We counted every way
to market Enervit
in America.

The elimination

Most marketing advice
is a longer list.
This is a shorter one.

Every spoke is a real way brands sell sports nutrition in this country. Watch what happens when we apply your actual constraints: no US checkout, sixteen doors, one person running a continent, and a competitor set that outspends you by three orders of magnitude.

Why we are not sending you to the shelf

This is the fight
we are telling you
not to pick.

Chevron · Meridian Avenue · San Jose
One of our partners pulled over on the way past and photographed the first health section he could find.

That is a gas station on a commuter road, and it still carries that much. Count the facings, then remember where you are standing.

Now picture the same wall at Target, at Dick’s, at Sports Basement. Every brand on it is paying for its position, and the ones at eye level are paying most. Winning that wall in a shopper’s memory is not a budget problem you solve with a bigger budget. It is why share of voice and price promotion came off the wheel before anything else did.

So we would go around it. Find the people a narrow audience already trusts, the ones with real sway over a few thousand climbers or triathletes or trail runners, and let them do the recommending. Somebody who is told about a gel by a person they believe is not shopping that rack. They are looking for one box.

People are always looking for the next thing. That is a tailwind, and it is free. The shelf is upstream, and it costs everything you have.

How we would find the four

Every bet on this plan
is small enough that
being wrong is cheap.

The reason most launches fail is not a bad idea. It is one expensive idea, committed to early, defended for a year because somebody has to. We would rather run twenty cheap experiments than one costly conviction.

Low risk. Get signal. Keep going. That is the whole method, and the smaller the niche, the faster it tells you the truth.

And one thing that is not in any scope

There is a door
we think we can open
that nobody else can.

Twenty minutes from our office there is a bicycle company you already know. Its founder is someone our team knows personally. It has more independent US specialty dealers than any bike brand in the country, it sells no nutrition of its own, and its shops sell somebody else's gels to exactly the rider who should be buying yours.

We have not called him. We wanted to ask you first, and we wanted to be sure it was the right play rather than the exciting one. That is the conversation we would like to have on Tuesday.

This is the kind of thing that does not appear on a rate card. It is also the reason to pick a partner with relationships instead of a partner with a media plan.

Three things we found on our own

Nobody asked us
to look. We looked.

All three are in the full response. So are the other two.

Tuesday

We are not going to
pitch you a campaign.

We are going to show you the four that survived, the reasoning behind each cut, and what it costs to test them at a size where being wrong is cheap. You should not have to guess, and you certainly should not have to guess expensively.

One addition to the room, because this conversation deserves him.