The customer is always right, even if they are wrong. Over 60% of U.S. consumers say that they avoid food products containing GMOs, but many of these consumers who are concerned about GMOs don’t actually know what GMOs are, reported Steve Lerch, president, Story Arc Consulting. He told the audience at the 2020 Annual Meat Conference in Nashville, Tenn., on March 2, 2020, that even if consumers are wrong, what they think matters.
Lerch, who is a digital strategy and marketing consultant, said that this is the hardest time to be in agriculture and food industry, because we have never had this pace of change and innovation in agriculture. New technologies are being developed and adopted at a dizzying pace at the same time that consumer trends and fads are also changing. Complicating things even further is that consumers want things they don’t even understand.
Consumers are being influenced in their beliefs by more sources than ever before, Lerch said. The amount of information on the Internet continues to expand exponentially. He said that there are now 20,000 unique web pages for each person on the planet. With this explosion of available content, consumers aren’t reading the same content or all watching the same shows now. Lerch cited the example of a cooking class, “Binging with Babash,” the 2,926 ranked show on YouTube, which reached twice as many people in a month last year as did the popular HBO program “Game of Thrones.”
Fads are changing quickly, he said that you can have “the greatest idea in the world” that becomes essentially obsolete overnight, because fads are changing so fast. Lerch jokingly suggested that one way to keep abreast of what the new fads are or might be by asking a 16-year-old kid what is big on TikTok. On a more serious note, Lerch, who used to work for Google, suggested keeping a close eye on Google Trends.
