Great conversations don’t just share ideas. They challenge how you think.
A big thank you to Jon Bradshaw, Jonathan Sully, and James Deysel for an outstanding MindPick Talk: Lessons in Growth. The discussion cut through a lot of the noise around what actually drives growth in FMCG and beyond.
A few themes that stood out:
🔹 Light buyers matter way more than we think.
Most customers buy very infrequently, most often just once a year. The pattern is fixed and unchanging. Brands and businesses must work with these constraints, not against them.
🔹 Growth mostly comes from more buyers, not from getting your existing buyers to buy more.
Most brands and categories grow through increased penetration, not by pushing a few heavy buyers harder.
🔹 Premiumisation plays a role… but later.
Price and mix matter more as categories mature, but only if penetration is maintained.
🔹 Loyalty is often overstated and hard to shift.
Buyers or specific types of buyers don’t belong to brands. People tend to buy across a repertoire. Your customer is usually also your competitor’s customer.
🔹 You have to be on new and light buyers’ mental shopping lists.
If people don’t remember you and what you do for them, your chances of making a sale drastically diminish. Reach, relevance, repetition, and remembering are the price you pay to stay mentally available.
🔹 Make shopping and buying as frictionless as possible.
Drive presence and prominence in store. If people can’t find you, don’t see you, or can’t buy you, you don’t grow.
🔹 Pack, price, product, and experience matter, but less than we think.
Buyers make satisfactory decisions, not optimised ones. A little bit better than good enough is usually good enough. Packs and formats need to make buying you for the first time as easy as possible, not just reward heavy buyers with value.
🔹 Great brands and businesses embed a growth framework. Great businesses codify the growth drivers and the constraints about what really drives growth into a framework or set of principles everyone understands and applies daily.
TLDR: To drive growth, make things easier. Easier to remember, easier to buy, and always thought worth it.
What made the session valuable wasn’t just the theory. It was how these ideas were challenged and applied across different categories, from FMCG to premium spirits to subscription models.
Thanks again to Jon, Sully, and James for sharing their perspective so openly and for all those who attended. If anyone wants a version of this session for their own team, reach out to us.
If you’re thinking about growth right now, where is your next buyer coming from?
If you’d like to watch the recording please reach out to us here
