BRAND SECRETS AND STRATEGIES

PODCAST #118

Hello and thank you for joining us today. This is the Brand Secrets and Strategies Podcast #118

Welcome to the Brand Secrets and Strategies podcast where the focus is on empowering brands and raising the bar.

I’m your host Dan Lohman. This weekly show is dedicated to getting your brand on the shelf and keeping it there.

Get ready to learn actionable insights and strategic solutions to grow your brand and save you valuable time and money.

LETS ROLL UP OUR SLEEVES AND GET STARTED!

Welcome. Market basket is the most effective way to measure a brand's true value. It's the key to driving true loyalty and gaining a competitive advantage. The harsh reality is that over 80% of natural brands fail within the first year. I'm committed to changing this. Level the playing field between you and the most sophisticated brands in your category so that you can compete head to head and toe to toe with them. You will learn the strategies that you need to be able to grow sustainable sales, and become a partner with your retailer to help both of you drive sales throughout the stores across multiple categories. I'm committed to helping you become a category leader.

A category leader is any brand willing and able to step up and help their retail partners grow sustainable sales by leveraging the strengths of your brand. The market basket is the sum total of dollars in the shopper's total purchases on a shopping trip. This is perhaps the most valuable metric for any brand. You're taught to pay attention to your sales volume and your product ranking within the category, but this overlooks what really matters to retailers. The value of your brand to a retailer extends well beyond your products. When shoppers purchase your product, they purchase complementary products throughout the store.

For example, if you're an organic brand, then your customers are more likely to buy organic products in other categories across the entire store. Therefore, your customers are more valuable to the retailer than your mainstream counterparts. Understanding how to leverage this is critically important to your future. You should never try to compete on price or sales velocity alone. You're worth far more to the retailer than the ingredients in your products. The true value of your brand is the customer who buys it. The customer who goes out of their way to choose your brand over the competition. Retailers generically don't make anything. What they sell is the real estate that your brand occupies on their shelves.

Savvy retailers want a couple of simple things, and if you can help them achieve this, then they're going to help you. Retailers want to know that if they put your product on their shelves that they're going to see growth in the category. They want a reasonable profit from selling your item and from the growth in the category. Additionally, they want a competitive edge in their market, and these are the strategies that you can use to help accomplish them. Strategies to increase market basket size and sustainable sales.

Before I go any further, I want to remind you that there's a free downloadable guide for you at the end of every episode. I always try to include one easy-to-download, quick-to-digest strategy that you can instantly adopt and make your own. One that you can use to grow sustainable sales and compete more effectively. Remember, the goal here is to get your product on more store shelves and into the hands of more shoppers. This podcast is about you and it's for you. If you like the podcast, share it with a friend, subscribe, and leave a review.

Now, let's focus on shopper's market basket size to exponentially increase sales. Leverage these important strategies for every new item introduction and for every retailer appointment. They will help you accelerate your brand sales and help you stand out on a crowded shelf. Why is this important? Traditional strategies overlook this important concept. Traditional strategies focus primarily on single items ranking in the category, which typically paints natural brands in a negative light. The reality is that natural brands are responsible for sustainable growth across every category and across every channel.

For proof about how this works, listen to other podcast episodes where industry thought leaders and CEOs candidly share and validate these strategies that I'm sharing with you. In addition to the show notes for every podcast episode, I include a link to a feature article that I wrote for the 2016 Category Management Handbook. This'll help validate this and that'll help make sense of this. For this project, I was given access to all outlet data Nielsen. It covered all outlet, every outlet that they carry for every category and subcategory in their database. What I identified is that natural organic products are the ones driving sustainable sales. In their absence, every category would be flat or declining.

The example I referenced in the article is this. Total dairy's up 1.5%. Organic dairy was up over 12%. Organic dairy only represented 9.8% of that sliver of the pie, the multi-billion-dollar dairy category. I identified that when you remove organic from total dairy, then total dairy sales were only up .5%. Now, I found this to be true across every category. What this means is that every category would be flat or declining in the absence of natural organic brands. Even better yet, when you focus on plant-based, gluten-free, allergy free, et cetera, the sales growth was even more dramatic.

The point is this. If you understand the numbers and you understand how to tell the story with the numbers that validates to the retailer the importance of your brand and why your brand is uniquely different from other brands on their shelf, that's how you stand out on a crowded shelf. Remember what I said a minute ago? Retailers want insights, actionable insights. They don't need a canned report with your unique spin telling them that you rank number five in the category, et cetera. Savvy retailers want to understand who your customer is, that unique customer that you drive into their store. They want to understand that while their customer's in their store buying your products, the other products that they're buying as well.

I want to step back and explain why this makes sense. Here are two key concepts that you need to understand and bake this into your selling story. The first is share of wallet. Let's say, for example, that I have $400 to spend on everything that I need to buy in a single month. The goal of every retailer is to try to get me to spend as much of that $400 in their store without inviting me to go to their competition. Share of wallet is everything that's on my list, everything that I need to buy. This is why your ability to help the retailer capture as much of that customer share of wallet as that customer's in their store is so critically important. If you can help the retailer do this, then that helps the retailer grow sustainable sales and compete more effectively in their market.

The next important concept is market basket. Now, I've alluded to this a little bit already. Market basket is the sum total of all the sales that are in the shopper's shopping after they check out. The reason that this is so critically important again is because we are taught to focus on a single item or a single brand's performance within the category and within the store. That doesn't make sense. When you think about the fact that consumers don't just buy a single item and walk out the door. They buy a lot of other products, so when a customer comes into the store and buys your product, what are the other unique items that they buy that they purchase alongside your product?

This is exactly why I released my free Turnkey Sales Story Strategies course to help you identify those unique items that your customers purchase alongside your products. Remember that I said retailers want insights, actionable insights? These are the kind of actionable insights that retailers want and need. If you can provide this information to the retailer and help them make decisions about merchandise and product selection, et cetera, then you can help that retailer get what they want, more sales, more traffic in their store, and a reasonable profit. Again, they achieve this by leveraging the strength of the unique customer that your product brings into their store.

That's the focus of this podcast episode and my mini-course, Strategies to Increase Market Basket Size and Sales. The strategies I'm sharing here can help you save valuable time and money while adding rocket fuel to your growth. For this reason, if you haven't done so already, I recommend that you take my free Turnkey Sales Stories Strategies course. Again, it's free, where I go over all of these topics. It's the foundation of everything I teach. It's the foundation of all the strategies on this podcast, all my content, and everything else.

A lot of brands overlook this, even the big brands. They proudly state that they know who their core customer is, and so they don't need any help here. I'd be willing to bet that there are things that you don't know about your customers, your core customers. How they use your products when they take it home. How they share your products with their friends and family. How they evangelize your products. Knowing this and understanding this exactly specifically can help you understand exactly why the consumer chooses your product over your competition at any price differential.

Now, I say that because you hear all the time ... A lot of quote-unquote "experts" tell you that price is the only thing that drives consumers to the shelf. That's not true. If that was true, then luxury and decadent items would all be declining in sales, which they're not. In fact, the opposite is true. The bottom line is, customers want what they want, and if your product delivers consistent high value all the time, then the customers that are buying your product are most likely buying it because they trust you, because they know that they can rely on your product to deliver the value and the quality that they expect. Think about it. It's nearly impossible to hit a target that's not well defined or not clearly expressed.

The same holds true for your go-to-market strategy or your marketing strategy. If your goal is to simply sell a couple of more units, then that's not gonna determine whether or not you're gonna be around a month, a week, a year, or even longer. Instead, if you have a goal that says that you want to grow sales by 10% every year over the next five years, well, that's something that you can get your arms around. You can build a strategy or a road map to help you achieve those objectives.

This is why knowing everything about your customer and your competitor's customer is so critically important. The more intimately you understand who they are and the more intimately you understand their behaviors, the easier it is for you to make sure that your product can be found wherever they look. The easier it is for you to meet their needs, the easier it is for you to make sure that when you innovate and create a new product, it's something that they're going to want.

Back to the market basket strategy. Customers want what they want, and if you can help the customers find your product wherever they shop and make it easy for them to find your product, then that's going to help you grow sales. In podcast episode 104, I share a story ... A true story about someone who's trying to help a friend of theirs who'd just gained distribution at a retailer. The problem was is that this person searched for 20 minutes, even with the help of the store staff. They finally found their product, but it wasn't merchandised where it made sense, where they thought their product would be merchandised. The moral of the story is this. It's critically important that when you work with a retailer ... When you first present your item to the retailer that it get merchandised in the proper location. That's the first thing we need to be thinking about.

The next thing you need to think about is, what are the other items that a customer purchases alongside your products? What are the complimentary items? How easy is it for your customer to find the other items that are on their shopping list? Also, if you know what the other items are on their shopping list, then you can co-promote with other items. This is a great way to maximize your trade spending. If you're selling pasta, then working with a brand that complements your brand in pasta sauce would be a great strategy to leverage both of your unique customers to help support each other.

This is also a huge win for your retail partner. This is why I say that market basket size is the most effective way to measure a brand's true value. It's the key to driving true loyalty in gaining a competitive advantage for you and your retail partner. This is why I launched my Strategies to Increase Market Basket Size and Sales mini course. In this mini-course, you're going to learn how to grow sales by focusing on market basket and why this matters. Identify what is included in your customer's market basket, how to focus first, second, and always are meeting and exceeding your shopper's needs. How to develop selling strategies focused on the category from your shopper's perspective. Confidently sell the strengths of your brand and avoid paying the pricing game. No one wins the pricing game.

Develop strategies to help make shopping easier and more convenient for your shoppers. Build strategic relationships with other brands across other categories. Creatively identify cross-promotional opportunities to dramatically improve your ROI. Spread the costs between multiple brands and exponentially increase your sales lift. Gain valuable insights that can be leveraged with other retailers. Prioritize the power of purpose, the market basket over traditional methods. Sales velocity. Measure the real value of your customer to a retailer, and then build that into your selling story, and then how to craft a more impactful and credible selling story to get your brand on more retailer shelves and into the hands of more shoppers.

You can learn more about this mini-course at brandsecretsandstrategies.com/marketbasketstrategies, or in the show notes. Today's free downloadable guide is an essential new item checklist, The Recipe for Success. This covers the key things that every brand needs to be doing each and every time that you introduce a new product, each and every time that you get in front of a retailer, each and every opportunity that you have to help educate the retailer about your consumer, and again, why your consumer matters so much to them.

You can instantly download this free resource on the podcast show notes, or at brandsecretsandstrategies.com/session118. Thank you for listening, and I look forward to seeing you in the next episode.

This episode's FREE downloadable guide

New product innovation is the lifeblood of every brand. New products fuel sustainable growth, attracts new shoppers, and increases brand awareness. Know the critical steps to get your product on more retailer’s shelves and into the hands of more shoppers.

CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD YOUR FREE STRATEGIC GUIDE: The Essential New Item Checklist - The Recipe For Success

Thanks again for joining us today. Make sure to stop over at brandsecretsandstrategies.com for the show notes along with more great brand building articles and resources. Check out my free course Turnkey Sales Story Strategies, your roadmap to success. You can find that on my website or at TurnkeySalesStoryStrategies.com/growsales. Please subscribe to the podcast, leave a review, and recommend it to your friends and colleagues.

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Until next time, this is Dan Lohman with Brand Secrets and Strategies where the focus is on empowering brands and raising the bar.