One of our clients, JCS kitchen, offers Jamaican food ingredients all over the U.S., and has been around as a serious player in their market for decades. However, we discovered a challenge shortly after beginning work on them, which was that most of the people who are likely to order Jamaican food online today already know about JCS and their main competitors. We needed a way to expand their audience, widen the mouth of our marketing funnel, and reach out to people who weren't already looking for Jamaican ingredients.
The Scotch Bonnet Pepper
One of the first obvious things that struck us was that spicy Jamaican food is largely ignored outside the Caribbean and Gulf regions. Your average person in Chicago or L.A. has no idea that jerk chicken is a fiery inferno of flavor, and that's something that we can begin to correct. Jamaican Scotch Bonnet Peppers are slightly hotter than habaneros, and they're delicious in a variety of dishes. To educate people about Jamaican spice we created this great infographic about the hottest pepper in the world, and where the scotch bonnet stands in relation to it on the Scoville scale.
The idea behind this is to tap into the same high-energy spice fandom that has elevated spicy condiments like Sriracha and Tabasco long before that into the public consciousness. Scotch Bonnet Pepper has been a flavorful fixture in Jamaican cooking for centuries, and there's no conceivable reason that the rest of the world can't love them too.
Jamaican Recipes
The other big approach we're taking is to reach out to the Jamaican community, both local and expat, to help bring JCS to a greater audience. We do this by working with our client and community blogs, news organization, and websites to publish Jamaican recipes and other Jamaican food articles to raise JCS' profile both at home and abroad.
Jamaican cuisine is very flavorful and represents a melting pot of world cuisines. Because of this there's just a lot of material to write about, both in terms of history, and the Jamaican food options that are available today. Talking about food is an accessible way to reach out to everyone with a kitchen, and it's an easy way to bring awareness to your brand without slipping into advertising or sales mode, which inevitably turns off readers.
How to Apply This
Marketing isn't about running your client through a mass-production style system and hoping for the best. Achieving any real results requires carefully examining your client's audience, and considering who to reach from where you are today, and how to do that. We hope you enjoyed our hot pepper-themed look at marketing today, let us know what you think in the comments!