How You Can Slay Like Buffy With Customer Avatars
It’s no secret that today’s economy is ripe for the toppling of old Gen X businesses by newer Millennial focused ones, as millennials grow to become the largest consumer group.
ABC is struggling to fight Twitter and internet journalists.
Comcast is struggling to fight Netflix.
Borders was toppled by Amazon.
And with Foodstirs, Sarah Michelle Gellar and Friends are hoping to topple legacy baking brands like Pillsbury, Betty Crocker, and Duncan Hines.
Foodstirs is a new brand of baking mixes specifically targeted to the millenial parent in ways we’ll break down in this article.
Their product line is non-GMO, organic, fair trade (when possible) baking mixes that are available in stores/online, and as a subscription box on their website.
You’ve probably heard of Foodstirs by now. Despite only being founded a little over two years ago, it’s been making waves in the startup news sphere lately.
For good reason — it’s spreading like wildfire.
Why?
Closing a successful series A, and bringing consumer packaged goods veteran/former VP of Marketing for Kashi Greg Fleishman on board, and being co-founded by Buffy The Vampire Slayer star Sarah Michelle Gellar have certainly helped — but these factors alone are not the only reasons for Foodstirs’ success.
In fact, it’s not even the main reason.
What’s allowed Foodstirs to take off like wildfire is their deep understanding of marketing.
The executive team at Foodstirs spends all day every day sweating over who they’re for, and why Foodstirs is perfect for them.
Here’s the problem Sarah set out tackle:
“I was so shocked because there was this real hole in the category,” Gellar says. “There was either the traditional baking mix, the legacy brands that are full of dyes and chemicals. Or the other end were these gluten free, very expensive, and honestly didn’t taste that great. And I thought, what about for the person that wants good ingredients and taste — where does that exist?”
(Want to learn more about “finding the hole” in a market?)
Setting out from the beginning, Gellar and her cofounder had a very clear vision that this was going to be a modern baking brand, for millennial parents.
“This is a time when people want to Instagram their food. They want to have these Pinterest-worthy beautiful projects” — Sarah Michelle Gellar
Foodstirs success is because of how well they were able to execute this concept to their target market.
The other week, we talked about why knowing what you are and who you’re for is so important.
Today we’re going to look more specifically at how one company does does it, and how it’s factored into their success.
How Customer Avatars Influence the Product
What’s cool about Foodstirs is that they can track their wheat, or cocoa from their mixes down to the very acre where it was farmed.
Many of their ingredients are certified fair-trade.
“Sustainable sourcing” is definitely emerging as a concept that’s important to millennials as a demographic — Foodstirs is right on point with that. Just look at other brands that are popular with the demographic, Starbucks Coffee and Chipotle.
Gellar also points to the larger “healthy eating” trend as a point of note for her customers:
“Consumers are now looking for more healthy choices. According to the Global Wellness Institute, the healthy eating, nutrition and weight loss sector is currently valued at $648 billion.” — Sarah Michelle Gellar
Because Foodstirs knows this about their customers, their products are dye free and organic.
Health conscious millennials are relieved that they aren’t feeding harmful chemicals or creepy flavorings to their children, and so are parents of children with other food sensitivities.
Even the distribution of the product was done with Foodstir’s perfect customer, the millennial parent (with a child under 10), in mind.
Foodstirs started as an online only ecommerce only subscription box.
A very smart move to launch a minimum viable product. They were able to engage with their core demographic in an enjoyable way, that also happened to offer a lot of strategic flexibility for Team Foodstirs.
Gellar points out that they were able to rapidly test a lot of hypotheses through the subscription box method.
Having to make so many different recipes, and incorporate so much feedback into the next month’s subscription box provided a lot of important research and development time for the actual baking mix products.
Since bringing Fleishman on board, and securing enough capital to do it, the Foodstirs strategy will shift a little bit to become more retail/consumer packaged good focused.
But there is a brilliant, customer focused approach to the online portion too — which will still remain a marketing key for the brand:
“We’re meeting consumers wherever they want to buy baking mixes most… Online they get kits that are a little bit more craft, and offline they get standards like cookie, cake or brownie mixes,” — Fleishman
Again, the executive team’s deep understanding of their customers affects even the product offerings in different purchasing environment.
And what retail stores did Foodstirs prioritize getting into first?
Whole Foods and Fresh Market.
Stores that target customers (mostly women) ages 22–40.
Aka the local hangout spot for health conscious millennial moms.
How Customer Avatars Influence the Marketing
The Foodstirs team’s skillful use of digital media is another way the “forward thinking” modernness of the brand is baked in.
Foodstirs has been using social media to promote their business extremely effectively, and much cheaper compared to other standard retailing tactics like direct mail, TV commercials, print, or even purchasing premium slots in the grocery store.
Instead, Foodstirs opts to use Facebook live to stream cooking shows.
Featuring real people (like their target audience), not professional chefs.
By using a content marketing strategy to engage their users in an entertaining way, on a platform their customers want to use, Foodstirs has been able to build an extremely loyal fanbase.
That show alone has probably made them 1,000 true fans, who will buy anything they put out.
“We’re all about building family and community so direct to consumer helps with that. Creating recipes and getting feedback online builds deeper brand loyalty.” — Laibow
On top of that, Sarah Michelle Gellar herself has built a platform on many issues that are important to the millennial woman (the main end purchaser of their mixes when you think about it).
Buffy The Vampire Slayer was one of the first shows where a woman could kick just as much ass as the guys, and didn’t need to be the “damsel in distress” plot piece all the time. That led to a lot of interesting topics being tackled over the course of the plot, from ideas about a woman’s role, to serious conversations about the loss of a mother for a daughter, to airing the first lesbian kiss ever on American TV — Sarah Michelle Gellar is no stranger to progressive ideas.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer airing one of the first lesbian kisses on TV
Ideas that definitely resonate with the core Foodstirs audience.
Foodstirs has been able to wrap this deep understanding of their demographic into effective and highly shareable Facebook advertising:
And viral, engaging Facebook content:
The reason why the Foodstirs Facebook ads/content have such great engagement is because Sarah obviously has a deep understanding of the psychology of her customers.
She knows what type of baking projects look the best on Instagram, and Pinterest, and adapts those concepts into her products.
The food is colorful, eye catching, and perfectly photographed to stop you in your tracks mid-scroll.
The team has an excellent understanding of their demographic’s syntax, using pseudo-“Buffyisms” re:“Eat up buttercup”.
The Foodstirs team uses social media to almost “read the minds” of their core audience, and capitalize on relevant cultural fads like Fidget Spinners (a toy fad for children of millennial parents):
They make effective, strategic use of Gellar’s platform:
And food trends like bacon:
How You Can Apply This in Your Own Business
How can you incorporate building a powerfully accurate customer profile into your business?
I love to use email autoresponders for this purpose.
It’s cheap, scalable, and very easy to incorporate for any business owner because it doesn’t require any complicated software.
Often it doesn’t even mean buying a new tool, because you’re probably paying for an email marketing service already!
In a minute I’m going to give you a list of helpful jumpstart questions to gather information on your best customers.
Before I do that I wanted to touch on how to use them.
When you’re adding these to your email autoresponder, try to stick with gathering one data point per email. Don’t ask for their age, gender, favorite blogs, and most frequently used social media sites in ONE email — that won’t get you anywhere.
Second, you’re going to want to dig into the knowledge base of your own email marketing service provider to pick the best survey tool for you.
Are you using Shopify? Do you want to view the data only in your email service provider, or do you want to manipulate it in a program like Excel? Review and see if your email marketing software had any helpful integrations with your website host, shopping cart program, backend, or other tools you use. (Feel free to respond to this story and tell me what tools you’re using too, I can try to help!)
You also might want to look at Zapier to automate transferring data between one program and another.
When in doubt, I would recommend collecting the data through a tool like Surveymonkey or Google Forms so you have the ability to easily download it as an Excel file later if you wanted to do anything fancy.
Asking questions of your readers and making a clear call to action to reply will help you develop a bond with your readers.
You can turn the standard “one way” marketing relationship into a two way street by learning about your audience, and incorporating what you’ve learned about them into your business’s messaging, future product offerings, etc.
Foodstirs certainly understands the power of engaging their customer base, and how it builds rabidly loyal fans.
Learning about your customers is so important because you’re really just figuring out how to help them better.
Questions to Learn About Your Perfect Customer
- What are their favorite TV shows?
- Are they cord cutters?
- How old are they?
- What is their gender? (Do your customers tend to be one over the other?)
- What are their favorite podcasts?
- What websites do they visit every day?
- What are their favorite blogs to find information on your topic?
- What is their political affiliation? Does a certain group tend to gravitate to you? Even if you never intend on discussing politics, knowing this could still help you gear your messaging to them.
- What music are they into right now?
- Where do they live?
- What’s their job title?/What’s their business’s gross revenue?
- What are some of your challenges around (your topic)?
- What are you trying to accomplish?
- Ask Why
Not all of these quickstart questions will be relevant to every industry, but take the ones you’re drawn to and create one email per question to add to your welcome email sequence!
Then you compile this information into a customer avatar, aka “persona”. You can fill out a sheet like this and create a profile that represents your one best customer.
Give this avatar a name!
When you read marketing advice like “Try to make what you write, like, personal dude.” think that you’re addressing the ad, mailer, [whatever] to that one specific person.