Welcome to day 12: Episode 284 — How To Make It Easy For Shoppers To Buy Your Brand
Day 12 of 30 Days to Prosperity

If a shopper can’t find your product, they can’t buy your product.

It doesn’t matter how powerful your story is, how compelling your WHY is, or how aligned your mission is with your customer’s values—if your product isn’t easy to find, understand, and purchase, everything else falls apart.

Today we’re going to talk about how to remove friction from the buying journey, how to help your customer succeed at shelf, and how to help retailers deliver the seamless and frictionless shopping experience their customers crave.

Because when you make it easy for shoppers to find your brand, you don’t just increase sales—you build trust, loyalty, and repeat purchases.

Why Storytelling Must Lead to Shelf Clarity
You’ve spent the last several episodes learning how to communicate your WHY, understand your customer, and tell a story that resonates. Now we take the next step:

Storytelling must guide your merchandising and your go-to-market strategy.

Think of your storytelling as the emotional connection.
Think of your merchandising as the practical application.
Emotion gives shoppers a reason to care.
Clarity gives them a reason to buy.
Your job is to connect the two.
Let’s start with the most powerful tool you have.

Start With the Market Basket — Then Work Backward
Everything begins with the market basket - the sum total of what they purchase on each retail visit.

Ask yourself:
What does my shopper buy alongside my product?
What complementary products appear in the same basket?
What does that reveal about their buying mission?
What does that tell me about how they shop?

Once you understand your customer’s shopping ecosystem, you can work backward to map out exactly how to support that journey at retail.

For example:
If your product is gluten-free granola, the market basket might include:
Plant-based yogurt
Fresh berries
Organic dairy
Functional beverages
Clean-label snacks

Now your merchandising story becomes clear.
You want to:
Be near complementary products
Be merchandised at eye level
Show up in secondary placements
Be cross-promoted with adjacent categories
Help shoppers build a bundle that solves their need state

This is how you transform your brand from a “nice to have” into an essential part of your customer’s shopping mission.

Identify the Shopper’s Need State
Understanding the need state is critical.
A need state answers:
“What problem is the shopper trying to solve right now?”
Examples are:
Cold & flu → wellness products, broths, teas, soups
Holiday meal → proteins, sides, sauces, snacks
Post-workout → hydration, protein, recovery
Plant-based lifestyle → dairy alternatives, meat alternatives, grains

When you understand the need state, you can:
Position your product correctly
Suggest complementary items
Educate retailers on optimal merchandising
Help shoppers complete their mission easily
Retailers love brands that help them simplify the shopping journey.

Retailers Don’t Sell Products—They Sell Real Estate
This is one of the most important lessons you’ll ever learn about retail.
Retailers don’t sell food.
Retailers sell space.
A tiny sliver of shelf—just a few inches wide—represents:
Rentable real estate
Revenue potential
Shopper value
Opportunity cost
Retailers want to maximize the return on every inch.

When your brand:
Drives bigger baskets
Attracts high-value shoppers
Encourages cross-category sales
Brings people back to the store
Reduces shopper friction
You become far more valuable to the retailer.

This is how you earn better placement, more facings, stronger support, and increased distribution.

Turn Insights Into a Story Retailers Care About
When presenting your brand to a retailer, shift from product-focused selling to shopper-focused storytelling.
For example:
Instead of saying:
“We’re gluten-free granola made with clean ingredients.”
Say:
“Our shopper spends twice as much per trip, buys premium dairy alternatives, shops produce more frequently, and chooses stores that support her lifestyle. When she buys our granola, her basket size increases by 27%. We help you attract and retain high-value shoppers.”

That’s a story retailers understand.
That’s a story retailers lean into.
That’s a story retailers can act on.

Trail of Breadcrumbs: How to Make Your Brand Easy to Find
Think of your customer’s path through the store.
Now imagine leaving breadcrumbs that guide them directly to your product.

Your job is to remove confusion at every point.
Here’s how:
1. Begin at the checkout line and reverse engineer the journey.
What brought them into the store?
What else will they buy?
What aisles will they travel through?
2. Identify exact merchandising placement.
Eye-level?
Endcap?
With complementary products?
Secondary location in a high-traffic zone?
3. Build KPIs that define perfect execution.
Your broker, distributor, or sales rep should have a bulletproof checklist, including:
Facing expectations
Shelf position
Adjacent products
Secondary placement opportunities
Pricing and promo alignment
Instore education elements (signage, tags, recipe cards)
4. Optimize packaging and messaging for quick recognition.
Your packaging should act like a billboard at shelf.
5. Make omnichannel seamless.
If shoppers look for your brand online:
Can they find you quickly?
Are you easy to order?
Do you appear in related product recommendations?
Your brand should be impossible to miss—anywhere customers shop.

This includes their search on the retailers apps and their online store. Most brands skip this.
A brand I recently did a project for has a health and wellness item. It was merchandised correctly in the store but when you did a search for health and wellness items, dod food appeared.

Take the shoppers journey everywhere your products are sold. I’ll bet that you find a lot of opportunities to make that journey easer for them.

Never Force Shoppers to Work Hard
Confusion kills brands.
Friction kills sales.
Poor merchandising kills momentum.

Your job is to:
Remove confusion
Reduce friction
Increase clarity
Simplify the shopping journey
Help retailers merchandise your brand correctly

When shoppers feel supported, they buy.
When shoppers feel confident, they return.
When shoppers feel seen, they evangelize.

Day 12 Action Item: Map Your Shopper’s Buying Journey
Today, complete the following exercise:
1. Identify your top 5 complementary products.
What else is in your customer’s basket?
2. Map the path your shopper takes through a store.
Where do they start?
Where do they end?
What detours do they take?
3. Define ideal merchandising locations.
Primary location.
Secondary placements.
Cross-merch opportunities.
4. Write 3 KPIs that define perfect shelf execution.
These become your non-negotiable guardrails.
5. Turn this into a 1-page merchandising story for retailers.

This is how you help retailers win.
This is how you make your brand easy to buy.
This is how you increase velocity and loyalty at the same time.

In Closing: Make your brand Easy to Buy, Easy to Love
When you eliminate confusion and friction:
Customers find your products faster
They buy more of them
They build bigger baskets
They develop deeper loyalty
Retailers support you more strategically

Build this into a story that resonates with retailers. Include insights that set you apart from other brands. Tell a story that speaks their language and aligns with their objectives.

Tomorrow, in Episode 285, we’ll talk about How to Merchandise Your Brand Like a Category Leader, including how to build schematics, optimize resets, and influence buyer decisions.

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And download the episodes free guide to go deeper into these strategies
Make your brand easy to find.
Make it easy to buy.
Make it impossible to overlook.

For additional inspiration listen to the following podcast episodes:
Episode 68 Proven Strategies to 2x Your Loyal Shoppers Easily
Sustainable sales growth requires a thoughtful strategy and a commitment to be better than other brands. Like the tortoise and the hare, small strategic incremental steps can add up to a huge win.

Episode 104 Essential New Item Checklist for Launching Products
New product innovation is the lifeblood of every brand. New products fuel sustainable growth, attract shoppers, and increase brand awareness. Know the critical steps to get your product on more store shelves and into the hands of more shoppers.

In this episode, I share a story about how someone was looking to help a friend grow their brand, looking to buy their friend's brand. The product was mis-merchandised. Because it was mis-merchandised, all the work that the brand had done to drive traffic in the store, that was a waste.

First impressions matter. Shoppers were left frustrated - they could not find the brand. The retailer was frustrated - they lost sales and new shoppers. The brand was frustrated - they now needed to re-merchandise the item - they lost a lot of sales waiting for this to happen.

Episode 144 Creative Disruptive Retail Strategies to Win Customers, Mike Fogarty with Choice Market
Explore innovative and creative disruptive retail strategies that put shoppers' desires at the forefront of retail success. Choice Markets, a hybrid grocery, convenience, and fast-casual store, was founded by Mike, inspired by his experiences in Barcelona and his desire to innovate in the convenience store industry. The store, designed to cater to urban consumers seeking healthy, high-quality products, aims to fill the gap left by traditional convenience stores that lack innovation.

Shoppers want what they want and any retailer can make that their primary focus will win the retail game. Now layer on local, organic, fast casual dining, etc.

Tip of the day: Confusion pushes shoppers away. The customer journey needs to be simple and straight forward. Help lead shoppers to the resolution of their problem and you will win them for life.

Thank you for listening. This episode has an accompanying video with illustrations and additional information I can’t share on an audio podcast. You can watch it at retailsolved.com/30daychallenge.

You can get the show notes for this episode by going to retailsolved.com/session284. Tomorrows episode is Use Clarity and Consistency to Amplify Your Brand

This episode will build on today’s conversation. Thank you for listening. I look forward to seeing you in the next episode.