The Agrifood Cluster of Navarre (NAGRIFOOD) started in September 2020 a project on Linking with the consumer, subsidized by the Government of Navarra and with the collaboration of the consulting firm The Flash CO.

The agri-food environment and the current market context are in continuous change and this forces industries in the agri-food sector to continuously rethink their business model.

In this new paradigm, it is essential for companies to adapt to the new reality by understanding the behavior of consumers/customers/users, with increasingly segmented and personalized value propositions, designing new products and services and changing the forms of relationship between customers and the company. All this, with the aim of increasing their competitiveness through innovation and implementing new business opportunities – this is what we have baptized as consumer linkage.

In this new environment, it is the quality of the customer experience that holds the consumer’s attention to a product and/or brand. Today’s consumers demand higher levels of personalization and customization in products and services, expecting their needs, preferences and lifestyles to be met. This new scenario brings new opportunities for the agri-food industry, both for marketing experts and for those responsible for new product development.

On the other hand, the figure of a new “digital consumer” is emerging, who is more active, informed and has clear ideas about what he or she expects from manufacturers and distributors. These users are the new consumers and a niche of potential interest for food marketing professionals.

In addition to all this, we must add the effects and the acceleration in the changes brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic. This extreme situation has definitively demonstrated the imperative need to link both digitally and non-digitally to the consumer or end customer. Physical communication channels have lost relevance due to social distancing measures, causing part of the linkage that existed with the consumer to be lost or migrated to other digital channels.

Thus, the main objective of the INVICON project is to identify challenges and collaborative initiatives of digital and non-digital consumer engagement among NAGRIFOOD partner companies with a consumer-centric vision, as the center of the strategy, to solve sectorial challenges from a global perspective.