The Opportunity For Brands — And For Well Stocked
The better-for-you CPG market is crowded with products promoting benefits that can be difficult to distinguish or validate in a mass-retail environment.
Consider the mocktail. In a crowded field of better-for-you beverages, how much value does “tastes like a screwdriver” and “contains no alcohol” actually create versus “calms your mind” or “tastes like mango”?
And how does that answer change when the consumer is younger, drinks significantly less alcohol than previous generations, and may not have a particular affinity for cocktails in the first place?
Let’s test it.
By placing products in locations with identifiable demographics and interests—and by developing an ongoing relationship with the people who buy them—we can begin to understand the real-world value of product attributes, pricing, positioning, and packaging.
This creates three potential levels of revenue:
- Better Assortments: Transaction data allows us to continuously improve what we sell, where we sell it, and to whom.
- Data for Brands: The same data can help CPG companies understand how their products perform with specific audiences, in specific environments, at specific prices, and against specific competitors.
- Our Own Products: Over time, the data can identify opportunities to develop products ourselves.
Amazon provides a useful precedent. Its Amazon Basics and Amazon Essentials brands emerged from a retail environment with enormous amounts of transaction and customer-review data. That information helped identify products and attributes capable of satisfying large numbers of shoppers.
Well Stocked can pursue a similar principle at a much more focused level: use retail data to discover what people want, validate it in the real world, and ultimately create products to meet that demand.