This second source of growth is often pursued in well-established or widely penetrated categories;
in many FMCG categories the challenge is not necessarily winning more customers, it’s about winning a greater share of the available occasions.
Winning more occasions can be an efficient way to grow your brand, but it can be a difficult task to work out where all the meaningful occasions are, and tricky to understand where you should play and how you can win. That’s where Demand Spaces come in.
Introducing Demand Spaces
Demand spaces are powerful because they are predicated on a key aspect of human behaviour – namely that an individual’s needs will often change depending on their context. Demand spaces are important because they help marketers map the full range of opportunities or occasions that are driven or influenced by the 5Ws and allow brand owners to spot potentially lucrative growth opportunities – they help identify a specific set of needs, that occur in a specific context and that result in a specific behaviour.
Demand spaces often lend themselves to categories (such as food & beverages) where the context (when, where & why) has a greater bearing on what is chosen. An established snacking brand, for example, might seek to grow by using Demand Spaces to identify new occasions or alternatively understand what is required to better meet the needs of occasions that already exist.
So how do Demand Spaces help you win more often?
Demand spaces are a quantitatively derived tool that typically consider two dimensions. On one side, you’ll have needstates (clustered groups of needs) – and on the other you will have the most discriminating elements of context (this might be daypart, location, activity etc.)
Mapping these elements then allows you to…
- Identify the occasions that exist within the wider category
- Prioritise target spaces or occasions based on value and fit
- Organise and innovate around your brands to help you access priority spaces
Helping a tea client win a greater share of occasions
In 2021, we worked with a major tea manufacturer who wanted to win more occasions, and specifically understand:
- How they could stretch their portfolio into cold beverages and recruit new customers
- How they could revitalise core black tea
- How to increase share for fruit/herbal/green tea
To address this challenge, we launched a total beverage Demand Space study, which helped to identify 10 key opportunity areas, straddling in-home vs out-of-home and hot vs cold drinks.
This approach enabled us to understand where tea currently had a strong right to play, both in terms of the share of that Demand Space, but also how well it fitted with the needs of that occasion.
As part of this work, we identified a Demand Space that occurred while consumers were busy settling into their morning work; here, consumers were looking for a refreshing, warming ‘pick-me-up’, and tea was the perfect fit.
By understanding the nuance of this Demand Space, the client was able to plan how to win further share for this occasion.
We also wanted to understand where tea wasn’t currently playing and what it would need to do to win in those spaces – we found a Demand Space that was dominated by indulgent iced coffees – typically a weekend morning in a premium café where you might meet with friends and treat yourself. The needs of the consumers here were for indulgent, aerated products with a full, satisfying flavour and a sense of ‘special’. Understanding this helped the client understand how it would need to innovate to meet those needs and which channels it would need to target.
5Ws – The drivers of behaviour within a category
Demand Spaces work because they invite you to think more deeply about the 5Ws, the drivers of behaviour within a category. The 5Ws cover:
- WHO the consumer is (segments)
- WHERE/WHEN the consumption is taking place (occasions)
- WHAT they are looking for (types of solution)
- WHY they make choices (needs)
Once you have built this understanding, you can set about winning a greater share of occasions. Lindt is a brand which ably demonstrates it understands this. Their focus on winning a greater share of occasions explains why they have pioneered such an innovative range of products:
- Looking for a premium gift? Lindt Master Chocolatier range
- Looking for an accessible gift? Lindt Lindor
- Looking for something to share with friends? Lindt assorted Lindor bag
- Looking for a treat on the go? Lindt bars
- Looking to delight children? Lindt bunny
Let’s recap
If you want to grow your brands by winning more often, we’d recommend that you take a good look at Demand Spaces. They are highly effective because they are based on a fundamental truth – people behave differently in different contexts. Why not take the guesswork out of the growth challenge and take a closer look at how the 5Ws operate in your category?
