CoM X participant Jordyn Evans is the founder of Mingle Seasoning, a business challenging a supermarket range that has been seen as stagnant for a long time.
As well as coming in to shake things up, Jordyn brought her marketing strategy experience to help Mingle reach more hands and mouths and change how people see mealtimes.
How did you see the seasoning industry before you launched?
It felt really bland from a branding point of view, so I saw an opportunity to shake things up.
The millennial in me was like, how do you launch a business? Instagram and a website!
I didn’t have much money at the time and was still bootstrapping the business, but based on my marketing strategy and experience I knew I needed other people to promote the product with me.
What was your marketing strategy to begin with?
Word-of-mouth became a really important part of our marketing strategy from day one.
I decided to name each seasoning thing after a different girl’s name – so you could mingle with them in the kitchen.
In our strategy now, the names aren’t as significant in the branding. We’ve transitioned it as we’ve grown, but at the start, the rationale was to help people to develop relationships with the products as if they were people.
How did you use user-generated content? (UGC)
Quite organically, people started holding the seasoning bottle over the meal they’d created and taking a picture.
People were creating the content for me and promoting the product for me and using taglines and a great audience of people who are keen to share the brands they’re interacting with and have that desire to be perceived as healthy.
They connected with it amazingly.
How did you encourage user-generated content?
At every touchpoint of the customer journey, we encourage people to post and share. The communication that they got by email got them excited to get their seasonings, and when they opened it up there is a postcard of beautiful images of customer’s photos.
That’s a lot of our marketing strategy in action – it prompts people to want to see their photos in the same position.
At that time, there was a strong desire for people wanting their content to be shown by brands, although now we’re not as driven by that.
We also sent a lot of product to influencers – this was also back when you didn’t have to pay for their interaction, and I was (and still am) very strict with not paying for influencers.
I want the brand to come from a really authentic place – if you like the product, promote it authentically.
And people did. So, I was quite lucky in that sense that we got a lot of sharing from influencers, and people just connected with the business and wanted to support a young woman giving it a go.
I think when you connect with people’s values or stories and also come in as a bit of an underdog, people connect to it.
