How Brands Can Help Shoppers Overcome Cooking Fatigue
Previously on our blog, we discussed a few fun ideas to help people beat their cooking fatigue. If you missed that, go back and give it a read! But just to sum it up, cooking fatigue is characterized by a lack of interest and creativity with home cooking often due in part to cooking at home more frequently than one is used to. For individuals, the best way to get out of a cooking rut is to mix-up your normal routine. For example, trying new recipes or setting challenges for yourself. Now, 8 months into social distancing, more and more people are experiencing this phenomenon. For brands, however, this could be a great opportunity to start forming bonds with your customers to help them overcome cooking fatigue.
It’s no surprise that interacting with consumers is a vital marketing strategy for most brands. Having a strong social media presence allows you to directly interact with your core customers. It also is the perfect platform to share tips and ideas to help shoppers get out of their cooking fatigue. Here are a few marketing strategies for brands to help solve a common issue amongst consumers during the COVID era:
- Share interactive recipes – Okay, hear us out. We know that this is a very common social media strategy, and most brands have already been doing it for years. But the key difference now is making recipes that are accessible to a wider audience. For example, recipes that don’t involve complicated ingredients or tools/appliance. Start by making a series of polls on either Facebook or Instagram stories and ask your followers what type of recipes they are interested in. Have them select the ingredients from your line of products. Give them options on the types of dishes they enjoy. Ask them how they like recipes to be presented (i.e. video, text, or through images). By getting them involved in the production of recipes you can ensure that you are creating content that is valuable to your followers. Take polls like this every few weeks, and keep updating your content to reflect what your core customers want to see.
- Partner with other brands – Another great way to inspire shoppers, and reach a larger audience, is to work with other brands to develop recipes or complimentary content. This could be as simple as creating two recipes that follow a similar theme, creating two elements that make up one dish, or something more involved like using products from both brands to create one dish. This is a great strategy because you could potentially reach twice as many people. And, if you partner with a brand with a similar demographic, you are reaching potential customers who would most likely be interested in your brand.
- Curate consumer experiences – Meal kits are a huge trend in the industry right now. Subscriptions such as Blue Apron or Hello Fresh offer curated experiences to consumers that forces them to get out of their comfort zone and try something new. Now, creating experiences such as those may not be accessible to all brands, but there is something we can learn from them. Pairing your products together to create a recipe is a great way to inspire your customers. This can be done in many different ways. The easiest way would be to highlight these pairings through a social media campaign, or if you have a DTC eCommerce site you could bundle products as a meal-starter kit.
Similar to our previous blog, the biggest takeaway for brands who want to inspire their customers is to think outside the box. Unconventional pairings and marketing strategies may be a risk, but they could pay off in the long run. Cooking fatigue is an incredibly annoying experience for many shoppers, but brands have all the right tools and resources to help them get out of their rut.
To learn more about curated meal experience, listen to our latest podcast with Carley Sheehy of Global Grub, who create international-inspired meal kits that help teach consumers how to cook new and exciting dishes.