Avocados from Mexico does what it says on the tin – following a brand building campaign that has seen it become the US market leader, the company now intends to lay claim to a wide slate of strong associations that consumers have with the category.

The firm’s main brand strengths include deep bonds with the country that features in its name, and the fact it can supply fresh produce for 12 months of the year, something growers and importers from other nations are unable to match.

“No one can talk better about Mexican heritage and all-year around availability than us,” Alvaro Luque, Avocados From Mexico’s president/CEO, explained at the Association of National Advertisers’ (ANA) 2019 Masters of Marketing Conference. (For more, read WARC’s in-depth report: Avocados From Mexico seeks to take ownership of generic category attributes)

For market leaders, growing the brand requires growing the category whose associations range from the traditional – guacamole and Cinco de Mayo, or to a lesser extent, football – alongside more modern ideas, such as “good fat” and avocado as part of a better diet.

From a branding perspective, the problem with such category attributes is their broad nature. “All of that is generic,” Luque conceded. “But we thought it was a great opportunity for us to try to own the conversation with our brand, and try to develop those generics.”

First, education: the biggest barrier in the category, according to Luque, is consumer anxiety when it comes to consuming an entire avocado. “They cut an avocado, they eat half, and the other half goes brown, and they freak out. So the education part is very important for us,” he said.

A case in point is AvoGuru, a chatbot on the Facebook Messenger platform that can respond to common questions – say, when to buy avocados, how to speed up or slow down the ripening process, and best practices for storing the fruit. It was the first brand in the produce category to introduce a chat bot.

Elsewhere, the brand has promoted the fruit’s physical benefit of heart health. Tie-ups with online tech title Mashable and app MyFitnessPal also yielded content that emphasized the “heart-healthy” benefits of avocados.

Finally, Avocados from Mexico is also addressing the consumer need for recipes in four areas: Mexican handheld foods, American handheld, guacamole and chips, and salads. Luque said Avocados From Mexico “[wants] to become the largest and most knowledgeable source of information on the web around guacamole. And why not, because the guacamole conversation is huge. And we are the number-one marketing company for avocados in the world.

“So we need to own that conversation.”

Sourced from WARC