Dec 10, 2014 | Uncategorized
Courtesy www.milehightreefarm.com
The third in the series outlining the 10 ways small businesses can beat the supermarket gorillas at their own game, by aggressively executing on category management.
Read the first here, the second here.
What better time is there for small businesses trying to make a mark with consumers and those key gatekeepers, retailers, than Christmas?
The 5 rules that normally apply to category marketig still do, but in the heat of the season, the quick and the smart can find a bit of extra leverage.
Any time of change is a time of opportunity, and Christmas ranging is one of the biggest changes retailers go through in the manner in which they allocate their shelf space, as they seek to maximise their seasonal sales. Doesn’t matter what market retailers are in, from fashion to food, car accessories to handbags, pre Christmas sales are critical to the annual numbers.
Meeting customer needs, and maximising the value of the retail shelf -space is what category management is all about.
Just think about the space supermarkets allocate to hams from the beginning of December. Where does that space come from? How do they allocate it across differing brands, sizes and types of ham? and if you are a ham producer, how can you get a slice, and if you sell some of the products that give up shelf space, to hams, how do you make up for the lack of shelf exposure?
6 simple strategies to employ to maximise sales:
- Know the relay schedule, and if possible be involved in the planning discussions. Most chain retailers, particularly supermarkets will have a lead supplier who has the inside running because they have all the data, and better access to the decision makers, but that doesn’t mean you cannot participate.
- Understand the volumes and margins of all products in the category, and manage your recommendations to the retail buyer with his objectives in mind, maximising the absolute margins that come from the shelf space, rather than just concentrating on your margins. Retail buyers are not there to look after your margins, only theirs.
- Understand the sales that come from differing shelf positions, and the impact of differing placements for differing Sku’s. Eye level is always best, but is high better than low? What about the type of shelf grouping, by size, brand, flavour, which combination is the best for you, and the retailer? Retailers will generally have a layout in place, but are often willing to experiment, from which you can both learn.
- Recognise the importance of the retailers profit model, particularly for bricks and mortar: Volume X Item gross margin = gross profit. Going one step further, dividing by the shelf space allocation gives a return on the space, and being really fancy, you can weight the value of the shelf space for a number I call RRRE. (Return on Retail Real Estate).
- To some degree, the discipline of the planogram that covers the other 11 months of the year will be put aside in favour of the short term outcome, knowing once the Xmas frenzy is over, they can revert to the plan, it is a great opportunity for those who can grasp it. Encourage field staff to be creative, a stack of bananas or Christmas pudding near the custard, French mustard next to the hams, dried fruit into he flour category with some cake recipes, A scarf from next door with your handbags, the potential for cross selling at Christmas is limited only by imagination.
- Christmas is a terrific time of the year, family, friends, social opportunities on steroids. At the same time, as the pressure comes off a bit because all the key decisions have been made, it is a great time to work on the relationships, plant the seeds that will deliver next year, and build your category management profile with your customers. After all, your competition is probably at the bar thinking the game is over. Whoops.
When you think that perhaps some external wisdom might be useful, lets have a chat.
Nov 13, 2014 | Uncategorized
Courtesy http://ultimateflytying.com/
Lead generation has always been a real challenge for marketers, an obsession for many. Billions have been spent on misguided, irrelevant and wasteful activity in the name of lead generation.
So, the question remains, how do you find and engage leads through a process resulting in a continuing stream of transactions?
These days there are all sorts of automated ways, tools, and techniques that promise, with the simple swipe of a credit card, to solve the old problem.
Here is some news: it doesn’t work.
Talking to a colleague last week about his lead generation, the conversation was initially around the tools, how best to use LinkedIn, adwords, and all the rest, but what was lacking was a guiding principal, an understanding of the real value that could be delivered to customers, how to articulate that value, and what would make the offer irresistible to the potential customer.
We got to talking about fishing, a challenge in lead generation of another sort. We are both keen and experienced dry fly fishermen, and have occasionally fished together over some hard to get at pieces of mountain stream.
We know which flies work in which circumstances, where the trout typically lurk at various times of the day under differing circumstances, and what may lure them into the open based on the natural feed we see around the river.
Based on that knowledge we make choices about the gear we use, the manner and timing of our attacks on the trout, and how persistent we will be in a particular spot.
Why should lead generation be any different?
Just paying for an ad, using a competition, or any one of the usual lead generation tactics without a crystal clear strategy and understanding of the context and current circumstances, would be like going to a random part of an unknown river and just picking a fly at random, and blindfolding ourselves while we cast.
Unlikely to be successful.
When fishing for leads, you need patience, discipline, skill and experience. When you tire of fishing blind, give me a call.
Oct 2, 2014 | Uncategorized
How many monopolies have you seen that do not make a good profit?
Very few I bet.
On the other hand, how many very sensible, responsible, customer focussed businesses in competitive markets have you seen go to the wall?
Which would you rather be?
Our consumer regulator works to achieve as competitive a market as possible, so it must be good, or at least seen as good, but good for whom?
If you take a broad view of what constitutes a monopoly, a situation where there is domination of a niche, you do not necessarily have to be a massive multinational, or legislated infrastructure supplier to be a monopoly. As a kid, there were several milk bars in the suburb I lived in, one of which had a monopoly on milkshakes sold to schoolkids, and as a result all the other stuff the kids in the area bought. They had a monopoly in a niche, and even as a kid, I knew it was good business.
GoPro went from a idea to a billion dollar company by seeing a niche in the camera market, and going for it. There are two in my household, 2 of my three sons, mad as they are, use GoPro’s to document their lives, and there is even now several years later, no alternative.
Perhaps the most common conversation I have with my client base is about the need for and means of differentiation. What makes you different? Why should people buy from you?
The ultimate differentiation is to have something that nobody else has, that some people want, and it does not have to be a superior milkshake, or innovative piece of camera technology, it can just as easily be a re-engineered supply chain.
The Dollar Shave Club delivers a product you can get in the local supermarket, difference is the way it is delivered. They have created a monopoly in mail order razors, who would have thought? Certainly not Gillette.
When you figure out what you can do for a customer that nobody else can do, and that customer is not satisfied with an alternative, you have what is in effect a monopoly.
Seems to me that the objective of differentiation, and a sure way to make a significant profit is to find a way to create a monopoly.
Sep 18, 2014 | Uncategorized
First let it be clear that I am neither a “power-user” of the increasing suite of tools supplied by Google, or an SEO expert. What I do is approach strategy from the perspective of the potential consumer of that strategy, wether that be B2B, B2C, or in this case, U2G, User to Google.
SEO has been a hot topic for a decade, some really smart people have made loads of money providing advice and bottles of snake oil SEO solutions, often selling it to people who should know better.
When you think about it, SEO is all about getting your content ranked highly, preferably above the fold on page 1. To do that, the SEO proponents go to considerable lengths to “game” the Google algorithms. Google, like all businesses needs to ensure that the people who pay for its services (advertising) get value, so it is in their interests to remove the opportunity to “game” their system. Therefore it seems logical that they spend lots of resources developing algorithms that eliminate any advantage the “gamers” may be able to find.
Who has more money and expertise, the Gamers or Google?
Who really has the greater motivation to remove the opportunity for gaming, Google or the Gamers?
Googles business model is not to make your website popular, they do not care in the least about your site. Nor will they willingly allow you to make your site “popular” by leveraging their algorithms for free.
Googles objective is to find the popular websites and index and rank them to better serve those searching, and to present the searchers eyeballs to those advertising to reach them.
Trying to “out-Google” Google by staying in front of their algorithm development is a losers game. Much better to ignore them, and set about making your site popular because it deserves to be popular, and let Google find and rank you.
Having said all that, there are a few simple things that you would be negligent not to do on your site:
- Focus each page of your site on a key word or phrase
- Ensure each page has a meta description to make indexing easier
- Keep media files to a minimum size to speed up loading,
- And the most important one, and by far the hardest to do: Create great and relevant content that your target audience is motivated to read, bookmark, comment on, and share.
It is easy to be put off by the techno babble that goes on, a lot of it trying to squeeze out the last few percent of so called performance, when in most cases, particularly for SME’s the cost of the last 5 or even 10% efficiency is not justified by the cost of securing it. A little bit of common sense and focus on the customer and the value you are delivering goes a very long way.
SEO as it is usually practiced measures how often your content gets presented to be seen, not by who sees it, and not what they do with it.
May 8, 2014 | Uncategorized
Apr 13, 2014 | Uncategorized
This post goes back to mid 2012. A conversation yesterday with a colleague brought it to mind, as we were discussing the the opportunities to monetise Intellectual Capital of the sort represented by the 1200 odd StrategyAudit posts. “You know more about category management that almost anyone”, he said, “You almost invented what was then Trade Marketing 30 years ago, there must be a bob here somewhere”.
Perhaps self indulgently, I agree.
