How do you promote with excellence? We will unpack this question further in a series of Ghost Tree Sales blogs. While we don’t have all the answers, we have kicked around the industry long enough to have picked up on what works. We’ve seen that most great products are fueled by “good enough” ongoing promotions.

For now, keeping with the theme of advice for new and emerging CPG brands, below are a few things your sales organization can do that will help optimize your promotional efforts:

Demo’s For Dummies: Anyone who believes that in-store demo’s are ineffective or a thing of the past is frankly a “demo dummy”. As someone who has built many brands and has personally run hundreds of in-store demo’s, I can tell you they work very well. Let’s start with the math. Even a small store can get hundreds of unique visitors a day while large stores get thousands. By running in-store demo’s you can introduce your new product to hundreds of new customers per demo. If you convert a small percent of samplers to loyal consumers, you can in short order over a few demo days build a base of brand loyalists for the store. The store manager appreciates your support which comes with a host of benefits. Never mind the multiplier effect that occurs when those new consumers introduce your brand to their friends and family. The problem is most people are lazy. Demo’s involve hard work. Many brand owners try to outsmart the retail fundamentals and do everything to avoid the work of demo’s. If you don’t do the work, you don’t get the benefits. Or, if you have got ahead of yourself and have placed the brand at a large chain where instore demo’s are too expensive…you may be working against your brand because consumer awareness is too low to support the chain.

Flash Training: Once your new product is on shelf, take the time to speak to your store manager. Most stores have store huddles first thing in the morning where you can quickly present your product features and benefits to staff and hand out free samples. The store staff can be an immediate pool of loyal consumer and they will recommend your product to store shoppers. You can also randomly drop by the store and chat with floor staff and hand out samples.

Farmer Joe: Living in the Santa Cruz California area we have the benefit of enjoying busy Farmer’s Markets running year-round. If you are a new brand and you qualify for one, I would highly recommend selling at Farmer’s Markets. They are a great source of revenue, and they are highly profitable (+50%). So, if you do 3 a week there is no reason why you can’t make $3,000. Multiply that by say 50 weeks and you have a $150,000 channel at a high margin. Plus, you get hundreds of shoppers sampling your product who often will go home and buy your product online if they are from out of the area. Or, if they are local, they will become loyal consumers at your local retail stores in the area throughout the week.

Silent Salespeople: Years ago, Bob was my boss when I was working for Nestle as a recent university graduate. I was working in confectionery and Bob was the master of all things Nestle candy. Bob taught me about the power of shelf talkers. These fell out of fashion for years during the clean store policy trend. Stores adopted the idea that stores should have limited in-store signage because they are clutter and a bad thing. Unfortunately, the people that initiated this trend had never worked in a retail store and didn’t understand the power in-store merchandising has on influencing purchase. Smart people doing ignorant things. Bob called them silent salespeople. These are things like shelf-talkers (wobblers/danglers) that scream the key benefit of your product. When done right, shelf talkers will drive impulse purchase behavior and can get consumers to try your product. The key to making shelf talkers drive dollar sales is to keep them very simple yet visually impactful. They should catch attention and pull consumers over to your product by screaming your key benefit – without offending. When done right, they are like taping a $100 bill on the shelf in front of your products, people can’t help but notice it and get excited when they do.

Kicked out of the House?: Bob liked to talk out of aisle secondary displays. These powerful sales tools fell out of fashion too during the clean store policy years. Some MBA decided to do away with these because she had never witnessed how they drive incremental sales for a store. Ask yourself, how many times do you think a person will buy a bag of candy if they don’t walk down the candy aisle? Now, what if you put that bag of candy beside bananas in the produce aisle? How many people will buy that bag of candy when they buy a bunch of bananas? Note, bananas are one of the highest store traffic zones while the candy aisle one of the lowest. If you are a new brand with a home shelf in the center of the store, one of the best things you can do to drive trial is place your product beside established fast moving products. This “out of aisle” placement away from the home shelf will spark impulse purchase (aka trial).

Let’s Make a Deal: Bob taught me that all consumers like deals. Unless you are the nanny with a gold card shopping for the wealthy family, you probably like to score a deal. You may even try a new product if it is on deal. One of the easiest and most effective ways to spark trial of a new product is to run an in-store deal. The deal runs for a period of time, usually no more than four weeks at a time and you run no more than 16 weeks per year total. Some would argue that for new products you do not want to run deals for the first few months post launch because you want to establish a regular sales baseline or because you don’t want to train consumers to only buy on deal. Well, neither of those concerns matter if you don’t move product and 12 months down the line you are delisted. Run deals as soon as possible and pulse them on and off throughout the year. You can over time offer less off or fewer deals as you establish a loyal consumer base to help grow your margins (depth & breadth).

Free Stuff: Bob strongly recommended giving away free samples if you are lucky enough to have a product that can be produced efficiently in small packs. Free samples are a very easy way to generate trial and help build your base of consumers. Ideally, you want to give away samples but make a profit on doing so. More on this in future blogs. Bob had some gold-plated strategies here.

Extra Extra, Read All About It: For new brands, print is not dead. Particularly local print publications that are available for free in area coffee shops, cafes and grocery stores. Every city has local print publications related to culture, food and local events. These publications offer advertising space that is relatively affordable compared to larger regional and certainly national publications. You would be surprised at how many people read these publications and the impact a creative ad can have on your sales. For new brands these publications can offer a good return on the investment.

Support Local: We’re running out of catchy titles – support local will have to do for now. What we are getting at here is the importance of supporting local events (event marketing) and local non-retail placement (ie., hospitality). If you are a new brand starting out in a town or city, we strongly recommend getting involved with supporting local events. It is also advisable to see if you can work with local restaurants, hotels and cafés to get placement for sales.

Two Faced: Bob taught me years ago when working for Nestle the importance of multiple facings. If you are a new product, it is highly likely that you may only have one SKU on shelf. The fastest way to drive velocity (sales turns) is to increase the number of “facings” you have on shelf. A facing is one product. Two facings are one product that is merchandised twice on shelf – same product side by side. Three facings are three of the same product and so on. Research has shown that when you go from one facing to two your sales will increase by a whopping 80%. Now this will vary by product type and category, but I have seen the research and witnessed the spike myself after going from one to two facings with products I was selling.

AVA: No, we are not referring to the movie here. What we are referring to is a merchandising principle that Bob taught me fresh out of university working for Nestle as a brand manager in confectionery. Availability, Visibility and Accessibility. Availability means that a product has arrived in the store and is placed on shelf. Visibility refers to the quality of shelf placement. Is the product merchandised on shelf such that it is visible to the shopping consumer. If it is obstructed from view by a pillar or if it is on the bottom shelf…it may not be visible to the consumer. Accessibility means that the consumer can reach the product easily and buy it. This is a problem for products on the top shelf where shorter consumers can’t reach the product or if it is merchandised behind the checkout counter or in a locked display box - the consumer can’t get to it to buy it.