Let’s face it, we live in a crowded marketplace and with each passing day, there are more and more entrants fighting for consumer attention and spending. You need to stand out. But how? A big part of creating products is looking at it from a holistic point of view. Creating unique experiences which are mission & value driven can be your main differentiator.

I’m Vibhuti Choyal & I have my farm to table DIY flour business, Floura. Here we make fresh flour accessible to people through our patented fresh flour grinding & vending machine technology which can make your flour within 6 minutes. With floura, people can have the custom made freshest flour whenever they want. Our mission is to decentralise the flour supply chain & enable local sourcing, local milling & local consumption.

So let’s understand how we can create a community & mission led brand for sustainable growth.

● What’s your mission – When you are starting a business, you need to be very clear about what your mission is. Having a well-defined answer to the prompts below will help you carve your own niche & actually enable you to help your customers better & create compelling solutions.
○ What problem are you trying to solve?
○ What are your customers’ goals?
○ Where do they come from?
○ What problems do your customers face?

● Community building: To do business in today’s time, community building has become a cornerstone of successful D2C brands. Community as a channel will help build trust. Today’s consumer wants to know the people who make their product. A good practice is to keep a mix of both offline & online community building engagements. A couple of ways to do:
○ Partnerships with community leaders: For example to create awareness & help people answer their queries we have collaborated with nutritionist experts. This is a great way to create some added value for your customer.
○ Reaching out to your community for product building: Communities can help unlock your next product & remove the guesswork of what will work & what will not. They can help you create a product which answers their problems. People love it when they become part of the process & it creates a sense of ownership in them and helps in making that connection stronger.
○ Educational content: Knowledge is very powerful so equipping your community with it through quick short informational videos, pro-tips, webinars can hel bridge the gap between people & their problems. Doing these will make you much more approachable to your consumers & they are likely to reach out to you than anyone else. Community building will also help you take your mission further by giving your audience a voice & helping them take that conversation forward in their communities.

● Experiential products can be a defining USP : Creating meaningful experiences with instant gratification for your consumers can help you differentiate yourself very quickly. For example while everyone is used to buying the generalised flour from off the shelf, we made making your own flour accessible to people. Putting them in charge of their product creates this ownership that a general off the shelf product can’t give. Of course having fresh flour is a big USP in itself but having your own flour with your name on it which is made only for you does make our consumers feel more empowered & connected to us.