Drive Share Growth in a Disrupted Environment, Part II
By Jayne C. Eastman, Managing Director

What Does a Share Growth Plan Require?

Not knowing the answer to three critical questions – Share of what? Who really is the competition? And what will it take to win? – can block the path to building successful strategies that grow share. But it is easy for marketers to unblock the path by deploying a single strategic information plan that includes three key elements.

First, thoroughly understand consumer behavior over the range of possible usages and purchases. Strategic marketers cannot take advantage of shifting consumer loyalties unless they understand the pattern to begin with. Consider the sometimes wide-ranging possibilities for how consumers can satisfy their needs beyond the marketer's particular portfolio, and then narrow the possibilities through a quantitative analysis.

Also, understand consumer patterns granularly enough to see the degree of loyalty consumers have to an existing behavior. Consumers rarely make a total switch to a new behavior. So marketers need to answer: How deep does their loyalty go? How easy (or difficult) will it be to displace their current choices?

For illustration, consider two markets in which the percent of people loyal to any one brand is similar. In the first market, the degree of each consumer's disloyalty is low, perhaps two out of ten uses or purchases. In the second market, the degree of disloyalty is much larger, maybe eight out of ten uses or purchases. In spite of the apparent similarity of these markets at the macro level, generating share in the first market will require much more branding effort in terms of benefit delivery and spending than in the second market. Unless marketers understand the consumer behavior at this granular level, they can vastly over- or under-estimate the profitability of their growth strategies.

Second, this understanding must be current, accounting for the recent and sometimes dramatic shifts in consumer loyalties to brands and categories. The weaker economy has been a potent force, acting on top of multiple other stimuli to drive consumer change – new brands and products delivering benefits in new ways, existing brands or products communicating what they deliver differently, and new needs developing from different life stages and lifestyles.

The marketer's share growth plan must stand up to this kind of inquiry: Does it explain why categories, brands, or products of interest are growing or declining? Why are new brands or products in these categories succeeding or failing?

These explanations must go beyond the general and non-specific iteration of numerous possible causal factors to a specific, quantified assessment that accounts for the magnitude of change. For example, Olay Regenerist, sold in mass outlets, competes against department store skin creams. The brand is benefiting from broader consumer recognition – especially among female boomers – of the need for powerful anti-aging treatment. Now it is also fueled by the consumers' more intense search for lower cost, but trusted, brand alternatives. While these factors may be identified as influencers on growth, Regenerist can develop an appropriately aggressive share growth plan with the right risk assessment only if the brand can quantify the specific impact of each factor.

Third, the understanding must be integrated into a holistic theory of how a market works,rather than using a single data point or source. Most marketing companies are rich with data sources, quantitative and qualitative. Marketers can mistake a deep-dive into their own brand's growth or decline for a real theory of how a whole market operates. As a result, they do not have the perspective that opens up new sources of volume or perceives oncoming threats.

Here is the issue in many companies: These discrete data sources become used as separate starting points for strategy development. Different parts of management see the world through these different lenses and therefore come to conclusions that can be poles apart. The result is an unfocused strategy diffused across too many objectives.

Marketers can address this problem only by completely integrating all reliable information into a detailed, validated market theory, in which all available data are in evidence and used in convergence to explain the complexity of consumer behavior. Furthermore, once this theory is fully developed, it enables consistency across the organization, speeding effective response to share growth opportunities.

Today's disrupted environment lends new urgency to changing the way marketers develop share growth strategies. Marketers should honestly assess how much strategy is really constructed on the basis of isolated data points, hearsay, qualitative-speak and conventional wisdom. Can you quantitatively and definitively answer: Share of what? Who really is the competition? And what will it take to win?

With these three requirements met, marketers in search of volume-driven share growth are in a position to take advantage of the disruption in consumer behavior evident today.