By Theresa Goffredo
Herald Writer
Farmers looking to sell to niche markets may want to take note of these seeds of change.
No.1 : Almost everyone nowadays is doing something to be healthier.
No. 2 : More and more of these health-conscious consumers are buying organically grown food.
That health-conscious group even includes people with "messy lives" — those folks who run three times a week but smoke on the weekends, consultant Laurie Demeritt said Wednesday in Mount Vernon.
"They are getting healthy, but they also still buy beer and chips," Demeritt said.
How to market to this new consumer was the question posed during a daylong workshop designed to give growers new information about what consumers are buying and how sellers can better develop product brands.
Demeritt is president of The Hartman Group, a Bellevue consulting and market research firm. The group has a particular interest in health and wellness markets, and has been following the trends in organically grown foods for the past six years.
What The Hartman Group’s research has shown is that consumers are "active and engaged" in buying organic. In 2001, consumers took a bite out of the $500 billion in retail grocery sales when they spent more than $7 billion on organic food.
And most of those shoppers — about 47 percent — bought their organic and health food at large retail grocers as opposed to health food stores — 14 percent — or farmer’s markets — 12 percent.
The majority of that organically grown food was fruit and veggies from the produce aisle. But consumers are also showing trends of buying organically grown poultry and dairy at a higher frequency.
Yet, the market to sell health food and organically grown food is still largely untapped, Demeritt said.
At least 60 percent of consumers are in the midlevel bracket when it comes to buying healthier. That means they are active in a wellness program, but still mainly rely on their partners when it comes to what healthy foods they choose, Demeritt said.
And these midlevel health-conscious consumers want convenience, and they want experts to assure them of what to buy.
"The experts don’t have to be doctors," Demeritt said. "When Oprah holds up a product, it goes gangbusters."
To create products Oprah would back, sellers must create a strong emotional attachment. Health food falls into that emotional category because consumers trust that healthier food will make them feel healthy and look more vibrant.
Bill Shepard, a principal of Mind Garden Group in Anacortes and former director of marketing for Chex cereals, said marketing a product means creating a relationship between the consumer and the brand.
"You want people to think of a brand as that interesting person you’d like to have dinner with," Shepard said.
One way to do that is to develop a perceived quality about the product. Shepard used the example of a seller who couldn’t sell his organic carrots. But once the seller added a story about the carrots to his advertising campaign — who grew them and how — the carrots flew out of the store.
"You need to indicate why the product is special and better, and you need to add that information, because the consumer won’t do it," Shepard said.
To market their agricultural products more successfully, Skagit County growers have developed their own logo. The intent of the logo, called "Skagit’s Own," is to give consumers an opportunity to support local growers, which number some 700 farms in Skagit County.
"You need to give retailers stories that help the product stand out," Shepard said.
You can call Herald Writer Theresa Goffredo at 425-339-3097
or send e-mail to goffredo@heraldnet.com.
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