el Rio: Southwestern Specialty Foods Line Gets A New Look—And Shifts Focus to Mainstream Market Share

Offering an extensive line of sauces, seasonings, beans and shells, elRio’s product line needed to be upgraded in order to reflect the company’s strategic initiatives to improve quality and provide “all natural appeal” due to newly added ingredients.

At the same time, the product line needed to be positioned more aggressively against challenger brands--like Old El Paso and Ortega—that were winning the lion’s share of mainstream dollars.

Findings and challenges:

Through internal brand research, Arcanna found the el Rio brand lacked any efforts at pushing the product through the sales cycle, with a tired look, lack of marketing programs and promotional budget resulting in flat sales. Further, the brand was suffering from a limited following and mainly being purchased by consumers looking for an inexpensive product not an appealing brand.

Most importantly, with Spanish foods a now-favorite and frequent purchase by mainstream audiences, el Rio management was not taking advantage of the dramatic increase in demand for ethnic foods by mainstream audiences.

Solutions:

Reinvigorating brand image. The brand name el Rio (which translates to “the river” in Spanish) was featured more prominently on all product packaging to improve its recognition to consumers. Additionally, a new brand logo was created to reflect the name’s meaning with the  use of warm colors to enhance the Southwestern appeal, and improve perception of the product line’s quality.

Marketing the end-product benefit. The goal was to expand the audience and increase sales to consumers by making the category item more “appetite appealing” by developing a brand package that placed focus on the delicious end-product dishes that the products are pivotal in creating. Therefore, emphasis was placed on product photography and imagery than product name.

Positioning product as inexpensive but still appealing to variety. el Rio has been repositioned to target mainstream audiences with ever-expanding interests in Spanish products who are open to trying alternative brands due to their curiosity in ethnic offerings, desire for more variety in their diet and the product delivering quality at a reasonable price point.

Note: image at top left reflects brand packaging before brand and positioning enhancements, with image at center right reflecting work done by Arcanna.

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Visit the el Rio site, click here.