How To Promote Food Without Talking About Food

Product quality, peer reviews, price, and seller reputation—all these are important factors that consumers look out for when making a purchase decision. But when the competition is between brands that are equally effective in showcasing these attributes, marketers might have to step up their game a bit in order to stand out.

In the food and beverage industry, for example, marketers need to rely on more than just the five senses to create marketing campaigns that resonate on a deeper level with their audiences.

Sure, some go-to formulas have made brands big money (e.g., pizza ads showing the “cheese-pull” trick, fried chicken ads highlighting the sound of crispy chicken skin, and coffee ads signaling the sweet aroma of that cuppa joe)—but to stay in the game for long, marketers need to build stronger connections with their audiences and give them more reasons to stick around.

How? By taking your product away from the spotlight and putting the deep-rooted interests of your consumers first. How exactly? By co-creating useful and relevant information with partner publishers and content creators. In short, through sponsored content.

Here’s a look at some of the most successful food and beverage campaigns we helped run at GetCraft:

Appeal to emotions

In the Philippines, food is a highly emotional subject—as it is often seen within the context of family and friends. It’s not just about what you eat; it’s where you eat and who you eat it with. In a lot of Filipino families, the most important interactions and conversations still happen during meal time.

Remember the iconic “Karen” TV ad by McDonald’s that aired in the early 2000’s? You probably still remember Karen, her grandfather who kept calling her Gina, and how the whole story made you feel. By appealing to the soft spot Filipinos hold for our grandparents, McDonald’s was able to plant itself in the hearts and minds of its customers.