The Best Way to Maximize the Effectiveness and Impact of Your Brand’s Portfolio

Managing your lineup while effectively incorporating innovations.

Whether you are introducing a completely new product or rolling out the 10^th generation of improvements, the importance of effectively managing your product portfolio is critical to your success. Effective management of your product portfolio will positively impact:

• Business results – sales, profits, market penetration
• Brand perceptions – the categories and context of how customers assess your brand
• Customer engagement – experience and satisfaction with how a product fulfills a customer segment’s needs

When it comes to this topic, there are several tools that tend to receive a lot of attention:

• Business intelligence analysis of industry, sales or behavioral databases
• Big data techniques and social media analysis

While these tools are excellent for managing SKU and mix details, their trend insights are usually too focused on historical information to optimally differentiate and set new strategic directions. Primary research that explores “what if” scenarios is needed to maximize your portfolio potential for brand and business results.

Fortunately, there are proven primary research techniques to achieve these goals. The most widely used approach is testing product alternatives and opportunities against each other and the competition. This type of study delivers insights that can:

1. narrow down features or offers for each product/service in your portfolio,

2. determine how many offerings you need, and

3. tell you how to position and price these products in your line.

The results reveal preferences for new combinations of features and products and guide decisions for differentiating and augmenting your line. This provides focus to drive sales and market share — and can also inform ways to streamline and reduce costs.

The insights gleaned from these studies are highly actionable and enduring, yielding several outputs:

• “What if” simulations to explore new hypotheses or scenarios of what the competition might do,
• Presentation of options in easy, visual exercises that best mimic real-world purchase decisions, and
• Ability to explore and optimize against key customer segments or need states.

This approach can also be applied to optimize the impact of positioning and messaging on your portfolio. Benefits, proof points, messages, sub-brands and pricing can be tested and optimized collectively, along with product features. This can result in a more effective value proposition, refining how each product is positioned and how the line should be constructed to cover the market opportunity.

Maximizing the effectiveness of your product portfolio often includes fine-tuning the target audience, with each product across the portfolio serving a particular group. All of these approaches can integrate customer profiling techniques to help you develop a new targeting strategy or refine an existing one.

Whether you are unveiling an innovative new product or introducing the latest iteration to the market, these approaches can ensure you move in the right direction with your portfolio.

Contact us to learn more about maximizing your product portfolio.