introducing the bain brand accelerator · figure 2: brand strategy and activation models work best...

Introducing The Bain Brand AcceleratorSM

By Nicolas Bloch, Guy Brusselmans and Russ Torres

How consumer products companiesare revitalizing brands and bringingthem to full potential, even inslow-growth markets and challeng-ing categories.

Copyright © 2011 Bain & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.Content: EMEA Consumer Products practice; Editorial teamLayout: Global Design

Nicolas Bloch and Guy Brusselmans are Bain & Company partners based in Brussels.Russ Torres is a Bain partner based in Chicago.

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Introducing The Bain Brand Accelerator

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How consumer productscompanies are revitaliz-ing brands and bringingthem to full potential,even in slow-growthmarkets and challeng-ing categories.

The bottom line is simple. In developed markets,many consumer products categories are notgrowing. And the growth of private labels acrossmany categories will continue to cause thetotal pool of branded products to decline. Theonly way to make your brand a winner is tosignificantly outperform your competitors.

The harsh reality: this is extremely hard toachieve. Our research has shown that less than5 percent of brands are able to grow and out-perform their competition over the long run.Despite this, almost every brand’s marketingplan continues to call for growth, expansionand share gain.

However, there is some good news: not allbrands are doomed to declining sales. Amongthe winners that manage to beat the odds,we’ve selected three examples of companiesthat turned around their trajectory, even inchallenging categories.

A juice company that watched sales in its coremarket continually decline was able to defineand implement a new strategy that led to agrowth rate of 2 to 5 percent in each subsequentquarter. A company we call Delicious Co. thatsuffered from sluggish growth boosted volumesales by 5 percent in the first year, creating apromising new usage occasion at the same time.Finally, a biscuit brand reversed several yearsof declining sales, returning to growth with an8 percent increase per year.

While these three companies each pursued adifferent strategy to successfully revive theirbrands, they have one thing in common: theapproach they took to developing the beststrategy. These winners used The Bain BrandAcceleratorSM, created at Bain & Company to helpconsumer products executives better identifywhy brands are not growing faster and mobilizetheir teams to act.

The Bain Brand Accelerator process starts byfinding the deep insights that can make adifference for reinvigorating brand growth—everything from clearer category definition tonuances in shopping behavior. The next stepinvolves using those insights to help make aseries of critical strategic decisions: determiningwhere to play, defining the right brand posi-tioning and product offer, and designing awinning activation model with the right mixof media, pricing, promotions and shelvingoptions, among other considerations.

The final step focuses on execution—puttingin place the organizational capabilities thatwill allow the company to deliver on its newstrategy day in and day out.

Why is it so hard to get these steps right? Fromour experience with clients, we see a numberof common issues. Roughly, they fall into twomajor categories. First, there’s an undetectedflaw in the brand’s strategy. Most brand strate-gies have hundreds of embedded assumptionsabout consumer behavior, the competition andthe category rules. It is easy for one of thoseassumptions to fall out of date—or there aretimes when the assumptions are simply tooshallow. The second major reason that so fewbrands consistently outperform the competition:execution plans are often not perfectly alignedwith the strategy (see Figure 1).

Let’s examine the three cases where consumerproducts executives surmounted the commonpitfalls to brand growth and created a revisedplan using The Bain Brand Accelerator.

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Two of the companies—Juice Co. and DeliciousCo.—were power brands with tired strategies.But they faced different underlying challenges.For the first, the core business was in troublewith no obvious way out: despite green lights onbrand health indicators, sales were decreasing,and the category itself was under significant pres-sure. For the second company the long-termerosion of core consumption moments caused itto look at new avenues for future growth, but itsinnovation efforts had limited success, with noclear reason why. The third brand, Biscuit Co.,also a power brand, thought it was rapidly los-ing out to private labels and had put together anaggressive strategy to compete against them. Butit turned out that the root cause of slow growthwas elsewhere, so it had to redefine its strategy.

Juice Co.: Reinvigorating a powerbrand through deeper under-standing of consumer behavior

Consumers are fickle. They might consumeyour brand on a day-to-day basis and even rank

it as their favorite. But that does not necessarilymean they are loyal to your brand. Heavy usageand loyalty are commonly mixed up, and thisbecame critical for a company we’ll call JuiceCo. as it sought to boost a stagnant brand. Thecompany used The Bain Brand Accelerator tounderstand better why sales continued plungingdespite signs of brand health and an aggressivemarketing campaign. The insights it generatedformed the basis of a successful strategy forreviving its core business.

The starting point: The company had thestrongest brand in its juice category but hadbeen losing momentum in its historical coremarket in Europe. Among the problems:consumers were buying less and turning tolower-priced segments in the juice market—this despite the fact that in surveys, Juice Co.was still rated as the favorite brand. Juice Co.responded with a marketing effort aimed atwhat it thought was a core segment of loyalusers, and focused on developing and spread-ing advertising campaigns to recruit and

The strategy derails because its underlying assumptions don’t hold true anymore or are too shallow

There is a disconnect between the strategy and how it gets translated into an execution plan

• Failing to update the assumptions behind a brand’s strategy when consumers, shoppers and retail environments are rapidly shifting

• Building a growth plan based on an understanding of the average consumer when there is no “average consumer”

• Forgetting that what people say is often not what they do: using attitudinal segmentation to define a strategy when only behavioral segmentation is truly predictive

• Misinterpreting loyalty, repertoire and heavy�user patterns

• Overplaying consumer understanding, but underplaying shopper insights

• Considering new product innovation as a lifeboat, and underplaying the roles of renovation and activation for core products

• Spreading advertising money over too many brands, but investing below threshold on most

• Supporting innovation for a few months only, when new products can take years before becoming anchored in consumer repertoires

• Producing and broadcasting advertising copy that is not aligned with consumer insights

• Applying the same activation mix to different categories or brands

• Overfocusing on above�the�line communications at the expense of point�of�sales efforts

• Applying the same in�store execution to fundamentally different retail channels, formats or customers

• Overemphasizing promotions as part of in�store activation to the detriment of navigability, secondary placements or other in�store activities

Figure 1: Top reasons why brand strategies fall short of expectations

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engage new “loyalists.” But the moves failedto reverse the sales decline. Juice Co. neededto understand the root causes behind consumerdisengagement. So it used The Bain BrandAccelerator approach to gain that insight.

The insight: Juice Co. turned to “repertoireanalysis” to learn more about its consumersand why they were not using more of its brand.A repertoire analysis (repertoire being the setof brands purchased by a consumer or shopperwithin a given category) helps companiesunderstand the critical nuances in consumerloyalty. (See sidebar, “Repertoire analysis:Learning the truth about your consumers.”)The results of the analysis produced an unex-pected insight. Most Juice Co. consumers wereheavy users, consuming the brand daily, butthey turned out not to be loyal to Juice Co. brand:60 percent of sales volumes came from con-sumers who actually alternated brands.

Because Juice Co. was failing to distinguishbetween heavy usage and loyalty, it was missing

the full category perspective: heavy users ofJuice Co. were also heavy users of all brandsin the category. By looking at it too narrowly,Juice Co. had misinterpreted consumers’usage of the category, and missed the criticalfact that they were “repertoire users.” Thatmeant consumers needed to be re-recruitedat each purchasing decision (see Figure 2).

Revised strategy and execution: Armed withthis insight, the company pulled back on itsstrategy of advertising to its perceived loyalconsumers, shifting the bulk of its resourcesto point-of-sales activities to win the battle instores. Those moves included improving storevisibility—ensuring the brand has the bestfacings and is well displayed—to restructuringpromotional activity. Among the elements ofJuice Co.’s new push: rebalancing promotionalefforts to this specific brand, as well as emphasiz-ing better and more consistent execution toimprove promotion efficiency and return oninvestment. Along with the change in strategyand marketing execution, the company reinforced

• Recruit new brand “loyalists”

Loyalist behavior Repertoire behavior

• Build brand “preference” among segmented and well�defined consumer groups through targeted marketing

• Leverage consumer inertia and activate brand in waves

• Focus most resources on above�the�line activities (advertising), sponsoring, events

• Brand preference (“favorite”)

• Switching points

• Recruiting and churn rates

• Continuously reconvince consumers to purchase the brand by pushing best references

• Build brand consideration among broader consumer groups through mass marketing

• Activate brand on a continuous basis (no consumer inertia)

• Focus most resources on below�the�line activities to ensure presence in store “hot spots”

• Brand consideration

• Repurchase rate or frequency

• Share of activation assets

What should thebrand aim for?

What are typical elements of winning activation?

What to monitor?

Figure 2: Brand strategy and activation models work best when tailored to consumer behaviors

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the sales team, introduced a well-devised incen-tive policy and created robust processes to ensurecoordination between marketing and sales.

The result: By revisiting its historical assump-tions on consumer and shopper behavior,taking a holistic view across marketing andsales, and aligning its teams behind a redefinedstrategy, Juice Co. successfully turned arounda losing brand. After defining and implementingthe new strategy, sales of its brand in its coremarket shot up 5 percent by the third quarter,compared with a 4 percent decline in the firstquarter (see Figure 3).

Delicious Co.: Rejuvenating apower brand by innovating ona new battlefield

Delicious Co. was also a powerful brand andthe undisputed leader in its category. It had astrong base of brand loyalists who demonstrateda deep affinity for the brand. However, saleswere flat. And despite trying multiple avenues

to generate growth over the past five years, nonegained traction. The team felt it needed to takea systematic look at what it might be missing.So it turned to The Bain Brand Accelerator fora rapid review of its strategy and to help it charta sustained course for growth in the future.

The starting point: Delicious Co. had a richtrack record of growth. It had consistentlygrown volume sales for several decades andthe brand had emerged to lead the categorywith a majority market share and the abilityto command a generous price premium.However, growth had stalled for the past fiveyears. Delicious Co. tried many avenues toreinvigorate growth, including new ad cam-paigns aimed at boosting sales in its coreusage occasion and launching multiple wavesof innovations designed to extend the brand’susage into promising new areas like ready-to-eat snacking. But none of it worked. Despite thesetbacks, executives and brand teams believedthat Delicious still had the potential to grow.

Juice Co. Delicious Co Biscuit Co.

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Figure 3: How three companies revived brand growth

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The insight: The Bain Brand Acceleratorprocess revealed a series of surprising insightsthat helped explain why the brand’s growthhad slowed and why past efforts had notgained traction.

First, the team found that the company neededto reassess its strategy for where to play. Fullytwo-thirds of Delicious Co.’s actual sales werecoming from usage occasions that were flator shrinking due to changes in consumerbehaviors that were unlikely to reverse. Thebehaviors that had driven growth for decadeswere now in decline. In the past, the majorityof advertising spend and innovation activityhad been aimed at breathing new life intothese core occasions. Now, a deep understandingof why the occasions were shrinking made itclear to Delicious Co. that this strategy wasunlikely to be successful.

But there was good news. The decline in thecore was being mostly offset by organic growthand momentum in emerging occasions whereloyalists and younger users were using thebrand in new ways, such as in recipe ingredientsand ready-to-eat snacking. It was especiallysurprising to see growth of the brand as arecipe ingredient—which had not been formallydeveloped at all. Delicious Co. realized it hadan opportunity to capitalize on these emergingpockets of momentum.

The team also found that despite conventionalwisdom, the recipe ingredient occasion was theright place to focus—not ready-to-eat snacking.When the Delicious Co. team rigorously evalu-ated snacking—for example, by studying the truecompetitive set, occasion by occasion—it becameclear that the winnable portion of the ready-to-eat snacking option for Delicious Co. wasmuch smaller than the company anticipated.Further, the economics were less attractive,and the operational investments to be madewould be substantial.

In contrast, the recipe ingredient market wasvery large, the behavior was growing and itpresented attractive margins. More important,Delicious Co. had distinct assets in this occasion,as its product had unique advantages overthe competition. But the existing productportfolio was wrong for recipe ingredients—there were significant barriers in taste, consis-tency, education and packaging. A deep diveinto consumer behavior in these areas, usingsuch techniques as statistical cluster analysisand ethnographies, identified the key dishesto focus on and precise issues to address withinnovation and advertising.

Revised strategy and execution: These insightshelped the company expand into the recipeingredient market, focusing on the “DeliciousSeven” dishes it could win. Advertising andmedia efforts were deployed to educate theconsumer, featuring Delicious Co. in variousrecipes, proposing easy recipes and organizingrecipe contests. The brand’s innovation pipelinewas also completely redirected and reinvigoratedto overcome barriers in packaging, taste andconsistency.

The result: New advertising was launched, whichleveraged the insights and refined positioning,and it showed immediate effect. Volume salesfor Delicious Co. jumped 5 percent in the firstyear. The resulting recipe ingredient productinnovations have been a huge success, creatinga new segment for Delicious Co. and a newgrowth driver. In fact, the innovations tested inthe top 10 percent of all new products in thebrand’s history. Sales per distribution pointwere moving well in the early stages of thelaunch. Perhaps most telling, the innovationswere able to acquire new shelf space in storesfor the first time in many years despite a fiercelycompetitive environment. The combined resultof the effort for Delicious Co. is a new wave ofgrowth to ride for the future.

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Biscuit Co.: Putting a power brandback on the growth launchpadby fighting the right enemy

The invasion of private label brands has promptedmany companies to adjust their strategies.Private labels are a growing threat in numerouscategories, making inroads in the numbers ofconsumers trying their products and stealingincreasing share from branded products.Companies try to stop this invasion by makingprivate labels their core battle. That is what

Biscuit Co. did when one of its best-performingbrands started losing sales.

The starting point: Biscuit Co.’s top-sellingproduct saw continued sales erosion after severalyears of solid gains and healthy margins. Atthe same time, private label brands were makinginroads into the category, increasing both inpenetration (more and more consumers wereturning to private labels) and in usage (thesesame consumers were consuming more andmore of the product each time). The road ahead

Repertoire analysis: Learning the truth about your consumers

Repertoire analysis is a powerful way to understand critical nuances in consumer loyalty.Insights from the analysis help you select the most effective activation strategy for your brand.

A repertoire is the set of brands within a category purchased by consumers to meet a specificneed or for a particular occasion. Bain research shows that consumer behavior rangesbetween two extreme types: loyalist and repertoire. Consumers demonstrate loyalist behaviorwhen they repeatedly buy one brand for a specific need or occasion. In contrast, consumersexhibit repertoire behavior when they tend to choose different brands for the same occasionor need. Most people display both loyalist and repertoire behaviors, depending on whatcategory they are buying. Also, the same category may elicit different buying behav-iors from one country to another.

Understanding the critical nuances in consumer behaviors usually requires a deep dive intocomplex consumer data. However, a simple tool can help quickly build a strong hypothesison where your brand stands. An analysis of penetration and repeat purchases across brandsin a given category (see Figure 4) can give a good hint of what type of category you playin. For instance, loyalist behavior can typically be revealed through high repurchase ratesfor all brands, which are independent from penetration. Even a “niche” brand can flourishwith a small group of loyal buyers. At the other extreme, repertoire behaviors are usuallycharacterized by repurchase rates that correlate with penetration. A brand that has a biggeruser base is also being repurchased more frequently. In these categories, a small brand isnot really a “niche,” it is just a small brand.

It’s critical for a brand to understand category behavior because winning in a loyalist categoryrequires a different activation model than does winning in a repertoire category.

For brands with loyalist consumers, the goal is to recruit new fans and build their brand preference.In such categories, highly targeted marketing (typically through media or recruiting events) is crucial.

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seemed obvious: the company decided thatrevitalizing growth for its star product requireda full-blown battle against private labels. So ittargeted all of its marketing on countering theirrise, mainly through price cuts and promotions.But despite its efforts, sales continued to decline.

The insight: Biscuit Co. had been using astandard “switching analysis” that initiallyshowed that it was losing sales to private labelsat the category level. But when Biscuit Co.took a much closer look at consumer switching

behaviors at the household level, the analysisrevealed that private labels weren’t the problem.For the most part, private labels had grownmainly from incremental usage of existingprivate label buyers, and to a lesser extent fromnew consumers discovering this segment inthe biscuit category. The lesson was that privatelabels were not stealing Biscuit Co.’s consumers.For Biscuit Co., the biggest losses of consumershappened to be caused by its own productsas well as competing branded products. Thecompany had cannibalized sales of its core

In contrast, brands with repertoire consumers need to reconvince them to buy their product eachtime they are shopping. In such situations, having perfect in-store activation is an absolute priority.

From our work with clients, we’ve learned that loyalist behavior is rarer than you might expect.Many consumer products makers are convinced—and act upon the belief—that shoppersare loyal to their brands when, in fact, they are repertoire consumers. This insight reinforcesthe need for companies to probe consumer and shopper behaviors deeply, with an emphasison research that reveals true behaviors—and not rely on attitudinal research. The scarcity ofloyalist behavior also underscores the importance of shopper marketing and perfect sales execution.These are two capabilities that do not yet get the attention they deserve in many executivecommittees or sales and marketing departments.

Repurchase rate

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Figure 4: A simple tool to diagnose consumer behavior

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SM The Bain Brand Accelerator is a service mark of Bain & Company, Inc.

biscuit product by introducing smaller secondarylaunches—and consumers were diverted bythese smaller bites, family packs and new flavors.

Consumer research also revealed that BiscuitCo. failed to anchor its brand clearly into aspecific usage occasion and orient consumersand shoppers to think about—and pick—theirbrand on this occasion. Years earlier, throughspecific advertisements, Biscuit Co. had suc-cessfully anchored itself as a “post-lunch bitefor kids.” Yet marketing efforts were no longerfocused on sustaining this connection, andthe link in consumers’ minds had progressivelyfaded. To make matters worse, branded com-petitors had deployed consistent and well-executed marketing efforts to attract consumersto their brands and create connections withthe occasion that had been Biscuit Co.’s historicalstronghold. As a result, competitors stolesignificant share from Biscuit Co.

Revised strategy and execution: The insightthat it was losing the brand battle to brandedcompetitors gave Biscuit Co. a clear directionfor a new growth model. It shifted its focusfrom fighting private labels to winning backconsumers through more active—and well-executed—brand marketing. The companyrefreshed its old appeal of “the healthy post-lunch bite for kids.” Biscuit Co. also focusedon regaining trust with shoppers—essentiallymothers who had progressively felt alienatedfrom previous advertising campaigns, andwho were not recognizing their kids as thetarget consumers. To regain a place on theirshopping lists, Biscuit Co. needed to remindthem of the nutritional benefits of its product.

The company introduced a new media campaignwith clear visual clues in advertisements thatfocused on the healthy post-lunch bite, newpackaging with detailed information aboutnutrition and ingredients, and recommendationson when to consume the biscuit. In addition,it also upgraded the product formulation todistinguish its value proposition from privatelabels. With careful and consistent execution,the plan helped re-anchor the brand in its his-torical positioning and reconvince shoppersof the merits of the company’s biscuits.

The result: By rebalancing its resources andefforts, Biscuit Co. was back on track. Followingseveral years of rapid decline—on average, 7percent sales decrease every year in its coremarkets—Biscuit Co. returned to growth withabout an 8 percent increase per annum inthe first two years after implementing itsnew strategy.

As these three examples illustrate, even in themost difficult situations, companies can accel-erate their brands by devoting energy to chal-lenging the underlying assumptions that drivetheir strategy. By diving deeply into consumerand category data and using proven tools, theycan update insights and build a new, morerelevant strategy for growth. But success can beachieved only if the entire organization is fullyaligned behind the new strategy. Given thenumerous challenges facing the consumer prod-ucts industry, this is an approach to growth—or sometimes survival—that few companiescan afford to ignore.

Bain’s business is helping make companies more valuable.

Founded in 1973 on the principle that consultants must measure their success in terms of their clients’ financial results, Bain works with top management teams to beat competitors and generate substantial, lasting financial impact. Our clients have historically outperformed the stock market by 4:1.

Who we work with

Our clients are typically bold, ambitious business leaders. They have the talent, the will and the open-mindedness required to succeed. They are not satisfied with the status quo.

What we do

We help companies find where to make their money, make more of it faster and sustain its growth longer. We help management make the big decisions: on strategy, operations, technology, mergers and acquisitions and organization. Where appropriate, we work withthem to make it happen.

How we do it

We realize that helping an organization change requires more than just a recommendation. So we try to put ourselves in our clients’ shoes and focus on practical actions.


For more information, please visit www.bain.com

introducing the bain brand accelerator · figure 2: brand strategy and activation models work best...

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