Premium: How to elevate a product above the rest

Premium… a challenging concept to firmly get to grips with and it often feels a bit intangible. That’s why we turned it into an onion. Yes you read that correctly… an onion. Well we like to think of it as a fancy, premium, Michelin starred onion but an onion nevertheless.

We’ve peeled back each of the onion’s layers to explore what premium means to people, ranging from surface layer indicators such as price, all the way down to what premium products say to others about our identity.

How did we go about this?

We took a top-down and a bottom-up approach. 

If you are not entirely sure what this means (and I’m not entirely sure I do) we explored what people perceive to be high-end premium and this was not category-bound (think tech, watches, jewellery… swiss army knives even!) to try and understand how premium as a concept is being communicated and achieved – this is the top-down bit. 

We then looked into how brands within the FMCG space are managing to push their products up above the mainstream canopy – this is the bottom-up part.

The result?

An understanding somewhere in the middle that will help to push the premiumness of FMCG products but in a way that is applicable.

The layers of the premium onion act as a form of checklist. Your product might be nailing it when it comes to where it can be found, the shelf it sits on and the other brands it finds itself next to. However, looking deeper into the onion, the role it plays may be unclear and people may be struggling to see how it’s role is different to mainstream products.

If you’d like to run any of your products through the premium onion then get in touch – we’re always happy to chat.