How To Develop a Successful Brand Merchandising Strategy

(Doris Morgan/Unsplash)

It’s easy to overlook emotions when building a brand merchandising strategy, especially in data-driven industries like engineering or manufacturing. But I’d like to take a moment to show you how much potential revenue you could miss out on by falling into that old industrial habit.

Human beings are emotional people. That’s true whether you cry watching "The Notebook" or pull your hair out when your favorite team botches yet another game. Emotions are inherent to our every decision, especially the “what, where, when, and why” of how we shop.

In this ultimate guide to building an effective brand merchandising strategy, you’ll learn everything you need to know to set a strong foundation for your marketing team.

Understand the Intersection of Manufacturing, Engineering, and Market Strategy

Obviously, your manufacturing, engineering, and marketing teams could not be more different. On the one hand, you have rugged employees who self-identify as blue-collar workers. On the other hand, you have English and marketing majors who spend their time promoting the company and creating content, all while reading about psychology and deciding which color would best fit the firm’s logo.

With the right strategic approach, these differences coalesce into a realistic and achievable set of actionable goals. The creative minds of the marketers, driven by data and expertise from the engineers, can generate a branded merchandise strategy capable of establishing your brand as the go-to sales outlet in your sphere.

Fundamentals of a Branded Merchandise Strategy

Branded merchandising is a part of the go-to-market (GTM) process for any good or service you offer. It involves planning, buying or producing, displaying, and selling merchandise. If you’ve opened your first outlet, you’re likely already familiar with the basics of branded merchandising. However, the strategy portion tends to complicate matters.

The 4 Must-Haves for an Effective Marketing Campaign

Effective marketing campaigns have four components: clear brand messaging, an understanding of the target market, quality merchandise, and a strategic plan to deploy location-based assets. Before discussing conversions, e-commerce sales, and other aspects, you’ll need a firm grasp of the four components.

1. Brand Messaging

Clear brand messaging is when all external assets (e.g., emails, brochures, packages, datasheets, and others) “speak” with a unified voice, tone, and style. Continuity is key here, as the only alternative to a strategic approach is a disjointed approach. This messaging requires a deep understanding of your industry, product capabilities, target demographics, and the persona you’d like to establish for your company or product line.

2. Target Market Knowledge

To know what persona best suits your audience, you’ll need to understand your market. This understanding comes from devoting considerable time and effort to market research in hopes of divining valuable insights from economic conditions and consumer behavior. But remember: Poor insight can damage your brand as easily as accurate insights can improve it. So never hesitate to put more funding behind your research if you’re not sure you’re hitting the mark.

3. Merchandise Quality

The better your understanding of your target market, the more you can tailor your merchandise quality. You might be asking, “Why don’t I always make the most high-quality goods I possibly can?” Here’s an analogy in response: Not every customer wants to buy 24-karat gold. Some are content with gold-plated nickel. In other words, there are countless tiers of consumers, each with their own level of wealth. It’s important to find which tier your product serves.

4. Location Strategy

Once you’ve achieved the first three marketing campaign components, it’s time to think about location strategy. Ask yourself where you’ll deploy your merchandise. Then, repeatedly drill down your answer, getting more granular each time. “Which country? Which state? Which city? Which store? Which aisle?” For example, when John Deere launched a line of branded sweaters, the company didn’t launch them first in mid-summer Miami.

The Additive Value of Social Media Marketing

Social media is one of the most essential tools for marketing in any industry — even, maybe “especially,” engineering and manufacturing. A valuable case study for this is Interesting Engineering, an engineering news outlet that uses TikTok-style reels on LinkedIn to communicate with more than two million followers. Most of those followers are industry professionals, hobbyists, and potential buyers of the exact kinds of goods you may be looking to bring to market.

Unfortunately, businesses often leave social media marketing to outsourced companies, if they use it at all. One reason for this is the perceived high barrier to entry — that you need to hire a dedicated social media manager to handle the accounts. Although that was true once, social media acumen is now widespread, and content is so easy to produce that anybody on your team can do it.

You’re most likely already making all the content you need. When adding an article to your blog, write a quick 25-word blurb and post it on social media. If taking pictures at a stakeholder meeting or an event with a client, write a 25-word summary and post it on your accounts. Always write 25 to 30 words that summarize whatever you’re already doing. Then, head to social media to share it.

Combined with content marketing (remember to include SEO), digital marketing, or influencer marketing, social media marketing can supercharge your content distribution and publication initiatives to reach much larger audiences and draw more traffic to your website.

Turning an Effective Marketing Strategy Into an Impactful Marketing Plan

An effective marketing strategy and an impactful marketing plan are the same, right? Unfortunately, no. The difference is somewhat semantic, but it’s an important distinction.

A strategy takes long-term goals and creates blueprints the organization can use to reach those goals. Planning transforms that strategy into action. To make planning possible, the strategy you select will need a solid foundation. You should start by defining your marketing goals.

Define Marketing Goals

“What do you hope to achieve with this campaign?”

The first step of any journey is deciding where to go. Are you looking to attract new customers, boost sales, improve brand recognition, or achieve something else? Start by identifying what your business needs. Then translate that need into a single, actionable mission statement. Here’s where thinking SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-oriented) comes in handy.

Use specific terminology when building your plan, and pair it with measurable, quantitative data to improve your ability to measure performance. But make sure to stay within the realm of what’s truly achievable and realistic. Finally, add a timeline and adhere to it.

Here’s an example: “This campaign will boost sales by 15 percent among new customers in Florida by the end of the next fiscal year.”

Lastly, read it back. Does it sound SMART to you? If not, rethink it and try until you have something you can be confident in.

Conduct Market Research

“What data can we use to drive our marketing strategy?”

The most effective marketing strategies are those driven by hard data and concrete facts. The fewer assumptions, estimations, or guesses you have to make, the more accurate your insights will be. In this phase, you’ll collect the data your business has at its disposal and position it to better serve you in the future.

Market research is the process of acquiring data on elements like your existing customer base, market share, and brand awareness and using that data to drive business decisions. These valuable insights are a crucial component in any marketing strategy.

Start by determining your target audience with the following three questions:

• Who are they?
• Where do they live?
• What are their demographics?

Then look for hot spots in the market where you can make your presence known. If you want to sell branded merchandise, the first step will be identifying your prospective customers (e.g., small business owners, self-starters, or manufacturing stakeholders). This awareness will help you determine what kind of merchandise will be easiest to sell and how best to bring it to market.

Next, find out what they like. Shopper surveys, industry reports, consumer shopping data, and the like will be helpful here. Do your potential customers prefer to wear trucker hats or baseball caps? Fuzzy socks or crew cuts? The more accurate and detailed your insights, the better your sales.

Develop Your Brand Messaging

“How can I improve the perceived value and convince customers that my merchandise is high quality?”

Brand messaging combines what you say, how you say it, when you say it, and to whom you say it. It’s how you communicate your value proposition (in this case, that’s the value of your brand merchandise). This is another piece of the foundation of all marketing and advertising efforts. Unfortunately, with so many options available, finding the one your customers will best respond to can take time.

When attempting to catch and hold customers’ attention, you’ll need to keep things consistent while allowing for variety. The consistency comes from brand voice, style, and tone. The variety comes from how you deliver content to your target audience. For example, you can present happy, excited, and blue-collar content across infographics, blog articles, social posts, and more without making those disparate channels seem disparate.

Overall, brand messaging with the greatest usability is that which best stands to convince your target audience that your branded merchandise is high-quality enough to justify repeat purchases.

Outline Your Marketing Strategy

“How will I use my research and messaging to achieve my goals?”

As long as your strategy is SMART (see above), it could take infinite forms. Part of the joy of marketing is that there are many options available. No matter what branded merchandise you want to bring to market, there’s a way to do it. For example, you can shoot t-shirts out of cannons at sporting events. You can hand out water bottles at gyms. The list goes on.

The key is using your data to decide where to send your marketers. Do you go to trade shows, or do you set up an online store on an e-commerce platform? Questions like these should get the answers from your data. This phase is simply where you set out to action those answers.

Take Action, Monitor Results, and Adjust Accordingly

“How is my marketing plan performing in the real world?”

Perfect in the boardroom doesn’t necessarily mean perfect in the showroom. Customers’ preferences constantly change, and predicting them without error is almost impossible. However, you should be able to redirect any missed shots by tracking your marketing plans after deployment with the correct key performance indicators (KPIs).

Analytics (directed metrics), such as reach, impressions, follower count, unit sales, geographical and regional sales, and more, are a mission-critical feature of this phase. The more data, the better. Always keep an eye on the bottom line and the rate of change in consumer preferences.

Case Study: Coca-Cola Collectibles

(Marc Fulgar/Unsplash)

In 2015, Coca-Cola launched a branded merchandising campaign centered around producing limited-edition collectible items: iconic, glass bottles. The purpose was to sell something notable in and of itself (separate from a consumable drink) and reconnect with the company’s roots. The result was achieving that goal and a substantial increase in sales and brand recognition — locally and globally.

The reason for the overwhelming success of this campaign was the fact that it wasn’t just another ploy to sell more bottles. The limited-edition collection reinvigorated Coca-Cola’s brand identity, boosted customer engagement, and drove anticipation among customers awaiting each release. Through clever marketing and omnichannel engagement, the company transformed simple glass bottles into bona fide mementos, reinforcing Coca-Cola’s well-earned brand loyalty among its customers.

Plan To Overcome Challenges, Not Just Encounter Them

Planning to encounter challenges is no longer enough in today’s ever-changing economy. You’ll need to overcome them. To do so, you must have comprehensive operational plans ready for deployment at a moment’s notice.

The Innovation Imperative: Don’t Forget To Improvise

We wouldn’t be living in the year 2023 if I didn’t mention the COVID-19 pandemic. This pandemic, which is still active in some places, taught us that supply chains aren’t ironclad. They’re soft, malleable, and surprisingly fragile, often with a single link bearing most of the weight.

Many businesses failed, and most experienced a drop in revenue between 9 and 26 percent. Those businesses that bounced back had the greatest liquidity, flexibility, and knowledge to adapt.

However, these insights aren’t limited to unforeseen and terrible events resulting from the spread of infectious diseases. They apply to most supply chain disruptions, even incidents as small as single-vehicle accidents. Maintaining any competitive advantage your marketing plan grants will require you to be adaptable. It’s how you respond to these disruptions that will determine the survivability of your long-term marketing strategy.

Optimize Your Merchandising Strategy Through Strategic Partnerships

Strategic partnerships can make things easier, whether you’re looking to expand your brand to cover countries out of your current reach or fine-tune a plan you’ve already deployed. My colleagues and I at Getzler Henrich specialize in providing guidance at all levels of the financial journey. To learn more about how to bring branded merchandise to market, contact us today or email me directly.

If you have any comments or questions, leave a comment below and I’ll do my best to provide an answer.