225 Ways to Grow Your Brand?

September 4, 2003, New York, NY - Every day in the U.S., brand managers develop and implement strategies intended to grow their brand's sales, and every day manufacturers invest in marketing programs designed to attract new users and to attract more usage from current users. Then how come most established brands in the U.S. don't grow annually?

The dilemma of brand management is that the risks of brand changes are costly, as are the risks of not making any changes at all. But it's no surprise that brand managers can't decide between spending more, changing ad copy, shifting support from advertising to promotion, or repositioning their brands.

"Armed with a database of more than 50,000 brands across 250 categories and 55 countries, our consultants identified over 225 possible strategies for growing brand sales," says Sandy Eubank, Senior Vice President of Ipsos-Novaction, the leading market research consulting group and member of the Ipsos Group. "With so many possibilities, which strategy or strategies will create a sustainable competitive advantage?"

In her study "Building Better Brands: What Works and What Doesn't," Eubank identifies 18 winning strategies. "While generating significant growth for established brands is complicated, there are statistically proven winning strategies for successfully growing brand sales."

The study and the list of 18 winning strategies appears in the latest issue of Ipsos Ideas, the newsletter published by the Ipsos Group, the world's second largest survey-based marketing research company. Every two months, Ipsos Ideas delivers the insights and ideas that Ipsos has gleaned from each of its research specialty practices: public opinion, marketing research, advertising research, and forecasting and modeling.

The Ipsos-Novaction study used Sales Builder, a unique market mix model based on UPC scanner data and key drivers of a brand's sales, to analyze two types of variables: push factors, meaning things the brand manager does to push the product towards the consumer, such as promotion and pricing; and pull factors, meaning measures of consumers' inherent demand for the product, such as differentiation and perceived value.

The findings were surprising, says Eubank: "Some strategies that we suspected would be winners weren't, and some strategies that generate a high probability of growth simply aren't sustainable."

"But the effects of winning strategies on brand growth are astonishing," says Eubank. "For example, we learned that brands that increased ad quality somewhat or a lot, and increased customer perception of the brand's perceived value, had an 83% probability of increased sales growth by at least 5%."

The complete text of "Building Better Brands: What Works and What Doesn't" and the 18 winning strategies are available at www.ipsos-ideas.com or by electronic subscription.

For more information, please contact: Sandy Eubank [email protected] Senior Vice President Ipsos-Novaction Tel: (203) 840-3431