Ep. 364 Steve Raye U.S. Market-Ready | Plan Your Work, Work Your Plan Part 1

Thanks for tuning in. I'm Steve Ray, author of How To Get US Market Ready. And in this podcast, I'm going to share with you some of the lessons I've learned from thirty years in the wine and spirits business, helping brands enter and grow in the US market. I've heard it said that experience is what you get when you don't get what you want. My goal with the book and this podcast is to share my experience and the lessons learned from it with you so you can apply those lessons and be successful in America. So let's get into it. Plan your work, work your plan. That's what we're going to talk about now. We're actually going to break this chapter up into manageable chunks. And today, we'll cover your route to market strategy, brand positioning, pricing, and market selection. Breaking into the US market is no easy task, and it's an even tougher challenge if you haven't developed the plan. And whether you are a small winery producing fifty thousand bottles or a multinational spirit company selling millions of cases, the scale and scope of the planning may be different, but its importance is equally critical. The key to the whole process is not so much the form or template that you use, but rather that sufficient thought be given to setting the strategy and making the tough decisions on how, where, and what resources need to be allocated. A great metaphor I like to use is to think of the US market as a series of three locked gates to go through with a brick wall at the end. Gate one is an import solution. Gate two is a distribution solution. Gate three is a retail or on premise solution. And the brick wall you've got to get through over, under, or around is a plan to get the end consumer's interest, attention, and advocacy. Having a solution for the first gate, finding an importer is great. But if you haven't thought through the whole process, including the brick wall, chances are the most you'll accomplish is to give yourself a bloody nose. So let's get started. Number one, on the plan your work, work your plan subject. Root to market strategy. So what about import options? What structure is the right one for your brand? And be open to considering a two step solution. First, a short term solution to get started and the longer term solution for expansion and growth. It might surprise you to learn that there are ten options, and we're gonna talk about those later in the book. Distributor choices. A narrower range of options exist here, but the order in which you make decisions on launch markets and distributors and networks will have a major impact on what your distribution options are as you go down the road. Think outside the box. For example, consider control states as a place to start or franchise states because the distributor options are wider there. Next is sales management. This is a critical decision that falls into two basic categories that that really need to be in sync. One is building the distributor network with longer term decisions on how you're going to manage sales execution. So there's two stages to that. One is managing selling the brand to distributors at the senior level, and two, managing the actual selling to on and off premise accounts at the field sales level. Those are two different disciplines require two different sets of skills and often two different sets of people. Next is marketing. Obviously, this is a critically important strategy, but one that needs to be flexible enough to evolve along with the brand's development in the market. Tools you might use for launch may be very different from those used for roll out and growth. So think beyond the basic four ps of product, price, place, and promotion, and consider ways to engage your audience to tell your story in their words to their friends. And that's social media. And again, we'll talk about that in more detail later on in the book. Next is brand ambassadors who also referred to often as feet on the street. Having in market sales support has become practically mandatory for new brand entries to get through the first and second gates. We're seeing innovative solutions to address this fact going beyond expensive brand ambassador agencies to now include shared or part time sales, or automated promotion, and direct to consumer channel solutions such as e commerce for retail stores, as well as direct to consumer sales for domestic wineries. Next, brand positioning. Think about the product. Having the high quality product is necessary, but not sufficient. Get consumer and trade feedback on liquid, labels, messaging, bottle size, shape, color, closure, reshipper the outer carton. You can do this through formal market research or more simply by visiting a few stores and on premise accounts and asking the opinions of the people who are there. Defining a competitive set and a point of difference that makes a difference. Let me stress that. A point of difference that makes a difference to each tier in the system. Ask yourself, where does your brand fit relative to other products? Not just in the minds of consumers, but also physically in the store. Next is creative look and feel. Every brand should have a written brand guide. It doesn't have to be long and involved. It simply has to say and show what is part of the brand's DNA and what is not. That would include color palette, imagery, typeface, label design, meme, if you use one, the lockup of the logo. All of these can be components. And you should also create a suite of graphic elements to manage how your brand is presented by anyone who might be using your brand imagery. For example, retailers in their ads, wholesalers making shelf talkers, journalists covering your brand. This should include high resolution files of your logo in both horizontal and vertical formats, also on a clear background, as well as a colored background, done in four color, as well as black and white and transparent versions, and guidelines on where and how the logo should be used. The trade expects to find this information and the supporting files in multiple formats on your website. Next, have a basic suite of point of sale materials. At minimum, You should have a single page cell sheet, a case card, shelf talker, brand press release, high resolution images of bottle and label, and reviews and ratings. And on the spirit side, cocktail recipes and for wine, food pairings. That's a basic list of POS and anyone along the chain, imported distributor on and off premise retailer is going to expect you to have that. They don't have to all be printed. They can be electronic. But they expect you to have it. Website. We cover this in detail later in the book, but suffice to say for now, key functionalities to incorporate include where to buy information for consumers. Now whether you're doing e commerce, or however you're you're making it available for sale to consumers. That's the most important thing in the website. And also for the trade, as we were saying earlier, who your distributors are in each market, and then also include your brand's story, the ratings, reviews, scores, the trade page with images, logos has talked about before, and all of the, sexy stuff about your brand and, how it's made and what makes it special. Next up is pricing. Do a detailed price structure for each individual market, including individual state taxes, factoring in timing for price posting states, like New York and Connecticut, a frontline price, multi case discounts, and your target retail, or MSRP manufacturer's suggested retail price. The bottom line in thinking through, doing a price structure is, is not to leave pennies on the table. And what I mean by that is if a price structure yields, nineteen dollars and twenty eight cent price point, then work it back from your FOB to yield a retail price of nineteen ninety nine. Bottom line there is someone is going to keep the change, and it might as well be you. Make sure that the formulas, jargon, and formats you use are in sync with how the distributor does it. Adapt to their systems, don't make them adapt to yours. A case in point in New Jersey is all about Rips, which are retail incentive programs, and they're gonna expect that to be top of the list when you're talking to them about your program. One other point on pricing at the get USmarket ready dot com website, we have a useful price structure tool, that you can download as an Excel spreadsheet. And another version of that, if you'd like to get it in a more user friendly fashion, is at best wine importers dot com. That's best wine importers dot com. Scroll all the way down to the bottom, and you'll find some, two user friendly, price structures, one for spirits, and one for wine. Number four, market selection. Use quantitative criteria to segment and prioritize among the fifty two markets. Boy, that's a simple phrase, but it covers a lot of ground. So we've developed a market selection tool, which factors in, well, facts and numbers, quantitative and qualitative. Yes. You can add qualitative criteria to help narrow down choices, but it's important to make the first cut based on priorities that are definitive and determinative for your brand. So we look at absolute numbers as well as ratios for things like LDA population, legal drinking age, category volume, per capita consumption, category development index, brand development index, whether sampling is legal on and off premise, competitive brands set or trend by market, whether they're a control or open state, and if the latter, whether they're a franchise state or not, Also, you wanna consider things like, proximity to each other for efficiencies in travel time and sales coverage. Clients commonly tell me in our introductory meetings that their brands are to launch in New York and California because they're the biggest markets. And that's often a bad decision for a number of reasons, but perhaps the most compelling one is that they're three thousand miles apart. It's simply inefficient to have limited resources, often just one person working markets that far apart. Think about it. Just one meeting in California would take a rep out of the other markets for three days. It would be like sending the export manager from Italy to Kazakhstan. Well, in terms of distance rather than market potential. But you can further inform and qualify these facts and numbers with subjective things that are important to you, such as cost of media communications, geographic proximity of the target states, where your stateside staff is located, distributor alignment, existing relationships with your executive team, and so on. Well, that's it for today. I don't want to take up any more of your time. Next week, we'll continue with working your plan. Join us then for how to get US market ready presented by the Italian wine podcast. This is Steve Ray? Planning to succeed is very different from planning not to fail.