Kantar’s research, the “Blueprint for Brand Growth,” offers businesses a unique opportunity to unlock their growth potential by merging attitudinal and behavioural data at scale, Kantar has revealed the key factors that drive certain brands to grow faster than others.
Unsurprisingly, it found that a strong brand matters.
Strong brand = Strong growth
In fact, strong brands grow more than three times faster than the average brand.
So what makes a brand strong? Well, according to Kanstar, it is a meaningful difference.
What does that mean?
According to Kanstar, meaningfully different brands:
- Are leaders and challenge the status quo
- Are distinctive with a suit of eye-catching brand assets
- Are emotive and go beyond the rational by creating a connection to emotive needs
- Are better and have superior qualities in their products and services
Meaningful differentiation is not just a growth driver; it is THE growth driver. It is the cornerstone of every successful brand strategy, ensuring your brand’s unique value proposition resonates with your target audience and aligns with your positioning.
Once you have a meaningful difference as your growth driver, Kantar offers three rules to accelerate growth. This article will examine these rules in more detail and consider how they might apply to your point-of-sale (PoS) activations.
Rule 1: Predispose more people
Or Be Seen. Positively.
Rule 1, ‘Predispose more people,’ is about increasing your brand’s visibility and positive sentiment. It is about making your brand a familiar and favourable choice in the minds of consumers.
No shock here, but the more you are seen in a positive light, the more likely consumers are to purchase from your brand.
So, how do you create this positive predisposition? Kantar offers four tips:
- Create great experiences
- Create superior products
- Create more convenience
- Create creative ads
How can we apply these to PoS?
Experiences
PoS activations allow consumers to directly and physically engage with your brand. So, make it a seamless experience.
For instance, combine your physical in-store experience with digital, easy-to-use experiences. Make it easy for consumers to discover, connect, or purchase from your brand. And make the experience consistent across environments and geographies.
You could even go big and turn your activation into a pop-up experience concept store. Just consider how you will engage the consumer throughout the experience. How are you going to surprise and delight them? How can we maximise accessibility and portability so that as many people as possible can experience it?
Product and Quality
Activations also provide opportunities to demonstrate your unique selling proposition. Whether through design elements that highlight key features and benefits or creating displays that support the demonstration of your product and how it is meaningfully different.
And do not let your activation or packaging let your product down. Make sure you design and use materials that complement your brand and the look and feel you want to predispose your audience to.
Create more convenience
Consumers need to know your product or service will fit seamlessly into their lives. Bring that to life through your PoS. Use imagery to show how they could use the product or allow them to try it out in real life.
Even better, show them how your product is easier to use and superior to the alternatives.
For additional inspiration, check out Jenni Romaniuk’s work on Category Entry Points.
Create creative advertising
Make your PoS POP.
Use your distinctive assets so that they stand out. Try to tell the stories around quality and convenience in an emotive way. And simplify your message.
Good advertising and branding in-store can significantly improve your average return on marketing investment. So do not skimp out on the creative. Spend time here and develop creative point-of-sale activations that inextricably link your brand to an emotive response. The best way to do that is to start with the end in mind.
Rule 2: Be more present
OK, so we have a meaningful difference, and we have developed creatives and point-of-sale activations that positively impact our target customers. Now, it is all about being seen and easy to buy.
It is about being prominently visible at the point of purchase and converting consumer predisposition into brand choice. If you have completed Rule 1, you will have strong demand power, as you will have predisposed consumers to your brand. Now, it is about activating that predisposition.
In fact, maximising your activation power can increase growth by 2.5x those with weaker powers.
How do you improve your activation power?
Ensure you are as easy to buy as possible. Being easy to buy requires your brand to be recognisable at the point of purchase, ensuring your brand is consistently represented in every purchasing moment, whether in the physical or digital world.
Brands that are always present attract 7x more buyers than those that are present on only half of buying occasions.
Consistency is key from your TV ads and digital experiences to your in-store presence and how you are displayed on the shelf. Your brand must be distinctive, different, and compelling everywhere.
Every moment to be seen is a potential brand-building moment, and if done well and consistently, it can aid growth over the long term.
One thing to be mindful of when it comes to being present is promotions.
Many brands also take the opportunity to activate consumers by offering promotions. But pricing promotions only have a short-term activation window – they only last as long as they are in effect.
We often get hooked on promotions, constantly having to offer them to generate the sales and profit we secured from previous campaigns and increase penetration. However, sales promotions work really well for smaller brands that need to make a mark in the industry.
But, for more established global brands, they are much better off focusing on the brand’s power to attract more people without a discount to generate greater profits. If your price is right and matches your value proposition, then let your brand do the talking.
Rule 3: Find new space
New space can take many forms. It can be new ways of being used, new ranges, category expansion, new environments, or geographies. It is essentially new space for your brand to grow into.
When thinking about your brand, this might involve creating brand campaigns that help you expand into more moments for more people within a category or expand your product line into adjacent categories.
However, when it comes to your POS activations, it is much more about placement and distribution. New space literally means just that—what new floor space can I command with my brand to create a more positive predisposition and make my products easy to buy for more people?
This might involve new geographies, store types, or environments. For instance, could you take your Euro 2024 in-store grocery campaign outside or to a transport station?
It could involve showcasing different SKUs for different stores to meet the needs of the different consumers who shop there or launching new product ranges in new markets.
When you reach this stage, do not be afraid to experiment. Based on the brand’s strength, you aim to find incremental growth in new spaces with high penetration.
However, remember to keep your brand consistent wherever you end up taking it. To maximise the power of your brand in new spaces, it is important to lean on your distinctive and differentiated assets. If consumers are already predisposed to your brand in a different buying situation, that can help positively impact their decision in this new environment.
There you have it, the three rules broken down into their impact on PoS activations. What are our takeaways?
For PoS activations, it is important to be bold, differentiated, and distinctive. You need it to be seen, particularly where your customers tend to make their purchases. You need to take your PoS activations to new places to drive growth. But most importantly, you must ensure brand consistency so that you can maximise its power and potential to grow your brand.
