340. Getting Onto the Shelf Isn't the Win. Becoming Irreplaceable Is.

0:00Getting onto the shelf isn't the win. Becoming irreplaceable is. One of the biggest consumer brands in the world just disappeared from Kroger's shelves, Red Bull. I don't know the confidential business reason behind what happened, and I'm not going to pretend that we do, but there's a lesson that every challenger brand should be paying attention to. Red Bull doesn't own the retailer's shelf. Neither do I, and neither do you. The retailer controls some of the most valuable real estate in their store. Getting access to it is a huge win, but it isn't the finish line. Getting onto the shelf isn't the win.

0:33Becoming irreplaceable is. And no, I don't mean that literally. No brand is impossible to replace. I mean becoming valuable enough that if your brand disappears, the shopper loses something and the retailer loses something. That's a completely different way to think about retail growth. Are you ready to hear more? That's what we're going to unpack today. I'm Dan Lohman, and this is the Bulletproof Your CPG Brand Podcast. There's a free guide with every episode to help you put what we talk about into practice. Now let's roll up our sleeves and get started. Years ago, I got a panicked call from a sales rep first thing Monday morning.

1:10A retailer was preparing to remove our brand from the shelf. We were the category leader with nearly twice the sales share as our nearest competitor. I quickly scheduled an appointment with the retailer for that Friday morning. By the time I got there, they had essentially made the decision. In fact, the SVP for the retailer said that while they had made the decision, they were going to give me the courtesy of the meeting. That is exactly why I keep talking about how important it is to become a trusted, value-added resource to your retail partners. Without that earned trust, the meeting would never have happened, and we had never had an opportunity to present our case.

1:46I could have walked into that meeting with another lengthy deck explaining our sales and what made our brand unique, just like most brands do. I could have talked about our market share, and I could have talked about why our brand deserves the space. I didn't. I showed them something different instead. I showed them who our shopper is and how they were different from the competitors. I showed them how they were loyal to our brand as well as the specific categories the retailer cared most about. Their produce department, their meat department, their deli, and their prepared foods. These were all the signature categories for the retailer and these were their biggest point of differentiation between them and other retailers in the market.

2:26Then I talked about what mattered to our shoppers, how she spent money in their store, how our shopper had dramatically larger baskets than the competition. That's what they spent on average per shopping trip to the retailer's store when our items in their shopping basket. Then I talked about our competitor, the one that was trying to literally buy our shelf space and have us discontinued. I did not badmouth him. Instead, I showed the retailer how their shoppers are loyal to price and how their shopper would chase the best price even if it meant going to the retailer's competitors. Now my goal was simply to keep our brand on the shelf, period.

3:01I understood how discontinuing the largest national brand would negatively impact the retailer's category and force our shopper to buy our brand at the competition. What happened was unexpected. First thing Monday morning, the SVP called and said that our brand was in and the competitor was out. I've heard and seen different versions of this throughout my career. This was not an isolated incident and this is true for large brands looking for space. This is also why this needs to be a warning to challenge your brands. Getting onto the shelf earns you the opportunity. Becoming a replaceable requires a different playbook.

3:37That experience changed the way I thought about retail. We did not save the shelf by asking the retailer to care more about our brand. We made the retailer's decision easier by showing them something useful about their shopper and their business. That's the difference. If you're already selling in retail or you're trying to get there, subscribe. Because this channel is increasingly talking about the things that I don't think the industry spends enough time teaching. What happens after the buyer says yes? Every week, I want to take one problem that can cost to challenge your brand distribution, margin, cash, or runway.

4:12Understand why it happened and help you make one better decision. That's the retail muscle we're building here. The shelf is not a trophy. A lot of founders spend years dreaming about the buyer saying yes. Whole Foods said yes. Kroger said yes. Sprout said yes. Target said yes. Congratulations. Seriously. But the retailer did not award you a trophy. They gave you access to scarce real estate. The retailer gave you access to the shelf. they did not guarantee you the sale. Your job begins after the yes. And now that space has to produce for the retailer. It might need to generate sales. Margin, a new shopper, a bigger basket, a new occasion, shopper traffic, introduce a new item.

4:54Something the retailer was missing. And what matters is different by retailer category and item. That's why simply telling the buyer we're growing really fast isn't enough. The buyer's question is, what are you doing for me? What irreplaceable really means? I think about this in two directions. First, would the shopper miss you? Not. Do they recognize the logo? Would they notice if you disappeared? Would they go somewhere else to find you? Would they substitute something else? Would they buy less of the category? Would the basket change? Are you trying to solve a need or an occasion that another brand doesn't solve the same way?

5:32That's where small brands can be incredibly powerful. You may have you're a shopper, but if they love what you do, understand why they buy you, tell their friends, and intentionally seek you out, that matters. Then look the other direction. Would the retailer miss you? What do you add beyond your own sales velocity? Do you bring in a different shopper, a different occasion, a more valuable basket, better category economics, incremental sales, new innovation? Do you make the retailer smarter about the category? Do you execute reliably? Do you follow through? That is where the moat starts getting interesting and this is where challenger brands have a unique advantage if they take advantage of it.

6:12The plus 9 % proof. One strategy I worked on for a major retailer helped grow the retailer's category by about 9%. Our goal wasn't how do we protect every one of our items. Our goal was how do we make this category work better for this retailer and its shoppers. That meant looking beyond our own products, looking at who the retailer is trying to attract, looking at the category, looking at the assortment, looking at what shoppers actually needed, and then helping the retailer make a better decision. That's what I mean when I talk about becoming a valued resource. You stop becoming another company asking the buyer for something, you become someone who occasionally walks into the room with something the buyer can actually use.

6:57Retailers sometimes reward useful brands with incremental opportunities not available to others. That's important. Ask, why should I care about helping the retailer instead of just selling my stuff? Because the retailer value can create opportunities money alone can't buy. Small brands cannot fight the big brand battle. This is where I think challenger brands sometimes make a mistake. They look at the biggest company in the category and they try to play their game. You probably can't. The bigger company may have far more money for promotions, additional distribution, displays, field support, data, and people.

7:32Trying to win dollar for dollar is usually a terrible fight to choose, and it's almost always a waste of resources and money. But you have advantages too. You can be closer to your shopper. You can listen without waiting for a massive research study. You can notice a problem and change direction next week. You can experiment. You can learn. And because you're smaller, scrappier, and more agile, a little bit of proprietary shopper knowledge can change the entire strategy. Big brands can buy outreach. Challenger brands can buy intimacy. You don't have to outspend them, outlearn them. This is one of the ways David beats Goliath in our industry.

8:09Not by preparing to be bigger, by being smarter about where the stones need to land. This is where brands get fooled by the report. Here's another reason this matters. A retailer portal might tell you sales are down. Useful. That's what happened. But now Now what? Was it because you lost stores? Lost an item? Changed price? Changed promotion? Went out of stock? Lost a display? Changed placement? Without the context, the number can tell you what happened and still hide why it happened. Did the category fall? Did the competitor promote? Did shoppers move to another pack size? Did the retailer change something?

8:44The report is the beginning, not the answer. What happened is not the same question as why it happened. That is one of the muscles I want brands to build. Why would happen happen? Because until you understand that, you don't know what to fix. AI makes us more important. And this is why I'm actually excited about AI, when you know how to use it properly. Retail muscle does not compete with AI. It makes AI more valuable. If your team understands the shopper, retailer, category, economics, and the limits of the data, AI can help you explore ideas faster. Pressure test ideas. Compare scenarios, find patterns, move faster.

9:23But if you give AI an incomplete picture and ask for the answer, it can help you reach the wrong answer much faster and with much more confidence. This is why I worry about some of the promises being made to brands. The last point matters a lot. That is the danger. A bad spreadsheet might look suspicious. A posh AI response can make an incomplete answer feel authoritative. The better the tools get, the more important it becomes to know. What question am I actually trying to answer? And what can't this information see? We'll go much deeper into that in another episode. Authorization is only the first link.

10:01There's also a very practical piece of becoming hard to replace. The buyer can authorize you. That does not mean that the shoppers can buy you. This is where poor execution can result in huge leaks. A broker can get authorization. A distributor can ship the case. Neither guarantees that your shopper saw it, bought it, and came back. Someone inside the brand still needs to understand what happened on the shelf. You can outsource work. You cannot outsource the understanding required to manage the work. Be useful before you need something. And here's a test that I would use. Imagine your retailer calls tomorrow.

10:36They don't ask, how's your brand doing? They ask, what are you seeing in my category that I should care about? Could you answer without immediately talking about your product? Could you tell them something useful about the shopper, an occasion, a competitor, a gap, a behavior, a saying? Something happened in their stores, something they might want to test. If the answer is no, don't feel bad. That's a muscle to build. Because when you consistently help the retailer understand their business better, something changes. You become more than another vendor asking for space. You become useful. And useful is much harder to replace.

11:12and this is where challenger brands can gain a huge advantage the irreplaceability test here's the practical rep I want you to do this week pick your most important retailer not every retailer one fish these three sentences number one if our brand disappeared tomorrow our shoppers would lose then number two if our brand disappeared tomorrow the retailer would lose then number three the The evidence we have to prove that is... The third question is what keeps you replaceable from becoming a motivational fluff? Prove it. That is retail solved. The last one is important because our customers love us is not a retail strategy.

11:55Show me. Talk to the shoppers. Look at the basket. Look at repeat. Look at velocity. Look at the category. Look at the stores. Look at the occasion. Find something real. And if you cannot fill in one of those blanks, congratulations. You just found your next retail muscle rep. This is the long-term mode. This is how I want challenger brands to grow. Not simply more stores, more sales, more people, bigger. I want every retail problem you solve to make the company a little smarter, a little more useful, a little harder to replace. Because competitors can copy a discount, they can hire the same broker, they can buy the same syndicated data, they can use the same AI.

12:36What they cannot instantly copy is years of learning about your shopper, your retailer, your category, your mistakes, your wins, and why what happened to happen. When that learning becomes the way your company makes decisions, it becomes part of your competitive advantage. That's retail muscle. If you're listening to this and thinking, I know I have a problem, I'm just not sure where to start. That's exactly why I rebuilt RetailSolve. Go to RetailSolve.com forward slash start. It doesn't ask you to figure out which one of my many guides, courses, or podcast episodes you need. It starts with a real problem sitting in front of you.

13:11Then choose how you want to solve it. Work through the free resources yourself. Build the capacity more deeply. Or if the problem is expensive enough that you need another set of eyes, bring it to me. One problem, one retailer, one decision. Then build the learning into the business. Getting onto the shelf is the win. Celebrate it. You earned it. But don't confuse getting the opportunity with winning the opportunity. The retailer gave you the shelf. Now, give the retailer and the shopper a reason to want you there. Become the brand shoppers look for. Become the resource the retailer trusts. Learn faster than the company you're trying to beat.

13:47And keep getting better. Because getting onto the shelf isn't the win. Becoming a replaceable is. I'm Dan Loman, and this is the Bulletproof CBG Brand Podcast. Find the problem. Solve that. Build the next muscle. Before you go, I want you to answer one question. If your brand disappeared from the biggest retailer tomorrow, what would the shopper or retailer actually miss? Put that in the comments. And if you're already in the stores trying to make their stores work, watch episode 338 next. This week's free download is the founder of Problem Finder. If one of the three blanks was hard to answer, use it to identify the next retail muscle your brand needs to build.

14:26You will find it along with the show notes at retailsolved.com forward slash session 340.