The Falafel Marketing Strategy
By: Maor Ofek
Tags: Marketing, Growth Hacking, Marketing Strategies, Digital Marketing, Growth

The Falafel Marketing Strategy

Choosing a Marketing Strategy That Fits Your Audience: A Falafel’s Tale

As someone born and raised in Israel, I know, love, eat, and argue about falafel on a regular basis. And it’s not just me — everyone in Israel knows and loves falafel, which is in essence a deep-fried ball of ground chickpeas. Not an overwhelmingly glamorous food, yet the love for falafel is so extreme that there’s even a well known folk song called “The Falafel Song”. During a short tour of the city of Haifa, where the falafel stands are considered the best in Israel, you’ll see the same marketing messages repeating themselves over and over again — “best”, “hot”, “tasty” and “clean”.

Here’s a breakdown of keywords used by Haifa’s top falafel stands:

“Zohar” — “Best in the country”. “Orion” — “Always clean and fresh”. “Hazkenim” — “Best in the country”. “Mishel” — “Falafel”. “George” — “True and clean Falafel”

Now, falafel is almost always vegetarian or vegan, which is often leveraged as a selling-point among food vendors. Nevertheless, in the marketing messages used by every one of the most successful falafel stands in Israel, there is no mention of vegetarianism or veganism. This is what happens when the target audience of a business is actually everyone — at least everyone that likes falafel.

Consciously or not, falafel store owners came to the conclusion that because everyone knows what it is and what it’s made of, all that’s left to do is say “Mine is the most delicious”, and leave the entire population to argue about it.

Same product, new audience.

We’re going to explore principles of marketing strategy when entering a product into a new market. Wait, weren’t we just talking about falafel?

As falafel has spread into more global markets, it’s had to find new branding, a new face.

I’m going to demonstrate the marketing strategy of entering a known product into a new market — and I’m going to demonstrate it with falafel.

In Israel, falafel is considered a simple street food — a food of the people. It’s certainly not one that is known for its health or medicinal qualities (mainly because it’s generally deep-fried and accompanied by tahini, a rather high fat sauce). In the attempt to penetrate new markets where our product is unknown, we may try to include a description of the product in our marketing message. In this case, we may come to the conclusion that we should market our falafel stand with the slogan “Deep Fried Hummus Balls with Sesame Sauce”.

Even if you’re the best marketing strategist in the world, advertising your falafel under this title would likely not be incredibly successful.

How should the owners of the stalls and the advertising agencies speak of the advent of a new, deep-fried product in an era where people are seeking nutritious and low fat diets?

You may recall from the beginning of this article an interesting fact about falafel. The falafel ball is vegan, unless your local falafel shop owner is doing some mildly sacrilegious things to falafel balls. Let’s see how leading falafel stands around the world advertise their product.

Here’s a breakdown of keywords used by top global falafel stands:

London: Falafel Magic — Pure Vegan. Barcelona: Falafel Maoz — Vegetarian. Financial District New York: Taim — a vegetarian Mecca. a vegan temple. Antwerp: Falafel beni — the best vegetarian fast food. Tokyo: Kuumba du Falafel — Natural Geogrammar

We can see clearly from this list that the words chosen to market falafel in global markets are totally different than those chosen in the product’s native environment. In an ecosystem where people don’t know the product, it had to be rebranded. Falafel here is not known for its authenticity or even its flavor, but for its universal trait of being vegetarian/vegan.

Framing

None of our marketeers have said anything inaccurate in any of their messaging — advertisers and falafel stands in different countries have simply chosen to put a different spin on the same product. The frame is chosen to convey to the audience what value this product brings them and its benefits as relevant to their desires. If the fat is the glass half-empty, the more marketable half-full glass is the vegetarian/veganism.

According to research by Brett Martin and Roger Marshal:

“Message framing can be conceptualized as actually equivalent information that is perceived differently by consumers by virtue of how it is presented. The analogy of a glass of water being labeled as “half-empty” or “half-full” is an example of message framing (Paese, 1995). In an advertising context, the emphasis is on advocacy benefits being framed in a positive or negative manner.”

How far can a frame reach into the consciousness of an audience?

On the Hebrew Wikipedia page for falafel, there is not a single mention of the vegetarian/vegan aspect of falafel. On the English Wikipedia page for falafel, there is an entire “Vegetarianism” describing the popularity of falafel as a vegetarian street food.

Good framing isn’t necessarily designed to match the demographic of the target audience. In Israel, where falafel is infrequently labeled as vegetarian, the percentage of vegetarians (including vegans) is one of the highest in the world at 13% (US 8%, UK 7%, Japan 4.7%, Belgium 2%, Spain 1.5%).

Different message frame

As we can see through this specific use case, it is critical to a product’s success in entering a new market that its branding and marketing strategy frames the product in a way which adjusts its perception and creates value for it as is appropriate for that market’s audience.

In other words, the same product can, and often should, adopt a totally different message frame when marketed to a different audience.

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