Peter's Post: Summary of "Grow the Core: How to Focus on Your Core Business for Brand Success"

Grow the Core: How to Focus on Your Core Business for Brand Success

by David Taylor

A summary of the original text.

In this summary...

Expand your business by selling more of the products and services that made you famous and profitable, rather than relying on stretching your brand into new markets.
Master a proven formula for growing your business in good times and bad, along with powerful tools, techniques, and tips on how to apply them to your business today.
Understand how you can define your core, and the two criteria for determining whether an extension makes sense: the size of the prize and the ability to win.
Increase the size and value of your business by leveraging the two growth drivers: penetration (widening the base of users) and premiumization (launching value-added extensions to the core offering).
Explore the eight Grow the Core Workouts that will enable you to focus on distinctive marketing, use distribution in both current and new channels, and extend the core.

Grow the Core

A strong core is essential for success. This is true for brands as much as it is for physical fitness. An increasing number of people in your local gym are trying to improve their "core strength" by working out the muscles deep in the abs and back that help keep the body stable and balanced.

In the same way, a strong core is also important for keeping a business healthy and in shape. Most successful businesses are built on a solid foundation of a core business where they have a leading position.

Timberland might sell a range of clothing and accessories, but the original Timberland boot is still crucial from both a business and brand image standpoint. The same goes for Dove and its small white bar of soap and Hellmann's with its original mayonnaise.

Growing the core has many advantages. By selling more of the stuff you already do well, you grow without adding complexity. Instead, you make what is strong even stronger, both in terms of brand equity and economies of scale.

Put most simply, growing the core is about a focus on selling more of the stuff you already sell, as an alternative to growing by launching new products and services. This approach is called "SMS," short for "Sell More Stuff."

However, despite the advantages of growing the core, companies that successfully do this are in the minority. Research shows that many companies neglect their core business and, in doing so, miss out on opportunities for profitable growth. Instead, they over-rely on stretching away from their core with new products or services.

However, companies under-estimate just how hard it is to stretch into a new category and take on an established brand leader in its core market. This is why the brand stretch graveyard is overflowing with failed launches, such as Levi's suits, Bic perfumes, and Harley-Davidson wine coolers. Worse still are the new launches that survive but end up being "brand dwarves"; small products or services that add little in extra sales, but increase complexity for retail partners, consumers, and the company itself.

All of this risks dilution of core brand equity, as the brand has to communicate multiple benefits. It also creates fragmentation of the brand's sales, with these being spread over a larger number of smaller products, often leading to a dilution of profitability. It can also provide a dangerous decline in the core business, owing to resources being diverted to support the "new toys." Marketing budget is taken away from the core, but just as important is the tendency for the best talent in the team and senior management to be distracted from the core business.

In contrast, growing your core makes what is strong even stronger, both in terms of your brand and business, and it does this without adding any complexity. However, if growing the core is so powerful, why is it so underutilized?

One reason is that it can just seem less exciting than new product development. Innovation with a capital "I" is what hits the headlines, with companies feeling compelled to create new products and services that take their brands in new directions.

Another reason growing the core is often forgotten about is because it's actually hard, requiring just as much, if not more, creativity than designing and launching new products. Most marketing people have been trained on how to develop, test and launch a new product. If you need some help, there are 45,000 books about innovation on Amazon, plus countless conferences and seminars to attend. In contrast, there is little or no practical advice about selling more of the stuff you already make. This is where this summary comes in.

First, we'll address the important task of defining the core, and describe the dangers of stretching your brand beyond it.
Second, you will be introduced to the growth drivers that can help you grow your core business.
Third, we will explore the eight Grow the Core Workouts. These exercises will enable you to focus on distinctive marketing using your product, identity, communication, and activation; how to use distribution in both current and new channels; and how to extend the core via added value products and formats.
Fourth, we'll outline a workplan to Grow the Core. This practical guide will help you implement the principles and workouts in your business.

Defining the Core

At the heart of most strong brands is a strong core product or service. This strong core is a profitable source of growth in its own right and also the foundation on which future initiatives can be built, so it plays a crucial role.

There are two key questions you can use to define the core of your brand:

What is your number one source of profit?
What is your source of authority?

The core product or service is the big, often the biggest, part of the business. So when you're trying to identify the core, a good place to start is to "follow the money." For example, Hellmann's has stretched into many new areas such as dips and sauces, but the original mayonnaise still makes up most of the sales. Although the Dove brand has stretched into many new categories, the soap bar business still represents an important part of the brand's sales.

In addition, core products are often more profitable. The core business is one that the company masters thanks to many years of experience and the size of the business means that there are often important economies of scale. Furthermore, as the brand is well known and trusted in its core area, it may need less marketing support relative to sales, compared to stretching into new markets where the brand is less well known.

The core product is also a source of authority. The brand's key attributes, benefits and associations are tied up in it. Often, this is the brand's original product. For example, Johnson & Johnson now has a broad range of products, yet most consumers still think of the baby shampoo when asked about the brand. Timberland now sells a whole range of clothing and accessories, but the boot is still emblematic of the brand, and the foundation for the whole business.

Once a business has defined the core of its brand, based on the source of authority and source of profit, it must avoid the temptation to overextend the brand away from the core.

Essentially, there are two criteria for determining whether an extension makes sense:

The size of the prize: How big is the business opportunity, based on market size, growth, and competitive intensity, plus the strength of the value proposition?
The ability to win: Can the business model generate sustainable, profitable growth based on cost position, route-to-market, in-store leadership, and sustained marketing support?

For example, the Virgin brand encompasses more than 25 companies with total revenues of more than $5 billion. It has two core brands: its music business and Virgin Airlines. But since the 1990s, it has stretched beyond this core and launched many extensions.

Many of these efforts flopped as Virgin failed to leverage the core brand equities and know-how to add value in the new market. Virgin Cola, Virgin Vodka, and Virgin Jeans relied on the brand's emotional lifestyle values. However, slapping the Virgin logo on unremarkable products was not enough to take on the established market leaders, Coca-Cola, Smirnoff and Levi's, in their respective core markets.

Virgin's brand stretching worked better when it leveraged its core brand equity and know-how in service businesses, where Virgin has built a reputation for providing exceptional service at affordable prices. For example, Virgin has made good inroads into the mobile phone market in the UK, U.S., and India. It offers real service differentiation, such as low-frill phones, Web-based ways of buying airtime, and no long-term contracts.

The point is not to avoid brand stretching altogether. Rather, the idea is to do fewer, bigger, and better brand extensions, where there is a decent size of prize and ability to win.

Failed extensions are bad for business, but the bigger threats for the core business are the small brand extensions that manage to survive. If the big, beautiful core business is "Snow White," then these tiny, new products are like the "seven dwarves," but in most cases there are more like 17 of them. While these dwarf products may be nice, novel and cute, they can seriously harm your core business in three main ways:

Stealing thunder
Cannibalization
New toy syndrome

Brand extensions often steal thunder from the core; they are used to launch exciting, new innovations that would have been better off used to revitalize the core. The basic rule is to ask if there is a "trade-off" involved in the change.

Upgrading the core product is a better route when the product change improves performance with no trade-off. This is how mainstream carmakers like Ford responded to the increased demand for safety features such as ABS brakes and airbags pioneered by Volvo. Rather than creating their own safer car extensions, they integrated these features into existing models. These were first offered as optional extras, creating incremental revenue. Eventually, these features became expected in a car and were offered as standard.
Extension is the best route when modifying the product adds some benefits, but risks undermining others. When Head & Shoulders wanted to respond to the trend for more regular hair washing, a frequent-use version was developed. It had a lower amount of active ingredient and a milder cleansing system. If this had been used to replace the original version, existing users may have been disappointed with the lower performance and left the brand. The new product was launched as a range extension and succeeded in building sales by about 10 percent, attracting new users to the brand.

Cannibalization is the risk of an extension devouring other family members. The biggest risk occurs with range extensions that are "brand clones," which lack differentiation versus the existing products.

Crest spent decades launching new toothpaste twists such as tartar control, gum protection, and whitening. In the U.S., market share halved from 50 percent with one product, to 25 percent with 50 products.

Each introduction competed for the same usage occasion and introduced novelty value, but not enough added value to create incremental growth. What most people wanted was an "all-in-one" version, successfully launched by Colgate as "Colgate Total."

Dwarf products can also harm your core business because of new toy syndrome. There is always a temptation to spend time, money, and energy on the sexy new extension rather than on the core business.

Funds for a new extension are sometimes taken from the core range's budget, leaving it exposed to competition. In many cases, the return on investment from spending on the new extension is less than if the money had been retained on the bigger core product.

Companies may even cut quality on the core products over time to reduce costs and fund brand stretching. This neglect of product quality leaves the core business vulnerable to attack, as happened with the Lifebuoy soap brand in India.

For decades, Lifebuoy's single, ruby-red bar delivered healthy sales growth based on delivering superior hygiene and health. However, during the 1980s and '90s, quality was cut until it compared poorly to competition and much of the marketing money was used to launch two new variants (Lifebuoy Plus and Lifebuoy Gold) that were less focused on the core hygiene benefit. Lifebuoy market share declined from 20 percent in 1996 to 12 percent several years later.

Fortunately, the core was relaunched in 2002, with a much richer formulation and upgraded packaging, and the Plus and Gold variants were withdrawn. Brand share climbed back up to 18.4 percent, making it the undisputed leader again.

The Core Growth Drivers

The two ways to grow the core are penetration and premiumization. Penetration involves widening the base of users and making the brand more popular. Premiumization involves launching value-added extensions to the core offering, using both new products and new packaging formats.

First, you will see how to grow volume share by building penetration, then you will see how to drive value growth through premium extensions to the core.

Most marketers have been trained to work on many ways of driving market share growth on the core business. These include trying to boost rates of repurchase, increase frequency of purchase, and growing the amount bought on each shopping trip.

If you're one of the many people investing time and money on a project to drive one of these variables, you're in for a shock.

According to research by Professor Byron Sharp of The Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, the only way to grow market share is by increasing penetration to expand the base of people using your brand. Your brand's user base includes a mix of light, medium, and heavy buyers. But the mix of these loyalty levels is likely to be similar to that of other brands in your category.

Byron's work shows that the most important group for growth is not the loyal users who buy your brand frequently. This group contains "brand fans" who know you well and are likely to continue buying from you. No, the key groups for growth are the many light and non-users who are on the verge of buying your brand or another brand at some point in the year.

The main role of marketing is to ensure that when one of these people is deciding what to buy, they choose you and not another brand.

The first way to get as many of these people as possible to buy your brand is to increase brand "saliency," so you are recalled and relevant when they do decide to buy your category.

But, contrary to conventional wisdom, the best way to be recalled and relevant is not to differentiate.

Differentiation will seriously limit your potential to grow the core. Differentiation will drive you to seek out secondary benefits. In doing so, you risk reducing your appeal, as you have moved away from the middle-ground of the market and the most important core benefits people want.

Market-leading brands are, in fact, not differentiated. They don't stand out for one thing in particular. Rather, they are stronger across the board. If you graph them against competing brands on how well they satisfy what customers want in a product or service, the shape of the graph is the same as the other brands; they're just higher on everything.

Instead of searching for differentiation through unique benefits, which would take them away from the heart of what people want, market leaders create distinctivemarketing mixes. This allows them to express the core market benefits in a way that is more memorable.

The bottom line is that, to grow the core, distinctiveness is more important than differentiation.

To further explore how distinctive marketing can help grow the core, think back to your last trip to the supermarket. If you were an average shopper, you would have bought around 30 items. If it was an average supermarket, you had 30,000 items to choose from. In other words, for each thing you bought, you chose 1 in 1,000 of the items on sale—and you left 999 on the shelf.

Now, how long did it take you to do this incredibly difficult task? Again, if you're an average shopper, it probably took you about 30 minutes. But how is this possible? How can you make a 1 in 1,000 choice, 30 times over, in only 30 minutes?

The answer can be found by understanding how our brains work. For 90 percent of the time, they work on "autopilot" in order to conserve energy. You act without actually thinking.

This autopilot behavior happens using "memory structure": hard-wired associations linked to distinctive symbols, slogans, and other "brand properties." The distinctive brand properties that are key to creating memory structure can take many forms, such as Marlboro's use of the color red, Nike's swoosh symbol, and Coca-Cola's script typeface.

In the supermarket you see a red can with a white swirl and, without thinking, a six-pack of Coca-Cola is in your shopping cart. On a minority of occasions, you will stop, perhaps to review prices or promotions. Here, you actually engage your brain and think, but most of the time you draw on memory structure to decide what to buy. This is why distinctiveness is so important in helping increase penetration and to grow the core.

We'll explain how to use distinctive marketing when we discuss the first four Workouts.

In addition to distinctiveness, the other way to drive penetration is with distribution.

Distribution certainly isn't the sexiest part of marketing. But getting your product sold in more places will help you sell more stuff. Distribution gets your brand in front of as many people as possible, including that important group of light and non-users we have been talking about. Simply put, if your brand is not available at the moment when these floating voters decide what to buy, then you've missed your chance to build the penetration of the core.

At the simplest level, distribution is about making your brand available in existing channels. So, for a typical consumer goods brand, that means maximizing presence in the major supermarkets.

Distribution is also about looking at new "routes to the consumer" by opening up new channels. This could be selling your brand in places where the product is not normally sold, such as the Calvin Klein CK1 fragrance selling in fashion stores. Or, it could be finding a way to sell direct to the consumer, such as Apple building its own chain of retail stores.

We'll explore distribution through existing and new channels when we discuss the fifth and sixth Workouts.

The driver of increasing penetration focuses on growing volume share. The second core growth driver is premiumization: making more money for each bit of volume you sell and growing value share.

This can be achieved by significantly upgrading the existing product or service to support a higher price. However, more often it will involve delivering new versions of the core that add extra value to consumers and so can be sold at a premium price. As long as the percentage profit of the core extension is the same as the original version, this means extra cash profit per unit sold. Even if the new product "cannibalizes" volume from the existing products, overall profit will go up.

Core extension can be done through offering a new product, such as Ryvita crispbreads launching versions with seeds offering both health benefits and a more interesting taste experience. It can also come through different pack formats, such as Heinz selling its ketchup in an upside-down squeeze bottle that's easier to use than the original glass one.

We'll describe how you can premiumize the brand to create new products that add value to the core by adding new benefits and by using innovative packaging design when we discuss the seventh and eighth Workouts.

Now that we have introduced the two key drivers to grow the core—penetration and premiumization—let's look at each of the eight workouts that make up the Grow the Core program.

Workout 1: Bake the Brand into Your Product

The best place to start growing the core is with the core product or service. The challenge here is "baking" the brand's distinctiveness into the product. This can be done in three ways:

By uncovering and amplifying a brand truth that the brand already has.
By giving the consumer more of what they want, taking existing benefits to new levels.
By giving consumers less of what they don't want, removing or reducing negatives.

The first way of using the core product to create distinctiveness is finding and amplifying a brand truth you already have.

The UK supermarket chain, Morrisons, is a good example of this. This is a business clearly focused on the core, as CEO Dalton Philips said: "We will be better in food because we focus on food. It's 90 percent of our in-store business. It's our core and we will make it stay that way."

The distinctiveness, in this case making and preparing more fresh food in store than anyone else, is baked into the product. This approach has helped Morrisons deliver good business results in today's tough times, with sales up 7 percent and profit up 8 percent in 2011.

Morrisons was relaunched in 2007 to turn around a declining market share. The relaunch aimed to challenge consumer perceptions about the brand being good on value for money, but not on food quality. What is so smart about the relaunch is the way it was built on product truths embedded in Morrisons' business model. This is focused on preparing and selling fresh food in store, which, in turn, is seen by consumers as being better quality:

Rather than buying all its food from suppliers, Morrisons produces much of the meat, bakery goods, and fruit and vegetables sold in its stores. This allows it to ensure freshness, control quality, and reduce costs.

Morrisons brings the brand truth of freshness to life in the customer experience with a distinctive in-store property called "Market Street." This is a part of the store where shoppers can find a collection of fresh food stalls, such as bakers and butchers. These stalls are staffed by well-trained and skilled employees.

Market Street is a powerful and distinctive brand property that really helps Morrisons communicate freshness and stand out from the competition. It cleverly taps into the desire of consumers to have the convenience of a supermarket and the personal touch of a local food seller.

The second approach is to offer people more of what they want.

A good example of this is Galaxy chocolate, which took its product truth to a whole new level, helping it outgrow its key competitor in the UK, Cadbury's Dairy Milk.

The brand is positioned as being "your partner in chocolate indulgence." The product truth to support this idea is the smoothness of the chocolate, with the brand having a famous advertising endline of "Why have cotton, when you can have silk?"

Brand owner Mars invested in amplifying this product truth on several levels, including the shape of the product. A "wave" design was introduced to make the little squares of chocolate themselves smoother in shape, in contrast to the sharp edges of Cadbury's Dairy Milk. This made the in-mouth taste experience much smoother.

The chocolate itself was refined to make it taste smoother. Even the feel of the wrapper itself was improved to make it feel smoother.

The third approach, giving consumers less of what they don't want, can be seen in the food and beverage industry over the last few years. Core upgrade focus has moved away from adding new stuff to taking out the bad stuff.

In reaction to increasing consumer concerns about the negative effects of artificial colors, flavors, and preservatives, companies have invested heavily in taking out these ingredients.

The other types of ingredients companies are working on taking out are the ingredients that make us fat. PepsiCo's UK brand of potato chips, Walkers, is a good example of a brand that has invested heavily in this area.

Over a period of several years, Walkers cut the saturated fat content in its product, with each change a gradual one so that people got used to the taste by degrees. Eventually, the change was announced, with a claim of a 33 percent reduction in saturated fat.

Workout 2: Create a Distinctive Identity

Brand identity is at the very heart of creating distinctiveness for the core brand. The most visible role that identity plays is in the design of packaging for the thousands of consumer goods we have to choose from during our shopping trips to the supermarket. But brand identity is much more than just the brand's logo. It's about creating distinctive brand properties that can turbocharge the whole marketing mix.

As discussed earlier, the only way we can choose 30 items from the 30,000 in a supermarket in 30 minutes is by not thinking. Rather, we shop mainly by acting on autopilot, drawing on the hard-wired associations in our brains called "memory structure."

The role of brand identity is to identify the brand. It really is that simple, and it's increasingly important. Your brand is trying to be one of the 1 in 1,000 products that make it into a customer's supermarket shopping basket each time he or she buys.

Gone is the perfect PowerPoint presentation of your pack, nicely sitting there in splendid isolation. In its place is an over-crowded shelf of products, all desperately vying for the shopper's attention. The key to cutting through this clutter is to have a simple and distinctive brand identity that allows consumers to "lock on" to your brand and buy it.

Brand identity helps us act on autopilot in this way through harnessing the power of brand properties that can take many forms including:

Typefaces, such as the Coca-Cola script
Colors, such as the blue of the Nivea tin
Symbols, like Johnnie Walker's walking man

These brand properties in themselves may not have much brand meaning when you see them for the first time. For example, the blue "lozenge" on the Hellmann's mayonnaise label in itself doesn't communicate anything. But symbols like this can be "loaded" with meaning over time.

Once established in memory structure, brand identity works as a key to unlock the brand meaning in an instant. In the case of Hellmann's, the blue lozenge works a key to unlock meaning about being the original and best-tasting "real" mayonnaise.

Design equities can also cover the structural or "3D" part of a brand, not just the visual side. Structural packaging is a big opportunity to improve distinctiveness and stand out. Examples include Coke's famous "contour" bottle, Evian packs that mimic the mountains where the water comes from, and the iconic Absolut vodka bottle.

The first step of any brand identity process should be a careful analysis to understand your brand's visual equities today. Too often, brand teams rush into a design process without doing this first step and so risk changing too much.

Carrying out a visual equities audit can help you select the visual equities that are strong and distinctive enough to be part of the memory structure that helps people choose your brand. One simple but effective way of helping identify visual equities is to ask consumers to draw the brand's design using colored pencils. This can help uncover which visual equities have been stored as memory structure, and which are more secondary.

A more sophisticated approach can be to use quantitative research to expose consumers to different visual equities for a very short time. This means they don't have time to think rationally, being forced to react on autopilot, a bit like they would in a typical purchase situation.

Once you've conducted a visual equities audit, keep the critical visual equities that are part of the memory structure used to help identify and choose your brand. Eliminate visual devices that are adding clutter and complexity and not helping to make your brand distinctive. Add any elements that are missing from your brand identity and are needed to make it more distinctive.

The brand identity challenge will vary depending on the strength of the current identity and the context your brand is in. There are five different approaches:

Updating your identity for a brand with a strong, distinctive identity where the emphasis is on consistency.
Creating an identity for a brand lacking visual equities, where the focus is on freshness.
Repositioning by going a step further to use brand identity to reposition the brand altogether.
Adding value by using brand identity to add value to the brand experience.
Packvertising by using the whole of the pack to communicate.

At one extreme of the spectrum between freshness and consistency is the handful of brands in the enviable position of having a strong and even iconic brand identity. In this case, the challenge is to keep as much consistency as possible to build on the strong memory structure. A great example of this is Nivea's core product, Nivea Creme.

The product was launched in 1911, and from 1925 it was sold in the highly distinctive round blue tin. What is most impressive is that the key visual equities we see today have been used pretty consistently for over 50 years since 1959:

Blue color
"Nivea" name in upper case
"Crème" written in same typeface but in script
Same round tin
Pure, clean, and uncluttered design

At the other extreme of the spectrum are brands that are lacking a strong identity; a visual equities audit would show up very little to build on. In this case, the challenge is to create a distinctive identity, building on some form of truth about the brand. This brand truth could focus on the name of the product, where it comes from, a key benefit, or how it's made.

Charlie Bigham's is an example of a brand creating an identity. This small, but fast-growing, UK food company is named after the founder, who still runs the company and oversees recipe creation. Bigham's make meals that are ready to cook, such as moussaka, lasagna, and pies, for a fraction of the price of eating out.

When Tom Allchurch joined as CEO, the brand's identity was nice but not very distinctive. Initial positioning work identified the benefit of giving busy couples an opportunity to spend some "us" time once the kids had finally been sent to bed. The couples want something better than a frozen dinner but don't have the time or energy to cook from scratch.

New packaging created with agency Big Fish used a cartoon couple, called The Twosomes, to be much more distinctive. Each package has a different humorous cartoon, which helps the brand to stand out on the shelf among the other premium prepared meals. Eighteen months after the relaunch, revenue is up 170 percent.

Beyond just helping the brand stand out, brand identity can help better cue the benefit of a brand. This is not about spelling out the benefits in detail, but rather using brand properties as a key to opening the door to the brand's meaning. A good example of this is the relaunch of Waitrose's private-label products.

This UK retailer has a niche position in the market, focusing on top-quality food associated with higher prices. This reputation helped the brand grow nicely for many years, but became a potential hindrance as recession hit in 2008. By the end of the year, the brand was starting to suffer from a drop in market share, as shoppers were "leaking out of the bucket" faster than new ones were being added in.

Consumers saw the brand as being 25 percent more expensive than the competition, even though it was actually the same price as competitors on many everyday items. Part of the problem was that the product range had a fragmented brand identity, with a confusing collection of different looking sub-ranges.

The solution was to create a new identity to unify 1,200 of Waitrose's everyday staple items, such as bread, cheese, and milk. This range was cleverly named "Waitrose Essentials." By avoiding terms like "Basic" or "Value," this avoided tarnishing the brand's quality credentials. The range was launched using communication with the idea "Quality you'd expect at prices you wouldn't." The new identity helped increase sales of the lines relaunched by 7.5 percent, worth $52 million a year in revenue and $17 million in profit, double the cost of the relaunch.

A step further than amplifying the benefit of your brand is to use brand identity to reposition it altogether. The redesign of Green & Black's helped transform it from a niche, ethical chocolate to a premium indulgence brand.

The brand's organic credentials and bittersweet taste from its high 70 percent cocoa content earned it instant niche appeal, but the market share stuck at only 1 percent. It was sold mainly in specialist stores and, when it was in supermarkets, it was stuck in the organic section.

At the end of the 1990s, new package designs helped to reposition the brand from worthy organic to luxury premium chocolate. Sales rose from less than $7 million to $77 million, and the brand was purchased by Cadbury's in 2006.

Brand identity has the power to actually add value to the usage experience, as shown by the story of Molton Brown's gift sets. This brand of high-quality toiletries is distributed in upmarket hotels and posh shops such as Harrods and Saks.

The Christmas gift sets used to be ordinary standard collections of different products, such as shampoo and shower gel, sold in boring boxes or see-through bags. However, Molton Brown found out through talking both to the end user (mainly women) and the buyer (mainly men) that these Christmas packs were perceived as a second-class gift, a "distress" purchase when short of ideas. The brand was good, as were the individual products, but the presentation let them down.

The other key insight was that most men are really lazy when buying gifts.

Building on these insights, the team transformed the special gift packs by designing a beautiful range of boxes that any man would be proud to offer. Not only did the buyer of this new package not need to put the individual products into a box, but because Molton Brown removed the external branding and added a fancy ribbon, the buyer didn't even need to wrap it up.

The business benefits of this move were huge. First, the company sold several times more products. Second, it was able to charge a much higher premium price. Third, stores loved the packages and so built huge displays of them, boosting both brand visibility and sales.

As discussed, the main role of brand identity is not to communicate a brand's positioning. Rather, the key role is to make a brand distinctive and so more likely to be chosen at the point of purchase. However, you can use the rest of the pack, beyond the front-facing part, as a communication medium, an approach called "packvertising."

This approach is more often used by smaller brands that can't afford expensive advertising, with the most famous example being innocent smoothies, a brand marketed by the Coca-Cola Corp.

Each bottle or carton of innocent is more like a mini-magazine than a conventional package. The package copy has been the main communication channel for getting across the brand's innocent, light-hearted, and friendly personality.

What is especially clever, and hard to do, is the way the package copy changes every few months, creating consumer interest and involvement. For example, the ingredient lists say things like, "25 blueberries, 10 raspberries, and two fat nuns."

You have now seen the role brand identity can play in making your brand distinctive, so it is at the forefront of people's minds when people shop in this category. Let's now move beyond the fundamentals of product and identity to discuss how to grow the core with distinctive communication.

Workout 3: Communicate

Communication can play a leading role in creating the distinctiveness needed to drive penetration of your core brand and business.

Effective advertising creates distinctive memory structure, in contrast to the campaigns that constantly change, or that are not linked to the brand.

Creating distinctive memory structure with communication requires fresh consistency (a skillful balancing of consistency and freshness). The importance of fresh consistency is backed up by scientific research into the way our brains process information, which was done by Radboud University in the Netherlands. This shows that too much freshness is ineffective.

"Disruptive" communication that is completely fresh and unexpected grabs attention and gets your brain working. However, this is hard to keep up and needs a high level of involvement, and most advertising tends to be processed with low involvement.

On the other hand, too much consistency can be a bad thing. If a signal received by the brain, such as the start of a TV commercial, sets up an expectation that is then confirmed by a subsequent signal, then the reaction of brain cells is reduced. As soon as we expect something and what follows confirms these expectations, our brain switches off and focuses on other things.

The optimum approach is to balance freshness and consistency. Many studies have shown that a message that is moderately in line with expectations is the most efficient at increasing attention, liking, recall, and recognition. The consistency needed comes from two main sources: the brand story and brand properties.

The first source of consistency is a compelling and relevant brand story that is brought to life in communication in the form of a "narrative." The first feature of advertising that gets encoded in memory structure is telling a story that triggers an emotional response.

Importantly, this story needs to have the brand in a starring role. Otherwise it's all too easy for people to remember an ad very clearly, but with no idea at all of what brand was actually being advertised.

The second form of consistency is the creation and amplification of distinctive brand properties. Here, communication plays a vital role, as it is the way a brand property is "loaded" with meaning. Over time, if the brand property is used consistently and creates memory structure, it starts to work as a key to unlock brand meaning.

So, in the case of Nike's "swoosh," you now just need to see this logo to immediately unlock brand meaning such as achievement, winning, and sports stars. If the link between a brand and an "iconic trigger" is constantly repeated and reinforced, the trigger can be used right along the path to purchase. For example, research by Neuro Insight showed that the Intel "chime" sonic branding device boosted memory encoding of the brand by 350 percent.

Communication properties can take a multitude of forms. Some of the main ones include:

Slogans, such as "Just Do It" for Nike
Celebrity endorsement, such as John Travolta for Breitling watches
Characters, as in Snap, Crackle, and Pop for Kellogg's
Colors, like red for Coke and blue for Pepsi
Package shape, as in Absolut vodka's distinctive bottle
Sonic device, as in Intel's chime

The most powerful brand properties are often not used just over years but over decades. The strongest of these take on cultural meaning, becoming part of everyday language. So, it's not uncommon to hear someone in a business say "Just Do It!" for example. These sorts of brand properties become true "brand assets" that add significant value to the brand and make its marketing much more effective.

You have now seen how distinctive communication can help create memory structure and so drive penetration to grow the core. Now you will move on to the last of the four ways to create distinctive marketing, by seeing how to go beyond promotions to brand activation.

Workout 4: Go Beyond Promotion to Activation

Scan a shelf of your local supermarket for promotional offers, and you're unlikely to find much in the way of creativity. It's probably full of "buy one get one free" and "25 percent off" promotions. Perhaps there will be the odd offer to enter a competition and "Win a Vacation" or some similar prize. These promotions might have a short-term effect on sales, but they do little to really drive distinctiveness and so increase penetration for the core.

In contrast, "brand activation" goes beyond promotion to boost sales as it works harder at communicating the brand idea in a distinctive and memorable way. If the activation idea is amplified consistently over the mix and over time, it has the potential to become a distinctive brand property that can help create memory structure for the brand.

One of the leading brands in this field is Red Bull. It has identified a series of high-adrenalin sports with appeal to its target audience of young, active men. The genius in them is the way Red Bull creates and amplifies distinctive properties for each of these, such as The Red Bull Air Race in aerobatic flying and Red Bull X-Fighters for stunt motorcycling.

In each case, the activation property literally brings to life the brand idea of "Gives you Wings." These properties also help Red Bull create a distinctive memory structure in a way that is more powerful, authentic, and exciting than using advertising alone.

Brand activation has two advantages over conventional promotions: grabbing attention, and bringing to life the brand story.

We'll explore these two benefits using the example of innocent smoothies' Big Knit brand activation.

The Big Knit activation has been part of the marketing that has helped innocent grow the core smoothie business from nothing to a brand with $150 million in sales in just 10 years. Until recently, this growth was achieved without significant advertising support.

Around wintertime, something interesting happens to the smoothies section of UK supermarkets, which grabs shoppers' attention. The little bottles of innocent smoothies, the leading brand in the sector, are wearing little woolly hats. Each one has a different design.

Each special woolly hat bottle that shoppers buy raises about 75 cents for the Help the Aged charity to help protect old people from the cold. Here, we see the first advantage of brand activation, which is to make your brand more distinctive and so stand out on the shelf.

The Big Knit also helps bring to life the innocent brand's caring side, by dramatizing the brand's support for a good cause. Importantly, innocent doesn't just stick the hats on the bottles and leave it at that. The activation is amplified across the mix, especially through the use of innocent's digital marketing program, involving the Web site, email newsletter, blog, and social media channels.

Consumers are actively involved through an invitation to help knit the little woolly hats themselves. Progress towards the target is tracked via a "Hatometer." This amplification has helped innocent increase the number of hats knitted from 20,000 in 2003 to a whopping 650,000 in 2011. The activation has, in total, helped raise $1.5 million for charity.

Other activation ideas reinforce this idea of being a caring brand by communicating the innocent brand's charitable work, part of an approach it calls "FMSG": Fast Moving Sustainable Goods.

The brand even had a clever play on the boring buy-one-get-one-free offer called "Buy One Get One TREE." This promotion invited people to buy a one-liter carton of innocent and, in return, the brand planted a tree in Africa. Customers were able to visit a virtual forest on the innocent Web site where they could enter their names and see the trees they had helped fund.

You have now seen how to use distinctive activation properties to make your core brand more salient and so drive penetration. This completes the four ways of making the brand more distinctive. Next, you will discover how distribution can be used to drive penetration and grow the core.

Workout 5: Drive Distribution Through Existing Channels

Driving distribution of the core is one of the most effective ways of increasing penetration by reaching more people, more often.

The boldest approach, which we'll address in the next section, is to open up new channels.

But, the first place to start when trying to grow the core by extending distribution is to work with the existing channels where your brand is sold.

In the case of most consumer goods brands, these are the big supermarkets. Here, there are two ways of increasing presence in existing channels:

More is more
Multiple sitings

Some of these ideas will sound simple or even basic, however, in the world of modern marketing, these basics are sometimes forgotten, so there's no harm in being reminded of them.

The most basic way to grow your distribution is simply to extend your brand's presence with existing customers. This more is more approach has worked wonders for Charlie Bigham's, a fast-growing brand of premium, chilled ready meals.

Until 2010, the brand had been sold only in Waitrose, one of the most upscale retailers in the UK. Waitrose had a great fit with the Bigham's brand, with a skew to the urban, upscale consumers the brand appealed to most.

However, Waitrose has only a 5 percent share of UK grocery sales. Following a relaunch of the brand with improved products, an extended product range, and new package design, the Bigham's team worked hard to persuade Sainsbury's to stock the brand.

This retailer also has a high proportion of upscale shoppers, but not quite as upscale as Waitrose. It has an excellent reputation for fresh, high-quality food and, most importantly, it reaches a lot people, having a 16 percent share of the UK market. This was forecast to dramatically increase the sales of Bigham's by 70 percent.

Clearly, getting these sorts of distribution gains is far from easy. So, what are some of the ways brands can help increase their chances of keeping the distribution they have and making distribution gains? Here are five suggestions:

Focus on the core. Retailers are getting more and more ruthless when it comes to smaller brands in a category. Market-leading brands have enough consumer "pull" to justify being stocked. However, smaller follower brands are prime targets for de-listing. This means brands need to focus efforts on their core business where the brand has strength in terms of sales and brand equity.
Build memory structure. Retailers begrudgingly accept that certain top brands play a key role in "sign-posting" a category—they help the shopper feel at ease and navigate their way around the shelf. For example, Hellmann's in mayonnaise, Lays in potato chips, and Kellogg's in breakfast cereals have incredibly strong brand identities that have become iconic.
Marketing muscle. Focusing on the core and creating distinctive marketing helps create "pull," which makes your brand a must-stock item for retailers. This is why applying the principles of growing the core should help your brand maintain and grow distribution.
Category leadership. Most big consumer goods companies have invested heavily in category management, understanding not just their brand, but also the category as a whole. This understanding can be used to show the retailer how your brand is not only growing its own sales, but also sales of the category as a whole.
Optimize your range. This involves a simple bit of analysis to looking at rate-of-sale by product or package format in the product line, compared to weighted distribution. This highlights products that are selling well, but in relative terms are "under-distributed", and others where the reverse is true: too much distribution, given the rate of sale. Adjusting the distribution to favor the faster-selling products can help you sell more stuff, and help the retailer make better use of its shelf space.

The second main way of using existing channels to help grow the core is to make use of multiple sitings.

Coca-Cola is the master of this approach. In a typical supermarket, the brand is sold in four different places through the use of different product formats, from stacks of 24-pack cases near the entrance, to rows of six-packs on shelves, to displays of 12-packs near the snack section, to chilled single bottles in coolers by the checkout counters.

This approach means that the brand has dramatically extended its reach within a given store and so increased its chances of being seen by the consumer. There is also a huge difference in pricing, with the most expensive format being sold at three times the price per ounce of the cheapest.

Workout 6: Drive Distribution Through New Channels

The second main approach to using distribution to grow the core is to open up new routes to the consumer. This tends to be much harder, requiring a change to the company's whole business model.

This is why, in many cases, channel innovation is discussed at length but limited progress is made. It stays stuck in the "too difficult" box.

However, creating new routes to the market can be an excellent way of growing the core, and a way for brand owners to wrestle back some of the power currently held by the major retailers, which have become increasingly dominant over brand owners in the following ways:

They have become masters at copying branded products and selling them at lower prices.
They charge high fees to be stocked and there is the constant threat of being booted out if you don't keep "supporting" the retailer with investment.
They control in-store pricing.
They own valuable data on shopper behavior.

Mastery of distribution and channels is perhaps the key factor in Coca-Cola's success. It is the expert at getting the brand "within arm's reach of desire" through different channels, including cafes, hotels, restaurants, and, of course, vending.

The company is continuing to innovate in this channel to grow the core. For example, new vending machines that Coca-Cola has been testing in Ireland sell not only Coke but also a range of other services, including ringtones and vouchers for adding minutes to mobile phone plans.

The machine also acts as a digital music jukebox, updated remotely to be always up to date, and can burn CDs. The pilot test of 200 machines has been positive, with revenue per machine twice as high as normal machines.

According to news reports, if these results were repeated on the top 10 percent of Coke's 2.8 million vending machines, revenue would be boosted by a staggering $1.5 billion.

This approach is also being used by other consumer goods brands, such as the Cup-a-Soup brand in Holland. For many years, Cup-a-Soup was a dormant brand in the Netherlands.

Sales of this dehydrated packet soup were static. The brand felt outdated in a world where the most exciting innovation was happening in chilled food and certainly not dehydrated convenience products.

A change in strategy was the catalyst for a period of sustained growth. Same product. Same package. No radical innovation. The core business was grown by finding and activating a completely new route to market: in offices.

Rather than relying on complex vending machines, simple dispensing devices were created, which delivered a portion of Cup-a-Soup that people could pour into their own cups and add boiling water.
Cup-a-Soup cleverly created and sought to own a specific moment of the day – "the four o'clock break." This was much more memorable and impactful than just saying "Drink Cup-a-Soup at work."
The final piece of the puzzle was using communication to activate the break idea. A tongue-in-cheek campaign featuring the funny, fictional character, John the Office Manager, was created and ran for several years.

One of the most impressive examples of a brand using new channels to drive penetration of the core business is Apple. Back in 2001, the company decided to open its first store, with the impetus for this bold move being a frustration with the poor way Apple computers were presented and demonstrated in existing channels.

Another key driver for the move into retail was the desire to drive penetration of the core business, as shown by this quote from the company: "One of the goals of the retail initiative is to bring new customers to the company and expand its installed base through sales to computer users who currently do not own a Macintosh computer, and first-time personal computer buyers."

The stores have more than exceeded the expectations on this objective; according to one study, 50 percent of people buying in an Apple store were new to the brand.

Here are just a few facts to show how successful Apple has been in opening up this new route to the consumer:

363 stores worldwide as of January 2012.
Annual revenue of $17.6 billion, more than JCPenney and nearly as much as Kohl's, both of which have more than three times the number of stores in the U.S.
Average sales per square foot of $6,116, more than twice that of closest rival Tiffany & Co., and over 17 times that of the average American mall store.

From the start, the Apple stores didn't look, feel, or work like any store that had come before. The stores delivered a totally new customer experience, designed to sell product but also to drive interest in and penetration of the core business. Here are some of the key features that have made them so successful:

Award-winning architecture that is open, airy, minimalist, and bright.
Merchandise is displayed in "solution zones" for hands-on, real-world use.
A "Genius Bar" where customers can ask questions and solve technical problems. A Macworld magazine survey found 34 percent of those with problems took them to an Apple store Genius Bar.

Meanwhile, there are also a growing number of brands experimenting with creating their own online stores. Domino's Pizza has increased its share of business done via online ordering. It was one of the first companies to open up this channel, starting back in 1999.

Online sales are now reported to make up 47 percent of sales, up from 40 percent a year ago. The online figures have been boosted by the recent launch of a new iPad application, which already makes up 13 percent of e-commerce sales.

We've now explored the first six workouts for ways of driving penetration, by harnessing both distinctive marketing and increased distribution in existing and new channels. The final two drivers of growth from the core will show you how to extend the core with new formats and products.

Workout 7: Extend the Core Through Packaging Extension

There are two ways to extend the core: with new package formats and new products. We'll discuss packaging first.

Extending through packaging formats can be a great way of growing the core. The big advantage of this form of extension is that you sell more of the same core product, rather than adding new products. You reinforce what made you famous from a brand standpoint, and you increase economies of scale from a business standpoint.

There are several ways packaging extension can help grow your core, including solving a consumer problem and targeting new occasions and channels.

One of the best examples of packaging extension to solve a consumer problem is a new package design by WD-40, the multipurpose lubricant, which stops squeaks and unlocks stuck bolts, amongst its many uses. This brand has delivered sustained and profitable growth over many years with one single core product.

WD-40 used to come with a little straw taped on the side, which was used to help direct the spray. The problem was that people would often lose the straw.

This led to the creation of "Smart Straw," a new WD-40 package with an integrated straw that flips up to use and back down to store. This is definitely smart on several fronts:

First, this is not about making the pack look nicer or adding a gimmicky new feature. Smart Straw solves a real problem and makes the product easier to use.
Second, by making WD-40 easier to use, Smart Straw helps to make the brand distinctive. This, in turn, can help drive penetration.
Finally, WD-40 Smart Straw delivers the double whammy of penetration and premiumization. It offers consumers real added value, so they are willing to pay a higher price than they pay for the original can. This premium more than recoups the extra cost, making WD-40 Smart Straw more profitable. So, even if people buy it instead of a normal pack, WD-40 still makes more money. The core extension has become very popular with consumers, making up 15 to 20 percent of the brand's sales where it has been launched.

Range extension using packaging also has the potential to grow the core by targeting new occasions and channels. This is a good way of breathing life into an established brand and introducing it to a whole new user base.

Take Ferrero Rocher. For years, the gold-wrapped balls of chocolate wafer-encased hazelnuts have been part of the Christmas routine, or perhaps taken to dinner parties as a gift. The product was only available with a large number of units, typically 30 or 48. The brand's advertising reinforced the idea of the brand being for sharing at special occasions.

However, the brand has now broken free of the straitjacket of special occasion usage with a new four-pack (suitable for individual consumption) that is sold at the checkouts of supermarkets. The brand is now also an indulgent, everyday treat, widening the usage of the brand and updating it.

Furthermore, the four-pack has "premiumized" the brand, with the convenience of the format supporting a premium price per chocolate, compared to a normal gift pack.

Workout 8: Extend the Core Through Product Extension

After having used new packaging formats to sell more of the existing product offer, the last step is to consider adding new products. Here, there is a need to focus on those products that genuinely offer potential to drive penetration by widening the brand's user base.

Core range extension offers new versions of the core product or service, such as Dove bar introducing a Refreshing Green version. You are telling new chapters of the same core brand story. This is very different from brand stretch, where you move beyond the core into totally new markets, such as Dove launching deodorants.

For example, the Kit Kat chocolate brand found that it was under-represented among young men looking for a substantial snack. This led to the Kit Kat Chunky core extension.

Range extensions can be a great way of growing the core. It can drive penetration by widening the brand's appeal so it's relevant to more people on more occasions. But it can also deliver an additional business benefit for the core in the form of "premiumization": charging a higher price for new benefits.

This means the core brand is generating more revenue for every unit sold, and so driving not only volume share but also value share. As long as the new product features are genuinely adding value to the consumer, the premium price should at least recoup the extra cost of the product to maintain percentage profitability.

In the best cases, the core range extension actually delivers a better percentage profit margin, meaning significantly more profit per unit sold.

A good example of this is the Ryvita brand in the UK, which offers three new "seeded" versions of its crispbreads, with added sesame or sunflower seeds. These core range extensions have played a role in repositioning the brand from being a diet product consumers ate out of necessity to a tasty, crunchy, and healthy product they enjoy eating.

The core extensions deliver a more interesting and tasty eating experience, while also offering extra health benefits. These extra benefits are worth paying more for, supporting a 60 percent price premium versus the original product.

Product extension can be an effective way of recruiting new users into the brand by tailoring the brand benefits to better meet their needs. An obvious example of this is the explosive growth in "Light" products in response to increasing concerns about health. Diet Coke is now a bigger seller than Classic Coke in some markets. In beer, Bud Light has driven growth of the total Budweiser beer business, even if it has stolen some sales from the classic Bud product.

We have now completed the eight core growth Workouts, covering distinctiveness, distribution and core extension. The final part of the summary will show you how a Grow the Core project works, so you can get started on your own brand.

Today the world stands at a crossroads, facing social, political, and economic turmoil on an unprecedented scale. Everywhere you look, things are changing.

Amid all this change, it is not clear where the world is heading over the next 50 years. But one thing is clear: The game is changing.

The old ways are rapidly becoming outdated and obsolete. New opportunities are opening up. Some see this transitional period in a gloomy, pessimistic way. By contrast, companies that are built on the 10 attributes we've just discussed are profoundly positive about the future.

But to really own the future, leaders must be proactive. They must challenge the status quo. In short, they must change the game or risk going out of business. This is not the time to tinker with reform. This is a time for large-scale transformation. In convulsive times, the stakes are higher—and the consequences of success or failure are greater.

The Grow the Core Workplan

A typical Grow the Core project is based on four key stages: Insight, Ideas, Exploration, and Action. Before launching into the work, there are a few things to get right from the start to increase the chances of success:

Assemble a cross-functional team of 10-12 people. This size is ideal to have a diversity of talent without the team being so big it becomes unwieldy. This will typically cover marketing, sales, product development, consumer research, finance, and sometimes one or two people from the creative agencies on your brand.
A project should typically take no more than 12-15 weeks, with the exact time depending mainly on how much research is done. Set the dates up for the key workshops at the start and stick to them. These then work as "drop deadlines" to push the project forward and create the sense of urgency needed to get things done.
The key workshops should take place in an inspiring venue away from your office to encourage fresh thinking. Book a nice big room with natural light; no basement bunkers (a sure-fire way to kill creativity). If possible, find a venue that links to the theme of your project. For example, for a project linked to soccer, the workshop was done in Johannesburg's soccer stadium, with a view of the field.

Stage 1 focuses on Insight. This stage of the project is designed to produce insight "fuel" that can help your team generate ideas for growing the core. A key reason for many "brainstorming" sessions to fail is the lack of any insight, as this is like trying to launch a rocket without having any fuel on board. There are many types of insight technique that you can use, but a good place to start is to consider four different angles of attack, including:

Looking back
Looking forward
Direct competition
Indirect competition

The first part of looking back is to remember what made you famous. This is a bit like "brand archaeology." You dig into your past marketing mix and look for hidden treasure. When was the brand "hot," growing share and sales and when was it "cold"? What was the brand doing at these times?

The second part of looking back is to carry out a thorough review of the brand and business, mining all the existing data you have. On brandgym projects, this often uncovers valuable nuggets of insight by reminding the team of key facts that have been forgotten, or by presenting data in a new and more inspiring way.

Consumer focus groups can be a good source of ideas for growing the core. With the rise of digital media, many brands now have online panels they can use, with the most advanced perhaps being mystarbucks.com.

At the same time as rewinding to look at what made your brand famous in the past, there is also a need to look forward to the future and how the world is changing. For example, on Carling Black Label this involved looking at how expressions of masculinity were evolving in South Africa. This work was done by analyzing communication in the form of advertising, but also popular culture such as TV programs and movies.

This work was a key input into creating an expression of masculine achievement that was more aspirational. This was based on success in different forms of life, both professional and personal, in contrast with the previous brand expression that was based on physical achievement.

There is, of course, a need to look at the brand's direct competition, to highlight potential opportunities and threats. Also, this analysis helps the team work on ensuring that the core brand mix is distinctive versus the key competitors. This means the competitive analysis needs to look not only at brand positioning, but also the key brand properties of other brands in the marketplace.

Finally, it's important to consider indirect competition by looking at case studies on "peer group" brands. These are brands from outside your category that are doing a good job of delivering similar benefits to the ones you want and/or connecting well with the core target audience.

For example, when working on the Ryvita crispbread brand, the key challenge was to appeal to women 30 to 50 years old, and to reposition the brand from being a "punitive" diet food to an enjoyable and healthy food.

Part of this relaunch was to create a more aspirational brand personality. Looking at the Diet Coke and Special K brands helped a lot, leading to the idea of Ryvita needing to be like "one of the girls": less solo and more sociable, a food you're not shy of eating in front of other women. This helped inspire new communication showing three girlfriends discussing toppings for Ryvita at the same time as sharing gossip. This played a key role in helping revitalize the brand and getting it growing again.

Stage 2 focuses on Ideas. This critical stage of the project is where the team will work on generating a long list of ideas for growing the core. Typically, this stage is centered on an Ideas Workshop with the projects team meeting taking place over two days. A rough idea of how this sort of workshop unfolds is as follows:

On Day One, the team should:

Recap objectives and workplan.
Share Grow the Core principles and the key core growth drivers.
Share brand and business review and use to generate core growth ideas.
Share fresh insight from consumers and brand peer group case studies to generate core growth ideas.
Review all the ideas generated and do initial prioritization based on potential to grow the core to get to the Top 10 ideas.

On Day Two, the team should:

Review the Top 10 ideas, with one page per idea, which have been polished and sharpened overnight.
Split into pairs and work up a more detailed summary of the idea.

Stage 3 focuses on Exploration. This stage of the project is where you bring to life and explore your ideas for growing the core. This can take the form of simply exploring the lead ideas inside the business and getting feedback, or it can involve doing qualitative or even quantitative consumer research. Whichever route you take, there are two key ways of bringing to life the ideas.

The first way is to use prototypes. Working with design agencies or on their own, the team can mock up ideas for growing the core, to help explore them with consumers and present them internally in a way which is inspiring.

The second approach is to create a simple one-page summary of each idea to capture what it is, why consumers would buy it, and a rough idea of the growth potential for the core, in terms of incremental revenue and gross profit. This approach forces the team to make short and snappy presentations, rather than the typical 20 to 30 pages of PowerPoint. It also makes it much easier to compare the different ideas, by using a consistent format.

Stage 4 focuses on Action. Key findings from the exploration stage on the lead ideas are taken into the Action Workshop, another two-day off-site session with the core team.

This involves getting the team to think and act like a group of venture capitalists, who have a limited amount of capital to invest.

Team members who "pitch" the lead ideas for growing the core, try to secure backing for their ideas, using the idea cards and prototypes, with no more than 5 to 10 minutes per idea. A huge wall chart is used to map the ideas, typically based on the brand and business building potential.

This helps identify how strong each idea is:

Cash builders. The ideas deliver profit for the core, but don't do much for the brand image, such as Gillette launching plastic razors to compete with Bic. A brand can do a few of these projects, but they are ideally executed with very limited marketing, so you can focus resources on "hero" ideas.
Heroes. These ideas dramatize the brand positioning while generating profitable and significant business growth for the core. Examples would be core range extensions like Gillette's Fusion, or upgrading the core ideas such as Galaxy chocolate, dramatizing smoothness via a new smoother shape of chocolate tablet, improved packaging, and new communication.
Drains. These ideas would eat up resources and have a limited impact on either brand image or business growth.
Image builders. These ideas look small in terms of incremental growth on the core, yet do something positive for the brand. However, these are the most risky type of ideas in some ways, as they often eat up resources without delivering the expected image-building effects.

To arrive at the final shortlist of around three to four ideas, the team members are asked to "place their bets" by allocating an imaginary budget of venture capital to no more than three ideas.

By going through each of these four stages, you will identify the ideas that have the greatest potential to improve the future of your business by growing the core.

About the Author

David Taylor is founder and Managing Partner of the brandgym, a network of senior brand coaches that helps teams create a clear brand vision and the action plans to turn this into growth. Clients include Sainsbury's LVMH, Unilever, T-Mobile, and SAB Miller.

He has been named one of the world's 50 leading marketing thinkers by the CIM. He is the author of four successful books on branding published by John Wiley:The Brand Gym, Brand Vision, Brand Stretch, and Never Mind the Sizzle. . . Where’s the Sausage? were all number 1 on Amazon’s branding books ranking.

David Taylor also writes brandgymblog.com, one of the world’s top 60 marketing blogs.

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