Challenger Brand Study 2018: The Magic of the Moat

by admin | Oct 11, 2018

Challenger Brand Study 2018: The Magic of the Moat

The competitive landscape for challenger brands has rapidly intensified.

Not so long ago, the challenger brand story most closely resembled that of David and Goliath. New brands entered mature, sleepy categories and used their guile and resourcefulness to disrupt the leaders. Their agility, transparency and consumer intuition allowed them to unlock the lion’s share of growth across categories. Back then, challenger brands had only to concern themselves with standing out against the large category incumbents.

Today’s landscape looks different. Lower barriers to entry, greater access to production, distribution and growth capital, and more

efficient ways to reach and build relationships with consumers have led to greater proliferation of brands and products in attractive spaces. The result is that challenger brands must now stand out not only against large category leaders, but also against a growing number of other challengers who have recognized the potential to disrupt. As this dynamic plays out across nearly every ‘hot’ category today – think cold brew coffee, kombucha and natural pet food, to name a few – challengers have recognized the need to further insulate themselves from competition.

What this means for challenger brands:

Enter the concept of the “moat” – an intentional competitive edge that raises barriers to competition, ideally developed early on in a company’s or brand’s life cycle. Successful challenger brands now need to start building their competitive “moats” early. When the Seurat Group identifies promising challenger brands, we tend to prioritize those that have deliberately dug their moats early in the development of their business model. An example of this is Q Mixers,

a premium natural mixer brand based in Brooklyn, NY. By aligning with the nation’s largest distributor in the majority of US states, they effectively established a “protected” route to market, enabling them to introduce the brand to Millennial consumers on and off premise, challenging flat-footed incumbents like Canada Dry and Schweppes and insulating against premium upstarts in the local/artisanal mixers space.

What this means for this year’s Challenger Brand Study:

This year we highlight 10 challenger brands that are not only disrupting existing categories but also using a “moat” to establish a clear edge for growth. These moats are a little different from the ways established brands have traditionally created competitive advantage. (Spoiler: it’s not about

defending shelf space, production and distribution scale, or paying for share of voice anymore). These days challenger brands are employing a host of moat-building techniques, from exclusive channels to social reach and proprietary technology.

TOP 10 CHALLENGER BRANDS 2018

Brand

Background and Moat

Bright Farms

Produce

Bright Farms is changing our food system by producing healthier and more sustainable local produce. The company finances, builds and operates hydroponic greenhouses near retail distribution partners, allowing the stores to reliably carry locally-grown, high-quality packaged vegetables.

The greenhouses are financed by long-term retailer agreements, effectively barring competitors from entry once Bright Farms gains distribution. Having already established successful partnerships with major retailers like Kroger, Ahold, Albertsons and Walmart, and posted 890% growth over the past 3 years, the brand is poised for continued expansion in the coming years.

Tony’s Chocolonely

Chocolate

Tony’s Chocolonely, a Dutch-based chocolate company that entered the U.S. in 2017, is challenging the industry to produce chocolate made totally without any unjust labor practices. By trading directly with farmers, paying above fair-trade rates and helping farmers grow profitable, long-term businesses, Tony’s is showing big players and consumers alike that it’s possible to produce affordable chocolate that meets a higher standard.

By changing the conversation around chocolate production and setting the new bar for quality, Tony’s has carved out a niche as a brand uniquely positioned to deliver delicious chocolate that consumers can feel good about eating. The brand has maintained a 50% annual growth rate since 2005.

New Wave Foods

Plant-Based Seafood

New Wave Foods co-founders Dominique Barres and Michelle Wolf knew there had to be a better way to give consumers the seafood they want while protecting the ocean’s finite resources. In 2015 they developed their first product: algae-based “shrimp.” The proprietary product story allowed them to enter leading-edge foodservice locations like Google’s campus.

New Wave Foods is an example of how a challenger brand can use new technologies, processes and ingredients to build a breakthrough product story that creates a moat even at start-up stage. Their early commitment to identifying, sourcing and processing the specific algae to recreate shrimp’s color, taste and texture will give them a significant head start as other brands start to bring plant-based trends to seafood.

Kylie Cosmetics

Cosmetics

Kylie Jenner is shaking up the beauty industry with the launch of her Kylie Cosmetics line. After earning $420MM in sales after only 18 months, Kylie Cosmetics is projected to hit $1B in total sales by 2022, just 7 years after launch. (By comparison, it took Lancôme 80 years to do the same.)While celebrity has always been a way to create an edge, today’s celebrities are using their social media reach to market directly to fans, further leveraging their fame to build the brands that bear their names. Jenner uses her social media pages (she has over 115 million Instagram followers!) to connect consumers with her brand. The instant consumer pull from Millennials and Gen Z creates a moat that is difficult for others to emulate.

Vital Proteins

Supplements

Vital Proteins has become a leading brand in the collagen space by using digital marketing and partnerships with “endorsers” from values-based groups. For example, the brand’s clean ingredient list won it “Whole30-approval.” (Whole30 is an increasingly popular eating plan focused on whole, unprocessed foods.) The brand has roughly tripled in sales the past three years, using these values-based endorsements to build a moat in the highly competitive supplement space.

From the Seal of Good Housekeeping to celebrity chef recommendations, brand endorsements have been around forever. What has changed is the source of these endorsements and their ability to act as challenger brand moats that help consumers navigate a sea of confusing food choices.

Four Sigmatic

Mushroom-based Drinks

Although “adaptogens” have become an industry buzzword over the past few years, they remain a mystery to most consumers. Adaptogens, or medicinal mushrooms, provide functional benefits like sleep aid and stress management – and Four Sigmatic is bringing them to the mainstream market. To do so, the brand makes it easy to understand and access mushrooms’ benefits. Their packaging pairs unfamiliar mushroom types (“reishi”) with familiar benefits (“chill”), and the products are powders that are simply mixed into water.

While others may jump on the bandwagon (Starbucks just announced an adaptogen latte), Four Sigmatic has made the ingredient synonymous with its brand by making an unfamiliar ingredient widely accessible. The brand continues to launch new products and geographies.

Oatly

Dairy Milk Alternative

Oatly, an oat-based milk free from dairy, soy, GMOs, gluten, or nuts, entered the U.S. market by eschewing mainstream retail and going directly to coffee shops. In doing so, they won over influential baristas and leading-edge coffee enthusiasts. This influencer channel continues to be a moat for Oatly to reach new consumers and generate demand and momentum to fuel its entry into mainstream retail and into new geographies.

Perfect Bar

Protein Bar

Years ago, Perfect Bar disrupted the bars market by targeting placement in refrigerated spaces, before a category for fresh bars even existed. This unique location not only harnesses the freshness halo of the refrigerated case, but also insulates the brand from the rest of the crowded ambient bar category.

In-store location is still the #1 medium for building brands in most categories. Perfect Bar demonstrates the moat-building power of a distinct location that communicates, educates and reaches new shoppers.

Bevi

Healthy Beverage Dispensers

Bevi is unique on this list in that it’s not a packaged good. In fact, Bevi has forsaken packaging altogether. This Boston-based company places digital healthy beverage dispensers in offices around the U.S., providing employees with healthy, tasty beverages that generate less waste than traditional canned or bottled options. The machines also track consumption, allowing Bevi to proactively restock machines and build a database of consumption insights. The brand says it has reduced office beverage costs by 50%, and Bevi itself posted 1000% revenue growth in 2016.

Bevi’s “moat” comes from the way in which it developed a complete solution model with distributors to help with the sale, delivery and maintenance of machines to offices.

Urban Remedy

Fresh RTE Meals & Snacks

Urban Remedy is bringing consumers ready-to-eat fresh meals and snacks whenever, wherever. Their omni-channel model, which spans home delivery, owned retail storefronts and branded kiosks inside of other forward-looking retailers, allows them to win a greater share of in-home and out of home occasions. The proof? Urban Remedy has experienced 100% growth over the past two years.

The company tracks data from owned points of sale, using the insights to tailor its assortment in real time (a kiosk’s assortment on a given day is determined by analysis of yesterday’s sales). Furthermore, Urban Remedy uses kiosks and branded stores to incubate and identify the 2-3 SKUs that are worthy of being rolled out to larger accounts like Costco. This “always-on insight strategy” provides a better chance of success when launching new products in mainstream retail channels – and creates a moat to stave off other brands considering entering the fresh packaged space.

10 moats that create an edge within the challenger brand model:

1. Supply chain as consumer benefit
2. Raise the bar on production standards
3. Proprietary product story
4. Commercialized social reach
5. Values-based endorsements

6. First mover with a unique ingredient
7. Influencer channels
8. Stand-out in-store location
9. Complete solution model
10. Always on insight strategy

As always, we want to hear from you! If you’d like more information on any of our challenger brand studies, or want to share a brand of your own, please reach out at info@seuratgroup.com.

Check out our previous challenger brand studies here, here, and here.

Sources:

Bright Farms

Tony’s Chocolonely

New Wave Foods

Kylie Cosmetics

Vital Proteins

Four Sigmatic

Perfect Bar

Bevi

Urban Remedy

Oalty

https://www.inc.com/betsy-mikel/this-439-cult-swedish-drink-is-poised-to-disrupt-a-16-billion-industry.html

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Challenger Brand Leadership Series: Harmless Harvest

2019 Top 10 Revenue Growth Ideas: Leveraging Insights to Drive Growth

Challenger Brand Leadership Series: The Honest Company

Future of Omni-Channel Planning

Future of Packaging: Re-thinking Plastic Solutions

Innovation at the Moment of Truth

by admin | Jun 13, 2018

Innovation at the Moment of Truth

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Innovation at the Moment of Truth

Introduction

Today’s Consumer Packaged Goods manufacturers face a challenging environment with overall industry growth forecast to be a modest 2.0-2.5% for 2018. While price increases have historically been a reliable growth lever, it has become increasingly difficult to realize price growth even when increased input costs justify a change.

The forces of value conscious shoppers, radical price transparency enabled by omnichannel commerce, and intensifying retailer competition have merged to reduce pricing power across the market.

Within this context, innovation remains an imperative for manufacturers to drive demand and realize higher prices. While most organizations focus on product innovation as the primary growth pathway, we at the Seurat Group see few manufacturers actively use packaging as a demand and value driver for their portfolio.

We believe package innovation is an under-utilized lever that brands can use to access incremental demand pools and realize higher price points among consumers, shoppers and customers.

Outside-In Package and Pricing Innovation

Historically, manufacturers have taken an inside-out approach to innovation and pricing decisions – both inside their category and inside the package. Within a category, revenue teams often lean on syndicated data to evaluate pricing within their category and brand portfolio to find the “optimal” price point.

Inside the package, manufacturers lean in on R&D teams to develop products that deliver enhanced benefits to justify higher price points – e.g., organic or clean label offerings.

While these steps are important, focusing solely on ‘inside’ dimensions limits opportunities to increase consumer share of stomach/ usage or to drive overall value growth.

Expanding to include an exhaustive ‘outside’ view elevates the importance of consumer, shopper and customer need spaces, and reveals opportunities for brands to meet new needs through enhanced benefits at higher price points.

Looking Outside-In

We have identified four best practices to unlock incremental growth opportunities for brand portfolios through packaging innovation and price architecture optimization:

Too often brands define their competitive set as products within their physical category at retail. Unfortunately, this approach is disconnected from how decisions are made along the consumer journey and misses choices being made among a broader set of products. Narrowly defining the competitive set misses opportunities to capitalize on whitespaces that may exist in adjacent categories. For example, broadening the frame of reference from ‘Pretzels’ (~$1 billion in sales) to ‘Total Salty Snacks’ (~$28 billion in sales) unlocks opportunities for a brand to compete for incremental demand and dollars.

Within a broader frame of reference it is critical to build solutions for consumers grounded in a deep understanding of the needs that drive product selection. Traditional price and package optimization often has a narrow focus on identifying gaps within a category’s current range of package sizes and prices.

However, this often limits growth to stealing share from within the category or subsidizing sales from a brand’s current product range. Re-orienting to start with broader consumer needs allows for brands to identify incremental demand spaces that are under-served and utilize package innovation to access incremental profit pools.

For example, understanding that a consumer is looking for an interesting, on-the-go snack to alleviate boredom on their commute, rather than a small bag of chips, establishes a whole new foundation to inspire package innovation.

Defining a unique role for each product at the customer level – and the specific needs of shoppers in those customers – are key inputs into package innovation and pricing. The result is an omnichannel product portfolio that delights customers and shoppers and is naturally differentiated across points of distribution.

As online retailers shepherd in the age of Radical Price Transparency (see our growthpaper ‘Radical Price Transparency’), manufacturers increasingly need ways to manage cross channel price matching. Channel specific package innovation provides the dual benefit of better meeting customer needs and minimizing pricing conflicts.

A product’s packaging plays a key role in addressing expanded consumer, customer and shopper needs. In order to access incremental demand spaces, innovation must incorporate package design elements required to win occasions from competitive products.

Vying for a quick-fuel, on-the-go occasion highlights that a package must have portable, quick to eat, no mess (e.g., one handed) elements in order to win a consumer’s dollars. In order to be successful, package innovation needs the same focus, investment and attention as product innovation.

Conclusion

As manufacturers seek ways to increase growth in a low-growth environment, package and price innovation can unlock significant incremental profit pools for new and existing brands. Looking “Outside-In” and utilizing the four best practices outlined above provides the foundation for brands to develop concepts that connect to incremental demand spaces and price points.

The Seurat Group helps clients look “Outside-In” to uncover incremental brand growth opportunities through package innovation and pricing. Please contact us directly at info@seuratgroup.com with any comments or questions. We welcome your input.

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Challenger Brand Leadership Series: Harmless Harvest

2019 Top 10 Revenue Growth Ideas: Leveraging Insights to Drive Growth

Challenger Brand Leadership Series: The Honest Company

Future of Omni-Channel Planning

Future of Packaging: Re-thinking Plastic Solutions

Developing a Winning Growth Strategy

by admin | Mar 16, 2018

Developing a Winning Growth Strategy

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Developing a Winning Growth Strategy

Plan for Growth

In today’s rapidly evolving consumer products environment, revenue growth and sustainable advantage are unquestionably challenging to obtain. Building a successful long range plan that guides the organization’s activities requires thoughtful choices informed by a robust fact base. Given today’s challenges, it is fair to ask, ‘what constitutes a winning growth strategy’ and ‘how do you know which strategies will lead to growth’? We at the Seurat Group believe that understanding how to develop a winning Growth Strategy is THE difference between being a company that is in sustained growth mode,

leading from ahead, versus one that is constantly scrambling, leaning on cost models like zero-based budgeting to turn up short term profit. The difference resides in the long-term strategic planning approach, an often overlooked capability that frequently manifests in an underutilized PowerPoint presentation to guide senior-most level discussions. The following outlines 5 strategic planning best practices growth leaders use to identify pathways to sustainable and profitable growth.

Change begins with challenging your organization’s strategic planning process. This is pivotal because long-range planning represents the top of the business funnel, influencing strategic choices that drive actions, investment, personnel decisions, and the ability to win with consumers in the marketplace. The key to success is the right starting point. Organizations traditionally begin long-range planning with corporate and functional strategic planning. We believe the starting point for long-range planning should be grounded in a common Growth Strategy. The process and insight to build the Growth Strategy will inform the appropriate choices and investment in enterprise strategies and, in turn, guide the functional strategies. The Growth Strategy starts with the company’s / brand’s Mission and wires the Mission to Actions. Starting with the Mission provides purpose and commercial focus. Wiring it to Actions requires critical planning in the Where to Play and How to Win stages. This process creates the rationale and conviction to act and orient toward the biggest opportunities. The net result is a Growth Strategy that identifies clear advantage, defines the repeatable growth model and forces all long-range planning to be designed to enable growth. Configure the company to serve the Growth Strategy, not serve the Corporate Strategy.

Strategy fails for brands when the operating plan is disconnected from the core consumer. Challenger Brands are creating growth because they are connected with a consumer’s value system and community. A successful Growth Strategy is an extension of this principle by putting the consumer at the center of planning. Companies tend to migrate away from the consumer with their Corporate Strategy framework and make choices and select metrics that lose important human considerations. Today the greatest value in planning comes from deep, proprietary insight into the consumer journey with a cohesive understanding of personal experiences and category triggers. Building a Growth Strategy around the connection to consumers leads to more personalized experiences through new technology and new demand generation tools. Re-orient strategy by putting the consumer first and driving demand-centric growth.

Living the company’s or brand’s Mission (assuming it is both genuine and compelling) creates unique advantage. When the Mission is tightly tied to planning, activities become more focused as the end goal is clearly defined. A Mission driven plan continually reinforces the purpose of the company and ensures synergies across commercial activities as all communication points are consistently on message. More than ever, consumers seek mission-driven, socially responsible companies. Having an authentic, aspirational mission creates a connection with consumers that builds loyalty and increases value capture. Simply stated, living the Mission ensures that the company’s ‘why’ is clear to consumers and customers, inspiring positive perceptions and enticing desired changes in shopper and buyer behavior.

Once the Growth Strategy has shaped the forward plan, the Operating Playbook connects How to Win choices with demand generating actions. Leveraging organizational strengths identified throughout the Growth Strategy and choices made on where to unlock value across consumers, categories and customers, the Operating Playbook captures the initiatives, resources, structures, and timing necessary to drive change. Long range planning fails to gain traction when Growth Strategy choices are not tightly wired to the Operating Playbook, causing a disconnect between leadership’s direction and day to day operations.

With the Growth Strategy and Operating Playbook in place, organizations can build out Corporate Strategy with the goal of supporting, wiring and fueling demand-centric growth.

Complexity creates confusion and inaction. An organization must be able to simply articulate the shift in strategy and the implications for all employees. Often overlooked, yet of unparalleled importance, the Plan-on-a-Page becomes the narrative for a company. Easy to share and discuss, the Plan-on-a-Page highlights key areas of the long range plan in a user friendly way that everyone can engage with from executives to managers to associates to 3rd party partners. By stripping away the details that are unnecessary for everyone, the organization can focus on the necessary, prioritizing key initiatives and configuring to drive actions that will unlock the greatest value.

In Summary

As the consumer goods industry continues to evolve and becomes more competitive due to new entrants, new selling platforms, and new technologies, growth remains the #1 challenge and goal. Building a successful long range plan that guides the organization’s activities requires thoughtful choices led by a robust fact base — failing to plan is planning to fail. First things first, do you have a successful growth strategy? We at the Seurat Group recommend following the 5 Point Plan outlined in the prior pages to challenge the strategic planning process and to use planning as the tool to be an industry leading growth company.

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Challenger Brand Leadership Series: Harmless Harvest

2019 Top 10 Revenue Growth Ideas: Leveraging Insights to Drive Growth

Challenger Brand Leadership Series: The Honest Company

Future of Omni-Channel Planning

Future of Packaging: Re-thinking Plastic Solutions

Delivering Idea Leadership

by admin | Feb 28, 2018

Delivering Idea Leadership

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Delivering Idea Leadership

The world is becoming more fragmented, and so is data

The days of standardized (and commoditized) data in the CPG industry are over. Traditional sources of information come from sales and marketing channels that hold less and less dominance over today’s shoppers and consumers. From a marketing perspective, there is a massive shift of media dollars away from traditional media to digital media. From a sales perspective, growth is increasingly coming from “dark channels” not measured by syndicated data (e.g., eCommerce, alternative retail models like travel and bodegas, non-participating retailers like Trader Joe’s and Aldi).

Insight investment is being reduced, while teams being tasked with doing more

On top of zero-based budget constraints, insight teams are forced to use their limited time in collecting data from across today’s fragmented, omni-channel landscape. Many organizations are giving teams long learning agendas to identify and understand growth opportunities while providing less in the form of resources. A recent Seurat Group assessment of the insights practices of CPG companies found that many researchers are struggling in this environment.

If you want to catch big fish, you have to go into deep waters

Some things stay the same: companies struggle to translate information to insights and actions. Is fragmentation of data driving your insight capabilities into increasingly shallow waters? As resource constraints cause evergreen issues in research to accelerate, it’s even more critical to tighten the ideal leadership process to arrive at the clarity to act and invest in the future.

The Idea Leadership Pyramid

Insights teams play a pivotal role in high performing organizations by extracting relevant information from data, elevating that information to insights, identifying the implications for the business and eventually aligning on imperatives to action. The Idea Leadership Pyramid helps illustrate opportunities to increase organizational capabilities to identify and action deep insights.

The Seurat Group conducted a recent assessment on research and insights, and identified barriers and opportunities to deliver Idea Leadership across the pyramid.

Information

Ongoing Challenges

Consumer shifts and new ways of interacting with brands creates a wider variety of data to gather and analyze.

Solution

Continuously test new methods, such as passive tracking and social media analytics, to understand the consumer & shopper everywhere they are, online and offline, throughout the ever-changing consumer journey.

As ‘off the shelf’ studies like market structures are increasingly commoditized, challenging to uncover differential insight.

Customize research design for specific insight needs and use multiple lenses of information to create the foundation needed to identify deep insights.

Insights

Ongoing Challenges

Fragmentation of data assets, often in silos, inhibit the data connections necessary to fully understand the consumer/shopper.

Solution

Activate a knowledge management plan that integrates all available data and facilitates connectivity.

Resources are increasingly scarce while needs continue to increase.

Establish an interconnected data structure and actively mine data that already exists in the organization before fielding new work.

Research not keeping pace with a rapidly changing consumer and shopper landscape.

Ensure research is designed to be “forward looking” to increase relevancy beyond a single point in time and anticipate future challenges.

Implications

Ongoing Challenges

Research reports often focus on sharing facts and information.

Solution

Ensure the “what” is connected with the “how” and the “why” to better identify relevance in addressing business issues.

Application of information limited by exclusive understanding and/or ‘ownership’ by the insights function.

Insight teams must develop capabilities to teach the organization how to interpret insights effectively and elevate through every level of the pyramid through storytelling vs. reporting.

Imperatives

Ongoing Challenges

Gaps between internal stakeholder business needs and available insights.

Solution

Make idea leadership a cross-functional “team game” in both informal team structure and project process through all slices of the pyramid.

Conclusion

The ability of any Consumer Goods organization to understand the needs and deep motivations of consumers and shoppers and successfully commercialize those insights is THE differentiator between winners and losers in today’s marketplace. Elevating information to insights and action is filled with challenges at every level, and many organizations have barriers that must be removed to realize the full return on insight investment. As these issues accelerate with increasing fragmentation across marketing and retail channels, it is imperative to re-examine foundational research processes to foster game-changing idea leadership.

For more information on Idea Leadership, contact us at info@seuratgroup.com or visit our website: www.seuratgroup.com.

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Challenger Brand Leadership Series: Harmless Harvest

2019 Top 10 Revenue Growth Ideas: Leveraging Insights to Drive Growth

Challenger Brand Leadership Series: The Honest Company

Future of Omni-Channel Planning

Future of Packaging: Re-thinking Plastic Solutions

2018 Top Ten Revenue Growth Ideas

by admin | Feb 28, 2018

2018 Top Ten Revenue Growth Ideas

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2018 Top Ten Revenue Growth Ideas

Ideas to spur growth through new strategies in 2018

Revenue Growth

The most valuable commodity in our industry today, revenue growth generates cash flow, builds an infectious feeling of success, enables career growth opportunities and creates new jobs. Investors like revenue growth: the biggest gains in valuation often come at the pivot points in revenue momentum. In short, revenue growth creates value and is the most important, yet challenging, performance metric in our industry today.

Revenue Growth

At the Seurat Group, we believe revenue growth is a lagging indicator predicated on leading indicators such as a company’s willingness to embrace and execute new ideas that often go against the grain. Last year’s Top Ten list focused on new revenue pools. This year, our list focuses on new capabilities to help our partners achieve revenue growth goals in 2018 and beyond.

Most insights and their resulting actions are still derived from rear-view mirror sources like syndicated, tracking, behavioral, attitudinal and competitive benchmarking. This type of historical analysis at best leads to incremental change but is often misaligned with consumer trends. Predictive insight, borne from understanding leading-edge consumers and trends, enables a step-change by identifying the triggers to design against for future growth.

Online algorithmic price matching ensures that e-tailers always offer the lowest marketplace price and produces the best value for their shoppers, increasing the risk of an automated “race to the bottom” for unsuspecting brands. While many manufacturers still feel insulated from the impact of ecommerce given a small share of sales online, the share of price influence and perception driven by online platforms far exceeds today’s dollar share. Radical price transparency is the new normal and threatens commoditization in many categories. To avoid significant price and revenue erosion, manufacturers must adjust trade and pricing strategy to outcome-based performance, limit deal price visibility and develop bullet-proof omnichannel price architecture.

Until big CPG places incubator channels on equal strategic footing as FDMC, Challenger brands will continue to emerge and disrupt categories. These brands that seem to come out of nowhere develop in incubator channels where 1-to-1 consumer relationships and immediate consumption exists; places like airports, bodegas, c-stores, foodservice, online and online direct-to-consumer. To achieve revenue goals, it is critical to break out of the traditional channel strategy mold and embrace the marketing mediums, growth, and planning leverage that influencer channels afford.

Native advertising is becoming the dominant way consumers engage with brands online as banner ads are increasingly ignored or blocked, and influencer #ad content accepted. Brands are increasingly shoppable directly from social media and blogs with widespread adoption of services like Instagram’s Product Tagging, LiketoKNOW.it, and Amazon affiliate links, merging the point of influence with the point of purchase.

Influencing greater brand execution at retail now requires more than category management and shopper marketing by brands. With retailers uncertain of the future for many categories undergoing rapid change or years of stagnation, manufacturers have an opportunity to help retail partners understand how to compete for an evolving share of consumption occasions, and against an increasingly competitive retail landscape. Leaders are reimagining the future of purchase and retail to create new collaboration planning playbooks.

As social and digital marketing become increasingly fragmented, personalization is the ante. 1-to-1 relationships and micro-community building create a level of loyalty that translates into differential revenue growth. A deeper understanding of key micro-segments and their needs over time or even over life stages are necessary to establish the guard rails for personalized offers and experiences. Top manufacturers are harnessing the technology to activate against each person at a particular time, place and need state.

An underutilized vehicle in today’s demand landscape, the right partnerships can help brands leverage each other’s strengths. Emerging brands can access the reach and distribution of established brands, and established brands can tap into the credibility and authenticity of emerging brands. Like-minded brands can facilitate inexpensive customer acquisition through audience-sharing and cross-promotion, but need to be guided by a strong shared sense of purpose and recognition of respective contributions.

DTC is an important consideration for new revenue generation capabilities, particularly in building brand equity, more impactful consumer education, and proprietary insights. Although type of product line and fulfillment are critical considerations, DTC is much more than a channel strategy. It is a way for brands to elevate from selling commoditized products to selling experiences. It enables brands to better convert shoppers with customized education and recommendations. DTC is also critical for developing differential consumer insights for an integrated marketing strategy online as well as in-store, serving as a continuous test and learn incubation channel to seed and support innovation launches in retail.

High growth Challenger brands successfully identify the plans that drive consumer influence and demand at each retailer, while large manufacturers have burdensome controls in place that limit customer planning. The tactics that work best at each retailer are still very different. Executional advantage and revenue growth lie in being flexible to leverage each retailer’s go-to-market strengths, align with their strategy and adapt plans to it. Challenger brands are customer-driven and couple a highly flexible approach with a total channel demand landscape view. By having the right level of controls in place to make smart decisions (e.g., using a total customer P&L), Challenger brands place decision making and flexibility closer to the customer rather than being control-driven at headquarters.

Segmentation strategy must be executed at every level of the demand landscape. Categories and brands must take into consideration not just who and why, but also where. Differential strategy execution is achieved by uniquely investing with retail customers that can over-deliver against each shopper group and need state.

Conclusion

Our industry is going through immense change. Tomorrow’s leaders will be the brands that are the agilest, with a strong bias for action and a willingness to challenge convention to unlock new sources of revenue growth. The Seurat Group prides itself on being a partner that can generate big ideas, and arm our clients to overcome internal and external hurdles to their execution. To find out how the Seurat Group can help your organization adapt and change to realize real revenue growth, please visit our website at www.seuratgroup.com or contact us directly at info@seuratgroup.com with any comments or questions. We welcome your input.

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Challenger Brand Study 2018: The Magic of the Moat

Challenger Brand Study 2018: The Magic of the Moat

The competitive landscape for challenger brands has rapidly intensified.

What this means for challenger brands:

What this means for this year’s Challenger Brand Study:

TOP 10 CHALLENGER BRANDS 2018

Bright Farms

Tony’s Chocolonely

New Wave Foods

Kylie Cosmetics

Vital Proteins

Four Sigmatic

Oatly

Perfect Bar

Bevi

Urban Remedy

10 moats that create an edge within the challenger brand model:

Innovation at the Moment of Truth

Innovation at the Moment of Truth

Introduction

Outside-In Package and Pricing Innovation

Looking Outside-In

Conclusion

Developing a Winning Growth Strategy

Developing a Winning Growth Strategy

Plan for Growth

In Summary

Delivering Idea Leadership

Delivering Idea Leadership

The world is becoming more fragmented, and so is data

Insight investment is being reduced, while teams being tasked with doing more

If you want to catch big fish, you have to go into deep waters

The Idea Leadership Pyramid

Information

Ongoing Challenges

Solution

Insights

Ongoing Challenges

Solution

Implications

Ongoing Challenges

Solution

Imperatives

Ongoing Challenges

Solution

Conclusion

2018 Top Ten Revenue Growth Ideas

2018 Top Ten Revenue Growth Ideas

Ideas to spur growth through new strategies in 2018

Revenue Growth

Revenue Growth

Conclusion

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