In Ramping Your Brand, I cite some research my old consulting team did on the optimal price range to ensure sustainable growth. Using a randomized set of 1000s of brands’ data for the prior five years, our modeling came up with 50-200% above the category’s
Laura Lerber and the Inc. team graciously allowed me to publish a four-part series inspired by my book, Ramping Your Brand. Here are all four articles, which I hope you can share widely with those new to my work! Top Five Mistakes Brands Are Still Making in
Scanner data companies like Nielsen, IRI, and SPINS love to default to Year-over-Year (YOY) time comparisons. Against every possible metric they have. Why? Because this involves the smallest amount of data released to any paying client, and it’s the least valuable possible information. It’s like the trailer
This post is a blatant plug. Not sorry, because I rarely do it. My course sales are up 80% this year! You don’t care, but there’s a reason I uncovered. In talking with B-school professors and founders, I realized that my courses hit a gap in
Reacting to tariffs is messy. It depends greatly on your current annual sales rate, working capital and supply chain. This makes it hard to give pointed advice to all founders in a public column. So, I will focus here on the vast majority of CPG
I have met founders who seem terrified of planning. This is often in the beginning, in Phases 1 or 2. The business is all upside at this early point in the journey. And most entrepreneurs hate shutting down opportunities. They generally thrill on seizing them,
Elon is the Kanye of Silicon Valley. Elon and Kanye both grew businesses and personal brands around ordinary fans and then lost almost everything due to their persistent, extremely anti-social behavior. Elon's fall has only begun folks. And I predict there will be NO redemption offered by
The notepad in this photo, folks, is not for order-taking. It’s a listening tool. Make no mistake the therapist is driving the therapy, not you. This may be obvious to many of you. I have no idea. Perhaps this teacher-student dynamic is clearer when you’re hiring
As you move farther up the Ramp, the risk of losing focus grows. Why? Well, now you have the cash to entertain all manner of distractions you quickly ignored early on: adding lots of new UPCs, extending into new categories, paid marketing in dozens of forms, national
The likelihood of a recession is getting higher every week under the new administration. It will be a challenging year for specialty food and beverage brands trying to grow with a hedonic or purely sensory positioning. Historically, this is the component of CPG where middle-class consumers