Physical Availability: Go to where the dogs are

The Cogs of Empirical Marketing, Part 7

Welcome back to the Cogs of Empirical Marketing — a better map to help you diagnose problems, drive strategy, develop tactics and grow your brand. 

Because once you know exactly where you are, you can chart a course for precisely where you want to go. 

Today we’re talking about one of the big cogs — Physical Availability.. 

If you want to grow your brand, you need to be where your buyers are. The goal, as former president of Coke Robert Woodruff put it, is to be “Within arm’s reach of desire.” And that means you gotta be relentless … and relentlessly clever. 

Let’s say you’re the CMO of “Woof Rush!”, a new meat-flavored energy drink brand for dogs. 

It hydrates! It makes their coats shiny! It gives them the boost they need to chase squirrels all day long! Woof Rush! Unleash the Hounds!

(This is a terrible idea. Do not give energy drinks to dogs. Also, I have no idea if energy drinks for dogs is a thing, and I’m not gonna Google it.)

You don’t have a website yet, so you create one. You get your SEO dialed in, so you’re at the top of the page when anyone Googles things like “energy drink dogs” or “best energy drink dogs running” or “how to give my dog the zoomies”. 

Now what? 

You must go to where the dogs are! Get “Woof Rush!” within paw’s reach of desire. 

You talk your way into local pet shops. You develop wildly unlikely partnerships with vets. You buy booths at farmer’s markets around town and hand out free samples. Dogs seem to love it! People are buying it! So you keep going.

You set up a table at local dog parks with coolers full of ice-cold “Woof Rush!”. Eventually, you buy a few vending machines because you can’t spend every waking moment at every dog park in town. 

You meet with owners of pet-friendly restaurants, and they agree to add “Woof Rush!” to their menus. 

Eventually, you build an Amazon store. 

You sponsor Flyball, Agility and Rally-O competitions, and you sell “Woof Rush!” there. You set up a TikTok shop, and you fill it with videos of dogs lapping up “Woof Rush!” while “Messy” by Lola Young plays in the background. Sure, some of the dogs are paid dogfluencers, and that’s fine. Gen-Z knows what’s up.

Then you get lucky. A local news story about “Woof Rush!” gets picked up by USA Today and the Today Show. You’ve got some heat! Across the country, people are clamoring for “Woof Rush!”. THEIR DOGS NEED THE RUSH!!! 

It is flying off your digital shelves! It’s flying out of the five vending machines you own and the few local shelves you’re on. It’s flying off the shelves of pet-friendly restaurants.

Now what? 

You have a choice to make — scale now or scale later. You’re a category of one at the moment, but eventually, you’ll have competition. Building a beverage brand is not easy, but it’s not impossible. 

You decide to scale and run with the big dogs. You make deals with PetSmart, Chewy, Pet Supplies Plus, Target, Walmart, Instacart and Kroger. You add new flavors to take up more shelf space. You’re everywhere pet supplies are sold, and you’re everywhere dogs are. Omnichannel for the win! 

(We skipped over the incredible brand work, media strategy, creative strategy, ad campaign and media buy you did with SRH. Trust us, your brand kicks ass, and it’s hella effective at driving mental availability, profitability, market share growth and pricing power.)

So you’ve grown from a tiny brand giving away free samples at farmers’ markets to the undisputed, heavyweight category leader in just a few years. Okay, yes, you were always the category leader because you invented the category. But you and the category are a lot bigger now.

Of course, being everywhere is not the whole story, because physical availability is also about making your product easy to buy. That means reducing every friction point possible. 

It means optimizing your website for a seamless customer experience, keeping your SEO on lock, and throwing your elbows to get more shelf space, It’s about Google ads, endcaps and in-store displays … and playing Amazon’s dirty little games. We can help with that, too. 

And we can measure your brand’s physical availability (along with the rest of the Cogs of Empirical Marketing), so you can diagnose problems, drive strategy, develop tactics and grow your brand.

See you next time!