Why is Category Growth important?
One of the biggest factors affecting a brand’s growth is the health of the categories it operates within. Sustaining long-term brand growth requires senior management to focus on how to unlock industry / category growth. This means moving from fighting for market share – usually stealing and shifting – to thinking how can we enlarge the whole pie and earn market share.
Over the last few years, the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute has pioneered new research into how industries grow and how to drive that growth under different conditions. This research has provided norms and expectations for what to expect from category growth (‘the odds’ of growth) and strategies to grow categories under different conditions.
Questions you should be asking to bring the evidence-based lens to your portfolio planning:
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What category are you in (stage of development and global benchmarking)?
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What does this mean for growth objectives and the way the category will grow?
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How does my portfolio cover that? How do the investments match?
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What do I need to take part in/accelerate category growth?
Our Products
Category Mapping
A global or a country maturity framework that allows for benchmarking and providing evidence-based rules for investments depending on category/sub-category maturity.
The objectives:
- Prioritise where to focus the business based on the category growth potential;
- Audit the growth ambitions set for a category;
- Check where are we weaker than the category and start asking powerful questions: And why?
- Audit the growth levers.
Category Deep Dive
The research will provide an audit of overall category health from sales and buyer behaviour perspectives. This includes isolating issues around where and with what the category has been growing. The purpose is not to forecast growth of the categories, but rather to identify key areas and important questions to be asking that can lead to growth and investment opportunities. This project usually follows the category mapping project.
The objectives:
- Prioritise where to focus the business based on the category growth potential;
- Audit the growth ambitions set for a category;
- Check where are we weaker than the category and start asking powerful questions: And why?
- Audit the growth levers and audit the investments for their ability to drive that growth;
- Audit the portfolio for what the category needs for growth.
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