The Idea
Offer manufacturers market share and market basket analysis based on scanning Lowe's, Home Depot and Menard's receipts and deriving market share from these receipts.
Origins
At PPG, I used the Paint Consumers Research Program. We employed a giant consumer survey to gauge what brands consumers bought in home improvement. The data were inaccurate and variable, and I often wondered why we couldn't just get market share directly from the retailers.
How It Works
Employ individuals using a service like Amazon's Mechanical Turks to go to the parking lots of various Lowe's, Home Depot and Menard's locations at assigned times to take cell phone photos of customers' receipts for a small fee. Use pattern recognition or just plain data entry to enter the items on the receipt. Collate the results in market share reports to be presented to manufacturers online. Sell to home improvement manufacturing market research departments.
Resources Needed
Software programming expertise, market research expertise, start-up capital to collect the first few months of data
Sustainable Competitive Advantage (If Any)
The longer the business collects a consistent set of accurate data, the harder it would be for a competitor to present value in comparison. Manufacturers want to see market share, in particular, over a period of time to see if it is increasing or declining. In order to increase switching cost and increase "share of wallet," the company could introduce other services over time such as matched sample testing for new programs (comparing the results at specific stores where a new product came out, for instance, versus similar stores without the new product).
No comments:
Post a Comment