Tocquigny

The How We Love Food series celebrates the iPad launch of How We Love Food, an annual collection of recipes from Yvonne Tocquigny, founder and CEO of Tocquigny, and focuses on the convergence of food, marketing, and technology. Download the app now for just $1.99, and all proceeds will be donated to nonprofit Urban Roots.

By now, I hope you’ve downloaded the newest version of How We Love Food – now available as an iPad app. From print to online to mobile and social, How We Love Food has evolved, just like my interactive marketing agency, Tocquigny, has over the last 30 years.

 While the way we share recipes has drastically changed since 1980, the way we share food hasn’t changed much at all. Everyone knows that food is all about sharing with friends or family. A meal well prepared is a meal best enjoyed with great company. Just like a successful dinner party is dependent on inviting the right attendees, the success of a mobile application strongly depends on promotion.   

That’s why we put so much thought into how we would best promote How We Love Food. An integrated transmedia campaign was led by two email blasts, driving users to the App Store. A landing page and a Facebook application also helped share the buzz about the application and pushed users to the App Store. Internally, the agency celebrated our proud creation by sharing links with our personal networks and – as you’ve seen all week – by contributing to 17 Stories with posts about our passion for the convergence of food, technology, and marketing.

The icing on the cake? Making things really social by contributing all download proceeds to Urban Roots, a signature program of the youth empowerment nonprofit YouthLaunch, which uses sustainable agriculture as a means to transform the lives of young people and increase access to healthy food. After all, How We Love Food – like most food experiences – has always been about sharing.

Over time, tracking key performance indicators like downloads, unique visits to the landing page, email click-through rates, referral visits to our agency site, and social media mentions has helped to prove the effectiveness and efficiency of different tactics.

In the end, Field of Dreams was a bit off. In marketing, if you build it, they won’t come. Promotion is the critical binding ingredient. So the next time you’re cooking up a mobile project, don’t forget to invite everyone over for dinner.

The How We Love Food series celebrates the iPad launch of How We Love Food, an annual collection of recipes from Yvonne Tocquigny, founder and CEO of Tocquigny, and focuses on the convergence of food, marketing, and technology. Download the app now for just $1.99, and all proceeds will be donated to nonprofit Urban Roots.

Growing up, I can remember the abundance of cooking magazines my mom subscribed to and her impulsive purchases of Cooking Light in the grocery store checkout line. After she would scour several magazines to find just the right recipe, she would only tear out one-or-two recipes per magazine that our family would even consider tasting (my sisters and I was quite the picky bunch). At the time, I just figured that this sort of behavior was normal.

Looking back on these childhood memories, I realize what a waste purchasing all of those magazines was. Of the 30+ recipes found in a single issue, my mom only saved one or two for her go-to recipe collection, and three if it was a REALLY good issue loaded with Italian recipes. Speaking with my mom recently regarding this topic, I found that she no longer subscribes to or purchases cooking magazines. When asked why, I found her response rather interesting: “Why would I pay around $30/month in cooking magazine subscription fees, when I can search thousands of cooking blogs for free recipes whenever I want?” Hate to say it, but she’s got a point.

This made me think about how the rise of social sharing has impacted our purchasing behavior. When we have unlimited, free resources at our fingertips, why not take advantage of that? These days there are thousands of cooking blogs, inexpensive iPhone apps, and friends who post their favorite recipes via Facebook for free.  It seems that if cooking magazines want to continue to be competitive, they will need to find a way to compete with my favorite cooking blog. Rather than Mom planning out her family meals for the week, technology and social sharing has allowed her to quickly browse hundreds of recipes to find the best fit for dinner. Like everything else, technology and sharing have changed the way we traditionally search for recipes.

The How We Love Food series celebrates the iPad launch of How We Love Food, an annual collection of recipes from Yvonne Tocquigny, founder and CEO of Tocquigny, and focuses on the convergence of food, marketing, and technology. Download the app now for just $1.99, and all proceeds will be donated to nonprofit Urban Roots.

No, not that Farmville. I’m talking about the new visibility of family farms in our responsible eating marketplace and how social media can be a great solution for keen farmers looking to seize this unique opportunity and build brand equity.

Picture the last time you were at a restaurant. Did the menu note that the food was fresh or organic? Maybe you saw a sign, trumpeting the restaurant’s locally sourced produce. These future artifacts are signs of the time. More and more consumers care about what they consume: Where did it come from? How was it made? Were the people who made it treated fairly How did it get to my plate?

Sustainability and social responsibility are no longer buzz terms - but market demands. According to a Deloitte study [PDF], 54% of consumers now enter stores actively considering sustainability attributes in their purchase decision. That said, only 22% actually buy based upon those attributes alone. For some reason, the 32% lost have changed their minds at the point of purchase.


For restaurants, that means selling the sustainability value proposition at their point of purchase: the table, check-out counter, or drive-thru. Consumers expect transparency, and that’s why restaurants (especially in Austin) are starting to list the local farms where they purchase their meat and produce.

In today’s digital world, it’s almost expected behavior to pick up our mobile devices and Google after being exposed to something of interest. Then, it’s no wonder why I’ve been perusing many a family farm website over the past year while nibbling on my non-GMO, grass-fed bison hamburger.

 
But, really - farm websites are admittedly a bit behind the times. And, that’s understandable: Farmers probably prefer to do what they do best - farm - and probably have very few resources to actually invest in such a labor-intensive communications medium. So, how can we save the family farm?

Easy: Social media! These websites clearly have great content: Stories about the family, why pastured eggs are better than factory eggs, pictures of the well-kept livestock, and more.

What better way to easily share that content than through Facebook photo albums or regular status updates? Or a quick Flipcam-produced YouTube video? Or check-ins on Foursquare at the Farmers’ Market?

Some farms are already catching on. And, while their audience may be small now, they’ll be well-positioned as the responsible eating marketplace continues to expand and this sort of restaurant transparency becomes an insurmountable barrier to entry.

Then, social media really will be dominated by Farmville. No, not that Farmville. 

The How We Love Food series celebrates the iPad launch of How We Love Food, an annual collection of recipes from Yvonne Tocquigny, founder and CEO of Tocquigny, and focuses on the convergence of food, marketing, and technology. Download the app now for just $1.99, and all proceeds will be donated to nonprofit Urban Roots.

It would be much easier to write about how technology hasn’t changed food – nearly everything has felt the impact of mobile apps, social, and the deluge of data. Whether it’s start-ups turning data from something mysterious to something fun (Gojee, Food Genius, Punchfork), food bloggers whose style and recipies I love (Homesick Texan, What Katie Ate, Cannelle et Vanille), online communities creating new local experiences (Grubly, Housefed, Dinevore), or apps that recommend jumping off I-10 in Jennings, LA to have lunch at Boudin King - technology’s impact on how and what we eat can’t be understated.

Our biggest challenge? Cutting through the noise! More than 5500 iPhone apps pop up when you search for “food” in the App Store.  Searching “food blog” on Google returns about 728,000,000 results. It’s like drinking from a fire hose - and the information will just keep on coming.  Once you hook up nutrition info with FourSquare and Nike+ I’ll know exactly how far I have to run to work off last night’s burger.  Or when you connect a smart fridge to the geo-location on a phone, I won’t forget to drop in and get cornichons when I’m near Central Market.

If you’re interested in food and technology, I love foodandtechconnect.com. For geeks like me it’s a great way to find out what’s new - from the latest start-up to new ways to think about all this data. New voices and new technologies will continue to teach us more about food and help us enjoy it. There are great fun problems to solve and I can’t wait to see what happens next.

But even as I think about all this innovation, the most important thing about food is what what tech hasn’t changed - it’s still all about coming together to enjoy a good meal with great people.

The How We Love Food series celebrates the iPad launch of How We Love Food, an annual collection of recipes from Yvonne Tocquigny, founder and CEO of Tocquigny, and focuses on the convergence of food, marketing, and technology. Download the appnow for just $1.99, and all proceeds will be donated to nonprofit Urban Roots.

In looking at the evolution of user-generated content and the power and influence of social media, it is interesting to note the effect it has on restaurants, large and small. In fact, eating establishments now look to social media as one of the primary sources to learn what today’s restaurant goers want.

On Facebook, chefs post pictures of new creations to share with friends, and more importantly, learn what the public likes and how to improve upon their already existing menus. In turn, this generates substantial buzz for the restaurant. And this isn’t just happening on restaurant Facebook pages or Twitter feeds. It’s all over chef profiles, as their personal pages become more intertwined with where they work and their networks become brand advocates, posting and sharing the content as well. According to the McKinsey Quarterly, word-of-mouth marketing and reviews can have a profound influence on consumers, as they are actively seeking the required information to finalize their decision to use a product or service.

From reviews in the newspaper, to Yelp and UrbanSpoon, to social media, the evolution of what is a restaurant review has blurred. And that’s ok with me. Honestly, I think the more involvement the public can have in the creative and marketing process of restaurants, the better.