HOLIDAY RESULTS ARE CRUCIAL!
The Holidays are 16.6% of the year but 20% of the revenues. This means you have to get your value, pricing, incentive, and marketing message right to end the year or you will leave significant revenue on the table. It used to be the slow part of the year for most Outdoor and Bike brands but now it is on par with the height of the robust summer selling season.
LOOKING AT THE WINNERS IN 2023!
CrankTank breaks clients into 3 segments, the Digitally Mature or Brands that have been selling online successfully over time where we can measure YOY performance as seen in the slide above. Again in 2023, we had some big growth overachievers! The 2nd segment is relative newcomers that got going in 2022 so full-year numbers are hard to measure since they just got going in the middle of the year, there we track actual dollar growth. The 3rd segment is brands that grew by adding Channels or upgrading their Growth Stack, for example, adding Amazon to D2C sales where we measured the 107% Amazon YOY growth.
WHY WERE SO MANY BRANDS DOWN?
CrankTankâs LinkedIn Brand survey confirmed that the majority of brand sales were down to flat in 2023, 54%. With only 30% showing high growth levels. Our view on this result is that Digital Strategy is getting more sophisticated, and requires better training of staff, better reporting, and better creative and wiser spending investment. The competition has also increased so all the major brands are now in the D2C mix.
INC. 5000 2023 HONOREE
With the support of our amazing clients, CrankTank made the Inc. 5000 list! A big thanks to our skilled, smart, and hard-working staff. Sort of cool, now back to work.
THINKING AHEAD TO 2024
Our Innsbruck, Austria European office is now up and running and we are fortunate to be managing Brands on both sides of the Atlantic in 2024. We believe that having an integrated Growth Stack in US-Canada and the European Union will give brands a higher ROI and lower operating costs as a percentage of revenues.
FUTURE EVENTS
We will be on the road this spring with Adrian and Scott both making trips to see Susanne and with our Brand partners in Europe in January and February. We will be attending the Taipei Cycle Show March 6-9, the People for Bikes Bicycle Leadership Conference in Tuscon March 26-28, and the Sea Otter Classic April 18-21 in Monterey. We hope to see you soon!
Think+Crank,
Scott Montgomery