Suggest Additional Uses

When do you eat breakfast cereal?

At breakfast, obviously.

But is that the only time breakfast cereal can be consumed?

Hold that thought.

There are several different ways brands can generate incremental sales.

You can find new customers who aren't already using your product.

There's a significant amount of research to suggest that this is the best and most sustainable way that brands grow, but finding new customers is easier said than done: it takes time and money, and smaller brands in particular are often in short supply of both.

You can enter new markets.

That's closely tied with finding new customers. But when you enter a new market, you often lose scale efficiencies, gain business complexities, and risk a diminished focus on your primary market. A failure to compensate for any of those things can spell disaster.

You can introduce new products.

Launching new flavours, new sizes, complementary products, or products with additional features and benefits can target untapped market segments and meet evolving customer needs. If you're launching products that customers want to buy, it's a great way to generate incremental revenue. But there's no guarantee these new products will find an audience, or the money spent developing, marketing, and managing them will yield a positive return on investment. Every new launch is a risk, and a potentially expensive one at that.

You can increase prices.

Call it "The Netflix Strategy of Revenue Acceleration", if you will: Raise your prices as much as you can until your customers have had enough and start to look for alternatives. (Economists will correctly recognize this as "The Law of Supply and Demand", but I think my title is snazzier.) Unfortunately, you can't raise prices indefinitely, so if your entire growth strategy is predicated on being able to raise prices, you should start working on a Plan B.

This isn't an exhaustive list; there are several other ways a brand can grow.

But perhaps one of the easiest is also often the most underutilized.

Which brings us back to breakfast cereal.

How might Kellogg's get people to buy more breakfast cereal?

By helping people to stop thinking of it as "breakfast cereal" and suggesting other occasions when cereal might be appropriate.

Perhaps like this, for example, found on a recently purchased box of Froot Loops:

Your packaging real estate is at a premium, you say? Fair enough. Then what about something more subtle?

The two examples above indicate that the smart marketers at Kellogg's understood their assignment. They knew that even if they could manage to convince 100% of the world's population to eat ONLY THEIR CEREALS for breakfast EVERY SINGLE DAY, that would still mean significant missed opportunities for growth from other eating occasions... because most of us eat more than once per day.

So while Kellogg's is still busy introducing new brands, flavours, and formats, they've also remembered to remind us, the consumer, that "breakfast cereal" can be enjoyed at other times of the day too.

"Suggest Additional Uses" is such a simple tactic, which is why the fact that it's so often forgotten is so surprising.

Like the "Increasing Price", this approach has its limits: if you're a restaurant chain, you may convince a patron to visit one, two, or even three additional times per week, but it's extremely unlikely you'll ever convince anyone to eat 100% of their meals at your establishment. If you're Pepsi, you can spend all of your enormous marketing budget trying to convince people it's a good idea to drink less water and more soda... but a human can only consume so much liquid in any given day, and no amount of marketing is going to overcome that physical limit.

Here's the key: if consumers can use whatever it is you sell in different ways or at different times than the way in which most people would think about using it, remind them of that!

Your consumers won't be as committed to finding innovative ways to use your products as you are, and they certainly don't care about driving incremental revenue for your business.

So, whenever you can, suggest additional uses.

Help them help you succeed.