Author Archives: dev@brucira.com

As brands mature, companies want to expand their product portfolios, sometimes to diversify and reduce risk and other times for chasing growth. Adding more products to a brand’s portfolio comes with management baggage. Most new products don’t make it big and the products that are added, often turn out to be too small to justifyContinue reading “Vectors of portfolio expansion”

Incubating new brands or product lines and making them independently successful is quite different from growing established ones. Although the competencies required are similar in nature, the context under which both objectives are pursued are widely different. When growing established brands, a lot of information – awareness & equity of the brand, pricing benchmarks &Continue reading “Why CPG firms should leverage incubator partnerships”

“We got rid of the classic product management function. Apple didn’t have it either. We morphed the function to a more Apple-style product marketing function. We combined product management with product marketing and we said that you can’t develop products unless you know how to talk about the products.”  – select excerpts from Brian Chesky’sContinue reading “Do traditional consumer businesses need product management?”

The tasks that man has had to do to get by in life have remained stable over time. The need for shelter, nutrition, commute, avoid disease, seek pleasure, be entertained etc. have existed since time immemorial. However, the context under which consumers try to address needs, evolves over time, leading to them feeling under orContinue reading “Getting timing right”

Innovation has always been a key agenda item for most large companies, although it often only becomes an urgency when gaining unit share in the category starts becoming increasingly difficult and expensive.  Because this situation is a typical trigger behind innovation focus, it is common for the consumer strategy behind innovation to shift focus toContinue reading “Innovating for existing consumers can help large players realise growth faster”

The ‘perfect’ ingredients for the success of a startup and SMEs would be a great idea, robust strategy and a strong team with the ability to execute the strategy and sustain the success. None of the ‘ingredients’ are complete without the other: building a startup or a small business is already extremely tough, hence aContinue reading “Building a Marketing Execution Engine for Start-ups”