Creating a successful strategy for your brand is comparable to playing a game of Battleship.
Before you start to play, you first have to determine the placement of your ships. If they are too close together they might be sunk right away. If they are in the corners it could be too obvious. So where do you place them?
To win the game, you need to know your opponent well. You need to be able to anticipate where they’d place their ships and what their next move might be. But what if you didn’t know your opponent and you had to play against them blindfolded? It would be pretty challenging, right?
Similarly, launching a new product or designing a retail space won’t be successful without first developing an effective strategy.
Our Philosophy on Strategy
If you don’t have the right strategy and programs in place, your customers won’t think about you the right way.
You need a strategy that displaces your competition both physically and mentally — a strategy that makes your brand stand out in a sea of brands.
Stagnation leads to alienation, complacency, competitive encroachment, and decreased sales. But on the other end of the spectrum, shared investment leads to joint selling, success stories, and mutually beneficial, successful results. You need to create specific actions to drive your channel to this result.
You want your distribution channel to be an unstoppable asset that helps you build equity; a channel that focuses on your brand when you are not there physically.
Are you capitalizing on your channels and relationships? Are they working for you, against you or not thinking about you? Are you influencing as powerfully as you should? Most organizations lose sales and miss profit opportunities because of inefficient channel design and underperforming locations and relationships. Ask yourself:
- What are your growth goals?
- Where do you stand with your strategic accounts?
- What is your mindshare with your network?
- Do you have channel programs designed to influence?
Your channel needs a strong, progressive partner to provide the best tools and resources.
Miller Wittman builds programs and designs environments that capture your channel’s imagination and mindshare for your brand to engage your customers, multiply your efforts, and grow your sales. Better yet, we show you how.
Strategy In Action
Whether you are a prime brand or a challenger brand, the stakes are high.
As a prime brand, if you get complacent you’ll lose your position in the marketplace. And as a challenger brand, understanding your competition is not enough. You also need to understand your differentiation factor and how to use it to your advantage.
We have helped several clients through this process with outstanding results. Here are just three examples:
Reinvigorating go-to-market strategy
We have a client whose retail and channel programs used to beat the competition handily with industry-leading programs and products. But lately, they have noticed less of a gap and some encroachment by challenger brands.
What we found was that the competition had started using the same tactics as our client, both channel and retail facing. We also found that the channel was complacent because they were used to the tools our client pioneered. We needed to reinvent and reinvigorate our client’s go-to-market strategy.
Through discovery and following our processes, we were able to help our client find their new leadership positioning and capitalize on where they could excel. Through executing tailored tactics and business plans, our client is back on track gaining market share and mindshare — even in a challenging supply chain environment.
Engaging the channel
Another client had been losing space in the independent retail environment and needed to figure out why and how to reverse it. We followed our processes, including interviewing stakeholders, researching competitors, and developing next generation plans and tactics specific to the brand.
Through executing these plans and tactics, we excited and engaged the client’s channel, gained the space, and, two years into the program, are seeing gains in excess of 50%.
Strengthening a challenger brand’s foundation
One of our challenger brand clients has been underestimated in the marketplace. Through competitive and stakeholder research, we were able to ascertain what specific attributes our client could use as a foundation.
Through the development of specific tactics to capitalize on those strengths, we developed go-to-market strategies including sales and dealer programs, new brand identity, and digital marketing. Today, we are seeing sales increases of more than 120%.
How Miller Wittman Helps You Develop Your Brand Strategy
At Miller Wittman, we help brands become more powerful. We can help you build your brand, build your channel, engineer your customer experience, and displace your competition.
We are designers focused on brand story and customer experience. We design facilities with a focus on your sales processes and profitability to gain prime position for your brand. We have built powerful distribution networks: we know, understand, and motivate channels to grow sales. Give us your toughest problems: we’ll help you solve them.
If developing an effective strategy has been elusive for you, Miller Wittman can help. Contact us today to learn more.