Tag Archives: challenger brand
Home Depot Builds Something Too Big To Ignore
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WATCH & LEARN – HOME DEPOT DECLARES BLACK FRIDAY IN APRIL:
The fight for Retail Leverage doesn’t end with brands duking it out in the aisles. Retailers take it outside, fighting their own battles. If you think unemployment, the real estate market, and tight credit has hurt sales for your brand, imagine how that rolls up to create a desperate environment for the retailer. While the home improvement sector in retail is still fragmented, the two resounding leaders are Home Depot and Lowes.
Home Depot, in a bid for some Retail Leverage of its own, and in an effort to drive year over year sales growth, has declared “Black Friday Is Back”, creating their own retail big event.
To read more, click on title. Continue reading
Filed under By Ben Smith, Can't Be Ignored, Challenger Brand Strategies, Home Depot, Lowes, marketing, retail
Warning! Brands at Retail – Your Product Development Process Is Harmful To Your Health
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SUMMARY:
Typical 5 Step/Gate Product Development Process:
1. Discovery/Scoping
2. Building the Business Case/Plan
3. Development
4. Testing & Validation
5. Product Launch
This process has one major flaw if you are a brand whose business case is primarily built on accessing the consumer through the world of retail – the retailer is predisposed to prefer a private label solution …
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Filed under By Vincent Young, Challenger Brand Strategies
Why You Should Buy Billboards In Bentonville
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SUMMARY:
1) Lose your “Delusions of Brandeur” when dealing with retailers. Your target consumer is the retailer’s customer.
2) You exert all this influence to get the product in, but once it’s in, there are results to be measured by. Your opportunities to influence decrease.
3) Buyers are consumers also
I would argue that some merchants even go so far as using exposure or lack of exposure to a particular marketing campaign helps them to justify a decision they made in the past. When the buyer gets exposed to the marketing vehicles regularly in their personal life, this makes them feel that that they might be missing out on if they chose to not assort or promote that particular product. “Am I missing out on an opportunity here?” Or better yet, “is all this marketing going to drive customers to my competitor down the street that is listing that product?” (conversely if they see marketing and earlier chose to promote the product, this probably helps justify their decision).
4) Why you should buy Billboards in Bentonville Continue reading
Filed under By Steve Marzio, Challenger Brand Strategies
STAINMASTER Carpet Goes Wall-to-Wall at Lowe’s
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While the STAINMASTER brand has considerable equity in the home furnishings and flooring industries, the team at INVISTA was able to gain distribution at the world’s second largest DIY/Hardware chain by thinking like a challenger brand and adopting two key strategies to gain Retail Leverage.
Retail Leverage Principle #1: Bring Pent-up Demand to Stores
Retail Leverage Principle #2: Offer Product or Program Exclusivity Continue reading
Implications For Marketers From Walmart Sku Reductions
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In order to effectively compete, challenger brands must learn to package innovative product offerings together with marketing programs designed to represent at least one of the following four forms of retailer financial growth:
FOUR WAYS TO OFFER RETAILERS FINANCIAL GROWTH:
1. Increase overall category demand
2. Increase the attach-rate of high-value complimentary items
3. Motivate a “trade-up” within the category
4. Help a given retailer win the war against another retailer
The most difficult thing for brands like Glad and Hefty is viewing themselves as challenger brands when their histories have been more reflective of the rare “power” brand. Continue reading
How Can Retail Leverage Help Garmin?
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SUMMARY:
EVEN GARMIN CAN FEEL LOST:
Who wants to be the first to admit they don’t have the answer to a problem? What do you do when your product is becoming a commodity, and even worse, when others start giving it away for free?
Garmin, the maker of GPS systems, is getting hit with this double-whammy. The majority of their problems center on their Automotive/Mobile business segment, which includes the main product that comes to mind for Garmin, the portable GPS for your car. Just as Tivo has watched the cable / satellite companies erode their share with generic DVR’s, smart phones are poised to erode the stand-alone portable GPS business.
WHERE DOES GARMIN GO FROM HERE?
The central question for Retail Leverage and our readers is “What can Garmin do to gain Retail Leverage with its nüvifone line?” Continue reading
You Can Be Skeptical of MagicJack – But Not How They Got Retail Leverage
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SUMMARY:
MAGICJACK: RETAIL AND DIRECT IN PERFECT HARMONY:
So you might ask yourself wasn’t MagicJack giving up something by tagging retailers, effectively pointing potential customers to stores?
Well they can start dialing back their Direct Response spend, or at least keep it flat. Plus after 2-3 years of hitting the airwaves hard with the same product, there are diminishing margins of return on the number of people who will buy your product direct. Chances are they saw the ad – if they were going to buy it direct they would have done so already.
Retail represents an untapped market. There are people who won’t buy direct, or maybe never even saw it on TV. And there is a good chance the retail margin they’ll pay is probably close to the cost per order to sell direct (media costs + fulfillment.
LESSONS LEARNED:
1A) Infomercials are a great vehicle for telling a story and building demand at retail.
1B) Marketers with a holier than thou attitude towards Direct Response TV (DRTV) are ignoring a viable tactic.
2) Take risk away from the retail buyer. This makes it easier for them to list / support your product. MagicJack wouldn’t be at retail if they didn’t have a success story from their direct experience, as well as ongoing aircover in the form of their DRTV spots they continue to run that in effect are ads for their retail placements.
3) There is less risk in balancing a direct and retail strategy than ever before. The battle lines have been blurred by retail consolidation, and the growth of private label. I don’t think the retail buyer spends much time worrying about where you are selling your product, as long as it is selling well in their stores. We spend way too much time worrying about who we compete against, versus just selling.
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