Clif Bar’s New Marketing Trends During the COVID Period
Thinking of significant new marketing trends after the pandemic, I want to talk about how Clif Bar has used personalization and interactive content to save itself during the global economic decline.
Clif Bar, from targeting Outdoor Enthusiasts to Natural Organic Consumers
The socially responsible company, Clif Bar, specializes in energy bars and drinks for the outdoor enthusiasts. This is a segment that has experienced massive growth in the last couple of years as people are becoming more aware of their health and wellness in general. This group of customers care about working out, nature, exploring and overall maintaining a healthy lifestyle. Thanks to all the data that has been gathered over the last couple of years, companies like Clif Bar have been able to keep on improving their efforts to be able to gain new customers and retain the ones who choose the brand for the first time.
Outdoor enthusiasts represent a growing demographic and Clif Bar has been able to compete in this segment during the last couple of years, and most importantly, has been able to position itself as one of the leaders in the market. However, marketing strategies have witnessed significant shifts due to COVID-19 changing consumer behavior, with many changes possibly permanently altering the market.
Smartly, Clif bar realizes the huge differences the COVID has brought to the market. They decided to broaden their target market to natural organic consumers. They created interactive and related content to attract people’s attention on health and healthier lives. And emphasize on the products’ natural organic and nutritional ingredients. Successfully, Clif bar’s sales and revenue has not been seen an decrease during the pandemic period.
Achieve their marketing objectives or not?
Clif Bar achieves its marketing objectives by experiencing exponential growth because they are able to target even more people. Also, with the increase of the at-home fitness trend due to Covid, many people continue with this habit of working out at home because of its convenience, and Clif Bar would not want to miss targeting this segment of people who still care for their health, but they rather work out at their homes.
What’s intriguing about it
The way Clif bar improves its interactive content with its consumers intrigues me. Clif bar responds to market change very quickly. The increasing demand for convenience food is driving the protein bar market. Most of the consumers are not only sports athletes, but also moms who want to have a wholesome snack for themselves and their families without the trouble of cooking. Clif Bar is changing in their marketing strategy where they start including more pictures about healthy families and start targeting heads of households who care about the health of their families. They start focusing more on portraying their product as a healthy choice for a healthy lifestyle in all digital channels overall, instead of just targeting extreme sports athletes. When going for this route, they also focus on the importance of clean, natural ingredients as this is what consumers are asking for.
Fade or Stay
I think this trend will not fade because recently they have been receiving positive results on this new marketing strategy. Also, they have analyzed huge amount of data before implementing this strategy. Market is changing in every second, and what brands need to do is to react to changes quickly, accurately, and agile. Strategies are not set in stone, they change in associate with the customers, with the market, and the society. By creating interactive and personalized content to provide what consumers are asking for is never going to fade or fail. I believe this strategy will be here to stay.
