Learn how to make and sell products your customers want to buy to drive profitable trends in your business. Building a thriving online community of loyal customers is crucial for brand success. This community can provide valuable insights into product innovation, helping brands create products that customers want to buy.
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Important: Brand Secrets and Strategies has been rebranded to Retail Solved. Please swap all BrandSecretsandStrategies.com URL’s with RetailSolved.com. This is now the Bulletproof Your Brand podcast. Thank you for listening! Natural is the R&D for total CPG. Natural products are driving the profitable trends. Co-creating with your loyal tribe can dramatically improve new item launches while streamlining innovation giving shoppers products they are eager to buy How To Make And Sell Products Your Customers Want To Buy The Retail solved Blueprint to teach you everything you need to know to confidently grow and scale your brand, build a connected community of loyal evangelists, and multiply your brands impact, sales, and profits. If we are meeting for the first time, my name is Dan Lohman. I’ve had the privilege of mentoring and working with hundreds of brands from pre-revenue to multi billion dollars in sales. This a culmination of the best strategies that are working today. I’ve spent years testing and perfecting them to save you valuable time and money while giving you the edge you deserve. If you haven’t done so yet, download the free 30 Days To Prosperity Workbook at RetailSolved.com/30DayWorkbook to help you get the most out of this brand-building series. Go back and listen to all of the episodes in this masterclass to that you don’t miss a thing. The strategies build upon each other in the order of the series. Please share these and help me raise the bar in natural. I want to take a moment to recap the last episode - How To Use Fact-Based Selling To Give Your Brand A Sustainable Edge. In that episode I illustrated how fact-based selling is advance storytelling, what I call true category management. This is the biggest differentiator between your brand and your most sophisticated competitor. Giving a retailer canned topline reports Will do nothing to help grow your brand. More importantly, using the same cookie cutter strategies and reports a brand uses the same motor oil will not differentiate or give your organic baby food a significant competitive advantage. This is why you need to commit to leveraging category management to to give you the edge your brand deserves. Teaching you how to use true category management to gain a comparable advantage is at the heart of all my content, my podcast, the webinar replace, my courses, the YouTube videos, and more. Use the strategies to help you get your brand onto more store shelves and into the hands of more shoppers including online - my mission. Today we want to talk about how to make and sell products your customers want to buy. I need to begin with stories about what big brands do to innovate. This is something I shared briefly in a previous show. One of the primary drivers for them is keeping their production lines running officially. The more efficient their production lines are the lower their costs are and that makes it easier for them to sell their products at deeper discounts. Of course there are other things that they do to drive innovation but their primary focus is almost always on the bottom line cost of the product. in other words they focus on what the product needs to sell for and what margin they need to be able to maintain. Their decisions are all based around profitability. Then they typically use focus groups to validate their new products sales potential. As we've discussed Focus groups don't always give a clear insights about how the brand will perform on store shelves. There are a lot of stories about brands that receive high marks in a focus group that later failed on retailer shelves. This is largely because Focus groups are not always comprised of the core shoppers that buy the product category. This is an even bigger problem in natural as i’ve illustrated throughout the series. The traditional strategy is that you create a product can you test on store shelves. The problem with a strategy is that you need to pre-purchased the packaging, you need to produce and ship a lot of product, pay slotting and other fees, in-addition to heavily promoting your new item. You have about six months for the item to prove itself before risking being discontinued by a competitor and that's assuming you have flawless execution when it comes to getting the item on every store shelf at the same time which is really rare - especially in natural. This is a horribly expensive proposition and another reason why so many brands fail. There's a better way to make and sell products that your customers are eager to buy. Ready to learn more? This is why it's critically important to your success to build a thriving community outside of traditional retail around your brand. There are a lot of additional benefits to this strategy but let's focus on innovation first. Your thriving community should the comprised of loyal enthusiastic customers that no like and trust your brand. You attract them through your social media with QR codes and website links on the packaging that educate and provide incentives. For example, offer a free recipe or other creative uses for your brand. Celebrate how other customers enjoy your products. Invite customers to get exclusive coupons and deals by providing their email address and first name. Your list, or email list, is the most profitable asset for your brand. This is how you future proof your brand. When you sell your products at a retail store including online you are renting that space and you have no control over how long your brand will be on it or how affective that retailer is it driving traffic to it. You do however have complete control over your brands success through an online store on your website. In addition, this is a great way to build sales and gain additional runway to pay for and support your growth in traditional retail. I recommend that every brand be sold on your own website in addition to online sites like Amazon, and then in traditional retail but only when it makes sense. Remember like we talked about in the previous lessons, your product needs to be available where are your ideal customer shops - everywhere they shop! One of the best benefits of building a thriving online community is your committed customers will help guide you to create new products that they want to buy. Remember I said that natural is the R&D of CPG. It's because we are closer to to our ideal customer and our products are designed to address their specific problems needs and wants. If you don't have an online community for your brand, build one now. Use a robust email service provider that allows you to segment and personalize your community. We'll talk more about that and if future lesson. I use drip and LeadPages. I'll include my affiliate links on the podcast webpage if you want to check them out. They allow me to segment listeners and subscribers based upon their wants and needs. That allows me to customize my communication with them so that I speak to them on their level. You always want to avoid a one size for all strategy in every aspect of your business. Anyhow the reason this matters is because if you have a thriving community you can ask them exactly what they want to see in your products. I've shared examples of where I conducted informal studies for a brand on Facebook that I was able to use in a presentation that helped them gain explosive growth. These insights or even more impactful when they come directly from your loyal community. While there are a lot of other benefits to this including maximizing your trade promotion ROI, perhaps the biggest benefit comes from asking them about new product innovation. For example, you can ask your customers what would they prefer chocolate or banana. A simple question like that can help you choose the right flavor so that when the product shows up on a retailer shelf you have a really good appreciation for how well it will sell. More importantly, if you do this right you already have customers lined up to buy your new products as soon as it hits store shelves. To go one step further or, after you segment your audience you can send out samples of you new products for them to try. Then, based on their feedback you'll know if you have a hit and how well it will perform on store shelves long before you spend money on packaging, etc. You can even use these insights when introducing your new innovation to each retailer. You can let them know how your product performed as well as some of the comments customers made when I tried it. You can also let them know that their customers anxiously waiting to buy your products on their store shelves. The best part is that you can share shopper testimonials in your new item presentation. Remember they want insights they can't get from anyone else. This is your opportunity to illustrate how are you are a trusted and respected category leader. This is how you make products customers are eager to buy. This is also how leverage the strength of your loyal community to give you a stainable competitive edge at retail. For additional inspiration listen to podcast episodes: Then listen to SECRETS 94 Miyoko Schinner With Miyoko's Kitchen, Reinventing Favorite Foods. This is a great episode about how Miyoko built a company from scratch. And highlights over successes and failures as well as all the struggles she faced in creating a disruptive brand there is now a fan favorite. Miyoko is a Champion and leader in the plant-based community. We talk about the importance of this growing segment and how you can leverage the strategies we talk about throughout this entire series the conflict grow and skill your brand. SECRETS 94 Miyoko Schinner With Miyoko's Kitchen, Reinventing Favorite Foods. Then listen to SECRETS 97 Greg Steltenpohl With Califia Farms & Odwalla, Disrupting The Category By Cleaning It Up. Greg launched his brand was a mission and a commitment to cleaning up a category. From his iconic packaging who is innovative flavors, Greg shares how he makes Products his customers are eager to buy. You can learn a lot from Greg on this episode. SECRETS 97 Greg Steltenpohl With Califia Farms & Odwalla, Disrupting The Category By Cleaning It Up. Then listen to SECRETS 185 Seth Tibbott With Tofurky, In Search Of The Wild Tofurky And The Evolution Of The Hottest Food Trend. Seth’s story is the iconic founder story and then after channel. His store is a lot of fun to listen to as he talks about the different challenges that he had and how you build a cult like following for his brand. What makes seth’s story so impactful is his perseverance and commitment the solving a fundamental need for growing community. How long his journey he used his experiences to help guide mentor and coach other entrepreneurs including Miyoko. Learn how a hippy created and grew vegan meat company and how he leads the hottest growing trend across the room category - plant-based foods. SECRETS 185 Seth Tibbott With Tofurky, In Search Of The Wild Tofurky And The Evolution Of The Hottest Food Trend. Tip of the day: Natural is the R&D for total CPG. Natural products are driving the profitable trends. Co-creating with your loyal tribe can dramatically improve new item launches while streamlining innovation giving shoppers products they are eager to buy. I’ve recorded the video which has illustrations and additional information I can’t share on an audio podcast. You can watch the accompanying video on on the podcast webpage and you can get there by going to RetailSolved.com/Session244. In tomorrows show we’ll talk about How To Become An Expert In Your Retail Partner. This episode will build on today’s conversation. Thanks for listening and I look forward to seeing you in the next show.
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Welcome to Day 18: How To Make And Sell Products Your Customers Want To Buy
SECRETS 51 Ahmed Rahim With Numi Organic Tea & OSC2 & Climate Collaborative, How An Unsung Hero Changed The Way We Celebrate Food. In this episode Ahmed shares how he launched and grew his brand by giving his community a touch of home while introducing I new community two new flavors and experiences. Ahmed shares his a story of how we launched a brown from scratch and then leverage his relationships to become a leader in the climate community. His story it's truly inspiring. SECRETS 51 Ahmed Rahim With Numi Organic Tea & OSC2 & Climate Collaborative, How An Unsung Hero Changed The Way We Celebrate Food.
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