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

Chapter 4

The core growth drivers

 Headlines

The two ways to grow the core are penetration and premiumisation. Driving penetration involves widening the base of users and making the brand more popular. The drivers to do this are creating a distinctive marketing mix, so the brand is recalled and relevant at the point of decision-making, and boosting distribution to make the brand available in more places. Premiumisation involves launching value-added extensions to the core offering, using both new products and new pack formats.

Having made the case for growing the core, I will now look in more detail at how to do this. 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 (Figure 4.1).

Figure 4.1 Core brand growth drivers.

Core growth driver 1: Penetration

Most marketers, myself included, have been trained to work on many ways of driving volume share growth on the core business. These include trying to boost rates of re-purchase, increase frequency of purchase and growing the amount bought on each shopping trip. A whole multi-million pound research industry has grown up to measure all these different variables in incredible detail and track them over time. Well, if you're one of ...