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Three Marketing Initiatives Key to Breakout B2C Brand Growth

Placing disciplined focus on three key business-to-consumer marketing initiatives and executing them properly helps top brands achieve “category killing” performance and can make a difference in market-share growth of up to 30%, according to research from the Marketing Leadership Council, a division of the Corporate Executive Board, writes MarketingCharts.

“Breakout Growth: Practical Lessons from Brands that Consistently Outperform Competitors,” sheds new light on how certain brands - despite fluctuations in economic and environmental conditions - are able to to exhibit breakout performance, growing at two to three times their category average.

 

The research included survey information from more than 130 top brands, including Ford, Sony, Coca-Cola, LG, Johnson & Johnson and Best Buy. It examined more than 100 different marketing functions before isolating the three that best explain the success of “breakout” consumer brands that consistently outpace their competitors.

The three most important initiatives:

• Future-Needs Based Investing: Contrary to common practice, companies that achieve breakout performance use structured methods to link future and emerging consumer needs with long-term investment decisions, increasing their risk tolerance and likelihood of placing bigger bets (see chart).
• Aggressive Segment Orientation: Breakout performers ruthlessly tie every aspect of their marketing activities to target segment preferences -from overall positioning to individual channel communications - see chart.  Such concentration yields clearer, simpler, more consistent brand strategy and positioning.
• Marketing Talent Focus: Top companies maintain a consistently strong commitment to talent, even in the face of enormous pressure to divert resources to shorter-term needs.  Specifically, these organizations prioritize the hiring and development of high-caliber talent rather than over-focusing on specialized skills, such as an expertise in specific emerging media.  This commitment to talent can provide an advantage over competitors in the development of ideas and their execution.

The study also found that baseline ROI proficiency is foundational, but does not drive breakout growth. View graph of growth index impact.

“What makes the results of our investigation so appealing, particularly in today’s environment, is that they guide marketers toward doing fewer things well rather than diluting their attention toward additional tasks for their already full plates,” said Dr. Tom Svrcek, the Council’s managing director and head of research. “Lately we have seen an alarming trend toward the proliferation of experimentation while attempting to achieve sales goals.  Our results suggest that far greater returns are achievable through the proper execution of just a few key activities.”

About the survey: The Marketing Leadership Council, a division of the Corporate Executive Board, conducted the quantitative investigation involving more than 130 business-to-consumer brands across a wide range of industries and geographies.  Participants were asked a series of objective questions to characterize their approach to an array of different marketing disciplines, including innovation, communications, brand positioning, organizational attributes, and investment strategies, among others.  The Council then used a variety of quantitative techniques to isolate those activities that had the greatest impact on overall brand growth.