Overcoming doom and gloom. 4 steps to unlocking short-term market potential for your brand
It’s tough for brands right now. The triple jeopardy of terrible economic forecasts, an ongoing cost of living crisis, and changing consumer behaviours, means that many brand budgets are being repurposed.
When it comes to strategies, it is possible to go beyond the clichés of shrinkflation and preserving brand value, and have a structured approach to growth. Adopting a forensic approach will help you to get to the heart of both the brand problems and opportunities.
The 4 steps to growth include:
1. Diagnosing the situation: understanding the current and short-term future health of your brand within the market conditions and competitive context
2. Driving penetration: ensuring that your consumer base is continuously replenished and growing
3. Driving a competitive advantage: ensuring that your brand is optimised for growth
4. Winning in channel: optimising solutions to meet individual channel requirements
1. Diagnosing the situation
Understanding the current and future key brand growth obstacles and opportunities is essential. Engaging with key stakeholders helps to understand what’s going on, and what the current and short-term priorities are.
Brand and marketing– to understand the key opportunities and challenges facing the brand in market from proposition through to sales and all of the marketing Ps in-between
Insights – to understand relative brand performance across a number of metrics, from equity to winning in channel
Shopper – to understand channel priorities, what works in market, and key operational considerations
R&D – to understand USPs about current products and near-term brand stretch opportunities
2. Driving penetration
Brands should have an ‘always-on’ penetration strategy to replace lost consumers and recruit new. The Ehrenberg Bass Institute uses the analogy of a ‘leaky bucket’; brands routinely lose consumers, and these consumers need replacing. Brands need to recruit new consumers to stand still, and then more to grow
What actions can you take to drive penetration?
De-risk choice: Put your brand in the best position to drive penetration by de-risking choice. Offer entry level products, packs, services and prices which entice the consumer to trial, with brands such as Coca Cola, Toblerone and Charmin using these strategies.
Disrupt shoppers in high footfall areas so that they discover you away from the clutter of the category at secondary displays in unexpected places, this should drive significant incremental sales.
Provide channel specific formats. Ensure that your distribution strategy matches the shopper occasion, and the specific channel requirements. Understand the competitive play in the channels, how your variants perform, and what you can do to optimise sales
Optimise your pack: the right materials for your price point; size and structures that meets the consumption occasions, cues and claims that signify benefits
Offer better products or services with innovation that meets needs and resolves tensions
3. Optimising brand relevance to drive a competitive advantage
Shifts in culture and attitudes, and changing market dynamics such as new competitors, means that brands lose relevance over time. This has always been the case, but becomes even more important when consumers are looking to justify where to spend their money. Identifying where to renovate product and services, where to innovate, and what pack and comms tweaks are required, helps the brand to present to market in the best possible way.
What actions can you take to drive a competitive advantage?
Interrogate brand equity and comms tracking. Lean into brand strengths and develop strategies to overcome weaknesses. For example, by understanding that your brand is less innovative than a competitor, less suitable for particular occasions, or falls short on particular perceptions, provides the start point for knowing what to fix and how. Your brand may need a re-stage or it may need small tweaks, this analysis will identify which.
Optimise the brand architecture. Dig into sales and distribution data by channel and understand brand strengths and weaknesses at a granular level. Combine this with shopper and demand space information and you have a powerful structure to (re)define your architecture.
Identify portfolio stretch opportunities. Combine research, previous concept development and R&D inputs. This will help to identify quick win concepts which can be repurposed, and, identify opportunities for portfolio stretch
4. Winning in Channel
People’s reduction in spend and changing shopping missions have forced channels to respond with tactics such as price guarantees and offers to secure revenue. Whether your channels are retailers, e-commerce, leisure facilities, HORECA or otherwise, knowing your channel partner’s priorities and how you can help them to protect their customer base in challenging market conditions, is a win-win situation.
Strategies to win in channel include
Matching format with price point, by creating channel specific propositions
Building reach and visibility, by working with the channel to optimise distribution and in-store support
Creating buzz, by aligning on limited edition strategies and in-store promotional activities to drive sales
Building a forensic mindset
To synthesise brand growth opportunities, requires the agility to handle cross-functional data sets, information sources, and stakeholder perspectives.
Structuring learnings according to the 4 steps and providing both evidence and clarity on the opportunity provides simple strategies for teams to act on. All of this can be captured in a brand growth playbook ready for use in the market.
Futureful has developed comprehensive playbooks as described in this article. To find out more, please contact us.