The Online Community for Food and Beverage Startups

   SELLING OFF       THE SHELF   

Hey ,

We all hear that selling off the retail shelf is tougher than getting on, but how do you actually go about doing it? That's what I'm diving into for today's email, so sit back, grab a morning tea or coffee, and let's get to it.

Merchandising drives customers to your brand

Once you get on the shelf it's important to develop a strategy that meets consumers where they are on their purchase journey. Using a tool like merchandising can attract new customers to the category and to your brand. First you need to understand that there are 3 types of shoppers in the store. Shoppers who:

• Don’t shop your category —> Awareness Goal.

• Shop the category but don’t shop your brand —> Consideration + Purchase Goal.

• Shop for your brand —> Repeat Goal.

Depending on the shopper, you should have a different goal and execution for each. There are different tactics to reach consumers depending on where they are along the purchase funnel.

 Shoppers who don’t shop the category. 

Your goal here is to grow awareness of the problem you're solving and the products. Out of Aisle placement can help consumers discover not only your product but the category itself. This can be accomplished with end-cap displays and stand-alone displays in other parts of the store. This way your products may catch the eye of shoppers who don’t normally purchase products like yours and entice them to buy.

As an example, if you have a BBQ sauce, try getting the store to display your sauces in the fresh meat department. When I shop at Whole Foods, I’ll buy the brioche hot dog and hamburger buns next to the meat section, instead of going to the bakery across the store.

 Shoppers who shop the category but don’t shop your brand. 

Your goal for these shoppers are for them to consider your products instead of the competition, and ultimately buy. How do you share your unique selling proposition? Again, this is where an end-cap or stand-alone display can help your brand stand out. Work with retailers to create an in-aisle display that highlights your products and catches the attention of shoppers.

Use shelf-talkers to literally stand out from the aisle. These can display a photo of you the founder, have product benefits, or offer a discount code. Aisle allows founders to offer discounts or free products to customers by scanning a QR code and redeeming through text. Not only can you drive new trial, but you can also collect customer information for future offers and build them into your community.

Temporary Price Reductions (TPRs) are the little sale tags on your product in the aisle. TPRs are a great way to drive initial trial, but the execution by retailers isn’t always great. It’s common to fund a discount to a retailer by selling them product at a lower cost, but then they take 1-4 weeks to actually place the discount stickers on all the store shelves.

During this time you’re missing out on sales and the retailer gets to keep any discounted product not sold and sell for the normal price, making a larger margin. Use merchandisers to actually make sure those sale tags are making it on shelf and the discount is ringing through the checkout.

Shoppers who Shop for your brand.

These are the customers who need to be nurtured and reminded to buy your brand. It takes customers at least 3 purchases before your products become a regular habit, and even then, you need to remind them to continue buying.

TPRs are a great tactic to reward current customers and encourage volume buying. While it may feel like you’re losing margin, you are gaining loyal customers. Just make sure you’re careful about your promotional schedule or else you can train consumers to only buy on discount.The yogurt category used to rotate brands each week that offered a $1 TPR, and I would typically stock up only when they had a sale, since it happened every 2 weeks or so.

This is an except from the Ultimate Guide to Merchandising I published last week. Read the full guild for more great tips:

JOYFUL CO. REBRAND JOURNEY

   BRINGING JOY   

Things are rocking and rolling with Joyful Co. Now that we wrapped up the branding, it was time to dive into the website design. Now, I've studied a hundred articles on how to create high-converting websites, but it's always so hard when creating one yourself. I tapped into Riser Design again to design our website and I'm really excited with how it turned out.This is definitely the most "premium" brand I've created, and we're striking a balance between joy and approachable luxury. How did we do from the hero image?I'm also working on a million marketing preparations. Creating a distinct "voice" is always difficult for me too, so I turned to my friends at No Revisions to create a Tone of Voice Storytelling deck (Link to see). Their team was able to give some great direction on Brand Architype, Tone of Voice, Brand Voice, and Caption examples. 

WEEKLY UPDATES

    HOW CPG BRANDS CAN       UNBOX THE POWER       OF INFLUENCER MARKETING    

Dive into our latest guide on how to utilize influencer marketing for your brand. You'll learn:

• Most brands suck at influencer marketing.

• How to speed up the customer journey

• 5 Essential Steps to Successfully Implement the “Brand Advocate Strategy”

We discuss how 3 brands utilize influencer marketing to rapidly grow:

• Liquid Death

• Athletic Greens

• Glossier

Read the Guide

    TOP 5 TAKEAWAYS       FROM EXPO WEST    

While I wasn’t able to attend Expo West, my friends at NielsenIQ were there and reported back their top takeaways:

Though there were many diverse brands at the show all selling in different categories and regions, there were some issues we saw popping up in conversations across the board. With so many factors affecting demand in 2023, it can be hard to determine what matters and what doesn’t.

With that in mind, here are their top 5 takeaways we brought home from Expo West 2023:

1. Consumers are Driving Change

2. Inflation is Top of Mind

3. Innovation is Alive in Natural Brands

4. Sustainability Matters

5. Emerging Brands are Making Waves

Read the full report here

    DEFENDING YOUR       ONLINE TURF    

What would you do if a competitor set up shop and started selling to your customers as they walked into your brick and mortar store?

You'd never stand for that, right? Then why would you let competitors sell to your customers right outside your online store? 

Enter: Branded Search Ads!

These are simply ads that show up when someone searches for your brand name on Google or Bing. They help to "defend your turf" and ensure that competitors aren't bidding on those same terms and showing up with ads above your organic listings.

Even the most loyal customer sometimes clicks on the top search result, even if it's not your specific brand. You need to make sure that that top search result is you!

🤷‍♂️ "But what if there's no competitors bidding on my keywords today, why would I pay for ads on my own brand searches?"

Outside of the fact that competitors may begin bidding on your keywords as your brand grows, there's another benefit to these ads: you have full control.

👉 Say you're running a 2 day sale. You can add that to the headline of your listing.

👉 Maybe you want to add a callout to a new product you're dropping.

👉 Perhaps you want to feature your free shipping policy right up front.

There's no way to control these pieces on your organic listing, but you can add them to your branded search ads.

🎉And here's the best part - These ads are CHEAP! Because your website is a better match for a user searching your brand name than a competitor site would be, you pay exponentially less than they would for the same ads!Talk to my friend Andy to set up these base ads to defend your brand. He's offering a Free 30 min strategy call:  he'll get to know your business and your unique goals, determine whether there's a fit to work together and you'll leave with a few actionable insights to improve your digital marketing today.

STARTUP TO SCALE PODCAST

107. Reinventing Made at Home Ice Cream

True Scoops is an innovative, premium ice cream mix company helping to bring the joy of making ice cream at home without the use of an ice cream maker. Founded by Shelly Marshall and Kelly Williamson who met at Penn State University’s “Ice Cream School”.On this episode we discuss the challenges of launching ice cream outside the ice cream aisle, how to succeed with merchandising, and their new Kickstarter launch.

Listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify

LINKEDIN POST OF THE WEEK

DISCOUNTS

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NielsenIQ Byzzer platform provides data for emerging CPG brands. You can access 3 free reports using this link.

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Maverick allows you to create individually personalized videos (with a customer's name) welcoming them to your community.