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
Folks who are new to planning, even 1-page strategic plans, often just don’t start. Why? Well, there’s a defeatist fog that overcomes them. If the plan tells me what to do, what if circumstances change? Then, it’s worthless, and I have to start all over? Hmmm
When you bring in a business consultant, they should be a rented business partner scanning the entire enterprise. In other words, be prepared to fire people and shake things up if need be as you make use of their input. Or you are wasting your effort. Half
In the world of early-stage consumer brands, you are generally premium-priced vs. the Lay’s, Philadelphia, and Oreo in your category. Sometimes, you’re very premium-priced. Premium pricing will shut down almost all curiosity trials from the average American in a conventional supermarket if they’ve never heard
The primary reasons to exit early (early being Phase 2 or Phase 3) is that a) you are sick of operating the business and cannot find a suitable person to step in (or quickly enough OR b) you want an ‘entity’ to finance its growth
You might think saying ‘no’ is simply a luxury of an established business that has the privilege to turn down an opportunity that isn’t absolutely dead-on perfect. But you’d be wrong. Saying ‘no’ is one of the fundamental business skills never taught in school, especially in business
The 20% figure here is a cross-shopping percentage. Say what? Cross-shopping is a shopper marketing term that measures shopper-base overlap from the perspective of one retailer’s shopper base. So…the title means that only 20% of Walmart shoppers in the past 30 days have also purchased groceries from
I wrote a whitepaper years ago about how using innovation to grow just doesn’t work. I want to refine my case here. It’s a problem that affects platform brands built around an attribute that easily crosses categories and the grocery store itself. Often, I’ve seen this
Albertson’s recently announced a new program to boost the presence of minority suppliers on its shelves. It appears to be a combination of onboarding assistance via RangeMe AND access to below-market interest rate short-term working capital loans. By offering cheap loans, primarily, is a retailer solving
In CPG, this means many things; nothing has to do specifically with being polite or inclusive (not that those are bad things). Use annual planning - it keeps you more objective and focused on results than just chasing ‘opportunities.’Test your playbook like a scientist would -