The global beverage market is estimated at 1,544.610 billion USD in 2018 and is forecast to grow at a CAGR of 3.10%, reaching a market size of 1,854.589 billion USD by 2024. FHA also predicted that this market would bring huge profits for beverage companies in the near future when the growing world’s population leads to more demands for beverage products.
Parallelly, more and more beverage companies are starting to enter the market with a variety of soft drink products. “How to build a successful drink business?” “How to stand out your drink products?” “How to create your own drink brand?” “What are the steps to build a drink company?” The following article will help you answer these questions.
The majority of newbies like you usually have doubts and confusion regarding ways to make your own effective beverage brand.
PHASE 1: Entering the drink market with a detailed and careful preparation
The preparation stage plays a critical role in the process of building a beverage brand. This stage is where you need to answer specific questions about the products you want to sell, your product communication and operation plans, and the resources for your business.
Category ideas
There are countless products in the beverage industry that your company can concentrate on. At this ideation step, you need to overview the beverage industry to determine the right beverage for your company.
In addition, you should consider selling only one beverage or combining multiple products, as this will affect your business and communication strategy later. Some main types of products in the drink industry include energy drinks, health drinks, juices, sodas, coffee and tea, sparkling water, and alcoholic beverages.
Formulation testing
There are many types of drinks with unique flavors as well as famous drink brands in the world. However, at this preparation stage, spend a lot of time perfecting the most amazing and unique recipe for your beverage product. The first piece of advice is to try a variety of drinks with different flavors. You can build a list of drinks with specific notes about the taste for easy evaluation.
In addition, the beverage market has a vast number of consumers with diverse and different tastes. To optimize the recipe development process, you can host parties with your friends and family to get direct feedback on the recipe you’re making.
Drink recipes need to be novel but still suit the taste of the majority of customers.
Business planning
Targeted markets and customers
To establish an effective drink company, you need to focus a lot on understanding the target market. Specifically, a company needs to identify customers’ needs, tastes, and desires in the target market to provide the best products and attract the most customers to their products.
You can find answers to the following questions:
- How is the beverage market overview?
- What is the size of your target market?
- What products have appeared and are prevalent in this target market?
- Who are the competitors in the market? What are their strengths and weaknesses?
- What are the advantages and disadvantages of entering the market?
Beverage industry overview: level of development, potential, broad market size and everything else
Financial planning
You can create the financial plan right after defining the exact types of drink products. However, to create a sound financial plan that can bring a massive amount of profits, you should determine how much your company’s initial capital is.
With start-ups, the leader should only make a financial plan for one year. After obtaining reliable financial data, the enterprise should create a financial plan for 3-5 years or more.
Human resources
In addition to the need for human resources with in-depth technological knowledge, beverage businesses are hungry for human resources who possess knowledge of processing technology, product quality, and management, sales, and negotiation skills.
Marketing planning
Major steps to develop a well-crafted and efficient marketing strategy include analyzing SWOT (Strengths – Weaknesses – Opportunities – Threats), seeking value of your brand, identifying marketing planning objectives, and building marketing methods.
- SWOT analysis
Based on the information you have gathered and identified at the business planning stage, you can conduct a SWOT analysis to identify your business’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.
- Finding your brand value
A great marketing strategy always starts with determining the market price of the company’s brand. Defining value is the step where you should invest the most time and resources, starting by identifying the key customer benefits and the value your beverage products bring to them.
- Defining the goals of the marketing strategy
Specifically, goals are expressed through measurable results over a fixed period, helping businesses evaluate your plan’s success and effectiveness.
- Establishing marketing methods
You need to choose the most suitable marketing methods depending on your business’s target audience and market. The ultimate purpose of marketing methods is to provide product information and communicate the brand message of the beverage business to customers.
You should find out which social channels your customers prefer. In addition, in the early stages, you should select to allocate costs and time to one/several marketing areas such as advertising, PR, content marketing, SEO, community management, or events.
The more specific and detailed the plans, the higher the chances of your beverage brands
Phase 2: Products completion
The product completion stage can help you easily enter the drink industry or make your beverage brand sink as soon as it launches. Therefore, at this stage, your businesses need to perfect the product’s brand image and maintain consistency throughout its life cycle. Necessary steps in the final product stage include:
Packaging designing
The package of a beverage is the first factor that impresses customers. In particular, the uniqueness in the product logo will express the spirit, message, and personality of your product brand. You can hire a logo designer to ensure a clean and attractive logo image. In the process of building a logo, you can consult many sources. Even if you are wondering about between many symbols, you can conduct surveys with users to choose the most suitable logo.
Usually, juice bottles, soft drinks bottles, or mineral water bottles often have the same design. However, the unique designs of bottles can easily impress customers and be suitable for each drinking water individually. The design of bottles also contributes significantly to conveying the message and spirit of your products. In case of meeting difficulty designing by yourself, you can find beverage packaging designing providers.
- Should know: Top 20 great beverage packaging suppliers that you should know to enhance your beverage business
Legalities
Experienced lawyers and accountants will be vital in the planning process of your brand. For an enterprise, especially in the drink industry, accurate and legal facts or figures are a prerequisite, affecting the business’s operation and success. It would help if you also considered a few factors related to legalities, such as:
- Type of business: There are five main types of enterprises: joint-stock company, single-member limited liability company, limited liability company with two or more members, partnership, and sole proprietorship. The process and procedures for establishing each type of business are also different. To be on the safe side, you should consult a lawyer to complete the necessary legal steps.
- Patents and protection: Product formula, logo, design, etc., are all elements that need to be registered for patents and intellectual property rights. Without investing in this step, your products are at risk of being copied, plagiarized, or borrowed to serve illegal interests.
The success of the business process depends very much on the finalization of legal matters.
Production
Ingredients sources/costs
Ingredients are an essential factor in bringing out the fresh taste of drinks. As a beverage business, you need to find out and choose the best ingredients sourced for your products in terms of quality and cost. At this stage, you should research and compare domestic and foreign sources of raw materials, primarily organic ingredients – grown and cared for entirely naturally.
Product equipment
Production equipment and machines are essential if your company intends to manufacture on its own. Some factors you should consider:
- Condition of production equipment (new or used).
- Equipment placement during the entire production process.
- Cost of buying self-operated equipment (compared to outsourcing costs).
In addition, you can also consider outsourcing product production, especially if you are a newbie in the industry and are not familiar with each stage of the production process.
Read more: Why start-up businesses need to outsource manufacturing? 7 reasons to consider
Delivery distribution
You should base on the original business plan to choosing the appropriate delivery method. If your business is small, you can organize your product delivery to control and control the source of your goods efficiently. However, you will need to consider the cost of materials, vehicle maintenance, staff, and insurance issues. In case your business scale is more expansive, you can cooperate with distributors in each specific region.
Choosing a partner or self-distribution depends on the size of your business.
Conclusion
In summary, the above article has provided specific and detailed information on starting a beverage brand of your own and some tips to help your brand operate efficiently. Hopefully, with the above sharing, you can grasp some critical points related to steps to enter the beverage industry.
If you still have doubts about your new business’s beverage product development process, you can refer to services at Tan Do Beverage. At Tan Do, we provide ODM (Beverage Original Design Manufacturing) and OEM (Original Equipment Manufacturer). Depending on customers’ needs, we can fully design and build products or create new drink formulas and specifications based on the idea brief or the blueprint provided by customers.
Take more:
- How to start an energy drink
- How to start a health drink business
- How to start a bottled water company
Tan Do is a global beverage ODM/OEM manufacturer and supplier located in Vietnam. Since 1996, we have built trust and credibility not only throughout Vietnam but also in many parts of the world. Leveraging state-of-the-art technology, we have crafted thousands of products that align with ISO, HACCP, HALAL, FDA, and many other standards.