MARKETING 'Fresh' continues to be a quality buzzword

In marketing, fresh can mean a lot of things, and they're all good.
WASHINGTON POST
Has the unbridled enthusiasm for the word "fresh" in marketing pitches diluted its abilities? After all, anything that's made to order now is fresh. Foods can be fresh frozen. Toothpaste and mouthwash are fresh. Even beer is fresh.
Fads come and go in marketing, of course. Remember a few years ago when the big rage was products that were "clear"? But fresh has staying power. And, more important, its ubiquity does not seem to be diminishing its effectiveness.
The reason for that appears to be that consumers have decided fresh means a lot of different things, depending on the circumstances and the product. What's more, people seem willing to give food companies -- restaurants, supermarkets or manufacturers -- the benefit of the doubt about when or whether something can be called fresh.
Guilty feeling
"Maybe it's a buzzword because people feel guilty about not having freshness in their lives," said S.B. Master, president of Master-McNeil Inc., a corporate naming and branding firm in Berkeley, Calif. "What could be better than fresh? It's like love. It's a desirable thing to have."
Analysts at the food-industry consulting firm Technomic Inc. have studied the word "fresh" extensively for clients. What they've found is that fresh has moved far beyond its roots as, simply, the opposite of "frozen." Now, fresh can mean just about anything -- and all of it is seen as good.
"Fresh equates very strongly with quality, and what fresh means to the consumer doesn't necessarily mean that a product has never been frozen or is not processed -- it means high quality," said Joe Pawlak, a senior principal with Technomic, based in Chicago. The word simply has a "healthy connotation" now, he said.
So at restaurants that may use processed or frozen ingredients, it's OK to trot out the tagline "fresh" if the final presentation is a meal that was just made or simply looks fresh.
For retailers and food producers, what could be better than a feel-good phrase that ignites few or no questions from the consumer? Hence, Fresh Choice, Baja Fresh, freshgo, Fresh Market, Fresh Express and so on.
But what is truly fresh? There is some regulation of the term by the Food and Drug Administration. The FDA's actions on fresh began decades ago, when it ruled that companies could not call something "fresh tomato juice" if it was a canned product. The rules are still pretty strict, according to the Code of Federal Regulation, Title 21, Vol. 2, last revised in April.
On packaged foods, fresh means that "the food is in its raw state and has not been frozen or subjected to any form of thermal processing or any other form of preservation," the code says. There are exceptions for fresh foods that have been "flash frozen," and provisions made for the addition of wax coatings, pesticides, chlorine washes and even radiation.
'Born on' date
Of course, there are lots of areas not covered by the FDA, and marketers continue to push the boundaries. Last year we were introduced to "fresh" beer by Budweiser, which has made the claim one of the cornerstones of its marketing efforts. The pitch? That a bottle of Budweiser is, on average, only 35 days old when it gets to store shelves -- bottles sport a "born on" date -- which the company claims is a much shorter time frame than the competition's passage from bottling plant to market.
The Budweiser.com Web site prominently features the company's Think Fresh Drink Fresh theme, while a TV commercial for the brew ends with the claim, "Fresh Beer Tastes Better." Apparently, we accept the idea that a beer is fresh because it was bottled 35 days ago.
Our interest in picking, buying or making something that is really, truly fresh is waning. According to the NPD Group's "Eating Patterns in America" report, 51 percent of Americans surveyed in 2003 completely agreed with the statement "It's important for food to be fresh when you buy it." But that was down from the 71 percent of those surveyed who felt that way in 1985. And while 47.9 percent of main meals eaten at home in 2003 included a fresh product, that was down from 55 percent in 1986.
Fresh takes time and effort, and we don't want to give up either. Instead, increasingly, we're letting ourselves believe that we're getting something fresh just because they say so.