Avocados From Mexico, the produce company, has made increasing usage of the fruit among existing buyers a core element of its brand strategy.

Alvaro Luque, Avocados From Mexico's president/CEO, discussed this subject at the Association of National Advertisers’ (ANA) 2019 Brand Activation Marketing Conference.

One significant avenue for growth, he believes, comes from the solid, existing 50% household penetration for the category, not from newcomers to the fruit.

“We have a very high market share in the US, and if I concentrate my forces and my dollars to try to get the other percentage of the market that I don’t have, my opportunities will be limited,” he said. (For more, read WARC’s in-depth report: Why Avocados From Mexico targeted existing customers to build market share.)

“But if I push the entire category as much as possible to try to expand it, I will have a greater opportunity to get more market share of a bigger market.”

Elaborating on this theme, he offered some hard numbers: “Seventy-three percent of all these consumers out there are only buying three avocados a month,” Luque continued. “Why not five? Or six?”

The avocado category, he told the ANA confab, is enjoying volume and value growth. And Avocados From Mexico also has the natural advantage that the country has four harvests a year, providing constant availability, which is highly unusual.

A core task for the brand is using “our creativity to grow this category,” Luque said. A case in point is increasing the use of avocados, be it as a butter substitute for healthy brownies, or as an ingredient in “handhelds” like sandwiches.

“I need to get very strong in handhelds, very strong in salads, very strong in guacamole and chips,” Luque asserted as he explained the brand’s strategy.

Millennials – or what Avocados From Mexico has branded the “avocado generation” – have been eager adopters of the fruit.

“They were born with the fruit. They invented avocado toast,” Luque said.

Equally, however, the brand wants to boost uptake with Generation X and Generation Z, and used SXSW 2019, the digital and tech festival in Austin, Texas, as a means to reach the latter cohort.

“We sponsored a food-truck event [at SXSW] and started giving away guac. [People] came to our booth and they traded their recipes and we made t-shirts with those recipes.”

Sourced from WARC