How to get your product into the retailer of your dreams

By creating absolute brand consistency

It's your baby. You've nurtured it with love. It's brought you joy and kept you up during sleepless nights. Throughout its lifetime, you've been stretched thin trying to do it all, but you've charged ahead – designing, copywriting, marketing, advertising, packaging, selling – you name it, you tackled it. No one's worked as hard as you to make your product as successful.

Here's the rub. Looking back with a critical eye, you'll probably find a hodge-podge of brand inconsistency in your path of all that hard work – inconsistency that can deaden your chance of landing your product on the shelves of your dream retailer. As hard as it may be, it's time to relinquish some control and put it in the hands of an agency that can take you barreling ahead and into those venues you want to command. Here are the steps your branding firm should take to get you there.

Dial in your positioning

Great design is meaningless without a unique, ownable brand position on which to base it all. If you've built a loyal customer base, there's something uniquely wonderful about your product. It simply needs to be communicated in its most pure form.

The best marketing strategists will have a proven process to extract that unique greatness from the most important people in your company and distill it into your simple, clear, compelling brand essence. All the answers are already in the minds of management. It just takes the right questions to pull them out and bring clarity to the thinking.

Insist on consistency

Moving forward, every piece of communication should be based on that simple truth you uncover. After a detailed assessment of your existing marketing materials, your branding agency may find many of the elements you've already created are usable in some form – especially if you've built a recognizable brand identity for customers. In the same regard, they may find the need for a complete overhaul. Trust in their recommendation.

There are two key reasons for absolute consistency. When you're on the inside looking at the same messaging and visual identity day in and day out (as you've been doing during the development of your brand), it's easy to tire of it and want to freshen it up all the time. Fight this urge at all cost.

While you may be bored of your message, it's only a blip on the radar for the rest of the world. If you continue updating it, you'll only further taint your chances of becoming a recognizable brand, and you'll wreck the opportunity to grab the attention of the retailers you want to inhabit. The most useful service your agency can provide is to establish a voice, and a look and feel, then clearly communicate them with utter, unquestionable consistency. Ideally, the same people in the branding agency who develop the positioning should be the ones to write and design the communications, ensuring the strategy never gets watered down in execution.

The second reason for brand consistency is that the retailer of your dreams is likely a large, sophisticated player who has their positioning and branding well put together. Perfect brand uniformity will give you an automatic leg–up on other, less refined companies that come knocking on retailers' doors. They'll feel like they're dealing with a major player at their own level.

Develop a succinct presentation

We'll never understand why the single most important sales tool for a meeting – the visual presentation – is put together by an internal team. Allow your agency full freedom to create a door–opener tool and presentation that has a lasting effect. You'll likely have one shot, either directly with the retailer or with a distributor who represents them, so do something innovative to open eyes and doors.

What should be included in the presentation? The good news is you don't have to develop every piece of marketing communications to wow your audience – and none of it has to be real. If you're a packaged goods company, have your agency render the packaging to look as if it's ready for shelves – even if it doesn't actually exist. Photoshop the product onto a shot of the retailer's shelves to show them its attention–garnering power. Create in–store merchandising and print advertising. Show them how you're going to drive customers to the product on their shelves. Paint a vivid visual picture.

From a nuts and bolts perspective, make sure to include an educated analysis of their current product mix and how you serve a need not currently being met. It should be easy to articulate your competitive advantages if your brand positioning was developed correctly. To fill out the presentation, you should include category trends, detailed information about your marketing strategy and a financial summary that all point toward embracing your product. Whet the appetite and you'll get in the door.

Let's talk more about getting your product into the stores you desire. I'm online all the time kreedy@leereedy.com.