Do you remember the biblical tale of David’s slaying of Goliath? The principle that a carefully planned and well-executed strategy can fell any giant is both romantically and intuitively attractive. A David-like strategy appears relevant to Irish food firms today as they face an environment dominated by retail and brand giants.

If you are a food business owner, try and imagine the category you compete in as if you are you are a consumer looking down the supermarket aisle… truly, how many of these products for sale offer the consumer a unique, exciting or original experience?

Challenge your brand in three ways:

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1 First, do you have a brand or just a promotional campaign? The value of the sling to David was the ability it provided to accurately hit his target with sufficient power to achieve his goal.

Food brands often fail because they forget the most important principle of branding. Positive customer experiences drive brand equity, not the other way around.

Does your product actually deliver something unique, which consumers truly desire and will pay a premium for? If not, can you innovate something that does?

2Second, test your brand’s mental availability by asking: When the consumers you want to sell to have a problem, do they think of your brand as the best solution?

In the book Why Brands Grow, author Byron Sharp identifies mental availability as the ability a consumer has to recall your brand when looking for a solution to a problem in the category in which you compete.

If your brand is not one of the first to be recalled it faces an uphill challenge to be purchased. Investing in building mental availability increasingly means developing brand engagement with a carefully specified target market using new media. Not cheap, but an investment.

3Third, Byron Sharp also identified physical availability as a driver of brand growth. This means that consumers have to be able to purchase the product conveniently. This challenge is obvious but I propose looking at it from a different angle.

While entrepreneurs and CEOs of small firms in industries, such as technology or pharmaceuticals, build their businesses with scaling in mind, most food firms, perhaps anticipating stagnation, do not. It is surely time to change this?

The Goliaths of the food industry are still a challenging presence and are likely to remain so.