The Importance of a Marketing Strategy

Speciality Bites with

Paul Hargreaves

Chief executive of Cotswold Fayre

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It’s show-time, folks. The biennial IFE Show at Excel takes place next weekend onwards for 4 days followed a month later by the Farm Shop & Deli Show, and I am currently in Athens at the second ever Food Expo Greece – disappointingly cold here though!

When selecting products at these shows I am trying to put myself in the shoes of our retail customers.  Of course, no good for us to select products which our customers don’t also love.  It is difficult to put into words, and sometimes you just know you have found a winner.  Most products though need further research on how much the producer is able to support the retailer, with sampling stock, tastings, promotions and whether they have a marketing budget to build their brand.

It amazes me sometimes, how many companies in the speciality food sector aren’t following a strategy in their routes to market.  They simply sell their product to anyone that asks, sometimes at an unsustainable price, and occasionally even where their wholesalers have created the desire for the brand.  The companies that do well in this sector have a clear strategy on where they are going, who they are selling to and what price they will sell to different types of customers at.  It is no good launching a brand with a certain price to retailers, and then realising down the road that the only way to continue to grow is by using a wholesaler, and there is no margin factored in for this.  It amazes me how often we and other wholesalers are approached by suppliers who haven’t realised that there needs to be some margin for us!

This lack of strategy and scattergun approach of selling to anyone without an accompanying marketing plan who asks sometimes results in stagnation of a producer’s growth i.e. the opposite of what they want to achieve.  This has happened both to us and some other wholesale friends.  Consider a relatively small brand which a wholesaler’s sales team have grown distribution throughout the UK, through talking about the products continually in every meeting they are in.  In effect they are not only selling the brand but also performing a marketing function too.  Indeed the large amount of money spent by the wholesaler on marketing focusses on these brands that they sell exclusively. 

Now several years later the producer decides to sell to a number of other wholesalers, some of which don’t even have field sales teams.  The existing wholesalers sales team loses interest in selling the brand as they are no longer exclusive, and the new wholesalers starting from scratch really only have customers to sell to that are already selling the brand in question i.e. swapping rather than selling.  It is easy to imagine in this scenario for the sales of this brand to decrease, as there is now less focused selling of that brand going on than there was previously.  There is no win-win here. 

One caveat to this, as I touched upon above, is where the producer has a superb product, and invests substantial money in marketing.  Only in these cases can the sales of the original wholesaler and the new wholesalers develop and increase.  In our crowded market these are the exceptions rather than the rule.

Food for thought – see you at IFE