Based on its distinctive profiles functional-food (FF) can be considered as a mixture of food and pharmaceutical items. Apparently, these different characteristics that exist beyond conventional food products contribute success of the commercialization of new innovative FFs. Therefore, assumption can be made by arguing that for the marketing a FF a distinctive marketing-strategic beyond the one usually used for the conventional food products must be employed. This study was pursued with the main aims to understand the consumer's psychological factors and to find out elements important to setting up the marketing strategy. These two findings will be then used as basis for designing a distinctive marketing strategy for a FF. We found that consumer's psychological set varied across different sample groups. Therefore, segmentation plays a significant role. Due to the fact that most of the consumers had a medium to high involvement level, communication strategy becomes a salient means for the marketing of FFs. According to the respondents some important extrinsic/intrinsic quality based elements of FF can be generally incorporated into the communication platforms for FF. From the industry's point of view this study showed that internal organizational and management, market attractiveness and trade capability are the most important elements supporting a firm in developing a new innovative FF in Indonesia.