Image: Turkey Hill Iced Tea

​Corporate Challenge: How to choose the next product or service offering.

Ironbound Strategy: Brand growth is a result of creating value for customers, employees, and society. Creating vertical integrations provides access to new customers that can grow your brand to record levels.

Ironbound Action: Pennsylvania based Turkey Hill is known for its iced teas, gas stations, and ice-creams.  Their brand’s rise to fame began when they opened gas stations to sell their branded products.  By vertically integrating into gas stations, demand for Turkey Hill products increased, and their branded products were successfully sold in grocery stores across the country. Turkey Hill now produces over 60 million gallons of iced tea a year. Small brands can quickly grow when their brand extensions create value for customers. There may be an opportunity for a new small brand to exponentially grow by extending their brand into charging stations, just like Turkey Hill did with gas stations.  
 
*The ready to drink tea industry is valued at $45.5B globally, and is expected to grow 22% by 2021.  In the US, 23% of Americans drink tea every day.

Image: Kettle Brand Chips

​​*The potato chip market is a $4.6 Billion marketspace, $500 Million in premium chips.  Last FY Kettle Brands had $163 Million in revenue.  

​Corporate Challenge: Using value-creation to entice customers away from competitors.

Ironbound Strategy:  In large product marketspaces, it may seem difficult to rapidly multiply market-share.  Brands that focus their efforts on creating value for customers, employees, and society, experience phenomenal growth from their value creating efforts.

Ironbound Action: Salem Oregon based Kettle Brand doubled their market share in 5 years, and then tripled it the following 5 years.  Kettle has maintained their old-fashioned all-natural production method, which keeps product costs high and margins much lower compared to their competitors who use chemically manufactured potato chips.  In order to generate growth, Kettle Brands dedicated themselves to creating value for society by reforming the chip making process to enhance the environment.  Kettle uses VW Beetles that run on recycled cooking oil, and offsets their energy with 100% renewable wind power.  Customers are influenced to purchase Kettle Brand chips because of their creative array of chip flavors, and knowing their purchase is positively impacting the environment.  In the next decade, millennials will become the largest purchasing segment in history.  Millennials are drawn to brands that create value for the environment, which is why Kettle Brand has doubled, and then tripled their market share.