Consumer Goods Marketing and Sales

I have been meaning to write this for a while now but then life took over & then this took a backseat. I needed a break from my craft as I have fondly started calling marketing. Well, this is the closest I will be able to call myself creative. So, I decided to take refuge in my second favourite passion - travel!!! This post comes to you from Japan. I am currently at this moment on my way from Osaka to Hiroshima - from modernity to history is what I am choosing to call this journey. It is also the sort of contrast I enjoy in storytelling & advertising.  Till now on our journey of making ads we have covered the science behind making ads & how to nail a brief. From the release of the brief till you actually decide on the script & then shoot it there is a long period. I call it the dramatic pause. How all performing arts have this moment when you wait with your breath held for something big & dramatic to happen. This is the time the creative team is taking to come

Part 3/3 from Jayant - insightful piece on Price Pack Architecture to optimise portfolios. From whatever I've seen, this is one of the most effective parts of the Revenue Growth toolkit. Designing Pack Price Architecture (PPA) through Conjoint Most consumer decisions are made within the influence of several factors – price, competitive marketing efforts (media and trade promotions), brand significance, share of mind/shelf in the shop/retail, new innovative launches etc. So how can a researcher decide on a methodology that allows us to study the impact of these variables when optimizing a brand portfolio. Price Pack Architecture is important to ensure that each SKU in a brand portfolio is aiding in maximizing volume and value for the parent brand (with least cannibalization). Since each SKU would differ slightly in its offering (size, price, flavor etc.), it needs to be understood what impact does it have on the business by changing or introducing new SKUs or brands in

Here's part 2/3 from Jayant - some basics in tracking your brands health KPIs for Brand Health Tracker: Reading BHT Metrics As a marketer tracking sales helps understand your market standing. But it doesn’t answer ‘why” your sales are the way they are. You may enjoy a large share but an undesirable brand strength or vice versa. Hence it is important to measure the health and equity of a brand in the market. Brand health trackers are the mostly used “research tool” to track (hence the name tracker) and measure the standing of brand and its competitors in the market . It is a standard report that is generated on a consistent frequency. This frequency may vary from industry to industry (e.g. it’s important for CPG brands to measure key brand health metrics on monthly or even weekly basis). Each such iteration is generally called a wave , so you read movements of key brand health metrics wave on wave . E.g. If we do brand health tracking twice a year, then you have two

A key area to nail to succeed as a marketer is research - it forms the basis of the decisions that you take. There are several areas to be explored in MR, so as a starter I requested Jayant to help clarify some  basic MR concepts, and introduce a few key frameworks (in the following posts). I know Jayant from MICA, and he's spent the better part of this decade working in research, helping consumer clients form better decisions from their data at AbsolutData in Chicago. You can find him here . Here's the first of three parts: Being smart about research: Most marketers would have support from their Insights and Analytics team. These teams could work parallel feeding strategic insights at regular intervals or at times respond to Adhoc requests from marketing teams. In majority of the organizations insights and analytics team is an integral part of the marketing team itself, working closely on a day-to-day basis. A successful marketer would always be a smart researcher as