“Everything gets sold.....Which product you would like to sell...No 1 established Brand or growing Brand .....”
There are different theories about how top brands in each segment keep maintaining higher profit & market share. How it’s difficult to eat their market share.
You can be on on either side, selling top brand or selling 4th or 5th ranked brand. Not everyone gets opportunity to work with top established brands of particular segment... at the same time not everyone gets opportunity to work with growing brand.
Both sides have their own learnings. When one works with no 1 brand, life seems easier. Still, there is always pressure to beat historical figures. There is always pressure to not only achieve Top-line but also better Bottomline. There is world class vendor base, world class processes, may be little less flexibility. You will work with top distribution network, which is also process driven. You will have best of the talent around you. There will hard work to increase & maintain margin leadership along with market share. Quality, brand, legacy remains as top selling pitch. There is fear of duplicate products & our own imported products(unauthorised) eating market share.
When you work with a growing brand the life seems difficult initially. You keep hearing disadvantages compared to established top brand. But when you think & accept the situation, you realise that there is still potential to grow, do better. These other brands are also surviving, there is always some space which is available to occupy. Things may be more flexible, less process driven & more people driven, more experiments possible. Distribution channel will be also people driven, whatever product may be, whatever market share, there is still someone willing to be part of journey, just identify right stakeholders. There will be less margin pressure but more market share pressure. There is ultimate satisfaction when top brand notices your teams efforts & they start feeling pressure.
In few scenarios, we used to hear discussions like, competition is like Aishwarya Rai & we are like Madhuri Dixit, it’s impossible to compete, our time is over. We used to hear that top brand is taking distributors to London & we are not able to go beyond India. After one year, Madhuri Dixit came back strongly with a new look & the same London travelling distributor wanted to focus on our brand rather than top no 1 brand.
Both places, we could eventually beat the competition by some extraordinary team efforts.
As we had found pockets where we can beat them due to our innovative marketing, smart use of marketing budget & flexible approaches in local micro market. It may not be possible to replicate same success across but it gives hope & energy to entire organisation. Both times, top brand-competition tried to poach our entire team.
It requires totally different mindset while jumping from one side to other side. Same learnings come when you are launching a totally new product or a new service. Most of the time start-ups go through these challenges. Let’s remember, everything gets sold ultimately, just need appropriate strategy.