James F. Richardson, PhD — author of RAMPING YOUR BRAND: How to Ride the Killer CPG Growth Curve — is a strategic planning consultant for early-stage Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) brands who has worked with nearly 100 companies including Coca-Cola, Hershey, and Frito-Lay. For anyone who is in the process of building and branding a CPG business, this book is written as guide and mentor towards showing exactly what one does next, each step of the way. (NOTE: even folks who are not necessarily aiming to conquer the CPG market may find a good deal of useful advice.)
Richardson is not a fan of the acquire-as-much-distribution-as-quickly-as-possible tactic, thereby slinging one’s product widely out into the marketplace to see where it might happen to stick. Instead, he favors the more methodical approach of knowing-and-tracking-and-targeting each product’s specific, moderate-to-heavy customer base. Declaring that the quickest growth curve entrepreneurs should realistically expect to achieve looks, in diagram form, more like a gentle skateboard ramp than the shooting star graph that is the ideal of product launches and product line extensions put forth by Big Companies, the author cautions readers who are new company founders to manage their expectations towards achieving steady progress rather than having to suffer the indignities of having one’s company race out of the gate, only to crash and burn. The Skate Ramp metaphor is based upon the idea of aiming to double sales — whether modest or sales of rock star status — each and every year, thus sooner or later reaching the million dollar mark as a reward for patience while scaling up the business. This often allows CPG innovators to totally take by surprise larger company leaders as they are quietly surpassed by the newcomer.
With chapters delving into design, single category brands -vs- multi-category brands, key revenue phases, the 4 P’s of strategic planning, light -vs- heavy users, pricing, penetration, conversion, velocity, and pack-size variation, this is not light reading. In fact, it can in places feel quite jargon-heavy. However it is the kind of book that can give anyone who is authentically interested in the subject a solid comprehension of the lay of the land.
No Consumer Packaged Good (CPG) is exactly like another, yet there is general, insider knowledge regarding ways to effectively structure one’s entry into the CPG marketplace that can prove helpful, and James F. Richardson, PhD offers this kind of clear, useful information in RAMPING YOUR BRAND: How to Ride the Killer CPG Growth Curve.
~C.S. Holmes for IndieReader