Background and challenge
A leading health and wellness company believed that one of its core brands in the juice category had strong potential in food, drug, mass merchant and warehouse club (FDMC) and ecommerce channels but had yet to fulfill that potential. There were many unanswered questions regarding the target customer, value proposition of the brand, product prioritization (formats and conditions), and how to uniquely tailor the brand’s position across key channel partners.
The company enlisted L.E.K. Consulting to help define a winning strategy for the brand’s FDMC and online distribution channels to accelerate revenue growth. This included assessing the brand’s current situation, developing a fact base of where to play/how to win, and building a go-to-market strategy road map.
Approach and recommendations
The first objective was to clearly define the brand’s positioning and value proposition. This involved identifying the brand’s target consumers, segmenting those consumers into discrete customer groups, and characterizing each group’s brand perceptions, purchase behaviors and overall needs.
We then gathered deep competitive insights by leveraging our proprietary SKUology tool to help inform our recommendations.
- First, we identified gaps in the market where the brand could play; for example, we found that many other brands in this category were not positioning themselves as fulfilling a function for the consumer (e.g., improving gut health). This data point was a featured insight in the “pitch pack” we developed for the client to leverage with FDMC buyers, as it highlighted a gap in the market that our client could fill.
- Next, we were able to benchmark competitor products across many data points to help the brand unearth the ideal price point and bottle size among the densely populated competitive set within the FDMC channel.
- Finally, SKUology illustrated the relative disparity between the percentage of juice SKUs and percentage of juice sales achieved online, further cementing our recommendation to rebrand/reposition the overall juice offering to help drive incremental sales.
Leveraging our fact base, we worked with the client to refine the overall product and channel strategy based on the brand’s current offerings and consumer preferences learned from our survey of existing and potential customers. Within each distribution channel, we helped the client define a clearly articulated where-to-play vision to target key customer segments.
Finally, we developed a detailed, yearlong road map to help guide the management team to fully realize the revenue potential of the brand. This included a step-by-step plan to ensure internal alignment on critical tasks and timelines, in addition to a checklist clearly articulating how to activate label redesign, FDMC and online distribution channel strategies, and “launch plans” for each new account won.
Results
The road map devised by the L.E.K. team is poised to accelerate revenue growth as the brand redefines its product and channel strategy. With the target customer, value proposition and product prioritization clearly defined, the client is now confident in the brand’s ability to realize its full potential and continue to capture the multimillion-dollar incremental revenue opportunity identified through our work.
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