Greg Thain > Quotes

“Laurent, La Marque, Ediscience International, Paris, 1989, ch. 3, pp. 96–8. As one would anticipate, there”
― Greg Thain, Store Wars: The Worldwide Battle for Mindspace and Shelfspace, Online and In-store

“If competitors are determined to grow in a static market, they may start to break the orderly market rules. Producing copies of rivals’ products is tempting because in the short term it ‘steals’ share and makes money. Although competitors with strong technological and marketing skills are unlikely to launch exact copies of rival brands, it is estimated that 97% of new products are not genuine innovations.6 The failure rate of new products is extremely high, around 90% two years after launch, so even though differentiated brands on the whole perform better than me-toos, me-toos are common in markets where innovation is slowing down. Once they get a hold in an industry, there is an inevitable downward pressure on prices.”
― Greg Thain, Store Wars: The Worldwide Battle for Mindspace and Shelfspace, Online and In-store

“if management is under pressure to deliver profits in the short term, quick-response promotions are a more attractive investment than design improvements. Short-term actions are also favoured in industries sensitive to changes in volume sales, like retailers. Shoppers tend to react more quickly to price promotions than to store layout changes.”
― Greg Thain, Store Wars: The Worldwide Battle for Mindspace and Shelfspace, Online and In-store

“Category management is something of a misnomer; category understanding may be a better goal. Category understanding should be an effort to see the market from the retail point of view, and offer brands/SKUs that retailers want to stock. The idea is not to sell to retailers what you want to produce, but produce what they want to sell and their shoppers want to buy.”
― Greg Thain, Store Wars: The Worldwide Battle for Mindspace and Shelfspace, Online and In-store

“What they didn’t own was the mindspace and shelfspace Cadbury had painstakingly built up over 180 years, especially in emerging markets like India. Cadbury had operated in India since 1948, and have a formidable presence with a 70% share of the rapidly growing chocolate market and a sales coverage that reached over one million stores. The costs and time for Kraft to attempt to replicate this would be unsustainable. Kraft can now use the Cadbury set-up to launch their own brands, and with their superior financial resources are able to add more juice than Cadbury would have been able to. In April 2011, Cadbury India launched Oreo, the Kraft-owned world’s number-one cookie brand, using Cadbury contract manufacturing expertise to source the product locally, Cadbury mindspace to brand the product under the Cadbury name and Cadbury shelfspace capabilities to achieve widespread distribution and prominent display. Mindspace and shelfspace are the valuable currencies of FMCG industries.”
― Greg Thain, Store Wars: The Worldwide Battle for Mindspace and Shelfspace, Online and In-store

“All other things being equal, the retailer will have an advantage because of their direct contact with the shopper.”
― Greg Thain, Store Wars: The Worldwide Battle for Mindspace and Shelfspace, Online and In-store

“In October 2011, Heinz UK launched a Facebook promotion where, when someone complained of being ill on their Facebook page, friends could have them sent a tin of either Cream of Chicken or Cream of Tomato soup with a personalised ‘get well’ message on the label. By such means are lifelong brand associations built.”
― Greg Thain, Store Wars: The Worldwide Battle for Mindspace and Shelfspace, Online and In-store

“For example, the Head & Shoulders shampoo brand is targeted at consumers with dandruff, approximately 20% of the population. Within that 20%, further profitable segmentation is still possible. Thus, Head & Shoulders can successfully target people with dandruff and either sensitive, itchy or oily scalps, and then coloured, permed or natural hair etc., resulting in 12 versions of their shampoo.”
― Greg Thain, Store Wars: The Worldwide Battle for Mindspace and Shelfspace, Online and In-store

“a key part of their subsequent success was rooted in the insight that continuous improvement to the shopping experience rather than any one particular improvement had the potential to be a major competitive edge. Tesco’s improvements included their ‘One in front’ commitment to effectively abolish checkout line-ups, baby-changing and bottle-warming facilities, ATMs, escorted searches for product requests and priority parking for pregnant mums. It was not that one improvement was more successful than another; it was the relentless implementation of a never-ending stream of small improvements that steadily improved Tesco’s image relative to their competitors, who were left seemingly forever floundering in their wake. The scheme also got Tesco’s staff more engaged in service delivery and coming up with ideas for further improvements. ‘Every little helps’ helped Tesco attract over a million new shoppers in the period from 1990–1995.”
― Greg Thain, Store Wars: The Worldwide Battle for Mindspace and Shelfspace, Online and In-store

“They need to rediscover what made them successful in the first place: consumer insight, customer knowledge, innovation and brand-building. The adoption of open-innovation strategies by majors such as Nestlé and P&G is a reflection of their need to ramp up innovation speed and capabilities.”
― Greg Thain, Store Wars: The Worldwide Battle for Mindspace and Shelfspace, Online and In-store

“If a new brand wants to build mindspace in a low-interest area, it is usually necessary to take a more aggressive approach: by forcing product use, borrowing or buying mindspace.”
― Greg Thain, Store Wars: The Worldwide Battle for Mindspace and Shelfspace, Online and In-store

“Hence the price wars of the 1980s, which reduced retailers’ margins to the bone. Hustle”
― Greg Thain, Store Wars: The Worldwide Battle for Mindspace and Shelfspace, Online and In-store

“When trade and consumer marketing conflict, trade will often ‘win’ (especially towards the end of the financial year) because its effects are immediate, whereas consumer marketing is more concerned with objectives that pay back over time, like building the brand image and maintaining premium prices. Hence, a balance between the two needs to be achieved. Below we look at the areas of potential conflict.”
― Greg Thain, Store Wars: The Worldwide Battle for Mindspace and Shelfspace, Online and In-store

“When a manufacturer has supply issues and leaves a retailer out of stock, the impact on the retailer is greater than it is on the manufacturer because of the difference in the importance of asset turnover combined with their lower overall profitability. Consequently,”
― Greg Thain, Store Wars: The Worldwide Battle for Mindspace and Shelfspace, Online and In-store

“The common approach for manufacturers to the art of segmentation is to slice and dice a large target market into subgroups of homogeneous consumer needs in order to better serve with tightly targeted offerings. Manufacturers”
― Greg Thain, Store Wars: The Worldwide Battle for Mindspace and Shelfspace, Online and In-store

“But all good things must come to an end. Once there is supermarket or hypermarket saturation, profitable growth via the discounter strategy becomes almost impossible. New sites”
― Greg Thain, Store Wars: The Worldwide Battle for Mindspace and Shelfspace, Online and In-store

“Despite the recession in 2008, Tesco increased their advertising spend by 18.8% to $125 million, and they weren’t alone. Asda increased theirs by 52%, Sainsbury’s by 21.3% and Morrisons by 15%. But even with recessionary budget cuts from manufacturers, the retailers were still outspent by Unilever, who had an advertising budget of $235 million in 2008 (up $4.8 million from 2007) and Procter & Gamble (P&G), with an advertising budget of $231 million (down $25.5 million from 2007), but spread across many brands. In”
― Greg Thain, Store Wars: The Worldwide Battle for Mindspace and Shelfspace, Online and In-store

“P&G excel at proactively managing their product ranges, as they have a history of divesting commodity-type brands, like Crisco and Oxydol, brands they owned for a century, while purchasing ones that are larger, have greater scope for innovation and a proven ability to sustain price premiums, such as Gillette, Clairol and Duracell.”
― Greg Thain, Store Wars: The Worldwide Battle for Mindspace and Shelfspace, Online and In-store

“Developing fresh foods as a differential advantage is important for two reasons. First, fresh products increase the frequency of store visits, as fresh food is bought more frequently than dried groceries. Second,”
― Greg Thain, Store Wars: The Worldwide Battle for Mindspace and Shelfspace, Online and In-store

“One retailer told us that, as a rule of thumb, sales of a brand will be reduced by two-thirds if it is moved from an eye-level to a foot-level position. Presence”
― Greg Thain, Store Wars: The Worldwide Battle for Mindspace and Shelfspace, Online and In-store

“Any manufacturer hoping to gain influence with a retailer needs to thoroughly understand the retailers’ never-ending battle for differential advantage.”
― Greg Thain, Store Wars: The Worldwide Battle for Mindspace and Shelfspace, Online and In-store

“While much has changed over time in the relationship between retailers and manufacturers, one thing that has not changed is that they are very different kinds of businesses. They are structured differently, operate differently and are financed differently, all of which are at the root of much of the tension that exists between the two. In”
― Greg Thain, Store Wars: The Worldwide Battle for Mindspace and Shelfspace, Online and In-store

“gaining shelfspace has become a more strategic challenge for manufacturers. Shelfspace has to be won by planning product offerings to satisfy not just consumers’ needs but also the retailers’ objectives. Because the retailer is overwhelmed with offerings that claim to have consumer appeal – that is now a given – it is in being seen to best meet the retailers’ needs that has become the battleground. Store management wants to increase category sales, improve average margins, provide a good range to shoppers and perhaps offer exclusive products, all the while looking to increase operational efficiency and reduce inventory costs by minimising the number of lines stocked and the workload involved in getting products on the shelf. Manufacturers now have to win shelfspace by working through these complex and sometimes conflicting needs.”
― Greg Thain, Store Wars: The Worldwide Battle for Mindspace and Shelfspace, Online and In-store

“A similar situation exists for impulse categories that are mostly only considered if the consumer notices them. This is often the case for items such as cut flowers, confectionery, treats and novelties. If the product is not seen, the consumer is unaware of dropping the purchase and won’t seek to find it elsewhere.”
― Greg Thain, Store Wars: The Worldwide Battle for Mindspace and Shelfspace, Online and In-store

“One of the big strategic advantages of manufacturers outsourcing production is that they are not as vulnerable to fixed-cost pressures to fill the factories at any cost.”
― Greg Thain, Store Wars: The Worldwide Battle for Mindspace and Shelfspace, Online and In-store

“Shelfspace, number of facings, position, local promotion, advertising, information from scanning data and choice of new products are all key assets for retailers. Selling”
― Greg Thain, Store Wars: The Worldwide Battle for Mindspace and Shelfspace, Online and In-store

“Selling strategies by retailers are not all bad news for manufacturers. Discounting big brands makes them exceptionally good value and, when advertised in flyers by retailers, reinforces the brand’s advertising presence, and thus share of mind (mindspace) together with the retailer usually devoting more space to the promoted lines, increasing their shelfspace. Meanwhile,”
― Greg Thain, Store Wars: The Worldwide Battle for Mindspace and Shelfspace, Online and In-store

“In India, organised chain retailers account for only 7% of the $435 billion market, a share forecast to rise to 20% by 2020.11 The discounter model is unstoppable in fragmented, unorganised markets.”
― Greg Thain, Store Wars: The Worldwide Battle for Mindspace and Shelfspace, Online and In-store

“retailers use a master brand model, supporting one brand, the chain, whereas manufacturers primarily use a product brand model supporting a wide portfolio of individual product brands. This gives the retailers an enormous economy of scale advantage because they only have to build and reinforce one brand image that covers billions in sales.”
― Greg Thain, Store Wars: The Worldwide Battle for Mindspace and Shelfspace, Online and In-store

“Importance of price: Price is imperative for FMCG retailers, much more so than for manufacturers. Retailers must constantly keep their real prices competitive and put great effort into managing their price perceptions in the minds of their shoppers.”
― Greg Thain, Store Wars: The Worldwide Battle for Mindspace and Shelfspace, Online and In-store