Product Launch Marketing Plan

Over the last year, nearly every FMCG executive I’ve spoken to whether sitting in Chicago, Paris, or São Paulo has echoed the same challenge: “We need to get closer to the consumer, faster.” Global brand, local nuance the future of FMCG growth depends on how well your leadership understands the street, not just the spreadsheet. It’s no longer enough to run a global playbook and hope for local resonance. Why? Because the center of gravity in FMCG has shifted. 84% of FMCG companies are now increasing local decision autonomy in key growth markets. (Bain FMCG Operating Model Report, 2023) → That means your CMO can’t be the only one with a finger on the pulse. → Your regional GM can’t just execute HQ strategy. → And your global leaders can’t lead with assumptions they need cultural fluency and operational humility. In other words: local-for-local is not just a supply chain shift. It’s a leadership shift. The most successful candidates weren’t those who had rotated through five global hubs. They were the ones who could… → Read the cultural nuances of consumer behavior in that specific region → Navigate the regulatory quirks that could derail a product launch → Influence global teams while building trust with local retailers → Speak the language literally and commercially They understood the street not just the spreadsheet. And they had the rare ability to connect what’s happening on the ground with what needs to be shifted at the center. These are the leaders FMCG needs now. → Strategists who don’t just adapt to the market, they anticipate it. → Operators who don’t wait for HQ they build and test in-market. → Connectors who know when to push back and when to align. Because in today’s world, speed and relevance win. And that doesn’t come from waiting for global sign-off. It comes from empowering the right local leaders. Here’s where I see many companies trip up: They treat “local” as junior. As operational. As reactive. The truth? Your next competitive edge may be a GM in Manila, a Marketing Director in Lagos, or a Commercial Lead in Warsaw who’s trusted enough to build strategy from the ground up. That’s what global FMCG companies are starting to understand and what we’re helping them solve for in every executive search we run. Not just global leaders who can work across regions…but local leaders who can lead across functions, cultures, and expectations while driving growth with urgency and empathy. This is the new face of global FMCG. Not centralized, but coordinated. Not rigid, but responsive. Not top-down, but built from the middle out. #ExecutiveSearch #FMCGLeadership #GlobalGrowth #ConsumerGoods #TalentStrategy #LeadershipHiring

7 out of 10 of my projects start with fixing what most people ignore. This includes: - making copy easier to read - making images informational - making product name impactful Simple, but yet forgotten. In this post, using URturms example, I'll be sharing 11 underestimated changes that can increase your website sales. 1. Adding breadcrumbs. Important if you drive ad traffic to the PDP directly. They take shopper to the parent category page. Reducing bounce rate. 2. Adding a badge. Like "Bestseller", "Most Loved", "Few Left". This reassures the shopper that they're making the right decision. 3. Making images easier to swipe. Add a sneak peek of the next image along with navigation dots that show the count. Cap them at 8. 4. Making the product name impactful. Add key USPs. Show your current product name to 10 people. Do they understand what it is? 5. Add a short description below product name. Keep it in 1 line. Highlight it's most important feature here. 6. Consider adding an offer close to price. This motivates the shopper as they see some potential savings or benefit. 7. Highlight key product strengths in bullets or with icons. Avoid sentences. Keep this before the add to cart CTA. 8. Keep your add to cart CTA full width. Don't combine it with quantity or another CTA next to it. Make sure it's readable and prominent. 9. Highlighting shipping time or return policy below the CTA. This solves for common questions - when will I get it? can I return it? 10. Cross-selling complementary products. Like bottoms with tops. Earrings with necklace. Do this close to the add to cart CTA. 11. Adding 'Benefits' to your accordion. This gets a higher click through rate, while helping shoppers understand why they should buy this. Other UX/UI changes I did: - Removed quantity button - Made the information bar non-moving - Removed log-in, moving search next to cart - Changed the font for product name and CTA - Increased font size in places for better readability Found this useful? Let me know in the comments! P.S. If you want to maximize your PDP’s potential, start by understanding your visitor's behavior and the gaps. Get heat maps for your site (Microsoft Clarity is free). Observe what they like to (and don't like to) interact with.

Product-market fit (PMF) isn't a binary. The reality is that there are *shades* of PMF and you need an *action plan* to get there. Maja Voje — better known as the GTM Strategist — has worked with 350+ startups to help them achieve & expand on PMF. She's now sharing her tested frameworks with the rest of us. Here's the TL;DR: 1️⃣ Proof of concept: Get 10 testers - These tend to come from your personal network, advisors or warm outreach (from a founder) with a hook - Show "problem-solution fit" by starting to document "can we even solve this problem?" metrics with case studies 2️⃣ Proof of monetization: Get 5 paying customers - These come from retained PoC testers, cold outreach to adjacent segments, case studies sent as warm outreach with a hook, or via influential people in your network - Pro tip: you need an early customer profile before you can get to an ideal customer profile (ICP) 3️⃣ Proof of 1+ scalable GTM motion: Reach 20+ paying customers - Your GTM options: inbound (content), outbound (cold outreach), paid digital, community, partners, ABX and/or PLG - Pro tip: you need differentiated positioning to unlock this GTM motion; Maja's recommendation is to always position in relation to *something* (a service, DIY process, doing nothing or direct competitors) 4️⃣ Proof of a sustainable business model: Reach 50+ paying customers - If you were to only use this 1+ scalable GTM motion, would you be able to become break-even / profitable? - Look at: retention/churn, acquisition costs, customer referenceability 5️⃣ Proof of market expansion: Reach 100+ paying customers in 2+ markets - There's now clear evidence that you're ready to win on more fronts: opening new markets, launching new products, selling to new personas --- Read the full piece in Growth Unhinged: https://lnkd.in/guUFj-5H My favorite quote: "I like to think of PMF as a cycle... Every time I fail to validate something, I remember that Nokia started with toilet paper, Lamborghini with tractors, and McDonald’s with hot dogs." Can't wait to hear what you think 🙏 #pmf #startup #gtm

When I started Go Zero, I made a very big mistake: In the early days, while building our first SKUs, my instinct was to wait until everything felt perfect. Perfect macros. Perfect texture. Perfect taste. But the truth is, perfection never comes. Even after launch, customers had their own verdict, and they still do: “Texture thoda better ho sakta hai.” “Thoda zyada sweet lag raha hai.” “Family pack kab aa raha hai?” That’s when I realized, you can spend 6 months obsessing in the kitchen, or you can launch at 70–80% and let your customers guide you to the remaining 20%. Every single Go Zero product you see today has gone through at least 3 to 4 iterations post-launch. Dekho, agar aap wait karte rahoge perfect hone ka, toh launch karte karte 10 saal bhi kum pad jaayenge. Kar ke seekhna is always better than kuch na karna. If we had waited for perfection, we’d still be waiting. Instead, we chose consistency. So, your plan should be: Launch, listen, iterate, repeat. That’s the real cheat code to building anything. 🍧

Tanishq was a failure for 10 years. But then, this company revolutionized the Indian jewelry market. My family has been in the jewelry business for 40 years. Although I’ve never worked in the business - I’ve seen it around me growing up. Recently, I was talking to my dad, Biren Vaidya, about the state of the market. He reminded that the world was very different when he started in the 80s. As much as 95% of the market was unorganized and there were no ‘brands’ - largely home jewelers – until Tanishq tried to organize the industry. In 1991, India had a severe forex deficit. Titan Company Limited needed $$ to import their watch components so they made a plan: Sell jewelry in Europe → Earn forex → Use it to import watch components → Make more watches in India → Sell the watches across the world This is how Tanishq was born :) After a while, the forex crisis settled down. The management still saw a new opportunity in the jewelry business domestically. They introduced 18-carat gold with European designs, trying to be ‘different.’ But in India, gold isn’t just jewelry—it’s wealth, status, an investment and tradition. This is what they missed. Plus, every family in India had a trusted “Family Jeweler” who had served them for generations – the biggest barrier to entry for any new brand was trust. By 2001, Titan’s stock crashed to ₹2, and the company was ₹150 crores in losses. Consultants urged the Tatas to shut it down. Instead of quitting though they kept fighting and adapted. Eventually a new playbook worked. They: – Shifted to 22-carat gold, aligning with Indian values of purity and investment. – Introduced the “Karatmeter” to check gold’s purity. It exposed that 60% of local gold was impure. – Now, to rebuild trust, they launched the "Impure to Pure" scheme with which customers could exchange their impure, adulterated gold for Tanishq’s pure 22-carat jewelry. They leveraged the core USP of the Tata Group and made it Tanishq’s USP - trust! 25 years hence, Tanishq is 88% of Titan’s revenue. Today, Tanishq is India's largest organized jewelry brand with over 400 stores—capturing 7% of this massive market. We are seeing a new trend as Indian customers are viewing jewelry more as a fashion accessory. This has led to a recent rise in 18 Carat designs – something Tanishq started with but miserably failed in 1994 :) So, India’s largest jewelry company and most loved retail stock started as a failure. Everything that ends well doesn’t necessarily start well. PS - I still see large investment opportunities in jewelry. The next frontier is lab grown diamonds, silver/demi fine and luxury. Thoughts? #business #success #growth

SHOWING TRACTION BEFORE YOU HAVE TRACTION Everybody knows that startups thrive when they have “real” traction — that is revenue, active users, great retention curves, and a fast growth rate. However, startups also find themselves in a catch-22 where they're not able to raise money to get real traction and thus struggle to get there in the real place. So what choice do new founders have to show traction before they have "real traction"? The answer to this explains the move towards cinematic launch trailers, B2B-oriented accelerators, waitlists, preorders, startup parties, building in public, and many of the other go-to-market trends that have emerged over the last few years. These are all tactics that are low-volume, hard to scale, but relatively deterministic, making them attractive to new startups that want to show precursors to real traction. These precursors end up being metrics like video views or number of waitlist sign-ups. Or SF tpot buzz. Or pipeline logos. Are these things as good as revenue? No. However, are they better than nothing? Yes. Let's take cinematic launch videos as an example. These have become very popular over the last year because of their high novelty value. The fact that social media feeds lend more real estate towards video, the fact that they are cheap to create but not too cheap, and as a result they have a tendency to go viral and rack up millions of views for a new product. Depending on how professionally you want it to be done, it can cost as much as $50,000 for a few minutes of spot. Or do it on a shoe string. For hardware/deeptech companies, the existence of this tactic is a godsend. It might take them more than a year from inception to get the first version of a prototype out. And scale production may take them even longer. To show real traction, that is, revenue growth and retention, is going to take ages. Way too long to get investors and employees excited about joining the company. Although creating a cinematic launch trailer costs money and effort, $50,000 is a lot less than waiting over a year to get your units actually manufactured and ready to ship You can argue that if your launch trailer actually gets millions of views, you do learn something. You validated that there's some kind of demand. Enough for people to watch the video, be excited, share it, and potentially comment. This isn't real traction, but it is precursor traction that tells you something. There is a continuum between precursor traction and real traction that's fuzzy, and you can often bridge the two. For example, rather than video views, isn't it better to drive people towards a landing page where they can put in their emails? Getting their emails shows deeper customer intent, and allows you to stretch your engagement capabilities past the initial viral spike and into a longer back-and-forth with a potential customer.

Why ‘Household Penetration’ Might Be Lying to You: In the world of CPG, "Household Penetration" is often the North Star. If your brand is in 35% of homes, you assume you have 65% headroom to grow. But what if that logic is fundamentally flawed? When I took over as CEO of Unilever Philippines, our food business—led by Benjie Yap, uncovered an insight that didn't just change our marketing; it rewrote the global blueprint for how we measure success in some categories. Our data showed Knorr Sinigang (tamarind flavored cubes) had a household penetration of 35%. Traditionally, that suggests massive, untapped potential. However, when we looked at the kitchen diaries of thousands of Filipino families, we realized something startling: Knorr Sinigang had already penetrated 90% of all tamarind soup dishes cooked in the country. In other words, we weren't in 35% of homes—we were in 90% of the relevant moments. If we had continued to push for broad household growth, we would have been shouting at people who didn't cook the dish, wasting millions in "spray and pray" advertising. We pivoted our entire strategy from "who buys" to "what is being cooked." This led us to a new metric: Dish Penetration. By mapping the "unrealized potential" of specific dishes, the "geometry" of our market changed. Instead of broad national campaigns, we shifted to localized micro-marketing. We identified the regions where these specific dishes were staples, used local dialects and influencers, and tailored our promotions to the "pot," not just the "person." Over three years, we increased Chicken Cube dish penetration from 50% to 72%. This insight triggered years of double-digit growth for Knorr and became a global standard for Unilever. Lessons for Every Strategy Leader: 1. Be Sceptical of "Painted Facades": Annual reports and broad metrics often hide the "beams and pillars" of the business. Go into the "kitchens" (or the factories, or the stores) to see the reality. 2. Find the Relevant Moment: Growth isn't always about finding new customers; often, it’s about increasing your share of the moments your current customers already have. In my soon to be launched book “A CEO’s BREW”, I share stories, principles and learnings from across different markets.

I lost $250,000 of my own money AND got humiliated in front of 500k+ people, after trying to launch a keyboard brand… here's 5 lessons I learned 🙃 In 2023, I launched a hardware brand called Lightmode. The vision was to make beautiful productivity products under a brand that wasn't tied to me. Why? Because my entire business has "key man risk." If I stop making YouTube videos, everything downstream dies. I wanted to build something that could exist without me, plus I really like productivity tech and thought it would be cool. So we worked with an agency to design a mechanical keyboard. We went back and forth with factories in China. Tested. Tweaked the keycaps. Made beautiful packaging. 18 months and $300,000 later, we launched. We've made back about $50,000. So I'm currently $250,000 in the red. Then it got worse. A keyboard reviewer named Hipyo Tech made a video tearing the product apart. He called it "half-assed." He said me selling it felt "a little bit scummy." It has 500k+ views now. Watching it felt awful. But here's the thing: he was mostly right. I reached out afterwards. We had a Zoom call. I thanked him. And I walked away with some of the most valuable lessons of my career. 1. Half-baked is worse than not doing it at all. This keyboard was never anyone's primary focus. It was a side project we'd revisit every few months when a new sample arrived. The lesson: Don't start something unless you can commit to it. 2. What got you here won't get you there. "Move fast and break things" built my YouTube channel. I had an idea, I filmed it on my bed, I posted it. Rinse and repeat for 7 years. But now? I have an audience that trusts me. Releasing something rushed doesn't fail quietly… it fails publicly. And it erodes the trust I've spent years building. The lesson: The playbook from 0→1 isn't the one from 1→10 3. If your gut says something's off, listen. Before we placed the order, I had a weird feeling. Something didn't sit right, but I talked myself out of it. "You're being irrational." "You're overthinking this." "The agency has invested so much time." I rationalised away my intuition. And it cost me dearly. 4. If the marketing feels uncomfortable to say, don't say it. I had 3 hours in an Airbnb in LA to film all the marketing videos. I was rushed and tired. The messaging felt too strong. Too salesy. I remember thinking "this doesn't feel like me." The lesson: If you're not comfortable saying something about your product, that's a signal. 5. "Would I use this?" is too low a quality bar. My standard was simple: Is this something I would personally use every day?The answer was yes. But that's not enough. I should have sent early samples to keyboard experts for private feedback. I should have asked: "Can we defend this product if someone publicly tears it apart?" We couldn't, and that's on me. The ultimate lesson was one of focus: it's hard to do multiple things. Sometimes the best lessons cost $250,000 🙃

Building a business in preventive health is hard. No one tells you this upfront. I learned it the hard way, first as a founder, now as an investor. You’ve chosen the harder game. Not because prevention doesn’t work, but because people don’t pay for it. Most wake up thinking about chai, parathas , deadlines, and school fees. Not long-term health. People today want instant gratification—sugar today, gym tomorrow. Curative health makes money because illness is urgent. No one postpones a bypass surgery or negotiates an ICU bill. But prevention? Everyone hunts for gym discounts, coupon codes for healthy food and thinks twice before paying for a fitness program. Hospitals & pharma companies thrive because they sell relief from suffering. And suffering is a guaranteed market—prevention is not. That’s why venture money chases curative health—it scales fast with clear unit economics, solving problems people can’t ignore. Asking someone to eat better, sleep more, and exercise for a payoff 5–10 years later is like selling an FD over a lottery ticket. So accept this reality and build accordingly. Yet, prevention is the hardest problem and the biggest untaped opportunity. #1 Healthcare in India will shift to prevention-not because people suddenly care, but because not caring is becoming too expensive. #2 Your market isn’t TAM, it’s WTM (willing-to-pay market). Everyone should care about health, but few will pay for it.To go mass-market, make it cheaper than chai and as seamless as WhatsApp. #3 If you’re selling prevention, reposition it. People don’t buy prevention. They buy status, performance, and convenience. Make it aspirational & competitive. #4 Trust in health isn’t built overnight. People won’t change their habits because you raised venture money. You’re in the business of delayed gratification. That means slow &sustainable growth. #5 If your product doesn’t make people healthier or keep them engaged long-term, the number of app downloads doesn't matter. Focus on retention, real outcomes and revenue—not GMV, DAUs or metrics to make a pitch deck look good. If you can do this, you won’t just build a business—you’ll change how India thinks about health. And that’s worth building for.

Growth Unlocked 🎉 : From PMF to Scale - Mastering the journey from $1m->$10m ✨ ✨ ✨ At Blossom Capital, we love to partner with founders at Series A, which we define as the time when founders are ready to invest capital for growth. It's at this juncture that the company and team make the transition from having initial signs of market demand (product-market-fit) to having scalable, repeatable growth. In practice, this most commonly means moving from founder-led sales to building out a Go-To-Market team and motion. Having now supported over dozens of B2B founders on this journey over 10+ years, including some of Europe’s breakout success stories such as Checkout.com, Pigment and Tines, we want to share our learnings and give as many founders as possible a helpful framework how to build a solid foundation for scaling. In a multiple part series, we’ll detail what we’ve seen work effectively, the mistakes commonly made and best avoided, and share a comprehensive set of KPIs/reporting to track performance. For the purposes of these posts, we’re assuming that the goal is to grow as fast as possible whilst maintaining high quality and efficient growth. We’ll break it down to cover: 1. ICP (ideal customer profile): who to sell to and how to reach them & 2. Pipeline: building large enough top of funnel that will convert with high degree of confidence into forecast revenue each quarter.   Alongside this practical guide, we’re starting by sharing a template reporting deck which helps to measure whether actions are working as planned. It’s very likely that as larger amounts of capital are spent to accelerate growth that things will break :) Having an accurate picture of progress and the correct KPIs can help keep you on track. We look forward to sharing future posts with you soon. If you have any feedback or questions along the way, please message us! We'd love to hear from you. https://lnkd.in/eXqaT3jR