Virtually ALL marketing loses money in the near term. The only exception I know of is a DTC brand we all know well. IT may or may not be on the home page. This wunder brand generated 5-10x return in terms of monthly unit sales,
It is a truism in consumer marketing that you have to build awareness in consumers’ minds, or else your retail distribution will underperform. Today, consumers are overwhelmed with signal noise coming from multiple screens and sources that didn’t even exist when I was a kid in
In the first two years of my ‘business,’ I bounced around in the chaotic, awkward process of finding the right services to offer the early-stage CPG community. I went to everything. I charged a minimal consulting fee simply to get deeper interaction with founders. I
Understanding why your fans love your brand is essential to creating a quality playbook for exponential growth. Understanding who they are is less important but critical to critical aspects of execution. Founders new to consumer-packaged goods often focus only on who loves them and assume they understand why they do. In CPG strategy, who is like the soil in your garden. Don’t think of who is like a giant mosh pit of disconnected individuals.
CPG accelerators exist now in most major markets; many operate attached to commercial kitchen operations. The best have credibility with distributors and local retail chains, credibility that can rub off on you if you secure a spot. What I continue to see that concerns me is
Most new CPG founders with an omnichannel or brick retail focus have heard people talking about SPINS data, Nielsen data, etc. One reason is that this is the data that elite sales teams demand to manage their accounts and mess with buyers’ heads. But did you
A few years ago, I had a series on Founder Archetypes on my podcast. A few of the archetypes focused on founders with serious functional biases - such as branding or finance. So, what is functional bias? It’s an irrational prioritization of one of the 4Ps
My award-winning, best-selling business book for consumer founders still sells every day. If you haven’t grabbed a copy, please consider it. Here’s an excerpt that might tempt you to grab a copy. “The Power of Focus, or the Law of Frito-Lay Ironically, there is another critical law
SkinnyPop’s ultra-fast exponential growth ride is by now quite famous. A crack CPG sales team led the charge up the ramp. Velocities grew organically as the accounts turned on and on. But one of the problems that Amplify Snacks inherited was that the growth decelerated fast
Why is a conservative formula for a brand’s Total Addressable Market (TAM) so elusive in the world of early-stage consumer brands? Among many others, the folks who study consumer behavior just aren't involved in these calculations. In a less giddy world than ours, bottoms-up formulas for