• by Karlene Lukovitz  @KLmarketdaily, September 4, 2008

Tapping into consumers' unprecedented interest in health and wellness is the name of the game in food and beverages today, but misfires are all too common. 

"The ground is littered with high-profile efforts that have, to be kind, underperformed--McDonald's salads, Aquafina Essentials and Atkins Bars, to name a few," points out Jayne Eastman, managing director for strategic brand growth consultancy Henry Rak Consulting Partners.

What's going wrong? Many companies make the core error of taking a "generic" approach to launches and marketing that's based on broadly expressed consumer attitudes about health and wellness, rather than on providing a specific solution based on actual behaviors, according to Eastman.

"Consumer attitudes can be very misleading, to say the least," she points out. "For instance, more than 70% express concern about fat, sugar and salt in their diets and claim they try to eat lean meats, fruits and vegetables. Yet, according to the FDA, only 6% actually have healthy diets."

In reality, consumers are "looking for specific solutions that fit within the overall context of their lives--generally things that will make their lives better but not change their consumption patterns drastically," stresses Eastman. Understanding the full context of consumer behavior patterns surrounding health/wellness-oriented F&B products is the key to uncovering the specific need, solution and profitable brand opportunity, she says.

In the absence of that behavioral context, marketers can fall into two traps: Either looking too narrowly at just their own F&B category, or segmenting consumers based solely on attitudes.

"Marketers may understand their existing customers and what they think are their one or two main competitors, but a strategy built on focusing on the brand that's next to yours on store shelves lacks that broader behavioral context," Eastman explains. "If you're selling soup, which is consumed mainly at lunch, your competitors are the full range of products eaten at lunch, whether those are in the dairy case, luncheon meats section or elsewhere. You need to understand the full range of choices from the consumer's perspective."

The next step is precisely articulating existing consumer behavior patterns and the specific benefits being sought, so that consumers can be broken into discrete groups based on those patterns. For example, many consumers eat some organic and natural foods, but for the great majority, these are a small part of overall foods and beverages consumed. "You need to pin down the reasons driving this pattern," says Eastman. "Where is organic an effective alternative for them, and where is it not--and why? What else do they eat and drink, and why?"

A granular understanding of these patterns reveals four factors that are critical to creating or positioning a product that fills a specific need: the variety of benefits that different types of consumers are seeking; how many consumers seek each benefit; the degree of consumer commitment or loyalty to each behavior that must be disrupted; and the product attributes required to "signal" the desired benefit to them.

"The goal is to build a bridge between what consumers say and how they behave," Eastman sums up. "Understanding existing behavior enables us to build that bridge to a new behavior by offering a better solution that answers the need. It gives us tremendous insight into what we need to provide consumers, how easy or difficult it will be to change their behavior, and the real size of the opportunity. It's the key to creating a health and wellness strategy based on a tangible, clearly defined brand opportunity."