brandcentric blog

I’m intrigued with what Quirky.com is doing to help bring new product concepts to market in a fast, efficient way.   As one of the few platforms to make product development truly social, Quirky truly is the intersection of crowdsourcing and product ideation.  The concept is simple:  any member can submit a product idea to Quirky.com, and the community of influencers can help shape, refine and complete the product.  The benefit is faster time to development with what could be a more commercially viable product.

Applying this model in CPG would likely be considered heresy among the ranks of most CPG market research teams.   The CPG product development model is steeped in the tradition of generating lots of ideas, prototyping a few concepts, testing those concepts among a pre-screened panel, conducting lots of focus group session and ultimately making a bet to commercialize (or not).  The crowdsourcing model turns over control and critical decision-making to the masses

The social product development model could help cut through the clutter much faster, and even help identify some whitespace product concepts that would otherwise have been tossed aside.  I see great application for entrepreneurs that can’t afford traditional product development processes.  I can even see some larger CPGs experimenting with platforms like Quirky, more from a learning perspective.  But ultimately it’s the real success stories that will help attract more attention to this newer, potentially better development model.

This is simply brilliant work by the Red Bull team.  If you haven’t heard about Red Bull Stratos, do yourself a favor and watch this 4-minute video trailer.  In a nutshell:

• Felix Baumgartner will attempt to free fall then parachute from 23 miles above Earth
• If successful, he will break several 50-year old records held by Colonel Joe Kittinger
• This project is completely underwritten and produced by Red Bull

Yes – Red Bull has upped the ante in the content department with a pretty compelling story.  In fact, this trailer feels very much like what you’d expect to see as a high quality movie preview.  But what’s most amazing here is that Red Bull is producing this alone – no big corporate media halo, no online media partner to ensure distribution, no A-list Hollywood producer name to lean on.  It’s Red Bull’s gig and they’re going all-in.

The “safe” thing to do would have been to partner with some big media outlet, if for no other reason than to guarantee coverage and distribution.  But the story is so darn compelling, that Red Bull has the license to go direct.

I see this as the wave of the future — brands investing in world-class content that is intimately linked to their equity and serving it straight up to consumers.  Not all brands, but those like Red Bull, Porsche, Nintendo and others that have authentic products, a crystal clear positioning and a base of die-hard loyalists.

Kudos to the Red Bull team and to @kdoohan who leads digital marketing (Kevin is also a ConAgra Foods alum).  Should be fun to see this unfold.

Hard to believe, but it’s been a year plus since I launched the brandcentric blog.  Many lessons learned about the art and science of blogging (mostly positive), and still a lot more to discover.

On the content front, this has been a fantastic opportunity to refine my focus in this bold, new era of CPG marketing.  A few of the more meaningful themes from the past year include:

• The expanding share-of-wallet that digital media has claimed from traditional media vehicles.  CPG was slow to adopt, but quick to catch up to (and potentially surpass) other industries.
• The coming-of-age of social media and marketing for CPG brands.  Word-of-mouth makes a lot of sense for considered purchases, even in the world of fast-moving consumer goods.
• Leveraging applied math and modeling techniques to achieve superior merchandising strategies.  The data is available, the science is mature and business-user applications are available through a browser.
• The relentless pursuit of developing, nurturing and monetizing direct-to-consumer relationships.  Alice.com was unexpected, but is exciting to watch.

As I look forward to 2010, a few early focus areas bubble to the top:

• Shopper centricity.   This will be huge across several fronts, including in-store marketing, trade planning, and broader merchandising strategic planning.   Retailers are ready to unleash the data and shopper segmentation, and manufacturers need to step up to the plate.  Collaborative planning has made a comeback.
• Pricing.  Commodity and ingredient cost volatility is expected to rear its ugly head once again.  The focus on promoted shelf price is more important than ever, especially when considering issues like gap to private label and the incredibly elusive consumer.  Expect manufacturers to funnel more marketing dollars to price as a strategic marketing lever.
• Digital integration.  Will this be the year that digital media and marketing shifts from a “center of excellence” service to a brand-driven strategic capability?  For some brands not quite yet, but for others absolutely.

There are many more themes that are percolating.  I’d love to hear what’s on your mind as you look forward to the coming year.

This is a follow-up to Part I on the same topic, which you can find here.

Earlier this month I had the opportunity to catch a live presentation by the founder and CEO of Alice.com, Brian Wiegand, at the Consumer Goods conference in Orlando.  This was a learning experience on many fronts, as my earlier views were based on partial information.

In a word, the best way to summarize Alice.com is PLATFORM.  What Wiegand and team have done is to offer CPG brands the tools and forum with which to sell direct to consumers.  Alice takes no ownership of the product, the data or the consumer.  They have built a nifty e-commerce platform that allows a brand, and really a community of brands, to easily merchandise themselves to a set of engaged shoppers.  Alice does take the burden of financial transaction processing, fulfillment, customer service and data management off the hands of the brands — a welcome proposition for most CPG companies so they can focus on building and marketing their goods.  Their fees are based on the services they provide, not how much volume they move.

This business model puts Alice in a unique position.  Unlike the first generation of selling consumer packaged goods direct to consumers (Webvan, Netgrocer, etc.), Alice can put their focus on three things: building the platform, ensuring excellent service, and working closely with the brands to mine the data.

So while my earlier analysis concluded that this channel may not move tonnage for many brands, it does offer a quick, easy and value-added way to reach a set of high value consumers…efficiently.  And since Alice isn’t directly taking a piece of each transaction, the full retail margin is passed directly to the brand helping to support Alice’s promise of free shipping.  But the real potential boon here for CPG brands are the valuable insights that can be gleaned by interacting with and marketing directly to consumers.   Alice intends to drive a lot of value with this part of the proposition, and rightfully so.

I’ve always admired Jim Stengel, former Global Marketing Officer from Procter & Gamble.  His focus on connecting with consumers is central to just about every message he shares with CPG marketers and agencies.  It’s a consistent and powerful statement for sure.

Jim recently gave a great interview with Brandweek and not surprisingly he remains busy consulting, keeping healthy, and working on a new book titled “Packaged Good”.  This should be a great read when it hits the press next year.