Did you know that sriracha is a style of hot sauce, not a brand of sauce? Just like ketchup, sriracha can be manufactured by anyone. However, in the U.S. at least, when someone says sriracha (or rooster sauce for that matter), they’re talking about Huy Fong Food’s spicy elixir with the iconic green cap and… Continue reading <span class="meta-nav">→</span>
Service: Brand Development
New Ingredient Marketing Stories: IDF + Purac
Of all the exciting things that happen at MarketPlace on a regular basis, one of my favorites is when we kick off new partnerships. One of our most recent partners is IDF (International Dehydrated Foods), a global leader in the design and production of poultry, meat, and broth ingredients. We recently began work with IDF… Continue reading <span class="meta-nav">→</span>
B2B Marketing, Paula Deen, and Differentiation
One of the best lunches I had in recent months was with Carmen Popescu, Senior Project Coordinator of Pharmaceutical Applications at Roquette America. Our conversation ranged from linguistics to Ceaușescu to tabbouleh to the state of higher education in America to hair care products. Carmen is energetic, witty, and warm, the kind of person you… Continue reading <span class="meta-nav">→</span>
Telling a Sweet Story: MarketPlace + Nutrinova
As a food marketing agency, we offer expertise and experience in all stages of a product’s lifecycle, from raw material to consumer packaged good. While our collective knowledge spans B2B and B2C food, beverage, and ingredients industries, our individual interests are varied. Some of us are really into craft beers, some of us have decades… Continue reading <span class="meta-nav">→</span>
Be Held: The Art of Packaging
I didn’t have the type of mother who said things like, “Well, you’re a sight to behold,” but if I did, she would have said that to me just about every day during my middle school years. I regret many of the outfits I wore in the mid- to late-eighties, but not because I dressed… Continue reading <span class="meta-nav">→</span>
Instagram: Capturing Perception
The moment is fleeting. You’d love for time to stop, but it doesn’t. You want the experience to linger, but you can’t hold it. You can, however, click it. And it takes only an instant. How many of your friends and acquaintances use a still camera to record their lives? Pretty much everyone, no doubt.… Continue reading <span class="meta-nav">→</span>
Talk Like There’s No Innovation: B2B Differentiation
I klong weekly. You probably do, too. “Klong” means “a sudden rush of crud to the heart” caused by the realization that you’d said, done, or believed something wrong for a long time. For example, I realized one day years back that I’d been saying and writing the phrase “for all intensive purposes” for at… Continue reading <span class="meta-nav">→</span>
Marketing the Impossible
We love challenges, whether they’re related to marketing strategy, advertising, brand building, or eating X number of Y in Z minutes. So we especially love it when we partner with a client who enjoys challenges as much as we do. Solazyme Roquette Nutritionals, a new client, is doing amazing things in the food, beverage, and… Continue reading <span class="meta-nav">→</span>
Good Design, Like Good People, Inspires Generosity
So, yeah, baby Dwayne is pretty darn cute. We love seeing him this way: happy, secure, and with a great opportunity to beat the systemic forces of homelessness among women and children in St. Louis. We love that Gateway180 entrusts us with the weighty work of helping to ensure that people know about, and respond… Continue reading <span class="meta-nav">→</span>
Faithful Marketing (or How to Create a Church Website)
How do you brand a body of people? How do you market a symbol? How do you design a great user experience for a constantly changing demographic group? Those are but a few of the many, many worldview-heavy challenges we faced as we created a website for Memorial Presbyterian Church (PCA) in St. Louis. We… Continue reading <span class="meta-nav">→</span>
A Loose-Leaf Look for a New Tea Market
We recently began working with Martin Bauer Inc, an integrated division of the Martin Bauer Group, a German-based supplier of herbal and fruit infusions, teas, and tea extracts. Their customers include companies from the tea, beverage, and pharmaceutical industries, and we’re working with them on marketing tea ingredients to help them break into the US… Continue reading <span class="meta-nav">→</span>
Marketing at the Center of Innovation
We’re very excited to be working with Roquette, a world leader in the ingredients industry offering a wide range of products and solutions in human nutrition, pharmacy-cosmetology, paper/board, chemistry-bioindustry, and animal nutrition. Experts in polyols and the leading European producer of maltodextrins, pyrogen-free raw materials, and cationic starches, Roquette has factories in Europe, America, and… Continue reading <span class="meta-nav">→</span>
Translating Hope, Designing Love: G180 and MarketPlace
It has long been a tradition of MarketPlace to partner with organizations that give back to the community. One of our favorites is Gateway 180.Gateway180: Homelessness Reversed, located in downtown St. Louis, is a resource for women and children experiencing the unimaginable burden of homelessness. They provide a safe and nurturing emergency shelter along with services… Continue reading <span class="meta-nav">→</span>
Photographing FURminator
There are few things I’d rather do than photograph dogs. It’s the perfect mix of so many of the things I enjoy; not only do I get to spend time with dogs, I get to spend time behind the camera, and I get to see the dogs’ owners’ faces when I show them the results.… Continue reading <span class="meta-nav">→</span>
The Technology of Trust: Building Brand Equity on Social Media
Typically, I pay more notice to my VHS collection of MacGyver episodes than to political conventions, but in 2004, even I cared about politics, as a handful of bloggers was issued press credentials for the Democratic and Republican conventions. This small act of validation signaled a large-scale shift in the way that Americans consume media.… Continue reading <span class="meta-nav">→</span>