Marketers talk endlessly about products, price, and promotion.
Place rarely earns the same attention.
It is often treated as a logistical detail rather than a strategic driver of brand growth. Yet a subtle shift in where a product is sold can reshape an entire category, signal quality in an instant, and help a brand define itself without spending heavily on advertising. Few companies have demonstrated the strategic value of place more effectively than Perfect Bar.
A Family Enterprise
Perfect Bar began as a family enterprise with a compelling story.
Their father, Bud Keith, was a nutritionist and an early advocate of whole-food eating. He developed a refrigerated protein bar made with nut butter, honey, and a blend of ground whole food powders.
For years, the family sold the bars locally. Eventually, several of Bud’s children took the idea national. What they had was not just another entry in the crowded bar category. They had something that tasted fresher, avoiding the chalkiness and artificial notes common in many ambient shelf-stable bars.
The product itself had promise, but the most powerful decision came later. Perfect Bar would not sit on the shelf next to Clif, RXBAR, Kind, and dozens of others fighting for the same glance. Instead, the company placed its bars in the refrigerated section.
This decision was far from obvious.
The bar aisle benefits from habit.
Shoppers know where to find bars. They see the aisle and tend to scan it with a narrow mindset. A new brand placed there can pick up incidental discovery. Perfect Bar walked away from that traffic. They removed the product from the competitive cluster and put it in an unconventional part of the store.
It was bold because it asked shoppers to notice something in an unexpected location. It was also smart because the refrigerated case instantly conveyed a message that advertising would have struggled to communicate. Being cold signals freshness, real ingredients, and minimal processing.
Location, Location, Location
The location itself became part of the brand’s value proposition. Consumers did not need to read a long ingredient list to know the bar was different. They needed to encounter it next to yogurt or kombucha rather than in the snack aisle.
Perfect Bars’ strategic use of place did more than differentiate the brand. It drove meaningful distribution and volume. Once consumers began discovering the bars in the refrigerated section, retailers responded quickly.
Today, Perfect Bar is sold in more than twenty-five thousand doors across natural, conventional, and club channels, including Whole Foods, Target, Costco, Kroger, and Publix. Annual sales have moved well past the hundred-million-dollar mark, according to industry estimates. In 2019, Mondelez owns a majority share in the business, with the Keith family still owning a significant minority interest.
Velocity in the refrigerated case often matches or exceeds that of top-selling ambient bars, despite the higher price point. The brand succeeded not because it fit within the existing bar set, but because it expanded the category’s physical boundaries. Perfect Bar persuaded retailers that the category itself could live partly in a different part of the store.
Refrigeration also changed how people thought about the role of a bar. A cold bar feels more like food than a packaged snack. It frames the product as more like a small meal. That distinction has helped Perfect Bar participate in new use occasions.
Many consumers pair it with morning coffee or keep it in the fridge at work rather than tossing it in a gym bag. By thoughtfully choosing a place, the brand expanded its functional territory.
Chobani and Place
Other brands have used a place in similarly strategic ways.
Chobani built its reputation on product quality and strong marketing, but it also made its yogurt easy to find across multiple touchpoints. When Greek yogurt was still a developing segment, Chobani worked with retailers to create more space in the dairy set, often blocking shelves in a visually dominant way.
The brand occupied more real estate than its market share alone justified. The result was increased visibility and a signal that Greek yogurt had become the new standard. The brand’s growth owed as much to physical presence as to taste or nutrition.
Oatly lives in a Different Place
Instead of fighting for space in the crowded plant-based milk aisle, the company focused heavily on placement in coffee shops. Baristas became an influential partner in educating consumers, demonstrating texture, and normalizing oat milk as a premium choice.
Supermarket placement mattered, but the early decision to seed demand through cafes accelerated the brand’s rise. Consumers first experienced Oatly in lattes, which set a quality expectation that carried over to retail. The café became a form of merchandising that existed entirely outside the store.
Hint Water used to Reframe a Commodity Category
Rather than living only in the bottled water aisle, Hint worked to place its products near produce. This location conveyed that the product was linked to natural fruit rather than sugary flavored beverages, even though sugar was never part of the formulation. By sitting among fresh produce, the brand borrowed equity. It signaled that its flavor essence came from nature rather than an artificial source, and shoppers interpreted the product as closer to whole food than to flavored water.
Recess – Started at A Different Place
Recess, the sparkling adaptogenic drink, pursued an unconventional café-and-boutique strategy in its early days.
The product appeared not only in natural grocers but also in design-forward shops, bookstores, and specialty retail. These placements reframed the drink as a lifestyle accessory rather than a functional beverage. The brand’s identity grew out of the context in which it appeared. The stores that carried Recess served as an implicit endorsement, shaping perceptions long before a consumer tasted the drink.
The pattern across these brands highlights an overlooked truth.
Place is a Form of Communication
It shapes meaning before the consumer reads a single word or tastes a product. It can separate a brand from a crowded category, elevate it to premium status, or attach it to unexpected use occasions. Perfect Bar showed that a place can even justify a premium price. Consumers pay more for refrigerated bars not only because the ingredients cost more, but also because the location tells them they are buying something closer to fresh food.
The underutilization of the place comes from habit. Brands tend to follow established category rules rather than challenge them. Retail teams often look for the path of least resistance. Buyers have expectations about where a product belongs. Marketers worry about losing incidental traffic.
All these forces push new brands into the most conventional shelf positions. The result is sameness and overcoming it is expensive. Brands end up relying on promotion and advertising to compete for attention.
Yet place can be a low-cost, high-impact lever. When used creatively, it can give a young company disproportionate visibility and help it escape the gravitational pull of category norms.
Coke Zero
My friend Courtney O’Brien, former Coke Zero brand manager added this:
I use PLACE as a significant lever in my marketing.
For example, when launching Coke Zero, I fought SO HARD to be on the fountain. You might think, “Oh, you’re Coke, you can get everything you want.” NOPE. Not for new brands. you don’t spend millions of dollars changing out fountain valves across the country for a brand that might not make it. But it reinforced what we stood for that I would NOT compromise on – COKE TASTE. Exact Coke Taste.
Therefore it HAD to be right next to it on the valve b/c we all know people first want to sneak a little sip and see. And if they don’t like it, fill your cup with Coke! No risk. Ended up a finalist for the Coke Worldwide Marketing Awards for the partnership the foodservice team and I forged to get this done, as it was nothing short of Herculean.
PLACE can absolutely be a huge differentiator.
Or you can go where every competitor is and use that lever not to say anything unique about you.
Three Takeaways
Three takeaways emerge from the Perfect Bar example.
- First, a place can communicate your value proposition more quickly than any marketing message.
- Second, unconventional placement can reposition a product and redefine how consumers use it.
- Third, choosing where a product lives in the store is one of the most underleveraged decisions in consumer goods, yet it can unlock growth that packaging and promotion alone cannot deliver.
What place will your product occupy?
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