Some areas of the marketing messages in the USA are a little startling on arrival – No GMO, No Growth Hormones, No Antibiotics (meat in particular).
To a UK consumer with the due diligence and technical standards of the UK supermarkets behind me I found these initially disturbing. Yes, the UK has all these standards – but we don’t shout about it because it’s a given. Clearly that is not the case here. Having seen the size of the chicken breasts that don’t make these claims in some of the more discount retailers, I wouldn’t want to cross the chicken in a dark alley! They are possibly twice the size of the average British chicken breast.
In produce however some of the marketing messages are done brilliantly here – for example at the start of the grill season (BBQ to the British) portabello mushrooms are renamed sliders (this is American for burgers), with the intention of inspiring the consumer to usage. Large bowls of prepped salad, with protein etc, are clearly labelled as dinner solutions. The much stronger presence of brands (more on that another time) to a certain extent disrupts the big retailer brand teams’ drive for homogenisation and consistency of design and leads to greater variety and innovation. They are not afraid to throw out prescriptive ideas, where often ideas or straplines in UK retail can get diluted to ‘great in soups and salads’.
There is a real desire to inspire, particularly at the premium end of the market with recipes, one-liners and also much more information about your product, storage and usage. There is a reticence I feel perhaps in the UK that telling your consumer the portabello mushroom is for burgers will mean that it puts off consumers from stuffing them, slicing them in stir fry, casseroles or tagines, but here they give the consumer more credit than that it appears. There are also, of course, plenty of packs that also just put the bare legal minimum.
Overall the breadth of information delivered to the consumer sits in stark contrast to a more standardised UK retail market. Where done well they are bolder and genuinely inspiring – I had never tried kiwi, strawberry and chicken salad before or apple slices and peanut butter as a snack. I have BBQ-ed portabellos for a burger in the past, but I certainly did it again a few times this summer too.
