Covid-19 days has witnessed a steep decline in the consumption of food & beverages products of major FMCG brands as well as disruption of their supply chains. Although at-home consumption has increased more than before but out-of-home consumption has reduced drastically which used to be the major portion of revenues for the brands.
FMCG brands were accustomed to vastly using experiential activations as part of promotions. But now as the situations have changed and people are being restricted to their homes, the possibility of outdoor physical brand activities have become grim, therefore the FMCG companies need to look for the other option that is bringing in-home experiences to their customers.
Why out-of-home experiential activities is important?
The food and beverages brands in particular consider their experiential activations as the helping hand of branding. It helps in reminding consumers of their existence over and over time. Out-of-home experiential activities become important because it becomes possible for the brands to attract customers when they are more likely engage with and respond to those activities. For instance, once, sports drinks brand Gatorade conducted an experiential activity by offering a complete athletic experience in the form of a combine. But that kind of activities are not possible in the current times.
How to offer in-home experiences to the customers?
The brands are focusing on creating in-home experiences through the most obvious options they have, that is, to partner their product with online food delivery and other online shopping services. Partnering with online food delivery companies could be really helpful because through them they get to know about the consumer behaviour through the large amounts of data they could get from the individuals who buy online. They could understand their eating pattern, their choice of food, healthy or not, and so on. This could help them in designing their experiential activity. Another challenge faced is how in-home experiences can be as engaging as the out-of-the-home experiences offered. The brands could come up with new gamification tactics which may also make use of the new digital technologies.
