The Essence Of Food Truck Brand Marketing

Conventional wisdom says building a strong brand for a food truck requires creating a cool name for your mobile food business, getting the word out about your truck, and enforcing brand message consistency in all of your future customer interactions. However, conventional wisdom is wrong. Branding doesn’t create, build or strengthen your brand. Your food truck brand marketing must always be a reflection of the quality of your menu and service. There are really no exceptions to this rule.

Food Truck Brand Marketing

To understand why, it’s first necessary to define what is part of a food truck’s “brand.” Most people think a brand consists of exterior elements: the truck’s name, it’s logo and the tag line. To get a general understanding of a brand, think about it in the simplest terms. Take yourself as an example, are you just a combination of skin, clothes, and what you say?

The essence of food truck brand marketing is not your truck’s exterior elements, but how your customers feel about your menu items and service.

The purpose of the brand elements is not to create those feelings, but to remind customers of them. If their feelings about your truck are negative, those brand elements simply remind them of how much you dislike the end product being sold from your service window.

The only way to build a strong brand is to create and sell food that delights your customers. If you fail at this basic step, brand marketing will become a huge waste of money. Not only that, but it will become counterproductive to your food truck business. Why? Every time someone sees your truck they will be reminded how they disliked the meal or service they last received.

The Bottom Line

Ultimately, if you want to build a strong food truck brand marketing strategy, put your time and money into creating and selling the best menu items as possible. Once you have invested in this area use additional brand marketing to help spread the word.

A question to food truck owners. How long did it take for you to find the essence of your food truck brand marketing? We’d love to hear from you. Share your thoughts on this topic in the comment section, our food truck forum or social media. Twitter | Facebook

By Richard Myrick|2019-10-29T07:04:53-04:00Oct 29, 2019|Branding|

About the Author: Richard Myrick

Richard Myrick is an architect by degree (Lawrence Technological University, Southfield, Michigan) who began his career in real estate development and architectural planning. In September of 2010 he created Mobile Cuisine Magazine to fill an information void he found when he began researching how to start a mobile hotdog cart in Chicago. Richard found that there was no central repository of mobile street food information anywhere on the internet, and with that, the idea for MCM was born. Richard also wrote the "Running a Food Truck for Dummies" available in bookstores everywhere and Amazon. You can reach out to Richard by email at: [email protected].