Strategy Design | february '15

By Carole Ayoub, Brandcell

To be successful a brand needs to stand out from its competitors by promising relevant yet distinctly different benefits to its target market. It also needs to convey these benefits in everything from its brand name and identity to packaging and product performance.

By carefully selecting these benefits the brand not only sets itself apart as the preferred provider but also as the only viable solution for its customers’ needs.

In other words, consumers are convinced this brand alone delivers what they’re seeking and they won’t accept substitutes even if it is not available. It is through this differentiation strategy that the brand becomes, in the minds of consumers, unique.

by David Meer, Edward C. Landry, and Samrat Sharma

A new approach can help CPG companies introduce products with the right features, price, and packaging. Consumer packaged goods (CPG) companies have a big problem: They have almost no idea which of their new products will end up being popular with consumers. Despite big data, despite a decade of heavy investment in innovation, despite chief innovation officers and efficient R&D, failure rates for new products have hovered at 60 percent for years. Two-thirds of new product concepts don’t even launch. One reason is that the retail environment has become far more complex. E-commerce continues to upend long-established business models, and consumers are shopping less at supermarkets and hypermarkets and more in convenience stores, at discounters, and online.

What’s more, although CPG companies are extremely good at the early stages of innovation—identifying promising areas of growth and creating new product ideas in those areas—and at the later stages of testing concepts and commercializing them, there’s a conspicuous hole in the middle of the process. They don’t have a clear grasp of which combinations of features, packaging, price, and even labeling will persuade consumers to make a purchase. They’re like triathletes who are world-class at swimming and running, but terrible at cycling.

There’s a way to fill that hole, but it won’t be easy.

by Shobha Ponnappa

Brand strategy trends for 2015 are both easy and difficult to predict. Going by what we’ve seen through 2014, a lot of last year’s trends are hardening. But still, when experts aim to predict for the coming year, they are cautious. They know we’re dealing with two notoriously fickle factors: technology and the social media.  Three well-known brand strategy specialist authors of articles in Forbes.com, Huffington Post and SmartCompany, as well as the trend forecasts of the branding agency Landor weigh in on their predictions.