#199 - How to Drive Velocity with Marketing with Janice Greenwald
The Startup CPG Podcast
Startup CPG
4.9 • 642 Ratings
🗓️ 3 June 2025
⏱️ 61 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In this episode of the Startup CPG Podcast, Daniel Scharff is joined by Janice Greenwald, a seasoned marketing leader with over two decades of experience spanning Unilever, Sabra, and numerous natural food startups. Janice shares her expert perspective on what truly drives success in CPG marketing, introducing her expanded “C’s and P’s” framework and offering actionable insights for early-stage brands.
They cover key topics including defining a compelling value proposition, conducting consumer research on a budget, evaluating product-market fit, optimizing packaging for shelf impact, and selecting the right creative partners. Janice also shares best practices for executing high-ROI tactics like retail media, demos, and digital couponing to drive velocity.
Whether you’re launching a new brand or scaling an existing one, this episode offers clear, strategic guidance to help your product stand out in a crowded market. Listen now!
Grassroots Marketing Demos: https://calendly.com/grassrootsmarketing/grassroots-x-startupcpg-intro-call
Janice's Cs and Ps:
- Consumer – Who is your product for, and what real problem are you solving?
- Customer (Retailer) – You must show how your product will grow their category
- Category – You’re not just selling a product; you’re helping drive category incrementality
- Competition – Understand the landscape and how your brand stands out
- Product – Is it actually delivering on a relevant insight or need?
- Pricing – Must reflect your value proposition, margin goals, and consumer expectations
- Packaging – Your single best marketing tool in-store—must break through
- Placement – Should be a joint effort with sales to get the best in-store visibility at the right retailers (or channels)
- Promotion – Covers everything you’ll do to move product off the shelf
Listen in as they share about:
- Marketing for CPG Brands
- Marketing Framework: Cs & Ps
- Product-Market Fit & Repositioning
- Brand Audits and Course Correction
- Driving Velocity: Practical Tactics
- Marketing Spend and ROI-Driven Tactics
- Research & Validation
- Choosing a Design Partner
Episode Links:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/janice-greenwald-marketing-consultant/
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Show Links:
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- Questions or comments about the episode? Email Daniel at podcast@startupcpg.com
- Episode music by Super Fantastics
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | All CPG brands need business insurance. Let's hope you don't have to use it, but if so, you better have a good policy. |
| 0:07.9 | We get asked about it in Slack all the time. When do I need general liability, product liability, workers comp, all that stuff. |
| 0:14.2 | I always tag in our friends at Amelia Risk Insurance. Just talk to them. You will see what I mean. |
| 0:19.0 | We use them personally, so does Fishwife, so many other brands from the community. They know you need coverage, but also you need to save money, so they will help you understand exactly what do you need and fight to find you the most affordable and effective policies. Reach out to them at amelia risk.com. That's A.M-E-L-I-A-Risk.com. |
| 0:40.0 | They're really happy to have a very friendly chat with you to get started. |
| 1:02.0 | Thank you. Sometimes it is the packaging, which is hard because it is an expensive endeavor usually, but I was working with a brand for about a year and a half where nobody knew what the product was inside. |
| 1:08.0 | And that's a really tough thing. |
| 1:10.0 | The brand had the most beautiful artworks |
| 1:12.7 | developed by a wonderful designer. And this is super interesting. Retailers loved it. So we had no |
| 1:18.9 | problem. They had no problem getting into retail. What they had problem with was getting it off |
| 1:23.4 | the shelf. And that because the packaging wasn't really communicating what the product was, |
| 1:28.0 | how I use this product, how do I cook with this product. And so we went through a whole brand |
| 1:32.6 | evolution exercise where we kept the essence of the brand and the beautiful design of the |
| 1:37.0 | brands while bringing forward some of the more practical elements of how a consumer might |
| 1:41.0 | understand the product itself. |
| 1:48.4 | Welcome everybody to another instant classic episode of the Startup CPG podcast. |
| 1:53.2 | A few weeks ago, we did a hugely popular episode on How to Drive Velocity with Sales Pro Matt Merson. So today I wanted to compliment that with a marketer's perspective. |
| 1:57.6 | We've got the expert Janice Greenwald on. She's going to dive into all of those marketing levers for emerging brands, but those levers really only work if you've got the fundamentals right. So we start with an overall diagnostic of your brand to make sure you're going to benefit in the long run. So this is somewhere in between how to drive velocity with marketing and marketing 101 for CPG. And I hope you love it. Here we go. |
| 2:22.6 | So Janice, you and I met because you were in the Slack channel answering so many |
| 2:26.1 | questions from brands, and I just thought your answers were so pragmatic and showed that |
| 2:30.3 | you've done this with tons of brands that are emerging, don't have huge budgets and |
| 2:35.6 | really have a lot of things they have to figure out and want to drive awareness and velocity |
... |
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