A "like-for-like" lesson from retailers

The habit of product brands to extend by launching new products makes it hard to compare sales from year to year. The brand might be up, say, 5%. But often this is all down to new product launches, and the core product has actually declined. Over time the core product is getting smaller and smaller. And the average sales per product is going down.

For some reason retail brands don't get away so easily. The industry norm is to report "like-for-like" sales. These results show the sales achieved from existing retail space,  stripping out the effect of opening new stores.

This would be a good discipline to use in consumer goods brands. They should report growth based on the same number of products so they can no longer cover up core product decline with brand extension.

Comments

[Carolyne]

Jennifer Mattern | I think the balance crcenon comes in for me because you no longer can run one marketing campaign. Now I can promote my nonfiction book, blogs, and freelance service by getting my real name out there. But when there's another name, all of that personal branding and marketing is somewhat wasted. Suddenly no one knows you again. I don't intend to adopt a new personality just a name. But instead of one blog tour, I'll have to manage two. I need to continue commenting on usual sites and blogs to maintain a network under my real name. But I have to make enough time to do all of that a second time to build a network under the pen name. Most things I can now do once, I'll have to do twice. At least that's the case if I actively promote the name. And since platforms are important to me, I don't want to slack off and not build one. In your case when you switched to the pen name, you actually stopped some marketing under your real name (like killing the previous Twitter account, getting rid of your old blog, and going quiet in the bulk of the freelance community). I don't have that option. That's an important networking group for me, as well as a product market for me. So I'm just hoping to lay enough early groundwork that I won't be overwhelmed when I'm ready to directly promote the novels.