Category Strategy Drivers
Category Strategy Drivers need to be clear and compelling to deliver results.
What is a category driver?
Category Drivers are statements that bring to life an opportunity that will drive incremental growth for a business and their customers.
They are part of a category strategy often developed by FMCG or CPG teams to engage their retail customers and develop collaborative growth plans.
How do you develop strong category drivers?
Potential category drivers need to be evaluated and prioritised to ensure the business has the brands and capability to really deliver against the consumption opportunities in the short to medium term.
After this evaluation we would recommend parking any opportunities where competitor brands will always be better placed, or better able to drive this growth.
Other drivers that the business would like to prioritise, but are currently unable to deliver against, should form the basis of an NPD pipeline to enable the business to stay ahead of the competition and have a platform for long-term growth.
Steps to develop clear Category Drivers:
Effective category strategies start by identifying potential in consumption opportunities for your target consumers, these opportunities are often referred to as Demand Spaces.
Once a business has identified unmet or changing needs for their target consumers, the next step is to identify how the business can meet these needs and drive growth, hence the terminology Drivers.
It's important to map drivers against short-medium-long term time frames.
This helps to create a long-term category vision to engage and excite customers.
It also provides a clear framework to ensure everyone is aligned and geared towards delivering the plan internally.
Best Practice Category Drivers:
Category Drivers work best when they embody and clearly convey the consumption opportunity.
This is in terms of how each category driver is written, as well as how they're brought to life visually.
In our experience this makes it so much easier for everyone involved to imagine what needs to be done to deliver against each category driver, and makes the process of developing Enablers incredibly straight-forward!