Mujtaba Ayub

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Category Growth, Brand Strategy

Where can a tired category grow next?

Repositioning your brands into whitespaces

Triangulating how your brands are currently segmented in the market and how they are perceived by target groups |Working out new moves to reposition by identifying opportunities in communications, price point, packaging, and profitability

Mondelēz

Perceptual map: a gum and candy portfolio migrating from crowded breath-refreshment into oral health, fun, and mood-enhancement whitespace. Two-axis positioning map with arrows carrying brands outward from a commoditized functional space into three differentiated territories. emotional benefit functional benefit premium / adult everyday / youth breath refreshment crowded · undifferentiated oral health fun mood lift
Repositioning your brands into whitespaces — project visualRepositioning your brands into whitespaces — project visual

The problem

A Gum and Candy portfolio crowded into commoditized breath refreshment, undifferentiated, with little room to grow on a functional benefit everyone else also claimed.

The approach

Two major layers of data were used to assess the current state of brand positioning, and identifying new spaces the brands could evolve into.

Layer 1: For Mondelēz Gum and Candy brands (Trident, Clorets, Chiclets), analysed portfolio health, perception, positioning, packaging, price points, and profitability versus competition across categories (Gum & Candy, Biscuits, Chocolates).

This was done using Retail Sales Analytics, including performance analysis by channel types; Large Sample Size Focus Groups using real time AI assisted transcription and semantic processing on responses, consumer and shopper in-depth interviews and shadowing studies in collaboration with research agency partners.

Layer 2: A comprehensive refresh of Occasions & Needstates research was done in target markets, painting a rich picture of what brands in the market were consumed on what Occasions (temporal, meal-adjacency, events) and to satisfy what Needstates (emotional - nostalgia, connection, distraction, indulgence, passing time, etc, & functional - breath refreshment, hygiene, pick-me-up/energy, etc).

Utilizing these layers, mapped the positioning space (Mondelēz and competition), identified white spaces, and migrated brands out of breath-refreshment into one of oral care, fun, and mood-enhancement territories — developing strategic playbooks in collaboration with brand, sales, merchandising, and operations teams that detailed how to execute this evolution.

What it revealed

Differentiated whitespace opened up on emotional and demographic axes the category had ignored, a refresh strategy grounded in perception data rather than instinct.

Under the hood

perceptual mapping · retail analytics · occasions & needstates mapping · price-pack architecture