Retailers & Consumer Products brands from all over the world congregated in New York the week of January 15 for the 107 annual National Retail Federation Big Show. One of the keynote speakers was James Curleigh, executive vice president and president of global brands for Levi Strauss & Co. The key question he posed was, “We're the worldwide leader in 5% of your closet, how does the company move beyond this?”.
Levi Strauss & co. answered this question by expanding their assortment, and expanding the channel with unique ways of engaging the customer. A couple great examples cited were, “A 25,000 square-foot Levi's store in Time's Square will open this fall and this week people will be sleeping outside of the San Francisco store to get the new Air Jordan-Levi's denim sneakers and matching jacket.” It got me thinking about how other companies get beyond their 5% comfort zone?
Time for A Disruption?
Like most obstacles in life, first you must admit you have a 5%. Simply put, if a company does not admit they have hit their ceiling, they will be disrupted by smaller more nimble competitors. The general tendency is to think this type of disruption only takes place in fast moving industries like high tech, but that is not the case. The Yogurt industry has been completely disrupted by the introduction of Greek Yogurt within the last several years. As recently as 2011 Yoplait owned 25% of the US yogurt market, and was the leader in the market. The Greek Yogurt pioneer Chobani now leads the United States in Yogurt market share, and the large yogurt companies are lowering their profit forecasts. Chobani Yogurt has been around for 12 years, and I am willing to bet the large Yogurt brands wished they had invested in disruption before the competition disrupted the market.
How Do You Do It?
You have hit the ceiling on your big money making offerings, and would like to disrupt yourself before your competitors do it for you? It is time to turn to R&D to build new innovation or M&A to buy new innovation. So which investment do you choose? The Answer is in the data, and you need an analytics platform that can address the following:
- Data Everywhere – To assist with the Build or Buy decision, you must be able to analyze data both inside your company and outside your company to make an informed decision.
- Business Users – The business will make the Build or Buy decision so the analytics platform must be simple to use, but also provide the business users to uncover insights in the data without having to call an IT Expert each time they use the analytics platform.
- Governance – The Build or Buy decision is core to the future success of the business. You must to ensure only the right individuals have access to the right data
Where Do I Start?
Retail & Consumer Products brands should begin assessing where they sit in the market now. A great example from Qlik is the Market Share Analytics Demo App which allows a consumer products brand to see what market share looks like today in all regions they sell and against all competitors in each region. This is the right place to identify trends that the company needs to get ahead of now to avoid future disruption by competitors!
