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Mark Tarchetti

A Timeless Formula for Success

Last month, I attended the Houlihan Lokey consumer products conference.  I was speaking on a panel and got to hear from several high growth businesses.  Many of the brands were in the middle of the scaling phase.  You could see a lot of progress but could also sense the yet untapped potential. 


When looking for the winners in a group of businesses I always come back to the formula for success that I believe consistently distinguishes the best from the rest.  It is a simple one. 


Ideas big enough to grow markets.  Brands strong enough to change behavior. 


In a nutshell, that’s the way to win in consumer products and convert stable growth into outsize value creation. Every success story I have been involved with has had this approach.  Sometimes explicitly, often implicitly.  The focus on those two ideas is even more powerful when coupled with ruthless editing of extraneous activity to enhance execution.


The first idea relies on innovation.  Not renovation or incrementalism.  True innovation. 


Finding the unmet needs, seeing what the consumer really wants or will want in the future.  Bringing news that stimulates consumption or stretches existing consumption into added value.  So many brands feel limited by apparently mature markets.  Yet maturity means you have scale to your consumer occasions.  You need to reimagine what comes next and think bigger.  In nascent markets, you must mature the emerging consumption to regular habits.  Many fixate on the total addressable market (TAM) but don’t do enough on imagining what it could be.  It should not be a linear perspective. We have done a lot of work in vitamins (VMS) for example, which is a very large and fast-growing market.  Yet, the market size is tiny relative to what it could be if all of us focused on our wellness, established daily habits and used multiple VMS products for multiple benefit areas.  The market could be more than 10x.  The winners will create that outcome. 


This is why the second idea is important. A brand name is not a brand.  A real brand drives consumer behavior, changing attitudes and nurturing habits. It can only do this if it is brilliantly well defined, rooted in deep consumer understanding and focused on the needle-moving attributes that matter.  It takes time (years) and money (a lot of it) to build a brand of that standard.  Brands must earn their consumers, not simply buy them transiently through digital activation. 


This formula is timeless.  It needs focus, investment and great consistency.  Define your strategy exceptionally well, stick to it, and avoid distractions.


All the work we do at Alchemy-Rx is focused on this formula.  Helping brands reimagine potential and then providing a practical path to execution. This includes identifying what has made them good and developing them in a way that will make them great.  A constant flow of new ideas is critical to the consumer and customer.  Our innovation work is tested, and we have averaged more than triple the benchmark quality scores.  Our techniques work extremely well, but like most products, they need constant improvement. So, this week you will see us launch SPARX AI.  A new AI-powered process that we have been testing in recent months that is now ready for launch.  Using technology to drive even better, faster results.

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