For Rude Health, we needed to compel attention for their  - newly listed in 350 Tesco stores – granola. And explain what granola is – it’s a new category – and unfamiliar.  And compete with all those habitual brightly coloured cereal purchases in the cereal aisle. Off the back of the consumer research we did, Rude Health employed a bright colour,  made the word Granola very big,  made the product shot appealing (it couldn’t be a window for technical reasons but it looks like one), listed out the ingredients clearly. All so the shopper, browsing, with a very few seconds of attention, may take a chance on putting it into her trolley. Because that’s what Rude Health needs to happen.  Over and over. We’ll tell you how sales are going in five weeks’ time. And, if you want to assist by buying some, we’d be very pleased.

And if you are a designer with mock-ups to hand, consider emailing me at tessa@assetresearch.co.uk for fast, cost-effective in-aisle with real consumers real research that helps your designs on customers work even better. So your clients love you even more…

Rude Health Apple Cinnnamon Granola

Jimmy’s Iced Coffee, available in Original and Skinny Love,  is very delicious. I thought I’d call up the originator of this refreshing product, Jimmy Cregan, and ask him for his FIve Tips When You’re Starting Out. And here they are. Thank you very much, Jim. Jim says:

And if you want to know where to find this blissful stuff, check them out here: www.jimmysicedcoffee.com or here:  www.facebook.com/jimmysicedcoffee

Sam and Fairfax of Sipsmith Gin

Last night I learnt how to distill gin. From Sam Galsworthy, the engaging co-founder of Sipsmith Gin in Hammersmith.  Thank you, Sam.I was introduced to Prudence, their beautiful copper pot still. She is a curvaceous and lovely toy, with lots of levers and piers and portholes, through which we could peer to see the botanicals steeping – liquorice, orris root, juniper, cassia bark, Spanish lemon and orange peel…

I was also re-introduced  to Sipsmith’s excellent gin, sloe gin and barley vodka. I’ve been drinking the gin for a while now, and the sloe gin makes a superb gift for elderly fathers.

I was glad to hear there is a damson gin on the way. The Summer Cup rival to Pimms they are planning sounds delicious.

Sam’s passion and enjoyment is so evident, and the tales of gin’s history and Sipsmith’s own 2 year journey so fascinating, that as you stand there, sipping a deliciously smooth flavoursome aromatic gin, in this little shed in Hammersmith, you connect emotionally to their story.

And that, of course, is why you buy.*

*And why 4000 people have been through their shed in the last 2 years, because there is nothing more powerful than making this direct connection with your  potential customers as you start out. Enthuse them, and they will enthuse others.

If you want to see Sipsmith’s passion for yourself, watch this:

Tom Mercer of MOMA!

Here are Tom’s thoughts on sampling, why it’s so important for brand building and how to do it well. Thank you very much, Tom.

What we at MOMA believe it does

Sampling is our key to getting consumers into the MOMA! world!

The main thing is getting people to physically try our breakfast – our products are pretty unique so it’s really important for people to taste it in order to understand and appreciate it – and once we’ve done that most people love it. Quite simply it’s the best way for us to introduce the product to people and encourage purchase afterwards.

How to do it well.

With lots of confidence, good product knowledge, and bags of enthusiasm.

Confidence encourages people to stop what they’re doing and take a sample; good product knowledge helps the customer understand what it is they are trying, which can often inform their reaction; and enthusiasm from the sampler is always transmitted to the person trying MOMA! and again, helps get a great reaction from them. The last point is important – products genuinely taste better when people are lifted with great brand energy!

Benefits.

If done well then sampling not only converts people to your product, and results in more sales, but it creates a great brand image. We want people to come away from trying a MOMA! sample thinking how great our product was, but also what a passionate, enthusiastic and fun brand we are.

Net-A-Porter

Last week I was invited to Net-A-Porter’s offices for a fashion show. (Thank you very much, Alix Partners.) How does Net-A-Porter offer incredible value to its customers? With most items costing three figures, it’s not exactly Primark.

I couldn’t fathom it out, until a young professional woman from Alix Partners told me how:

“I shop online from my desk. It has the designers I like, and the clothes I need for work. I buy two of everything. It arrives at my office the next day. I try it all on in the disabled loos – if it looks good there, then I know it works! I send back the size that doesn’t fit, using our office despatch facility, and I’m done. I hate wasting my Saturdays shopping, I don’t like shop assistants bothering me, I don’t like to clothes shop with friends. Net-A-Porter is a godsend.”

Net-A-Porter’s huge value to her is in her precious time saved. Now she’s an evangelist for them.

What’s your value to your customers?

Like all of us, Homer is a ‘cognitive miser’. We don’t like thinking – deliberative thinking is hard and difficult.

Humans make less than perfectly thought out decisions all the time, intuitively, emotionally, effortlessly and quickly. We’re good at it – it’s why we have survived.

If you give people a choice of three things on a menu, they will choose in the middle. Online clothing retailers exploit this brilliantly.

If someone is buying a new TV, the cost of spending time researching all the possibilities and acquiring all the information on a perfect TV is emotionally high. So they will ‘anchor’ their choices on their existing TV,”I need a bigger one.”

Humans don’t make decisions in space.  It is a common human tendency to rely too heavily on one trait or  on one piece of information when making decisions. So, if people are looking at a new product on a shelf, they will compare it, ‘anchor’ it, with something roughly equivalent that they are familiar with.

Don’t give customers a lot to think about – help them choose on intuition.

Jamie Mitchell, formerly Innocent’s UK Managing Director, and now CEO of Daylesford Organic, shares with us his  thoughts on why small brands can always win against big ones. Many thanks to you, Jamie.

In his words:

“Having worked with, met with and generally hung out with lots of small, independent brands, one thing comes through over and over again when I think about which ones are most likely to succeed in their chosen (viciously competitive) market: “I think, therefore I am”. OK, so maybe linking Descartes’ existential theories to strategies for small brands may be a bit of a stretch, but let me try and convince you.

Small independent brands have something very powerful over their big company competitors: they have people who live and breathe the brand. They have what marketers like to call inside-out values, where the values of the brand is simply a mirrored reflection of the values of the people inside the business. When people think of the innocent brand as natural, honest, humorous, or challenging, these are the internal company values too. If people think Gu is a brand with a worryingly serious passion for chocolate desserts, go meet some of the chocolate loving people who work there.

These sorts of brands ‘think’, so they exist. “I think, therefore I am.”

On the flip side, take most big company brands. Out of the thousands of employees who might touch the brand, in production, sales, finance, and so on, often only one or two people (the brand managers) are exclusively focused on that brand. How can it possibly generate a personality, a set of values, in an environment mixed up with so many competing voices and personalities?

But why does this matter? Well, big companies don’t think it matters because they still have a model of developing a product: a set of brand guidelines, a big budget and a 30 second advert. And that can still sometimes work in big, stable categories.

But if you want to innovate, and to engage customers in a genuine relationship, it helps if there is something real underneath. Compare the conversations between independent brands on twitter with the big corporate brands, and you can see how different the relationships are. One is transactional and commercial and fake. The other is like old friends.

For many small brands, however, the culture and values may not have been set up clearly in the first place. That means you need to be sure who you are before you start chatting too much with your customers.

At Daylesford, my current home, I joined at a time when it wasn’t sure if it was a sustainable food brand or a luxury lifestyle brand. And that showed inside the company, with people passionate about different things. This year, we have gone back to our roots – to the farm where everything started and, in truth, where most of the team admitted their passion for the business came from. A farm truly like no other, with a clear purpose to Make Food Matter. Once we all realised this, we could start talking to our customers with more singularity about who we were, and with the honesty, integrity and natural passion that you could never copy with a script or set of brand guidelines. And importantly, it’s believable and trustworthy. Which is one of the reasons why, today, our customers are showing signs of increasing loyalty to our food.”

Sales

All my clients are feeling squeezed at the moment. Sales are harder to make. Costs are rising and margins declining. Marketing spend is under pressure. Staff are the biggest cost of all, so clients are making staff redundant.

How can you market without increasing marketing spend?

How do you use fewer staff to deliver an even better service?

I’ve been working with a prestigious estate agency group recently.

Their issue is how to stand out, to deliver the premium service expected.

I have researched and heard from their clients what are the thoughtful, the considerate, the human gestures that actually make the estate agency experience memorable. They don’t take very much time, or cost much money.

But they do take thought.

And a bit of empathy, seeing it from the client’s eyes, understanding how it feels for them to not know whether they will get the house they want or not. Whether they will successfully  sell their biggest financial asset. Or not.

The financial rewards for my client  of getting these gestures right are huge. Their buyers and sellers rave about their agency service to their friends. And use the agency again, to sell and to buy. That’s precious, valuable FREE marketing, that my client doesn’t fund.

Have you thought about your service to clients recently?

Can you delight them in ways they don’t anticipate?

Can you reassure them it’s going to be more than OK? (We’re all less confident than we were in this current climate.)

Can you meet their emotional needs, as well as their practical ones?

I’ve worked with Lucy Thomas, NPD Manager at innocent drinks, on several new product development projects. She’s agreed to do a bit of sharing on the topic here so you can benefit from innocent’s cost-effective ways of developing new products.

Lucy hard at work

Here are her thoughts:

“So many small companies make decisions on product formulation by taste testing on their friends and family.  That can be a good start, but it is highly unlikely you will get a non-biased view.  In addition, your friends and family might not represent your target consumer.  Whilst it is appropriate at times to invest in consumer research that is very costly, there are more cost effective ways to give you a sense of how your products perform.  At innocent we’ve developed some award winning products using this methodology, and we continue to do so.

1) Find out where your consumers are and tap your contacts that will help you get in front of them 
For example, I’ll ask friends who work in offices in London, can I pop in and do a taste test at their office.  People are generally really receptive, especially if you offer them something back (all our tasters get a free smoothie).

2) Test on as many people as possible. 
Ideally 100, but 40-60 gives a good steer.  Encourage them to be as honest as possible and embrace any feedback you are given.

3) Get some advice on your methodology from the experts.  
We used Campden BRI http://www.campden.co.uk/ to help us design the forms tasters fill out and cover any legal requirements.  They also gave us lots of tips on best practice, e.g. 11am is the optimum time for tasting.

4) Be clear on the targets you want to achieve before you do the taste test. 
An average score of 6 is a minimum requirement on a 1-9 scale for us. Or on a just about right scale (e.g. for sweetness), we’d expect at least 60% of people saying ‘just about right’.  Don’t forget to look at the distribution of scores, even if you hit your average, you might have a polarising product.  Not always a bad thing, but worth understanding before you launch.

5) Benchmark against your competition 
Decant all samples into unbranded packaging, to avoid bias.

It’s really good fun, and a great way to get feedback on your products.

Finally, these guys offer a similar service, and I’d recommend you call them if you don’t have time to do it yourself: http://www.wssintl.co.uk/

Happy taste testing!”

So there you have it. A freshly pressed draught of very useful advice from Lucy at innocent drinks.

Thank you very much, Lucy.