Eileen Bentley, Senior Manager Marketing Strategy, Bord Bia
All sectors including food and drink are facing increasing uncertainty as dynamics continue to shift within the marketplace. These shifts have come from two sides: big, traditional platform based companies moving into new categories relatively easily (e.g. Amazon) and the emergence in almost all categories of smaller ‘challenger’ or disruptor brands often with innovative offerings and business models. As a result, many brands and businesses risk becoming squeezed in the middle, so taking the time to adopt proactive strategies to prevent erosion of market share is critical. To do this, four key points should be considered:
- Understand your consumer or customer’s pain points – when a brand or business fails to understand their customer’s frustrations, it leaves room for a more innovative or responsive offer to gain ground. Getting to the bottom of these pain points is not rocket science – taking the opportunity to seek feedback when sampling, asking core customers for a response via social media, talking to shoppers in-store are all easy and effective methods to consider
- Know what is meaningful to your consumers and engage with them through your brand. Bord Bia’s Consumer Lifestyle Trends identifies Responsible Living as one of the five key trends in the world today where sustainability increasingly encompasses social and fiscal responsibility, as well as environmental, and as such consumers seek relationships with businesses who have ‘purpose beyond profit’ that have a tangible, net positive impact at every point in their value chain.
- Think synergies – the fastest way to grow is to offer something that your current consumers/customers, those most loyal to you, would be happy to pay for if you provided it and which would make your original product even more valuable to them.
- Build a strong identity based on a robust value proposition and shared values – Knowing what your consumers and customers want, and why and how your brand or product is relevant and unique to them, can help you to grow your business.
To understand more about how to develop a value proposition for your business and where this fits within your overall commercial marketing strategy, visit www.plantogrow.ie from Bord Bia.
References:
Don’t let your brand get squeezed in the middle - Johan Ekelin and Emma Barrebo, Feb 2018 WARC
Disruption starts with unhappy customers, not technology by Thales S. Teixeira, June 2019