Schwan’s Home Service

Branding Bucket

By Maria Goldblatt

October 7, 2005

Branding Bucket

• Central Issue: What branding

(mission, positioning,

promotion/people strategy)

should Schwan’s Home Service

adopt to shore up business

today and be poised for

profitable growth in the future?

Current Situation

• More competitive than ever before with no end to the trend in sight

• Extreme reliance on Route Manager direct selling and product/price to the deficit of the rest of the marketing mix (promotion and customer focus “people”)

• The way it was is not how it is today . . .

• Need for clarity, structure and acceptance of Schwan’s Home Service as an Experience Provider not a Food Seller to differentiate self in market

What is going well today

• Bedrock Foundation of Schwan’s Home Service: – Loyalty of core customers

– Unique premise and distribution competitive advantage

– Lots of trucks and locations with sunk investment

– Committed sales/delivery people

– Strong brand

– Entrepreneurial culture

– Business is profitable

– Wide variety of high quality products

And Vice Versa

• Need to clearly define mission-philosophy, positioning and value proposition

• Home Service Brand exists in a vacuum

• Vague definition of customer

• Underutilization of knowledge, data mining, technology

• Not poised to address changes adversely affecting business – Competition, socio-economic changes, mobile workforce, mobile

customer base, shopping habit evolution, heightened consumer expectations, diversity in US population and related taste preferences, trends in food consumption, higher educational levels, diminishing door-to-door sales force talent pool.

• Not leveraging all the tools in marketing mix

Desired End State

• Desired End State = delivery on mission

today + poised for continued growth in

future with relevant dialogue X

differentiated customer experience under

invincible brand halo

Recommendation • Stop, drop and roll. Launch off from strengths to address

weaknesses with new strategies. – Buy-In: outline mission and positioning for today in a way that

will propel us into the future; ensure it is understood and embraced across the organization

– Integrated Plan: balance strength of the Route Manager distribution and product portfolio with a focus on the Brand and customers, across all channels

– Flawless execution: there are very few super-novel things; most real wins are in flawless execution of new twists on proven ideas

– Stay the course: commit resources to the longer view, allowing time to track, measure, learn and improve the entire contact strategy with patience, tenacity, discipline and endurance

– Team: pull together talent needed to research, plan, develop, execute and measure programs; ensure organizational structure allows delivery of all of marketing mix