While planning to launch soccer cleats, you’d probably pick a market like Brazil or Argentina. One simple reason: the massive fan base of soccer enthusiasts in these countries will provide you with an excellent business opportunity. If you already know this, then you have analyzed the markets, studied its pulse, and, in the end, figured that the launch will work out.
Liked the trailer? Let’s dig deep.
In the e-commerce business space, to transform a D2C firm into a success, brand aggregators usually run deep analysis before and after rolling up a brand. These analyses are imperative for aggregators like us to test the potential of a brand. We pull out the history and evaluate a brand before devising its revamping strategies. It enables us to develop growth strategies based on hard numbers! The analysis we aggregators perform not only helps in understanding the brand’s current state but also aids in gaining insight into the threats a brand has been subjected to. The check involves finding answers to questions like:
How are the D2C brand’s competitors faring?
How does the brand meet the needs of future consumers?
What caused the operating system to fail an expansion plan?
How much cleansing does the brand need?
This head-to-toe analysis clears the way for the smooth execution of the strategies. Once the necessary research and checks are done, we get into action by laying out the objectives! Reaching out to maximum e-commerce marketplaces, positioning the brand in the targeted marketplaces, boosting product line performance, expanding the product portfolio, streamlining the operations, and refining the entire manufacturing setup – are some of the common goals set up to mark the start of a brand’s journey.
Through this, we dissect each function of the brand and chart its future roadmap.
Let’s break it down further and see how aggregators like us scale up the freshly acquired D2C brands around the world.
How do Aggregators Strategize their Acquired Brands?
From Amazon to Walmart, you will find that the marketplaces are populated with brands that carry a promise to grow. However, in most cases, the brands get stagnated at the “existence” phase. To plan a transformation, it’s always practical for roll-up organizations like ours to start with whatever we have at hand, which guides us to two aspects – the existing brand image and product portfolio.
Which Product Do We Push and Where
As anyone would agree, it’s easy to start with something tangible, hence we generally start off with probing the product portfolio.
Here’s why?
To live up to the true potential, a brand needs to make its product portfolio visible in the market, inform and attract prospective customers, get them to make a purchase decision, and eventually push the sales curve.
While paid ads on the marketplaces and social media are always an option to get that job done, we believe taking a hard look at the stock helps in making much more judicious expenses with respect to promotions that are anyway scheduled to happen later in the journey.
Product portfolio introspection offers some super powerful insights with respect to which product is performing, which is the bestseller, which one can lend a tough competition to similar products of another brand, which one needs to be listed on multiple marketplaces, targeting different geographies. The answers to these questions serve multiple purposes, among which one is definitely in which market we should launch a brand so that it can meet the already existing need of the consumers.
A case in point, let’s take our Vizari Sports as an example. This soccer-accessory brand always yearned for a niche market with an avid soccer fan following. Hence, we launched Vizari in a radically new market, Brazil. It is an ideal environment for Vizari since soccer-related accessories have always been in demand there, moreover, 79% of Brazilians shop online.
Time to Expand, Position, and Promote
Performing product and market identification gets the ball rolling. And this is exactly where the journey starts becoming interesting. As the natural next steps, we aggregators start discovering the scope for product line expansion, manufacturing cost optimization, and, needless to say, promotions.
Taking cues from the performance of a product in a market, we get on to the drawing board to select a “performer” and hypothesize whether it has the possibility to serve the market with its extension.
On one hand, we are already equipped with the performance numbers. It gives us a clear indication that we need to scale the production. On the other, when we get back the performance figures of the extension, and if we find that promising, our manufacturing cost optimization decision gets an underscore. As a result, we huddle to crunch the numbers involving changes in raw material procurement, employing skilled labor, conducting frequent quality control checks, and even moving the manufacturing base. They all come together to push up the bottom line of a brand.
A good aggregator never forgets its customers! After a quick glance at the technical aspects of how products can be improved, we also ensure positioning our acquired brand well.
Let me share the story of Red Cup Living. Born in the US, Red Cup Living deals with reusable and recyclable bisphenol-A free products that are non-toxic to the environment. We positioned the brand by talking to three types of people. The first is environmentally conscious and hates waste, the second is the frequent party doers, and the third is, who aren’t intrigued by the idea of being eco-friendly or having parties. We wanted to appeal to every one of them.
Through constant engagement activities, and communicating the “brand value”, Red Cup Living (RCL) started engaging with every consumer one by one.
Since RCL speaks about reusing and recycling, we happen to rope in the first type of audience with “product’s USP” – reuse and reduce. The second type, or the partygoers, are the ones who spend a lot on party supplies. RCL cups proved to go on for a long time and their “durability” became an interesting purchase trigger for the customers. The third type was practically a tough nut to crack. The third type wasn’t much focused on “reusability” or “durability,” they needed a strong reason to look at RCL. For them, RCL was positioned as “more than a cup to raise a toast together!” This not only helped the third type of audience to convert but helped the brand to build a universal appeal to the other two audience types as well.
To trigger the customers to hit the “buy now” button, we put in our effort from creating a storefront to deploying ad campaigns. While the broad level strategies revolve around pay per click (PPC), retargeting, and social media marketing, our marketing strategies differ from brand to brand and even from product to product. As the marketing stories unfold differently, I’ll talk about that more in a future post. Over here, I am limiting myself to the broad strokes we apply to most of the brands to fetch eyeballs, trigger a purchase intention, and make the final nudge to click on the “buy now.”
Briefly
As I wrap up this post, let me leave you all with a thought to ponder. Do you know how many D2C brands actually succeed in the e-commerce space? We all know that every day numerous brands step into the different marketplaces with the dream to succeed, however, only a few manage to get there. The question is “Why do the others fall behind?” Think about it.
If you are an aspiring D2C brand who has already been in the market for some time or just stepped in, I request you to go for a second read of these strategies! In case you are interested in a more in-depth discussion, feel free to write to me.
Cloverbites By Rupesh Sanghavi 