Is Your F&B Brand Actually Strong? Part 2: The Differentiation Problem
Branding for Food & Beverage
3 mins read
I've been thinking about the second half of the branding question.
Let's say your F&B brand is recognizable.
Great.
But then what?
Why should I choose you?
It's a surprisingly difficult question to answer.
And I don't mean the answer from your brand strategy document.
I mean the answer from an actual customer.
Ask someone:
“What do you think this brand is about?”
The answers can be revealing.
The founder might say:
“Premium, modern, artisanal, high-quality.”
The customer might say:
“It's that snack I buy for movie nights.”
Neither is necessarily wrong.
But if the gap is large, something isn't working.
Because F&B branding isn't really about communicating everything you want people to know.
It's about making sure they remember something specific.
And this is where I think a lot of food and beverage brands get stuck.
They talk about quality.
Everyone has quality.
They talk about ingredients.
Everyone has ingredients.
They talk about being authentic, natural, premium, innovative or crafted.
Everyone has those words too.
So I keep coming back to a much simpler question:
Why you?
Not what you sell.
Not what ingredients you use.
Not what your founder story is.
Why should I choose you instead of the five brands sitting next to you?
Sometimes the answer is functional.
Sometimes it's emotional.
Sometimes it's cultural.
Sometimes it's simply a point of view.
But there has to be something that makes the brand worth remembering.
And then there's one final test I like.
Imagine you launch a completely new product tomorrow.
Different flavor. Different format. Maybe even a different category.
Would I know it belongs to you?
If I can, you've probably built more than packaging.
You've built a brand system.
And that's when food brand strategy becomes really valuable.
Because F&B brands grow.
One SKU becomes five.
One city becomes ten.
D2C becomes retail.
A product becomes a category.
Your brand identity has to stretch without losing its identity.
Which brings me back to what I've been thinking about through all of this.
Maybe strong branding isn't about making people notice you.
Maybe it's about making you hard to forget.
Hard to confuse with someone else.
And easy to choose.
Because in a category overflowing with good products and beautiful design, memory might be the real competitive advantage.
