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

Chapter 10

Workouts 5 and 6: Drive your distribution

 Headlines

Driving distribution of the core is one of the most effective ways of increasing penetration by reaching more people, more often. The first way to do this is to increase the brand's presence in existing channels, both in terms of number of outlets and the presence instore through multiple sitings. A bolder approach with bigger, long-term benefits is to open up new routes to the consumer. This has the advantage of giving brands back some of the power they have lost to the major retailers.

Distribution isn't the sexiest bit of marketing. However, whilst neither I nor anyone else have any idea whether your sexy, social-media campaign will sell more stuff, I'd bet my life savings that being sold in more places definitely will. Extending distribution increases the number of consumers you can reach, and so it's an excellent way of driving penetration of the core.

The challenge with distribution for consumer goods brands is, of course, the ever-increasing power of the big retailers. In the UK, the Big Four supermarkets (Tesco, Sainsbury's, Asda and Morrisons) account for almost 80% of all grocery products bought (1). In the USA, Wal-Mart is a $250 billion monster, wielding incredible power over brand owners. This is why ...