How Emerging Brands Can Get the Upper Hand with Bedrock

CPG markets have experienced widespread diversification and growth opportunities over the last decade, but with that also come challenges. Emerging brands now have more ways than ever to launch new products, but competition is the highest it’s ever been, making it that much harder to stand out on the shelf.

There is plenty of room for emerging brands to grow if they know the shape of the market and how to react to modern trends. Emerging brands have the advantage of being lean, nimble, and able to dismantle (or start) new trends faster. It all comes down to the stories they tell and the data that backs up the details. 

CPG sales ebb and flow in retail, so it’s important to show the momentum of your brand. You can do that by showing your KPIs, product and marketing rankings, volume, velocity and distribution levels, or pricing against key competitors. But first, emerging brands need to know what they’re up against.

Challenges of being an emerging brand

Most emerging brands don’t have a team of analysts dissecting their sales figures every day. Instead, they have a founder or small team who wear the multiple hats it takes to run a young business. 

The process of creating a single sales deck is time-consuming, and even the industry’s most common analytical reports take hours or days to complete. Category managers and retail buyers don’t have this kind of time when they’re looking for the most recent data refresh to help them make informed product-related decisions.

When inefficiencies exist with accessing or analyzing data, organizational bottlenecks occur until each report is ready. That places emerging brands on their heels as they try to react quickly to ever-changing market trends.

Syndicated data has transformed how CPGs distribute, package, and market products, while informing every major decision made across sales and executive teams. The idea of spending budget dollars on data and insights can seem like more trouble than it’s worth, but with the right data, an emerging brand decreases its chance of losing out to a competitor.

“36% of emerging brands said their traditional competitors have already gained a material edge by integrating data and analytics into their core business. By utilizing both POS and panel data, you can take advantage of shifts in the market to gain shelf space and market share.”

How can emerging brands get on shelves?

For emerging brands and CPG startups, the existing rules for data-driven sales presentations still apply. New brands still need to generate weekly reports, measure velocity, and prepare long-term promotional strategies that attract customers. Many retail buyers won’t even entertain a meeting with prospective vendors if they don’t bring data-backed brand and category plans to the table. That being said, velocity and compelling brand stories take on more importance in a crowded product category.

• Identify opportunity gaps 

Remember those growth opportunities? Unfortunately, these opportunities are not without risk for emerging brands with limited resources. How can their smaller sales teams know which untapped market or region is the most valuable? These gaps can be filled by introducing a new product or expanding coverage within retail categories. Identifying these opportunity gaps requires an in-depth understanding of your market, product velocities, and distribution. How? By using data analytics instead of gut instinct. Visualizing key data points can help track the businesses better with less effort.

• Transform the data into compelling sales stories

When presenting any story, it’s essential to keep the audience in mind. No matter which angle of the story you choose, make it worth the buyer’s time. Walk them through a sequence of data events that lead to a final, focused insight. Show your strength in terms of dollar or unit sales, or other critical measures that show how an item drives category growth. Prove your product makes more margin than the competition. The elements, graphs, charts, and slides you provide for your sales story, and the order you place them in, are crucial to whether you succeed or fail at engaging the buyer.

•  Show how their products can add value to retailers

Retailers don’t necessarily care how your product tastes or whether it’s well-reviewed. They want to know what’s in it for them and the success they’ll see from having it on their shelves. No two retailers are alike. Leverage data that is specific to each storefront and show how you can bring value to the entire category. Always consider your brand and how it fits in specific retail accounts. Focus on metrics that benefit the broader category, such as velocity, movement, dollars per store per week, or profit margins. By demonstrating that you understand a category, it’s easier to prove that your product adds value to it. If retailers do share one trait, it’s that they want your brand to help their business grow.

The Bedrock Solution 

At Bedrock, we know data is key to unlocking growth opportunities in a brand’s early years. In fact, 89% of CPG executives agree that advanced analytics is critical for emerging brands. For some, however, data overload can be confusing, intimidating, and low priority when you’re just trying to get your business off the ground.

Bedrock levels the playing field between emerging brands and legacy names with tools that generate insights and take away the guesswork. We help any size CPG win over retailers with the facts using features like:

Bedrock Storyboards

Gives retailers the data points they want to see by creating a sales presentation with the flexibility to reorganize (Drag & Drop) and auto-save the flow of visualizations in the same way they will present the pitch. Another feature within Storyboards is “Points,” which dives deeper into the analysis within the context of a Storyboard.  This feature lets you embed bullet points with further explanation under the visualization or tile for an added frame of reference.

Bedrock Sales Decomposition

This feature breaks down sales performance by the measures that determine if a product is declining, growing, or staying stagnant. The Sales Decomposition Tree presents the data from two distinct angles: Dollar or Unit volumes, which are then dissected into Base and Incremental volumes. Each descending branch of the Sales Decomposition tree digs deeper into the why of the branch above it, deconstructing the key drivers that contribute to growth or decline in a straightforward, easy-to-read format. Having a way to easily break down the change in sales provides valuable information for strategic planning to capitalize on success and adjust the “sales” where needed.

Bedrock Harmonizes All Data for a Full Market View

Data harmonization improves the quality, accuracy, and utility of CPG data. Integrating the various data sources into a singular data set makes retail and sales data “analysis ready”. For CPGs to get an accurate full picture of their current landscape, harmonizing the data is a must. It reduces data discrepancies and keeps all departments working from the same source of truth, keeping it consistent and reliable throughout the organization.

Book a demo today and see how Bedrock helps emerging brands separate from the pack with the leading sales analytics platform in the CPG industry.