The importance of showing your product in context and evaluating your approach to growth

I was speaking to a company recently about the importance of not just showing a product, but of creating a usage occasion to give people a reason to purchase it.

Their problem was that they were selling a lot of their products as souvenirs and gifts in a prime tourist location in a large city, but wondered why they were not selling more as an 'everyday' purchase. In my mind there were a few obvious problems. The product looked like a gift, it was retailed in a top location for tourism, it was not priced as an everyday purchase and the format was not an ‘everyday’ format. In the client’s mind, asking customers to buy the product every day was a surefire way to generate more revenue with greater frequency. Not only that, but the customer was being told ‘what’ and not ‘why’, which is a really common mistake. We focus all too often on what we are selling and not why it will benefit out target market. ‘Why’ is also not enough. We should also add ‘when’.

For example, imagine you are selling spice mixes.

“We sell spice mixes” might evoke the reaction, “Oh, right”.

“We sell spice mixes that taste great sprinkled on roasted cashew nuts”. “Hmmm, nice idea.”

“Sprinkling our spice mixes on cashew nuts and baking them in the oven for 15 minutes provides the perfect healthier solution for the 2pm-4pm sugar dip when you ordinarily reach for a chocolate bar". We now understand our need for this product and it has a context in our lives. We have created space for it.

In this case, the company had applied business logic (we need to make more money by selling more units) but not married it with context (does this model work with what we have, or do we need to make changes?)

The best way to evaluate an approach for growth is to conduct a brand audit, followed by a brand or marketing strategy. We would start by identifying the real objective, which is, “We need to make more money”. The brand audit would look at everything your company has in terms of product, branding, brand touchpoints (everywhere the consumer encounters the brand), Tone Of Voice, messaging, aims, objectives, vision and mission. The purpose of this is to identify gaps and discrepancies in brand consistency, and to work out why the objective might not be matching the reality.

Hearing the results of a brand audit is not always a comfortable experience. It might even feel personal, but the way to succeed is to be open-minded and to treat it as a diagnosis that you might not want to hear, but that is the first step to recovery and progress.

From the brand audit we create a brand or marketing strategy document, which addresses each of these key points with a plan for how to resolve them. A marketing strategy leads to a detailed marketing plan, which is the implementation of the strategy.

In the case of the company I mentioned, we first had to question whether they were going after the right market. If their product looks like a gift, is priced and packaged like a gift and is located where gifts are purchased, then should we instead be maximising the gifting potential, tapping into markets such as hampers, subscriptions, tourism, high-end experiences, hotels and airports? Or is a better strategy to change the positioning, branding, format, price point and imagery to re-position the product as an everyday purchase?

As for giving your product some context, we have often worked with clients in the past to place their product in context for social media. This might be by developing recipes and photographing them, by placing a product in an interior, or by showing the product being used. This gives your customers something to connect with, and helps them to imagine owning that product themselves.