It’s a law of marketing seldom discussed but first popularized by Byron Sharp many years ago. What’s the gist? Well, the evidence shows that consumers with a robust set of brands they’re content within a category are much harder to distract with a new brand than those
Brokers can open doors you cannot open on your preferred timeline. They can even get off-cycle meetings to happen. In both cases, intermediaries shine as access nodes where you couldn’t make headway. In a world where large chains do annual resets, especially for the small
I keep meeting new founders, usually from within the service end of the CPG industry (promo agencies, digital marketing outfits, etc.), who snap back into BigCO assumptions about what early-stage brands can or cannot afford to do. This snapback owes itself to memories of serving
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.
Why wait to bring on a mentor? You have to fail first to really get ready to learn. You have to know enough about the industry to formulate meaningful questions. Then you’ll get a lot of value from any industry expert. You have to be a superb
As a public figure in the CPG industry, I get a fair number of inbound messages, mainly on LinkedIn (and I answer every single message!). And some of them still are from folks in a hot hurry to get referred to this or that specialist.
Although I caution against chasing unicorns, this is not meant to validate any brand’s growth rate in the single digits, YoY. This slow growth rate may be in line with the premium CPG sector overall, and it may be much faster than commodity brands in
Exponential growth does require you to add distribution. Your growth will ultimately be composed of a mix of distribution gains and velocity increases. You just don’t want your growth to be led only by distribution gains, i.e., positively correlated only to growth in %ACV and
I continue to meet founders who position their new food or beverage as something with real, simple, natural ingredients. As if that’s enough
Many new CPG founders get very concerned at the highly unstable, week-to-week velocities and month-to-month sell-in volumes for their product lines. The fear is heightened once you are inside a significant chain. I get it. But here’s the thing. This is entirely normal. It’s like