How To Increase Popularity with Distribution

The Relationship Between Popularity and Distribution

Your brand’s Popularity is the general sense of ‘buzz’ around your product within the public eye. You can drive your Popularity through Distribution as, naturally, the more places your product is physically available the more Popular it will appear.  

Increasing your Popularity through Distribution can be done by guaranteeing your product’s visibility across more points of sale and in more prominent places. So, when driving your brand’s Popularity through Distribution, consider the below: 

1. How can you drive breadth and depth of Distribution?: Popular brands are sold in multiple locations – whether that’s online or in mass retailers, grocers, pharmacies, value chain stores, club stores and so on. To be considered popular, your brand needs to appear everywhere it can. While achieving this breadth of distribution is key, what is also important is the depth of distribution. Making sure you’re in over 80% of stores or sites within a particular retail brand will ensure your brand saturates the marketplace. 

2. How can you own more than your fair share of shelf?: Popular brands occupy lots of space. It isn’t just about getting into as many stores as possible, you need a large presence within them, too. Often brands are given shelf space in store and online which are mostly equal to their market share. Commonly referred to as “Share of Shelf”, to drive your Popularity you should aim to over-index in terms of your Share of Shelf vs. Share of Market. 

3. How can you get into the most premium locations on shelf or on a website?:  Popular brands hog a lot of the spotlight, so not only is it important to be in most stores, with a large shelf presence, but the location of your brand on that shelf or on the site is also key. Ensuring that your brand sits directly in the centre of the aisle and at eye-level on the fixture will draw the most attention to it most naturally. For online, the equivalent is being above the fold and on the first page.  

What should you do next?

• Build a powerful trade story to enable you to expand your Distribution within your existing channels. 
• Land meetings with new buyers of your brand to enable you to uncover and expand into new Distribution opportunities. 
• Show a Buyer how your brand is best at meeting the needs of customers in the category while delivering unique value. 

How to determine if it’s working.

• Keep an eye on the rise of your brand’s Popularity over time as your Distribution starts to grow. You can also observe your brand’s unprompted awareness - traditionally the brands that are most Popular tend to be the ones people think of first.

• Monitor your brand’s followers across your social media versus your competition as well as the number of branded searches you’re getting per month online.  

  
  
  Guidance from:
  Michael Coden | Head of Marketing, ProQuo AI
  
  Michael has spent 10 years developing and building brands across the US, Europe and Australasia for global companies.