BRAND SECRETS AND STRATEGIES

PODCAST #105

Hello and thank you for joining us today. This is the Brand Secrets and Strategies Podcast #105

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. I really appreciate you for listening. Don't forget, at the end of the podcast, I frequently include one free downloadable guide that includes 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 onto more retail shelves and into the hands of more shoppers. If you like the podcast, subscribe, share it with a `friend, and leave a review. This helps me to help others. Remember, we rise by helping each other.

Brands need to have a clear and compelling message that resonates with shoppers. Nothing is more important to a brand than the customer. Your brand story needs to resonate with shoppers just as much as the ingredients in your package beyond a retailer's shelf. Brands who can personalize their messaging have a potential of going viral. This is why a clear and compelling brand message is your recipe for success. It's at the heart and soul of everything you do. If you've been following me for a long, you've probably heard me say repeatedly that you never get a second chance to disappoint a customer. The strength of every brand is the connection you make with shoppers. You want shoppers to know, like, and trust your brand. First impressions matter. Make it memorable.

Have you ever played the game where share a story with someone, and they share it with someone else and so on? Your story's unrecognizable by the time it comes back round to you. Every brand I've ever worked with struggles with this. Every impression your brand makes on a retailer's shelf, online, through social media, in the press, or by any brand ambassador needs to be communicated with the same authenticity, passion, and enthusiasm as is originally shared by the founder. Your selling story needs to be so compelling and so inspiring that it goes viral.

Genuine shopper loyalty is earned and not something that's embossed on a plastic card. The true value of your brand, any retailer is the customer that you tracked. This is what retailers want. They want to know that if they put your product on their shelves, they want to know that you're going to help them increase category sales, bring more shoppers into their stores, and increase their shopper market basket. Your selling story unites shoppers around a common cause or community. Brands that build a strong and vibrant connected community have the ability to drive sustainable sales in both traditional and online. Your turnkey sales store strategy will help you attract loyal shoppers, get your brand on more retailer shelves, expand distribution, improve merchandising, and help you understand what retailers really want. This is your roadmap to success.

Remember, everything begins with the customer. You need to get to know your customer on an intimate basis, the same as you would any good friend. That's what this podcast is about, helping you get your product into more retailer shelves and into the hands of more shoppers by helping you understand who your true customer is, and then leveraging that customer when you're working with a retailer to help them understand why your brand is unique and important to that retailer and how your brand is going to do more to drive sustainable sales in their stores.

Current strategies and why they fail. Very little has changed in the past few decades regarding the way brands interact with retailers. The strategies natural brands rely on today are similar to what we used in mainstream 30 years ago. The focus was on increasing sales volume as opposed to what does the brand contribute to the category. There's a better way.

What I just described is what I would call a push strategy. This is the strategy that literally every brand uses. This is where you get out your checkbook and the retailer tells you how much it's going to cost to get your product on the shelf or how much it's going to cost the merchandiser, et cetera. That strategy is not sustainable either for the brand or the retailer. Not only does it add cost to the products, but it makes it difficult, if not impossible, for that retailer to compete with online threats and mainstream threat.

The better way that I recommend is what I would call a pull strategy, a pull strategy where the value of your customer is the key thing you're selling into the retailer. The fact is that your customer's far more valuable to the retailer than any of the fees they charge you. Brands rely solely on the retailer to merchandise and sell their products. This is a huge mistake. Retailers cannot possibly be expert on every item they sell and in every category. Retailers are not an expert on how your customer shops your products. Retailers want and need your help. Savvy retailers appreciate brands willing and able to help them drive sustainable sales in their categories.

Savvy retailers already know how well your brand is performing on their shelves. They don't need canned topline reports to tell them that you're ranked number two or three in the category and that your sales are up. What retailers need are insights, actionable insights, actionable insights that your competition isn't giving them. Brands need to take an active role in every aspect of their sales and their success. Brands need to be fully prepared to support retailers to help them sell their products. They need to take an active role in how their products are sold, where they're sold, how they're sold, how they're merchandised, when they're promoted, how they're priced, et cetera.

Brands should use every selling opportunity to educate their retail partners about the category, who shops a category, how they shop the category, et cetera. They also need to help the retailer understand who their competition is and how their store compares to the competition. Retailers need to collaborate with brands to provide effective category management support. This is all part of the pull strategy. When you can help a retailer achieve their objectives, then the retailers, savvy retailers anyhow, are going to bend over backwards to help you achieve your objective. That's why this matters.

So, let me back up a little bit in reframe this. Today, the retailers have all the power. What I mean by that is that there's an illusion that brands need retailers more than retailers need brands. This is simply not true. A big part of the old narrative is that price is the only thing that motivates shoppers to buy your products. You continually experts go on and on about how price is the only thing that drives sales at retail. This is simply not true. If it were true, then luxury brands and decadent products would not be growing in sales. The truth is that quality matters more than price. Value matters more than price. Clean, healthy, natural, organic products matter. They play an important role in any retailer's growth strategy. This is why I want to challenge the premise that retailers have all the power. In other words, they need you as much as you need them.

The simple reality is that natural organic products are the ones responsible for driving sales across every category and across every channel. At the bottom of every podcast, there's a link to a featured article that I did for the 2016 Category Management Handbook where I prove this. The gist of it is this: Most every category's flat and declining in mainstream. Their growth that they have is coming from natural organic products, including products that are plant-based, gluten-free, et cetera. When you remove those products from the category, then most every category is flat or declining.

The specific example I reference in the article is this: All [inaudible 00:07:34] dairy sales are up 1.5%, organic dairy sales were up over 12%. Organic dairy represents only 9.8% of a multi-billion dollar pie. If you remove that small sliver of organic, then total dairy sales are only up .5%. The contribution from plant-based, gluten-free, allergy-free products are up even higher. Again, in their absent, every category be flat or declining. This is why your brand message is so important because you are, again, more to the retailer than the ingredients in your package. The true value of your brand to any retailer is the consumer that you bring into their store that buys your product and while they're buying your product, all the other items that they buy with it. This is what's at the heart of the pull strategy. The pull strategy is what brings customers toward your brand and includes fact-based selling from true category management.

So, why does this matter? There's a lot of confusion about how to handle, how to sell, or how to merchandise natural organic, gluten-free, allergy-free, plant-based, non-GMO products. Because of the confusion, products that are natural organic are typically mismerchandised. Consumers awfully overlook the natural, organic alternatives or options if they're forced to go on a scavenger hunt or if they can't find them. You need to think about the customer journey. How to retailers and brands work together to make shopping easier? I recommend retailers put natural organic products right next to their mainstream counterparts. This is key because consumers want to make healthy choices for themselves. This is how retailers can grow category sales while giving shoppers what they want.

Let me illustrate how this works. If a consumer picks up generic bread, then they're probably hungry before they eat it. If instead the consumer picks up the mainstream bread, the best bread on the shelf, they may be satiated for three or four hours. However, if you are what you eat and what you eat matters, then eating a product with all the nutrients that your body needs is going to satiate you longer, so putting the organic bread next to the mainstream counterpart is actually a better value even though it cost a few cents more on shelf. In other words, you eat less bread over time because it fills you up because it satiates you longer.

Now, take a minute to think about how consumers buy your products, how they consume them. Do they buy your product because it satiates them longer? What's important to the consumer that buys your product? And then how do you bake that into your selling story? This is why getting to really know and understand who your core consumer is so vitally important to your success, your ability to communicate the value of your product to them so that they understand and can judge for themselves the real value that your product offers and why your product is different than your competitor's product. This all begins with your selling story. And at the heart of your selling story is the power of a unified voice that all starts with the customer. Nothing happens till someone buys something, and shoppers can't buy your products if they can't find them. You need to have a unified selling story. Your message needs to be the same across your entire sales funnel.

In a perfect scenario, you personally would go out and make every sales presentation to every store. Your passion, your knowledge, your love for their product for your consumer, your commitment to the brand is ideally what you want to present consistently to every retailer, but that's not realistic. Instead, you'll hire a broker or sales team. You need to arm them with the right tools to be able to communicate the strength of your product and the value proposition it offers with the same passion, authenticity, enthusiasm is if it came directly from you. This is the biggest failing I see in most brands. Your story has to be so compelling that when it gets to the fourth, fifth, or sixth person, it is exactly the same as when you first started. This is the power of a unified voice.

More importantly, it's going to help you better connect with your core customer because you can communicate what the unified voice over social media, in the press, and across every community where your shoppers exists. You can also use your unified voice to attract new customers and convert them into loyal brand evangelist. Being able to leverage your unified voice with fact-based information, actionable information is how you stand out on a crowded shelf. This is how you become a category leader. A category leader's any brand willing and able to step up and help guide the retailer to drive sustainable category growth across every category in their store by leveraging the strength of the consumer that buys your brand.

This also means that you need to know your numbers. You need to go beyond canned top line reports. Canned top line reports are great starting place to begin any analysis. What story are they telling you? What do the numbers share with you? Once you identify what the story is within the numbers that they're sharing with you, then you want to ask questions. Why is that happening? For example, it's easy to say that the category's up because brand A grew sales by 5%, but that doesn't answer the question. What's driving the growth of brand A? Is it because it's gluten-free? Is it because it attracts a new shopper? Where did the sales come from? Was it because they promoted the product or did customers come in because they wanted the product, and they have high standards, and they wanted that product over everything else? This is why fact-based selling is so important. This is at the heart of true category management.

When performing any type of analysis, you need to start with a benchmark or a line in the sand that you can measure yourself against. Typically, that includes measuring your growth against the category as well as your competitors. The challenge is that this level of insights do not set you apart from your competitors and they are not actionable. My point is that you need to have the necessary skills to be able to dig into the data and be able to understand what the data's telling you. Then you need to be able to build an effective story leveraging those insights. Remember, the objective is to know how to help the retailer grow sales by leveraging your brand. That should be the primary objective of every category management endeavor, not just spitting out generic topline reports.

I cover specifically how to do this on other podcast episodes as well as in several of my mini courses. Being able to bake these actionable insights into your selling story is going to help you stand out on a crowded shelf. This is what retailers really want and need from you.

Now, let's be honest, none of this matters unless you have recommendations, recommendations that the retailer can use and instantly adopt to help drive sustainable sales. Simply putting a canned topline report on a retailer's desk does nothing. In fact, typically it's just a waste of ink and paper. Remember, savvy retailers already know how well your brand's performing on their shelves. What they want to know is how do they leverage the customer that comes in their store to buy your product to grow sales, and then how does that customer sales impact other categories. Your analysis needs to include recommendations that touch on merchandising, promotions, the product assortment on their shelves, the shopper that their store attracts, and more importantly, the shopper that your brand attracts and what's unique and different about them. Simply put, how do you help the retailer help the shopper that comes in their store to find the products that they want so that they come back again and again, and more importantly, so that they tell their friends and their family about the wonderful experience that they had on that shopping trip? This is how you differentiate yourself. This is how you stand out on the crowded shelf. This is how you become a category leader.

Now you need to bake all this into your selling story. Knowledge is power. You now have the knowledge, so now let's turn that into a powerful selling story that will help you get your brand on more retailer shelves and into the hands of more shoppers. But, how do you do that? We need to consider everything that we've talked about on this episode, as well as other podcast. Consider what's involved in baking a cake. You assemble all the ingredients according to your recipe to create your masterpiece. Building your selling story is similar. You assemble all the insights and facts you collected from shoppers, retailers, and data providers to build your story. Your creativity and curiosity can be your greatest asset in building an effective story.

There's no right or wrong way to do this. Start with answering the question why what happened happened. This means striving to understand why shoppers choose your product over your competition, and how does your decision impact category sales? Try to understand all the different decisions shoppers make when they come into the category, the other items they purchase along with your items. Start using your new detective skills to put yourself in the shoes of every consumer that buys your product or shops the category. This is what a talented professional category manager tries to do on every project.

Once you've identified all the resources that offer insights into how and why shoppers make choices about the category and your brand, spread them out on a table and organize them. Focus on the primary goal, satisfying your customers and helping them find the products on retailer shelf. Start with the end in mind, and working backwards organize all the information to help support your story. Remember that everything is negotiable. Don't allow yourself to get hung up on old, outdated ways of doing things. Focus on providing the highest value to your customers, the retailers' customers. Focus on the facts and stay true to the insights. Don't try to force a conclusion or makeup facts to make a point. There's always a good story to tell.

Here's an example of that might help you make sense of this. We typically focus on dollars as the primary measure, since dollars are what we take to the bank and they are most impactful. While doing a deep dive analysis of a product, I was struggling to find a coherent selling story that made sense. I tied together most everything I could think of, and the story the numbers were telling me was always the same, and the story was not good. The brand was not driving category sales when you look at dollar growth. This is something I typically find when I work with brands that don't have the velocity of their mainstream counterparts.

I took a short break to clear my mind. When I came back, there was a story right in front of me. I realized that the brand sold many times more units than other brands in the category and that the shopper who purchased the brand also purchase a lot of other products in other categories. The key learning was that the market basket was higher for their brand so that the brand did more to drive sales within the retailer than the competitors did by a lot.

As you become more proficient at spotting trends and identifying actionable insights, you begin to notice things that you may need to explore more in depth. For example, you may notice that a competitor's sales are not growing in a key segment. You can then dig deeper into the data to better understand what they're doing and then assess the impact it has on your sales. Here's where your new skills are beginning to pay off. Here's where a talented professional category manager can make all the difference in the world. To use an analogy, this is where you separate the wheat from the chaff. Knowing what to look for and how to find your answers quickly is what will separate you from other brands.

Once you become comfortable with the skills, you need to take a hands-on role in helping your sales team, your broker, and your distributor manage and grow your business. Develop a scorecard for each important activity and hold them accountable for your success. And again, education. I cannot stress this enough. Commit to developing your category management, sales management, trade marketing, and management teams by teaching them the best strategies to help you grow your brand sustainably. Not only will this help you compete at a higher level at retail, it'll also help you get more out of your available resources. Imagine being able to get more runway from the money that you have from the funding that you've been able to get or from your sales. This is how you grow your brand sustainably.

Remember, if you want to play at the level of the big brands, do you need to be at the level of the big brands. Now, that in no way says that you need to conform to them. What it means is that you need to leverage the strategies that they use, the strategies I talk about in the podcast, the strategies that are in my mini courses to help you gain a significant and sustainable competitive advantage. You then bake that into your selling story. This is why it's imperative to have a clear and compelling message that resonates with shoppers, one that you could leverage with retailers.

Thank you again for listening. I continue this story in other podcasts, in my many articles, and in the mini courses that I just launched. They're all designed to give you significant and sustainable competitive advantage, saving you valuable time and money. These are the foundation that you need to grow your brand on. I've worked with and mentored hundreds of brands from every stage of development, from pre-revenue to multi-billion dollar companies, as well as a lot of retailers across different channels, and I've also helped mentor brands at various incubators, including the 2018 Natural Products West Expo Pitch-Slam. Please share these insights, these podcasts with others. Help me spread the word. We rise by helping others. My mission is to make a healthy way of life more accessible by getting your brand onto more retailer shelves and into the hands of more shoppers.

Today's free download is my Turnkey Sales Stories Strategies course. In this course, I cover more in depth the things that are covered in this podcast. This is the healthy foundation that you to build your brand on. The strategies that I share in this course are strategies that even the big brands overlook. These are the strategies that are going to help differentiate you on a crowded shelf and help you stand out at retail. You can get a link to the free course and download today's show notes at brandsecretsandstrategies.com/session105. I look forward to seeing you in the next episode.

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.