The 5 Shares
Kantar Retail, 2011
Looking to 2011 and beyond, there continues to be five core areas where retailers (and concurrently suppliers) are seeking to gain momentum and share. Share immediately makes most people think “market share.” However, it is Kantar Retail’s firm belief that in today’s world market share is an outcome, not an objective—and that the enablers to gain that share are fundamentally changing. In fact, those enablers are “shares” themselves.
Those shares can be derived from looking at the change dynamic presented by three key factors:
- The change in the retail/trading environment
- Changed shopper
- The changing nature of information access and usage
These three variables intersect in a variety of ways, and between them raise five key issues we think will be transformative for suppliers and retailers in the 2010s:
Share of real growth or where will I grow? In a world where growth is harder to find, aligning resources against where the growth is becomes even more important. Share of real growth will force us to look at the markets, channels, and customers that are growing faster than the marketplace overall, and understand whether our organization is well positioned to capitalize on this increasingly selective growth.
Share of wallet or how much will shoppers spend? In markets where new square footage is harder for retailers to find, retailers become obsessed with selling more to shoppers they already have. In markets where square footage expansion opportunities continue, retailers still need to understand how to capture share of footsteps most effectively to capture the wallet spend that comes along on those trips.
Share of decision or why will shoppers choose certain outlets/brands? As shoppers continue to be exposed to marketing and information from a variety of sources, smart retailers are aggressively ensuring they are part of the shopper’s rapidly changing decision processes. Those decisions drive three more questions retailers and suppliers must be prepared to answer successfully in order to win: Who owns the “decider”? What are they deciding? Where are those decisions taking place?
Share of solution or what can I offer to provide more value to my shopper? Retailers continue to use their own brands, bundled products, and service offerings to expand their share of their shoppers’ lives. Those solutions take three key forms:
- Retailers replacing the value creation historically driven by suppliers
- Retailers moving their solutions to “adjacent” spaces
- Retailers tackling non-traditional services/ initiatives to provide more holistic solutions
Share of engagement or how will I cut through the clutter and connect? Simply being shopped today is insufficient to predict future growth. Retailers and suppliers are continuing to find the need to engage with their shoppers more comprehensively. We see this engagement needing to take place in three core areas:
- In aisle
- Across the total store
- Beyond the store
Maximizing each one of these shares requires a robust series of capabilities and approaches to capitalize on the opportunities and mitigate the threats presented by them. One final note—the primary focus of this paper is on the “brick-and-mortar” retail world. This may seem anachronistic in a digital age, but the simple fact is that more than most of the trade in consumer goods and services today is conducted through traditional physical stores. The impact of online retail competition (and more importantly, online information) is discussed extensively, but done so from a bricks-and-mortar perspective.