Marketing strategies for newly developed functional food products

It is always a challenge for a company to develop new products, which respond to a turbulent environment and an uncertain market development. Developing an innovative product carries a huge risk for the organization’s survival, and it requires for a company to learn and, when necessary, to adjust her established organizational behavior. Understanding continuously dynamic market demands and a changing environment are important aspects for keeping an organization alive. Because, consumers show great variability in terms of their primary psychological aspects such as perceptions, motivation, attitude and personality. The difficulty of identifying the consumers’ choices is also caused by the increase of the attributes offered, the value of attributes and the uncertainty about the value of many attributes. This situation represents the current market situation of the functional food segment. The concept that food is linked to optimal health benefits, especially for preventing many diseases, is relatively new. The market of functional food has developed in line with the increase of people’s understanding concerning nutrient-disease relationships. Upon learning the fact that many new potent functional food products have failed in the market, a new marketing approach should contribute to improving future commercialization of newly developed functional food products. Having the principle end goal to propose an imposing concept for developing strategic thinking for the marketing of functional foods, the present study proposed three different strategic approaches related to the development and commercialization of a functional food i. e. (1) at the industrial level, (2) at the business level and, (3) at the product level. At the industrial level the ‘Seven Extensions Approach’ is presented with the aim to maximize return on investment of a newly developed innovation such as a functional food product. At the business unit level, this study includes some evaluations concerning the important role of a segmentation model and the spectrum of communication messages relevant for a functional food product. A new segmentation model called ‘the I-V segmentation’ is conveyed as a suitable alternative for clustering the target market. Factor analysis resulted in two grand communication themes appropriate for functional foods, i. e. affective and cognitive issues. At the product level this study includes some analysis relating to the marketing mix elements for the product sample ‘’Giessener Trunk’’.