CircleUp Blog: Articles, Reports, and Resources for Consumer Brands

Helio for Brand Managers | CircleUp

Written by CircleUp | June.29.2022

Brand Managers are responsible for the entire strategy of a brand. Looking after everything from innovation in their category, media, competitors and how to gain distribution. Not to mention working with Innovation, R&D, Category and Sales teams to help their brand succeed.

Helio Helps Brand Teams:

  • Keep tabs on competitors, including emerging companies in their category
  • Feed Innovation and R&D teams ideas for brand extensions to identify what’s feasible for their next big thing
  • Identify white space to grow the brand
  • Feed digital strategy from social media to SEO
  • Identify improvement opportunities based on ratings/reviews
  • Determine the best path to market for their brand

What we hear over and over again from Brand Managers is that all of today’s CPG suppliers can’t show them emerging brands and trends, leaving them with huge blindspots.

With Helio, Brand Managers can be experts in where their category is today and where it’s headed, look after the health of their brand feeding both sales and innovation with the information they need to increase overall health and revenue, and replicate what’s working most in market for their next big thing.

1. What’s hot in the category and where is it headed?

In this analysis, we helped an innovation team look at the cross pollination of attributes between the alc bev and non-alc bev space, followed by an analysis that looked at the predicted future performance of select attributes to inform a forthcoming new product, helping the Brand team understand not only what is hot now, but where this category is headed.

 

2. How is my brand doing and how are our competitors doing?

With Helio’s Key Purchase Criteria (KPC) analysis, Brand Managers can quickly understand what consumers discuss most about their choices when shopping in their category; but beyond that they can see how their brand stacks up.

In this analysis, we look at KPC for Low/No Alc beverages. You can see that consumers value: value for money, ingredient quality, flavor and nutrition most. When looking at the cohort of brands analyzed, we see that one brand outperforms all other brands analyzed across these key dimensions. Whereas others have opportunities for improvement.


In a separate analysis for a client in the Bars category, we look at top review terms associated with review ratings <3.5 in the Bars category and can see that most brands get dinged for broken bars, however for one particular brand specific flavors are being called out and in many cases, consumers noticed a soapy taste.


3. What’s the best path to market for our next big thing? 

While coming up with the idea for the next big thing is critical, winning teams also have a game plan for using the 24 month period post-launch to gain the lionshare of revenue. Brand teams look to Helio to understand key growth dynamics of winning brands in order to replicate what’s working so they can reap the lionshare of the rewards faster.

In this analysis, we helped a Brand team in the Beauty category look at the optimal channel mix for beauty companies in order to shape their launch strategy. Notably, we saw that the companies with the highest median HGP score had a mix of E-Commerce, D2C and Offline channels activated, leaving Amazon out of the channel mix.

If you are a Brand Manager and you feel like you're flying blind, our team would be eager to help you! While this is just a sampling of the types of data we provide, we partner all the time with Brand Managers to; 

  • Feed Innovation and R&D teams ideas for brand extensions to identify what’s feasible for their next big thing
  • Identify white space to grow the brand
  • Feed digital strategy from social media to SEO
  • Identify improvement opportunities based on ratings/reviews
  • Determine the best path to market for their brand

Get in touch here.