs to stand out from the competition. Start by developing unique value propositions. What makes your product different? Does it provide an exclusive health benefit, taste innovation or some other unique element that customers won’t find anywhere else? If you can identify these points of differentiation while you’re developing your product, you’ll be ahead of the game when you’re ready to start selling.

Next, use those value propositions as the foundation to build an effective brand. Your visual brand identity, including your logo, color palette and imagery style, should be unique and memorable. Your brand voice should convey your brand’s personality using the characteristics that matter to you—for example, authenticity, passion and expertise. And your messaging should clearly and concisely tell customers what problem you’re solving for them and why they should trust you.

Once you’ve established points of differentiation for your product and a solid brand platform, you can design a packaging solution that brings it all together. Combine your visual brand identity with clear messaging and value props using colors, fonts, copy and images that tell your brand story and sell your product.

3. Listen to (and Satisfy) Your Customers

One advantage of living in the digital age is easy access to “voice of the customer” data. Whereas in the past, companies had to actively seek out customer feedback, usually by phone or mail, today’s always-online consumers provide it regularly. Feedback often takes the form of online product reviews as well as comments on social media platforms. You can also conduct customer surveys or interviews to find out what they think of your product. What do they like best about it? What other flavors would they like to try? What made them buy it? Are they using your food or beverage product in another dish or recipe?

Going straight to the source not only gives you unprecedented insight into what customers are thinking, it lets you respond immediately. Take what they’re telling you and use it to improve your product, the overall customer experience or both. Responding to customer feedback will also help boost your brand reputation, which is always good for business.

Building a Brand People Can Trust

Consumers have more choice today than ever before. The global economy and online shopping have literally put the world at their fingertips, which means in addition to developing a standout product, you also need to build a trustworthy brand.

Here are some eye-opening stats about consumer trust from a recent PwC survey:

• 91% of customers say they would buy from a company that gained their trust
• 14% of those customers say they would buy significantly more
• 73% of customers say they would buy significantly less if a company lost their trust

Trust is especially critical in the food and beverage industry, because people are putting your product into their bodies. And they’re not going to do that if they don’t trust your brand.

So, how can food and beverage brands earn that trust? Be honest and transparent with your customers about, for example, what’s in your product and where it’s made. Show buyers that you value them by asking for feedback and reinforce your authenticity by sharing real customer reviews. Even the negative ones. In fact, you can turn a negative into a positive by responding to critical reviews, which demonstrates your commitment to excellent customer service.

How Ernest Can Help Your Food or Beverage Brand

At Ernest, we work with food and beverage brands of all shapes and sizes, all across the country. That includes an eco-friendly spring water company, a local brew house that got tapped by Costco and a global freight company that ships perishable goods around the world, to name just a few.

From helping Chef Shamy double their butter production to designing smart packaging for a game-changing energy drink, we love helping food and beverage brands land on the perfect packaging solution to protect their product and build their brand. Whether you’re just getting started with building your food brand or building your beverage brand, or you’re looking to revamp an existing product package to kickstart sales, our team of experts is ready to help. Let’s talk.