Digital Branding Strategy For Seafeast Foods: Analysis And Recommendations Essay

Strategic Brand Process

The primary aim of this paper is to analyze and understand the organization Seafeast foods, based out of Dublin, Ireland and present a suitable digital branding strategy to consider the strategic brand process for the Company, including developing a plan for designing a virtual brand community for the Company. The Seafeast foods is a seafood company based out of Dublin, Ireland, specializing in prawns and fish. The Company specializes in succulent sea-based food products that are specially and ethically sourced. The Seafeast foods offer a range of products to the people of Ireland, especially Dublin, via signature coated fish and seafood products. Seafeast foods is a Nationwide popular go-to seafood products brand, available in the freezer at Tesco, Dunnes Stores, SuperValu and all good supermarkets in Ireland. The primary headquarters of the brand is located in 9C, Beckett Way, Park West Business Park, Dublin 12, Ireland. The Company also has a website and a direct contact line via email and phone number (Seafeast 2022). The proposed Brand Vision of Seafeast foods is to be the leading provider of premium quality frozen and fresh sea-based food products and items to the people of Ireland by being the "Ocean of Flavours." The proposed brand objectives can be enumerated as (Arriscado, Quesado and Sousa 2019) –

• To add something special to the next mealtime.
• Making a wide range of signature coated fish and seafood products like prawns available to the people of Ireland.
• Being recognizable and available in all the major freezers and supermarkets in Ireland.
• Providing the highest of quality of fish and prawn products via ethically and specially sourced fishing activities.

Based on the accessible information about the organization, the report produces a relevant digital branding strategy for Seafeast foods that are in line with the vision and objectives of the Company (Arruda 2019). 

This segment analyses the factors that drive Seafeast foods' corporate reputation and their corporate brand position and value.

The various factors driving the Corporate Reputation for Seafeast foods are enumerated below.

• Products and Services: Seafeast foods provide various signature coated fish and seafood products like prawns. Some of their offerings are Wild Atlantic Raw Prawns, Raw Black Tiger Prawns, Breaded Shrimps, Chrispy Fish Strips, Fish Goujons, Salt and Vinegar Fish Bites (Bamm, Helbling and Joukanen 2018).
• Innovation: The Seafeast foods provide ethically and specially sourced fish products to the Ireland market via a premium, special, fresh and frozen offerings into the market and innovative approaches within the entire fishing and processing operations (Barreto and Ribeiro 2018).
• Emotional Appeal: Seafeast foods appeal to the emotional attachment and the popularity of seafood in Ireland by providing diverse seafood options for the people of Ireland at competitive prices and across all the major supermarket and freezer chains in Ireland. The business statement of Seafeast foods is "An Ocean of Flavour" (Estialbo 2021).
• Governance:Seafeast foods operate within the legal premises of Ireland and is based out of Dublin. Hence, all the legislations, rules and regulations pertaining to fishing, processing, manufacturing and providing seafood items to the Ireland Market are applicable for the Company and is incorporated within the operational framework and framework for governance within the Company (Bamm, Helbling and Joukanen 2018).
• Social Engagement: Seafeast food strives to increase its digital presence by incorporating effective digital branding processes, staying connected to its people, developing strategic and long-term relationships, and a positive brand image in the Ireland market (Barreto and Ribeiro 2018).
• Leadership: The organization is led by the vision to become the premium and primary seafood products provider in Ireland and is governed by aggressive and competitive leadership values and business practices (Estialbo 2021).
• Financial Performance: So far, the financial performance of Seafest foods is not extraordinary or overboard. The organization is growing and expanding well, expanding its offerings, strategic decision making and competitive pricing strategies (Bamm, Helbling and Joukanen 2018).

The Corporate Brand position of Seafeast foods is to stand out and differentiate from its competitors by not only providing raw, fresh and frozen foods to the people of Ireland but also to provide ready-to-eat products at competitive prices, to appeal to the seafood love and favour of the people of Ireland, to gain strong and positive brand image in the market. Seafeast foods aim to build out a niche market for themselves by becoming the leading fresh, frozen and ready-to-eat seafood product in the Irish Market. The Corporate Brand Values of Seafeast food are to build a strong brand out of the popularity of fish and prawns among the people of Ireland, by providing specially sourced seafood products, to emerge as "An Ocean of Flavours" and add "something special to the next mealtime" for Ireland (Festa 2019).

Corporate Branding Strategy

This segment will provide recommendations to build a successful brand position, values and identity for Seafeast foods, based out of Dublin, Ireland.

The various factors that are essential and to be considered while building a brand position in the Irish Market by Seafeast foods are listed below.

• Brand Attributes: Seafeast foods will require to create extensive and adequate brand value by offering quality and premium products to the Irish people via competitive pricing, and a diverse selection of seafood products, in the form of frozen, fresh and ready-to-eat offerings. The primary aspect is to deliver features and benefits to the consumers. (Gerlitz, Meyer and Prause 2021).
• Consumer Expectations: The brand will require to stay true to its value offerings and propositions by adequately considering the consumers' expectations of quality, fresh and affordable kinds of seafood and allied products. Seafeast foods need to align its values and offerings to consumer expectations (Gielens and Steenkamp 2019).
• Competitors' Attributes: Seafeast foods will require to make adequate considerations to understand and analyze the various features and offerings of its direct competitors and provide unique and better value and features to the Irish market, to stand out and better its proposition in the seafood industry (Gerlitz, Meyer and Prause 2021).
• Price: Effective pricing determines the success and market share capitalization. Competitive pricing enables effective distinguishing between the competitors' price and the price of Seafeast's food products. This is essential to build acceptance and a level of loyalty by the people of Ireland (Gielens and Steenkamp 2019).
• Consumer Perceptions: The success and growth of a brand in a market depend upon the level of consumer acceptance and perception of the brand. Hence, Seafeast foods will require to build substantiative brand value in the Irish Market to better their chances of acceptability via positive brand perception and its various offerings (Gerlitz, Meyer and Prause 2021).

The various factors that are essential and to be considered while building brand image and identity in the Irish Market by Seafeast foods are listed below.

• Finding and Focusing on Target Audience: The key to brand success is finding and focusing on the target market. Market segmentation and penetration is the key to the organization's success. It is important for Seafeast foods to know its target audience and add value and benefits to the targeted segment accordingly (Grzesiak, Grzesiak and Barlow 2018).
• Creating Unique Selling Point: The key to success and growth in Ireland's highly competitive seafood market is offering something new, standing out, and being different. For Seafeast, these are the primary key to ensuring market share capitalization. For example, competitive pricing, product diversity, ready-to-eat offerings are some of the key USPs of Seafeast foods (Herlandy 2021).
• Exposing Core Values: As a brand, transparency and clarity in key and core values is essential to build a sustainable and ideal brand. Hence, for Seafeast foods, transparency and projection of their core values of premium seafood offerings and flavours must resonate loud with the people of Ireland (Grzesiak, Grzesiak and Barlow 2018).
• Originality and Endless Value Addition: To succeed, Seafest foods must stand apart from the competitive crowd. The brand can do so by adding endless value to the people and staying true to its business goals, values, and principles (Herlandy 2021).
• Focusing on Positives: The positives are the highlight of the business, and based on their effective projections, the consumer perception is built, and market reputation is gathered. Hence, for Seafeast foods, the projection and concentration of business positives are key to the brand's success (Grzesiak, Grzesiak and Barlow 2018).
• Sticking to Promises: Making promises is not enough for a brand if the brand cannot deliver on them. Hence, for Seafeast foods, the construction of realistic promises and delivering upon them proactively is the key to its success and acceptance in the Irish market (Herlandy 2021).

This segment will recommend ways for Seafeast foods to increase their digital brand engagement in the Irish market via designing a strategic virtual brand community for the Company.

The various ways to design a strategic online brand community for Seafeast foods can be enumerated as given below.

• Identifying key stakeholders for the Online Community: Building an online community is equivalent to an offline community. Just like teams and key stakeholders are necessary to build a good offline community, Seafeast foods will require capable community managers team members with adequate knowledge and skills pertaining to the digital world and build an effective organizational structure, specializing in building, maintaining, sustaining and growing the online Community (Indumathi 2018).
• Defining Purpose and Goal: The idea behind an online community is to provide value to the customers. Hence, for Seafeast foods, the major goal will be to deliver value to the people via products and services, with the purpose to capitalize on the online space and building a community of loyal and long-term customers. A virtual community is the backbone of any brand operating in the digital space (Mijan and Abdullah 2021).
• Selecting a Community Platform: To create the most impact and set forth a formidable community, it is important to decide upon the platform as well. For example, for Seafeast foods, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube are the best platform to grow their online presence as billions of users are active on these platforms regularly. This will allow Seafeast foods to strategically target its contents for the people, depending upon the platform (Mundiri et al. 2021).
• Building a Member Profile: To build a formidable member profile, Seafeast foods need to identify its target audience and understand the Community it is serving. This is only possible via extensive market analysis and scanning and identifying the key digital metrics and the community patterns online (Indumathi 2018).
• Developing Rules and Norms: Rules and norms are the keys to ensuring the health and purpose of the platforms, as well as the members and the Company. Building formidable online rules and regulations is important to conduct organic virtual communities and for their continuity (Mijan and Abdullah 2021).
• Setting Up Community: The best way to set up a community is to build one large Community and further subdividing the same into specific topics or groups. For example, the primary Community for Seafeast foods can be about seafood, whereas it can be further subdivided into groups for prawns and fish or fresh and frozen or ready-to-eat, etc. (Mundiri et al. 2021).
• Promoting the Online Community: Setting up an online community is futile if people are unaware of its existence. Hence, effective promotion, advertisement, announcement, etc., is important for Seafeast foods to let the Irish people know about the virtual community in order to facilitate the working of their digital brand (Indumathi 2018).

The various ways Seafeast foods can increase its digital brand engagement are as follows –

• Emphasis on Customer Reviews: Customers are the pillar of any business. In the case of Seafeast, facilitating streamlined and proactive feedback and review mechanism will help the Company proactively work on its products and services and ensure smooth continuity and efficacy of its virtual Community (Partho 2019).
• Asking Question about the Brand and Products: It is important for Seafeast foods to frequently enquire from its online Community about the products and services that it offers, what can be some improvements, additions, deductions, and so on. This will allow the business to function properly and become "customer centric" (Petroni 2019).
• Video Sessions: Video sessions are important in the digital space. For example, Seafeast foods can upload recipes videos about fishing practices, manufacturing, etc., on YouTube, host product launches on platforms like Instagram, etc. There are various ways Seafeast can leverage video sessions (Rowles 2022).
• Mobile Applications: For Seafeast foods, understanding the importance of mobile applications is extremely crucial. Mobile applications allow customers to place orders from anywhere, anytime. The ease of accessibility is crucial for customers to stay loyal to one brand and not move over another (Partho 2019).
• Four I Strategy:  Involvement allows the brand to actively connect with the customers, Influence allows a brand to project a positive attitude and perspective about the brand, Interaction is extremely crucial to build brand understanding and connect with the audience, and Intimacy allows the brand to develop deep-rooted company-customer relationships. The four I strategy holds true for Seafeast foods (Petroni 2019).
• Digital Marketing Content to social media: It is important to provide quality and regular content to the virtual communities to let the members interact via various social media platforms. This is important for Seafeast to gather community members and grow its digital brand (Rowles 2022).

This segment discusses various CRM strategies and software recommendations for Seafeast foods, based in Dublin, Ireland.

The various benefits of implementing a CRM System by Seafeast foods can be enumerated as below.

• Better Customer Service: CRM improves business-customer relationships massively due to its technologically driven approaches and constant development. CRM software gathers all the important customers' information and makes it accessible to anyone within the organization to better and develop customer service across all channels (Santosa et al. 2021).
• Increased Sales: CRM gathers important data related to business and customer interactions, like frequency of sales, most popular items, customer details, feedback, data and so on. Organizations can analyze these metrics and work upon them to boost sales and increase revenue flow (Scorrano et al. 2019).
• Improves Customer Retention: It is important for brands to retain their customers and build upon long-term relationships. One of the best ways to retain customers is via providing impeccable quality products, with the best services and at the best prices. CRMs make this entire process easier for organizations to work upon in delivering impeccable quality of products at the best prices via a formidable customer experience. CRM also facilitates personalization and customer-centric business approaches (Santosa et al. 2021).
• Analytics: CRM makes important business data and metrics easily available across the entire organization, thus improving the entire business facet and their customer handling and facets (Scorrano et al. 2019).
• Sales Forecasting: Via data gathered by CRM, organizations can predict and forecast plausible sales trends for the future via present analytics (Santosa et al. 2021).
• Automation: The entire business-customer proceedings are automated via CRM, reducing errors of manual data collection and facilitation 24/7 services, with cost and energy-saving (Scorrano et al. 2019).

For Seafeast foods, HubSpot is the best CRM software and strategy that they can implement. It has competitive prices, a range of useful data analytics and benefits, multi-layered digital protection and ease of use and accessibility. Seafeast foods are best suited with HubSpot as their CRM software and strategy for their newly constructed digital brand strategy (HubSpot 2022).

Line Extension Brand Strategy is the most suitable brand strategy for Seafeast foods to prove its stronghold in the Irish seafood market and build its Online Virtual Community via Digital Branding Approach (Shalender 2021).

Benefits of implementing the Line Extension Brand Strategy for Seafeast foods are listed below –

• Allows the brand to target newer markets without creating a new brand identity.
• It works on the "cost-saving" and "effect maximization" approaches.
• Line Extension Brand Strategy will allow Seafeast foods to address every dimension of its business, by introducing new products and developing upon its existing products to add better value to the target customers (Herlandy 2021).

Ways for Seafest foods to measure brand performance and metrics are stated below.

• Regular monitoring of the business progress, in terms on sales, revenue, customers, retention, new customers, trends and preferences, and key attributes of its online and offline community.
• By establishing solidified and streamlined metrics for measuring KPIs of Seafeast. For example, analysis of data gathered by the CRM, via standard deviation and mean deviation.
• By comparing previous performance with the current performace to understand deviations and areas of improvements (Grzesiak, Grzesiak and Barlow 2018).

Ways for Seafeast foods to sustain and grow brand value are stated below.

• A formidable brand value is created when an organisation strives to provide endless value to its customers and changes the business paradigm as per the expectations and needs of the consumers.
• A brand can grow and sustain itself when it has USPs over its competitors and “hooks” to attract and retain customers. This can be done via product diversification and service expansion.
• It is important for brands to maintain healthy customer-business relationships throughout. Hence, to project a positive and an influential brand value, Seafeast foods must maintain and operate on an active CRM system and instil trust and long-term associations (Estialbo 2021).

Conclusion

The above report concludes the paper by successfully analyzing the business proposition of Seafeast foods based out of Dublin, Ireland and by drawing up and implementing a relevant digital branding strategy for the organization, which are at par with the digital brand process of the organization as well as the vision and objectives of the Company. The digital branding strategy primarily aims to build a better digital presence and network capabilities of the organization via effective digital branding concepts, strategies, principles and concepts. The paper successfully enumerates a suitable branding methodology for Seafeast foods in the digital space and for Nationwide operations in Ireland. The paper successfully enumerates the various factors that drive the Company's corporate reputation and its corporate brand position and values. The paper also recommends a strategy for the brand position and several factors to enhance and better the brand image and identity in the National seafood market of Ireland. The paper additionally recommends several ways to build a virtual brand community for the Company and several ways to increase digital brand engagement. The report enunciates the advantages and the benefits of having an effective CRM system to enable informed decision making in the digital brand process. The report recommends a CRM software package and strategy with adequate justifications. Lastly, the paper recommends to the Company the various ways to implement their newly drafted strategic brand approach, via strategic digital branding process, the various benefits and merits of implementing the proposed approach, recommended ways to measure and interpret the various brand performance metrics and ways to grow and sustain the brand value, by facilitating continuity and progress. All in all, the proposition and implementation of the digital branding strategy and process for Seafeast foods is aimed at developing the digital front of the organization and enabling strategic growth and development for the organizational objectives and operational fronts.

Virtual Community/ Digital Brand

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