In today's fragmented media, a single press feature no longer guarantees sales. Brands must treat PR clips as assets to be amplified through paid digital advertising to ensure they reach a wider, asynchronous audience and drive conversions.
AI chatbots are emerging as a primary tool for product discovery. Brands with validated, third-party scientific research supporting their products can gain an edge by ensuring this content is easily findable and digestible by AI, leading to recommendations for 'safest' or 'cleanest' options.
For new CPG products creating a category, co-branding with adjacent, established brands (e.g., protein sprinkles with a yogurt brand) is a superior strategy. It provides distribution and credibility without the risk of creating a cheaper, private-label competitor that could cannibalize your future brand.
Retailers use private labels to copy existing, proven best-sellers, not to build new, unproven categories. A startup doing a private label deal early risks doing all the expensive work of consumer education and marketing for the retailer's brand, only to compete against it later.
To raise capital on favorable terms, founders need to de-risk the venture for investors. Demonstrating meaningful repeat demand and solid unit economics, even from a single retail store, is more compelling than having a patent on an idea with no proven market traction.
Focusing on a market segment with built-in repeat purchases, like children's products (e.g., shoes), can be a 'holy grail' for CPG brands. The predictable reorder cycle (kids growing) ensures high customer lifetime value and creates a stable, recurring revenue stream that is difficult for competitors to disrupt.
A founder's non-traditional background should be framed as a unique advantage, not a weakness. A real estate agent creating a home fragrance product has a more compelling and authentic story rooted in real-world experience than a biologist, which can be a powerful marketing and branding tool.
Founders often look back fondly on the early, cash-strapped days. The feeling of being at a low point and leveraging pure human creativity to find a solution and survive is a uniquely rewarding experience that builds a core belief in one's own problem-solving abilities.
A product designed for one demographic (e.g., protein sprinkles for kids) may find unexpected traction with entirely different groups (e.g., bodybuilders, GLP-1 users). Actively identifying and marketing to these surprise communities can unlock significant, unforeseen avenues for growth and brand adoption.