If you hang out with old school sales pros from the natural products industry, you will often encounter a belief that distribution (in the right locales and channels) is all you need to grow with an ‘incremental’ product. They are used to low EBITDA businesses
(This is a continuation of Monday’s disturbing post). So, it’s now time to get constructive about measuring ROI(return on investment) in marketing. And it's not about the standard of your sales team or finance. You need both a smarter and more realistic way to measure impact. Or,
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,
An agency employee recently posted the following provocation on LinkedIn. “Storytelling > product features” My wild guess is that she is tired of tech company creative briefs that lock her into narrow feature plugs vs. unleashing the power of emotionally intense stories (e.g., Dr. Squatch, Liquid Death)
Door-counting is easy to pick on as a completely common, yet non-strategic, 'metric.' Door counting is the easiest public way to suggest growth without divulging your actual trailing revenue to your competitors. The problem is two fold. 1- Not every door is created equal in retail.
It is possible to double your store count every year in an exponential ramp up of distribution. If your product is good, you will achieve a stable (i.e., not declining) velocity plateau. Great. You’re doing better than many brands. This will still appear ‘slow’ to the
Kara Goldin loves to recount her tale of being laughed at and mocked by ex-Pepsi executives when she discussed selling non-carbonated flavored water. "That'll never work. No one will ever make it for you. Not scalable." These were the knee-jerk operational objections she heard from a mansplaining
Q1 is done. But it's hard to tell where premium brands are headed this year. A mild recession will not do much damage due to the premium CPG spending of America's upper-middle-class. And this group is also much larger than in 2008. Top-income households do
The best question asked in my Q1 Author Q&A was from Kyle Kent, founder of Vodkyte. And so he got a signed hardcover of Ramping Your Brand. His question? "Is it a plus to do private label production for one of your top retail customers?" I routinely hear
Premium CPG founders face serious headwinds trying to scale. Most never do. The ones who do scale take 7-10 years on average, though we all get distracted by a tiny group that does it in 2-3 years. This is why I always recommend that founders