Go-to-market strategy: The art of stating the obvious and still getting it wrong

Few phrases in business jargon are as simultaneously revered and vacuous as "go-to-market strategy" (GTM).

A GTM strategy involves identifying your target market, crafting a value proposition, deciding on pricing, and selecting your marketing and distribution channels. Sounds obvious, right?

Every business does this. The process includes basic steps any lemonade stand operator intuitively grasps: find people who are thirsty, tell them why your lemonade is worth drinking, figure out what they’d pay, and make sure they see your stand first. The GTM strategy simply applies a bit more glitter to the process.

Admittedly, the devil is in the details, and the strategies for achieving market penetration can be as complex as you want. Yet, the underlying principle remains rudimentary: offer people something they want, make them aware of it, and provide it at a price they’re willing to pay through a channel they trust and use.

Still, it’s amazing how established, highly successful businesses can get their GTM strategies wrong.

Take Coca-Cola.

Despite its vast resources and deep market insights, Coca-Cola's launch of Coca-Cola Spiced was a classic example of a GTM strategy that missed its mark. Introduced in March 2024, Coca-Cola Spiced aimed to innovate by adding a "spiced" twist to the classic Coke formula, integrating raspberry flavour and a mix of warm spices. The launch was supported by a high-profile marketing campaign. This bold move was meant to cement the drink as a permanent fixture in the Coca-Cola lineup.

However, just six months later, Coca-Cola announced the discontinuation of Coca-Cola Spiced. Despite the significant investment in marketing, the company cited reasons like the lack of consumer awareness and confusion over the product's flavour profile, which wasn't actually spicy, as some consumers expected. This misalignment between product and consumer expectations underscored a critical oversight in the GTM execution.

While that is a reasonable explanation, the accelerated development—sped up to just seven weeks, compared to the usual 12 months—likely contributed to Coca-Cola’s inability to properly test market assumptions and fully understand consumer expectations.

The sector is called FMCG (Fast-Moving Consumer Goods), but being fast shouldn’t mean rushing to market. The rushed development cycle may have left little room for creating and testing messaging that accurately conveyed the product’s unique attributes.

Sonos provides another instructive example. 

Like Coca-Cola, Sonos, the maker of premium wireless speakers, faced its own GTM debacle with a disastrous app rollout in May 2024. This update was crucial and intended to enhance user experience and functionality across its devices. However, it resulted in widespread customer dissatisfaction, as many users found themselves unable to use their speakers—an essential feature of the Sonos ecosystem.

The impact was severe enough to prompt an 8% cut in the company’s projected revenue for the fiscal year, and to drag down its stock price by nearly one-third since the rollout.

In response, Sonos unveiled a plan to win back customer trust, which included more than just patches and fixes. The company extended warranties, introduced new testing procedures, and even formed a customer advisory board to ensure such a fiasco would not be repeated. Most notably, the executive leadership team decided against taking any annual bonus payouts for the new fiscal year unless they succeeded in significantly improving the quality of the app and restoring customer trust.

One could argue that, in the technology sector, particularly software and consumer electronics, the practice of shipping products quickly—moving fast and breaking things—and then iterating based on user feedback is quite common. But launching products that aren’t fully tested can frustrate users and damage a brand's reputation for reliability and quality. In the case of Sonos, the rollout of a problematic app led to direct usability issues for existing products, severely impacting customer satisfaction and trust.

When Coca-Cola Spiced was launched, Shakir Moin, chief of marketing, Coca‑Cola North America, said “We’re disrupting our ways of working to be faster than what the market expects of us. The mindset is that we’re a 137-year-old startup focused on bolder, faster, fewer innovations that delight consumers and create growth for the company.”

Coca-Cola and Sonos aren’t startups. They might reconsider their rush to adopt startups’ “go-to-market” strategies or face having to start over.

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Éric Blais is president of Headspace Marketing, a consultancy that helps marketers build brands in Quebec. He can be reached at feedback@headspacemarketing.com