What is the Essence of Demand

Helping Categories and Brands achieve their full potential – The Essence of Demand.

For categories and brands to achieve their full potential, retailers and suppliers must be able to understand and satisfy market demand (profitably).

“Demand” is the degree to which a market seeks and can satisfy its needs through the benefits it acquires from products and services from categories and brands.

Simple enough, BUT….

In many markets, there are unsatisfied needs – these needs may or may not be known to retailers and suppliers. It is also true that there are superfluous benefits in many categories (or brands) – the market has no (recognised) need for them.

To resolve this evident inefficiency and help categories and brands achieve their full potential, two types of demand must be understood, as they require different solutions:

·     “Latent Demand” is a demand that is known to exist, but the market is (as yet) unable or unwilling to access the benefits it needs

·     “Potential Demand” is a demand that may exist, but either the need is not yet identified or stimulated, or the benefit is not yet possible or feasible.

So, to help categories and brands achieve their full potential, suppliers and retailers should first determine what type of demand they are trying to access and then decide what capability they need to invest in to gain access to that demand.

If targeting “Latent Demand”, retailers and suppliers should build a competitive advantage in three critical success factors ie

1.    Research – identify areas and causes of latent demand within the market value chain

2.    Availability – ensure the market has convenient access to the benefits it seeks in the form of relevant products and services

3.    Communication – persuade the market about the relevance, appeal and availability of the categories and brands’ benefits.

If targeting “Potential Demand”, retailers and suppliers need to ADD to their Latent Demand capabilities in the following ways:

1.    Research – identify new, emerging and evolving needs in the market value chain

2.    Development – fine-tune category and brand benefits to better meet the evolving needs of the market value chain

3.    Innovation – introduce new relevant benefits to meet the new and emerging needs of the market value chain

4.    Communication – inform and persuade the market about the relevance, appeal and availability of new (unique) benefits.

How can Big River Solutions help you?

We help retailers and suppliers grow their categories and brands to their full commercial potential by increasing their capability in the critical success factors for driving demand across the whole market value chain – the Commercial Advantage Programme.

Do you need help accessing your categories and brands’ latent and potential demand? If so we would be delighted to help.