TAKING ON THE LIQUID-BREAKFAST CATEGORY.
BRAND STRATEGY & POSITIONING
September 2023 - December 2023
Project Team: Project Lead & Innovation Manager working with a Cross-Functional Client Team and Design Agency
My Role: Innovation Manager
Challenge:
With exceptional brand awareness and market dominance in their own category, the client was seeking a new product proposition that would leverage their strong brand positioning, and disrupt the liquid-breakfast category. To do so we needed to uncover current tensions, consumer needs, and identify their right to win in category.
Background:
Our client wanted to take on the Liquid Breakfast category - worth an estimated $208m, with 89% of value coming from Grocery alone - where Up & Go has a mostly unchallenged monopoly. New category entrants have historically failed, given Up & Go's established presence as an Australian household brand, thriving under the health halo of Sanitarium.
Approach:
Defining Success
Knowledge Share: bringing together a cross-disciplinary team of marketing, insights, sales, and R&D, we exploded hunches, shared existing knowledge, and identified knowledge gaps. Together we defined what our vision of success looked like - considering marketing, insight, product, category, and sales objectives.
Research Deep Dive
Consumer Insight: we spoke with 16 consumers across 4 life stages, digging deep into their current morning routines, needs, and pain points, dissecting current players in the category, and identifying areas of opportunity.
Defining Proposition Territories: capturing and synthesising learnings from our research, we identified 11 emerging proposition territories that would inform our ideation approach.
Approach:
Cross-functional Ideation & Harvest
We held a full-day ideation session, bringing together 3 organisations and 5 teams; marketing, sales, insights, R&D, and brand.
Exploring liquid, brand, comms, and go-to-market opportunities, 42 propositions were crafted, with 6 leading propositions identified.
Taking the 6 top ideas to harvest for prioritisation, we crafted 3 refined leading propositions.
Design Development
We briefed in the creative team, who brought the leading propositions to life through primary pack design, secondary packaging, on-shelf mock-ups, and communications headlines.
Consumer Co-design & Proposition Refinement
We spoke with 18 consumers across 4 co-creation sessions, exploring the leading concepts.
We synthesised learnings into a final recommendation, clearly defining the opportunity, brand and product attributes, go-to-market approach, and brand blueprint.
Outcome:
A brand blueprint that leveraged existing and new attributes consumers identified as desirable in the liquid breakfast category, defining product delivery, communications, formulation & experience.
The final concept capitalised on an untapped opportunity in the market, delivering a strategic balance of emotional and functional benefits, that would see the client becoming a disruptor in the liquid-breakfast category.