Choosing where a food brand could credibly grow next

The question

A food brand had a strong core business, and its next stage of growth would have to come from categories it wasn’t yet in.

Leadership could see several directions the brand might take. The team wanted a shared view of how far the brand could go while staying recognizably itself, which moves to make first, and how to keep the brand’s meaning intact as it stretched.

Our approach

Every candidate category was weighed on a few criteria in a workshop with the client’s team, once the first exploration was in, so each direction was judged the same way.

Focus groups ran with the brand’s core audience and with a broader mainstream one, because a growth plan had to work for the people the brand already had and the people it needed to reach, and a survey then measured the directions still in play.

What the team came away with

The leadership team had a growth roadmap, with guidelines for developing the brand in new categories, ready to plan the brand’s next moves against.

Leadership was part of the work from the opening visioning session to the final workshop where the roadmap came together, so the plan reflected the brand’s ambition and the evidence from its buyers at once.

Every direction on the roadmap had been through the same criteria, the same consumer work and the same measurement. That let the team compare very different categories on equal terms, and the guidelines gave it a way to judge later ideas against what the brand could credibly offer in any new category.