Marketing to Linda

Marketing to Linda. I’m Greg Martin with today’s Line On Agriculture.

Any business needs to know who their customers are and there is one special customer. That is the target. The United States Potato Board has named their target customer, Linda. Kate Thomson, Senior Research Manager with the Sterling Rice Group.

THOMSON: Getting to know the audience means getting to know your opportunities for increased consumption. And we knew quite a bit about Linda before however in the past year we have done a ton of research to better understand who she is, how she thinks about cooking, how she thinks about dinner and most importantly how she thinks about potatoes.

The additional research has helped to refine who and what Linda is.

THOMSON: Beyond just being a woman with kids which is how we defined Linda before, she’s a woman with kids that likes to cook, is good at cooking, enjoys looking for new recipes, she’s pretty food involved. She’s also fairly traditional. She’s doing a lot of the same things her mom did when she was a kid, she’s buying a lot of the same brands and her own family now influences what she’s doing at the grocery store.

By getting a better idea of who the target consumer or “Linda” is the USPB can then direct their marketing efforts to that person.

THOMSON: We know that when she’s looking for foods for dinner she’s looking for something her whole family is going to like. That, above health and convenience is most important. In addition she wants to feel good about what she’s serving so that’s not to say that health is not important at all but were talking about a sort of prioritization here.  First, they’ve got to like it. Then it’s got to be healthy but not so specific about what’s healthy. Healthy to Linda is fresh, natural and unprocessed.

While the healthy aspect is important it is not so specific to fiber content or vitamins and minerals.

THOMSON: Finally, this idea of being able to get it on the table in a reasonable amount of time. That’s really important for most people – important for Linda but relatively less important. She’s have a lot of pretty traditional dinner situations in which you hear so much about peoples lifestyles changing, getting quicker and people being driven into these more convenience oriented meal solutions but for Linda, still a good majority of her meals are these traditional sit down dinners in which she putting a good 45 minutes into preparing.  And convenience is not the most important thing. Knowing that we can kind of re-access how we’re talking to her and what we are saying.

That’s today’s Line On Agriculture. I’m Greg Martin on the Ag Information Network.