Case Study
Building a go-to-market strategy in the organic premium chocolate segment
Strategic market intelligence | Due diligence | Market entry
Business need
- A producer of organic dried fruits, vegetables, fruit snacks and other natural food products wanted to expand its product portfolio into more indulgent products such as chocolate and confectionery items.
- The client had recently purchased a business in this space and was interested in assessing opportunities in the premium and above chocolate segments for a successful launch.
- It wanted a comprehensive understanding of the global target product segments, emerging trends in the North American market, key market drivers, best practices, white spaces and growth opportunities.
To uncover market and consumer trends in the premium chocolate segment in Europe and North America.
The client outlined two key reasons for engaging RocSearch:
- Our ability to rapidly deploy customised teams with the necessary skills.
- Our proven due diligence capabilities and flexible client-centric engagement models.
Approach and Methodology
- We created a heat map to prioritise the front runner markets in the premium chocolate category based on their relative market sizes, synergies with North American market nuances and relative disruption index values based on the number of initiatives of global/local brands.
We examined various customer archetypes & buyer personas, studying trends such as increasing popularity of organic and healthful products, higher penetration of international brands, and taste preferences of millennials.
- We studied the best practices in product portfolio expansion, marketing and sales, and brand positioning strategies, which niche and focussed players had used in the premium category to scale up their operations.
- We examined the white spaces and growth opportunities in terms of ingredients, product forms and packaging in the international markets.
- We shared actionable insights on strategies, innovations, recent developments, initiatives and use cases of local and international successful brands.
Business Outcomes
- The client was able to derive learnings from the best practices and winning business models of the local as well as global trend-setters and formulate its own growth strategy.
- The insights from the study equipped the client for a successful launch in the premium and above chocolate segments.
The insights equipped the client for the launch of a new range of premium chocolates.
