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Faced with the turmoil brought on by war, inflation, the pandemic, climate change and technological advancements it is easy to focus on the transitory, rather than the fundamental. To navigate today’s world, brands need to strip it back to the basics. We listed three key takeaways brands need to consider retaining and growing their shoppers in today’s inflationary environment: 

  1. Inflation is not one-size-fits-all; 
  2. Offer a compromise or be the compromise; 
  3. Think beyond price.

So, one thing that does not change in a cost-of-living crisis is how brands grow. Brands still need to attract new shoppers and they still need to do so by pulling at least one of the brand growth levers:

  1. Building meaningful difference;
  2. Reaching new targets;
  3. Reaching new occasions, or new needs;
  4. Entering new categories;
  5. Securing new presence.

Be brave to drive brand growth through innovation

Innovation will continue to be the foundation on which strong brands are built, and, if history teaches us anything, disruptive times create the catalyst for a disruptive strategy for innovation. For example, the sharing economy picked up after the 2008 financial crisis. Brands grow by creating more reasons and more opportunities to buy, making innovation indispensable in a brand’s growth strategy.

Change brings new opportunities for innovation. But an innovation may not be completely new, just better, more convenient, or more affordable than existing products. 

Kantar innovation design principles are centred around removing the frictions and driving the fuels to create innovations that represent a frictionless choice. And this means the innovation needs to be convenient, meaningful, and rewarding. Read the full article to see examples from BIC and Decathlon.

The context may have changed, the winning strategies have not.

Change also demands agility, the ability to test and learn, adopting a development process, enabled by fast and effective consumer research, and then evolve the offering based on the feedback to make the final innovation reaches its full potential.

Read the full article.

Get in touch with our Innovation Team, Jochen Vandenbossche, Isabelle Van Coppenolle and/or Corinne Mostaert for more information.

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