Brand Competitiveness.

VOL. 0020 – FLORIDA, MONDAY, MAY 22, 2023

Juan F. Arjona Harry

President & CEO Strategee

One of the primary objectives of any CMO is to successfully establish a brand. But naturally, in a world as hypercompetitive as the one we currently live in, attaining this goal calls for a lot of methodology, attention to execution in all media and contexts where the brand is exposed, but, most importantly, it calls for investment and the time needed to positioning the Brand or reposition.

All of the aforementioned is correct in theory, and the approach, time, and marketing expenditure are the three most crucial positioning criteria; nevertheless, how can one determine whether a brand is truly competitive or not?

What degree of competition do you exhibit?

The evaluation of a brand's level of competitiveness is a crucial statistic or KPI for defining the future of the company. On a scale of 0 to 100, a brand's level of competitiveness is determined by how well it performs against the following other important indicators:

1. The assessed brand's sales have grown more slowly than its competitive segment, which has grown more slowly exponentially.
   

2. Sales of the analyzed brand increased at a slower rate than the category in which it competes, which also grew at a slower rate.
   

3. The brand's stature is determined by taking into account its involvement in the market niche in which it competes, the amplitude and depth of the strategic vector (configuration of the double segment/product), and the brand's strategical vectors served relative to the segment's overall strategic vectors.
   

4. Relative market share, which takes the brand's involvement in the segment or category (where applicable) into account.
   

5. Indicator of the brand's nationality or geographic reach; to be determined in accordance with its market structure (remember that there are 44 market structure parameters by differentiation and indifferentiation, as well as by the degree of sales concentration of the category). The brand must possess a minimum amount of market share relative to the category in accordance with the market structure, with the understanding that after doing so, the brand is granted a greater or lower level of nationality depending on the market structure. It should be kept in mind that all of the geographies in which brands operate are in competition for markets.
   

6. Value for Money; in this metric, the average price per unit of the brand sold by reference and by channel must be compared, on average, to the price of the brands in the segment or category; with the understanding that, at a higher index, the brand obtains a higher value for money for its manufacturer.
   

7. Innovation Rate: Measuring the universe of new SKUs launched by the brand during the period, minus the SKUs withdrawn, less the SKUs corresponding to products launched and failed, and dividing the result by the same items but of the category will give us the percentage of innovation of the brand over the class, or what is the same, the rate at which the category is renewed and the brand renewed.

The brand then receives a number between one and one hundred by entering a model that weighs market structure; this finally represents its level of competitiveness within the segment and within the category.

Highly competitive brands get a lot from their marketing efforts, such as:

1. Being able to expand their product lines smoothly and without additional challenges; in other words, the market readily embraces the brand's innovations.
   

2. Be able to expand your brand into related categories; in other words, offer yourself the flexibility to move to related categories and even partially replace them, as well as having H2 innovation frontiers free from obstacles to its introduction, development, and market expansion.
   

3. You can expand your brand into areas that are different from the original brand category, giving you more brand reach and enabling you to easily enter markets that the brand was not even initially thought to target.

Brands with regular or low levels of competition, on the other hand, experience a persistent decline in their innovation process, even when accepting new references, as well as in their program of offering and stimuli, and are more susceptible to predatory offers of their margin in order to be sold.

Raising the competitiveness of a brand is a task that requires time, investment and methodology to not go wrong on the way and not lose money. It is a process that takes time and a lot of discipline in its execution. At Strategee we accompany multiple brands to their competitiveness goals, with methodology, experience and an acute sense of numerical pragmatism in decisions.