Introducing: Insights to Action Series [Part 1 – Market Share]

By Liz Emery, Senior Director, Product Marketing, Affinity Solutions

Welcome to Affinity’s “Insights to Action” blog series, exploring how to use Consumer Purchase Insights to solve complex business problems. Consumer Purchase Insights provides a complete, granular view of customer and prospect purchase behaviors, across and between brands and categories, to inform a wide array of growth strategies based on deeper audience understanding. This 8-part series will dive into different examples of how to gain insights into – who your consumers are, how they spend, and where they buy – to inspire meaningful action.

Let’s dive into “Market Share” analysis and how it can help you understand your brand footprint and improve your organization’s investment strategies.

Part 1: Market Share

Market Share is the total percentage of money consumers are spending on your products in-market vs your competitors. As marketers, we are often asked questions around our brand market share.

• Is my market share increasing, decreasing, or staying static?
• What is causing changes in my share of spending?
• Are my promotional efforts making an impact?
• Do we have a stronger share in some markets than others? If so, why?
• What marketing investments can we make to gain footing?

The answers to these questions are not always straight forward. We must account for variables like competitive footprint, buying decisioning by market and media impact, to name a few. It can be difficult to identify what your market share is (overall and by market), what is causing change, and what you can do about it.

Marketers need a way to track the share of consumer spending across their own brand and competitive brands in a timely and accurate way. Identifying these metrics is the best first step, but you need to know how to use these insights to make data-driven decisions that move the needle.

The Problem

A 1% shift in market share does not sound like a meaningful change in share, but that can be misleading without investigating that number. Let us take our large coffee chain for example. Last year’s revenue in the coffee segment was $95 billion and this large coffee chain’s market share was estimated to be 37% in the US. That is revenue over $35 billion. A 1% shift in market share has an impact of $35 Million, a considerable number. 

With insight into the 1% shift (where it is coming from geographically, demographically, competitively and the time frame), this large coffee chain can update their strategy across divisions to close the gap. Perhaps implementing a win-back campaign in April, focused on the Northeast, targeting millennials? Or a survey of millennials in the Northeast to understand their attitudes in the category? The opportunities are vast. 

Using Insights to Create Action Plans

What if you had a way to know the percentage of sales for your brand (overall and by market) for a given time-period, by consumer segment, and how that spending was shifting across your competitors in the category? 

What impact would it have if a large coffee chain were able to know (with confidence) they lost 1% share, in the Northeast, in the month of March, from millennials, who migrated to Competitor A, during the breakfast hours of 7 to 10 am? While these data points are important on their own, how does the large coffee chain understand these insights and create a plan to act on them? 

At Affinity Solutions, we do this every day to empower our clients with the ability to uncover and determine the top purchase signals, providing the valuable insights brands need to predict future behavior. Here is what it looks like:

Consumer Purchase Insights | Market Share

By using Market Share insights, you can customize your media and promotional plans for reliable data-driven decisioning across the customer lifecycle. The goal of using these insights is to improve business strategy, decrease waste and take the guess work out of marketing.  To learn more about Consumer Purchase Insights Market Share reach out to Sales@affinitysolutions.com.

That wraps up Insights to Action Part 1 – Market Share!  Check out Insights to Action Part 2 – Cross Shop where we dive into the benefits of understanding where else your customers shop!